Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…It's rolling, super rolling. Jason, there's one thing you said I think is really insightful. When you're not Phil Hellmuth and you're playing poker for the first time, just invest in things that have shifted and have revenue. Once you became better and better and you became Jason Calacanis, you can invest in Calm. Why are you comfortable at the level you're at investing in a no-revenue meditation website? Why is that okay? I can take you to the background, it was very simple. I had known Sam Harris, I had heard positive visualization. I heard that term and I used that in sports because I was a Psychology major. I've done positive visualization to get to the New York City Marathon which I did 11 of. I didn't know it was called meditation but I just positively visualized myself along the route. When I did the run, I had had that in my mind how good I was going to feel at each part and how the Bronx and the wall was going to be difficult. When I saw Calm, I talked to Sam Harris about it because he was doing cat scans of brains, he was a meditator, and into psychedelics and all that stuff. He put me in touch—when I was doing my research on Calm—with the woman who ran the Mindfulness Center at UCLA. I found out that Phil Jackson, who I'd known when I was in LA, when he was coaching the Lakers, he had become friends with him. He had Kobe and Shaquille O'Neal meditating and it just clicked through me. Wait a second, Phil Jackson, innovator, Sam Harris, innovator. There's something at UCLA around the corner for me in Brentwood. They're studying and they have a program, they're teaching people this? They're studying it on PTSD Soldiers? This is the future. But unlike yoga, which also started in Santa Monica, this could be delivered through your ears. Wait a second, yoga, you have to do in person and yoga is everywhere but meditation is delivering it in your ears. If this does work and it becomes as popular as yoga, there could be 100,00 people paying for this. It could be a $10 million a year business, this could be $4 million, this could be the future. That's when it all clicked for me. It was like an easy bet for me to make. Then, the subscription service came out and Apple allowed subscriptions. When we invested in Calm, they had done $10,000 in revenue a month.…

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