3 killer businesses hiding in plain sight

Unknown Speaker: So, there's this one business called Charles River Labs. ... They do this as like research testing as a service for all the biotech companies so they don't have to do it themselves. ... They work with like 80% of biotech companies. ... absolute monopoly. They do 4 billion a year in revenue. ... They bought a monkey breeding business like a supply like part of the monkey supply chain cuz they were like so dependent on these wild swings. They bought one for $500 million just just to control the supply better to get make sure that they were not going to like lack lack the supply of these these NHPs.

Unknown Speaker: So, it'll be like in Cambodia, or it'll be in Vietnam, and they basically so they they they they certify that they basically breed these four testing. ... there's this story in Fortune magazine of this guy. ... he he's like the director of wildlife in Cambodia, and these are like monkeys in a cage right here coming out of this pickup truck, and they're being transported. ... he got jailed for like a year. He was like in house arrest for like, you know, a year waiting trial.

Speaker 1: You realize like wow, there's a lot of business in the weird nooks and crannies of the world. There's a lot of money to be made doing things that are just off the beaten path because there's this arbitrage between what smart people learn about in their day-to-day life or school, which is why you'll see a lot of programmers who will build to-do list apps. And, you know, dating apps and things that it's like, what's a problem that every smart person runs into? You simply want to just stay away from that and go into things that they just haven't heard about. They don't know too much about, you know, what I mean? Like, go into a a category that is just not ripe with really smart, you know, high agency people, and you're playing against weak competition.

Speaker 1: It's the art of noticing. If you go listen to like what Rick Rubin says, what the great comedians say, it's all about noticing. It is actually why comedians, when they get rich and famous, they fall off. Because it's the struggles of the everyday person that led them to an insight that when they said it in front of a crowd, everybody connected with it. But when you're flying private and you you have four nannies and you have a chef and you have this and that, well, you don't really encounter the same struggles that the everyday person does. So, you stop coming up with the genius insights that make that resonate like a truth that you said out loud to the audience. And so, you have to really like create a system where you were going to be exposed to interesting things and a habit of noticing them. Of paying attention to them, of writing things down, of slowing down, of not being too busy, not being too distracted, of being more present.

Speaker 1: I've said another one is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is such an underrated trait. Everybody knows that it's better to work with somebody who's enthusiastic. Everybody knows that enthusiasm is a positive attribute to have, but it's something that smart people feel stupid when they do it. Like it's a low status thing for a smart person to do is be enthusiastic. And you seem sort of like dumb, like a golden retriever. Well, guess what? Everybody wants that person around. We love golden retrievers. And it's actually a very useful trait for going and doing something hard is to have enthusiasm every day versus just being beaten down by the reality of your situation. So there's these like handful of traits that smart people refuse to work on, which makes it like an uncompetitive playing field. You could just go dominate with very little effort.

Speaker 1: The first is look into your childhood. So if you read about people who suggest how to do this, a lot of the times they say look into your childhood or pay attention to what you did in your free time. Rather it's your free time as an adult, but as adults our free time sort of shrinks in smaller and smaller segments. And you know, you fill your free time with errands or things you should do. But when you're a kid, you don't really think about what you should do. You just simply think about what you want to do. And so, when you're a kid, you get obsessed with different things. You go into these different rabbit holes and these different phases, and then you grow out of them. But they often have like similarities. So, you know, I got obsessed with one video game. But then I would grow out of that, but then I got obsessed with online poker. And online poker has a lot of similarities to that video game, if you think about it, but I didn't consider online poker to be a video game. And I got obsessed with business, and now I'm sort of obsessed with investing. And they're all the same through line, right?

Unknown Speaker: San Francisco is the best city on Earth, in my opinion, to induce the emotion of awe. ... it's basically experiencing both vastness, which means something that's really large, something that feels like endless or incredibly old, while also being a thing where it sort of breaks your mental framework, your mental schema. ... it reduces anxiety and depression because it creates the self-diminishing emotion. ... a lot of times anxiety and depression exists because you are the center of all your problems. ... when I'm in San Francisco, I drive through or ride through the Presidio, and you see these massive hills, and you see views. ... seeing horizons, particularly when it's like a large view and it's an ocean, like it's uh you're above an ocean and you can overlook, it gives me this like deep sense of calm, this deep sense of like um well, of awe.

Unknown Speaker: I thought it was was fantastic. More so than the businesses that they were working on, what I like about San Francisco is there seems to me an outsider it felt like there was a significantly higher quirky attribute, a significantly higher nerd attribute, against the grain attribute that I particularly love and I get a huge amount of inspiration was from. ... San Francisco has the most startup ideas that will sound terrible and probably be terrible than anywhere else where you find entrepreneurs. ... the spread of the ideas is just so different than anything you would see in most other like places where you're going to find business. ... I think if I was 22 years old or 20 years old and a recent college grad and I was remotely interested in technology, I still without a doubt I think it's the place to be.