This Opportunity Is Hidden In Plain Sight

important question is where is there opportunity well yeah i wanna do an o's per style i'm gonna write something down and we'll see if i'm right go see yeah you write down tell me was done alright it's done so obviously there's big opportunity ai right now obviously there's a big opportunity in peptides or like biology with ai something like that what i'm gonna about let's to talk about is i did not write that down alright agree on that though i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal less travel i was looking at like where where's is their opportunity right now and the when you opened your laptop like what what is your to do let's say scheme yeah there's not even laptop it's like a note notepad the hotel note notepad i don't think most people will actually ask themselves this very important question where is the opportunity right now that's like like you know i was sitting there as a fourteen year olds how do i have sex like don't like that's literally what you should be thinking you should be thinking a fourteen year old like which girls gonna kiss me where are the girls that might kiss me and how do i get them to kiss me right that's like actually what you should be thinking about i think entrepreneurs need to think like that it's like sounds caveman sounds stupid but like it's actually the they where is the opportunity right now you you met me back in i don't know twenty thirteen fourteen something like that do you remember what i was working on back then like the types of stuff i was working on yeah it was a the first it was a be which was like a a passed its heyday social media network and then that pivoted into a twitch streaming competitor or a plug in for twitch streaming i don't think you ever totally fully figured it out so early on i was working on like like i said like messaging apps social media apps basically and hey guess when all the social media apps were made between two thousand and four and two thousand and twelve and then i'm you know so so i'm ten years late to the party and i'm starting to think about like hey what if i what if i made like a place where you could post photos and send videos to each up it's like yeah it's called snap at like and what if we made a way for you to message that like yeah it's called whatsapp it was actually created in you know whatever two thousand seven and so the things that i was working on was the last waves opportunity no that sounds stupid why would you would do last waves opportunity well the answer is pretty understandable because that's proven to work and i'm trying to i'm so insecure and like have so so such a lack of a spine that i'm just gonna go towards what i think might actually work and i'm using what has already worked but the problem with what has already worked is in business what has already worked is is now done in the game of no that's not true winner take call you just talked about groom no bob saying what i was working on like social media like like venture tech is winner take call it's there's you know you don't work on airbnb five years after airbnb has been proven to be successful and you're gonna be like another airbnb there's not gonna because it's there's no network affect businesses the winners have these run escape velocity that's why they get so big that was the game i was so i was in the venture game right doing venture technology companies and in that i was doing the venture technology companies of the last ten years pretty stupid so and what what should i have been doing during that period well like during that kinda like twenty twelve to twenty you know eighteen range like the most interesting things were basically anything in crypto which by the way it's not like it was invisible to us like people in our office loved crypto and your were yeah i was buying crypto we just didn't we didn't think of it as like we didn't put two two together everyone has to google this that if you google sean prairie there's an article from an india newspaper that says famous entrepreneur sean prairie puts twenty five percent of net worth into bitcoin and i think this was any pre acquisition i think this was pre wealth so i like that was twenty five percent of three hundred dollars so yeah crypto was as was a interesting space to play the other one was basically like anything in machine learning or you know big data and lastly was like different like new mobile mobile apps we had one mobile and we had one iphone engineer on our company when i joined in twenty twelve the iphone came out i think like four years before that or something so like yeah we were we were just not even on forget about like we weren't surfing the wave we were in the lazy river and then the ocean is over there and we were just going at circles in the lazy river like idiots and so i think the very important question is where is their opportunity yeah i wanna do i wanna do a a an o's per style i'm gonna write something down and we'll see if i'm right how's does how was that there's is zero percent chance you're gonna get right what i'm about to say because it is so random in fact you're gonna laugh when i say what i'm gonna say because you're gonna be like after that huge ramble about big opportunities that this is the thing you just told me okay good let's see yeah are you write down yeah yeah let's talk about dogs i'm gonna close my eyes you show the camera you share the camera i'm gonna close my eyes tell him was done alright it's done i showed alright so obviously there's big opportunity to ai right now obviously there's a big opportunity in peptides or like biology with ai something like that i don't know if those are the ones you're were thinking about what i'm gonna about let's talk about is grand theft auto six i did not write that down just give that write what what did you write down gpus and power plants okay these are also good these they're by the way there's not one answer to where is their opportunity i thought that's what you're gonna say based off of things that we had seen on twitter but i am hearing about i there was someone just did a big stick on on grand theft auto didn't they well the horn thing is the new one is coming out is is the big deal so i don't if let me just do a quick little i'll i'll do the personal story and i'll do the primer on on gta okay so the personal story is this i have this friend who i don't know if he wants me to say his name or not so i won't say his name just right now but i have this friend who was you know him as well he was one of the first guys to convince me that i needed to put a huge chunk of my net worth into crypto early on and he was basically saying like why aren't you eighty percent in crypto and i was like eighty percent is insane and he's younger than years yeah he's like this is obvious what are he's like what are you talking about this is what it's gonna be blah blah blah so he's been early on a few different calls with me in my life to the point where now when he says something that i find out outlandish i have learned through trauma of missing out on his prior prior not not fully backing his prior things that i should really pay attention so he came to my house about a year ago and he was like yeah i'm thinking about putting together a hostile takeover of take two interactive like take two interactive but what is that is that the do they make video games so yeah they make nba a two 2k and they make grand theft auto and i was like hostile take do you know anything about a what does a hostile takeover we don't even do that he's like yeah i will this will be my first and i was like you're insane alright so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they wanna hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business now a lot of people message sean and i and they say alright i wanna start something on the side is this a good idea is that a good idea and again what they're really just say is just give me the ideas well my friends you're in luck so my old company the hustle they put together a hundred different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it the side hustle idea database it's a list of a hundred pretty good ideas frankly i went through them they're awesome and it gives you how to start them how to grow them things like that gives you a little bit of inspiration so check it out it's called the side hustle idea database it's in the description below you'll see the link click it check it out let me know the comments what you think dude i saw the the ceo of take two i've i've had some interactions with he is the new york city guy ripped have you seen him z right dude google him and the word shirtless oh my god no seriously this isn't like a a sam being weird like this is a s is that he's not are you sure this this is not maybe cute this seriously he people do stories and how ripped he is he's absolutely ripped see this is what i'm saying this is not like me just like commenting a men's bodies this is he's like sixty years old he's no no he's almost seventy he's almost seven okay yeah because this article from twenty yeah you're right good luck hustle take over these yeah my point is he was telling me he's like he's like i think grand theft auto is an incredible asset and he basically made this case like warren buffett describing a business with incredible mo so he's like here you have a product that's you know the last one when they released it it blew away all the analyst expectations they did a billion dollars in sales in three days it's bigger than any move he ever created it's bigger than any video game ever created by the way the video game industry is three times bigger than hollywood this is the most def def product in the world ten years later it's still selling five hundred million dollars a year annually it's not like i thing you buy once they figured out how to make it a recurring revenue business and there there's no substitution so there's not a second place thing that you go by instead of grand theft auto if it was ninety dollars instead of eighty dollars or a hundred and ten dollars instead of eighty dollars it's not like you go buy pepsi instead of coke there is no pepsi if there's only coke and so he gave me this imp investment case for why this is such an important asset so just like some of the numbers they've sold almost five hundred million copies of the game so you know twenty billion in lifetime revenue you know it's one of the top grossing for entertainment franchises period like all media pokemon and harry potter and others it's up it's like at that level it's in the upper upper upper pant of all ip ever created and it's the fast fastest entertainment product ever hit a billion dollars twelve years later still doing five hundred million dollars a year now a lot of their revenue comes from gta online so they figured out how to make it a recurring revenue business the new game which we've been waiting for for you know ten plus years is almost ready whenever some of these games like i'm a i like call duty i don't play any video games except i like doing career mode on call duty because it's like a war movie like it's like a movie career mode i didn't even they have that that's like the only one i like like the infantry like a lower tier die or what you like you know it's like james bond career mode you remember like you like hit complete missions but yeah these things are like movies and so like i don't even own an xbox i buy an xbox to for the game the game and then i like it sits there for three years i never touch it ever again and it gets old and and so now when gt what grand the donald comes to six i'm gonna have to like buy a thing just to play it that for six hours and then i'll never touch it again so yeah i exactly and and it's actually worth it because these are incredible products i mean they spent a billion dollars just developing the product like just on the actual like development time so the you know the predictions now are like in year one they'll do like three billion of sales they'll probably do a billion dollars of pre orders before they even launch wow which is bananas but you know there's there's a whole economy around this and so i just wanna bring this up not because it's the biggest opportunity obviously if you're saying what's the biggest opportunity go do ai gotcha right like if you wanna what's the biggest opportunity great go into energy go into biology you know go into drug development using a yes but what's fun to talk about on this podcast is this little economy around gta six by the way i think we have i think we have marked is it marcus or mark pink the founder of z i think we have them coming on soon and they're owned by take two so he could give us his take on this the hospital man hostile takeover is that the by the way the hustle takeover has been shelves now the stock went up too much so like i don't know you know how a hustle take it works but you have to buy you have to kind of acquire like i know like five percent of the company silently and then like announce your bid and and you you really want it when it's like snapchat right now when the stock is going down down down down down and you can rally support that a change needs to be made can this guy come up with a billion dollars so he was raising you know he was raising you know three four hundred million dollars to do this but the stock went up and so then there was no when once the stock pops then there was like not gonna be enough enthusiasm and the price went up and you know the value the the return would go down on on the on the activity so there's a whole economy around this so there's people who do content around this there's people who create like mods and tools and data scraper and guides and then there's people who who sell things in the game and like we don't know exactly how the game's is gonna work but the game might work like some of these other video games now where you can buy and sell in game items like outfits or something yeah like skins guns outfits whatever like the different different aspects of the game and so there's there's going to be a lot of people who get wealthy off there there's you know for example in the last wave when gta five came out these guys made this thing called no pixel so they created their own like mod version of the game and they ended up selling it back to the company after i got really like mega popular i got more popular than like the real game on on twitch so i just think there's gonna be a lot of opportunity for like if you're in this kind of thirteen to twenty five year old range you know you're you're fun employed basically there's gonna be an interesting chance to have fun do something that's in your circle of of confidence like in an area you know about and to actually like learn business by doing a starter business in this little grand theft economy i'm saying a little but like it's probably the game is obviously like a you know tens of billions but the economy around it is probably gonna be in the hundreds of millions and it's this weird thing where you know it's coming but it's not out yet and so there's no like nobody has a head start necessarily in in doing this and so whoever moves fast whoever builds interesting things whoever creates interesting content is going to benefit from this did you when you were doing this you're were in the video game world who what were some examples of shockingly large businesses that were like accessory accessory businesses for games so well i'll say for gaming so like there was this company i've ever discovered called g fuel and like i had never heard of g fuel did you do you know what g fuel is no it's kinda like a energy drink type type of deal they might be a little shady the product might not be good for you i'm not saying any of that as a business i thought it was very smart what they did you are saying that no no i was i was like red bull red red bull could for you no it's red was like good for you but like red can be you can admire a red bull as a brand and a business well one of their energy you should drink this one of their energy drinks is called shit up collector's box so yeah got three of my home i don't think that's shady i don't see the red flags to be talking about it's like the red flag wrapped around my eyes but they didn't suddenly really start they they figured out that twitch streamers were undervalued assets that people were going for influencers based off of their like following size and so as like a following size the the twitch streamers on twitch they didn't have huge numbers but they realized like the depth of trust was insane because when you watch somebody on twitch you're watching them live for eight hours a day these gamers had a lot of influence and the influence was disconnected from their price sheet and so what g field did was it went to all of them and it ran basically the nike playbook with streamers so they would go to the popular streamers they'd say hey we wanna develop a flavor just for you a shaker bottle that's your colors your branding and you're gonna get a cut of the affiliate revenue and they partnered with all the top streamers which was not that hard to do at the time even though these guys were really popular traditional brands weren't coming to them at the time and so they went zero to a hundred million in sales and like guys you and had never heard of them because they did it just within this gaming bubble using just the gaming influencers that and so they did that there's obviously like el ga which sells accessories for streaming that now has become even more popular with you know podcasting as well like they got they got both of those waves and so el ga is this is another company that sells like picks and shovel the stream industry you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written and everyone is aligned and you realize someone still has a sit down and actually create the content that someone is you and it's due tomorrow breeze assistant can help it works right inside of hubspot drafting campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all grounded in your actual customer data so don't just create content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses wait can i you a question about streaming i actually like don't play video games at all but i do occasionally we'll watch clips of like gamers because like it's for some reason it's like fun i don't i i i can't figure out why but these streamers like what's the guy's named cla cla cla whatever his name is but are they when people watch them is it mostly from clips which i do see and find them funny or is someone literally watching them on their tv like just walking around goof around both but they're just like so they have to be funny or all the like all the time no they don't have to be funny all the time fact they're not they're not that funny they do they do crazy stuff so like yeah you're right like so right now if i go to twitch the top category is called just chatting the top the top category is people not playing video games just chatting the second the third top category right now with forty five thousand live people watching is ir is basically them streaming so you can be watch right now i will do crazy stunt i will risk being in trouble i will go meet these people i will travel the world and you from the comfort of your you know your bed can kind of like watch me do it watch we make a fool of myself there's one guy who's selling hot dogs and he does eighty people and twitch watching them but are they watching this on their like what okay so when people do podcasts they're normally working out or going to work when people watch youtube it's usually on their phone when they're in public transport or they're just goof off on the couch or they're watching it on their tv when people watch twitch or other live streamers are they do they have it on a tv and then they're playing games on their phone do they just sit there with the computer and watch the whole thing like a movie what do what's the what's the consumer habit obviously there's like because there's hundreds of millions of people it's like a little bit of everything but the three major use cases are young people just on their phone because their phone is their like personal entertainment device so they'll just watch stream in me like on the front and it's the main thing they're paying attention to then there's like second screen background screen which is either you put it up on the tv while you're chilling on the couch yeah and or like what we saw a lot of a twitch was like second tab so like i'm a programmer my main thing is like i i'm working like all day but while i'm doing it i have like a second monitor or i just put it in a background tab and i just have the audio going yeah like waiting room noise favorite streamer hanging out and i'm watching i i'll glance over what he's doing it but i don't have to pay full attention to it so that's like the behavior with the stuff but it's pretty insane the level of trust i was talking to a a guy who's twenty eight one twenty two years old and i him i you know back in the day like you know logan paul jake paul they were like popular youtubers there was casey neistat there was you know mister beast i was like who's i go not who is the most followers but who has like the minds and hearts of young people like who do all the young people agree is like the shit who do they think is really cool and so instantly he was like oh speed definitely speed and he was like you know kai speed like these are about they're the top they're the the like both like the the multiplier of popularity times like approval rank approval rating or you know you fit you kind of admire them in some way and where does he stream youtube twitch some some guys stream on kick because that's like a big competitor that's owned by a state like the casino company okay that's crazy you meant you mentioned clips we should talk about this so our friends from tb vpn just had an incredible two year less months less less than two years eighteen months right all time even eighteen months is a twelve i don't know what it is our friends at tb vpn so the story is tb vpn which is a tech live show just got acquired by open the makers of chad gp for an undisclosed some of money people rumored to be a hundred million maybe two hundred million which is bananas for not just any product that's twelve eighteen months old but specifically a podcast or a show specifically one that doesn't even get that much viewership for its actual flagship show and john and majority are awesome super happy for them but we haven't chance to talk about that so what was your your reaction where were you and what was your reaction when you heard this what it was i it's not like nine eleven i don't remember where i was but i think my reaction is amazing deal for them i would have taken that nine out of ten ten out of ten times if it's anything north of a hundred million take that all day yeah i and my second reaction is they're gonna win even bigger in two years when the board of directors of open ai says guys we gotta get we gotta buckle our belts and and get profitable we gotta look at why do we own all these things whose idea was it to buy a media company can we please just say that we're gonna sell it back to them just give it to them and we'll own five percent and they're gonna own it again so okay that's the prediction not only was this an incredible first deal but there's gonna be a a bar stool style second deal on the other side of this it was really dumb i think it's really dumb for open ai i think that hubspot bought media company my media company and that makes sense because they were using it to sell twenty thousand dollar a year software and there's a direct attribution when hubspot bought the hustle we had ninety i think or hubspot had ninety thousand users i think something like that now they have two hundred thousand users something like that i don't know for just look it up and there's direct attribution of where they get their customers and they could say we got this much revenue from this customers it came from this podcast this news or whatever this thing this thing with open ai they already have a billion users i don't understand like how there's like any growth related to this other than it's just a cool thing to own yeah i do think it was there is very interesting right because they didn't really release any rationale for it there is no rationale other than it's cool and you know after a couple weeks you're like i guess if there was a rationale they would say it right and i think they the closest thing that they mentioned was i guess back in the day apple bought this ad agency and it was like yeah bringing that in house was like transformative for our marketing and we think that like having john and jo and tb vpn in house is going to but it's not trans they're they're also say they're speaking out of both sides of the mouth right because they're like they have full editorial control we're not gonna exert our influence over it it's not gonna become a propaganda tool for us like we're not gonna use it but we just paid two hundred million dollars for it or a hundred million dollars for it so so which one is it do you think it was a good it's there's no debate it was awesome for these two guys right yeah oh incredible epic for for for the tv guys okay sure do you think this is a smart move for open let me make the case because i think on the surface it's like what it's a head scratch right you know for example check has something like nine hundred million monthly active users tb vpn might have ninety thousand but you know viewers including you know across they're on their show and then maybe if you include clips it's like a million people see a clip i know it's not gonna move the needle for maybe like getting an executive to buy open ai is a two hundred two hundred million dollar deal i mean you just have to get a lot of but again who's already not i don't know like buying no like it's not like an awareness play like normally it's like media has attention and you have lucrative product so you use media to get your lucrative product into more people to to have more attention in this case chat has so much attention i'm not sure what you get out of that but i think you know here's the case because i think we should you should assume that these very smart people don't do very dumb things but as a default you should try to figure out what they what they're telling themselves so okay let's bit ball real quick even if it's hundred million dollars what is that what is a hundred million out of eight hundred billion divided by eight hundred billion right because that's the percent of the company they gave up assuming it's a like mostly stock deal but that's not how a a disciplined company thinks i would think that's well let's start with this like because you might say if i was to give up point o zero one percent of my stock to a uniquely talented group of guys who understand media and marketing and communication and like the modern media playbook and just having them in our office and having them be you know working on our comm or strategically yeah guiding us is that is that gonna make our company point o one whatever right i don't know the math point o one percent more valuable like for sure maybe just one ad campaign for sure maybe you could pay for that yes one insight into how we should be doing our comps differently one insight into how we should be positioning ourselves because right now it's kinda crazy america hates ai like i don't know if you seen the sam old has said two like like assassination they don't just hate ai i think they specifically hate him i think i think a yes hate ai and b he he's the face he's hated the face of ai for for for whatever reason like he somebody went drove by his house and through a molotov cocktail like a week ago and then went to the office and then they've no then they drove by and shot like a bullet at his house also so in like two days later and so but the same guy the same guy threw a molotov of cocktail they arrested him at the open ai office because he was trying to do the same thing there he was there too oh my god that's insane so literally like you know obviously there's a public perception obviously there's like a a a public brand issue here with like yeah why is ai so deeply unpopular like i've i've seen some charts where it's like it's more unpopular than trump you know it's like wow this is like it's not like it's not like a it's extremely polarizing you know for ai so people don't like ai they don't like what's going on with that i'm not sure exactly why it might be because of fear of job loss data center being built in my backyard it's too powerful the government's watching us like what is it well it's that but i'll also like i i i'm on this weird feed where i'm i think i clicked one of them i'm getting more there's so many people who are doing these breakdown videos where they're like i work so hard i work sixty hours a week i don't have my parents to support me and yet i still barely have enough money every single month to pay rent i'm so angry that i'm i've been struggling for eight years i went to college i did what i thought i was supposed to do and yeah i'm still struggling and i feel like i'm always one paycheck away which right it's a totally fair sentiment i one hundred percent you say if my baseline state is a deep say state of dissatisfaction like i'm already done i'm i our recording without ai right and now you're telling me i can't get a job you're telling me that i'm not gonna have a job and that my energy prices are gonna go at my my electricity costs are gonna go up because they're building this like megawatt data center and then i hear that they're raising billions and billions of dollars and individual people are getting paid a hundred million dollars to go do this and that that's what you think is the the kind of the main all after i've spent a decade doing what i thought i was told i had to do it's okay to get debt to go to this college because it's gonna be worth it i'm gonna get a good lawyer or accounting job that pays me enough to just live amazing life in a vicinity of a city that i wanna live in and yet i can't have kids so i can't afford them i'm single because a lot them are single now and i'm still struggling even though i'm putting the effort in why why is this broken that's the sentiment of it and then why the hate of sam and chat beauty is it just the winners curse you hate the yankee you hate duke because they're winning is that why or is there something else to it and also i think people when they see him talk one of the big sins that anyone who's a public player can make is being ina and being ina authentic is what he screams because what he screams is i'm just saying what you want me to you want heard that's one of the reasons why people like elon even though he's an asshole he's very authentic with sam it definitely feels you are just telling me what i want to hear that's the perception yeah what he admits to by the way he says i'm horrible at confrontation and sometimes i'll just say things that i think you want me to hear yeah but i think he's say a slightly different way i mean i think chad an amazing product i think that tb what the tb vpn guys did but john and majority did i think is another short of incredible and that's putting aside this exit if they had never exited we were saying this before like i think what they built as it just a brand it's awesome and the the one they had the brand they built the way they captured people's minds i would say like the way they broke the right rules like what's the what's that phrase where it's like you know amateur don't know the rules pros pros know the rules and the masters know which when to break the rules if you look at a couple of the things they did it's kind of incredible so first they changed the the the playbook for for the podcast it was like nobody's watching the show we don't care we produced the show and the show's the functionality of the show was to produce clips so what everybody else was doing in the industry was let's post clips to promote and the clips job is to promote the the real show the long form show and i think they inverted that i don't they didn't say this i'm putting words in their mouth but let me speculate for a second i believe what they found was that it's not that the clips job the clips are there to promote the live show it's that the live show is there to produce the clips and the clips is the product and we do this four hour live stream as a farming exercise to just farm twenty great clips a day and if we do twenty great clips a day and we're on your feed where you're already browsing and where you're hanging out and we give you ten seconds fifteen seconds thirty seconds forty seconds of entertainment of insight of a great sound bite well that we've done our job that's the show the show is this distributed thing not one central long long form thing right like the way we and most podcast podcasts just think of our show is what we do is like the podcast listening to the hour long thing is the thing and we're gonna use social media to hopefully draw you into the main thing they did it at the exact opposite way they're like we'll sit here for for four hours and talk the product is the you know that's the end product that we're actually trying to create so i think that was great i think going all in on twitter was smart and interesting when nobody else was doing that i agree i think you know they hey for the record i made a prediction three years ago what you remember the prediction yeah you were like every social media platform has like their star creator somebody who was born on the platform becomes super famous and super you know successful and wealthy from the platform instagram had it youtube had it if i had it all the platform and you were like twitter who's that on twitter and we were like kind of couldn't think of who's who's that person that twitter star and then your prediction was that there will be i don't know exact prediction was something like i said it there's there's an opportunity that somebody's gonna do it and they're gonna you know make a billion dollars doing this essentially yeah so it and it wasn't totally wrong and it wasn't a brilliant prediction but it was just an observation but that i still think it can happen i think that there's like by the way t tb vpn was tiny even on twitter like it's only in a very niche of niche on twitter i still think that there's that for example i think that it's not in my world but like sports twitter is awesome i think political twitter twitter is so i i i don't i like it but it's an awesome category to be and like the twitter is awesome yeah yeah like there's still like those those categories can i give you two lock in stories i think anybody can take you know we we like to nerd out about media but most people don't care about media yeah can i just tell you to john stories so i don't know jo as well as i know john so i i i was in a mastermind group i created a little mastermind group for media like guys like me who are like content creators and we had this text group and we would do these calls and at the time john was doing a youtube channel where he would do like excellent explanation the history of donald trump the history of xi jinping pretty pretty good stuff high quality and he was actually getting like a lot of views like his videos could get like a million views or two hundred thousand views two million views so he was like doing well too was like successful at it we had him on m mfa during that point but he wasn't like it wasn't married to it it wasn't like this is my thing i'm gonna do this forever who's he exploring and so i was kinda helping him and talking through like what are you thinking about he was like thinking about this and this and this and he tried several experiments before he landed on t so the first thing was massive credit for walking away from the metrics so like how many subscribers does he have on youtube four hundred fifty four hundred fifty thousand in his last video did nearly one million views and it was people still don't under it was about visa so a pretty nerdy topic but he did a good job but that's like a high quality audience this is i would say imagine financially i'm sure this could have been a huge success and he had half a million subscribers that's a lot so so you had half a million subscribers who's was doing videos are gonna a million views but it wasn't what he wanted as a as a creator as like the artist in him was not like this is it this is the thing i wanna do for the next ten years and he walked away and i just wanna point that out because walking away from that and then not just walking away from that and trying to build back up to that but like when you're doing tb vpn and you're going live every morning and you don't get to go on vacation because you gotta be live every morning and you're you're dressing up in your suit you're showing up at the studio you're preparing you're doing sixteen interviews in a row you're you know you're then going into cutting the clips you're preparing for the next day and you look at that number on your live stream and you've got three thousand people watch today do you know how hard that is mentally as a creator who was just seeing that same number on youtube be one million did he say now two thousand and show up with enthusiasm in the next day he i mean i didn't bring it up like this with him but like i can tell you why because when you're doing the thing that you actually enjoy doing you'll sustain even in the face of bad results right was like for him i think talking to jo is fun as hell talking about venture tech was more fun than talking about like the history of xi jinping i think he's like more in that the scene if like recruit tech and i think having the creative freedom to like build the brand in the show the way they wanted it i think it was fun for him and so like i think the fund sustained him when the numbers would have been discouraging to the average person that's the first part of like massive credit because as a creator i know how hard that is i know how hard it is to go like naval talked about this that the hardest the true masters are people who can go back down the mountain and start again and take a new path because going back down the mountain once you climbed up once is like you know how exhausting it is you actually know what goes into it and it's so hard to give up the vantage point you have to go back to be a beginner again and seeing where that new road might take you the second one we've i invited john to our basketball camp people i don't know this john's like freaking like six eight or something that he's huge she's like the tallest guy in the tech industry and i was like oh dude did you should come to our camp it's amazing we got all these amazing the founder of air b and reddit and you know mister beast and then this famous guy feels the famous guy this famous guy was like you should come man we you know we want you to come this year we'd love we'd love to have you and he's like oh that's amazing he's like i just got figure it out with tv i was like dude it's two days it's over the you know it's like just like thursday friday you'll be back they'll be fine also who cares tb vpn it's nothing yet it's just a baby right it was like like at that time they weren't even doing the live show but was it this like two months ago no no this was the the year prior year oh got it and so at the time all they were doing was replying to tweets they didn't even have their show yet it was literally a a twitter account where they would reply to a tweet with them in nice suits recording a response to an interesting tweet somebody had so there wasn't even like we had to be live it was just he was just like i got momentum so first he asked he goes geo come to it i was like dude we're super constrained on the the like number of people he's like could we come could we record from there and i was like i don't know man i'm not sure like big miss well there's there's no miss i'm saying incredible for him at that time to turn down that invite to be like no even forty eight hours i gotta just be locked in i gotta just like there's something here i just i don't wanna lose any momentum and as a founder as like is that anybody who tries to like make a project happen the amount of like manual cranking you have to do at the beginning to get something off the ground is like so underrated and i know that me i would have been like i got invited at the school event who all these cool people are gonna be there it's only a couple days i won't be that big of a distraction like whenever i can come back to this like i would have done that prop like mad props to him for being like no no i got i gotta stay with this and so he stuck with it he's he so he didn't come he stuck with it and when i texted him about this about this outcome about this like incredible outcome he goes it's a testament to the great lock in and i was like the great lock in and that's what really what they did they just locked the in for twelve months they're like every day we are gonna be balls to the wall at doing this thing and it doesn't matter if other people think this thing is important we think it's important it is a testament to the great lock in so i i give them all the credit that's amazing have you seen this other drama it's kinda cool so jason lump in front of the pod he said okay it's weird now i don't see tb vpn on my pee all my feet as often i did a few weeks ago anyone else noticing the same and there's like tons of tons of people which yeah it could be conspiracy theory because that's usually how things work like you're like i don't see it and like dude like like people tell us all the time they're like oh i don't listen to the podcast i'm my if family i'm like well our numbers are like through the roof high so someone is that's a juicy story so you're saying elon who's got a competitor to open maybe it turned out that knob a little bit it doesn't seem crazy does it yeah it doesn't because he did he it's been proven he did that with subs you you know the story no he tried to buy subs stack they didn't cut the deal founder walks away it's like dude total respect elon musk this is amazing but like we just we wanna be a dependent and then the next like day all traffic to subs from x goes to zero essentially they basically shadow band subs links and then they bought review they launched their competitor of x articles like did a whole bunch of things so it is not beyond mister free speech you on us to to put his you know what is it gonna say puts finger on the skip of his thumb on the scales to tilt you know to be competitive with with other products so i would not be surprised if the tb vpn visibility going away is is not a conspiracy theory and in in fact is a is a fact i wouldn't be surprised as think in two weeks so right now elon and sam alt they're in a lawsuit and i believe it goes to i don't i'm i don't wanna sound i'm i'm an idiot just you guys know just deposition or we set to the front just they're doing a dig depot like i don't even know i don't know how courts work but like is it the deposition a thing where they get the best clips from when they're in like a small room and and they're gonna ask them like has it like what sizes is his penis like can you describe his penis it's like it's like gonna be insulting but like with the best videos online are about but anyway they're doing something that started something happened is happening and it starts next week but i i do i think i think that starts in two weeks though yeah it's amazing it's amazing how i know i have some friends that are basically like they get sued and then they won't they're like we have to settle this because we just don't wanna go to discover we don't want discovery because discovery is like une alerts a lot of stuff and so like one of my one of my absolute favorite accounts is internal tech emails yeah did you you follow this on twitter is like one of the best accounts and it basically just nicely formatted it goes digs through all of the discovery that happens in these like antitrust cases and then you see you know mark zuckerberg texting his you know cfo about buying instagram versus snapchat and how much they should offer and what if he says this and then now let's try this instead and you could basically piece these together and see the internal thinking and conversations the stuff that's never public this is the real stuff that goes into into the strategy behind a lot of these companies my sister's a corporate attorney and she's represented a lot of the guys that you just mentioned and she always tells me don't text her right stuff because it's gonna get discovered and so one of my jokes is her and my wife and i are all in a group chat i love to say the most offensive things then i'll say hello to the person doing the discovery sir it was humor like this is the top pin tweet right now on internal taking emails it's from elon musk subject honest thoughts and this is his email to sam open guys i've had enough this is the final straw either go do something on your own or continue with open as a nonprofit i will no longer fund open ai until you've made a final commitment to stay or i'm just being a fool who's essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup up discussions are over right or the next one the zuckerberg texting elon musk hey quick heads up we sent a letter to the california attorney general supporting your lawsuit against open someone not us leaked the letter it'll be public in the next hour wanted to make sure you heard this for me elon okay suck i have an idea to run by you not urgent but let me know if there's a good time to call in the next few days these are these are these are my fc emails these this is what i love to love to read with my spare time this is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year revenue because around this point that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company and you realize two things one you've done something great but just do a long way from your final destination and two you look around and you realize i am all alone i've out run my peers which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone by yourself and that is when mediocrity can creep in my company hampton we solve this problem by giving a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are gonna hold you accountable call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way because the fact is is that there's only tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there and they're hard to find and if you can find them it's hard to have this explicit time this explicit place where you sit down where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and into be one another's board of directors the biggest risk is not failing you have a company in it's working you're gonna be fine but the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying shit i barely grew in business and in life and for people like you who ambitious wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid we have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members and i know this stuff actually works whether you work with hampton or you get your own group on your own but having a group like this of group of people who you meet with in real life once a month it can change your life it change mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com alright i have a story that i think is gonna be rep your alley you're running a book on this topic have you heard of william randolph hears do you know who that is i've heard of like the hears family i feel i heard that yeah let me give you a little bit of background on this because i went into reading about the story because i wanted to learn about how to build a company that can last two hundred years which he has almost done but you're gonna like it on how to manage creative that's like a big learning that i've had from this so check this out so william randolph hears i think he was born in something like eighteen sixty i forget the exact year but around there the reason i liked him at first was his father was a missouri minor he kinda moved out to san francisco where you live where we where used to live to kinda make a big in the mining industry and he had like a boomer bust type of career where he found a little bit of gold when he was like forty and became quite wealthy lost all the money and then when he was sixty became the richest man in america so he basically like married this amazing young woman named phoebe got her pregnant and basically only saw like once a year plus the kid but he like was out in the minds up in like yosemite valley like mining and like his kid and family his wife was down in san francisco just kinda live in their life and the kid's name was william william randolph hears and there's amazing book called the chief that i've been reading about it have you ever seen or have you heard the movie citizen kane it's regarded as one of the best movies of all time and the main character in the movie is based off of william randolph hears william randolph hears was a larger than life character so we went to harvard and like kinda took over the clubs system you know what that is like basically it was sort of like f skull bonds yeah like times ten it was like f times ten it was like where all the cool kids would go to but they like had a ranking system they even would rank like the best clubs and he was like a very natural leader and also he was very rich his parents gave him like a lavish allowance and he just like spent and spend but generally seemed like a good guy and was very well liked and so he convince us his father dad i graduated the college i need something to do can we please buy the san francisco examiner which at the time was one of the i think it was an important newspaper in san francisco but i don't think it was the biggest but it was kind of like important in in miss spanish and he was like let me buy let me do this so his dad's like oh dude fine and his dad was actually on board with this because his dad wanted to run for office and he was like william run the newspaper help get get a popular and then just like promote me and william did it and it worked his dad became a senator of california and it and it worked it was very effective but william ran first he realized that he loved newspapers he loved him like crazy and so he builds up the the examiner a little bit and what he did was sort of what modern journalism and media is today have you heard of this phrase called yellow journalism no sounds like a insult it's not well it's it's it's it sounds racist which is when i it's not racist so basically up until like the early nineteen hundreds so newspapers were boring they were just like facts they were just like sheets of paper with like black text with the headlines were not significantly larger than the text and if you go and look at old new york times articles or or like if you ever seen like archive new york times you'll cut them notice this there weren't photos at the time but this was a big deal because radio and movies weren't a thing and so newspapers were how everyone got their information on a daily and weekly basis and so the news in industry was had this massive tam but like it wasn't like the most exciting thing and so william reynolds her who's this young charismatic guy he was like make the headlines bigger add photos and then the phrase if it bleeds it leads it came from that era and he was the guy so there was basically him and this guy named joseph pulitzer you've heard the pulitzer surprise right joseph pulitzer another saint louis guy he started the saint louis post a dispatch and then eventually bought other newspapers because newspapers were kinda like software companies except local software companies you start one in one market you go start one in market and another market in another market and their subscription based and people will stay for decades so it's a very good business and it's like a land and expand type of business model well anyway it was joseph pulitzer who's like the man and then this up and coming young hears who's funded by his dad they go back and forth for years years and one of the ways they go back forth is through this thing called yellow journalism basic the the idea was they put cartoons in their newspapers and one day hurst made the cartoon like a yellow guy like he wore like a yellow shirt and the yellow background and he had these huge headlines like for example one time a us navy ship was bombed and we weren't even sure if it was the spanish who did it but he was like the spanish were the ones who bombed this thing and that is one of the reasons why the spanish american war started was because hertz r up all these people using this the yellow thing means it says a style of reporting that prioritizes eye catching headline scandals emotional narratives over factual news to boost circulation it started like you said spanish american war with pulitzer at hears yeah so kind of interesting stuff right now he was he was a crazy man hears he was sober he didn't party but he loved women and he loved spending so at the peak of his the hears media empire at this point like decades on the line of doing it he owned so many different newspapers that's something like twenty percent of america got their news from hears he was spending the equivalent of twenty million dollars every single month just to live and a handful of top there was yeah the a handful of years he spent two to four billion dollars building homes so ernest hemingway you know i think it was ernest hemingway or or another like reputable author was like if god were to come down to america and build a home it would look like one of her home so he was famous for just being a in insane spend so at one like he's he's not spending in the building case right he's he's just he's doing it as a business he's selling the homes or no he's just building him to have him to have him so his empire he was amazing at building companies and he was amazing at spending all of the money he was famous for telling his accountants just find out where the money is from and he was also famous for collecting and which is what i'm gonna talk about used to collect journalists that was one of his skill set he would find talented people the the thing is is he he collected everything so he collected homes she would collected rare coins he collected cars he collected exotic animals he collected everything have you heard the hears castle no the hears castle google hears castle so it's was a forty thousand acre a state in middle of california not quite middle but like a little bit outside of la on the water of the ocean and he had this thing called hears castle and he had zebras and camels and polar bears he had a zoo there this was his personal home and it was so big that when he died he was like i can't give this to anyone because it cost too much to run it i'm just gonna give i'm just gonna give it to the california government and they're gonna turn it into a museum and that's what her castle is but okay these numbers you're saying are kinda crazy so you said twenty million a month two to four billion annually of spending the best way to describe this what imagine imagine this imagine the those numbers work twenty twenty million a month it's two hundred forty million a year but he a two billion give you me explain these numbers because what i said was he he he was quoted as saying on average he spends x amount a month which is the equivalent of twenty million a month but there was occasional years where it was up to two to four billion when he had huge projects like the the money all came from the paper empire the money all came from the paper empire so he used the company like his piggy bank which wasn't wrong because he owned one hundred percent of the business so he's able to do this the problem is imagine this imagine so at the time he was actually grew to be one of the top ten richest men in the world which let's say it's jeff bezos imagine the government saying jeff you owe a lot of people a lot of money we have to put amazon under receivers ship so like the bank is gonna like run it for a couple years or you could still run it but like we we have to like step in here and get everyone's gotta get paid and that happened multiple times so imagine that one of the largest companies in the world when hers is in the in the sixties and seventy years years old for multiple times for two to three years in a row the government would step in and being like dude you gotta pay these people so like we're we're we gotta put you on an allowance because that's how big a fishy was and that happened multiple times i'm just looking i'm looking at all these i'm just looking at i got seven tabs open right now because i gotta see what this guys do google hears mansion santa monica this is just like the photo is just gonna be insane so he it's no longer there but he literally had a a mansion it it's hard to even fathom but literally on the sand to where you walk out the front door and your feet are in the it looks like a it looks like a resort hotel first because it's on the it's like on a beach and it's as big as a hotel so he had dozens of these homes but not only that he had the most expensive art collection on earth he had the best car collection on earth he had everything he loved collections let's let's review what do we love high charisma at a young age leader of men took over the harvard social scene we like that the second thing you like is land and expand newspaper monopoly third thing we like media innovator decides why are we just doing transactional informational news let's sell stories baby let's sell emotion creates this yellow journalism trigger some wars it's okay whatever so that's the third interesting piece so the fourth is lavish extravagant and spending man of taste collecting cars animals clothes jewelry homes all the things that we like so there's a lot we like there's a lot of things that like if it his tinder profile matches our what we like i hear over here on m mfa so so far so far so good well we haven't even got to the part you mentioned which was about like creative and i don't wanna we don't have to dwell on this but i i can't give him a pass he didn't like the jews so joseph pull pulitzer he used to call him juice pulitzer like he and he also he also had hit before hitler was before the nineteen forties happened hitler was like a a leader of germany who like revitalize germany and he had hitler as a columnist and everyone knew hitler was anti semitic but they didn't know that he was like killing yeah jews so anyway he doesn't get a pass so he did a lot of bad stuff there but you know we're gonna talk about a whole man so and so i'll last i'll tell you what what hurst is today and then we'll get you in the good stuff so hurst now they are a media company but it's still family owned i believe it's one hundred percent family owned i believe it's the they do something like fifteen billion dollars a year in revenue and what's interesting is when he died he set up this amazing trust and i think it's the largest trust in america that's like this where the trust runs the company and basically the trust has six non family members six family members on it and those are the ones who vote on the company and it appears to be quite well run so her now owns cosmo cosmo magazine which you know they own i think they own gpu in a bunch of other magazines but they also own twenty percent of espn yeah that's worth like twenty billion dollars they own half of a and e they own like a lot of local new stations they own finch finch ratings which you probably don't care about but it's like a b b b boring thing they still own a ton of stuff including the original newspaper in s that he bought so it's still pro prolific company and interesting story they tried they didn't try to buy the hustle but when we were selling the hustle we met with them and my wife her mom and dad lived next door to the hears tower so they own this beautiful tower in midtown manhattan and i slept at her mom and dad's house when i had the meeting and the next day i go to the meeting and they're like what'd you and i was like look at that window that's literally the bedroom that i slept in last night like the the power tower you're looking at so so you mentioned two things one was managing creative i'm curious about that yeah and then i have a different question after that about you said you wanted to build like a two your company and i wanna ask you some questions about that too so first give me the creative part and then we'll go the other way so here's what made him interesting so hurst was he discovered so much talent he was famous for hiring the best people and at one point there was even in like a congressional hearing of like should we is there like a monopoly for creative talent like is that like a thing and so like people actually like questioned if that was a thing because he was famous for hiring the best people and a couple of people who you'll recognize are mark twain so he was very early and being one of mark twain first employers or first like promoter jack london famous writer and a bunch of like these really great people and there's a a whole bunch of others that aren't particularly relevant to everyone now but they were relevant then and he was famous for basically personally recruiting these people paying them more money how is he finding them because there's no social media back in the day there's no portfolios how does he even figuring out who's the diamond in the rough what what what would he look at so this is where it's interesting and i think that both you and i can identify with this a little bit even though he was like a clickbait guy and he would sensational stuff he still loved words and he loved like beautiful prose and so he was a very it was like a dichotomy where he like was like all about like building big and like flashy headlines and also like beautiful like isn't this beautiful look at the sentence this this author wrote and so he would find like for example there's a story where he was based in s f he found a little pamphlet that this one like twenty three year old journalists in oakland wrote and he wrote he like read and he immediately went to oakland and he personally recruited the guy and what he was famous for was a personally showing up so at the time imagine imagine you know i think phoebe gates is like in the news now for being a startup up founder right imagine phoebe gates knocking on sean's door like one year or six months into m mfa or being like because she read my blog you know it's like did like and and her saying like you got it you got what it takes right and he did that he was famous for that he would personally find these people so he actually cared about this and two he paid really well he was famous for like he's like my philosophy which i think is a good takeaway we see this time and time again we're seeing this with facebook super intelligence and that's to a way bigger extreme of like getting the best people under one roof even if it means that your profits are gonna be really tiny or break or at a loss it normally tends to work out and that's what he did and so his newsroom was famous amongst the guys who loved actual news as being the best talent and he'd let them do what they want additionally what he was really good at is he would take cover for them so for example let's just say that like or for like you and i right we work with hubspot on this there's been multiple times where where we maybe have done something a little bit controversial and like if hubspot were to be like dude don't like what you said but i got you back it's cool for you to say like whatever you want or imagine like howard stern in sirius radio and howard stern saying something crazy that that's what he did all the time so there's be times where they would say something shitty about the sitting president and her would be like it's cool dude you're you're safe to say that i got you and so he got like right he did that all the time so he was he got loyalty that way and yeah that's kinda what i wanted to talk to you about because i know you're writing a book on creativity and so i i i'm the reason i'm interested in hers was because the legacy thing but also the managing creative because i'm managing creative now at my company and i have set these like hard deadlines and these rewards for them and i'm learning when i'm learning about managing a creative team that's the exact opposite of what i should be doing and so that's why i was like learning about rent random of her so my my rant a little bit on him is done well i think collecting talent i think managing creators is different than collecting talent i think collecting talent is actually the the more important part of of the equation and the part that i think everybody wants to do let me ask you you started this by saying i'm interested in these like multi hundred year kind of companies because i wanna make hampton that what did you take away on that side of it well i think that when when i tend to care about things i care about a ton and also i care about it not at all so like you say also or either or also so it's like i care i care about it i really want it to happen i love it but like if it doesn't happen i'm like no you know right by the way the that's the perfect disposition for an entrepreneur like yeah so it's like deep a a a a deep desire for the outcome and then a complete detachment from the outcome as well yeah so that's sort of so it's that's sometimes hard for me to explain to people but that's how i feel i'm like i want to so bad and then if like it rains that day i'm like i was looking for to play baseball all but video games are fun you know what i like right it doesn't matter but anyway i'm interested in it just because i think it's a fun just surround myself with people and i think having a company is a great way to decide who i spend my days with and be i do want like my family to be proud of me and i would love to have something that i can bring them into the fold and we have an excuse to work together so for example hears junior was an entrepreneur his father was an entrepreneur there was some bonding that they had where it's like even if they weren't in the same company were still in the same family and they beach had overlapping companies there was like this really cool relationship that they had that i think is great so that's one of the reasons why i'm interested in it i've told my kids that they we're gonna work together but in the reverse so i think most people who you know build business and it becomes successful they wanna in they want the kids to inherit the business to take over the business that's the i would say default that's not my plan other people wanna leave money and be like you start your own thing but i will like this will enable you to chase your dreams that's also not what i'm gonna do i i'm more of a believer in the warren buffett money which is warren buffett philosophy which is you give your kids enough to do anything but not enough to do everything to not enough to do nothing sorry sorry so so so that i believe in but the but the what i've been telling them because i for my son and daughter who were old enough to kind of understand they i'm like yeah you guys you guys can go do whatever you want you can make movies you could build things you could do whatever you want to do it'd be cool if you guys work together but like you know whatever we'll see but i was like i'm gonna work for you i was like when i retire my goal like i wanna be gonna work on whatever you're i'll be your intern basically and they're like but you're gonna have to pay me and i'm like okay i guess i'll pay you then i will pay you how much do i pay there like you have pay me ten ten dollar bucks which is what they call money and i'm like alright i'll pay you ten dollar bucks but i'm gonna come work for you and i think this is actually a better plan than being like i will have this empire and you will someday run this empire symbol but i'm hoping i'm hoping to that as well you know you know whatever just as long as we can be together right what exactly exactly and i fear figured the best way to be together is for me to be their voluntary like in turn of whatever the whatever they're trying to do in life is gonna end up being better for me so that that's i just wanna throw that out is like an alternate view to the traditional to traditional path just wanna ask you one question because you're learning about all those creativity stuff shows but sean's writing a book on create the creative process that's cool but tell me about managing creative people are there any tips on that well most of what i've been studying is the individual so how do you how do you reach your max potential of being able to make dope shit so like anybody in any endeavor doesn't actually matter what what endeavor you're in like we think of artist as like whatever painter musician whatever and obviously that's true that's like you know a hundred percent of their value and and sort of output is gonna be based on their creative work but you know even if you're a a ceo or an entrepreneur you're creating a company or creating products honestly even if you're a dentist and you have a dental practice like you're gonna either you're gonna be un or gonna be differentiated like it's it's the game of stand and so do you care about standing out do you care about doing something that is beyond normal and if you do like you probably wanna untapped as much of your potential you can so i've been first studying how do you get yourself to do it which is like i would say eighty percent of the battle mh then the second is group dynamics so how do you in a creative how does a creative team work to wake this work which is kind of like when pixar makes movies and they have the brain trust and the directors all have to learn how to actually give feedback to each and do you show somebody something at a raw stage and how how do you bring it up and how do they interact with you so that one plus one equals three so that the product gets better versus your eco getting bruised or them taking in a different direction or are you feeling shut down or something something like that from raw early work which is usually not great i haven't even worried about the other side which kinda what you're talking about which is how do you hire and manage that talent because that's not like been the focus for for what i'm looking so i don't have a lot to share there i actually think there is an interesting you know just to props to you i feel like with the hustle you spotted a couple of people right like a lot of people now have i've seen steph smith on our podcast a bunch or trunk has become a famous person on twitter and like you found these people as diamonds in the roth you brought the man you paired them you're forgetting one of the more popular ones who am i forgetting you bro bro bro i came to you i can't to you ready baked that was the door dash delivery on your doorstep and some of that's over the door love yeah sure fair enough okay you could you can have that well we'll give you that one if it helps you but i think you've done a good job of that like identifying what is ap plus talent and i i would say like the biggest thing when you said that stood out to me when were talking was you talked about paying people more and this is like one of the great asymmetric arbitrage that exists which is that the person who is truly great is worth somewhere between ten and a hundred times the average person but they'll never cost ten to a hundred times only only maybe now with the ai researcher thing where ai researchers are making like hundreds of millions of dollars a year maybe now they're getting paid their actual work but like you know in every other industry in all of history it's like the a plus person versus the b plus person is getting paid ten percent more thirty percent more fifty percent more even hundred fifty percent more max but they're generating you know one thousand percent more of of return of work and so the the the mindset shift has to be there of like the whole game is find the best people i'll give you a little story so i was before this podcast i was telling ben because i've been hanging out i mean i saying out with ben and i just said i said hey what if our what of our conversation in the last twenty four hours do you think would make like be useful for people on m not just entertaining but useful and he goes oh the thing you said about one of our companies so in one of our companies we kinda hit a plateau so we got into like twenty million plus plus range of revenue which is great because we were growing fifty percent a year but that we plateau to and i had stepped out of the company about two years ago and so the question is like what's what do we do and i had told ben i was like we're in a little bit of a pickle because to be great in that type of a company let's just tell let's you use the analogy you're doing of hears right to be great in the newspaper business you have to make the most compelling media right so you gotta have stories that hook people that get people to become daily readers if you don't do that it's pretty hard like what are you doing that's the main thing and so identify the main thing and then either the person who's doing it has to be like the world class figure outer of that so it's like you know you were this with the hustle i feel initially which was with the hustle like i remember you wrote this style this writing style guide and you're like this is how we write this is what we write about this is what's a good story versus yeah a story we don't do that other people might think is good but we don't think it's good this is what a good headline looks like this is what a bad headline looks like and you are the figure out of the main thing that you needed to get right order for that business to work in let's say e commerce like i don't know if you saw grooves just sold the like gum company or whatever and they sold for a billion dollars and what was it like it's like they just picked the right category with the right model in obviously a bunch of things have to get right when you get a a billion dollar exit in three years so i'm not gonna say you isolate it to one thing course or the main variables the main variables were like yes they're in a great category or like supplements are a great category and then secondly they were in like a they were on trend with like greens basically so like you have a athletic greens but then you had greens as gum and yeah the product as a gummy is good and differentiated but like look a lot of people were basically saying like the genius of groom was that they turned athletic greens into a gummy and like guess what like a lot of people can do that would do that if that's all it took they would be copied like that you know it would be it would be trivial for somebody else to create a gummy a product equivalent of their product the thing that was really hard to copy was their marketing excellence and basically the dirty secret of all commerce and d businesses is that they are world class a at just marketing funnels it's like they're a world class at the facebook tiktok google ad game going to a landing page getting you to buy a thing and then emailing you incessantly and texting you nonstop until you buy again they were good at that they're not just good they're they're their world class at that and so anyways back to the kind of like the useful lesson these lesson is figure out what the main thing you're gonna have to get right that's gonna be like seventy percent of of the of the battle and then either the founder has to be so world class at it that they're gonna do all the hard figuring out and then they're gonna like delegate to anybody else like to do the work but they're gonna do the figuring out at each at each step so for example people don't know this but at the hustle when you started you know you started with the event and then you had to figure out how to the what was the main thing for the event it was like get speakers that i can use to sell the tickets if you were just constantly playing this game of like can i get a bad ass speaker and then can i tell the world that the speaker's gonna be here and that they have to come and buy this ticket to this event and then when you started before you show the newsletter you were blogging and it was like we have to have these articles that go viral and being great at going viral is gonna be the thing that these either gonna make this company successful or not successful right and then you had to grow figure out them when you switch the news it was a different thing but let's just take the going viral part you gotta be world class at that or you're gonna have to learn how to recruit world class people at doing that thing there's only two ways to win you are the world class person doing the figuring out or your world world class recruiter to get the people who are gonna do the figure out there's really only two things to be great at with that and so in terms of like your question about hears like what what stands out to me is it sounds like he was a world class recruiter of the great people and we often hear about companies that are the opposite where it's just you know the the the gene the person is the genius the product genius or whatever but like you go look at apple or any of the great companies that do things over time like i just read the elon biography same thing like yeah he's spectacularly smart no doubt but it's the legions of really world class people that he's able to recruit bring in that are actually gonna be able to like you know develop the breakthroughs you know that's the other skill so what we just did an example of a podcast a so i did a good job dr down the court and just lob the ball up the air and you just slam dogg that shit brought up home that was a very good job the that alright is this it is that the pod dude i had them i had a midlife crisis yesterday i was we were at the as i'm saying at this like nice hotel and we were at the pool and there was a girl there who was just her it was secured a friend and if she just was like clearly taking like instagram like influencer picks it's like pretending she's having a good time she wasn't having a good time but she's like pretending she's like posing as if like a really fun thing was happening and her friend was like getting the fight shot and then they would like quickly like drop the drink and then you know be like okay alright next we need to okay come over here make it look like i'm doing this and that was happening right next to me and i was laughing at her mocking her and judging her and then i was like yes it's not so different what i do as i like my vlogger is just like right over there for my youtube channel i guess guess it's not that different what i'm doing i just posted a video on my new youtube channel me like working out not not that different i guess the the worst is now that i am in instagram superstar is when i'm walking on the street and i'm talking what is the worst part of now being an instagram superstar is walking on the street and talking to a camera and then the worst part is the people if i'm around the same person they hear me do a second take until they know for a fact that i'm not on a facetime that is the worst part that's the because and they know for a fact that i'm not good enough to do it in one take oh my god that's the worst fact i'm self conscious about it and felt like what i said was a little bit wrong and i am insecure and i wanted to do it better and do to try again like honest question is the is the loss of self respect worth gain of influence and money yeah alright curry on there yeah what do are you talking about again send later is that the stupidest question ever that's it that's the odd i feel like i could rule where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a roll less travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break to tell you about our sponsor it is a podcast that we want you to check out it's called d pod it's hosted by ramon barr and blame bolus and this is a podcast about all things direct to consumer d it's e commerce stores it's how you optimize your brand they're talking with founders marketers and the platform creators about all kinds of things that you need to know for d you know website conversion pay ads facebook ads consumer trans email marketing if you wanna know the stories behind your favorite brands this podcast is for you so check it out listen to d pod wherever you get your 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