This opportunity is hidden in plain sight

Very important question is where is their opportunity? Well, yeah. I want to do an O's Pearlman style. I'm going to write something down and we'll see if I'm right. Go ahead. Let's see. All right. Do you write it down? Tell me it's done. All right. It's done. So, obviously there's a big opportunity in AI right now. Obviously, there's a big opportunity in peptides or like uh biology with AI, something like that. What I'm about about to talk about is I did not write that down. All right, carry on then. I I was looking at like where um where is their opportunity right now and um when you open your laptop like what does your to-do list say? scheme. Yeah. No, it's not even a laptop. It's like a notepad. It's the hotel notepad. I don't think most people 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 14-year-old, how do I have sex? Like, no, that's literally what you should be thinking. You should be thinking uh as a 14-year-old, you're like, which girls going to 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 thing. Where is the opportunity right now? You you met me back in I don't know 2013, 14, 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 uh the first it was a Bibo which was like a a past 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 to fully figured it out. So early on I was working on like like you said like messaging apps, social media apps basically. And um hey, guess when all the social media apps were made? Between 2004 and 2012 and then I'm, you know, so so I'm 10 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 other? It's like, yeah, it's called Snapchat. Like, hey, what if we made a way for you to message each other? Like, yeah, it's called WhatsApp. It was actually created in whatever 2007. And so the things I was working on was the last waves opportunity. Now that sounds stupid. Why would you would do last waves opportunity? Well, the answer is it's pretty understandable because that's proven to work and I'm trying to I'm so insecure and like have so such a lack of a spine that I'm just going to 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 already worked is is now done in the game of No, that's not true. It's winner take all. You just talked about goons. No, no, but I'm saying what I was working on like social media like like venture tech is win or take all. It's there's you know you don't work on Airbnb 5 years after Airbnb has been proven to be successful and you're going to be like another Airbnb. There's not going to because there's no network effect businesses. The winners have these like runaway escape velocity. That's why they get so big. That was the game I was playing. I was in the venture game, right? Doing venture technology companies and in that I was doing the venture technology companies of the last 10 years. Pretty stupid. So, and what what should I have been doing during that period? Well, like during that kind of like 2012 to 20, you know, uh 18 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 crypto, I was buying crypto. We just didn't we just didn't think of it as like we didn't put two and two together. Everyone has to Google this that if you Google Shawn Pur there's an article from an Indian newspaper that says famous entrepreneur Shawn Purry puts 25% of net worth into Bitcoin and I think this was any pre-acquisition. I think this was pre-wealth so like yeah what's 25% of $300. Um so yeah crypto was is was an interesting space to play. The other one was basically like um anything in machine learning or you know big data and lastly was like different like new mobile mobile apps. We had one mobile in we had one iPhone engineer in our company when I joined in 2012. The iPhone came out I think like 4 years before that or something. So like you know 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 in circles in the lazy river like idiots. And so I think the very important question is where is there opportunity? Well, yeah. I want to do I want to do a an O's Pearlman style. I'm gonna write something down and we'll see if I'm right. How's How's that? There is 0% chance you're going to get right what I'm about to say cuz it is so random. In fact, you're going to laugh when I say what I'm going to say because you're going to be like after that huge ramble about big opportunities, this is the thing you just told me. Okay, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about dog. I'm gonna close my eyes. You show the camera. You show the camera. I'm going to close my eyes. All right. It's done. I showed it. All right. So, obviously there's a big opportunity in AI right now. Obviously, there's a big opportunity in peptides or like uh biology with AI, something like that. I don't know if those are the ones you're thinking about. What I'm about to talk about is Grand Theft Auto 6. I did not write that down. Did you get that right? O, what what did you write down? GPUs and power plants. Okay, these are also good. Uh, these, by the way, there's not one answer to where is there opportunity. I thought that's what you were going to say based off of things that we had seen on Twitter. But I am hearing about uh I there was someone just did a big sticktick on on Grand Theft Auto, didn't they? Well, the important thing is the new one is coming out um is is the big deal. So, I don't know if Let me just do a quick little I I'll do the personal story and then I'll do the primer on on GTA. Okay, so the personal story is this. I have this friend who I 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 80% in crypto?" And I was like, "80% is insane." And he's like younger than you? Yeah. He's like, "This is obvious. What?" He's like, "What are you talking about? This is what it's going to 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 outlandish, I have learned through trauma of missing out on his pri 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 2 Interactive." I'm like, "Take Two Interactive? What is that? Is that the Do they make video games? He's like, "Yeah, they make NBA 2K and they make Grand Theft Auto." And I was like, "Hostile take Do you know anything about a host? What is a hostile takeover? We won't even do that." He's like, "Yeah, we this will be my first." And I was like, "You're insane." All right. So, a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they want to 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, "All right, I want to start something on the side. Is this a good idea? Is that a good idea? And again, what they're really just saying 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 100 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 in the comments what you think. Dude, I saw the uh the CEO of uh Take Two. I've uh I've had some interactions with he um New York City guy. Ripped. Have you seen him? Zelnik, right? Dude, Google him and the word shirtless. Oh my god. No, seriously. This isn't like a Sam being weird. Like this is his stick is that he's It's not Are you sure? This This is not me being cute. This seriously he people do stories on how ripped he is. He is absolutely ripped. See, this is what I'm saying. This is not like me just like commenting on men's bodies. This is He's like 60 years old and he's No, he's almost 70. He's almost seven. Okay. Yeah, cuz this article is from 2018. 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 moes. So he's like here you have a product that's uh you know the last one when they released it, it blew away all the analyst expectations. They did a billion dollars in sales in 3 days. It's bigger than any movie 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 defensible product in the world. 10 years later, it's still selling $500 million a year annually. It's not like a thing you buy once. They figured out how to make it a recurring revenue business. And there is there's no substitution. So there's not a second place thing that you go buy instead of uh Grand Theft Auto. If it was $90 instead of $80 or $110 instead of $80, it's not like you go buy uh Pepsi instead of Coke. There is no Pepsi. It there's only Coke. And so he gave me this impassioned investment case for why this is such an important asset. So just like some of the numbers, they've sold almost 500 million copies of the game. So, you know, 20 billion in lifetime revenue. You know, it's one of the top uh grossing entertainment franchises, period. Like all media, Pokemon and Harry Potter and other it's up it's like at that level. It's in the upper upper upper pantheon of all IP ever created. And it's the fast fastest entertainment product to ever hit a billion dollars. 12 years later, still doing 500 million a year. Now a lot of their revenue comes from GTA online. So they figured out how The new game which we've been waiting for for you know 10 plus years is almost ready. Whenever some of these games like I'm a I like Call of Duty. I don't play any video games except I like doing career mode on Call of Duty because it's like a war movie. Like it's like a movie. Career mode. I didn't even know they have that. That's like the only one I like. Like a infantry you know like a lower tier guy or what? You like you know it's like James Bond career mode. remember like you like hit complete missions but these things are like movies and so like I don't even own an Xbox. I buy an Xbox to the game play the game and then I like it sits there for 3 years I never touch it ever again. It gets old and so now when GT when Grand Theft Auto comes out I'm going to have to like buy a thing just to play it now for six hours and then I'll never touch it again. So yeah, 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 predict 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, which is bananas, but you know, there's there's a whole economy around this. And so, um, I just wanted to bring this up, not cuz it's the biggest opportunity. Obviously, if you're saying what's the biggest opportunity, go do AI. Gotcha. Right? Like, if you want to, what's the biggest opportunity? Great. go into energy, go into biology, uh 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 6. By the way, I think we have uh I think we have Mark, is it Marcus or Mark Pinkis, the founder of Zinga? I think we have him with him coming on soon. And they're owned by Take 2, so he could give us his take on this. Uh the hostel Hostile Takeover is that by the way, the Hustle Takeover has been shelved now. The stock went up too much. So, like I don't know if you know how Hustle Takeover works, but you have to buy you have to kind of acquire like I don't know like 5% of the company silently and then like announce your bid and then and you you really want it when it's like Snapchat right now when the stock is going 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 yeah he was raising you know3 $400 million to do this but the stock went up and so then there was no uh once the stock popped then there was like not going to 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 scrapers 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 going to 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 this. There's, you know, for example, in the last wave when GTA 5 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 it got really like mega popular. it got more popular than like the real game on uh on Twitch. So, I just think there's going to be a lot of opportunity for like if you're in this kind of 13 to 25 year old range, you know, you're you're funloyed basically. There's going to be an interesting chance to have fun, do something that's in your circle of of competence, like in an area you know about and to actually like learn business by doing a starter business in this little Grand Theft Auto economy. And I'm saying little, but like it's probably the game is obviously like a, you know, tens of billions, but the economy around it is probably going to 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 were in the video game world. Who what were some examples of shockingly large businesses that were like accessory accessory businesses for games? So, uh, well, I'll say for gaming. So, like there was this company I remember discovering called G-Fuel and like I had never heard of G-Fuel. Did you do you know what G-Fuel is? No. It's kind of like a energy drink type of type of deal. They might be a little shady. The product might not be good for you. I'm not saying any of that stuff. As a business, I thought it was very smart what they did. Um, you are saying that. No, no, I was like Red Bull. Is Red Bull good for you? No, it's not Red Bull's not good for you. But like Red Bull can be you can admire Red Bull as a brand and a business and not one of their energy. I think you should drink this. One of their energy drinks is called [ __ ] Up Collector's Box. So yeah, got three of them at home. I don't think that's shady. Yeah, I don't see any red flags. What are you talking about? It's like the red flag is wrapped around my eyes. Um, but they did something really smart. They they figured out that Twitch streamers were undervalued assets that um 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 cuz 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 GeFuel 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 want to develop a flavor just for you, a shaker bottle that's your colors, your branding, and you're going to 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 100 million in sales and like guys like you and I had never heard of them because they did it just within this gaming bubble using just the gaming influencers. And so they did that. There's obviously like Elgato which sells accessories for streaming that now has become even more popular with uh you know podcasting as well. Like they got they got both of those waves and so Elgato is is another company that sells like picks and shovels to the streaming industry. Wait, can I ask you a question about streaming? I actually like don't play video games at all, but I do occasionally will 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 um what's the guy's name? Clav Clav Clavvicular Clavvicular 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 goofing around? Both. But they're just like, so they have to be funny all the time. Like all the time? Um, no, they don't have to be funny all the time. In fact, they're not they're not that funny. They do they do 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 uh the third top category right now with 45,000 live people watching is IRL, which is basically them streaming. So you can watch right now. I will do crazy stunts. 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 me make a fool of myself. There's one guy who's selling hot dogs and he has 80 people on 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 goofing off on their 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 are 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 cuz their phone is their like personal entertainment device that they'll just watch a stream in like on their phone 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. And or like what we saw a lot of at 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. My favorite streamer hanging out and I'm watching. I'll glance over what he's doing, but I don't have to pay full attention to it. So that's like the behavior with this stuff. But it's pretty insane the level of trust. You know, I was talking to a a guy who's 21, 22 years old, and I asked him, I go, 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, Mr. 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 [ __ ] Who do they think is really cool? And so instantly he was like, "Oh, speed. Definitely speed." And he was like, you know, Kaisenat speed, like these are they're the top. They're the the like both like the the multiplier of popularity times like approval rank approval rating or uh you know, you kind of admire them in some way. And where does he stream? YouTube, Twitch, some of some of the guys stream on kick because that's like a big competitor that's owned by a stake like the casino company. Okay, that's crazy. You me you mentioned clips. We should talk about this. So, our friends from TBPN just had an incredible 2-year less less less than two years. 18 months, right? All time. Is it even 18 months? Is it 12? I don't know what it is. Our friends at TBNN, so the story is TBPN, which is a tech live show, uh, just got acquired by OpenAI, the makers of Chad TPT, for an undisclosed sum of money. People rumor it to be 100 million, maybe 200 million, which is bananas for not just any product that's 12, 18 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 Jordy are awesome. I'm super happy for them. Uh, but we haven't had a chance to talk about that. So, what was your what was your reaction? Where were you and what was your reaction when you heard this? Where was I? It's like 9/11. I don't remember where I was. But uh I think my reaction is amazing deal for them. I would have taken that nine out of 10 10 out of 10 times. If it's anything north of 100 million, take that all day. Um and my second reaction is they're going to win even bigger in two years when the board of directors of Open AI says, "Guys, we got to get we got to buckle our belts and and get profitable. We got to 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 going to sell it back to them? Just give it to them and we'll own 5%. And they're going to own it again. Okay, so that's the prediction. Not only was this an incredible first deal, but there's going to be a bar stool style second deal on the other side of this. It was really dumb. I think it's really dumb for OpenAI. I think that HubSpot bought a media company, my media company, and it makes sense because they were using it to sell $20,000 a year software, and there's a direct attribution. When HubSpot bought the Hustle, we had 90, I think, or HubSpot had 90,000 users, I think, something like that. Now, they have 200,000 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 OpenAI, 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. It's 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 the the closest thing that they mentioned was um I guess back in the day Apple bought this ad agency and um it was like yeah bringing that in-house was like transformative for our marketing and we think that like having John and Jordy and TBPN inhouse is going to but it's not trans they're also saying they're speaking out of both sides of the mouth, right? Because they're like they have full editorial control. We're not going to exert our influence over it. It's not going to become a propaganda tool for us. like we're not going to use it, but we just paid $200 million for it or $100 million 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. In incredible epic for for for the TBN guys for sure. Do you think this is a smart move for OpenAI? Let me make the case because I think on the surface it's like what? It's a head scratcher, right? You know, for example, chat GPT has something like 900 million monthly active users. TBPN might have 90,000, you know, viewers, including, you know, across their on their show. And then maybe if you include clips, it's like a million people see a clip. I don't know. It's not going to move the needle for maybe like um getting an executive to buy OpenAI is a 200 $200 million deal. You get I mean, you'd have to get a lot of But again, who's already not I don't know like buying uh 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 have more attention in this case Chad GPT 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 as a default uh you should try to figure out what they what they're telling themselves. So, okay, let's spitball real quick. Even if it's hund00 million, what is that? What is a hundred million out of 800 billion divided by 800 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 they Well, let's start with this. Like, because you might say, if I was to give up 0.001% 01% 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 comms or strategically guiding us. Is that is that going to make our company 0.01 whatever, right? I don't know the math. 0.01% more valuable. For sure. Maybe just one ad campaign for sure maybe could pay for that. Yes. One uh insight into how we should be doing our comms differently. One insight into how we should be positioning ourselves because right now it's kind of crazy. America hates AI. Like I don't know if you've seen this. Samman has had two like attack 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's and then he's the face he's the hatable face of AI for for for whatever reason like he somebody went drove by his house and threw a Molotov cocktail like a week ago and then went to the office and then they no then they drove by and shot like a bullet at his house also in like two days later and so no but the same guy the same guy who threw a molotov cocktail they arrested him at the open AI office cuz he was trying to do the same thing there he was there too oh my god that's insane so literally like you Uh obviously there's a public perception uh obviously there's like a a public brand issue here with like 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 um uh for AI so people don't like AI they don't like uh what's going on with that I'm not sure exactly why it might be because of fear of job loss data centers being built in my backyard it's too powerful the government's watching us Like what is it? Well, it's that, but also like I I I'm on this weird feed where I'm I think I clicked one of them and I'm getting more. There's so many people who are doing these breakdown videos where they're like, I work so hard. I uh work 60 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 yet, I'm still struggling. And I feel like I'm always one paycheck away, which is a totally fair sentiment. I 100%. So you say if my baseline state is a deep state of dissatisfaction, like I'm already I've already without AI, right? And now you're telling me I can't get a job. You're telling me that I'm not going to have a job and that my energy prices are going to go up. My my electricity costs are going to 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 $und00 million 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 going to be worth it. I'm going to get a good lawyer or accounting job that pays me enough to just live amazing life in a vicinity of a city that I want to live in and yet I can't have kids so I can't afford them. I'm single cuz a lot of 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. And then why the hate of Sam and Chad? Is it just the winner's curse? You hate the Yankees. You hate Duke cuz 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 figure can make is being inauthentic. And being inauthentic uh is what he screams because what he screams is I'm just saying what you want me to what you want heard. That's one of the reasons why people like Elon. Even though he's an [ __ ] he's very authentic. With Sam, it definitely feels you're just telling me what I want to hear. That's the perception. Which 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 saying it a slightly different way. Um, I mean, I think Chad TPD is an amazing product. Uh, I think that TB what the TBPN guys did, what John and Jordy did, I think is um nothing 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 just a brand was awesome. And the the fun they had, the brand they built, the way they captured uh people's minds, and I would say like the way they broke the right rules. like what's the um what's that phrase where it's like you know amateurs 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 uh the the playbook for for the podcast. It was like nobody's watching the show. We don't care. We produce the show and the show's per 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 clip's job is to promote the the real show, the long form show. And I think they inverted that. Um I 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 20 great clips a day. And if we do 20 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 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 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 podcasters think of our show, what we do is like the podcast, listening to the hourlong thing is the thing and we're going to use social media to hopefully draw you into the main thing. They did it the exact opposite way. They're like, we'll sit here for for 4 hours and talk. The product is the CL, you know, that's the end product uh 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 I made a prediction uh 3 years ago. Do you remember the prediction? Yeah, you were like um 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, Vine 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 the exact prediction but it was something like I said there 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 and it wasn't totally wrong and it wasn't a brilliant prediction but it was just an observation but that uh I still think it can happen. I think that there's like by the way TP TBPN 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 uh political Twitter Twitter is I don't I don't like it, but it's an awesome category to be in. Like there's me Twitter is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's still like those those categories. Can I give you two lockin stories that I think anybody can take cuz you know we we like to nerd out about media but most people don't care about media. Yeah. Um can I just tell you two John stories? So I I don't know Jordy as well as I know John. So I uh I was in a mastermind group. I created a little mastermind group for media like guys like me who were 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 um uh explanation you know the history of Donald Trump, the history of Xihinping. Pretty good stuff. High quality um and it was actually getting like a lot of views like his videos could get like a million views or 200,000 views 2 million views. So he was like doing well too. He was like successful at it. We had him on MFM during that point, but he wasn't like he wasn't married to it. It wasn't like this is my thing. I'm going to do this forever. He was exploring. And so I was kind of helping him and talking through like what are you thinking about? He was like I'm thinking about this and this and this. And he tried several experiments before he landed on TBPN. So the first thing was massive credit for walking away from the metrics. So like how many subscribers does he have on YouTube? 450 450,000 and his last video did nearly 1 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 he had half a million subscribers he was doing videos that were getting 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 want to do for the next 10 years and he walked away. And I just want to 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 TBPN and you're going live every morning and you don't get to go on vacation because you got to 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 16 interviews in a row, you're uh you know, you're then going and you're cutting the clips, you're preparing for the next day and you look at that number on your live stream and you've got 3,000 people watched today. Do you know how hard that is mentally as a creator who was just seeing that same number on YouTube be 1 million to now see 2,000 and show up with enthusiasm 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? Like for him I think talking to Jordy is fun as hell. Talking about venture tech was more fun than talking about like the history of Xiinping. I think he's like more in that the scene of like for true tech and I think having the creative freedom to like build the brand and the show the way they wanted I think was fun for him and so like I think the fun sustained him when the numbers would have been discouraging to the average person. That's the first part of like massive credit cuz as a creator I know how hard that is. I know how hard it is to go like Naval has 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 ma mountain once you've 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 being a beginner again and seeing where that new road might take you. The second one I invited John to um our basketball camp. People don't know this. John's like freaking like 6'8 or something like that. He's huge. She's like the tallest guy in the tech industry. And I was like, "Oh, dude. You should come to our camp. It's amazing. We got all these amazing the founder of Airbnb and Reddit and, you know, Mr. Beast and then this famous guy, this famous guy, this famous guy. Like, you should come, man. We you 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 to figure it out with TBNN." I was like, "Dude, it's two days. It's over." You know, it's like just like Thursday, Friday, you'll be back. It'll be fine. Also, who cares? TBPN. It's nothing yet. It's just a baby. Right. At that time, they weren't even doing the live show. But wasn't this like 2 months ago? No. No. This was the entire 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 Twitter account where they would reply to a tweet with them in nice suits recording a response to an interesting tweet somebody had. So, it wasn't even like, "We have to be live." It was just he was just like, "I got momentum." So, first he asked me, he goes, "Can Jordy come too?" And I was like, "Dude, we're super constrained on the the like number of people." He's like, "Could we come and could we record from there?" And I was like, "I don't know, man. I'm not sure." Like, "Oh, big miss." Well, there's there's no miss. I'm saying incredible for him at that time to turn down that in invite to be like, "No, even 48 hours, I got to just be locked in. I got to just like there's something here. I just I don't want to lose any momentum." And as a founder, as like a as 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, "Oo, I got invited to this cool event. Oh, all these cool people are going to be there. Oh, it's only a couple days. It won't be that big of a distraction. Like, whatever. 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 got to stay with this." And so he stuck with it. He so he didn't come. He stuck with it. And when I texted him about this uh 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 12 months. They're like, "Every day we're going to 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 lockins. So, I I give them all the credit. That's amazing. Have you seen this other drama? It's kind of cool. So, Jason Lumpkin, friend of the pod, he said, "Uh, okay. It's weird. Now, I don't see TBPN on my PE on my feed 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, "Oh, 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 MFM anymore." I'm like, "Well, our numbers are like through the roof high, so someone is." Um, that's a juicy story. So, you're saying Elon, who's got a competitor to OpenAI, maybe uh it would turn down 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 Substack. You know, you you know the story. No, he tried to buy Substack. They didn't cut the deal. Founder walks away. It's like, dude, total respect. You're Elon Musk. This is amazing, but like we just we want to be independent. And then the next like day all traffic to Substack from X goes to zero. Essentially they basically shadowbanned Substack links and then they bought review. They launched their competitor of X articles. They like did a whole bunch of things. And so it is not beyond Mr. Free Speech uh Elon Musk to to put his you know u what is it what do they say? Put his finger on the put his thumb on the scales to tilt you know to be competitive with with other products. I would not be surprised if the TVPN visibility going away is is not a conspiracy theory and in fact is a is a fact. I wouldn't be surprised is what I put. I think in two weeks so right now Elon and um Sam Alman they're in a lawsuit and I believe it goes to I I don't want to sound I'm I'm an idiot just so you guys know deposition. Wait, should we send this up front? They're doing like I don't even know. I don't know how courts work but like is it the deposition? Is that that thing where they get the best clips from when they're in like a small room and and they're going to ask him like has like what size is his penis? Like can you describe his penis? And like it's like going to be insulting. That's like what the best videos online are about. Uh but anyway, they're doing something uh that's something happen is happening and it starts next week. But I do I think I think that starts in two weeks though. Yeah. It's amazing. It's amazing how I know I I have some friends that are basically like they get sued and then they won't uh they're like we have to settle this because we just don't want to go to disco we don't want discovery cuz discovery is like unears a lot of stuff and so like one of my one of my absolute favorite accounts is uh internal tech emails. Did you you follow this on Twitter? is like one of the best accounts and it basically just nicely format. 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 let's 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 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 or write stuff because it's going to 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 that I'll say hello to the person doing the discovery. Sir, it was humor. Um like this is the top pin tweet right now on internal tech emails. It's from Elon Musk. subject rehonest thoughts. And this is his email to Sam Alman. Guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw. Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit. I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have 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. Discussions are over. Right. Or um the next one, Zuckerberg texting Elon Musk. Hey, quick heads up. We sent a a letter to the California Attorney General supporting your lawsuit against OpenAI. Someone, not us, leaked the letter. It'll be public in the next hour. Wanted to make sure you heard this from me. Elon. Okay. Zuck, 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 Epstein emails. The this is what I love to love to read in my spare time. All right. I have a story that I think is going to be up your alley. You're writing a book on this topic. So, have you heard of William Randph Hurst? Do you know who that is? I've heard of like the Hurst family. I feel like I've 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 200 years, which he has almost done. But you're going to like it on how to manage creatives. That's like a big learning that I've had from this. So, check this out. So, William Randph Hurst, I think he was born in something like 1860. I forget the exact year, but around there. Uh, the reason I liked him at first was his father was a Missouri minor. He kind of moved out to San Francisco where you live, where we used where I used to live to kind of make it big in the mining industry and he had like a boomer bust type of um career where he found a little bit of gold when he was like 40 and became quite wealthy, lost all the money and then when he was 60 became the richest man in America. So he basically like married this amazing young woman named Phoebe, got her pregnant and basically only saw her like once a year plus the kid. But he like was out in the mines up in like Yusede Valley like mining and like his kid and family his wife was down in San Francisco just kind of living their life and the kid's name was William William Randph Hurst and there's this amazing book called The Chief that I've been reading about it. Have you ever seen the or have you ever heard of the movie Citizen Kain? It's regarded as one of the best movies of all time and the main character in the movie is based off of William Randph Hurst. William Randph Hurst was a larger than-l life character. So, we went to Harvard and uh like kind of took over the clubs system. Do you know what that is? Like basically it was sort of like Fratz Skull and Bones. Yeah. Like times 10. It was like frats times 10. It was like uh 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 spent but generally seemed like a good guy and was very wellliked. And so he convinces his father, "Dad, I graduated college. I need something to do. Can we please buy the San Francisco Examiner, which at the time was one of the u 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 and mismanaged. And he was like, "Let me buy it. Let me do this." So his dad's like, "All right, 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 it 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 off first. He realized that he loved newspapers. He loved them like crazy. And so he builds up the um 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 sounds racist, which is what I It's not racist. Uh so basically, uh up until like the early 1900s, 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 archived New York Times, you'll kind of 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 industry was had this massive tam, but like it wasn't like the most exciting thing. And so William Ryn 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 of the Pulitzer Prize, right? Uh Joseph Pulitzer, another St. Louis guy. He started the St. Louis Post Dispatch and then eventually bought other newspapers because newspapers were kind of like software companies except local software companies. You start one in one market, then you go start one in another market and another market and another market and they're subscriptionbased 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 cominging young Hurst who's funded by his dad. They go back and forth for years and years and one of the ways they go back and forth is through this thing called yellow journalism. Basically this 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 SpanishAmerican war started was because Hurst riled up all these people using this like the yellow thing means and it says is a style of reporting that prioritizes eye-catching headlines, scandals, emotional narratives over factual news to boost circulation. It started, like you said, SpanishAmerican War with Pulitzer and Hurst. Yeah. So, kind of interesting stuff right now. He was a he was a crazy man, Hurst. He was sober. He didn't party, but he loved women and he loved spending. So at the peak of his uh the Hurst media empire at this point like decades down the line of doing it. He owned so many different newspapers that something like 20% of America got their news from Hurst. He was spending the equivalent of $20 million every single month just to live and a handful of time there was yeah a handful of years he spent two to4 billion building homes. So Ernest Hemingway, you know, I think it was Ernest Hemingway 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 Hurst's home. So he was famous for just being a insane spender. So at one, but he's bu he's not spending in the building case, right? He's he's just uh he's doing it as a business. He's selling the homes or no, he's just building them to have them to have them. 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 going to talk about. He used to collect journalists. That was one of his skill set. He would find talented people. The the thing is he collected everything. So he collected homes. He would collect rare coins. He collected cars. He collected exotic animals. He collected everything. Have you heard of the Hurst Castle? The Hurst Castle. Google Hurst Castle. So it was a 40,000 acre estate in middle of California. not quite middle, but like uh a little bit outside of LA on the water of the ocean. And he had uh this thing called Hurst 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 cuz it costs too much to run it. I'm just going to give I'm just going to give it to the California government and they're going to turn it into a museum." And that's what Hurst Castle is. But okay, these numbers you're saying are kind of crazy. So you said 20 million a month, 2 to 4 billion annually of spending. The best way to describe this is imagine imagine this. Imagine the Those numbers don't even work. 20 20 million a month is 240 million a year. But then you said 2 billion. Give it give 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 20 million a month. But there was occasional years where it was up to two to four billion when he had huge projects like the Hurst. The money all came from the paper empire or the money all came from the paper empire. So he used the company like his piggy bank which wasn't wrong because he owned 100% of the business. So he's able to do that. The problem is imagine this. Imagine uh so at the time he was actually grew to be one of the top 10 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 receiverhip. So like the bank is going to 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 got to get paid." And that happened multiple times. So imagine the one of the largest companies in the world when Hurst is in the in the 60s and 70 years old for multiple times for two to three years in a row, the government would step in and being like, "Dude, you got to pay these people. So, like we got to put you on an allowance cuz that's how big of a fish he was. And that happened multiple times. I'm just looking I'm looking at all these. I'm just I got seven tabs open right now cuz I got to see what this guy's doing. Google Hurst mansion Santa Monica. This is just like the photo is just going to 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 water. I mean, it looks like a It looks like a resort hotel first cuz it's on 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 collecting. So, 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 ah why are we just doing transactionalformational news let's sell stories baby let's sell emotion creates this yellow journalism trigger some wars. Ah it's okay whatever. So that's the third interesting piece. The fourth is lavish, extravagant 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 his Tinder profile matches our what we like here over here on MFM. So, so far so far so good. And we haven't even got to the part you mentioned, which was about like creatives. And I don't want to um we don't have to dwell on this, but I don't I can't give him a pass. He didn't like the Jews. So, Joseph Pulitzer uh he used to call him Joseph Pulitzer like he and he also he also had um Hi before Hitler was um before the 1940s happened Hitler was like a a leader of Germany who like revitalized Germany and he had Hitler as a columnist and everyone knew Hitler was anti-Semitic but they didn't know that he was um like killing Jews. Uh so anyway, he doesn't get a pass. So he did a lot of bad stuff there. Um but you know we're gonna talk about a whole man. So um and so I'll last I'll tell you what what Hurst is today and then we'll get to get in the good stuff. So Hurst now um they are a media company but it's still familyowned. I believe it's 100% family-owned. I believe it's the they do something like uh $15 billion 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 um has um six uh non-family members, six family members on it. And those are the ones who vote on the company. And it appears to be quite wellrun. So Hurst now owns Cosmo Cosmo magazine, which you know, they own I think they own GQ and a bunch of other magazines, but they also own 20% of ESPN. Yeah. That's worth like $20 billion. They own half of A&E. They own like a lot of local news stations. They own Fin Finch Ratings, which you probably don't care about, but it's like a B2B boring thing. They still own a ton of stuff, including the original newspaper in SF that he bought. So, it's still a 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 Hurst Tower. So, they owned 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, "Where'd you stay?" And I was like, "Look out that window. That's literally the bedroom that I slept in last night." Like I That's the power tower you're looking at. So So uh you mentioned two things. One was managing creatives. I'm curious about that. And then I have a different question after that about you said you wanted to build like a 200-y year company. And I want to 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 um he discovered so much talent. He was famous for hiring the best people. And at one point there was even in like um 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 question 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 in being one of Mark Twain's first employers or first like promoters. Jack London, uh, 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 was 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 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 sensationalize stuff, he still loved words and he loved like beautiful pros. And so, he was a very uh it was like a don dichconomy 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 SF. He found a little pamphlet that this one like 23-y old journalist in Oakland wrote and he wrote he like read it 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 um imagine you know I think Phoebe Gates is like in the news now for being a startup founder. Imagine Phoebe Gates knocking on Sean's door like one year or six months into MFM and being like because she read my blog, you know? Yeah. Like like and and her saying like, "You got it. You got what it takes." And he did that. He was famous for that. He would personally find these people. So, he actually cared about that. And two, he paid really well. Uh 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 going to be really tiny or break even 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, um 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 um controversial and like if HubSpot were to be like, "Dude, I don't like what you said, but I got your 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 uh he did all the time. So there would be times where they would say something shitty about the sitting president and Hurst would be like, "It's cool, dude. You're you're safe to say that. I got you." And so he got like he did that all the time. So, he was um he got loyalty that way. And yeah, that's kind of what I wanted to talk to you about because I know you're writing a book on creativity. And so, I I'm the reason I'm interested in hers was because the legacy thing, but also managing creatives because I'm managing creatives 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 random her. So my my rant a little bit on him is done. Well, I think collecting talent I think managing creatives is different than collecting talent. I think collecting talent is actually the the more important part uh 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 multiundyear kind of companies cuz I want to make Hampton that. What did you take away from 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 Do 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 nah, you know? Right. By the way, that's the perfect disposition for an entrepreneur. Like Yeah. So it's like deep a a deep desire for the outcome and a complete detachment from the outcome as well. Yeah. So that's sort of so it's I that's sometimes hard for me to explain to people but that's how I feel where I'm like I want this so bad and then if like it rains that day I'm like I was looking forward to play baseball but video games are fun you know what I mean like it doesn't matter. Um but anyway I'm interested in it just because I think it's a fun to surround myself with people and I think having a company is a great way to decide who I spend my days with and b 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, uh Hurst Jr. 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, they were still in the same family and they each 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 um that we're going to work together, but in the reverse. So hope I think most people who you know build business and become successful. They want to you they want their kids to inherit the business to take over the business. That's the I would say default. That's not my plan. Other people want to 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 going to do. 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. Not enough to do nothing. Uh oh. All right. Sorry. So, so, so that I believe in. Uh, but the, but the what I've been telling them cuz I, uh, for my son and daughter who are old enough to kind of understand, they uh, I'm like, "Yeah, you guys, you guys can go do whatever you want. You can make movies. You can 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 going to work for you." I was like, "When I retire, my goal, like I want to be I'm going to work on whatever your I'll be your intern, basically." And they're like, "But you're going to have to pay me." And I'm like, "Okay, I guess I'll pay you then. I will pay you uh how much you want to pay." They're like, "You have to pay me 10 $10 bucks," which is what they call money. And I'm like, "All right, I'll pay you $10 bucks, but I'm going to 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, Simba." Oh, but I'm open I'm open to that as well, you know? You know, whatever. Just as long as we can be together, right? Whatever. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And I figured the best way to be together is for me to be their voluntary like intern of whatever the whatever they're trying to do in life is going to end up being better for me. So that that's a I just wanted to throw that out there as like an alternate view to the traditional traditional path. I just want to ask you one question cuz you're learning about all this creativity stuff. So 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 [ __ ] 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, 100% of their value and and sort of output is going to be based on their creative work. Um, but you know, even if you're a a CEO or an entrepreneur, you're creating a company, you're creating products, um, honestly, even if you're a dentist and you have a dental practice, like you're going to either you're going to be undifferiated or you're going to be differentiated. Like, it's the it's the game of stand out. 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 want to untap as much of your potential as you can. So, I've been first studying how do you get yourself to do it, which is like I would say 80% of the battle. Then the second is group dynamics. So, how do you in a creative how does a creative team work to make 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 other and how 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 1 plus 1 equals three so that the product gets better versus your ego getting bruised or them taking in a different direction or you feeling shut down or some something like that from raw early work which is usually not great. I haven't even worried about the other side which is kind of 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 at. So I don't have a lot to share there. I actually think there is an interesting you know just props to you. I feel like with the hustle you spotted a couple of people right like a lot of people now have 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 rough. You brought them in. You empowered them. You're forgetting one of the more popular ones. Who am I forgetting? You, bro. Bro, bro, I came to you. I came to you ready baked. That was a Door Dash delivery on your doorstep. Someone has to open the door. Um, yeah, sure. Fair enough. Okay, you can 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 A+ talent. And I would say like the biggest thing when you said that stood out to me when you were talking was you talked about paying people more. And this is like one of the great asymmetric arbitragees that exists which is that the person who is truly great is worth somewhere between 10 and 100 times the average person. But they'll never cost 10 to 100 times. only only maybe now with the AI researcher thing where the AI researchers are making like hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Maybe now they're getting paid their actual worth. But like you know in in every other industry in all of history, it's like the A+ person versus the B+ person is getting paid 10% more, 30% more, 50% more, even 150% more max, but they're generating, you know, 1,000% more uh 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 cuz I've been hanging out with I'm in Austin. I was hanging out with Ben and I just said I said, "Hey, what if our what of our conversation in the last 24 hours do you think would make like be useful for people on MFM?" Um not just entertaining but useful. And he goes, "Oh, the thing you said about um one of our companies." So, in one of our companies, we kind of hit a plateau. So, we got into the like 20 million plus plus range of revenue, which is great because we were growing 50% a year, but then we plateaued. And I had stepped out of the company about 2 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 take let's use the analogy you were doing of Hurst, right? To be great in the newspaper business, you have to make the most compelling media, right? So, you got to 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 worldass figure it 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 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 were the figure outer of the main thing that you needed to get right in order for that business to work in let's say e-commerce like I I don't know if you saw Grun's just sold like gummies 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. Obviously, a bunch of things have to go right when you get a a billion dollar exit in three years. So, I'm not going to say you isolated to one thing, but what were the main variables? The main variables were like yes, they were in a great category like supplements are a great category. And then secondly, they were in like a uh they were on trend with like greens basically. So, like you have athletic greens, but then you have greens as gummies. Um, 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 Grunons 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 of their product. The thing that was really hard to copy was their marketing excellence. And basically the dirty secret of all e-commerce and DTOC businesses is that they are world class at just marketing funnels. It's like they are world class at the Facebook, Tik Tok, Google ad game, going to a landing page, getting you to buy a thing, and then emailing you incessantly and texting you non-stop until you buy again. They were good at that. They're not just good. They're they're they're world class at that. And so anyways, back to kind of like the useful lesson. The usual lesson is figure out what the main thing you're going to have to get right. That's going to be like 70% of of the of the battle. And then either the founder has to be so world class at it that they're going to do all the hard figuring out and then they're going to like delegate to anybody else like to do the work, but they're going to do the figuring out at each at each step. So, for example, people don't know this, but at the hustle when you started um you know, you started with the event and then you had to figure out how to what was the main thing for the event? It was like, get speakers that I can use to sell the tickets. And you were just constantly playing this game of like, can I get a badass speaker and then can I tell the world that this speaker is going to be here and that they have to come and buy this ticket to this event. And then when you started before you started 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 going to be the thing that is either going to make this company successful or not successful, right? And then you had to grow figure out then when you switch the news that it was a different thing. But let's just take the going viral part. You got to be world class at that or you're going to have to learn how to recruit world-class people at doing that thing. There's only two ways to win. You are the worldass person doing the figuring out or you're world world class recruiter to get the people who are going to do the figuring out. There's really only two things to be great at with that. And so in terms of like your question about Hurst or 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 gen the person is the genius, the product genius or whatever. But like you go…

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