And by the way, you know how I know this is a great episode?
Because I feel like I need to get off this and go do these ideas right now.
Like, I don't even want to finish this episode.
I want to go do one of these things right now.
That's how I know this is a banger.
I feel like I can rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like the days off on a road.
Let's travel, never looking back.
Have you guys ever heard this idea that the Australian accent is just drunk English accent?
Because, like, Australia was populated by all the criminals or the drunkards from England.
And that the accent in Australia is just a drunk London guy.
Still far off. There's a great Paul Graham blog post that I don't know if you guys have read called Cities.
I think it's called Cities and Ambition.
And he has this concept in it.
He says that every city whispers something to you.
Every city is whispering something.
So he's like, you know, maybe it's in LA, right?
The whisper that's there for you is become somebody, right?
Become sort of known, become a power player, a famous person, basically.
You're not famous enough.
And in Silicon Valley, he says the whisper is you're not ambitious enough because the status symbol here is not who's the most beautiful or the most famous or even the most rich, to be honest.
The status symbol is like who's doing the big mission here, right?
Who's like the AI guys now.
They're the highest status.
Even if you have a really amazing, if you're the CEO of Workday and you're like, dude, I got an $80 billion company over here, you're low status compared to the guy who's trying to make the next version of an LLM.
And so he says, New York whisper something.
He basically is like, you should think about which cities you want to live in because that's what's going to get whispered to you all the time.
I don't know what it would be for Austin.
I'm curious. You guys, Sam, you've lived there.
What's the Austin whisper?
The Austin whisper is how do you live a fit life on your own terms, which means being very balanced.
So Austin is very much a balance.
So how do you work six hours a week, go for walks, be with your family, wake up early, be healthy.
Austin is a place of balance, I think.
George, what's the Dubai whisper right now?
Is it like you're poor? Like, there's definitely a little bit of that.
I never thought I would have ended up being in Dubai for a little bit of time, but it was during COVID.
And the second lockdown came along.
And I wanted to go to the mountains by myself.
And Chris, my friend from Modern Wisdom, said, come to Dubai.
And I was like, I grew up reading Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens.
I'm scared of going to an Islamic country.
And Chris gave me the ultimate reply of, don't be a virgin.
Come. And I went for two weeks, stayed for three years.
But it's a very unique, weird, bizarre, fascinating place.
That's great. All right, let's jump in.
So you knew that we love business ideas.
And I'll give you two things.
You wrote an intro for yourself.
I'm going to read it, but I think you didn't do yourself, just so you said, I'm excited to come on.
You said, I don't have crazy high stakes, huge exits of my business.
I'm more of a mum's basement writing ideas online, coming up with weird ideas and essays kind of guy.
So I have some ideas, some business ideas and opportunities, but I have a lot of philosophies and frameworks.
I think that's great. You also didn't do yourself full justice.
You have a great marketing agency.
So you have a successful business there.
Also, you're not just a kid in a basement writing essays.
You're a kid in a basement writing essays.
They get read by everybody from Joe Schmo to Elon Musk.
Elon's been retweeting you a lot lately.
And I think that's a good sign, bro.
You've made it. I appreciate that.
You're killing the British syndrome out of me.
So I do appreciate that.
What happens when Elon retweets you, by the way?
Do you get a lot of traffic?
Yeah, I get quite a lot of traffic.
I mean, the one thing I did notice is I've reached hundreds of millions of people on Twitter and I've never had one DM from a girl.
And then Chris Williamson started sharing my videos on Instagram and it changed a little bit.
Like it's all men tech, things on Twitter, like that.
But yeah, you do get quite a lot of traffic.
The notifications bell does start to break a little bit.
Hey, real quick, one of the cool parts about what we're doing is that people have reached out and told me that they've built actual million-dollar businesses, made their first million, often idea they heard on the show.
That is crazy. That's wild.
That's why we want to do the show.
And we want to see more of that.
One of the questions we get asked over and over again is, is there some kind of idea, database, or spreadsheet where we list out all the different business ideas that we've talked about?
Well, the answer is finally yes.
The fine folks at HubSpot have dug through the archive and pulled out 50-plus business ideas and put them into a business idea database.
It's totally free. Go to clickhubspot.com slash MFM and get the database for you.
All right, now back to the show.
All right, so let's start with business ideas.
What have you got for us?
What are the opportunities, ideas, little half-baked startups that you're in your mind right now?
Yeah, so as Sean kind of mentioned, I run the Ad Professor account.
So people want to know that on Twitter as well.
We make some of the best ads online.
I'm obsessed with, from an advertising angle.
And all my business ideas, think of the advert first, and then I kind of work from that.
So the first business idea that I think would be pretty cool that I've always wanted to do, but I've never got round to, is essentially, I know you guys love personality tests.
The personality test business model that exists, it's quite an easy find out about yourself.
Everybody's fascinated by it, even if a lot of it is pseudoscience.
And I'll never forget the day I'm in the car with my mom.
I hope she don't mind me telling the story.
I'm in the car with my mom.
My dad's there. My brothers are there.
My mom's heavily dyslexic.
She doesn't want to do the personality test, but she wants me to read it for her.
And then she's answering.
So I'm reading out the question of, I don't like to get into arguments.
And she'll be like, oh, I heavily disagree.
And then me and my dad are like, no, heavily agree.
So quickly realize that personality tests are often answers that you want to be true about yourself versus the actual reality.
And this kind of idea of a self-awareness test, where the personality tests you potentially fill out, but everybody in your close circle, so in your wife, your parents, your business partner fills out, and you have a note there.
Reason why I like this idea is it's a little bit of a lot of collusion.
You've got one, stacking on personality tests that have always worked, but two, the social graph effect.
And then three, the advert angle of being able to run adverts directly on find out what your wife thinks about you.
The question I would have is, is it a vitamin business?
You like it? It is a great idea.
I've been talking about tests like this.
I have a notebook of what's the new IQ test, the five love languages test.
And I've been really fascinated, could you run a Facebook ad funnel to one of these businesses?
Because I think most of the people who do this, they do a book funnel, which is the slowest, old way of doing things.
They write a great book about the love languages thing.
And then in it, like Strengthsfinders, they write a book.
And then in it, they give you a code or whatever to go take the test.
And you go pay for the test.
But I love this for the reason you just described the viral factor.
Can I tell you a story of why I think this might work?
So when I first moved to Silicon Valley, I worked for this guy, Michael Birch.
And he had built a social network called Bebo that he sold for $850 million.
But before he built Bebo, he built a social network called Ringo.
That was the same exact thing as Bebo, but just like 12 months earlier, that he sold for like $2 or $3 million.
And what he did was he built Ringo.
It started to grow. He didn't know he couldn't keep up with the server costs.
He didn't know how like at the time, there was no Facebook.
Like he didn't know how social networks were ever going to make money.
So he was at a meetup and a guy offered him like $4 million for it.
And he's like, done. Then he worked for that guy.
And they had a quiz company called Tickle.
And Tickle was basically like it started out more on the Myers Briggs like intellectual tests.
Then it became everything.
Then it became what breed of dog are you?
And turns out what breed of dog are you?
Was way more viral than like, what is your life passion supposed to be?
This like harder, more introspective tests.
People wanted the what dog are you?
And so what dog are you? When really viral, they sold Tickle for $100 million to Monster.
So he was like, holy shit, quizzes are this amazing viral thing.
Because people want, like you said, their favorite subject is themselves.
Then they're curious to know the answer.
Where do I land? And then when they're done, they post or they share where they landed.
And other people say, ooh, that's what you are.
I wonder what I am. And they go take it as well.
So the only difference he made between Ringo, the thing that was growing kind of fast and sold for $4 million, and Bebo, which grew really fast, a million users in nine days, the first nine days, only change he made was that when he launched Bebo, it was a copy paste of Ringo, but with one difference.
Instead of filling out a profile, you just started off with a personality quiz, which was the best, I think it was called the best friend test.
It was how well do you know me?
So you would answer questions about yourself, and then other people would try to, and you would send it to your friends, and be like, see how well you know me.
And then it would show you who knows you the best, and you would kind of compete.
And after they would fill yours out, like I'm guessing how well I know you, then I would fill my own out, and I would send it back to you.
And so it went super viral off this one mechanism.
And so the thing you described, I think, would work really well, because it is how well do you know me?
But your version was, how well do I know myself?
But I think the real question there actually is, what do other people think about me?
Which is probably the biggest question that I have, is what do other people think about me?
And can I kind of anonymously find that information out?
So Sean, do you remember, like, six episodes ago, you were talking about going to Victoria, and how someone said they did this like...
Jack scheme. Yeah, they did this like executive coaching thing where you do a quiz, and it tells you about yourself.
So I loved that. And turns out with Hampton, we have access to thousands of executives.
And so we were thinking about, should we integrate this?
And so we're currently testing it actually with like, that's a smart idea.
Three or four customers where what we've done is we've created a quiz, like you've described, George, where it talks about like, whatever you're asking your mother, like these questions of like, what's your opinion of yourself for these questions?
And then you actually send it to 20 different coworkers, wife, husband, whatever.
And then you get the results, and we have put together this presentation to help you improve.
And maybe it's a product that we charge thousands of dollars for, but...
George, do you know about this?
Like the thing we're talking about, have you ever heard about this?
No. So this guy basically does this for executives, and it's like a 360, like basically brutal, honesty punch in the face.
So that's the idea is like, he charges, I think like 30 grand for this.
You pay $30,000 to take this test.
And what they do is they go interview, it's not just a quiz, they go and actually like sit down, talk, interview your wife, your business partner, your people who manage you, people who you manage, all this stuff.
And they then come back to you with like, here's like the truth.
Here's where you're amazing.
Here's maybe where you rub people the wrong way.
And here's, you know, something that's, you know, whatever they give you that, that feedback.
I don't know how great it is, but the two people I know who have done it were both like, yeah, this was massive for me.
Now they were both also in that phase where they sold their company for hundreds of millions of dollars and needed a little bit of direction and purpose and wanting to indulge.
It's a luxury item. They are a thirsty person asking for water.
Yeah, exactly. But hey, Hampton is a group of thirsty people asking for water.
So Sam, my prediction is I think you will either double or triple the lifetime value of your customers if you integrate this thing.
I think that is a genius idea, Sam.
So George, you got any more tips for me?
So people, what I like about this is it rides a few societal means as well.
That you've seen the gurus on Instagram and shout out self-awareness, but what does that actually mean?
And what, show me where that grows called.
And what does self-awareness actually mean?
Whereas this, it's a quite a bit of a practical way of seizing self-awareness.
And I remember there's a line from Daniel Kahneman who wrote, thinking fast and slow.
So he's the ultimate cognitive behavioral researcher, a Nobel Prize winner.
Every cognitive bias you can think of came largely downstream of Daniel Kahneman.
He's the Godfabra. And his overwhelming lesson was that essentially, all that research taught him nothing.
And the only thing that it taught him was it's much easier to see mistakes in other people than to see it in yourself.
And this is that kind of idea, right?
That other people, we don't notice we have bad breath, but other people can realize within seconds.
We don't realize we're dating the wrong partner till 20 years in our horrific divorce, but your best friend sees it in two minutes.
So there is something about when your ego is removed from it and other people see things a lot clearer than you can.
And it wasn't his other takeaway was that he was like at the end of his life, he was like, oh, I think I was wrong.
I think a bunch of this research, he like did this book and it was amazing.
And he goes, I think we got a lot wrong about that.
Is that true? Is that what happened?
Is that what happened, George?
It was something like that where he like, it's like, you know, we said these like five theories and like these three, I think actually are wrong.
There's a few, he definitely got wrong.
But there's a few funny ones of where he talks about planning fallacy.
And even knowing planning fallacy doesn't prevent planning fallacy.
So even the guys that came up with the idea of planning fallacy, when they were putting in research of how do we teach planning fallacy to kids at schools or to any curriculum, they even, they underestimated how long it would take for the curriculum or planning fallacy itself.
So just because you know the cognitive biases doesn't mean you can escape them.
What is that? What's the planning fallacy?
The planning fallacy is this idea that if you say, I'm going to achieve X of in a month, it will probably take two months.
And no matter how long, and even being aware of the planning fallacy doesn't prevent it from not happening.
So you constantly, it takes three times as long as you think it will and cost twice as much.
Which is interesting when you read Elon's biography, I wonder if that's one of the reasons why he just always sets absolutely absurd deadlines.
Because he knows that even with that fact in it, it's still going to be later than you.
Well, that's what I was going to ask you.
So is the way to fix that, that you make stupidly ambitious goals?
Like if it's where you shoot for the stars and if you miss your lane on the moon type of vibe?
That's what he does. I think there's definitely something to that, but I wonder if you can actually bullshit yourself to that level.
I don't know. Yeah, I think the other way to do it is you burn the boat.
So you make it where it has to get done.
There is no way for it to spill over.
Like it's not physically possible, because that's when the sort of the remarkable things happen, right?
Like you know, it's when he runs out of money and the last rocket has to take off.
It can't explode like the previous three.
That's the rocket that actually went because he's actually out of money at that point.
There is no other way. And I think there's a lot of remarkable stories of people in sort of like when they're actually backed into a corner and there's no out, that's when they're able to perform the miraculous.
They're able to do what seemingly couldn't have been done before.
You said something interesting I want to go back to real quick.
You said, when I think about businesses, I start with the advert, which is the ad, and you work backwards to the business.
So what like explain that more, because I think it's really smart.
What do you mean by that?
Or maybe what's an example of that?
I've helped so many founders with their advertising and the amount of them will spend years on their idea and then realize there's no distribution for this thing.
It just isn't distributed native.
So I always think from the compression algorithm.
I know we spoke about this, Sean, of like a sticky idea, which is essentially all adverts, like good adverts themselves are a sticky idea, which is essentially the following algorithm of total amounts of emotion times number of people that can understand it.
And that is what makes ultimately a good advert.
And if I can't compress it down, because people talk about an elevator pitch, it's almost like the ad pitch, right?
Can you compress this thing down to person who doesn't give a fuck about you, scrolling in their feet?
And then immediately going, I'm gonna give money towards this, that two second snapshot.
And I think if you can't compress that down, it needs more work.
You have an idea on here.
And the sentence that you're gonna reply with when I ask what your second idea is, is it's just the most ridiculous sentence that will ever be said on this podcast.
So what's that one? Yeah.
Number two. Number two.
Sean already knows me quite well, so he knows I'm an absolute weirdo, Sam, but obviously first impressions down, ruining it for you.
I love weirdos. This is great.
This is exactly what I'm about.
So sex is going to potentially die as a reproductive mechanism.
So if we just go through the history of sex, so if you could imagine a chart of sex to baby ratio from like the 1500s.
So you have the first official condom that came in in 1855.
There's talk that it was actually in the 1500s, people using animal parts, but I've heard that.
Condom as we know it. The condom as we know it now.
Like a sheep intestine.
Yeah. Now that's the dropship in store right there, right?
And then the morning after pill came in the 1920s, and then full effect in like the 1970s.
So you can imagine number of times having sex to baby, it's going like this with time.
It's completely plummeting.
What I think is looking more and more likely with, and another, we talk about advert first approach.
I think you spoke about this before, Sean, when you look at different technologies coming in, so you've obviously got IVF, you've got bio banks with lots of genetic data, you've got phenotype tests, genotype tests.
I think you're already seeing this with my friend, Jonathan has a company that they're gonna be launching probably around about next year, that essentially, particularly for wealthy people, then I think it will trickle down society where you have 10 embryos and they can basically map now, okay?
If you want to avoid diabetes, crone disease, cancer, et cetera, we recommend this embryo selection, and then obviously it's gonna probably get weird or weird with time, whether that's height, eye color, IQ, things like that.
So we're really on the precipice of this, and all you're gonna need is a few people with being able to crunch the data, and it's gonna be a wild couple of years.
So that's actually pretty convincing, because Sam's right, when I read this, he said, we're one of the last generations to be created via sex.
I was like, I don't know what the hell he's talking about.
Test two babies, and then, but when you just made that case, I gotta admit it went from George's nuts to, oh, he's right, which is basically that, we already have the tech now to basically have a baby, to create a baby without having sex, cool.
IVF does that all the time, and then when you say, well, what's the benefit?
The benefit is selection, right?
So first it's de-selection of horrible diseases.
Who can argue against that?
Then you have pro-selection, which is, do you want the blue-eyed, smarter, taller?
Like, what do you want, right?
The higher likelihood chance, right?
And let's say, let's say that science is making that more and more possible over time.
Seems like that's where the puck is going.
At that point, are you gonna be the parent who's like, nah, I'm crap shooting it.
I'm just rolling the dice.
I'm just gonna go do the animal way.
We're gonna, in and out this burger animal style.
We're just gonna go do it, and then whatever happens happens.
Whereas all your friends and neighbors are the ones hand-picking best babies out of test tubes to say, we want the embryo that's gonna be the healthiest, the most sort of setup to thrive.
It seems like you're at a disadvantage if you're gonna go choose the old school way, right?
It's driving stick when the world moves to automatic.
When I read the sentence, George, I was like, when George is gonna love the Earth when it comes back down to reality, like once he leaves Mars, because you're gonna love Earth, it's great.
We have water in here. Yeah.
But then I realized, hey, guess what?
I had my child via IVF, so.
I wasn't gonna say it, but Sam did this.
Exactly what you are describing.
I did it, my friend. Yeah, and listen, we did it because there's a gene that runs in our blood that we didn't wanna pass on, and we did it.
We all, we, mission accomplished.
We eliminated that gene.
We got rid of the target.
The two sexy gene, dude?
Yeah. You got rid of that?
Damn. Being beautiful is causing too many problems for you.
Yeah, we wanted our kids to be 5'8", and it worked.
And so, yeah, I did the exactly the thing that you're talking about.
I'm gonna get rid of the British self doubt.
I think, I guess there's two types of people that hear this.
There's one type that goes, this is really weird.
Why would anybody ever do this?
And the second type goes, oh my God, I've been so worried about this family in a red tree condition for so, so long, of course.
So the first people, if you actually hear that, I think that you're probably quite lucky that you don't have it.
But anybody who has, like, I've got a few different family chronic conditions.
And as soon as I heard this, I was like, oh, if I could not see my child go through pain that I've seen other family members go through, whatever money this takes, goes back to Sean's point, work backwards from the Facebook ad.
Like, are you concerned about ABC, diabetes, Crohn's disease, insert condition, funnel right there?
And immediately you can see how you can have very wealthy people paying a lot of money for that.
And with time, the unit of economics will go down, serve up, and serve up.
And it also makes sense because people are waiting, like I've got so many friends who are in their 30s, late 30s, and they're wanting to have their first kid, because like they're yuppies and they focused on career for a long time.
And then you get in your late 30s and you're like, shit, my parts aren't working as they're supposed to.
Like I could use a little help to like make this happen.
It's so, so calm, so much more common than I ever thought.
Hey, so you're listening to a business podcast, which means you probably like business and you like podcasts.
And because of that, I've got another business podcast you need to check out.
It's called Marketing Made Simple.
And its host is Dr. J.J. Peterson.
Again, Marketing Made Simple.
Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work.
One of the episodes that I think you need to check out, it's called Get Your Audience From Don't Care to Buy Now with Better Copy.
And he basically just breaks down all the biggest mistakes that most marketers make when it comes to their audience in respect to copy, which is obviously a topic I love and I talk all about.
So you guys need to check it out.
Marketing Made Simple, you can get it wherever you find your podcast.
So funny story. So we were doing the podcast with somebody who's super, super wealthy, like a billionaire.
And before we did the pod, I wanted to meet the person.
So I went to their house, hung out with them, got to know them a little bit.
Ben was with me. And we, so we hung out, it was great.
We had a long conversation about a bunch of different subjects, business, tech, life, blah, blah, blah.
And somewhere along the way, this person was like, they mentioned, oh yeah, I have this many kids and I'm expecting, we're expecting our next one.
We're like, oh, congratulations.
Anyways, we leave. And so when we're leaving the house, we say bye to everybody, meet the family, say bye.
Afterwards, I'm like, Ben, so what's the, what were your big notes?
What were your takeaways?
So what did we learn? Wow, we just got this amazing access to this person.
None of this was recorded, but like, we can learn from this.
What did we learn? And I had like all these like business nuggets, like, oh, he mentioned this growth tactic.
Oh, he said this was the reason why that thing succeeded.
And Ben goes, and look at his notes, he goes, oh, I found the ultimate luxury item.
I was like, what, like his car?
Or what are you talking about?
And cause he had showed us his garage of cool cars.
And he's like, no, surrogate.
I was like, what? Because when we were walking out, we saw his wife and he said like, we're expecting a baby next month, but his wife is not nine months pregnant.
Fucking Colubbo. He's like, that's amazing.
He's like, that has got to be, he's like, right?
That's got to be the ultimate luxury item.
It's like, you don't have to go through like this like incredible body, you know, experience to carry and then birth this baby.
That's the ultimate luxury.
And so I started laughing at that.
And I thought, he's kind of right.
I think there is like a- I so disagree with you on that.
You disagree that what?
That it's a luxury item?
Yeah, I think- Or that everybody wants it.
No, I think, I don't want, I mean, look, it's a bunch of dudes talking about shit that we ain't gonna experience.
But like- Dude, I could barely form a sentence.
I called it a body transformation.
Yeah. Yeah. I got three kids and I still don't really understand what's going on.
Yeah, but no, I think that's like a necessary thing to go through in order to bond with your kid.
So I don't- That's like saying if you're adopted, you're not gonna have a bond.
This is, I think there's a lot of new ones to that.
But George, what do you think?
I mean, I like these things because- Tell me your opinion on what we should do with women's bodies.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, put me on the spot there.
Okay, I'll give you like a different angle to this.
When I, so my wife wanted to deliver naturally.
So no medication, no nothing.
And I was like, are you nuts?
Why are you trying to do this the hard way?
She's like, no, that's what I want to do.
So we went to this birthing class, giving birth the natural way.
By far the most like, scarred into my brain, you know, three hours I've ever been in.
And one of the things that I raised my hand at one point cause it's like 90 minutes in and they're just describing what seems like voluntary torture.
And I'm like, hey, I just gotta ask, like, is this what most people do?
Or, and she's like, no, no, like, I think she said 80 something percent, 85% of people choose an epidural.
And I was like, makes sense to me.
And epidural is also kind of a new, newer technology, right?
Like, so for, you know, hundreds of years, there was no self-sufficiency as an epidural.
But once you had the option to have a baby that was, without, you know, being able to feel all of the pain and the delivery and the labor, obviously a lot of people opted into that.
And so there's a whole bunch of like birth businesses that are like, you know, the epidural is a birth business.
Like after we had our baby, they're like, do you want to freeze the cord blood and like eat the placenta?
And I was like, I don't know what you're talking about, but like, no to the eating, freezing, what's that for?
They're like, well, if your kid ever has a thing and they need a, you know, stem cells, this is like super rich thing of stem cells.
And I'm like, cool. So how does this work?
And they go, well, we're going to take the cord right when the baby's born.
And this might save your baby's life someday, but we're just going to freeze it and you're going to pay us, you know, a couple thousand dollars now and then like $500 a year for now until the end of time.
And I was like, okay, yes, but also, how do I go buy one of these businesses?
Cause this is the most incredible business I've ever heard of.
You're playing on parents fear at a time when all of their loving dolphins are kicking up and they're like, okay, my purpose in life is to protect this baby.
And then it's a set it and forget it, you know, tens of thousand dollars subscription for a thing that you're just going to, the ultimate insurance policy for your kid.
That has to be the best business I've ever heard of.
That's good. So if anyone has one of those out there, I'm still actually looking to buy them.
I've never seen one for sale, which I think is another signal that it's a very good business.
100% What's the selling eyes is art thing?
Yeah. So this is one thing I noticed whilst I was traveling around Europe.
Have you guys seen this store?
Let me pull it up. So how old are you, George?
I'm 30, just turned 30. Yeah, good energy.
I like this. This is called an indicator of interest from Sam.
Sam starts to ask like, So before we do that, let's talk.
And then past the first 20 minutes of the pod where it's like, does this present anything interesting to say to now?
Like, wait, I need more of this guy in my life.
The second British guy says whilst I'm like, you have my attention.
That's my favorite word.
Oh, it is. Well, can you guys see this?
So for the people who are listening, your eye for art.
So in Amsterdam right now, I walk past the store.
I walk past the store and in the outside of the store, there's this thing where you kind of lean into a telescope and reflecting back from the telescope is your eye.
And what's fascinating, I've got relatively nice eyes.
I don't get many compliments on them blue eyes.
You can say that again, George.
There you go. You've got to get me blushing too much, Sam.
So you then have certain friends of yours that are probably beautiful eyes that get compliments all the time.
What's actually fascinating, similar to the personality test, when you zoom in to someone's eye, even if they've got the ugliest eyes in the world, they're beautiful.
So like my eye, I was like, wow, this is incredible.
You can even do it where couples partner their eyes.
This is one of the fastest growing companies out of Europe right now.
Like it's growing really, really fast.
Did you do this? I did do it, yeah.
Me and my girlfriend got the eyes scanned.
Is it like on the wall behind you?
Where is it at? No, no, no.
It's not on the wall behind me.
I'm getting in my mom as a gift.
Is it a print or digital?
What do they do? What do they give you?
You can print it and then you can do like big blow-ups on the wall.
And they charge quite a lot for these things.
It's like 200 to 300 quid.
And the reason why you like this is because you're all about distribution and you were walking down the street, you saw the storefront, you can look into this thing and they show you a picture of it and then you pay money to buy it.
And you said sticky idea is emotion times market, right?
So this is everybody's the market and the emotion I think is pretty strong in this.
Yeah, it's so customized to them and it looks beautiful.
Dude, and you can buy like a necklace or a ring or something of your wife's like eye print.
Correct. This is awesome.
There's probably no repeat purchase here, but this is awesome as a one-time thing.
And it's so much more beautiful.
Even if you think you've got boring eyes, when they zoom in at that level, it's like seeing the universe.
You go, oh my God, this is its own mini universe inside of me.
I notice on their landing page, they don't have very many, you know, boring black guys like mine.
So it's all like beautiful greens and blues and hazels.
I think you'd be surprised.
I think you'd be surprised to quit running a show.
I think when you get under that, it's crazy.
Well, I'm definitely curious.
Like I definitely would want to do this.
If this was around me, I would definitely want to do it.
And I would certainly do it with my wife or my kids because it's just like a thoughtful, it's a thoughtful, cool thing rather than like, you know, same old, same old.
So one of the innovations I'd like to see is, could you distribute this online?
So with smartphone cameras getting better and better, is there a bit of ability and like AI scanning images?
Is there something there?
Or is it that you send a little device that sits on their camera that gives even more definition so they could do it at home?
On all of a sudden, you can imagine the advert first.
Oh dude, if you could do this with an iPhone.
How beautiful your eyes are.
Bull global market. All right, I'm gonna send this to somebody to try to make this.
Dude, this is awesome. I just texted this to my wife.
I said, hey, let's go. To Europe?
This is awesome. No, they have a New York location.
Okay. If you click find gallery, they have galleries all over the world.
So George, you said this business is doing well.
What do you know about them?
Doing really well. From when I went into the store, I was like, this ticks all my book, like the lot of pillows or effect right here is ticking all my boxes.
And they said it's like one of the fastest growing startups in America.
They opened 150 locations last year or something like that.
So it's growing my bananas.
You guys wanna hear something?
So the other day, have you guys seen this?
It's mostly women. And it's this thing on TikTok where you go to this place and they hold up colors to your face and they tell you your color palette.
Yeah. What's that called?
Color scale or color grade or like, so it's like, it's like a noun where it's like, hey, what's your blank?
I forget what it's called.
But anyway, my wife wanted to, she saw an ad on TikTok for it and she was like, this looks cool.
And I was like, I'll go and you pay $100 and they rented this tiny, like it's like a huge closet basically.
And you just sit there and they just hold up a shade to you and they go, no, not that one.
Is it for clothes or for makeup orage for everything?
It's for, and at the end you get this thing and it says you are this one, whatever.
Like there's like 18 categories, which means this makeup, this clothing color, this all these colors, these are your colors.
And it basically like for me, it was like, it's all women.
It's like Margot Robbie.
Like it just said, like some other white lady who that's like, she is also an example of this person.
And so you should wear clothing in the wintertime that are these colors in the summertime, these colors, whatever, but it's a brick and mortar thing that has been franchised out.
Similarly, I mentioned to this business and I was like, how many of these a day do you have?
She's like, I'm packed.
I've got 14 a day and each one has paid $100.
And I give HQ, like the headquarter company, half of it or something like that.
What was it called? What's the name of it?
Yeah. And I think I went, I think the place that I was called the place that I went, it was called the color lab or something like that where it's like, sign me up.
And I taught and it had the same type of stick as this one, George, where it was like a brick and mortar.
It was franchised. It's like Dexa.
Yeah. There was like a thing outside and you're like, yeah, of course I have to know what color I am.
Otherwise I'm going to be ugly.
It totally got me. Have you seen this guys on like TikTok or Instagram?
It's mostly like a women thing.
I've heard of the trend, the color analysis type of thing.
And I don't know, George, you probably know the fancy word for these things, but there's like, so there's the concept of consumerism, right?
Which is like, you know, how Americans basically feel like we need to buy certain things.
We need to like, I'll give you the example.
A friend who lives in India came over to visit and they go, yeah, India's really changed.
One of the things is like, India feels like America.
We've become consumerized.
He's like, you know, before, he's like, India used to have one max two pairs of shoes.
He's like, but now it's normal to feel like you need like 10 pairs of shoes.
You need like all the different colors and all that.
It's like, that's not a real need, but it starts to embed itself in culture.
It's like, you almost convince yourself that you need this much stuff.
You need to buy more things.
And I think that there's like this personal consumerism, which is around, you need to know X about yourself.
You need to know your quantified health.
You need to know your color grade.
You need to know your personality test.
And I think you can just keep selling into that.
And there's just seems to be an increasing amount of consumerism around the self too, not just around material things in your house.
Yeah. I don't know the specific thing forever.
It's this idea of the infinite consumer abyss.
You stare into it and it stares back into you.
Dude, look at this guy. The infinite consumer abyss.
It's just off the dome. That's why this guy's the guy.
If we're gonna have an infinite consumer abyss, I'm getting red because according to Lily's color lab, that's those are my colors.
Wait, so you did this or you made it sound like your wife did this?
Well, she was like, let's do this.
And I was like, I'm in. Here's $200.
Let's plural. Yeah. Yeah.
Let's find out our colors.
So what's your color? I don't know, dude.
I didn't use any of it. I don't know.
I just went to experience what it was all about.
I don't know. Sam Lylac Par.
Let's go. I just wear blue and black anyway.
That's my color. All right, let's do these other two ideas because I'm curious now.
By the way, you know how I know this is a great episode?
Because I feel like I need to get off this and go do these ideas right now.
I don't even want to finish this episode.
I want to go do one of these things right now.
That's how I know this is a banger.
All right, so let's do number four.
Mold cleanup as a service.
What do you mean by this?
Yes. So one big meme slash wave that I was noticing in America is people becoming more and more concerned about mold in their house.
Yeah, people freak out about that in Austin, particularly.
Yeah, 70% of houses in America apparently have mold and obviously it varies in terms of the amount, but downstream effects of autoimmune conditions, severe health issues, asthma, et cetera, et cetera.
Working backwards from the ad first, find out if you have mold in your house, like a horrific image of the mold and horrific insights into the damage that mold can do.
You could sell the visits for free and people are ripping up their houses, spending tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars, because if it's your home and you have poison in it, the friends that I have that are renting are literally moving out of the house.
They're not sticking around now.
So if you actually own the home, it's even stickier.
I like it from an ad perspective, a health perspective.
If you could partner with a big like health influencer, that's your chief influencer officer, that could just chat about mold all day and just run the funnel of find out for free and then sell them all the services on the backend, similar to what Maric Health has done for blood optimization, but doing it in the house.
I think there's a lot of money to be made riding that wave and I know Sean you chat about one chart businesses.
If you put mold in Google trends, it's just every year steadily getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
I love that for a bunch of reasons.
So what is that you said?
30% of houses have mold?
70%. 70%. Okay, so that is also killer hook for the ad, right?
75% of the houses have mold, find out for free if yours does, type in your address and we'll send out a person for free to go diagnose.
And if you know that 70% have something, then your conversion, even if 10% or 5% of those people are gonna spend a few thousand dollars getting rid of the mold, that's pretty good.
You could target high value areas.
You could also just run this as lead gen only.
So people who do mold servicing probably are not great at Facebook ads.
And so you could just be the great at Facebook ad part and then farm out all the leads to the mold companies all around the country.
So that seems like a really good part of this business.
And then the last thing is like, there are so many people that have undiagnosed health issues.
So maybe it's like fatigue, maybe it's a bad allergies, whatever's going on and you can't find the root cause of these.
And I think this is why something like gut health has taken off in such a big way.
Cause it seems like one of these like, yeah, if your gut's screwed up, then everything downstream is gonna be screwed up.
And it could explain 15 different health conditions.
And so same thing, like if your environment is toxic, then that could explain 15 different conditions that you might have.
And who's gonna argue that, no, I wanna keep it toxic once you find out that they are.
You know, we had a pest control guy come to our house and he's like, yeah, see that little like nook under the house.
That means you have, you know, mice and rats that are under the house.
And, you know, even if you're not seeing them in the house, they're here, they're at your house.
Would you like me to seal this and like play some traps and I can come by every month and spray?
I was like, cool, here's $300 a month, go for it.
And, you know, that's a subscription, $300 a month subscription that I'm on now for the vague possibility that there's like a mice, like, you know, my eroded problem at our house.
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Now, back to the pod. What you're gonna learn, George, moving Austin is that like, it's like the most health conscious city I've ever been to.
And like, some people are pretty extreme, but it's kind of exciting to be around those extreme people.
And I know people who have like a Berkeley water filter for their entire home.
And I started researching it.
Have you guys ever seen the inside of a water heater?
Like a water tank? They're horrible.
It's disgusting. It's horrible.
You see that? There's a picture of somebody literally just holding two like fistfuls of what just looks like either mold, fungus or just like mulch of some kind.
And so I saw one of these videos where they just cut open a water tank, like a water tank for the water heater.
It's called a water heater tank autopsy.
It looks like what you would see with like an old coffin that you woke up, opened up with just like a bunch of like rotted skeleton bones.
Like it's just like, what the hell is this?
I don't even know what this is.
And it makes you like crawl.
And so I remember seeing this and I'm thinking, is my water heater like this?
Are my pipes like this? I have to get one of these Berkeley water filters.
I need one of these things.
And this is very similar.
And the differences is I think getting mold out of your home is either, it's actually quite hard or in some cases it's impossible.
I think like, I don't know if the problem, I'm not sure if that problem in many cases can actually be solved.
Getting a new water heater, getting a water filter at your house, much more solvable.
Particularly like my in-laws live in New York city where these buildings are built in the 50s.
It's a lot of times the similar pipes or the water that goes through New York city, it's like pipes have been around for a long time.
And I remember seeing these videos of these like water heater, like where they cut them open and do autopsy.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm never drinking water for many of this shit ever again.
Like, and I was like, I need to find a, I need to find someplace to replace this.
That is in line with what you're talking about.
It may be even more of a pungent ad.
Yeah, that's a good one.
Should we move on to the next one?
Yeah. All right, let's do this last one.
So your final idea, I think is a really fun one because it's not even a business, it's like a country level idea.
Like you should be the CMO of the UK, explain this idea.
Yeah, I like how when Bellagy went from like crypto currencies to now trying to build his own country.
And you have, I mean, think about companies this entire time.
People are out here thinking of countries.
And I don't, the city's whisper, right?
He's in Silicon Valley for too long.
It's like, you need to be more ambitious.
You're starting companies.
Oh, that's cute. I start countries.
So one of my reflections as they, coming from the UK, and we spoke about it to begin with, on experiencing America.
And despite all the political shenanigans that America has attending 4th of July in Nashville, and I'm going, this is wild.
Like there's flanks everywhere.
There's people chanting, you were safe, you were safe, you were safe.
Everyone's on the streets.
So I was at the end of the day chanting USA.
And then people were going, you can't do that.
That's why we're chanting, because we got rid of you guys.
And anyway, I then reflected on it.
And I realized that I've never met an American that doesn't celebrate their national day in some regard.
And then I realized I've never met a Brit that does celebrate their national day.
And then I realized I've never met a Brit who even knows the day of their national day.
Well, because you guys have been like the bosses, like there is no Independence Day.
You were like the colonizer, right?
Exactly. So that's one of the issues with it.
So the irony is, by the way, the national day is St.
George's Day. I'm English called George, and I had to Google it.
It's April the 23rd. In England, there's no flags anywhere.
You can't have national pride.
And I do think part of it is the colonization side.
Also St. George is like, who was this guy?
Whereas of Independence Day, you have a clear enemy.
So thinking from an advert perspective, who is St.
George? It's the Slater Dragon.
Nobody cares. And essentially canceling St.
George's Day and creating Dunkirk Day.
So the Britons finest hour, we've made a lot of mistakes, but Britons finest hour was when we escaped Haplers, Germany, 400,000 men with Churchill, all of Britain came up together, sending the boats across.
And literally the only reason the country exists and we're not speaking German, and I argue me, Adolf Hitler doesn't conquer the whole of Europe, is because of this day.
So there's an enemy. No matter where you stand politically, Adolf Hitler, number one enemy when it comes to that ad strategy.
And make it the most British day imaginable.
So from midnight to 12 PM, you can complain, moan, drink tea, talk about what's wrong in the past, present, and future.
But come 12 PM, get the RAF in the sky, get kids dressed as like, if you look at the number of British icons, Charles Darwin.
William Shakespeare. John Lennon.
Like, there's so many icons of history that the world should be grateful for.
And I think you could add billions to the tourist economy of the UK and unite a difficult nation for at least an afternoon.
Sign me up, my friend. This is amazing.
This is awesome. There we go.
Like, we get an oasis, by the way, just announced they're going on tour.
Go into that. Yeah. He's like Darwin, Shakespeare, Sam's like, oasis.
Liam Gallagher. Obviously, playing Wonderwall would not be a bad idea.
That might be the official song of Dunkirk Day.
There we go. So you posted this.
Did anybody like hit you up?
Did you get some like, a PM in the DMs?
What happened? Who? I mean, who's the like?
I don't know. Harry Reachout?
Who's supposed to get Reachout?
Not yet. Not yet. I'm not going to keep banging the drum for a while.
But it's one of those things.
You should run ads to your blog post targeting specifically, as hyper-specific as you can in a certain area.
The Zip Code of the Royal Family.
10 grand of ad spend. And I'm pretty sure you're going to get a meeting at the palace.
We're here to discuss. Let's do it.
Let's do it. Dunkirk Day.
That's fantastic. That is like a funny conundrum that England is in when it's like, well, you guys have been a man for so long, but there's not really like a like started from the bottom now.
We're here type of story.
It's more like you've been the man for so long, and now you're like in Forrest.
So like that's like pretty good longevity.
Well, the thing is, you need the brand, right?
So like, I bet if I walked outside right now and I went to like, you know, just like a nearby, I don't know, I went to Home Depot.
And if it was a busy day at Home Depot, I feel like if me, if I could get two other people with me to start chanting USA, I'm pretty sure the whole store would just start arbitrarily, not on a July 4, just start chanting USA, because there's such a pride.
And USA has like, the brand is really, really strong, right?
It's like freedom number one, right?
There's the American dream.
There's like sort of the pride of America, whereas like, I think what would the country stand for?
So you were like drink tea and wine, which is like, okay, that's like, you know, humorous in a way, but like, what would be the thing?
Would it be like, would it be creativity?
Would it be art? What would be the thing that's like, we can hang our hat on of like, we're the best at this, the British pride.
What is the British pride about?
I think from first principles, the reason why Independence Day works is because there's an enemy that you escaped.
And just using creating an enemy, again, talk about advertising tactics earlier, a great advert angle, but the enemy of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany is the only thing that can unite this country, I think.
So, and then just go through the, like whatever you wanna pick, you wanna pick literature, you wanna pick the Industrial Revolution, like we've got some classic hits in the library.
We've got a lot. I think I have an answer to my own question that adds on what you just said, which is the UK is sort of like the Harvard of countries.
It is Ivy League, it is prestige, it is old money, it is old history, it is we've been here forever.
And the great minds have come from us.
I think that's the branding, which is like the US is more like, I don't know, a big state school, it's a bit of a party school, right?
And whereas, you know, we're more USC, whereas the UK is more Harvard Yale Princeton in its vibe and its brand.
And so it's got that old luxury, old money, old prestige brand, which is like it's elevated.
And I think that's part of, well, that's what I would lean into more.
It's not like modern and super high tech.
I would lean into the other side on the branding.
One of my favorite ad campaigns, George of all time, it was in the 70s, it was a Rolex campaign.
And it would show a picture of Dwight Eisenhower, the general during World War II, and then the president of America giving a speech to troops, and he had a Rolex on.
And then it showed an admiral of a great ship, like giving directions to his folks, and he looks like he's going to war, and he's wearing a Rolex.
And then I think it's so JFK wearing a Rolex while he was like talking to cash show or something like amazing, whatever.
And the headline was the men who control the destinies, the men who control the destiny of the world wear Rolex.
And it's one of my favorite ad campaigns of all time, because you like, it makes me associate Rolex with prestige and like doing something, not just being elite, but actually flexing that muscle.
And I've never seen a good idea on how to reuse this ad campaign that I love so much.
But this might be the one where it's like, the people who have given the world art or the people who have kind of helped shape the destiny of the world or British, whatever.
But that's one of my favorite ad campaigns of all time.
Yeah, I think the copy is if you were here tomorrow, you'd be wearing the Rolex.
And he does different variations of that.
I broke that one down a few times.
It's so hypnotic. Even that lineback, if you were here tomorrow, you would wear a Rolex with like an image of the White House.
Therefore, aspiration association of the White House, it puts you, so it puts you in it.
That is hypnosis. If you spoke to a hypnotist about a sentence, that sentence is all literal hypnosis.
Like for example, there's a Porsche one that I love, Sean.
And it says, too small to get laid in, but you'll get laid the second you get out of it.
It is a picture of a Porsche.
Or the New Balance one, right?
The only shoe worn by high fashion models in London and dads in Ohio.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that one.
That's like such a good one.
Like I said, we broke down a lot of these on the ad professor.
So like one of the Porsche ones is, honestly now, did you spend your youth dreaming about someday owning a Nissan or a Mitsubishi?
Yeah, that's good. You may get lost, but not in the crowd.
That's another good Porsche one.
If this car doesn't excite you, check your pulse.
You may be dead. So yeah, there's so many, like, did you go to the ad professor on Twitter?
We've got so many of them.
So we should talk about the ad professor real quick.
So you have this marketing agency, and to grow it, I thought you did a brilliant thing, which is you created this anonymous account on Twitter, the ad professor.
And I think you didn't tell people at the beginning that that was you, right?
Nobody knows to this day, really.
Well, we just... There you go.
Breaking news. Scoop came out the closet.
Yo, YouTube thumbnail, George Mack comes out.
Reveals his truth. We got it.
Yeah, people won't click on that, they already know.
So he creates the thing, the ad professor, and all he does is just give.
It's like, I love ads, which you do, and you collect them, and so you just started threading, here's just badass ads.
And then in that, people start DMing you, and from what I understand, it's a better salesman than any sales guy you could have hired to go out and pitch for business.
Is that true? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, we also then create ads for brands.
So we did one that, the Friday reach like 30 million people, like 23 different ads of ads that we've created from Ryanair.
So we did a Tesla one of...
You're saying is you created ads on spec, meaning you pretended Tesla was your client, and here's the ad we would make for you, Tesla.
Here's the ad we would make for you, Ryanair, and you just did those.
Those also went viral, because you really did a good job of that, right?
Exactly. So like the Tesla one was, it takes, I think like 3.4 seconds to read this ad.
The same time it takes a Tesla to go to $1.60.
This is great, and it's a picture of a Tesla driving off.
This is a really cool website.
So you do that, and then people just start sliding into your DMs wanting to work with you guys, or how do they even know?
Because you don't even say, I have an agency, by the way.
You don't do heavy calls to action on this, or am I wrong?
A little bit like plug at the end, but it's always value first.
And I think that model of who you went to school with, and knowing people that way, versus just making dope things online, and people seeing the ads, and realizing that those poor shouts from the 70s still have relevance today, and trying to create ads that are just super sexy.
There's this weird, I discovered it via looking at ad horn on Reddit, and there's like hundreds of thousands of communities dedicated to people chatting about ad porn, and then created the ad professor off the back of that.
But yeah, nobody knew it was me until today, I guess.
Does this make good revenue?
We do, okay. And how many people are working?
Dude, they're great. Say the name of your agency, by the way, so that people can go find you guys.
Yeah, that's just, I just go to adprofessor.com.
Sam was mentioning the website then.
We have about 40 people give or take.
Wow, this is awesome. And this is really cool.
I would like to use you guys.
Thank you. I feel sold. Like when I go to this website, I'm like, this is cool.
And I've filed that Twitter handle.
I thought it was really cool.
All right, we are gonna split this.
So that was part one of an episode with George Mack.
That was ideas, ideas, ideas.
I thought he had some bangers in there.
The next part we're gonna do is his frameworks, which is actually what he's more known for.
This guy has published essays and tweets that are, he gets retweeted by Elon Musk like once every week.
So he has some really awesome ideas and frameworks that he has curated or uniquely come up with.
We're gonna talk about those.
That's all part two with George Mack, the big ideas.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off on a road.
Let's travel never looking back.
