Sam and Shaan cover how celebrities have quietly built billion-dollar businesses off their names — from Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville empire to Rihanna’s Fenty. Along the way they dig into car dealerships as underrated wealth vehicles, the Spoonflower marketplace sale, George Clooney’s briefcase story, the “Die With Zero” philosophy, bar mitzvah money as a cultural investment hack, and Aubrey de Grey’s case that aging is a solvable engineering problem.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, founder of Milk Road)
Cold Open [00:00:00]
Shaan: All right, we’re live. What’s going on? How was Steph?
Sam: Nice fancy pants background.
Shaan: Yeah, I’m in a Mechanism office. It’s a fancy pants office. Do you know what Mechanism is?
Sam: I’ve heard of it. That’s the agency guy who’s a friend of yours?
Shaan: I kind of know him a little bit now. They have an agency — maybe 200 people — and as you do with agencies, you’ve got very fancy offices in SoHo in New York and no one is here. So I’m in the fancy office right now.
Sam: Good stuff. Yeah, you missed Steph. She was great as always. She had a bunch of ideas.
Shaan: I know. It’s funny — we’ve had Brayou be kind of like our version of Jamie. Joe Rogan has Jamie, we’ve got Brayou, and now we have Dan. You get a sense because at the end of every episode we go, “Oh Dan, how was it?” And I feel like they both really keyed in on the same thing. I don’t know if listeners care in the same way, but the more random tangents we go on, they kind of love it but kind of hate it at the same time. Whereas when Steph comes on, it’s like: here are five ideas, we’re going to do one, two, three, four, five. What a jam-packed episode. It’s more packed with info but less packed with detours. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s packed with info.
Sam: I’ve also noticed that the things I think are going to be good tend not to be good, and vice versa. But the reason I wasn’t here — let me tell you this funny story about Twitter.
Sam’s Racing School Adventure [00:01:30]
Sam: So four months ago I tweeted that I wanted to go drive race cars. One of my 2021 resolutions was to do more adventurous stuff — take a sniper class, go hunting and kill what I’ve eaten, do a cross-country trip, and learn how to race cars. So I tweeted it out, and this professional NASCAR driver named Parker hollered at me. Me and Jack Butcher — a buddy of mine — drove two hours outside New York up to Connecticut and took this class. It was $2,500 at a place called Skip Barber Racing.
Sam: We met the owner. This is a business that does about $15 million in revenue. An ex-NYPD cop owns it — he just tried it after he stopped being a cop and it turned into a thriving business. He told me his goal is to hit $200 million in revenue in the next five years. Here’s what they do: Skip Barber is a famous brand from the ’60s. He bought it out of bankruptcy — I imagine he paid low hundreds of thousands of dollars for the brand name and the website. People submit leads about where they want to go. They find tracks around the country, rent them for 20 days, show up with a tractor trailer and 20 Mustangs. It’s like a traveling circus, place to place to place.
Shaan: What’d you drive?
Sam: By the way, I know nothing about cars, so you’re going to say something and I’ll be like “oh cool.” It looks like a Mustang from the outside, but it’s a race car — no seats for passengers, you’re locked in, you wear a helmet. There’s a roll bar, no AC, no radio. But from the outside it looks like a Mustang.
Shaan: That’s fascinating. Pretty cool business.
Sam: Crazy fascinating. And while you were saying you used to be a cop, I’m thinking about the retired mafia tours in New York business we talked about. I’m going on one of those.
Shaan: Yeah — if you didn’t hear that episode: a retired cop in New York takes you on a walking tour to the different areas where mafia families lived, tells you stories. You love crime TV shows? This is crime TV as a walking tour. He did over a million dollars in sales on his Airbnb Experience. What’s cool is I think someone could build a really cool version of a cops-and-robbers car chase experience. You get a junk cop car, there’s a driver who knows what they’re doing, you get to be in the cop car talking on the radio, trying to get the license plate, and then at the end you spin them out and you get to “arrest” them. A controlled simulation of a cop chase. I feel like that would be super fun.
Sam: And the video content from it — I paid $2,500 for the class and an additional $300 for the video. But it was awesome. Fun to get out of your comfort zone.
Shaan: All right, love it. Let’s do some ideas.
Virtual Shooting Range Idea [00:07:00]
Shaan: I have an idea kind of related to this. I was watching Dana White — he was doing this YouTube video showing off his hotel room in Houston. Did you see it?
Sam: Yep. Go ahead and describe it.
Shaan: He had a full half-size basketball court painted like the Rockets court, with an official scoreboard on the wall. He had a full gym in his hotel room. Full steam room. But the thing I thought was interesting — he grabs this huge rifle off the wall. A rifle and a shotgun sitting next to each other, and he’s like, “This is cool, it’s like a virtual shooting range.” They panned over real quick and I couldn’t even really see it.
Shaan: But in my head I immediately thought of those golf driving ranges that are basically a green screen — you swing a real club, hit a real ball into the screen, and it simulates where it would’ve landed on a real course. He’s got this rifle and I started thinking: somebody could build a high-end version of a virtual shooting range. A screen, and then you give them what feels like a real gun — real weight, real recoil — but it’s digitally enabled so no bullets needed. You could sell this to bars, for at-home use, corporate events. A pretty unique niche business.
Sam: That’s a fantastic idea. Have you been to an indoor shooting range?
Shaan: Not indoor, just outdoor.
Sam: Oh, indoor shooting ranges are miserable. They’ve got hospital lighting and it is so loud. Have you ever been next to an AR-15 when it shoots? It doesn’t just make noise, it shakes you. It’s miserable. I would way rather do something like what you’re describing.
Shaan: And because it’s digital you can do fun stuff. When I went to shoot a gun for the first time — my brother-in-law’s into it, we went outside — it was cold, you’re shooting paper targets that don’t move, you have to stand still, every five minutes you stop to reload. The action is fun but there’s a lot of downtime. So I think you can make a souped-up version of the deer hunter game where you get the digital gun but it feels like the weight of a real rifle, and then you have like a digital scenario. You wanted to do a sniper class, right? So you could simulate actually sniping someone — you can only see part of their head, they’re really far away. Instead of a paper target. Good business. Needs to be turned into a business-in-a-box or a traveling circus like you said. A productized model.
Sam: That’s a great idea and I would love to attend.
Car Dealerships as Wealth Machines [00:13:00]
Shaan: Let’s do another one. Pick one of yours.
Sam: This is a little less of an idea and more of an experience I had. A few weeks ago I had a car problem, had to leave my car at a Mercedes-Benz dealer in Nashville — it’s called Music City Mercedes. I went to pick it up and started shooting the shit with the salesperson. He told me they sold 200 cars in June. Does that boggle your mind? That’s $20 million in car sales in one month at that one location.
Sam: So I looked into what the figures are across the industry. It’s pretty steady — 1.6 million cars sold in a high month, 1.2 million in a slow month. Not crazy different. If you assume the average sale price was $100K, and they did $20 million for six months and $15 million for the other six, that’s $210 million at one location. And then I was talking to the guys running the dealership and they said they can expect 10 to 15% profit. Does that boggle your mind? One location.
Shaan: Did it feel like an outlier location? Killer real estate?
Sam: It’s a Mercedes dealer in Nashville and there are three in the city. So an outlier in the sense that they’re selling expensive cars — it’s not Hyundai. But Nashville is one of 10 to 20 cities in America that are equally booming. So not a crazy outlier.
Sam: So I got interested and I went to OpenSecrets — opensecrets.org. If you’re a senator or in the House or in certain offices, you typically disclose your income taxes and net worth. You can browse through and see how much they have in different bank accounts, different stocks, how much they value privately held businesses. Incredibly fascinating. If you google “OpenSecrets net worth senators” you’ll see the richest senators listed and where their money comes from.
Shaan: I’ve heard of it but never really gone to it. It’s like WikiLeaks or something?
Sam: I go to it all the time. And what’s interesting is that these people are incredibly wealthy and you can see how they allocate money, where their income comes from. And I noticed a fair number of them made money through car dealerships.
Sam: So: the richest senator is Mark Warner out of Virginia at $214 million. The poorest is Alcee Hastings of Florida at negative $7.5 million — this guy is in a hall of debt. And the lowest non-negative is probably like $100K. I went through the Congress members who were rich: Vernon Buchanan out of Florida, $157 million net worth, owns Buchanan Automotive Group in Florida — assigned around $100 million of his net worth to car dealerships. Ron Williams from Texas, $67 million, close to $10 million from being part-owner of a Chrysler Dodge and Jeep business. John Campbell, $23 million, owns franchises for Nissan, Mazda, Ford, Saturn, and Saab. Mike Kelly, $20 million, at least $5 million from car dealers. Incredibly fascinating.
Sam: I dug even deeper on the Nashville dealer. Do you want to know who’s the co-owner? Nick Saban — the University of Alabama coach. He owns three, four, or five dealerships. Crazy.
Shaan: That combo of local hero and car dealership has just worked forever. In the movie Little Giants I think the guy had his money from being a local football star with a car dealership. That’s just a formula. And there’s that Toronto Raptors superfan, Navbakhtyar —
Sam: Nav Bhatia! I actually have him in my list here. He started as a Hyundai salesperson and eventually started owning dealerships. Claims a $50 million net worth. Spends all his money traveling with the team and buying courtside seats to every game. He’s been doing it for like 20 years, courtside, cheering like crazy. Started as a salesman. You’re right.
Shaan: Okay, I want to add to this. If you scroll down you can see all the examples of people who’ve made at least a billion from car dealers. The Benson family owns the Saints. Roger Penske started with AutoNation, now owns the Miami Dolphins. Mark Wahlberg has one. Michael Jordan has one.
Sam: That’s pretty interesting. I didn’t realize this is one of those franchises you kind of want to own. I wonder if it’s changing though — isn’t this dead? Aren’t car sales moving online? You have Carvana becoming like a $7 billion company.
Shaan: Some buying is moving online but not all. I actually ran into this company called Modal — modalup.com. A buddy of mine, Samir Bala, he was going to do a startup and then I checked his LinkedIn and he was CEO of Modal. I was like, if this guy took a job, this must be interesting because he would not join a company unless he thought it had really good prospects.
Shaan: What they do is essentially Shopify for car dealers. It lets you sell cars digitally — creates a website, a checkout button, a buy button. It also automates all the workflows. When you buy a car you end up sitting in the dealership for an hour doing paperwork — loan, lease, title. These guys turned all that into software. They were growing well, going to car dealerships and getting them to adopt it. The pitch is: don’t stay stuck in brick-and-mortar only. Digitalize your workflow, let customers check out online. They claim they can boost sales by 30 to 35% and shorten the purchase cycle. Pretty cool business.
Sam: I’m on board with the digital stuff. But I was just fascinated by the brick and mortar. The average car dealership in 2021 did $36 million in sales in just the first six months. And we sell something like 1.6 million cars a month as a country. The lobbying data is also crazy — the car lobby, there are like eight of them, and they give substantial money to the government for different laws.
Shaan: You know what’s cool? Tesla — no dealership model. Bold move. Kept a lot of the profit, went direct to consumer. First direct-to-consumer car company.
Sam: And I could see that taking off, but the market is massive. There’s room for everyone.
Shaan: Always holding it down for blue-collar America. In my mind it’s just two coasts squished together with some stuff in the middle, and you’re like: no, no, the middle is huge.
Spoonflower: A Niche Marketplace That Sold for $225M [00:28:00]
Shaan: All right, let’s do some more. Look at my topics — which ones are interesting? Spoonflower is one of the most interesting things I’ve seen lately. Had you heard of it before?
Sam: No.
Shaan: They sold for $225 million. I got familiar with it because for a clothing company we were working on, we needed to find patterns online. One place was Spoonflower. It’s basically a marketplace where designers come up with, say, a nice floral pattern, and then someone can buy that pattern and use it for pillows, wallpaper, mats, curtains, blankets — anything patterns go on. So it’s this niche marketplace most people haven’t heard of, and then you go there and you’re like, oh, this makes total sense. They sold for $225 million to Shutterfly. What’s your first reaction?
Sam: I think this is brilliant. It’s based in North Carolina — I like things not in Silicon Valley, not in the heart of tech hubs. Win-win-win: you help designers make money, you help buyers get what they want, Spoonflower makes a cut. Started in 2008, been around for a while. Marketplaces are extremely valuable when you get them working but they take time because you have to keep cranking the wheel of supply and demand.
Shaan: One thing I liked — a listener named Adam Keisling pointed this out. Spoonflower has 3.3 million unique artists and 4,000 new designs uploaded every day. What they did was host design challenges: the top 50 most-popular-voted designs would get featured as the winner’s circle at the top of the website. That drove about 95% of sales to a lot of creators — feast or famine, but if you got noticed you got a ton of inbound sales. Maybe a thousand or two thousand people competing in each contest.
Shaan: This is a pretty smart model for bootstrapping a marketplace. You need buyers to want content for Halloween. How do I get designers to make the right Halloween content? Host a contest. Winners get exposure plus maybe hundreds or thousands of dollars. Adam was also sharing that Food52 used the same method when they were seeding their recipe marketplace — they’d create a contest called “your best recipe using fresh mozzarella,” get Whole Foods to sponsor it with a gift card, grand prize is a thousand dollars. And they’d keep doing contests around things people were searching for, seeding the marketplace with the right content.
Sam: Amazing. And Shutterfly buying them — I forgot about Shutterfly. They had a $2 billion market cap and close to $2 billion in revenue when they were public. That’s a complicated space. Good luck to them. Spoonflower is badass.
Celebrities Who Got Rich Not From Fame [00:35:30]
Sam: Can I tell you something that surprised me? The other day Rihanna was named a billionaire. Pretty amazing. So I got curious — I started working with Jake and was like: what other celebrities have gotten rich in ways you wouldn’t have guessed right away? This is basically a YouTube segment: “10 Celebrities That Got Rich Not From Their Fame.” Well, it’s a little extended from the fame, but I’m going to give you six of them.
Sam: First: Jimmy Buffett. Do you know who Jimmy Buffett is?
Shaan: I’ve heard the name, but if you put five old white guys in front of me and said point out Jimmy Buffett, I would just point to the far right.
Sam: White 60-year-olds who wear Tommy Bahama love him. He created “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and the album Margaritaville — all about the Caribbean, being on a boat, parrot-style living. His fans are called Parrotheads. He’s got Margaritaville — it’s a subsidiary of Cheeseburger Holding Company, which is a pretty funny name. He’s got 30 restaurants, vacation clubs, hotels, a retirement village, and tequila. Collectively the holdings do something like $2 billion a year in sales.
Shaan: That’s crazy.
Sam: Then Dolly Parton. Do you know Dolly Parton?
Shaan: I’ve heard the name. If you showed me five old white ladies I couldn’t point her out.
Sam: Famous country singer, but she did more than just country. Did you know Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”? Dolly Parton wrote that. She wrote “Working 9 to 5.” She’s a hit maker. Famous for blonde hair and, you know, her look. She’s got famous phrases like “You’d be amazed at how much it costs to look this cheap.” She’s actually a great person, known for her philanthropy. Estimated net worth of $600 million. And — I drove through Gatlinburg, Tennessee two weeks ago, right outside of that she has a theme park. It’s called Dollywood. It’s almost as big as Six Flags. People in the South are obsessed with it. That’s where you go on vacation. And you’ll see Dolly Parton-themed slot machines in casinos all over the South.
Shaan: That’s crazy. You’ve really never heard of Dollywood?
Sam: We’re like 15 years away from Paul World in LA — the Paul brothers’ version of Disney World. That’s what’s happening. They’re our generation’s Dolly Partons.
Sam: Another one: Sammy Hagar. Van Halen?
Shaan: I’ve heard of Van Halen.
Sam: Sammy Hagar from Van Halen sold a tequila company for around $80 million.
Sam: Kate Hudson — you know Kate Hudson?
Shaan: I know Kate Hudson but I see “athletics” written here. What does she have to do with Fabletics?
Sam: She helped start it. One of the co-founders. Didn’t know that, right? 2020 revenue: $500 million. Wild. And she owns 20% of it.
Sam: And finally — Jessica Alba. She started or helped start the Honest Company. Just IPO’d, market cap north of a billion dollars. Her stake is around $130 million. Pretty amazing.
Shaan: What do you think is the best model? Entertainment — hotels, casinos, amusement parks. Or makeup, skincare, fragrance, alcohol. Which one do you like? Or is there a category celebrities are leaving on the table?
Sam: Alcohol seems like the best. Conor McGregor recently sold Proper 12 — his stake was worth around $100 million. I think alcohol is the best because you can charge $50 for a bottle and someone might want to buy it multiple times a month. Makeup is okay. Rihanna’s Fenty is killing it.
Sam: But I think there’s a world where, if I was Lance Armstrong — I actually told him this when he was on the podcast — I would 100% partner with a hotel brand and do fitness-focused hotels. A branded pool, branded pool workout, branded cycling hotel. I think you could make money for 50 years doing that.
Shaan: I think doing something on-brand is the key. Sam Harris did this with a meditation app — that’s on-brand for him. If Sam Harris came out with alcohol or a skincare line, no thank you. But Sam Harris with a meditation app — that thing prints money.
Sam: All right, you want to do a few more?
Shaan: Yeah — Dan has one on here: George Clooney making a billion dollars with Casamigos tequila.
George Clooney’s Briefcase Story and Die With Zero [00:44:00]
Sam: Somebody told me this story — I didn’t plan to say this and I’m not sure if it’s 100% true, but: have you heard about George Clooney giving his friends a million dollars each?
Shaan: No.
Sam: So the story goes: George Clooney, at some point, was thinking about how when he retires or dies he wants to give some of his wealth to his friends. These friends are some of the best people in his life. He used to sleep on their couches when he was trying to make it. And he decided — why am I going to wait till I die? That doesn’t make any sense.
Sam: So he invited them all to dinner and showed up with 14 suitcases — Tumi suitcases — each filled with a million dollars in cash. And he gave each of them a suitcase and said: “I’ve been through some hard times and you helped me. I want you to not have to worry about your kids, your mortgage, school, whatever. Here you go, enjoy.”
Shaan: That is a baller move. Why haven’t I heard this story before? That’s kind of amazing.
Sam: It actually comes to a point I’ve been reading about. There’s this book and concept called Die With Zero. Have you heard of it?
Shaan: No, but I get the idea just off the title.
Sam: Good title. The idea we all have is: I want to earn money, and when I die I’ve got something to give to my family or causes I care about. Die With Zero asks: why would you do that? If I’m going to pass away, I don’t care about my legacy when I’m dead — and so if I’m going to give to make an impact, impact today is worth a lot more than impact 45 years from now.
Sam: Two scenarios. Scenario one: you wait till you’re 88 or 92, you pass away, there’s a will reading. A couple of your friends are there — they’re also 88 to 92, and your 88-year-old friend is like, “Thanks for the million dollars, George, it’ll go straight to my nursing home.” And your kids are like, “Cool — could have used this when I was paying off student debt, but now that I’m 45, I appreciate it.”
Sam: Scenario two: you invite your friends to dinner, show up with a suitcase with a million dollars in it, and say, “When I eat, we all eat.” You hook up the people who helped you, and it matters to them today. Because why wait 40 years and let them have more discomfort when you could help now?
Sam: I’ve really taken this mindset — when I eat, we all eat. I think it’s a lot more fun to live that way.
Sam: I’ll share this little story too. I was talking to my trainer and I was like, “You know my goals, my dreams — what’s your dream?” We did an imagination exercise. He has this thing where you don’t imagine the outcome — you imagine the congratulatory moment. You don’t imagine selling your company and seeing the number in your bank account. You imagine your friend calling to congratulate you, or booking a trip because you have free time now. You imagine what happens after you have it.
Sam: So his was: “I imagine getting a text from my mom saying, ‘Son, thank you for the six thousand dollars this month. I’m so grateful to have a son like you.’” And instead of saying, “I want to be a millionaire so I can do that,” he imagines the text. The next day he goes and sends her $600 — he can’t send $6K a month yet, but he can send $600 today. He showed me the text he got the next morning. It was almost word-for-word what he’d told me. She said, “Son, I don’t know what I did to deserve a son like you. The money you sent — you don’t even know, I needed that. It’s going to go exactly where I need it. Thank you so much.”
Sam: And I love that he didn’t wait until it was all done to start the giving plan.
Bar Mitzvah Money as an Investing Hack [00:54:00]
Shaan: Since you were talking about giving money away — I saw that you wrote something in our document about the Jewish hack to wealth.
Sam: I totally agree, and I have so many thoughts. My wife is from a Jewish family, I’ve got a lot of Jewish friends, and I am so envious of how that community functions. At my wedding, our Jewish guests gave us significant checks. My Missouri friends would give $100. Our Jewish New Yorker friends would give $1,000. Amazing. I think there’s something in that community where money flows more freely and you help each other out.
Sam: And getting $5,000 or $8,000 at 15 or 16 years old for a bar mitzvah — I’ve talked to kids who said that’s how interesting businesses got started. “I used my bar mitzvah money.”
Shaan: I don’t know exactly how many Jews there are in the world — maybe 14, maybe 20 million. Not a lot. But Jewish people punch way above their weight. They have a lot of impact, a lot of success. I don’t think it’s genetic — I think it’s cultural. A strong foundation of helping each other out. Birthright, for example: a basically all-expense-paid trip to your home country at some point in your life. That one transformative experience keeps people tied to the culture instead of the brain drain of people just leaving.
Shaan: And bar mitzvahs — I’ve heard so many times, “I took all my bar mitzvah money and started investing in the stock market.” My buddy had $10 grand or $12 grand or something when he was 13. By the time we were in college he had a portfolio of $250,000. How? It’s been compounding for 10 years. And one of the family friends didn’t even give him cash — gave him straight stock in a biotech company he really believed in. That company 10x’d in seven years. And so he’s like, “We’ve got $200K if we wanted to start a business.”
Sam: What a hack. More cultures should do this.
The Birth Dividend Idea [01:01:00]
Shaan: I’d also heard a pretty interesting idea. There’s this universal basic income concept — every year you give people some amount of money, $10,000 a year or whatever. Some people think it’s great, some think it’s bad. I don’t really know or care. But there’s another idea I heard that I think is better: what if you got a birth dividend?
Shaan: Every U.S. citizen when you’re born — the government or whoever puts $2,500 in your account. You can’t touch it until you’re 21. So from age zero to 21, it’s compounding. Something compounding over 21 years is going to double probably at least three times. So you’d have $15,000 to $20,000 waiting for every person at 21 — a cushion for life, a way to start something, a way to fund a creative pursuit.
Shaan: And because it’s invested in an index for 21 years, everyone is bought into the same thing. Different opinions on everything else, but at least we all have a tiny bit of skin in the game, incentivized in a similar way. And everybody would learn about investing and compounding — the benefit of time in the market. Time in market beats timing the market. Once you’ve been in the market for 21 years and you see that account going up, you’re going to realize the value of investing. That’s the true path to wealth. Whereas if you never get started you never really feel it.
Sam: We should have the American bar mitzvah fund. That’s actually a great idea.
Shaan: Incredibly interesting.
Aubrey de Grey and Anti-Aging Science [01:06:00]
Sam: All right, maybe one last one. Tell me about Aubrey de Grey because I know a little bit about this. He’s an anti-aging doctor and professor, right?
Shaan: So this is a funny — well, ironic — story. I went on Twitter last night and I see this tweet that says “Aubrey de Grey is a sexual predator.” I don’t know who Aubrey de Grey is, so I click it. Basically: two women who are in that field, Laura Deming and someone else, came out recently saying Aubrey de Grey made them feel uncomfortable, said things that were totally inappropriate. And the organization that funds him knew about it and covered it up because he was so important for fundraising and for the science of the anti-aging movement.
Shaan: So I see that, then I go look him up — he’s got this huge beard. He looks a little bit like Rasputin. You know, Gandalf or Dumbledore lineage. And I click and listen to this TED talk. Ironically, the funniest thing in the TED talk was at the end, someone asked, “If you’re so into anti-aging, why do you try to look like an old man?” Hilarious.
Shaan: But the topic of anti-aging is fascinating, and I was blown away by what’s going on in this field. I basically want to summarize his TED talk from 2005 in two minutes. He talks a million miles a minute, these slides with white background and red font callouts. Very effective.
Shaan: He goes: aging, illness, and death — people think these are inevitable, acceptable, even good. I don’t think any of those things are true. I think we will defeat aging. I think we’ll be able to live thousands of years. 150,000 people die every day. Let me get through the bad arguments first.
Shaan: Bad argument one: “Oh, we’d be so bored if we didn’t die.” Bad argument two: “The population will get too big, humans are bad for the earth.” He goes through these and debunks each one quickly. Then he says: what we want to do is be healthy for a long time. Not old and feeble and dependent for a long time. Healthy.
Shaan: Here’s what’s going on in the field. Why do we die? Two reasons. To live, your body does all these metabolic processes — heating, cooling, immune system, digesting, growing, building muscle. Just like any machinery, the more you use it, damage accumulates. Eventually it breaks. Living creates damage. Damage kills cells. Cells die. You die.
Shaan: Two schools of thought. School one: prevent the damage. Bad idea — we barely even know how metabolism works, and it’s highly unlikely you can keep the machine running while stopping damage. That’s called one school of thought. The other is geriatrics — damage happens, but how do you repair it or limit it so it doesn’t kill your cells? He says that’s where this will work.
Shaan: He calls the therapy Human Rejuvenation Therapy. Basically: the damage accumulates from day one, but you don’t feel the effects until you’re 40, 50, 60. That’s when brain function slows, muscle function slows, reaction time slows. There’s a point where there’s too much damage. So we need to give you a therapy before then — something that repairs the damage faster than it accumulates. But not by modifying your DNA to prevent damage. By the time you’re 30 or 40, we give you something that repairs the damage that’s happening.
Sam: Is this boring or should I keep going?
Shaan: No, keep going.
Shaan: Number two: we’re going to solve it in mice first. A mouse lives two years. The test is: can you get it to live five years? But here’s the trick — you can’t breed the mouse differently. You have to let the mouse live normally for 18 months and then give them something at 18 months that extends life by two years. And he’s put up a multi-million-dollar prize for anyone who can do that. An X Prize-style test: let the mouse live 18 months, give a therapy, the mouse’s life needs to extend by two years, while the control mouse dies on schedule.
Shaan: Once we figure it out in mice, he says 10 to 15 years later we’ll be able to translate it into humans. Right now we can extend mouse life by a few months but not years.
Shaan: Then he addresses the “this is really far away” objection. He shows a curve. If you’re 80 when we discover this, too late. If you’re 60, probably too late. If you’re 50, we might extend you by 30 years but you’ll probably die. If you’re 40 or 30 — that’s when you have escape velocity. He says the difference between someone living an extra 50 years and an extra thousand years will just be a 10-year age gap, because you’ll just be below the damage threshold. Once we have the therapy, someone 10 years younger than you will live to 1,000 and you’ll live to 150. That blows people’s minds but it’s just the way it works.
Shaan: Then he talks about breakthroughs being hard to predict. Flight — from prehistoric ages we’ve had the idea of flying, and nobody figured it out until 1903. After the Wright brothers, every 25 years there’s a major jump. Two guys in a plane that’ll kill you, to reliable planes, to long-haul flights, to supersonic, to now where you go to sleep and watch a movie and land safe. Incremental progress after the breakthrough is predictable. So he knows that after they get the mouse breakthrough, they’ll have 15 to 20 years before it translates to humans extending life 20 or 30 healthy years. But we don’t know when that breakthrough is coming. And the bad part is it’s been about 100 years and basically nothing’s happened on that breakthrough yet.
Shaan: I was just at the TED talk level — that’s the surface of the surface. But I’m very interested in going deeper. There’s a book called Lifespan I’m thinking about reading. I’m very fascinated.
Sam: I’ve been thinking about this too. It seems like most people just die from cancer or Alzheimer’s if the timeline’s long enough. And I’ve always wondered — isn’t it weird that with everything we have, you could still die from something you’ve had for 6 to 24 months and not know? You should know right away once that cell forms. I don’t know anything about medicine, but you know what I mean. Maybe I’m flipping out a little because I’m getting into my 30s and I’m feeling a tiny bit of soreness and I don’t want to get older.
Shaan: There’s this chart that’s great — shows why people die. Blue if it’s non-transmissible, red if one person passes it to another. The size of the bubble is how many people die of it each year. Number one is cardiovascular disease, number two is cancer. Those are the bulk. Then you’ve got influenza way down the list. You’re right — it’s the same causes people are trying to fix. But no breakthrough yet that radically eliminates them. Someday people will say “remember when people used to die of cancer?” — like how we think about polio. It’s just a matter of when.
Sam: That’s interesting. All right. I think that episode was a nine out of ten. What do you think?
Shaan: I liked it. What do you think, Dan?
Sam: Dan gives it a nine as well. Dan’s got a little bit of a Ned Flanders in him, I could see that. Great neighbor.
Shaan: What’s wrong with Ned Flanders?
Sam: Nothing, he’s a very positive guy. All right, I’ll take it. That’s the episode.