Sam and Shaan dig into the surprisingly massive horoscope/astrology business — covering Sanctuary World’s $5M raise, the mechanics of why personality-driven products convert so well, and a framework for building quiz-to-newsletter funnels. They then explore the concept of “personal monopoly” through Michael Buffer (the “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble” guy) and Judge Judy, and close with Sam’s Tim Ferriss story and a discussion of how great personal brands work at every point of contact.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, investor)
Open: Carnivore Diet, Intro [00:00:00]
Shaan: What’s going on? We were just talking about losing weight. You look good. How long have you been doing meat-only?
Sam: Meat-only is only four days in. I heard about it — Joe Rogan talked about the carnivore diet. It sounded ridiculous at the time.
Shaan: Then you started sending me nude selfies and I was like, damn, Sam’s pretty stacked. You’re like, yeah dude, I’m just only eating meat.
Sam: Yeah. The second person mentioned it, and then my trainer — he’s getting shredded for his season or whatever — I asked what adjustments he makes and he goes, “I just go to kind of a pretty much meat-only diet. Protein only. Grass-fed ground beef, some fish, a little bit of turkey.” I was like, well, I don’t know if this is gonna kill me later, but I’ll do it for two months. We’ll see if there’s any noticeable change.
Shaan: You’ve lost how many pounds? I mean, pounds isn’t the best way to measure it, but you’ve probably lost the equivalent of like 20 to 30 pounds of fat.
Sam: I don’t know that’d be a lot. My weight is the same or higher than when I started working out, but I do the DEXA scan — we talked about that business, where you lay down and it shows you where the fat, muscle, and bone is in your body. According to that, I’ve lost like — I do it every three months — the last three months I went down three or four percent body fat. This time I’m going down another four or five percent. Hopefully I’ll lose like 10 percent of my body fat.
Episode Overview [00:01:30]
Sam: The first idea I want to discuss is going to start with a fitness story — that’s my segue. We’re going to do mini episodes. You’re going to try the first one. We don’t even need to say what it was, but we’re gonna try a mini episode — probably five to ten minutes, we’ll see.
Shaan: Today we’re gonna talk about a horoscope idea, which sounds silly but it’s actually gonna be pretty awesome. Then we’re gonna talk about Judge Judy and Michael Buffer, which is actually gonna be pretty awesome. And then finally I want to talk about something I’ve asked Sam to prepare — about how he manages his team of interns.
The Sanctuary World Story [00:02:30]
Sam: I want to tell you the story about this guy named Ross Clark. Never heard of him? That’s okay. He kind of looks like me — just a white-haired, blonde, corn-fed-looking dude from South Carolina. He was a triathlete and he used to do SoulCycle. He would go to SoulCycle and he loved seeing these women walk out with a glow. They were very confident when they left. He thought to himself, “How do I make people feel like that? I want to make people feel confident. I want these women to feel great about themselves. I want them to have a better life.”
Sam: So he thinks, what can I do to make that happen? And then it hits him — kind of a weird thing — but he goes, “The best way I can do this is to create a store or a brand that sells crystals and zodiac necklaces and t-shirts and customized birth charts and smudge sticks. Things that make women feel great.” Kind of weird, right?
Shaan: Yes.
Sam: So that’s what we’re gonna talk about. He says he’s gonna launch this brand that creates all this — I consider them kind of woo-woo — stuff. But first he’s going to start with horoscopes. And that’s the story of SanctuaryWorld.co. They just raised a seed round of five million dollars.
Shaan: That’s caused a little bit of controversy because horoscopes, well — there’s not a lot of facts behind them. They’re not real. But a lot of people buy into them thinking they are. Something like 40 percent of women check their horoscope on a regular basis and will make decisions based on it.
Sam: By the way, what is this link to the SoulCycle thing? That sounds like —
Shaan: Who is this guy, Ross Parker?
Sam: No, Ross Clark. That’s the story, bro. Sounds like he was like, “Oh, women believe this stuff, men believe this stuff, I’m gonna sell it to them.” Not “I was standing outside a SoulCycle, saw them glowing and happy, and somehow connected the dots between feeling good after exercise to selling crystals.” That doesn’t make any sense to me.
Shaan: Well, I’ll give you that. He’s connecting SoulCycle. He also in the article mentions Headspace. He’s just name-dropping — this is good. He’s trying to associate himself with legitimate companies so he gets the halo effect of being bucketed in with those guys.
Sam: Like meditation, like religion, like fitness.
Shaan: Yeah. At one point he called it the “Uber for zodiac signs.” So basically: say three or four legitimate company names alongside yours and you too will get the halo effect.
Sam: Right. And calm.com calls themselves “the Nike of spiritual fitness,” so hey — I hate the game, but I’m not gonna hate the player.
The VC Controversy: Josh Wolfe vs. The Industry [00:05:30]
Sam: So let me explain to you why this is interesting. Josh Wolfe — a guy that you like — tweeted, “This is bullshit, whoever funds this idea is a crook.” And I actually don’t entirely agree with him. I understand where he’s coming from.
Sam: Josh Wolfe on Twitter, well-known VC, says: “Seriously, shame on anyone for funding or encouraging this. No doubt there is demand, but this isn’t peddling entertainment. It’s encouraging a slippery slope of snake oil flapdoodle. We ought to desire an informed, educated, rational and not naive, gullible, superstitious society.” And then he screenshotted all the investors who participated in the round.
Shaan: Shots fired. Although I disagree with what he said. Go on.
Sam: So the way this app works — I downloaded it, it’s actually beautifully designed and it sucked me in hardcore. You sign up, you click your sign — I’m a Gemini — you select your birthday and it says, “Today is your daily reading.” It tells you like it’s text messaging you. One or two sentence description of what you should expect. Then it says, “By the way, we want to tell you more in a few hours. Can you please turn notifications on so we can tell you more about what’s going to happen to you?” They use this language that speaks exactly to me.
Sam: Then they say, “Also, we have a little bit more we can tell you if you sign up here.” The way the app works — you can have a premium subscription where you get more info, or you can stay for free where you get daily updates. Or, this is where it gets interesting, you can pay a little bit more money and you can talk to a live what do they call themselves — a mystic?
Shaan: A reader.
Sam: You can talk to a reader and she’ll tell you all about you. Basically, you get to talk to a Miss Cleo on the phone or via text and they’re going to tell you what you can expect for the coming year, the coming day, yada yada. Now in itself that’s not entirely new — but what’s really interesting is how big this is.
Sam: As two 30-something-year-old men we probably don’t know too much about this, but it’s way bigger than I ever thought. I started reading articles about the horoscope industry in typical educated liberal blogs written by women, and I would have thought, “Oh these women are gonna call it a scam.” And you know what? All the articles were very positive. Even in TechCrunch, this woman named Sarah Perez wrote: “Yeah, horoscopes aren’t really harmful, it’s just fun meaningless entertainment.” Whereas Josh completely called it out.
Sam: And the reason why women were perhaps okay with it — something like 50 percent of women check their horoscope on a monthly basis, 37 percent said they check daily.
Shaan: I always get into these awkward situations. My sister-in-law is a big believer in the zodiac thing. A situation will be happening between her kids, or we’ll be talking, and she’s like, “Oh, such a Taurus.” And I’m always like — I don’t know how to respond to this. I can’t validate it or agree because I don’t agree.
Sam: Yeah. I don’t know what to say in response to that either. I always say to them: look, if I was born one second later at 12:01, you’re telling me I’m gonna react differently about things just because of that one nanosecond? Or I always say, what if I’m born in Australia where the hemisphere is different and the seasons are different? But by the way, in India they have this times ten. So if you think Miss Cleo was big — and she was big, she generated over a billion dollars in sales — in India, this is still on TV all the time. There are these gurus, these mystics, and in every village, even the poorest villages — especially the poorest villages, because that’s where superstition and religion is strongest — when your kid is born, you take your kid to a local mystic guy and he writes this giant thing on a scroll and gives it to you. It says stuff like, “Don’t let him eat yellow lentils,” or “He shall not be married in the months of May, June, or August.” And people I know — educated doctors, lawyers, bankers — will be engaged, and someone asks, “When’s the wedding?” and they’re like, “Nah, we can’t do summer.” “Why?” “Because my parents had this reading done when I was two months old.”
Shaan: It’s a worldwide thing. Under many different names. Worldwide superstitions.
Sam: Wild. So let me tell you a little about the industry. The company was founded by this guy Ross Clark, went through Lorne Michaels — the guy who runs SNL — who apparently has a digital incubator. He raised money from NBC, Advanced Capital which owns loads of magazines, Greycroft which is a media investor. So all these traditional media people like this type of stuff. And the reason why they like it: the horoscope business has been large for years and years.
Sam: Astrology.com — you’ve heard of it?
Shaan: Of course.
Sam: They do low eight figures in revenue. They do programmatic advertising — ad arbitrage — and they also sell subscriptions. A little premium reading when you click a button. They make tens of millions doing that, and they’ve been at it for about 30 years. Horoscope.com gets about 20 million people a month to their website. These guys have been around since 1995, 1999. Just making $10M+ in revenue and about 15 million visitors a month. A lot of that is direct or search, which is really good.
Why VC Moralizing About Astrology Is Annoying [00:11:00]
Shaan: Which way do you want to go with this? One is the controversy — Vinod Khosla, Josh Wolfe came out saying how evil it is to fund this. Agree or disagree?
Sam: I totally disagree and they’re wrong. Why would you ever invest in a nicotine business, an alcohol business, a burger chain, Netflix? You can believe that there are negative consequences for society and humanity for Facebook too, right? In this case their view is very tainted. Here’s the easy example: if somebody was doing a religion app, they would never say anything. But because the religion is the stars instead of the gods, now it’s snake oil, now it’s fake science. What is religion? It is a belief in something supernatural, invisible, unprovable by science. It is blind faith in something. And that faith gives people comfort, entertainment, community — many positive benefits. So if you’re gonna say this about astrology, you better also say it about religion. Otherwise I view you as a hypocrite.
Shaan: We’re on the same page. And also — a lot of people have a hard life. They go to work, they get home at five pm, and they just want to veg out. If a little horoscope gives them a little bit of hope, who cares?
Sam: I’ll say it’s bulls*** just like I think a lot of religion is — sorry if you’re religious, I respect that you like it — but it’s okay. And also the virtue signaling by VCs is so annoying to me. The grandstanding is so annoying. People take any chance they get to say how they’re greater than others by trying to take the moral high ground at any cost.
Sam: If you’re an investor going out and saying “I’m a good guy, I would never fund something like this” — that is such an annoying move personally. What do you think of that?
Shaan: I completely agree. We have to remember there’s some mom in Missouri having a hard day who needs to find a little bit of happiness somewhere. I don’t care if she wants a soap opera or reads horoscopes. Not everything needs to save the world. It just needs to be a little bit of fun and entertainment. And not everyone needs to agree with you. You don’t want to fund it? No problem. But to call out and demonize the people who do fund it — and the people who lose the one fundamental thing, which is open-mindedness — that’s just weird.
Sam: Okay. So for all the people who want to talk about the opportunities — why does this work?
The Business Opportunity: Quiz Funnels and Personality Products [00:14:00]
Shaan: I have a couple. I’ll go first. The first is Myers-Briggs and other personality tests. You can do this exact same thing with that. And by the way, the reason I bring this as the most interesting subject to anybody — it’s themselves. Themselves. That’s the umbrella. We’re not talking about selling pseudoscience. That’s the technique: why does this work? Because the most interesting topic to me is me, and the most interesting topic to you is you. Once you understand that to be true, it opens up a set of business possibilities you can work through.
Shaan: So the goal is to find personal stuff. For most apps, the free-to-paid conversion ratio is probably one percent. Maybe you can get to three or four percent. With this app I bet it’s as high as ten percent. If they told me ten, I’d be impressed — but not surprised.
Sam: Ten percent free-to-paid conversion rate is stupid good. The reason it’s good is you can spend a lot of money to advertise. The churn might be high, but that’s a situation you address after you’re already big.
Shaan: The reason why it’s six percent — let’s say six — is that it’s so personal. So you need to go find personal stuff. That’s why Myers-Briggs or any personality test works. I can say, “You’ve just told me these ten things about you. That means you’re probably disorganized. Let me tell you all about being disorganized and what that means.” It’s actually the same thing as a horoscope.
Shaan: And what you can do is a daily email. By the way, all those people who are like “Horoscopes — that’s for gullible people” — they’ll also put their Myers-Briggs type in their Twitter bio. Like, “I’m an ENTJ.” Right?
Sam: There’s slightly more science behind Myers-Briggs, but I don’t know — this is all hand-wavy as far as I’m concerned.
Shaan: Exactly. And guess what — I’m in favor of it all. I take these tests and enjoy them.
Shaan: So I think you can do a daily email for this. I also think paid subscriptions work really well for these types of things. And what this app is doing that I particularly love — and that could work for so many different things — is you get a top-of-funnel thing where you give these tests, and then you do “come and talk to a person” and you charge $50 per person or per hour. As a middleman you take a cut. I think that is brilliant.
Sam: There was a company we talked about on here, I think it was called Intro. Basically you could book a call with Justin Bieber’s stylist, or with someone who remodels kitchens on HGTV. The founder sold his last company, starts this thing. Guess what the number-one vertical was for them? Astrology readings. They found all these Instagrammers — people with 50,000, 150,000 followers who just post a daily reading — and people will pay to book personal time with them. It’s taking off. The founder doesn’t publicize that; if you go to the website it still looks like it’s about style and home renovations.
Shaan: Fitness, nutrition, makeup — smart people nod their head at those. But where’s the highest demand? It’s “tell me about me through a reading — psychic reading, astrology reading, whatever it is.”
The Golden Button: Build This Quiz Funnel [00:19:00]
Sam: I want to go back to something you said — I think it’s super legit. We need a sound effect for whenever we have total conviction, like the golden buzzer on America’s Got Talent. I’m pushing the golden button right now for anybody who wants to take this idea of creating this funnel.
Sam: To do this you need to know nothing about code, but you do need to be internet savvy and clever. You should probably go read Hooked by Nir Eyal, or Influence by Robert Cialdini — somebody who gets into this stuff and is nonjudgmental. Here’s the experiment: you create a quiz at the top of the funnel. “Find out your personality,” “find out your Myers-Briggs,” “find out your horoscope,” whatever. You create a quiz. To get your results, you put in your email. We email you the results. Then we send you a daily newsletter that’s personalized to you because you were born on this day of this year — I’ll give you your daily horoscope, your daily reading. That’s the whole product.
Sam: If we do this, I will put money in. I bet Shaan would too. You put a little money behind paid acquisition, and there’s inherent virality because people will share their quiz results, especially when it says things like “see if you’re compatible with your girlfriend, your brother, your mother.”
Shaan: I think you could easily build a 100,000-plus person list doing this. And there is a clear premium offering on the back end. I would say with a high degree of certainty: if you work on this full time for three years, you have a $5M/year business. Or even simpler — a lot of people just want a side hustle they can do a few hours a day that brings in a few thousand dollars a month. This will do that.
Sam: So if you want to do this, DM us, email us, find a way to contact us. I want somebody legit to actually try this.
Sam’s Side Project Experiments: IQ Test, Love Doctor, Crystals [00:22:00]
Sam: Let me tell you about some experiments I’ve done in this area. I don’t even know if you know about these things.
Sam: Not too long ago I was quite bored. I had sold my company and I said, last episode you asked if I want to build something that lasts 30 to 40 years — yeah, sometimes I dream about that. But sometimes I dream about: what’s something I could do this weekend that would be fun and I could throw away next weekend if I wanted to? A low-commitment fling of a business. Just a fun scheme. A hookup.
Shaan: A one-night stand.
Sam: And I created three ideas that I thought would work. The first was an IQ test. I always wanted to know my IQ. I’d like to think I’m smart. I think I’m above average — but guess what, everybody thinks they’re above average. I thought, why isn’t there an easier way to do an IQ test? If there was an ad on Facebook that was like a puzzle — “Solve this puzzle, this is the start of an IQ test” — I would go through that. I’d take the IQ test for 20 minutes and then I’d want my results. I’d give my email, and I might even pay for the full results. I thought that was interesting — recreating Mensa as an online funnel. No physical product, no shipping, no logistics. Pure play digital info product.
Sam: Second one: have you read The Five Love Languages?
Shaan: Obviously. You’re married, so at some point you were given that book.
Sam: So that’s a pretty successful franchise. If you go to my Facebook page right now, you’ll see I’m the admin of a page called “The Love Doctor.” Let me tell you why. I wanted to take the Five Love Languages test, put it online, send people through the flow where they answer a bunch of questions. Then say, “Would you like to know what your love language is? Put your email in and I’ll send you your results.” Then: “Well, we need to see who you’re compatible with. Do your love languages match? Send this to your partner.” Then: “Buy the eBook that will tell you what to do given your love language.” There’s only five languages, so I can just make five PDFs and sell them.
Sam: And I have one last one that I did. As you can tell, these types of businesses appeal to me. I like simple, lightweight stuff with a lot of demand that Silicon Valley likes to pooh-pooh and say they’re better than. So — crystals.
Shaan: Oh my gosh.
Sam: Yes. This guy Ross Clark wants to sell crystals. And I don’t think it’s “sell” — it’s like, is a placebo a bad thing? If this thing has no measurable effects but I believe it to have a positive effect and it helps me feel better, has it not achieved its purpose?
Shaan: Exactly.
Sam: So I looked at these three ideas and had to pick one. I found that with crystals, there were a bunch of interesting things. A lot of female celebrities and idols — Adele carries a rose quartz crystal before every performance. Gwyneth Paltrow with Goop. The Kardashians — after Kim got robbed and felt unsafe, she credits crystals as one of the things that helped her center herself. And I found I could source crystals very easily, not that expensive.
Sam: So I created an e-commerce store for crystals and tried it for a couple weekends. I spent maybe five to ten grand spinning this thing up and I broke even, even made a little profit. In the end I got bored of the hookup and was ready to move on.
Shaan: But you validated the idea. You only did it for a few weeks — most things you have to stay at it a bit to actually get it to work.
Sam: Exactly. And then separately — you know Ryan Holiday, the author? His thing is Stoicism. He talks a lot about how to deal with adversity, how to be a tough guy. This is probably mostly men, whereas horoscopes are mostly women. I read one of his books, it made me feel better about myself, and I went to DailyStoic.com and bought a $30 coin that has some Greek thing on it. I don’t even know what it says but it translates to something like “you live and then you’re gonna die, so live well.” I would carry it around. I paid $30 for it, I think it costs him a dollar to make. He’s made a few million dollars. That works.
Sam: And my one-night stand from a couple years ago: our friend Ramon was killing it on dog stuff. I’m like, that looks fun. So I created this one page called Bully Boo — the word “bully” and then “boo” — bully breeds, like pit bulls. I just went and got viral videos from Reddit and posted them. I got like 10,000 followers on Facebook in about five days.
Shaan: That works.
Sam: I also heard this guy was making money by printing your pet’s photo on socks as a gift. Great weekend hookup — tried it, spun up the whole thing, had a friend who has a sock company print them. My results weren’t great but same sort of thing.
Meta-Lesson: Experiment More, Marry Less [00:30:00]
Sam: Here’s the thing — when I share these I think part of it is just interesting to hear these little random stories. I didn’t even know you did the Bully Boo thing, you didn’t know I’ve done these three things. There are actually ten more that each of us has done that we haven’t talked about. A lot of which are embarrassing. These are the ones we’re talking about — imagine the ones we don’t.
Sam: So one of the meta-takeaways is: just experiment more. Be willing to spin something up quickly and then throw it away when you’re done with it. Don’t try to marry everything. It’s okay to date, it’s okay to have a hookup or a fling or a one-night stand with a business. That’s a lot of where skill is built.
Sam: In doing that, I used to tell one of my interns who was working with me on the crystal thing — he was like, “Dude, I don’t know if this crystal thing’s gonna work, but I’m amazed that in 48 hours we went from you just bullshitting about the idea to our first sale.” He called it a “flash brand.” I love that. We created this whole brand in 48 hours — it looks real, it’s got a name, we named it after my sister’s kid, we created a logo, we got a Shopify store spun up.
Sam: And in doing so we learned all these mechanics: how do you get better at writing copy? How do you get better at naming things? How do you make a logo? How do you use tools like Shopify and Klaviyo and all the different piping you need to sell stuff? Even if you think the ideas we’re talking about are dumb, it’s not dumb to use these as an excuse to learn about Facebook ads or building a Facebook page quickly, because that might come in handy three days later or three years later when you’re trying to do the next thing.
Sam: And of course that’s not the most important thing you’re learning — what you’re really learning is the confidence to just go through the motions and get stuff done. In the same way it’s a lot easier to get in shape when you know how to bench press and squat and you feel comfortable. You’re like, oh yeah, I just do this and I eat less and boom.
Sam’s Writing Course on Maven [00:34:00]
Sam: Can I tell you a mini story on this real quick?
Shaan: Go.
Sam: So I invested in that company Maven — started by our mutual friend Gagan Biyani, who started Udemy, which is a three-billion-dollar edtech company, and now he’s got a new one for teaching online. I invested in the company. In order to get in — it was such a competitive deal — he’s like, “Look, you guys have a good audience. You have a big Twitter following. You gotta do a course. If you agree to be a teacher, I’ll let you in the round.” I was like, done.
Sam: Then he’s been hitting me up: “Where’s your course? Come on man, make your course.” I was overthinking it. So yesterday I took about 20 minutes, wrote a three-tweet thread about how writing has helped me. I said: in school I was a shitty writer — they want you to write long essays, minimum word count, you study Shakespeare and think that’s what good writing is. But in the real world it’s the exact opposite. You’re paid to be concise. I said I’ve gotten pretty good at real-world writing through trial and error, and studying the best people — yourself included, our friend Neville, I bought his course, I got better at copywriting. And I said: how much value can be unlocked if you’re good at writing emails, tweets, blog posts, company memos, investor letters? It’s made me millions of dollars. I think it can do that for other people too.
Sam: So I tweeted: “I want to package this up into something you can learn in 10 days. It’ll cost $400. Here’s a link.” Put it into a shitty Google form where you put in your name and email and tell me why you want to take the course. Guess how many responses I got?
Shaan: 300?
Sam: A thousand. Of people who gave me all their info and said they’d like to sign up for the first batch. Off of one tweet. Not email list, not anything else.
Shaan: Wow. Let’s say it’s a thousand people, course costs $400 — not all will convert, but maybe 200. Actually he said about 30 to 40 percent of people will end up converting once you qualify the list a little bit. And this was just one tweet. If you email it out or tweet again, you could probably triple the size of the interest list. So the net net — on the low end $100K, on the high end $400-500K for this course.
Sam: Sweet. But the lesson here is actually that I was not gonna send this tweet. I was telling Gagan, here’s my plan: first I’m gonna work on the content of the course, make sure it’s good. And I want to show people I’m good at this, so I’m gonna do ten examples of taking bad writing and making it better. That’ll get people interested. Then I’ll mention it on the podcast. Then I’ll do this other thing. And he’s like, “Dude. You don’t need to do all that. Just say: hey, I’m thinking about doing this, here’s why it would be good for you, if you’re interested sign up.” I was like, yeah, you’re right.
Sam: That thing — doing all that preparation — is what most people do. You’re afraid to fail so you overthink what you need to do to make it successful. “I need to incorporate, I need a good name, I need to buy the domain, I need to build a website, I need to have a high-quality product before I launch.” Nope. Shitty tweet, shitty Google form, 1,000 responses.
Sam: The classic quote: if you’re not embarrassed by your first version of your product, you waited too long to launch.
Shaan: Do you know what you’re gonna teach?
Sam: Yeah, actually. The way to get good at writing is to write — the way to get good at anything is to do it. But I can’t just tell you to go do it. If it was that easy, you would have already done it. So here’s what I’m thinking: every day I give you a prompt. Let’s say we want to get better at cold email — the way you cold emailed speakers to come to Hustle Con. I say: “We’re going to write a cold email to someone you want to come speak at your event. I’m not gonna tell you how first. Put fifteen minutes on the clock and try it. Write a shitty version.”
Sam: So they try it. Then I give them the learning. It’s: do, learn, do. Then I tell them how I would do it, with four examples. “Here’s one way, here’s another, here’s another. Here are the common principles I’m using in all of these.” All right, you learned that — good. Now do it again. And I’ll give feedback on all the submissions. “Hey, this is actually awesome.” Or, “Hey, this is much better than your first attempt — look, in 30 minutes you went from really shitty to pretty good. Here’s how you go from pretty good to amazing if you make this one tweak.”
Sam: So I want people to get daily reps at writing — specific things. Write a headline. Here’s the story, write the headline. Okay, that was a bad headline. Here’s what goes into a great headline. Now try again.
Shaan: You better launch fast. Someone listening is going to go and do this.
Sam: Of course. If you want to do this, help me do it. I think this should exist.
Michael Buffer, Judge Judy, and Personal Monopoly [00:42:00]
Sam: You want to talk about Michael Buffer?
Shaan: Yes. On our doc I’ve got “Michael Buffer and Judge Judy — personal monopoly” written down. I’m very curious what that even means.
Sam: So this started with curiosity. I was watching the Canelo Alvarez boxing match that happened last weekend. Fun match — the guy broke this other guy’s face in three places and then the guy quit between rounds. Anyway, boxing is this funny thing where the match itself only lasts for some number of minutes, but they need to charge you all this money for a pay-per-view, so there’s all this pomp and circumstance. They walk out with music and their entourage and their outfit. And then there’s the introduction. And in the introduction there’s always this guy — you’ve probably seen him — white guy with a great voice. In boxing he says: “Ladies and gentlemen… let’s get ready to rumble.” That’s like his signature thing.
Shaan: You kind of get wired over the years of following the sport. Like, yes — this is the main event. This is the big one.
Sam: And by the way, do you know who his brother is?
Shaan: Bruce Buffer. He’s in the UFC. He says “It’s time! It’s TIIIME!”
Sam: And they didn’t know they were brothers until they were both in their 50s. Crazy story. So I was watching this and I was like, how much does Michael Buffer get paid?
Shaan: 10 million a year?
Sam: Michael Buffer has made $400 million in his career. He made most of that off the fact that he created a personal monopoly — he is synonymous with a big boxing match. And his phrase “Let’s get ready to rumble” is trademarked. He licenses it out to video games, movies, shows. And actually if you go watch old UFC fights, they cut out Bruce Buffer’s “It’s time” part because they don’t want to pay the royalty on it.
Shaan: First of all, I knew he was wealthy because he looks like he’s got a lot of work done on his face — that Wayne Newton Las Vegas rich look. And second — how does the boxing federation allow him to own “Let’s get ready to rumble”?
Sam: So the way it happened: Michael Buffer is the announcer. At first he’s not making much, boxing is kind of nascent. He grew with the sport. Tyson got popular, Holyfield, all these big names — you keep seeing this one guy for like 30 years. He ended up building his own brand along the way.
Sam: So it’s 1984, he’s saying “Let’s get ready to rumble.” Bruce Buffer — who doesn’t know they’re siblings — is watching an event and sees this guy’s last name is Buffer. He goes, “I’ve never met another Buffer.” He looks in the yellow pages, no other Buffers. He goes, “Dude, this is crazy.” So he’s driving with his dad or something and asks, “How crazy is this — this announcer guy grew up half a mile away from us.” And the dad, while driving, just goes… “Yeah, I think that’s your brother.” Bruce is like, “What?!” The dad says, “Yeah, before you and your mom, I had another son. I don’t know if it’s him, but maybe that’s your brother.”
Sam: So they find out they are actually half brothers, share a dad. Bruce then goes to Michael and says, “You’re doing great but you have no business manager. I’ll be your manager.” Michael says okay. Bruce goes, “You need to trademark this phrase. This is your catchphrase.” He applies, gets it, and starts licensing it out — merchandise, hats, shirts, video games, everything.
Sam: Then later Michael gets Bruce into the announcing game, and Bruce becomes the UFC announcer. Now Bruce makes $50 to $100K for a night’s work — before every fight he just announces the fighters. He probably does three events a month, so you’re looking at $3.5 to $4M a year. And his net worth is in the tens of millions, whereas Michael Buffer is in the hundreds of millions.
Sam: This came together into this concept of creating a personal monopoly. How do you build yourself to the point where you are irreplaceable? Like Ryan Seacrest with American Idol. Chris Harrison with The Bachelor. Jeff Probst with Survivor. These are hosts where on the surface it’s like, “Oh, he just comes out here, says a few lines, anybody could do that.” But no — the fans grow attached to this person, and that becomes part of the brand of the event. The consistency of seeing the same faces, saying the same catchphrases, is part of what makes it popular.
Shaan: At the beginning of American Idol there were two hosts, and one guy after season one was like, “This is a hit, I want more money.” At that time he didn’t have a personal monopoly yet — he was replaceable because the show was so new. So they said no thanks. Ryan Seacrest did it for like 15 years and by the end was making $10 to $15 million a season because he waited until he became entrenched as the face of the franchise.
Sam: Judge Judy is probably the greatest example. The highest-paid person on TV for a number of years was Judge Judy, making $47 million a year for — I don’t know — about 50 days of filming. So about $900,000 a day filming. She was a judge before that, making $113,000 a year. From the commodity skill of being a judge to building her personal monopoly as the show called Judge Judy — she turned $113K a year of pricing power into $47 million a year. And CBS bought the back catalog of Judge Judy for $100 million, so she’s still making royalties without working anymore.
Shaan: I just find this tremendously interesting. It’s counterintuitive to me — all these people seem replaceable, but clearly the economics of Hollywood show that they’re not. And the story of one long-lost brother finding the other, becoming his manager, convincing him to trademark it — that trademark is what helped build a multi-hundred-million-dollar franchise.
Jack Butcher, Tim Ferriss, and How Great Brands Are Built [00:52:00]
Sam: I know a few people who have these personal brands. Maybe some people think I have that — but I actually don’t, because I’m not nearly careful enough. You seem quite careful about your brand.
Shaan: Who comes to mind?
Sam: Tim Ferriss. Jack Butcher. Jack is a great friend of mine. He created this huge following off of Visualize Value — great name. All he does is make one picture that describes a thousand words. You have a complicated topic, he makes one graphic a day that explains exactly how it works. You would think that’s silly, but he’s crushed it. He probably makes $2 to $3 million a year selling a course on that topic.
Sam: The second one is Tim Ferriss. And the reason why I can’t do this is because these guys are so protective and particular about their brand. I know Tim Ferriss because we were neighbors — we would walk our dogs in the same park. And I wouldn’t bring up business, I wouldn’t even act like I was a big fan, other than saying “Hey, I just listened to this podcast the other day, it was wonderful, good job.”
Shaan: How did you meet the first time?
Sam: The funny story is I was on the way home from the hospital after getting a kidney stone, super high on morphine. It was 8 AM. My wife Sarah — my girlfriend at the time — was driving me home. I see Tim walking in front of my house and I was in the passenger seat, seat back, all high, and I see him walk by. I go, “Hold on, Sarah, back up.” I roll down the window — “Hey, Tim! What are you doing around here, man?” He goes, “I live down the street.” I go, “That’s cool, I’m a big fan. Just got a kidney stone — you got any tips for that?”
Shaan: Oh, that’s obnoxious.
Sam: Then I saw him again the next day walking his dog and I go, “Tim, I just wanted to apologize. I was under the influence. But anyway — I know your books, big fan. What’s your dog’s name?”
Shaan: Yeah, that’s it.
Sam: And then we would just talk about dogs. That’s all. Then eventually he cold-emailed me months later: “Hey, I heard about The Hustle, it seems cool, do you want to have dinner?” I go to dinner and he goes, “Wait a minute — you’re the guy with the dog.” I go, “Yeah man, what’s going on, it’s me, Sam. I’m your neighbor. I didn’t ever want to bring up email or business because I didn’t want to be tacky.”
Sam: So it was a weird thing that we knew each other. One day after he invested in my company, he comes to the office, sees me drinking a Coke, and goes, “Hey man, can I have one of those?” I go, “Yeah dude, you can have as many as you want.” I give him one and he chugs it super fast. “Can I get one more?” I got two — he chugs both. We get done with this meeting, there’s like six of us in this little conference room — basically a bedroom in one of the apartments. He goes, “All right, well, that’s a good meeting.” And he pushes the Coke cans my way. I go, “What?” He goes, “You mind throwing those away for me?” And I go, “Yeah, yeah.” And I take them.
Sam: He just didn’t want to be seen walking out with a diet soda can. That’s how particular this guy was. And you know what? I think it’s great. I dig it. Whenever we work with Tim — if I write something and there’s a misplaced comma — he’s on top of it. At first I was like, you’re really being a pain in the butt. And then I realized: you’re not being a pain in the butt. You are being Tim Ferriss. You are protecting your brand. You want things a very particular way, and you’re being demanding. I respect that.
Sam: That’s when I realized I don’t think I could ever be a personal brand. Because you have to guard that stuff like crazy. Every single time. In a very particular way.
Shaan: EPOC — “every point of contact.” I don’t know if I made this up or somebody told me this, but it stands for every point of contact. If you want to make a great brand, you need to be congruent. You need to have something you stand for — most people don’t know what they stand for, it’s not unique, not compelling, not notable. But once you do, the second step is at every point of contact, you have to embody that. You can’t be the Four-Hour Workweek guy and be super inefficient and working 80 hours a week. You have to be congruent at all times. That should be the goal as a brand: at every point of contact a customer has with you, they’re getting that same thing you stand for.
Sam: That’s what great brand owners strive to do. Disney World has all these things — there’s no trash cans in sight, you can’t see the mascots ever taking a smoke break with their heads off. “At every point of contact, this place stands for joy. So everything’s got to be joy — the bathrooms, the food, all of it.”
Sam: And what you and I do — or at least what I know I do — is I test stuff on people. I see which jokes hit. Which stories make someone lean in and which make them lean back. You find these hooks and you rinse and repeat.
Shaan: I’ve seen this with Chris Sacca. He’s like one of the best investors ever, to the point where he’s already retired. He only invests in climate change stuff now because he’s already won the game of money and success — he’s “post-economic.” I met him in person and he told this story, and he had all these little offhand moments where he’d be like, “I didn’t realize that at the time.” And he’d say something, then correct himself in a very natural-sounding way. Later, I saw him on CNBC and he said the exact same things in the exact same way — like a comedian who has told the joke a million times but makes it feel like the first time. That’s when it really hits. And I saw him do that and I thought, “Oh, there are levels to this. Not only do you have to be good at it — this is like comedy, this is like storytelling, this is like a Broadway show going on stage every night for a new crowd. They have to do it like it’s the best performance they’ve ever given, even though they’ve said these lines a hundred times.”
Sam: Once you have that story in your bank, you can tell it over and over and people feel this way about you.
Sam: And when you’re pitching — your company to investors, hiring someone, going on other podcasts — you have the same pitch. You look at the inflection, you look at the person’s eyebrows and body language, see where you get them to lean in. You find these hooks and you constantly throw them out and see what bait works, then rinse and repeat.
Shaan: Exactly.
Sam: Anyway — cool story about Michael Buffer and Judge Judy. It pays to have a personal monopoly. That’s the podcast.