They spend 11 months preparing for the 30-day Christmas season, during which they aim to maximize profits by selling almost every tree in the city. This intense focus allows them to generate significant revenue in a short period.
Hammer is rumored to bring in more than $1 million every December from selling trees in Manhattan.
The profit margin for selling Christmas trees is estimated to be around 50%, which can result in significant earnings for those in the business.
The trend began in 1851 when a Dutchman named Mark Carr started selling trees from the forest to city dwellers, associating them with the Christmas spirit. He sold trees in Washington Market, which marked the start of the indoor Christmas tree trend.
Selling Christmas trees can generate a significant portion of a business's annual revenue, potentially reaching $150,000 to $200,000 in profit for the year.
Neko Health has seen over 60,000 signups in just 12 weeks since its launch in London, with a potential pipeline of $15 million in bookings.
Superpower is a digital health clinic offering a 10x better version of an annual physical, including 100+ lab tests, a full body report, and an hour-long consult with a doctor for $499.
Superpower had 3 million hits to its site during launch week and a waitlist of over 100,000 people, indicating strong initial interest.
Shaan believes Whole Foods will decline because its products, particularly the hot food bar, contain low-quality ingredients. He also thinks consumers will shift towards locally sourced meat and in-season produce, making Whole Foods less relevant.
Shaan predicts that local meat, natural fiber clothing, and a decrease in one-use plastics will become significant health trends. He also believes that having plants in homes to improve air quality will grow in popularity.
So this Christmas tree thing is kind of crazy. The story is this article that I read in Curbed. Basically, it's talking about the brutal mafia-style business of Christmas tree sales in New York. And I'm just going to read you a paragraph here that just captures it. It goes,
Christmas trees are a big business in New York. A lot of people see the quaint little shacks that appear on the side of the road just before Thanksgiving with a bunch of trees, and you think, oh, these are probably independently owned, maybe by jolly families of lumberjacks looking to make a few holiday bucks. That's what I thought anyways. In reality, a few eccentric, obsessed, and sometimes ruthless tycoons control the sale of almost every tree in the city.
They call themselves tree men. They spend 11 months a year preparing for Christmas time, which to them is a 30-day sprint to grab as much cash as they can. I'm in. You're in, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This needs to be a Netflix show, right? Yeah, and is this the one about this guy named Scott?
Well, there's a bunch of guys. So it talks about like the different guys because they basically carved up the territories. Like you got Harlem. This one guy gets Manhattan. This other guy's got the east side. And they all have different territories and they all have crazy names. So it's like George Nash and Kevin Hammer. And it's like, oh, yeah, Nash got Harlem. He's a smooth talking hippie from Vermont. Hammer is a Brooklyn born Scientologist.
He was a powerful force in the business. He's the one who shaped it. Hammer is rumored to own half the tree stands in Manhattan, bringing in more than a million dollars every December.
The lore is Hammer lives on a yacht somewhere in the Atlantic, and he visits New York only at Christmastime, where he holes up in a midtown hotel room with a pile of cash on the bed and a pit bull squatting on either side of him. Like, is this even real? What am I reading? Sounds fake. Dude, if you sell a million dollars of trees in one month, like, with all your expenses, like, that's like a $150,000, $200,000 a year salary. Yeah.
Yeah, like way more aura. Yeah, you might have a pit bull, but there ain't gonna be piles of cash or a yacht. But you definitely- It might be like 50%. I can see there's a world where there's like 50% margin all in. Well, you ain't owning yachts in Manhattan when it's on 500 grand a year. You've been doing it for like 20 years. This is an old article. So I think, yeah, it's pretty crazy. So then it talks about like,
Basically, one interesting thing is it talks about the history of the Christmas tree. So it says 200 years ago, the idea of putting a tree inside your apartment would be a bizarre decision. It didn't make any sense. This is supposed to be shelter from the outside. Why would you bring a tree in? And it talks about how like Christmas trees that are trees themselves weren't even really associated with Christmas time.
And then it says that started his change in 1851. There was a Dutchman named Mark Carr who was like, I think I can do this. What's doing this? Like selling trees to people for the spirit of Christmas. And so he goes, he's considered the father of Manhattan Christmas tree business. And we don't know much about him. But basically the way it describes him is he was out of work.
And he realized that he could chop up a tree from the forest, bring it into the city, and try to sell it to the people in the city to have a piece of nature with them. And he goes and he tells his wife. She's like, that idea sucks. This is the great story of every entrepreneur. Tell your wife an idea. She says it sucks and you do it anyways. I think that's the real American dream. And so he comes in and he basically tries to associate these trees with nature.
Christmas spirit with the jolly winter time. And he goes and he got a permit for $1 to sell it inside Washington Market, which was like their wholesale bazaar. And he starts to explain to people there that these are trees that you can stand upright in your house and it signifies Christmas. And he sold about a day. And that kind of started the trend of indoor Christmas trees. Again, assuming this article is not fake completely and the onion.
All right. So when I ran my company, The Hustle, I think we had something like 2 million subscribers and we made money through advertising. We didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model. And so I remember sitting down and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off The Hustle that aren't advertising? And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake,
Sean, me, and the HubSpot team, we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business. And we put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research. And we call it, very appropriately, we call it the Business Monetization Playbook. Go to the description of this episode and you're going to see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free. You just click the link and you can see it back to the episode. ♪
My parents used to do this for a living. They owned a fruit stand. You're just sitting on that fact for five minutes while I'm making up shit about the Christmas trees? No. So to this day, I've told you my father's a produce broker. So basically, these are made up numbers, but hypothetically, he'll buy a million dollars of onions from a farmer and then organize a truck to go pick them up and then sell that
of onions to Walmart for $1.1 million and hopefully make $100,000 in profit, of which 50 goes to the truck or whatever, you know, made up numbers. But the way he got into that was my mom and dad owned a fruit stand like on the side of the road. And that fruit stand made a lot of money every October by selling pumpkins and every Christmas selling Christmas trees.
And my mom would tell stories about getting up at 5 a.m. in the morning in order to flip the pumpkins because I guess they can't rest on one side for too long. Otherwise, they get lopsided. And they would package up these trees and they would just sell a shitload of Christmas trees. And that would make their Q4. I am fascinated by these once-a-year businesses. Michael Girdley came on the podcast. He was talking about his fireworks business where 99% of the revenue happens the day before July 4th. This is July 3rd.
is 99% of the revenue. And it's like, what a make or break, what a like high stress, but also, you know, kind of peak season versus off season style of business. And those kind of fascinate me. We've talked about before, like I think one of the great side hustles is going around the neighborhood and basically saying, hey, like, do you want us to put Christmas lights up for you? We'll put Christmas lights up. Like, I think you can make
you know, tens of thousands of dollars in a six-month sprint if you just wanted to go knock on doors and ask, you know, the same question over and over again. And I think that, like, there's a guy in our neighborhood who basically does that. You know, he hits up
He gets like 50 houses to say yes to this thing. Each one of us pays, you know, I think I paid like 1700 bucks for like a basic Christmas lights thing that took them, you know, and the guy who was knocking on the door wasn't even the guy who put the lights up. So I don't even know if he was just like a lead gen guy. I don't know who he was, but you know, I respect the hustle. What's this health startups that have wild traction? So there's a couple of health startups that just caught my eye as...
Normally, there's a bunch of these ideas that sound really great, and then they just never work. And a lot of them are like... And they're all the things that basically a...
rich, smart, San Francisco, LA, New York type of person does or wants in their life. And they think that everybody does and wants that and that it can be accessible to all of them. But actually, it's too expensive and too hard to do and too bespoke and all this stuff. Ideas that fall into this category were like music discovery. And then there's like... Let me give you a good example. This was a headline in Business Insider. Billionaires plan to launch a media brand around the zeitgeist of Brooklyn.
Exactly. A billionaire launching a media company about how Brooklyn is where it's at. That's the worst. I'll take how to lose $50 billion for $100, Alex. You know, the Instagram co-founders after Instagram, their revenge company was...
this news reading app. So they basically, they, they got, they, they quit Facebook and they were like, ah, Facebook is kind of bastardizing Instagram. They're just copying Snapchat and like all this shit. And they were kind of like making these low key, like passive aggressive remarks and,
And then they were like, we're doing it again. And they did this photo shoot of them in their vacation home where they get away when they want to be creative. And they say they're going to try to change the way that we consume news and make news less biased and more easy to consume and all this stuff. And of course, two years later, they shut it down because that's, again, this kind of smart, wealthy, well-meaning person trying to solve a problem that they have that not a lot of... It's not...
It's basically not junk food. Like people want junk food, people want Cheetos and they want the Cheeto dust on their fingers. And anybody who's like, I'm going to take the Cheeto dust off their fingers, they just don't find a lot of demand typically. Okay, so this is like what I, this is like one model of the world I have. And then there's, but then you always pay attention to what's going to break your frame. Where am I too biased? Where have I locked in? And maybe the world is changing underneath me. And so there's two health startups. And so Daniel Eck, who is the founder of Spotify,
who is an awesome guy, but he checks a bunch of the boxes, right? Billionaire who's coming off of a huge life-altering win of a company. And he's been rich since he was 21. Been rich for a long time. Obviously, he's at that Huberman phase where he's like, you know what? I need to take care of my health. I need to get a protocol. And I'm going to start taking these...
Like, you know, I'm going to start taking drugs that nobody can pronounce. And like, I'm gonna do all these things. Right. And that's like a normal thing that like, you know, I'm sort of biohacking and like the protocol phase of life. Like, yeah, exactly. So he's in his protocol phase. And so he, he launches this thing called Neko health.
And it even had like the other kind of like, oh, warning signs where it's like, he's not really running it. He's like a part of it. But he's like, wait, you're running Spotify. So how are you going to do this? Like, oh, there's like a team that's running it. Okay. So maybe this operator model, who knows? We'll see what happens. So, you know, there were some warning signs. Instead, there's this post that came up. So he posts on LinkedIn and Daniel posts over 60,000 signups in just 12 weeks.
It's been only three months since we launched Necco Health in London. The response has been nothing short of incredible. Over 60,000 people have signed up for a scan, which reflects a growing shift towards preventative healthcare and early detection. And I think it's sort of like, you know, maybe pre-nuvo-esque. Dude, by the way, I think that's bullshit. Getting 60,000 email subscribers, I don't think that's particularly...
Maybe. Because if you go to the website, it's the craziest, awesomest thing you could imagine. It's a $250 scan, right? So let's just say the full value of this is $15 million pipeline in three months. Now, you're saying, okay, some of you will just looky-loos. Sure, of course. Not all these people are going to convert. Okay, fine. Even if it's one-fifteenth of that, if they booked a million dollars in bookings for this thing in 12 weeks...
for a single geographic location in London, that's kind of interesting to me. That's not nothing, right? That's not like this pie-in-the-sky thing. What's it do? I think what they're trying to do is, basically, they're going to scan your body. They're going to look for moles, and they're going to look at your arteries and your cholesterol levels and all this stuff. And they're going to be, it's like a better health check, okay? So, and it's preventative. It's not, like, normally, you know, normal healthcare system is,
You have symptoms. We sort of tell you to take two Advils. You come back. You're like, hey, I still got the symptoms. And they're like, okay, well, let's check some basic things here in the office. And then you're like, dude, I really think something's wrong. It's like, all right, go get a scan. Right? So when you're broken, you get scanned. And the idea where healthcare is going is like you get scanned before you're broken to tell you where you might break or what's starting to break so that we can fix it earlier. Right? Obviously, like any...
Anybody can agree with that idea, but actually doing it and making it work both technically and building the brand around it and getting consumers excited about it and getting enough funding or getting enough revenue in the door for this to be a real business, it's pretty impressive to me. Okay, so that was the first thing that happened, that little post. The second thing was I'm an investor in this thing called superpower. Are you an investor in this?
I think you told me about it and it looks amazing. So superpower.com. So it says a new era of personal health, the world's most advanced digital clinic to help you live longer, prevent disease and feel your best. Okay. Ignore all that. Ignore all that. All it is, is a 10 times better version of an annual physical. Okay. I like that. Okay. You're getting an annual physical anyway. If you're, if you've, if you're bought into the idea of I should get an annual physical, uh,
Here is a better annual physical. And they're like, okay, what's a 10X experience of the annual physical? And by the way, I love that idea. The simplicity of that pitch, of that mission, I think is really, really powerful. And the thing costs like, I don't know, like 400 or 500 bucks. So it's like, I would be willing easily to pay. Dude, you're on their homepage right below Mark Zuckerberg's sister and right next to the Winklevoss twins. Oh, hold on. Mark Zuckerberg's sister?
Well, still pretty cool. My excitement went up and down. You're right next to Mark Zuckerberg's sister. Shout out to Ariel. Cool, actually. I met her at a party. She was actually very cool.
All right. So a while back, we had Gary Tan. He's the president of Y Combinator, which is the most successful incubator of all time. We had him on the podcast. And he said that the future of businesses is creator-led. And that's why I'm interested in the podcast, Creators Are Brands. Creators Are Brands explores how storytellers are building brands online. They're going to cover the entire creative process. They're going to talk about navigating brand partnerships. They're going to talk about what you need to know about growing your social media platforms. Everything you need to know on this topic.
Creators Are Brands is the pod. So check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Again, it's called Creators Are Brands with Tom Boyd. All right, back to the episode. Okay, so let me just tell you a little about this. So they sent this investor update. I think I'm allowed to share this.
So Jacob, one of the founders, he sends this investor update. And I invested in this thing like a little while back. Didn't kind of hear about it. They were like working on it. Honestly, it was like, all right, we'll see when this thing comes out. And here's what they said. They go, the best doctors in the world already offer this today, but having a concierge doctor who does this type of
type of work for you can cost like 100K plus. It's only for rich people. So our job is to make that available to everybody. By the way, I'm going to my concierge doctor tomorrow for my checkup and it's not $100,000. Would it be 20K a year? No, maybe 5,000.
A year? That's it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's okay. I don't want the facts. Bottom of the barrel to have a doc. Yeah, I thought of the yellow pages. No, I don't want facts. I do have a friend who has Peter Atiyah as his doc, and I think it's a quarter million dollars a year. So there's a range, and you're on one side of that range. You're not in the middle. That's the good news. I'm definitely on one end of that bell curve. Not the good one.
They wrote these stats and they were like, we had 3 million hits to our site during launch week. Wow. I was like, what? And they said our wait list has grown to over 100,000 people. What?
I was like, what is going on? And so I emailed them and their product is the first product of the membership is a 10x better version of the annual physical. And so basically it's like. Is that the language they use in their documentation or you just saying this is just 10x better? This is what they said to me in an email. Got it.
And they were like, you know, basically you're going to get 100 plus lab tests, a full body report, an hour long consult with your doctor, a limited QA with your doctor throughout the year, additional health consults and whatever at insider prices for $499. Okay, I kind of buy this value prop, right? Like, I think that's going to work.
And so I was like, dude, that's pretty crazy. Like, like how can you even offer this for 500 bucks? Secondly, did you say you had 3 million visits during launch week and a hundred thousand person wait list? Like, how did you do that? Because yeah, I tweeted your thing out, but like, you know, as much as I love to pat myself on the back, I don't think I can, I could help anywhere near that type of those type of numbers.
And they were like, yeah. Basically, in the first three or four months, 100,000 people signed up for this thing. So, superpower.com, their site is beautiful. But the way to... You can click join. Did you say thank you? Yeah. That's my thing nowadays. I'm slipping in thank yous and your welcomes when people are not trying to give me compliments. It's great. Or when you're 0.1% of the...
of the reason why it looks good. You know, like you... We have a 100,000-person wait list. Yeah. Is it in person? So, like, is the checklist done... Or, sorry, is the checkup done in person? So, how do they, like...
like, you know, like do the thing where I like cough or. I think, I don't know because I haven't been a customer yet. I'm on the wait list still. But I assumed it's like those other, like all telemedicine where basically let's say they send you to a diagnostic, like, you know, a quest type of thing to do the blood draw.
Got it. They order your labs and then there's a doctor remote who's analyzing your labs, who does the call with you, does the consult, talks to you, all that stuff. Understood. Okay. Anyways, I thought that was pretty crazy traction because I was like, dude, if I was like, let's just take the total potential value of the pipeline. You're saying during launch week or during this like kind of first couple months after you just announced the company, you have $49 million of potential revenue in the list, which of course only a fraction of a fraction is that going to convert. But
I mean, it's still just like really impressive. So a lot of these health startups that I thought were kind of like wishful thinking, I think something has shifted in the culture where health startups are no longer wishful thinking and people are legit willing to pay. And you see this with content. You see this with Huberman, with Peter Attia, with Brian Johnson. I think you just, I think there's a shift happening where
Health is cool. Health is in. And whatever that next layer of the market, that next segment of the bell curve that's interested in this, but it's a big sizable chunk. It feels like another part of the bell curve has gotten unlocked of people who are willing to spend. What's the early adopter phase? Is it like...
It's like freaks and then it's like early adopters and then it's like everyone else. What is it? We should rename all the segments. Yeah, like fucking quacks of weirdos. People you hate to talk to. Innovators. That's the one you're talking about. Freaks and geeks. Yeah. So the freaks and geeks and then there's early adopters, which are the wannabes. That's us. So we keep an eye on what the freaks and geeks are doing and we start to half-ass copy them.
And then there's the early majority. And the early majority is kind of like, you know, the smart, reasonable person. And then you get to late majority and then the laggards, which is like, you know, your mom who still has a newspaper subscription and, you know, whatever else, AOL email address.
My mom does, actually. And I would say I'm an early adopter. Sometimes I'm the innovator for some of these things. And I think what's going to happen, based off of my pattern, is I think a lot of these things are one-off stuff. So I have tested so many different blood work companies, just because they're the latest and greatest, and it's exciting to try something new.
In general, I've not had a huge amount of repeat purchase for many of them. For some of them, I've... For example, do you remember Forward Health? Mm-hmm. Something like that, I was like, Oh, I'm actually in. Or remember One Medical, which is popular now? I've been a paying customer of theirs for five years. So some of them, I become recurring customers. But I love trying new stuff. What I think is going to happen is now...
It's shifting to now the one past the early adopters. They are now open to trying this stuff. And so I think getting a wait list, I actually think it's less challenging than it appears. But making it so you come back every year is really, really hard. And it's going to be interesting to see who can pull that off. Because I've done the Pranovos. I've done...
uh in you know inside tracker have you or yeah like i've done everything and they're awesome it's just a matter of like which ones do i rely on every quarter or every year as opposed to i just found some new drug and i just want to stick it in my body this one time just see what's up and i'll never touch it ever again there's a lot of people like me who do that by the way yeah yeah you're in the on the fitness and health side i would say you're in the freaks and geeks
Yeah. Right. You were telling me about like, dude, I injected this stuff in my butt and I don't have cravings anymore. And basically you were talking about Ozempic before Ozempic had like a brand name. You're like, I read about it on a forum and it's amazing. I don't eat candy anymore. This is going to change the world. I think I told you about that in 21. I think it was summer. I think it was summer of 21.
or something like that, maybe 22. And I remember telling you, I was like, when I put this stuff in my body, it feels like people who have alcohol and addiction issues, I think that's going to go away. And then actually last week, my friend Jason went to a conference and the CEO of...
Eli Lilly, I think it is, the maker of one of the semi-glutide or OZEPIC competitors. He announced that it has been officially approved for alcoholics. So like I do put weird shit in my body just to see what's up. And I actually texted you eight months ago, I think. And I said, this new one, I forget what I called it. It was like,
it started with a T and I was like, this one, this is going to be the one. What was that called? I remember thinking I should buy Eli Lilly stock when you told me that because I was like, who makes this? And I'm in, I learned my lesson the first time, ignore, like kind of writing off your,
your weird health experiments and i was like okay i'll just blindly follow this but eli lily is already a 750 billion dollar company so i was like okay i don't know how much like upside is left on that like even if it became a two trillion dollar company it's like i like what am i what am i really thinking is going to happen here with this thing so you know i think i missed that but if you look at like a five-year span eli lily is up you know 10x almost in the five-year span so 8x
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Do you do any health stuff today that you think... Doesn't it show? Thank you. The sentence was not ending, do you do any health stuff? Do you do any health stuff today that you... Are you trying to die? Do you do any health stuff today that you think is considered a freak and will one day be the norm? Yeah, I do two things. I don't think these are like in the freak... I guess they are, I guess...
If I took a population of 1,000 people and I said, how many people are doing this? I think the number would probably be zero. Even if I went to a CrossFit type of health community, 1,000 people, and I said, who's doing what I'm doing? I think the number is zero. You, I think, have done one of these things. But there's basically two things I do on a daily basis and have been doing now for probably...
Two years. The first is Breathwork Every Morning. Yeah, that's awesome. So I do Breathwork Every Morning. It only takes me six to ten minutes. I use the Othership app. It's the best Breathwork app. I think you might have invested. I invested too, but there's not a shill. I don't even think the app is their product anymore. The app is like their side thing. They have physical locations in New York and stuff. But
Their app is so good for breathwork. So I do that. The second thing I do is I work out, but I don't do what most people do when they work out. So, you know, I would say conventional workouts are either cardio or weightlifting. And then some people will do like a yoga, Pilates, something that's flexibility, pliability based and weightlifting.
My trainer got really into something and I'm into whatever he's into because he's my trainer for life. And he got really into something called functional patterns. It's basically a style of training that I think the way to describe it would be like it helps you pick up a baby when you're old, right? Where it's like, yeah, it's like, so it's based around core movements. So like, like if you like sport, this will make a lot of sense to you. If you don't like sport, if you're just used to going to the gym and trying to get a pump, you're
then this might not make a lot of sense to you. But like, if you play any sport, baseball, tennis, basketball, whatever it is, like the core movement in all of the sports is like, let's say throwing. It's a twist motion of your body. Yeah, it's not like a squat or a bench press where it's a linear lift weight up. It's, yeah, I understand. Love the pronunciation of linear there. That was awesome. That was like European. Yeah, it was like, I also call it personal finance. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
So the colors of this are... All right, so yeah. So if you go to a gym, everything is usually static. It's rigid. Or even if it's like a dynamic movement, it very rarely involves like torque. And if you do that wrong, obviously you can get really hurt, but doing it right matters. So...
Functional patterns is based around moving in the four core movements. So run or sprint, throw, which is a twisting motion, jump, and then I think it's just like walk, like your gait. And so I literally, my workout when I go downstairs is not to like, I go to my gym and it's not,
like some like Barry's bootcamp music blasting, like go, go, go, push, push, push. It'll literally be like, all right, let's practice our gate. And it's like, are you putting the right amount of weight on your big toe? How's your weight shift? Let's look at your ankle mobility here. Let's try to get strong in this position. It's like things that don't even look like you're doing a workout. It looks like you're rehabbing from an injury, but it's an injury you never had. It's like to prevent all your injuries, right?
And so like I do it, my mom does it. He trains like NBA players with this. Like it's, it's that type of training where it's very much for sport and it's for, yeah, it's, it's to prevent like disease and like breakages in your body. So it's a weird, it's a weird style of training, but that's something that I do, you know, four times a week, basically. Mine, mine are, I think that in 15 years, um,
We're going to look at Whole Foods sort of like a discount grocer where it's like, you know, however you look at like Kroger or Safeway or wherever your regional like normie brand is. That's what Whole Foods is going to be. I think that people are going to be like, they're going to think it's nonsense and they're going to instead they're going to want to buy their meat locally. So I think that... And is that because...
it's marketing smoke and mirrors or it's just not the top of the top. There's no more levels above that. Which one is it? Is it that it's not what they say it is? It's kind of like it's just a marketing stick or there's even better. It's not what they say it is. And also...
because they were the first popular health food store, we still hold them with high prestige. But in reality, I don't think they're that high prestige. I think maybe it's a lot more expensive than other alternatives, but I'm not convinced that it's actually significantly different than anything else. And what makes you say that? Because if you go and look at the ingredients of the hot food bar, so if you go to the hot food bar and look at the ingredients, it's shit. It's not good. Like they got all types of crap in the, in those ingredients. And, and,
that like to me is like a signal that's a canary in a coal mine type of vibe gotcha um and i also when you look at the meat so when you look at the meat so i tend to buy during the summertime i have a farmer's market across the street from my house so i tend to buy my meat there and the chickens are like bright yellow have you ever seen like a like a like a chicken from a farm that you get it's like now well i've seen eggs eggs look different but they look way different they look way different they look way different it's like a
bright yellow. Honestly, it's kind of gross if you're not used to seeing it. And so all the foods have way more color in them. And you go to Whole Foods and it's kind of weird to think that a company as big as Amazon can somehow get lots and lots and lots of
fresh, healthy stuff. Isn't that fucking insane how in Connecticut in December, I can still get a strawberry? That's ridiculous when you think about that supply chain. And there's no way that you could do that, in my opinion, in some type of safe way. It's better to do local, in-season type of thing. And I think local meat in particular is going to be a huge trend in the next 15 years. You're seeing it a little bit. There's a lot of people in Austin who I know that were yuppie types, not rednecks or farmers, and they would buy whole cows instead
and you'd store it in your freezer. And I think that will be more common soon. Do you agree or disagree? I do agree with that because you're right. When I think about the freaks and geeks in my life, a lot of them already do that. It's like they have a favorite ranch. Yeah. It's like, where do you get your meat? And I was like, the store. What are you talking about? Like, you know, I don't have a,
I don't like to have farms on speed dial. I don't have like a personal relationship with a ranch, but they do. And they have like, they'll open up their freezer and there's all these like kind of like frozen steaks basically that they have. Yeah, you like spend $1,000 and you get like a year's worth of beef. Right. So like, I don't know and understand that. I also, I don't know if this is true or this was just a one-off thing, but like aren't farmer's markets, like I've read something that farmer's markets are,
got in trouble because the... They looked into where they were getting the stuff and it wasn't like from a farm. It was like they were taking the safely rejects and like stuff that was about to expire and just selling it at the farmer's market as like, ooh, like this is...
This is straight farm to table or whatever. So I don't know how much I trust even my local farmer's market. That's the problem with all food. Yeah, and I agree with that. What do you trust? Yeah, my sister one time went to Ghana for some trip, and she came back with this souvenir that she bought from some kids on the street thinking they made it, and it said Made in China on the back. And so that's basically what this little lady selling chicken at my farmer's market might be doing. So yeah, that definitely could be a thing. I think another thing is that in the future, I think
a lot of people are going to have plants in their homes way more than they do now i think plants are going to be a lot more popular because it keeps the air clean and i think one of the things in 20 30 years we're going to look back and be like you had dirty ass air in your house all the time that's probably why you felt sick all the time uh i think that um here's one natural fiber clothes that's going to make a a big comeback so there's one company called uh
Ryker, R-Y-K-E-R. I don't know these guys. I just think it's cool. They make all cotton workout gear. Workout gear in particular, oftentimes you want some type of sweat-absorbing, stretchy material. Typically, that's not natural fibers. And so a lot of people are wearing shorts and shirts and underwear that has plastic in it and has forever chemicals in it. And I think that natural fiber clothing...
is going to be a lot more in fashion in the next 10 to 20 years because of what we're going to learn about forever chemicals and plastic and foods. And then the last one is one-use plastics, I think, will make a decrease. I think that it's weird how much bottled water we drink. And so those are some of my predictions. But the cotton clothing, I would bet a lot that that will be a very popular trend in the next 20 years, a health trend.
Is there like a trade-off, like quality, price? What's the trade-off here? Yeah, like look, the reason why Lululemon is dope is because when you put on a Lululemon pair of shorts and it has that nice stretchy feel, and when you stretch it, it goes right back to how it's supposed to be. That is...
man-made material. So it's good in that sense. It's probably cheaper as well. Natural fibers, I think, are probably more expensive. And have you ever had a sweater that you wear a bunch and it starts losing shape? That doesn't happen with what I call a swishy material. What's the rain...
water resistant like material for like a range like that shit doesn't happen with that right so that there is a trade-off is that like some of these man-made stuff are definitely more convenient or are better performing that's why they call like like performance wear whatever performance wear yeah it's because it is like better performance right and so there is yeah there is a trade-off
But I do think it's going to be more popular. Riker is actually the only company I have found that is making somewhat interesting non-toxic workout gear. But that's like an interesting, it's an interesting angle for a company like that to get started in. Right, right. Okay, fascinating. Do we want to wrap it there? I feel inspired to be a healthier, better, local eating man machine.
Dude, local eating is great, man. It's great. I got a nice old Russian lady who makes great cheese. You need some cheese? I got a lady. It's fantastic. I kind of want to have a guy or a gal for every food that I eat. I have a hummus lady. I got a chicken guy. That seems like my future to have that. Dude, I'm down. All right, that's it. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to.
Hey, Sean here. A quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story. He started Twitter and before that he sold a company to Google for $100 million. And somebody asked him, they said, Ev, what's the secret, man? How do you create these huge businesses, billion dollar businesses? And he says, well, I think the answer is that you take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for thousands of years, and then you just use modern technology to take out steps. Just remove the friction that exists between people getting what they want and
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I use it for not one, not two, but six of my companies right now. And it's used by also 200,000 other ambitious founders. So if you want to be like me, head to mercury.com, open an account in minutes. And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC. All right, back to the episode.