He Bought a Local Newspaper… Now He Makes $600K/YR

so the article tells a story of multiple eighty something year old guys who own publications that are making that are fine businesses maybe they make six figures a year in profit but they can't find anyone to take it over so they're literally just shutting it down i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never look at we start with this the tweet it's media gaze which i guess some media publications commentary on media companies it says small town newspapers are shutting down due to lack of a succession plan not financial issues in nearly a dozen us states this is a growing problem okay and so the article tells a story of multiple eighty something year old guys who own publications that are making that are fine businesses maybe they make six figures a year in profit but they can't find anyone to take it over so they're literally just shutting it down and here we have a tweet from matthew prince i think the same as matthew is worth i think something like four or five billion dollars he's the ceo of cloud for there do you wanna kinda read what he says yeah so he says actually this is a recipe for a really rewarding life if you're a recent college grad and not sure what to do find a small town you could love with a local newspaper whose owners are ready to retire raise the capital to buy it run it with the community's interest at heart you'll not get too rich but you'll do well more importantly you'll be a hero of the community and have influence or even early in your career you'll meet the love your life at some point at some event you otherwise wouldn't get invited to you'll have kids who will proudly call you their parent and make this corner of the world meaningfully better if anyone wants a seriously fault us recipe and just lacks the capital happy to talk so i think that's amazing insight but the true insight so someone chi at them and they say something like go ahead what do they say i can't read it all so so the literally the guy's name who's replying is us some guy so i'm not not even dis discouraging this guy to some guy tweets adam and says this is the sort of un un unwilling funny stuff that wealthy people say that a hundred thirty iq guy should be content with an imaginary small town life lived in anonymity near i don't even know what this word is being a hundred eighty degrees from their own choices which deliver untold wealth and influence i don't even what what is this guy saying i didn't understand the it's basically saying like this is something that that wealthy dudes say that's so funny because it's so wrong that a guy would be happy doing this yeah what everything saying and here's why i like twitter so matt matt prince i don't he's not high profile he's not like a average like the average person way who this is but he's worth five billion dollars and it's so interesting to get his insight so this is this is the tweet that i really care about and i just the rest was for context read this next one alright so he says i have it just replies to some guy he goes i have untold financial wealth and i own a local newspaper so i have some perspective like warren buffett likes to say surprisingly little changes when you move from upper middle class to truly rich houses or houses cars or cars and watches are stupid that's so good what's more important is meaning i feel lucky to have achieved financial wealth while chasing meaning that is super rare and feel incredibly fortunate to have gotten both but if you're early career and decide i'd rather optimize for meaning than financial wealth i think this is a better path than most would consider example volunteer for the peace corps it will actually make you a good leaving and you'll have incredible influence and meeting within your community and if you later decide to go for untold financial wealth always remember rupert murdoch empire began with the adelaide advertiser which he bought when he was twenty one how fantastic is that this is really great although you know not to be a reply guy but like cloud fairs is not the peace corps or owning a small town newspaper in a community so like is he saying that cloudflare was his meaningful thing or he did something before that dino know that's his meaningful thing but but the point is for one he has another one so he's like some guy goes how is one supposed to make a good living from a small town newspaper do you have a model a new model for profitability blah i wanna sit hear a breakdown and he said matthew prince says the local paper we bought cash flow around six hundred thousand when we bought it we wanted to run it as a nonprofit so we plow it all back into the into spanning coverage but it is not the case that these are bad businesses they're just not big businesses so the takeaway of multiple multiple things one newspapers are dying local newspapers we're talking towns that have five thousand people ten thousand people thirty thousand people they are not dying and if you read the replies you'll see people who are saying i own a local newspaper that does five hundred thousand dollars in eb like there's there there are replies here and matthew matt just said one of those replies where he explains the numbers but two it's just so fascinating to hear this guy's perspective who has so much and i actually agree with them and i also think that there is a big opportunity to buy a bunch of these but you can just start with one and i don't think local newspapers are gonna go away anytime soon to be honest i think that they have a very stable subscriber base and low and what matt says in there he says something like hospitals and other like local businesses they are dying to advertise in local newspapers and then right this business while small is doing great and it's very subs it's a monopoly okay i love this one ten out of ten five good job i gave a talk at berkeley that was about starter businesses are called white belt businesses a few months ago wait let's reflect on that that's pretty cool what given a talk yeah berkeley i don't know that sounds cool to me like i never got to be go to fancy is hilarious so i i'm like i'm gonna give this talk and i i i think i've told the story before but my entire life shifted because i was in a random class at duke i planned to be a doctor i taken the amc mca cats all of it and then i took this one class but this amazing woman lisa easter and she had she was she herself had graduated ten years earlier and got gotten wealthy lived in interesting life and came back to teach and she decided like what class did the kids actually need and the class was called getting rich it's kinda like this podcast my first millions like sort of a a a pretty crude title her class was called getting rich and actually it was two things it was personal finance you'd learn about like mortgages and savings and how that all worked compounding shit like that and then secondly she would invite speakers in just so that we would get exposed to other ideas of what a life could be besides doctor lawyer consultant banker which was like you know at school like duke that's where ninety percent of the students are dev voting their energy and a guy came in and he gave a talk and it literally changed my life not even something he said i just kinda was like this guy seems like he's having fun he's doesn't seem like he's that much smarter than me like you know maybe smarter now but it he's you know he's saying at the beginning he didn't know shit about shit and that's where i am today and like why don't i just do what what this guy doing and the last thing he had said was like he's like look if you go try to do something entrepreneurial or interesting and it doesn't work out this america that maybe like the story is is a currency for you and look i hire kids like you and guess what you all have the same top three fourth of the resume you go to school you got a three point something gpa you have some stupid extra extracurricular activities you got an internship at some big corporation where you didn't really make an impact the only thing that differentiates any of you guys is the other section at the bottom of your resume like have you done anything have you gone on any interesting quest and so he's like go on an interesting quest you have nothing to lose right now you don't have kids you don't have a mortgage just go try some shit and if you fail if it works fantastic if it fails don't worry it creates a great story that guys like me like to hear so that like really shifted my life and so i get i get invited to go give this talk at berkeley and i'm like i'm gonna do this man i'm a change someone's life oh be a life changer today and i prepped my ass off like i really tried i like i like thought about it i spent two days were really like full like just ten hours a day just working on this one talk two days doesn't sound like a lot but like i show up to these podcasts pretty cold like i can wing it with the best of them so for me to really put twenty hours into one talk i'm gonna give to fifty kids that didn't you know that that was unusual for me you sound like the kenny powers have given a talk man you're like get ready kids i'm i'm gonna make you piss tears like exactly hold on your butt i'm not about your world so i go in and guess what these kids really just don't give a fuck within two minutes of the talk and again i'm trying to fire on all cylinders it's interactive i'm crack jokes i got a story do it i have a big promise at the beginning and i look around and i just remembered vividly in that moment i was like oh i remember being nineteen you're not even out of school yet like the the real world is a it's a distant land far away at this point you're just trying to you're like okay i have to be here till five and then i'm gonna go eat and then i have that paper to write three years out of your target demo too like they're indian they go to berkeley and you're like they could like alright perfect this is my demo and then you're like shit they're still nineteen i need to wait till they're twenty one until they have heard of me exactly so honestly it was a of a giant waste of time i don't think i shifted anyone's life i i think i changed exactly your lives but i really tried it and one of the principles in there was like when you get out of berkeley instead of getting a job like consider you know doing a company but for most of you you don't have the next facebook you don't have the next big idea and maybe you're not even talented enough to handle that's like kinda like if if you know jessica alba walked through that door and she's like you it's like did you couldn't handle jessica alba right now anyways don't worry about it that's not your problem like you need to go you know put your hand under her mindy shirt in the bag behind the bleach yours over there like that's the level you're at right now and so i basically was like you need a starter business a white belt business and i was giving them ideas for what simple starter businesses are but with this your analogy did you just no i see that one else now it's i thought you're pretty good yeah well we'll see the funny thing is i have you and i'm like sam's gonna love this he's gonna love hate this and then our i'm like ari just gonna hate this and sure enough as i'm saying it that's what i got i got sam laughing but face balm and ari just looking off into the distance wondering how did i end up here why do i have this job my god go that that's a that's a fantastic analogy it's very true everyone dreams of like the jessica although about elbow doing that and you're like wait what do i do what do what do i do with my hands you know what i it's perfect exactly you are not prepared for jessica gal yet and that's okay you you just need some reps and so what's what's the point of this what are you show me elbow oh guess the tie to that was i think owning a local newspaper is a fantastic version of business to right was that not obvious that was so crystal clear to me the connection show me this this story about steve ba and then also i wanna see the gary you one okay two great choices excellent choices off the menu alright this is from i believe steve balm goes on the acquired podcast it was really good it was so good i agree i didn't watch it but i agree and the clips have been good and so he's telling the story and they they go do you guys know the story of key at microsoft he was one of the most pivotal things at microsoft and then the hosts go why why i my i knew is important but please tell the story and steve goes he was pivotal in a way that you won't even know so he goes first of all he's a brilliant guy great guy he's at yahoo and he went to a grad school with the head of microsoft research harry and so the the the the the the setup here is that satya and na mandela who's now the ceo of microsoft was running bing at the time bing is trying to compete with google and harry runs the research program there and harry comes and he goes look this guy key is a genius we have to hire key i don't know if he wants to work for us we gotta learn from this guy we gotta hire this guy so he's like satya mandela steve balm and harry all fly down to california to meet with this guy k liu and they talked to key and they're like dude you're right this guy's brilliant and we're learning about him and then at one point he walks away he leaves him and goes to restroom restaurant or something and he goes satya throws out this idea he goes we should hire key and i should work for him goes so harry who's all in because he worked with him harry works for satya and satya is like we should not only hire this guy i should work for him i should report to him like gives up power basically so they they call him and they're they to like he listen you know he was thinking about taking a job somewhere else but he ends up joining and he goes and the the host goes so what what did he do at microsoft he goes what i just told you he told me about satya it goes i love satya and we were giving him more and more responsibilities anyways but when i saw that this guy would do the right thing for the company he would give up power to bring in a more a talented person and agree to work for him he didn't have ego that got in the way i knew that satya was the guy and now satya has become the ceo of microsoft and led microsoft on this incredible run that's so good that's a great story it's up a thousand percent and for a company as big as microsoft to go up a thousand percent and now is a three trillion dollar company all you know under satya kind of regime i thought that was just a bad ass story right and later on in the podcast steve balm talks about phil and he i i don't know how rich is but i think a hundred billion or plus and he was like the acquired guys were like your wealth is growing i think twenty percent a year you know twenty billion dollars whatever he was i'm trying to give it all the way and he goes you're forgetting about something and and the host go what he goes you know microsoft pays a dividend so just my dividends are making me one billion dollars a year and he's like he goes he goes i'm trying to give it all the way and i can't find p enough people who can accept the money well steve we would love to help you with this problem we're a he was over here yeah he was talking about how he's like i don't i don't i forget the capital appreciation of of this or the stock appreciation lately it's been what fifteen percent of you i i forget it's something like magnificent where he's earning tens of billions of dollars from that and yeah he corrected the guys when they said how wealthy he is he goes you're forgetting about our dividend which pays me one billion you know he's just been sitting on that by the way you know he's like he's mother out here don't know they don't know i'm ball it was a really great pot cast it was like three hours long and it was fantastic and he gets made fun or bomber gets made fun of a bunch for that one video where he just looks goofy but he he he's the a great salesman and he's way more technical than people realized bomber a genius that's cool i mean you gotta you gotta be special i mean there's luck is involved but i think it's it's so easy to write people off and he's a great example of enthusiasm as a skill i've talked about this in a bunch of other podcast podcasts but enthusiasm is a actual skill and that video that people make fun of the developer's developers developers developers to me that's like watching you know vince carter dunk or something like that right like this is a guy who probably brought a shit a ton of energy and enthusiasm and belief and to the team in an unwavering way and at an unusual level and yeah that was obviously funny to laugh at i get it i thought it was funny a shit too but enthusiasm is a skill and i love it because people don't even think of it as a skill but we all know it when we see it like if you ever worked with somebody who's really enthusiastic and is a believer in what you're doing and brings good energy every day and doesn't get like doesn't get worn down and doesn't get buckled by adversity you love that person that person clearly valuable to the team you would hate if that person left your team yet nobody talks about enthusiasm as a skill or something you could practice for develop or at least even celebrate that you have something you know seems like something sort of for dumb people what's some what's this scary one yeah it's is funny funny alright does gary love gary v gary i love you this is also hilarious so they're playing a game called bullish and bearish where the host is gonna tell him a company name and he has to decide as he a bull or a bear on it watch this meta bullish reddit bullish out that bullish we i'm not educated enough to give an answer not to be honest nvidia i feel like if i spend ten hours educating myself i'm like okay this is not sustainable to be this crazy disney disney very bullish i think intellectual property is one of the most underrated businesses of the future of b are and everything i don't think people understand how big owning ip is gonna be tesla bullish microsoft very bullish open ai i'm bullish amazon very bullish bullish alibaba bullish off bullish even though it might be banned bullish bitch on bullish okay before that word gets out of your mouth i'm bullish what am i can do i'm bullish how funny is this i i love gary i it sucks because she picked like on honestly like i can't hate i'm also pretty bullish on all the the all the tech companies that the all the best companies in the world too yeah am out of chat gb so funny he dude people forget i i think va media i track it because i like gary and i think that it's easy to dismiss him as like a guru but i you know is doing something like three hundred million dollars a year right now i did not that and what do you say you track it where you where are you getting this information from so i actually do you remember how i told you i had this document where i track companies and i like i i i i track people where i will make a timeline of their life and like at different they do different things i track it with a variety of companies as well and va media i was curious about their trajectory and he was growing the company like at a really good clip like it was doubling for a couple years and it was still growing at like fifty percent for a couple years and so i just wanted to check in and add to my document and over the last three or four years he's grown it's to something like two hundred and fifty million a year in revenue if google va media revenue he actually is fairly public about it lately of where it's at but it's in the two hundred three hundred range two hundred to three hundred million a year yeah and what do they do now is it just marketing services or what what's going on va so va x which is now the holding company in two thousand and twenty four was on track to do three hundred million dollars in revenue and this was written in december of twenty four so yeah you could assume that did in the three hundred million range yeah it does they do social media this the same shit just they manage people's social media stuff i mean it's gotta be more that manage people's social media stuff it's gotta be more of that i think that's the bulk of it they do social media advertising and campaigns so like if you're sam song and you wanna run ads on facebook and you wanna make really good ads i believe looks ignore van on board what is the most interesting thing that's come out of your tracking people manually year by year song borderline creepy stalker think that you're doing what's interesting to me is a few things one the ability to grow is it it it gets harder and harder but like the people who are like really big animals they just figure out how to do it and that's really fascinating to me but occasionally even companies that are growing quickly they'll have two or three years of no or little growth and the reason why i like to do this research is it helps me understand figure i think that it's the same way when you talk to your rich friends and you talk about money with them you start to normalize money and that's why i do the stuff where it like it sounds like it's like a almost like an emotional regulation because entrepreneurship is this long longer than you want more up and down thing than you want and seeing that the people the things you admire today either a took a long time or had you know multiple flat years it makes you not feel like shit when you're in one of those you know periods that is it yeah yeah exactly because i think i showed you the revenue chart or no the so i've i've shown you charts before a business insider which is a company i also used to do this for and they've grown like crazy but there was like three years where every single month they actually didn't grow and i was like this chart looks great because we've zoomed out to fifteen years but zoom in on those three years and imagine feeling that way for nearly a thousand days that doesn't feel great yeah doesn't look at all the whole life of the company right now is three years imagine this whole time just flat you know or i'll give you another example rep it yeah you know we've had a omni job on the podcast and that it was one of our biggest ones they just announced the other date that they hit a hundred million in revenue that's huge right well what he kind of said like at a small comment like in a reply is that i believe last year or the year before they're at ten million in revenue so they went from ten million to a hundred million in record time like one year or two years something like that but what he told us on the podcast is that he started the company eight years ago which means from years zero to eight he got to ten million in revenue which is not impressive that's not that's that's neat that's not impressive and what's and that's just insane to me that he kept at it for eight years and then and and tell me if i'm getting my numbers wrong but he kept at it for that long and then success was like in two years yes and no i think you're you're you're right but it's not like it was just failing that whole time because if you look at the user growth of developers and i think i tweeted this out with it i'll find it but like basically they grew they were growing exponentially in number of users who were developers so that was you know that was also happening at that same time and so it's not as it's not as like oh man you know it's just you know suddenly it starts to work like i mean look at this this is paul graham tweeting about rep before before they even turn on monetization this is back in twenty twenty but like what years go to this is twenty fifteen to twenty twenty like midway through twenty twenty like or end of twenty it's basically twenty twenty one and so they had five million developers programmers using their thing and he paul paul talk he says this graph is impressive not just for the perfect men xml shape about the numbers five million users is a lot when those users are programmers imagine how many users their users will have of their apps and i think the crazy thing about rep is that basically they pivoted the entire company when they're at a billion dollar valuation i invested in rep i think at a eight hundred million ish eight eight or nine hundred million valuation i invested in the fund and i invested personally because i was like such a big believer in this and they had pretty much no revenue at the time but it was this type of growth and i love the product and i loved judd i was like this guy's is a savage and they have they built an incredible product that i think will have a network effect over time and then they pivoted the entire business to say it's not about like young programmer because i thought oh they're getting young programmers to start coding on rep and maybe those people will never leave they'll code their whole career on rep and then when ai happened they pivoted based the entire company to now it's not even four programmers it's for people who don't code typically to make things right it's for non non engineers to i to suddenly be able to be engineers to be able to to to write create software for software creators and now that's ramped to a hundred million at ten the ten x the revenue in one year so now i look like a genius investing in this thing but i really didn't even invest in this because they pivoted they like basically shifted the entire user who is the user and what is the use case you know afterwards yeah i mean this is just insane i i use rep probably three or four times a week it's really fun i just asked chat to make this this is sam stocking all these businesses dude i do this like crazy i'm gonna have to share this doc i just i like tracking few numbers to me when we first met you were like i took every billionaire and i tried to figure out what they were doing at age thirty and i was like what and you're like jack do do at age thirty his net worth was only what and i was like how do you know this why do you know this what are doing i and you're like by the time i'm thirty my goal is to have x i think we were well we probably met when we were twenty four twenty five years old something like that yeah and you were like when i'm thirty i wanna have twenty million dollars in the bank that was your number and you were like look at that some i'll be ahead of jeff bezos and jack do of these guys i was like yeah this guy's a sick of but i like it it was the i should call like if i teach a class it's gonna be called like how to become an economic animal it unfortunately like there's way levels there's as many levels to this and i'm there's many people who are way above me and i didn't understand like how exponential growth works but hey you know i think i got in the arena of what i was aiming for alright talk about the new mayor not because there's a politics podcast i don't know actually i didn't even know this guy existed until three days ago to be honest with you but you're moving to new york and you seem to know about this guy and i am following him only from business and marketing perspective i have a business and marketing take on this guy but can you first set the context for people like me who are not following who this new york city he's the mayor right that's what he's just became he's me the democrat who's running for mayor so it was a the democrats were i don't even know the right terms but nation and he won so basically it was ham cuomo new york is very democratic he's most likely to win is that why people are freaking out because normally if he's just a candidate yeah more likely than not the the issue was here the issue has a a bunch of issues basically every politician is corrupt so mayor cuomo or the cuomo is running for mayor he was previous at the governor he got in trouble for like asking his coworkers workers has have sex with them and he was the guy running against this guy the current mayor mayor adams he has accepted bribes he is gonna be running as an independent versus this guy and so we're kind of like stuck with like a paper scissors yeah it's like you know a soft park they it's like a do short turd sandwich should you get vote for that's kinda like what we're working with here the the gist of this guy is that he's incredibly charismatic he's thirty two years old he believes in a lot of crazy things that's my opinion crazy but basically a lot of socialist things so for example he wants to freeze rent meaning you can't raise rent on on on i think something like two million different apartments rate different rent stabilized apartments he also wants to create government owned grocery stores and a handful of things like that that are very controversial to people who don't like socialism but amongst young people who are very angry about a lot of things that they should be angry about like housing costing a lot of money versus the wage growth but he's super charismatic and so he won over young people's votes and so okay great great summary now again i don't care about the politics of this and i don't live in new york but i'm fascinated by this guy like i literally had never heard of this guy and then i watched this video okay kill this tweet he killed it so so this tweet right here has three point seven million views so that's just the twitter part of this forget instagram tiktok anywhere else that i'm sure he's posting this type of content but first of all the branding so like that was the first thing that stood out to me like literally the branding of this guy like the the font etcetera so what is this video it starts like he's a tiktok content creator he go it says new york is suffering from a crisis and it's called halal inflation and then he talks about how halal from like the like food trucks you know chicken and rice halal from like a whole halal food truck now cost ten dollars but it used to cost eight and he's basically goes and he's interviewing them he's like you know how how much you sell or ten dollars ten dollars to dollars whatever we'll play the video is suffering from a crisis and it's called halal inflation today we're gonna get to the bottom of this how much does the plate of halal cost right now from this truck ten dollars ten ten dollars yeah when you're a street vendor you have to pay for the food the plates how much do you have to pay for your permit before it was twenty two k twenty seventeen thousand and how much does a license cost if you get it from the city think four hundred who are you paying the bear owner you're not paying the city no no no you pay the permit on a twenty two thousand dollars just so you can sell this food yes and who is this random guy have you ever applied for a permit yeah i'm applying no combo anything it's long wait number three thousand eight hundred something and after two years your number three thousand eight hundred yes these are the four bills that are sitting in the city council right now which would give these vendors their own permits and make your hall halal more affordable but eric adams hasn't said a single word about them if you own the permit then how much would you charge for the plate seven dollar eight dollars would you rather pay ten dollars for a play to hello or eight dollars eight dollars eight dollars fifty eight dollars a way to go if i was the mayor i'd be working with city council from day one to make halal eight bucks again oh day tastes like ten bucks for the chevy be eight so i was blown away because i have never really seen a politician doing this type of like i wanna call her like kinda of natural influencer content i don't know what what do you what do even call this but this is not what politicians typically did he's making like a vice documentary but in two minutes it's very good he keys he's well you're doing u content that i think that's the way i would put it so the same thing happened in in in business especially e commerce so sam i don't know if you remember like in the earlier days of e com right like let's say twenty twelve twenty fourteen you know you mostly did just static images okay there was not really a lot of video on let's say facebook or google at the time so you would do static images for your ads and but those images you would pay a professional designer to make and they would make it look slick and then that's what people would click and then when video came out people tried to do the same thing they would basically film professional looking videos you'd hire a videographer you'd to have somebody holding the camera and then you would you'd would have a good background good lighting and you would say your thing that's but it turns out that commercials didn't really work as well on the internet as me picking up my phone and just making something that looks very raw like i'm doing my you know it'd be a girl doing makeup while talking about a different product right and it just feels like it's a get ready with b video or it's you know a mom who's in a rush who's just being like y'all i gotta tell you y'all this is a life saver like my husband if my husband can't believe how much of a how much how how much happy i am since i got this thing and then they ruffle in their bag and grab something out and this ads that don't look like ads and they call this u user generated content and that's the new style that works best in ads for the last i would say five years that's dominated most of e commerce advertising this is the first time i've seen a politician do this so like if you compare i don't know like kamala and how perfectly manic everything was like her image her her you know pants suit her like professional photography her like fake phone call with somebody but then you see that the phone wasn't even on and she's just chuck to nobody like it was all super super fake and polished and this guy's doing like man on the street interviews holding the microphone you can literally hear like the you know it kind of rubbing against this jacket sometimes accidentally like it's like it's w sa dude it's it the perfection in the imperfection to to go full circle there this kind of blew me away i don't know if i'm just like overly nerd out about this but from from the topic like halal chicken rice ten bucks it should only be eight to the style of the video i immediately was like i get why this guy won and the on saturday the election was taking place yesterday he was so he spent the whole day walking around new york and like doing like these very raw looking videos talking to people and i think that this is just proof which we already have had this proof that charisma matters more than ideas in reality and this is not like takeaway that like this is a very obvious takeaway but this is just another example because he his charisma is off the charts and he has just been like killing it what and when his ideas in my opinion are just absolutely insane but because of the style marketing it's it's done wonderful young people react this stuff and and by the way this is what we need like mayor or quote or a governor cuomo the guy who was running for he's an old guy he's in his sixties baby seventies and he would never in a million years grab his cell phone and just start talking to it but that's what i need i think my friend our our friend austin reef tweeted something out and he said the next politicians and the next presidents are going to be podcast and subs and that sounds like a ridiculous statement people who write newsletters and people who have podcast podcasts that sounds ridiculous it's not ridiculous and i i totally buy into it yeah definitely there's gonna be a podcast president why because they're gonna have a built to following before they run so they're gonna build the audience before they go run two they're gonna be trained with ten thousand hours of storytelling and communication of you know how to make a point so you know i think that's gonna be one archetype the other one is gonna be short form video creators i think roberto our friend said this thing he goes whether this guy's agenda is good or bad for new york is irrelevant he told the best story this is why steve jobs said that the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world a lie told us a good story can never never can never beat the truth trapped in a bad story or i think it's can always beat the truth trapped in a bad story and then i had because i tweeted this thing so when i saw this so i i saw the second video don't know if you're seen this one but can you hear this dude do you know what's funny is i don't have to hear what he's saying and i could sense the charisma well so okay so he's speaking hindi in this video and i think he does actually speaking hindi but i it made me realize oh dude to eleven labs is gonna make like a billion dollars next election cycle because every politician is gonna trans everything they're saying into all languages using ai instantaneously like you know why would you not you're just gonna pick up free views like we did this we started doing this with our m m episodes ben was like hey i think i can get more views if we dub our episodes into another language so now if you're on youtube and you click the settings wheel and you click like audio track you could select spanish or hindi on on or on some of the episodes and it's gonna be all the episodes soon because we went to eleven like hey dude will you guys help us like translate this and immediately we now get tens of thousands of views a month that we weren't getting before in spanish and in hindi there's probably people in mexico right now that think we just speak spanish that were their favorite spanish podcast and if they meet us they'll be sore disappointed that's a really good insight i didn't i'd i have not seen this video of him is he is this video dubbed is this a fake video or real he kinda looks like he might speak there or maybe i can't tell exactly but i guess that's the point i wouldn't know ai tools have gotten so good that i would never know and i i actually tweeted you said i could a thousand percent create an ai politician that could win over you know a citi election out of course you can't actually run if you're not a human being but whatever and i said here's how i do it you know i would make a likable sort of guy next door character like this guy i would create a hundred x more video content than than than my opponent because andrew cuomo is not gonna be able to keep up with my ai engine i know if you've seen people who do this they basically they create an ai workflow that's an agent that scrape like it comes up it's there's one agent that's just brainstorming topics it's like looking at reddit it's looking at tiktok trends etcetera and it's brainstorming topics then they have a script agent that writes the writes a one minute tiktok script then they have an a video generation agent that creates a video that's does that that has your your ai avatar speaking it like hey jan or or little labs who's doing this there's people that are doing this there's they run what they call face list channels so they run channels on instagram and tiktok they get millions of views like would b role in narration but it doesn't have to be b roll anymore because now they use an ai avatar so they just put a person there and then they're like cool i don't wanna be an influencer i wanna wake up and get ready and have a nice house all this but i'll just tell you i'll just make an ai character that does this and you can just create an ai character that does exactly this and then but the the cool thing is they automated the entire workflow from coming up with the idea scripting it recording it and then actually like scheduling it posting it analyzing the data and feeding that back into the engine who what's an almost like if you guys applied your talents to something useful this is you'd be incredible i but but it's amazing that you could even do this i'm reading a book called a promised it's obama's biography or so auto he wrote it but it's it's it's old as ten years old but i was at the airport and it's looked cool i meant at the point in the book where he was like i was getting my ass in the election because i was too long winded and my campaign manager criticized one of my debates and he's like dude you're answering the question he's and he's like yeah they ask me a question i'm giving them an answer and like it's kind of nuance and it's long and like a answer yeah i'm give like a good answer it goes yeah that's bullshit that's not how you would a debate and that's not how you win votes you're don't give an answer you you're not answering the question the question is irrelevant all people wanna know is can they trust you with their vote and like on do are you a brand that they wanna get behind stop answering the question and tell a story that lets him know that they can get behind you and he was like he he goes that rubs me the wrong way but that's the game and i will play that game and there's like a distinct difference in like you know we know him now obama's is regarded as a a fairly charismatic good storyteller he was like that was the change yeah exactly do you know lulu no she's she's really cautious a very interesting person to follow on twitter and whatnot so lulu i think she was the head of comm at like pal or something like that i don't i don't or andrew i think it was but she does a good job she post regularly is basically comm if device communication device p r slash how executive should communicate and i think was always an interesting one because like instructors trying to conform as this like boring government contractor you know they let their free flag fly so she she tweeted this out she goes it sounds so basic but he is too likable to lose friendly devin demeanor smiles with his eyes seems earnest on being liked outweighs policies experience at nonsensical plans quote i just have a good feeling about that person can override almost anything and then harley this ceo shop shopify said vibes it's like oh man we're sort of vibe voting now and it's like actually we're kind of always we've always been doing that man we've always been doing that you know jfk was one of the most jfk have like a seventy percent approval rating when he was murdered and he was well loved he was our princess diana or whatever for that generation like he he was well loved and he was well loved because he was incredibly likable that's like a his policies were fine but it was because he looked great he had a a beautiful wife who was poised he had a lovely family with really white teeth like that is why he won because he was very likable and he could and good looking so i'm likable might not even be the word because you might look at trump and be like wow like is he would you say he's likable like well he's funny he's funny he's charismatic so yeah i ever tell you about the time where so i had this friend who's like a billionaire successful tech guy and he sends me a google doc one day called the president and i'm like okay what's this and i opened it up and i no idea what to expect i think he might be running for president i don't know what this is and it was basically a pitch for a television show and he laid out a case and he basically said if you look at the last i forgot what it was like i'm to make up some numbers if you look at the last ten elections you you would look for a pattern you'd say is it always democrats is it always republicans is it does it always switch between democrat republican is it based on the economy is it based on the person's height like if you tried to look for correlation where would you find it it goes the highest correlation you could find that the more charismatic candidate wins and he goes ever since the advent of radio and television when our primary way of getting messages out scaled up like crazy the more charismatic candidate wins whether this was clinton or reagan of it wasn't reagan like an actor or something like this yeah he was looking yeah he's going through history and basically twenty twenty was kind of the only exception where biden won and i would say biden was the less charismatic candidate than trump of seems to be like the outlier but the guy's case was basically he's like i think in his case he didn't he didn't want trump to win and he's like problem is trump is incredibly charismatic he he's able to capture people's attention he says things that are very memorable he says things that excite certain people and inflamed certain people but it's all attention that he gets free earned media so he had this idea to create a television show and he's like this sounds a little bit silly but he's like i think for the democratic party which is the party of he was a part of he's like i think we need to start no more charismatic candidates and if you look at the last few they they have not been the most charismatic and he's like we're we're sort of it's a captured party and we lack putting forward charismatic candidates since obama obama was the the well one of the most charismatic candidates and he said here's what i think we should do just like you know american idol or the voice or whatever if there's the apprentice even there's been proven shows where you can have like let's say a eight to twelve week period where you start with ten people and then they get eliminated in in the end you have a winner he's like what if we did this presidential candidates so you would take twelve candidates not random people off the street but people that genuinely are thinking that they wanna run and so you'd get pete butt edge and others in in this batch he's like week by week you know let's say they they go to a small town in pittsburgh and they're gonna actually meet with the the the car manufacturers there whatever like you know some some like presidential type of shit that they do and they have to present a plan and then it's actually like and the judges for that week will be the the car car manufacturer people and then they'll sort of pick which candidate they felt best understood them and was able to to address their needs and week by week you started limit candidates he's like by the end of this twelve week thing we have captured so much attention and hopefully found a candidate that's like one of the hearts of people the people will know their backstory they'll know what they're all about they'll have seen them in a more human light and we will have filtered out the less charismatic candidates for the more charismatic candidates he's like i'm not saying charisma is the end all be all like ideally at the beginning you try to screen people that you think are worthy you know candidates to lead but amongst that worthy pool give have a boost to the most charismatic candidate i thought this was fascinating and i really wanted him to do it and he had a he was friends with mark burnett like guy who created survivor and a i feel maybe bachelor or whatever like a bunch of other major major reality shows and he's like i'm gonna talk to mark and i think we're gonna do this and i hit them up recently and i was like whatever happened to that idea he's like i just decided i didn't want i didn't want then the avalanche of problems in my life for creating this and i decided it wasn't worth i have a great life and it really wasn't worth you know what it was gonna do and but and biden in one in twenty twenty so he felt like maybe maybe i was wrong maybe there's not as bunch of a need for this but isn't that interesting dude yeah that's pretty fascinating i i wish i wish she would have done that i feel like that would work too like it sounds like an it's an idea that i think it's easy to make fun of it's also an idea that i think would be effective at the the stated mission it's easy to make fun of because we don't want it to be true but it is true like you know who's a really good example this is arnold source snag yep he was just he's a he was such a charismatic interesting person he was good to look at like wanted to look like he looked like even the people who aren't even the people who are become our leaders who aren't really good looking they're still sort of in interesting to look at like donald trump is intriguing to look at he looks like remarkable in a weird way you know what i'm arnold sc is a perfect example of this can i show you one last thing which one i think is funny interesting so i found this and i don't i i think i've talked to this guy brian and he was cool so i don't wanna shit on him but i'm more so shitting on people who this line of thinking maybe this line of thinking and alright so let let's let's explain what it is sky the he says he says i asked quote what company is worth less than ten billion today that you could be worth five hundred billion plus in a few decades i have received seven hundred and ten answers here's the top twenty picks that have fifty x potential and this tweet has eighteen thousand likes you know was probably i don't know how many views but like what year was this over a million this is in twenty twenty one july of twenty twenty one when times were good when everybody's making a ton of money in the stock market and he lists twenty companies and and these are ones that this guy who i think he has a whole youtube channel towards picking socks and i don't know if these were his picks necessarily or if they were his his audience picks but and this guy has six hundred thousand followers his bios says i teach investors how to analyze businesses stock fundamentals and valuation teacher dm buffett for premium courses free ebook in my description okay that's that's this guy so this was in two thousand twenty one and i just was curious like how it was he right like what's his deal i'm almost positive that not only did none none of them fifty x i am pretty sure that most of them are down from from down even from this tweet but of the of the twenty that he had selected somebody somebody says this has to go down in history as the best case of stupidity of the crowds here's where we're at three years later so three years later only one company is up and it's up six percent the average company is down seventy percent on this list with several of them minus ninety five percent and the minus ninety five percent minus ninety eight percent minus ninety percent minus ninety seven minus eighty six minus ninety nine and of course oz which was an e commerce platform in russia which is deli listed and i think open door is now and so this tweet that you're looking at that was even six months ago i'm almost positive that open door is d listed and virgin is down even more i think lemonade is d listed or out of business the context logic i think is out of business which is wish alright we should post an update here and now we're at five years later here's how the stupidity of the crowd has done and my point in bringing this up isn't the actual results the results are not good that's the summary the results are actually really bad but it's just crazy how hard it is to pick winners it's very challenging this guy he has six hundred thousand followers i assume that he does this all the time for his job and you still can't nail it it's just so challenging is it though okay i'm gonna tell you what i did back in twenty i graduated in two thousand ten and that i started my stock portfolio i think right around like senior year of college and i i bought i believe six stocks and my dad was telling me just by the index but i'm like dead i got this right i had the dun kruger effect i thought i knew a lot more than i knew and i think i bought five or six stocks how much money i mean i didn't have any but i had twenty five thousand dollars i i had probably sixty thousand dollars total that's a lot of money well i guess what i'm saying is even though the results were great it didn't didn't you know on a very small base that doesn't doesn't deal a whole lot for you i bought amazon google facebook and tesla what years these were it was basically twenty ten twenty eleven well oh my god about those stocks so i did the thing you're not supposed to do i picked i didn't pick with any sort of brilliance i was like these are like obviously just seemed like the good companies of the world to be at the time and you know i did make a mistake because i sold tesla early or like i sold it probably twenty fourteen or something like that so that and that would have been a a a much bigger return so you i i think i still i still am a in the case study of like it's really freaking hard to do even if you buy right you'll sell wrong and shit like that like i bought bitcoin early and sold some early and then bought it back again and bought sold it again i bought it back again you know i'm not saying i'm smart i do dumb things but i guess what i'm saying is sometimes it's actually kinda obvious i think one of the reasons that what this guy did was so hard was she was looking for a fifty x he's like what company small today that's gonna be massive tomorrow which of course if you knew that'd be fantastic but there is a simple way of looking at things like right now for example i put my money into what my own little ai index and i didn't spend much time on this and i'm gonna go back and do a little more research but basically it's very obvious i think at this moment in time in the world that ai is going to be a very big deal that the biggest winners over the next five to ten years are gonna be ones that are benefiting from ai in some way whether they're nvidia they're selling chips whether they're companies like google or facebook that are able to use ai in order to make all their services better and slash tens of thousands of employees that they don't need shit like that right like i think it's pretty obvious ai as a big deal and i think if you put in the time to just think about like instead of buying the generic s and p five hundred like what's the equivalent of the ai fifty or the ai twenty and it's like twenty companies that i believe are well positioned it's hard for them to lose given the ai tailwind and okay again and it's a little bit naive because you might say well nvidia today they have ninety percent gross margins and that they're gonna get competed away and blah blah i'm not saying it's like easy i'm just saying i think it index of ai of ai focused companies that doesn't mean companies that are like you know all chip makers or whatever i'm companies that are gonna disproportionately benefit from ai and are gonna adopt ai and get the benefits of it i just feel like that's an obvious thing today yeah that's the version of me of twenty ten being like i don't know me and all my friends used the internet like crazy i think i should just like own the the big internet companies that seems like a good idea the the issue is not can you pick winners because i think that like we when we saw facebook was valued at when it was hit low i think a year and a half ago everyone who has ever bought any facebook ads was like yeah this is undervalued this is a great company the issue is the amount of times that you have lost using that same logic like and so if you were take a lump up of money and you would buy and sell like occasionally or rather often versus just letting it sit and ignoring like if you average i'm actually gonna go back and just back test this for me me specifically and i'll publish my result i'll bring i'll bring it to the next episode because i i i'm curious i and i would say i think there's a more likely chance that i buying and selling has buying and selling and picking has under i would i assume that to be true i think there's a chance it's not been for me but i'm i really wanna go get the exact answer because it all include i think i should include crypto because i think that was kind of like buying and selling picking and i wanna see the returns of if i had just in just the same amount of money in the same times in just the index versus my picking i just wanna see for myself what i've done and give it honest be able to look reality of the face of like you know how is this working for me so let me tell you this let me tell you this crazy stat that an told me so jerry bus the guy who owned the lakers that you know they they recently just sold the lakers for ten billion dollars so he bought the lakers for sixty seven million dollars in nineteen seventy nine and he sold it for a hundred and fifty times his money at ten billion dollars in two thousand and twenty five and yet had he taken that sixty million dollars and instead just invested it in the s and p five hundred he would have been able to have had thirteen billion dollars so he would had more money that all stupid what year that's stupid that's not stupid but listen it's a top think of all it's sounded correct i mean it's just a it's just math is is acting like he didn't take money every year in gains from the business he could've have lost cash flow every year do they do most winning teams do not make a profit most winning teams they they think they could show paper losses i i know team owners i thought i talked about this i i was like is this true do you guys actually lose money on this thing and they're like no most years we're making money occasionally if we're way over the luxury tax we get we get a huge penalty then yes we can lose money in that one year but no we're not idiots we're not burning hundreds of like people say like oh they lost two hundred million dollars as usually like i'm not losing two hundred million dollars every year some the top comment was like yeah but are you adding into the p and l all the women that he was able to get it because of he because of him owning the letters forgetting the joy of owning the lakers which is already congratulations you owned the s and p five hundred versus you own the lakers forgetting that the lakers are a business that has been generating cash and so all he's taking into account is just the exit price and none of the thirty years of cash flow well i don't really look at the facts when why whenever make but i think it's it did make for a good headline and it is kinda stunning what i don't know eleven percent compounding over forty years actually does it's pretty crazy i like doing this alright that's it that's about i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days off on a travel never looking back