Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 682: Sam Parr of The Hustle

Episode Date: January 11, 2018

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin interview Sam Parr of the Hustle (www.thehustle.co). Sam is just 28 and has built an incredible business in a short period of time. If you are an entrepreneur or wanting to increase your success in life then you will want to check out this episode. The Wall Street Journal meets The Daily Show. Find out what The Hustle is all about. (3:58) Sam explains why Facebook ads are not the way to advertise. Email is not dead. (6:30) Open rate. Sam explains what it is and why it is important. (11:12) Sam explains how his media company is a pirate ship and every email is a wind in their sails. (13:30) What is The Hustle? What type of content is in it? Come listen to Sam describe it. (15:27) Who is on Sam’s radar currently? Hot topics? (21:20) Find out how meeting Mike Wolfe, started his passion of entrepreneurship. The origin story of The Hustle. (26:12) The dos and don’ts of email marketing. Come hear Sam’s tips. (35:05) How has he monetized his business? Are they holding events for their fan base? (42:12) To have extreme success it takes an extreme personality. Sam gets personal about his life and thoughts on therapy. (46:00) Money is flowing freely now. Why are venture capitalists in Silicon Valley taking bets on basically anything? (52:46) ICO’s. When the shoe shine boy gives you stock advice is it time to get out? Come hear Sam’s thoughts. (57:00) Smoke and mirrors. What companies are totally inflated? On the rise? (1:00:15) Education. Is it worth the financial debt? (1:04:04) If he had to do it all over again, what advice would he give his younger self? (1:08:40) What is in the future for Sam and his media company? Podcasting in his future? (1:13:17) Related Links/Products Mentioned: ViralNova - Your Stories On The Web Email marketing statistics 2017 compilation Why Your Office's Millennials Aren't Lazy, Selfish and Entitled Hustle Con: An Event for Non-Technical Startup Tactics Internet.org Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. Ep 643-Lewis Howes - Mind Pump Media Realist – CoreLogic Hemingway Editor How to Win Friends & Influence People - Dale Carnegie (book) Anxiety Linked to High IQ The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy - David Nasaw (book) HQ - Live Trivia Game Show What is Cryptocurrency: Everything You Need To Know Magic Leap Theranos Flexport - Freight Forwarder and Customs Broker The Hidden Costs of Medical Student Debt Mastery - Robert Greene (book) The Power - Naomi Alderman (book) Female Founders Conference Featured Guest/People Mentioned: Sam Parr (@theSamParr) Twitter The Hustle Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck)  Instagram Steve Jobs Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)  Twitter Logan Paul (@loganpaul)  Instagram Mike Wolfe (@mikewolfeamericanpicker)  Instagram Lewis Howes (@LewisHowes)  Twitter Ted Turner Jon Stewart Tim Ferriss (@tferriss)  Twitter Casey Neistat (@CaseyNeistat)  Twitter Casey's Youtube Adam Neumann Tom Bilyeu (@TomBilyeu)  Twitter Tai Lopez (@tailopez)  Twitter Would you like to be coached by Sal, Adam & Justin? You can get 30 days of virtual coaching from them for FREE at www.mindpumpmedia.com. 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If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, hop, mind, hop with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. God, Sam par. Hustle con, man, if you guys have not checked out this dude, I mean, I bet you, I mean, we have a decent amount of millennials that listen to us. They probably already know or they probably already subscribe. He's got over what, 600,000 now subscribers

to the hustle con, hustle. It's basically a newsletter that he does three-mail. He is a pretty fascinating young entrepreneur. And you just feel like how young he was, because he sounds so mature. He's a 28-year-old kid, right? Within a year and a half, has built himself a multi-million dollar

taking over the world. He gives a lot of gold in this episode in terms of building a business, starting a business. Very interesting, fascinating story. Yeah. Fund to listen to, fund to do all we were doing. No, no, I was really excited to talk to him because he has, there's a lot of people,

there's like two camps right now in the emailing world. And because we have all this ability to connect to people on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, instantly, you have one camp that thinks that email is dead, the future is for you to have this personal connection through social media and those guys that are still living in the email world are silly. Then you have the other camp, which he stands in, which I was excited to talk to a young young entrepreneur like him Who was like absolutely not it's not dead. It's just that people are using it incorrectly or they they haven't evolved with how to use it properly because It's extremely personable in fact it can be more personable than all the social media bullshit and he has mastered it mastered it to a point where

His open rate is like 46%. That's insane. We talk about keeping our open rate over 20 something percent. Right. So, and I think that we connect with our audience really well. So to see somebody do that and then to be able to get some tips for him. So if you're an entrepreneur, you got to tune into this episode through his stuff. Share this with any of your friends that are entrepreneurs.

They're going to love this episode. Check out his stuff. His website is the hustle.co. Also, this month, what do we got going on at him? When we given out shirts. Give it away, shirt for all the... Get away! All the bundle people.

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because this is all centered around correctional. It has, it comes with a compass test to see where your imbalances are. And then you can focus on addressing that first. It's a great way to transition into any of our success. Right. So you can get any of these bundles, and if you want just information on mindpumpmedia.com. So without any further ado, here we are talking to Sam Par,

the CEO of the hustle. Talk to us a little bit about, because we're gonna have some listeners who aren't familiar with the hustle, with what you do and what you guys are. Can we, let's give just a quick breakdown of that and then talk about how you got that started? Yeah, so the hustle, we call it a membership company.

A lot of people call it a media company. Oh, what's interesting. Yeah, I think of us as a membership company. And basically we have about, now we're getting at close to 600,000 members, so 600,000 people a day who consume our news. And so every single morning at 9 a.m. Pacific, we have our team. They send out all the business news you need to know throughout the day to 600,000 people.

And it's almost like our content is like a combination of the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg meets the Daily Show. So it's witty and funny, yet it's intelligent and people, it's accurate. Also not with the audience. And it's all and people, it's accurate. Also, it's all three-mail. Yeah, so when we started, we made the decision early on where like, what if we built a whole media company via email

as opposed to having a website? What if our email was the website? And so that's when we launched. And we also host huge events. So we have an event called HustleCon where we'll get like 3000 people come. And it's where we get some amazing entrepreneurs and they come and they tell their story.

And we're gonna be launching other products soon. So what's interesting to me about this is, we got into this business and we're a media fitness company, right, and we're talking about producing lots of media. And when people would bring up things like email, they would say things, the way I would think about it is got email, that feels old, it doesn way I would think about it is, got email, that feels old, it doesn't feel as new as some of the other tech,

like websites, but the reality is the opposite, right? It's more effective to work through email, to deliver people directly. Yeah, and when you think about it, like think about it really at its core, email is like a protocol. Email, email is the internet, and it has not, I mean, email has existed

since the internet has been around. And email, like realistically, it's been static for decades. I mean, what's like the biggest change that your email has had in like two decades? It's like the fact that Google put a promo tab in a social tab. Right.

That's like, that's kind of been it. And so it's just like really, really stable. Whereas companies who have gotten traffic from Facebook, that should change is every quarter. People are like, I'm getting way less traffic from Facebook or Google just made a change this time. It's just like changes all the time. We were just talking about this.

I, you know, know a guy who his business was based off of Facebook and Facebook advertising. Yeah, he's gonna be fucked. Yeah. He was, no, not a joke. Explain that, that's a fucking great point. Well, I'm gonna tell you what happened, and then I want you to explain maybe to our listeners, but this is what happened to him. The guy was making something like $90,000 a month in revenue through Facebook advertising.

And overnight, he made something like, he went down to like seven or eight grand a month. Like a ridiculous reduction in revenue. Zuckerberg has an opinion, a farts or whatever, and it thinks change. That in your business, in your livelihood has just changed. So basically the history of this is basically, Facebook came out in 2009 or 2008, whenever it came out, and media companies were like,

okay, great, this is awesome. We're gonna get a ton of traffic from there. Everyone like our page, and they would get, let's say, for rounding numbers, a million people to like their Facebook page. Every time they posted an article, one million people would see that article and a smaller percentage of that would click

on their article and go to that website, and they would earn money from advertising revenue, right? Well, over time, what happened was every other company was like, oh, great, likes, that likes, can turn was every other company was like, oh, great, that likes turn to traffic, which turn to customers. Awesome, let's get a Facebook page. And then some people, like for example,

the guy who started sites like the viral NOVA, they're like, oh, this is interesting. We can use this for arbitrage basically. And so Facebook, it's a supply and demand thing. They only have a certain amount of demand, which is eyeballs, and they started getting way more media companies, and they could pass, like every media company went on there,

and they would post 25 articles a day. And so what that meant is like, okay, well, look, you're only scrolling through a certain amount of content. Therefore, now we've got a pick and choose. So although you have a million likes, now only 80% of your audience is going to see each article. And then these guys like Viornova were like, oh, only 80% are seeing an article. We've got to make

our shit more click-bitty in order to reach 90%. And then everyone started making it more click-bitty. So then Facebook said, okay, that's a horrible experience. And B, now we've got more supply than demand. There's more content than Ag's actual eyeballs, so let's bring it down even further. And so now, if you have a million likes on Facebook on average, you'll probably reach 7% of your people. Damn, that's it.

Maybe nine, but yeah. That's a fucked number. It's horrible. And so basically, you can look at this right now. You can go to Elite Daily's Facebook page, you'll see they've got maybe 10 million likes or five million something like that. And an article will get like three likes and two comments.

Now did you have the foresight to see this, Sam, because I feel like I've heard people, and just I remember when we were first building this, I would hear guys talking about how email is dead, and that the future is Facebook. Did you foresee this happening, and that's what made you go the email direction?

A lot of people saw this happening. So I'm certainly not the only one, but yes, it was so clear. It was like, guys, do the math. This is not working. And now you have instant articles on Facebook, right? You guys know, you guys say that shit loads fast. Yeah. It's clear what they're doing.

They don't want anyone to leave their website. So now you're like a media company who have built them back to Facebook. In a way, they're just like people who have built like apps on Facebook. So you know, like those games, like, you know, they're used to be like Farmville. Oh, yeah.

And what happens? Gone. Where are they? Do those even exist anymore? Like, do you know what I mean? Right. So like, that's just going to happen. Is this, is this why now when I go through Facebook, because I noticed something very interesting,

pages would, would post lots of pictures, then it turned into. It's different trends video. Yeah. And now what they do is, and what the video was, because I think they were trying to get around the algorithm, is they would post a video, but it would just be a picture. So it's just the plan. It's just one picture, I guess, because that got around the algorithm. And then Facebook said, oh, the image isn't changing. We, we, we know how to figure that out now. So we're not going to give you any airtime or whatever. So now what they do, you'll see this on some of the videos you hit.

You'll, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll scroll through and it'll have these weird, like little arrows and stuff floating around on this picture to trick the algorithm almost into thinking it's playing a video. Exactly. And you don't have to be you and me. We don't have to be smart marketers or techie guys to know this, everyone knows this, right? Like you start seeing these patterns,

you're like, oh, that's things change. So the new thing that's gonna happen is, and I know this because I have friends who work there and I, it's just, this is public knowledge. The new things is Facebook's gonna be making more changes this quarter, and what you're gonna see is that they're gonna prioritize group content over pages. So you'll see that soon.

So basically it's gonna just get people who are mostly reliant on Facebook. This is different from their ad product. This is strictly organic content. You're gonna see less and less of that, even more of pages content in your feed. Wow. Wow, that's crazy.

Now, you're talk about some, I've watched videos and interviews of you before, but I want our audience to hear you talk about this. One of the things that fascinated me was, your guys is open rate. Your open rate for the size and the amount of people that you have that you're emailing, talk about some of the things that you hacked into

that I just, I first time ever hearing some of them or the stuff that you're doing. Yeah, so we have, I don't even know the specific number at the top of my head today, because we grow at like two or three thousand people a day. Today it might be at close to 600,000. But on average, about 45, sometimes 50% of people will open that email.

Yeah, that's incredible. Now what is an industry average in comparison? Or what's considered good, I guess? Because that's obviously great. I think the, I think like 20 or 21 is average. Oh, it's double. Yeah, we're double. A lot of people treat email as just like a newsletter

and we treat it as like the product and because of that, it's created a habit amongst our users and we also have built a technology to make that a thing. You know, the idea was like, look like, what if we sent content to someone and like when you're on your phone, what are you doing the morning? You'll pull out your phone and you look at your email.

What the hell, like what's the difference between where you're looking if it's in your email or on a website? I mean, content is content. Like the screen is the same. Yeah, if you show that to someone, you literally just see a white page with that. If anything, you could argue it's more intimate because it's coming from your email, right?

It is more intimate. It's way more intimate because how many websites do you go to a day? Not a lot. You don't literally type in that website each day, not a lot at least. It's a for porn hub. Exactly for porn hub. I don't know when it.

Porn hub and reddit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, it's just like, why would we even have anyone click off? Like, what if we just, like, in the same way that someone was like, look, podcasting is different from blogging and blogging is different from movies. Like a lot of people thought like, oh, it's content.

Like it's actually totally different platforms. And so we're like, what if we just treated it as its own platform and went all in on it? And that was the idea. And so yeah, we've had to create a lot of technology to make that a thing, but it's working. Now, when you look at all platforms, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, emailing, what do you, I would love to talk to a guy

like you and hear your opinion on all of them for building a business. Like, what do you see each of those, their strengths and their weaknesses, and how do you approach that? I'm not an expert on a lot of them, but I am an expert, I think, on email. But basically, we call our business a pirate ship and every email is a little bit of wind in our sales.

And the idea was like, how can we create something that we own? And basically, my life is like, I hate being told what to do. And how could the business be the same way where we never have to be told what to do and no one will be in control of our destiny? Kind of, if I could fist bump you. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And that was the goal. And email seemed like the best one. Now, unfortunately, that doesn't, we still, I guess technically if Gmail made a change that would hurt us, but we have a lot of, Gmail isn't the only one. There's only one Facebook that are many.

Right. If you really think about it, I mean, if I build a business on YouTube, and I'm making millions of dollars on YouTube, if YouTube wanted to, they could fuck me completely. Which they are. Which they do to a lot of people. Same thing with Facebook, same thing with other platforms.

Even podcasting at the moment, iTunes is like the big dog that's primarily everything. If iTunes wanted to, they could basically sever us from our audience, but what you're doing, you own that, like nobody can really mess with you as easily. Yes, and it's not to say that we or anyone else shouldn't go deep on some of these platforms

that they don't own, they should. In fact, they should, they should go where the attention is, but they should diversify. I want our traffic to look like a peace sign. Where's like a third, a third, a third, you know? And before all that, you have to have good shit that people love and people want. So it's like, if Jay-Z is on title or Spotify,

I don't care, if I want Jay-Z, I'm going. But let's say he's not on any of those, it's like, well, it's not accessible, it's kind of difficult, or like I can't discover it, it makes it a lot harder. Let's talk about your content here for a little bit. What kind of information, what are you transmitting to your readers, what is your specialty, what is the hustle all about?

Yeah, so we're tech and business news. And so we have a very aspirational audience. It's almost like my parents are in their 60s now. So I almost explain, it's like my parents who are professionals, they own companies and they've done well. Just like imagine them like 35 years ago when they were younger. People who want to make a dent in the world. So people who are builders and makers and entrepreneurs, we basically give them the content that they need to be intelligent and sound intelligent with their peers to actually be more intelligent and to get shit done. And so a lot of that is news. So like Kodak had an ICO the other day,

which was interesting, we talked about that, or Uber is always doing something crazy, so we make sure people are informed about that so they can make better decisions. And we also recommend different products to you. So I love the reason I asked about that, Jabra said you have theirs. I'm always into like gadgets and how to just be more efficient throughout the day. So we'll talk about that. So like, I nerded out in the email the

other day and wrote about my favorite notebooks because I liked it. I like tested a series of notebooks that want to know like what's what papers the smoothest and which one's actually the best. Very cool. And so we'll talk about that too. So whatever is going to benefit like the entrepreneur mind and their processes with that is pretty much what you're gearing at around. Entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurial. Yeah, exactly.

We just help, we wanna help people make a dent in the world and we'll give them whether that's a product recommendation or the news at the moment, it's mostly news. But like I said, we're expanding into, we're expanding. Now I'm gonna make an assumption, and I'm gonna assume, and you correct me if I'm wrong, that you have a large percentage of your audience are in that millennial age group,

was that a safe assumption? That is a safe assumption. Okay, and now- That's what we saw at that event. We really? So the- That's EES? Yeah.

Oh, wow, really? Lots of millennial activity. So the reason why I first I'll made that assumption But the the point I want to make is There's this stereotype that Millennials, you know live at home still they don't want to really do anything that unmotivated You know the other feelings hurt really easy this that and the other but what I'm seeing and maybe there's some truth

That maybe not but what I'm seeing, and maybe there's some truth to that, maybe not, but what I'm seeing is this, they seem to be one of the most entrepreneurial generations that I can that I've seen since I've been alive. I'm not super old, but it seems like more and more people in that age group, more than almost any other, is trying to do something for themselves, and maybe part of that is technology isn't enabling them, like never before. Like I couldn't, 30 years ago, I couldn't just post a video on something

and then, you know, potential global viral. And the other part of it is the heroes of millennials are entrepreneurs. Whereas when we were kids, a lot of our heroes were celebrities. And now these people are looking up to like, people like Steve Jobs and Ellie, Aaron Maskin, Gary Vee and that kind of stuff. Well, I think part of what you said is right,

like getting their feelings hurt and living at home. I mean, I do think that, you know, our generation could be sensitive, but there's a lot of pros to that. There's a lot of cons and pros, but the pro is that I do agree that we, our generation millennials are very aspirational, but not only they're aspirational, and this is like a prone con, there's a lot of downsides and upsides to this, is that they expect

to be great, and they expect to do great work, and they expect to be happy with their work, and they refuse to just have a job, they want a career, and they want a mission. I think that our generation is more mission driven than my parents' generation. Part out of necessity, but if you think about it, a millennial has mostly grown up in a fantastic market. So like, I was 18 in 2008 when the financial crisis hit. Right, I didn't know anything about that. I wasn't, it didn't meant nothing to me.

Right, you weren't heavily vested somewhere or didn't have a house probably before that. Right, it didn't meant nothing to me. Right, you weren't heavily vested somewhere. I didn't have a house probably before that. Right, right. So unless they live in New York, I lived in Missouri, so it didn't impact me at all. I was just like, I see this on TV, and that's all I know. Right, and so I've come, I've grown up in a bull market, in a great market, and so I see money flowing,

and I think I'm badass, and I know that greatness is attainable because I also see my peers whether it's a YouTuber or my actual friends. I see people living great lives and so I expect that if I work hard I can do the same and I think a lot of people feel that way. It's like the gold rush, you know, except and like the gold rush, a lot of the people making all the money, the one selling the shovels. You know, I can't think of another time that's more disruptive than right now. I mean, we're seeing the biggest, most powerful markets ever being so disrupted, like music,

you know, movies, transportation, transportation, like hotel business, like these are established, like they've got the roots deep and they've got their hands in the pockets, politicians and fox they're absolutely screwed the taxi cab taxi cab industries just it's insane and this these are these are some of them all those out I don't miss it either we did get in a taxi cab this we were down in LA for the LA FedEx last time I ever do it and we got into it we got in a taxi cab it was right there what an asshole I was though because I'm asking him like uber questions yeah I'm so used to using Uber now.

Then how long have you been driving for Uber? Yeah, that's funny. Oh, you could tell he was totally offended by it too, because I guess he had left and actually tried to do Uber for a while and then went back to driving for the taxi cabs. Before for him, he made the claim that it was much more difficult for him to build a full time service than it was to work for another company. Yeah, I imagine so. And that's just like a hazard, I guess, of trying to, quote, disrupt shit,

is that some people lose out and that's unfortunate. Right. Now, what companies, I'd love to hear from you since you geek out on stuff. Like, what's fascinating you right now? You have specific companies you'd love to watch to see what they're doing. What are we doing to look out for? Well, I love the YouTube stars. These guys, even if I don't like his content,

I love seeing Logan Paul just disrupt things and break stuff. Oh, he's been all over the place lately. I love this guy. I love seeing how these media, like, so Casey and I sat, spoke at House of Count, one of our events. And like, it's just so crazy that this one guy has more clout than a CNN. So a celebrity, right?

Yeah, and when Trump did the ban from Iran and Syria and like the five or six country ban, Casey Neistat filmed, did a thing on some of the folks who were being banned in the JFK, in the airport. And I thought that his, this one person did a better job of explaining some of the folks who are being banned in the JFK in the airport. And I thought that his, this one person did a better job of explaining some of this information than CNN did. And so that was incredibly interesting to me. So I think that these YouTube guys are,

I think that they are really gonna change what, they might replace a lot of media companies. Oh, I think we're seeing it happen. I think it's fascinating to see all these guys falling right now. Are you watching all these celebrities? It seems like every day we have a new one that's getting busted? Hollywood one. Yeah, you can't do bad shit anymore Yeah, you already got to hide it really really good because one person has a big loud voice and every if you do something wrong Everyone will know I know well talking of YouTube you were saying something you mentioned and we moved on

But I want to go back to it like that YouTube is starting to regulate more and what do you see happening in the future of that? You think it's going to be just as fucked as Facebook and as a challenging? What do you think? Yeah, this is just like, I just love looking at numbers. Just a supply and demand thing, right? Facebook has so many users that they have this new thing called internet.org where they put, you can look at something, they put these huge gliders over India and they transport free internet

to these folks who are in poverty and can't afford internet because Facebook says, look, we have so many users on Facebook right now that literally the only people who are on Facebook are the ones who don't have internet so we're going to give them free internet because it makes sense for us. So like a solution. Right, and it's just a supply demand thing. You solution. Right, and it doesn't supply demand thing. You'd need more eyeball, more page reads, whatever. So YouTube inevitably, yes, it will go through this

and it is going through this. I mean, this is what like Ethan, H3H3, complains about all the time. I don't know if you guys follow him, but he's a, I don't tell us. He's just a YouTube comedian, but they're starting to get more serious about how,

in Casey Neistat and Logan Paul, I think all these people, I've heard them all talk about demonetization on YouTube and how they're starting to get more serious about how, in Casey and I said in Logan Paul, I think all these people, I've heard them all talk about demonetization on YouTube and how they're getting pissed off that YouTube isn't treating their creators properly. So yes, YouTube is going through this at the moment and it will continue to do that. So when the whole net neutrality thing was going on,

that must have been big news with you guys and your readers. Yes, it was. I think our readers, our audience, our community is more interested in a little bit more business oriented than net neutrality. Right now, everyone cares about crypto. I mean, that's just like the hottest thing going.

Yeah. I'm so sick of hearing about crypto. Everyone talks about it, but that's way bigger than the net neutrality, but net neutrality was quite large. And also, Uber, Uber, what they're going through is a big deal. Our audience and Amazon just taking over the world is huge too. What's going on with Uber when you brought them

up a couple of times? Well, also about a year ago or maybe half a year ago, the CEO got always getting in trouble, right? Yeah, well, he got forced out. The guy who started it got forced out because he, well, he did a lot of things or he was accused of a lot of things, but rather that true or not, his image was that he was pretty much a smug asshole. So he got kicked out and then he just sold like three or three billion dollars

worth of his shares the other day, which is like huge, big news. Who knows what he's going to do with it? And this guy is like kind of crazy. And he's going to start the next one. How important do you think image is now for a CEO of a big company like that? Unfortunately, it's huge. Because Uber's not even a publicly traded company. You know, it's a private company. It's different when you... How fucked is that?

You have a private company you built up and you get fucking ex-id-ished out. It's the worst. It's gotta be a motherfucker. I've put my foot in my mouth. I'm a nobody. And even I have put my foot in my mouth. And it's crazy that you just have to be aware

of your public perception. It's so important. And, you know, most of the people who are starting a company's down day are just computer nerds. Like myself, we're just like nerds who started shit behind our computer screen and kitchen. Like for a lot of people, the goal is not to be like.

Famous. A cool guy, or like popular. Like, you just became cool on accident. I don't know. I don't know if you become cool, but you certainly become, you certainly have a larger platform. Three billion dollars makes anybody cool. How did you start this?

Take us back, which is one that longer, right? Our company is pretty new. Our product is about 20 months old, but we changed what we did early on but basically so I'm from Missouri I went to school in Nashville Tennessee on an athletic scholarship so I'm I'm familiar with all these all this awesome gear you guys out here. What's for? I was a 400 meter runner. Oh, awesome. Yeah, the fast switch muscle fibers. Yes, but it also makes it easy to get fat. Okay. Stop running. Yeah. So I was an athlete there and then I met a guy named Mike Wolff.

Have you guys seen that TV show American Pickers? No. Oh, I have. Oh, yeah. Would they go into the, uh, pick a beard or the other guy? The other guy. Okay. The skinny one.

The skinny one, yeah. And I met him on the street of Nashville because I was a huge fan and he offered me a job at his, at his store where we sold junk basically. Right. And doing that, I learned what an entrepreneur was. My parents are entrepreneurs, but I didn't really care about that when I was a kid. But anyway, I threw this guy, he taught me how you could start a business, and I ended up launching a hot dog stand in national Tennessee called Southern Sam's.

Weeners is the biggest of babies on. On your own? On your own? Yeah, swinegaz babies. I heard it. Yeah. So I quit working for him, and I started a baby's arm. On your own? On your own? Yeah, so I can't be as big as a baby's arm. Yeah. That's amazing. So I quit working for him and I started a chain of hot, it ended up becoming a chain of hot dog stand. Shut up.

Hold her, you're awesome. I was maybe 20. Oh, fuck yeah, 19. And so you have, how many stands do you have at this point? Just a couple, but I had spots all over town. And so like during the day, you're in one spot and then in the evening, you're like in one spot and then in the evening you're where the drunk people are and you double your prices.

I know a guy that did very well doing that. He would set up right at all downtown San Jose where all the nightclubs and he would work from like 10 to 4 a.m. and just rake in. Yeah, you can kill it on some days. You know, I could walk home with like two Gs in cash. Yeah, oh shit. Other days it might be like a hundred bucks.

But other days it could be like two grand, you know, and that's like a big deal. But it was, it's really hard work. It's physically demanding, especially in Nashville when it's 110 degrees some days. It's really hard. So I was like, there's got to be a better way to like make a living. This is so like physically challenging. Like I'm sunburned all the time.

And so I ended up starting an online liquor store called Moonshine Online, where we sold um, uh, whiskey, white whiskey. It store called Moonshine Online where we sold Whiskey white whiskey. It's not really moonshine, but we called it that And so I was like, oh the internet's way better And so I ended up physically demanding. Yeah, it's way easier So I left school early moved out to San Francisco because I just Google it and they said that all the internet Companies are in San Francisco and I met a guy and he had this idea for a roommate matching company. So I joined him and we kind of built that up. And then after like 11 or 10 months, it got acquired.

And so after it got acquired, I was like, all right, what should I do next? And so I ended up starting hustle con, which was a conference for entrepreneurs. And I was like, I'll just put this little thing on. And hopefully it will all meet someone or it'll lead to some type of inspiration for starting my next big thing. And I did this conference and unexpectedly about 360 people came and it made a whole lot of money and profit. And I was like, I didn't expect that to happen.

That's what I'm saying. That's just like Lewis House story with LinkedIn. I don't know if you know his story. Very, very similar. I mean, he was one of the first guys in LinkedIn to like make a name for himself and then he just started a whole conference. So, he's a little conference. He's blown turn up these conferences. Yes, these little conferences. It was like blown away by what he was able to make.

I'm sorry. So you sold the one business and you make good money off that. You make a little bit of money to set you up. Is that what you know? No, not a lot enough that I didn't have to work for a little bit. Okay. No, not a lot. I sold that company.

You go by a Lambo or anything like that. No, I rode my motorcycle across the country for about 80 days and chill. That's what I did. Oh, cool. Very cool. That's so cool though. Yeah, so you do that, you start a hustle calm and it's an idea for a conference.

Where do you find these people? Like how does this all start? Because one of the hardest things for people to understand about entrepreneurship is, or one of the biggest questions I should say is, how do I get started? What do I do first? Yeah, I learned from a very early age that you just make shit up, and if you act confident, people will follow along,

and most of the time, if you're smart, you'll figure it out. I hate to say it, but that's exactly what it is. It's like our MO. Yeah. You'll figure it out. That's the jump out of a plane with no, like, how to figure out how to make the bread right away down. Yeah, you'll figure it out. You kind of figure it out, and just act the right way down. Yeah, you'll figure it out. Like you kind of figured out it just act confident

and people believe that you'll know and you'll figure it out most of the time. Sometimes you don't. But anyway, I just like would eat. I had like 16 people in mind who I wanted to invite. And I just kind of lied to them and I told each one that the other 15 were coming and thankfully it worked out to the word most of them said yeah. So I was like is that alive? It does coming. And thankfully it worked out. Most of them said yes.

So I was like, is that alive? It's not alive. As long as it works, it's not alive. And so I did that and they said yes. And then I also knew a little bit about, I'm a self-taught copywriter. I'm not very good, but I understand how it works. And I knew email was powerful.

And so I started a newsletter. That's what I did. And so in about seven weeks, it made like 60 Gs in profit. And 360 people came. And I was like, oh, that's crazy that that worked. I didn't expect that to work. And so I did it again after about six months. And this time I called my co-founder for my old company.

And I said, John, come do this thing with me. It might work. I don't know what's going on, but maybe something's here. And then this time it made like a quarter of a million bucks near. Oh shit. In like 80 days, 82 days. And we did the exact same thing of email.

And then throughout this period, I had, I read the biography of Ted Turner. He's a guy who started CNN. And I was like, that's kind of a cool life. And that's like, you're kind of doing stuff on culture that's really neat. Like they covered CNN, covered the first Iraq war in 1990. And they had some pretty revolutionary coverage around it.

And I read all about it, and I was like, oh, that's kind of neat. You really put a stamp on the world, that's cool. But then I saw the average Fox News and the average CNN age was like 70 years old, and I was like, oh, well, there's clearly opportunity here. There's like, you know, hundreds. Very smart.

Yeah, I mean, there's like a big opportunity. There's like 100 million millennials in America, most of which are college educated. There's a market here. I don't know what it is. I don't even know how it's gonna make money, but there's like a big opportunity. There's like 100 million millennials in America, most of which are college educated. There's a market here. I don't know what it is. I don't even know how it's gonna make money, but there's something is going on here.

And so we're like, my co-founder now, we're like, look, if we're good enough to create content to convince these strangers to come to our event, like people flew from Dubai, from Nigeria, from Asia, all over the world. Well, maybe we can like make this bigger. And at the time, business insider had just sold for 500 million bucks.

Vice had just raised a whole bunch of money at like a five or six billion dollar valuation, just a lot of money. And we're like, if they did it, we could probably figure this out. So we on in August of two years ago, we launched the hustle. And the idea was like, a business insider

meets a vice type of blog. And so we did these articles where, like, we did like crazy, crazy articles, like where I had a friend who would basically write books on how to get laid and he made like 60 Gs a month on Kindle. And I thought that, but he told me about it where he basically just like ripped off like copied other people's works

and like sent it to the Philippines for a guy. I just like slightly changed the words and then he bought like a fake or not a fake, but he bought a dumb sexy cover and named it some stupid thing and then had people review it that he paid like five like fake reviews and then he would make like 30, 50, 60, two, three, two, a month. And I was like, that is so shady. That is very shitty.

I was like, so we wrote about it and we talked about it. And then the next week what we did was we had my co-founder. He was doing this whole time. He, we realized that the most volatility in the Kindle market was romance novels. And so we had him become a best-selling romance novelist by doing this guy's method. It worked.

It worked. Oh my god. Shut the fuck up, are you serious? Captivating Claire by John Havill, it worked. Wow, and he made money, he made good money off of that. It made a little bit of body, but it got to number one. And so these like, fake authors, so there's number one author,

one of those exact formulas. Exactly, because all these authors are like, I'm a best seller, we're like, what's that mean? What's that mean? How hard is that really? Yeah, she get there. So he became a best selling author of a romance novelist, and then we didn't wait.

We did like these crazy blog posts like this, and it did well, we got millions of views, but we're like the, the, the, the economics of this is really challenging like not that people not that many people are gonna Go to your website every day and it's hard to make money that way and so on April 20th so for 20 of Two it'll be two years this April. We said look email only worked for Hustlecon and you guys know the website, Thrillist. They's Thrillist.com. It's like a travel.

Okay. It's huge. It's like a maybe a billion dollar company, you know, it's called Group 9. It's a big thing. They own now this. It's just a big like conglomerate type of deal. Anyway, they started as email only as well.

And we're like, well, if those guys did it, like, and we're pretty good at that. What if we just did that? And so, yeah, 20 months ago, about 20 months ago now, we switched to email only, and since then, the numbers just kind of blew up. So you guys still wait for 20 differently now, for a moment. Yeah, we're the same guys. We're the same guys.

He's had that moment. Different reason to celebrate, but the same way. What are some of the do's and don'ts and even what have you learned yourself and seen during this whole process of building this email business? Let's see. Some things that happened early on that I tell people to know early on, tell people when they're starting now is basically you know how you do like a double opt in for emails. Yeah, get rid of that.

Don't do that. You'll increase your subscriptions by like 30%. Wow. So when someone enters your email, you know how it says like, now click this thing, just get rid of that. What else? Treat email as its own platform. So a lot of people just treat their email as like an RSS reader

where they're just like, or just like, nearing something. Yeah, I think that's silly. I don't think you should do that. A few other things were like, you're welcome email and your confirmation page after someone subscribes. Those are really, really, really important. Those are really great opportunities to be different.

A lot of times people just use the generic, like, you just subscribe. Yeah, it's just like the basics, stuff that they don't like to change, or the subscribe page, or even the unsubscribe page. They just make it the same thing. If you make those on brand for us, it was kind of humorous and funny. People will love it. You have a very similar style like your voice

when I read your stuff as we do. Give some examples of that. You're the subjects, even the stuff how you sign off on it, I mean, talk about some of those things. Yeah, so voice is really important with that. So like, it's not the welcome email anymore. It's the subscriber page after you subscribe. But when we first launched, it was like the welcome email, the headline was, the subject line was, look what you did, you little jerk. And

it said like, you know, you can read it. If you Google the hustles, welcome email, there's like 12 blogs we've written about this. But basically, oh, there it is, there it is. I assure you, we don't take what just happened lightly. And it's a whole page about how all these people in our office, like, Karen just took a whole bunch of shots at Keela because she's so pumped, you just signed up. Or like, that's so cool. Yeah. And it's had an hook to stream.

Like, it's like a long thing, which a lot of people wouldn't think all these things had just happened. Right. And a lot of people wouldn't think that this would work because it's like kind of a long form, but it does. It works really well. Now I also notice spacing the size of it are these all things that are that you take into consideration also 100%. So if you don't, if you're just starting to get into writing, I, I tell people,

try to keep sentences below 25 words and keep sentence paragraphs, three sentences or less. It makes the readability increases the readability. It does. Remove needless words, trying not to use too many adverbs, right at like a sixth grade reading level, and you could do that by going to Hemingwayapp.com. Oh, should I should be good for this then? We should be fine. You should do all of our right.

All right. You will do it by me. So the irony of all this, why I was so excited to have you here is we actually built this thing without using email whatsoever. It was probably one of the biggest mistakes that we ever did. Was we were so focused on the content and providing as much free good content

to our people and the podcast was the main source of that. That once we woke up one day and said, oh shit, we got a million plus downloads a month of people listening to us. How do we reach them and touch them on a regular basis and sure we're on social media platforms. We really had kind of dropped the ball on email and we just started really capturing emails this past year and we haven't even put in place any sort of sequencing or anything. Yeah, so sequencing is great. My buddy Neville, who's a big email guy,

he calls him his little slaves, because basically he creates a sequence one time, and they go to work for him all the time. So basically if one person subscribes, you have a drip sequence, and you know by like sequence five, or by email five, that 30% of people will buy whatever he's selling. So then you just get a bunch of people to sign up for the email,

then you got yourself a machine. Right. Do you think a lot of people overthink those sequences? And maybe like, because you're just saying sixth grade reading level, I mean, keeping it safe. Well, they definitely over, they think too much about the writing. You know, the writing is incredibly important. But like a lot of people use jargon or they like,

oh, like they'll talk like resume talk, I ensure that we hit goal. Or they just use jargon, it's like, you don't, and if you ever said ensure, I made sure we did this, just say that, just talk right like you speak. And that's what I noticed,

is that it's like I'm listening to someone talk to me rather than reading. Exactly, it's like, and it's like, people automatically assume that that's unprofessional. It's like, that's not unprofessional. If I met the president, I would be like, Mr. President, how are you?

It's great to see you. I wouldn't be like, hello, sir. Like, what's going on? Like, you know what I mean? Like, like, like, well, I would even say, what's up to the president? And if you, if what's up, it's great to see you. And if you think about it, everybody's on text so much.

It's so important. That it's if you think about it, everybody's on text so much. It's so important. That it's changing the way we read, like copy, whereas before there was a very professional, I think you go back 30 years, you wrote a certain way and you read a certain way. But now that's what's going on. We're using the emojis now. Yeah, now we're so used to text,

like it's almost like this is more personal. I believe this more than the super, you know, kind of reg regiment and type of writing. And we call that the John Stewart effect. And my buddy made up that phrase that we use now, which basically we are silly and funny, yet intelligent. But because we're, because we write in a relatable tone,

people trust us more. Kind of like when John Stewart would make jokes and shit, but he was actually incredibly intelligent. So you trust him a lot more because he's like, oh, you're kind of self-deprecating. But yeah, and like Slack, text, messenger, I mean, like, you spend most of your time, email, you spend most of your time in the text world. Get good at that.

Get good at that. Right, yeah. Well, now with your, how do you guys monetize with this? Is it a fee to subscribe or is it? No. Because you've got, okay. So we make, you know, we're at close to 20

full-time people now. So it grew quickly and it's very, it makes good money. And 100%, not 100%, 90% of the revenue is made through advertisements in the email. And so in the same way that Huff Poe or Business Insider, you see advertisements on the website, we built our whole own. It's literally no different.

It's no different. It's just in an email. The only difference is that we had to build all of our own stuff. So that's obviously on Business Insider. It's technology, that's like third party technology that you just plug in. It's like boom, you just are making money. That didn't exist for emails.

We had to build it all. We built it all ourselves. Are you impacting and helping a lot of people? Do you get a lot of messages from people saying, man, you totally? Yeah, if we like tell people to respond, and we say like, hey, like let us know what you think about this thing of this thing,

we'll get thousands and thousands of replies in one day. On a normal day, we'll get hundreds of replies of just people reaching out, or we'll get people mailing us stuff, or just showing up at the office. It could be small, like you made me sound more intelligent when I was interviewing for this position, and I was able to shoot the shit with this guy who was interviewing me and it kind of built

rapport and I got a job. Other times it's like, you inspired me, now I just started a company. We've had people who have come to our conferences and they've started huge companies and they've recently sold them. We just helped create a generation of wealth for this person and that's pretty cool. So it changes, or it could just be like, I was bummed today and you just made me a little happier. So yeah, we get that type of stuff all the time. It's cool. So it changes, or it could just be like, I was bummed today and you just made me a little happier. So it's, yeah, we get all that, we get that type of stuff all the time. It's cool.

Do you guys have a way for connecting like the subscribers besides like your events that you do sort of live and in person? Yeah. So we have about 4,000 ambassadors. An ambassador is someone who has gotten a unique URL and gotten their friends to join the hustle And we have a Facebook group where they hang out and we have a lot of really cool investors like Tim Ferris or The guys who start bleach report and all these really cool companies and we'll have them do live Question and answer sessions in the Facebook group. So we talked to that's like where our most loyal folks will Hang out and then we're expanding to other types of content. So we'll be able to talk to them throughout the day soon.

But right now it's besides live events and email. Our company is like so simple. A lot of people are surprised that it does what it does. Just off that, but that's pretty much what it is. Yeah. It's that was a simple. Like just keep it simple, stupid. With with your events, you get you do them once a year. How big? That was just simple. Yeah, I love it. Just keep it simple, stupid. Yep. With your events, you do them once a year. How big do you get?

Well, we do a couple other ones. Oh, you do, okay. We do, we have this one called 2X, and it's basically what it's like to succeed and all about the struggle from females in the tech world and entrepreneur world. And so we'll, we do that in LA in San Francisco. And we've got some coming up in Chicago, New York, and Austin. And we'll do those and we'll have, like we did, when the one in San Francisco and we've got some coming up in Chicago, New York, and Austin. And we'll do those and we'll have, like we did when the one in San Francisco, we sold close to a thousand tickets in like 24 hours.

Wow. So that one's more of a female centric type of that one is female centric. And so what do they get when they go there? Are there like booths or is it speakers? So I'm from, or I moved here from National Tennessee. I'm a huge music fan. I studied music business. And so the whole idea early on was like,

let's try to make it as exciting as a concert. And so they're all most nearly every one of our big events is done in a music venue or something that feels like a theater music venue. And so it's typically like a talk. Oh, okay. We do have boost and stuff like that, but it's more like a show as opposed to a trade show.

And then what about your hustles called hustle con? Hustle con, conference. What is that one all about? So that's at the Paramount in Oakland. We had close to 3,000 people show up last year. Wow. And Casey Neistat there. Casey Neistat, so we've had all types of cool people.

So we've had Casey Neistat, the guy who started Benobos, the founder of Pandora The founder of away travel we've had the have up with this one the guy started a mental warehouse You know like you're gonna like that guy that guy founder of Trubbies founders of Casper. Oh, wow You get some great ones Who was most interesting? The guy Miguel the founder of we work, he was probably the most interesting. Casey was cool.

Tom from, uh, Oh, Tom Billio. Yeah. He was interesting. But he was. Yeah, he was cool. Um, yeah. Casey was interesting hanging out with him for the, like, or just talking to him for a little while was, was, was pretty interesting.

I have, I'm, I curious to hear from you because we notice something, uh, when we interview or talk to like these, talk to these YouTube type celebrities, they tend to be very different than the personality they have on the show. Did you find that at all? With Tom, I did. Tom was so personal and just like a guy hanging out, but then when people were surrounding him,

he was like this inspiration. Who turned it on, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Casey was very hyper, and I like, I'd be like, Casey, pay attention to me. Here's a microphone. And he was like, ooh, look a flashlight.

It's like, we should try the flashlight in his eye. And then he was like, oh, if you watch the talk, he's got like duct tape on his leg, because in the back, he's like, oh, look at this tape. And he's like, he started tearing it, just like sticking on it on his legs. And I was like, Casey, look at me. And he's got to pay attention, please look at me.

It's cruel. So yeah, that's exactly what it was. So he was way more hyper than you, when I would have fun. I find a lot of them are like that, because it takes this kind of different personality to get on this camera and look at it, pretend like you're talking to millions of people

with all this energy, right? Yeah. I find that they're a lot different. I also think it's just entrepreneurs in general tend to be a little bit, I don't know, a little different. I mean, you're obviously an entrepreneur, kind of the prototype. Do you find some, like, that you see certain characteristics kind of are similar between entrepreneurs?

Yeah. Well, I think to most of the time, to have extreme success, it typically takes an extreme personality. And it's a struggle. I mean, hell, I just came here from my therapy. So like, so it's like, there are, it's fucking hard to do this shit and it's stressful every single day and it makes you weird.

So I don't know if you start weird or if it makes you weird. That's cool that you admit that. I was gonna ask you because you referred to yourself as a nerd a few times, but you actually seem to have this really outgoing personality. Has that been something that you've you've developed over time? No, it's gone the other way So I feel as though I was very outgoing, but now I'm way more introverted

So I am pretty outgoing, but at the same time I don't drink alcohol I don't do drugs and so when I'm not working I just like to be at home and I don't like doing anything I don't like being around anyone. Like really quiet stuff. Yeah, because I get enough of this. Well, not like this, but like people messaging you on Facebook or tweeting at you or emailing you. I don't want to talk to people because I need to like turn off my brain.

I actually find that very common. I think that's, we all would agree we're the same way too. When you talk for a living and you're constantly interacting with hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, when I go home, I just want to shut. that's we all would agree were the same way too. When you talk for a living and you're constantly interacting with hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, when I go home, I just want to shut off completely. Yeah, and it's like, let's say that you want a lot of money in life,

and once you get a little money, you're like, oh, okay, that's cool. What else is there? You know what I mean? And it's almost like that with attention. So it's like, oh, I wanted a lot of attention. And then you start getting attention. You're like, oh, right.

I was, I've been in and out of therapy my entire life as a seven year old, my real father committed suicide. My mother married into an abusive relationship. So I'm no stranger to going to therapy whatsoever. Was that something that you just recently started in your adulthood? Or is it something you've been doing for a long time? I've always, when I was seventh and seventh grade, I read how to win friends and influence

people. So I was always like kind of weird about like understanding my own emotions and like how to like manipulate in a positive way, but manipulate other people's emotions to like feel good about themselves or whatever. So I've always been weird about that and I've always had depression and anxiety issues. So I've always been, I think that I'm a little neurotic and just high strung and like very aggressive and that's kind of made me succeed in a lot of ways

but it's also like just makes me a little nutty, like a little high, you know, just like wild tight. Yeah. And I also, I feel like weed would be so good for you. Yeah. I hate weed. Really? I don't do any drugs. I know I heard you say that I thought, God, that weed would be so good for you. Yeah. I hate weed. I don't do any drugs. I know.

I heard you say that. I thought, God, that's such a good one for you. See, if I should try it, April, paranoid drug, and I think it's San Dipponis and Mayor B. April 20th is such a great day for you. Dude, dude, get the wrong strength. This is common when you get, uh, first off, anxiety is, uh, as, uh, strongly correlated with high intelligence.

And oh, thanks. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually, no, this is a real with high intelligence. And oh, thanks. Yeah, we know. It's actually, no, this is a real statistic. And marijuana, I found that certain people, especially very smart people, just get more, like, they start to analyze themselves even more and get really paranoid.

Is that what happens to you? I hate it, yes. I've smoked very few times in my whole life. And when I have, I'm like, I'm never doing that again. That was good. It's like, I don't like to fly. Either I try never to fly.

And it's the same thing. It's like you're in a thing and you can't get out if you wanted to get out. It's too control. Yeah, it's like that freaks me out. It's so much. It's so I don't do that at all. And also I get addicted to shit.

So I don't. You know that about your personnel, aren't you? Yeah, so I don't, I, what are some, what are some things you've been addicted to? Well, alcohol. Oh, for sure. So I don't know that. It are some things you've been addicted to? Well, alcohol, for sure. So I don't, I don't know that. It took me, it was, I had to get off that

and that was a huge deal. So I don't know. When did you realize that? How long were you? It's been about five years. Okay. So I just kind of went wild between ages like 19 and like 22. No, 19 and 23.

Okay. And I just tend, whenever I'm into something, it's all I ever think about, it's all I ever want. And whenever I'm into something, it's all I ever think about, it's all I ever want. And so I just like, well, so I'll do it as much as I can. I just get obsessed with it. So I try my hardest to only get obsessed with healthy things. For a long time, it was sugar. That was my thing.

Sugar? I just love sugar. Like M&Ms, I just eat so much of it. Or just like whipped cream. Whipped cream? Yeah. Sugar, I just love sugar, like M&Ms, I just eat so much of it, or just like whipped cream. Oh, I love it. Whipped cream? Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's just like,

cause that's like a way you can consume a lot of sugar and don't fill you up. I just love that shit. Or like, right now it's Coke Zero. That's my obsession. For a long time it was watermelon. I just get obsessed with like certain types of food, particularly sugar based food.

That's funny, that's funny. So through this process with the therapist and knowing this about yourself and you're not a drug guy, have you found other things to help you with that? Do you meditate? Do you find that really travel? What are the things that help this create balance for you? Well, so the unfortunate part is that most of those things that give you that immediate dopamine rush are bad for you.

So drugs and alcohol, sex could do it, but it's not as immediate. And running does it, but it takes like 20 minutes to like really get those endorphins going. You know what I mean? With alcohol, you just take a shot and you feel it. So running has helped. I'm a runner. So that has helped. I do meditation every morning.

Sugar was unfortunately my thing for a while, but I've tried to stop that. In reading, reading biographies has been like a real drug. That's like, I get a pretty obsessive about certain types of people, and I'll just like research and learn everything I can about them. Any favorites in the last year or two?

Joseph Kennedy, JFK's father. He's super interesting because at age 24, he said, I'm gonna get so wealthy that all of my kids, I'm gonna have a fuck ton of kids, and all of them are gonna be so wealthy that all they're gonna be able to do is being government because I'm already taking care of money, and that's exactly what happened.

And so basically, Joseph Kennedy was interested because he basically made modern, a lot of people don't know this. He made modern Hollywood, Hollywood. So like back then, there was a whole bunch of issues where they were like, oh, we don't trust these Jews. You know, like, it was a lot of anti-Semitism and he was a white guy and so basically, he kind of came in

and changed shit. And then Spielsburg came in. Yeah, and it changed it all. It was basically a ton of anti-Semitic thought and he took advantage of that because he looked like me. He was a blonde hair white guy that people happen to trust, even though he was incredibly unethical and really shady. Oh, really?

Yeah, he was very unethical, and he was not a good guy in some sense of that. But anyway, he also helped delay World War II. And so he was very, had his hands in culture, and that's why I find him to be incredibly interesting. Are you ever worried because you get into things, helped delay World War II. And so he was very, had his hands and culture and that's why I find him to be incredibly interesting. Are you ever worried because you get into things, you really get into them and then you seem to move on.

You ever get worried you can get bored with what you're doing now and you have to do something else? Worried, no, but I embraced that. That's my thing. No, I'm not worried about that, but I don't really get bored with shit too easily, I guess. I mean, I get a, like I'm obsessed with business and making money, and so I don't think I'll ever get bored

of that. Maybe I'll get bored of a certain type of, of like business unit, but the cool thing about media and what we do is there's like lots of different business units in it, or there can be a lot. How do you see Sam? How do you see business evolving in the future for us? Like what are we in the middle of right now, and what do you, how do you see Sam? How do you see business evolving in the future for us? Like what are we in the middle of right now? And what do you how do you think things? I mean to me being someone who's 36 I already saw the difference. I didn't have a Facebook

I don't have an Instagram. I don't have any social media because that wasn't that cool when I was a kid growing up I did I did without it. I actually had built successful businesses without it But now it's like a necessity, right? Yeah, so what do you see now and where do you see us going? Well, in my small world of Silicon Valley, I don't know how involved you guys are with that, but in my small side of the world of this whole Silicon Valley venture capital type of thing, money is flowing freely, money is good,

anyone with any idiot with an idea can get a million bucks. Same thing with these crypto thing, anyone with that puts ICO next to something, it's gonna be huge. That's gonna change in the next decade for sure. And so what I think is gonna happen is, these guys who think that they can get a $5 million valuation off just an idea and raise a million bucks,

or sometimes a $10 million valuation, just off of a stupid idea of like, let's say, have you guys seen HQQ that trivia game? Okay, it's like Jeopardy, but it's basically just a guy. It's cool. But anyway, it's just like a trivia game that you'll see it's everywhere now. Anyway, they raised money at a hundred million dollar valuation and it's only been around for six months and they have a lot of users. They have a million users. They've only been around for six months, but I mean Where's the business? Yeah, what is it? Where is the business? And it's only six months old and anyway $100 million fuck no

So anyway that type of shit happens all the time. Why though? Why is that happening right now? Well because there's cuz there could a bunch of VCs that are just excited to give all these Silicon Valley kids fucking money is that yeah, but that's how it works You only need one Facebook to return a whole fund and so Basically, that's how the game works. It's just right now wallets are looser. So like We could have hated on fit we get when Instagram got bought a lot of people thought it was the stupidest thing ever and now they make a Probably I don't know they probably make 15 billion bucks a year and they were bought for a billion dollars. That's a great deal But they there's just like now people are just making lots of bets like that.

So the strategy kind of works. It just won't work. Like a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand that a venture capitalist is gonna make 100 bets and only really like three or four of them actually need to work in order to make a fuck ton of money. Like they don't understand that like one investment is gonna thousand X and all the rest are gonna die. And a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand that like one investment is gonna thousand X and all the rest are gonna die.

And a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand that. That look like this, you're only one of a hundred to this guy. You're not important necessarily to him. And so, but they think that they are the one and they could be the one. But anyway, the thing that's gonna happen I think is that profitability is gonna matter real soon once the markets go to shit. And never leave they will. There'll be some kind of correction. Right, right. It's gonna matter real soon once the markets go to shit. And never leave they will.

There'll be some kind of correction. Right, right. And they will. And people are not gonna make a 10,000X off Bitcoin. That should not gonna happen all the time. And you're gonna have to have fundamentally sound companies, which people do not have right now. Many people do not have.

And so I believe that's the, in my world of venture capital and technology, that is gonna change probably definitely in a decade, probably way sooner than that. Well, I would think it would favor a guy like you though, because you guys tend to have a very well-oiled machine right now, it's good. We make profits.

It's good for us. And I understand the idea behind some of that, you know, with a big business, a restaurant, it'll take a year to make back your money. If you, you know, a restaurant, say, for Cisco, that probably takes a million dollars. I get that and you won't make that back for a while. Understand, I understand that.

But many of these companies who are raising large, large rounds, I don't think will ever make anything. And I think that will change. The hype, the hype is so big right now. Right, have you ever gotten to a conversation with someone about ICOs? No, oh yeah, no. Do you someone about ICOs? No, oh yeah, no. Do you know about ICOs?

No, okay. And ICO is a, okay, I'm gonna sound like an ADX explaining it, but this is how people believe it. And it is kind of true, but an ICO is a, what, initial coin offering. So these companies create their own coins, their own crypto coins. And then people buy them and they hope to trade them.

It's basically like stock, but they want these coins to be currency. But basically, you have all these, basically the guys who used to live in Las Vegas and post photos of them with money and cars, they're got into this world, because they're like, fuck, we can basically get all of these, we can tell these people we have this amazing technology, and get them to buy all these coins and then pump it up. It's like penny stocks, pump it up and then sell it,

and then sell it and then they're left with it and who cares? Yeah, pumping up is happening big time with the crypto. It's pumping up, so this is exactly what it is. And I do think that there is some great technology in there. There are some real folks in there. There's just a lot of shardalentants and it's, if you go and look at some of these big ICOs and Google the founders and look at their Instagram

and you can kind of tell, I want the person who looks disgusting and like an alien to be doing, like, you know what I mean? I don't want like a good looking guy to be crushing this. It is Ferrari and shit. That guy is not the guy I want to be doing this. I want the guy to like have like,

like spaghetti stains on his t-shirt. Because he's in the fucking computer all the time. Right, because he doesn't leave his room. I want him to have like shit under his eyes, because he hasn't slept. I don't want him to be good-looking, and I don't want him to talk about how fiddies and I don't want to see his abs. If he has abs, I'm not doing it.

He's working his ass off for that. Right, right, right. And so basically what's going on is you have all these people with these ICOs, and it's gonna fail really. Anytime you have an emerging market that's exploding, you have a bunch of shit that comes along with it and eventually it clears out and then the winners. Right, and the famous one of the favorite Joe Kennedy stories is he's like, look, anytime

that he goes, he pulled this money out of the markets during the great, right before the Great Depression started because they were in a bull market and right before that and he goes, the shoe shine book boy gave me advice on which stock to buy. And at that point I go, this is not a good idea. I gotta get out of this, there's too much hype. I've heard that quote before, that's brilliant. So once the shoe shine boy gives you stock advice you know send a bail.

And once like bros who have abs are telling me what to do with this ICO and they're saying I gotta invest in these quotes. That's how I feel about crypto. All right, crypto is now getting the point where it's reached so many people that you're hearing about it everywhere. Like I got a hairdresser doing my hair the other day and she's telling me I'm like, oh, fuck yeah, it's about time for me to sell all my coins.

And I own a bunch. I do too, you know, say I'm gonna make it's gonna do well. I bought it a long time ago. I'm happy. And I think there's like cool stuff around the technology. And I believe in that. No, I believe in blockchain. I believe totally this is the future of how currency will be doing but there being that be done But I definitely believe there are a ton of charlatans that are now getting involved in it So my theory was listen I'm gonna buy in it when a lot of these are low I've already more than double a lot of my money pull out what I've invested and then I'll just sit on the rest

If it goes somewhere and it goes whatever it thinks it may do then I'm sitting on some good money And I and I agree with you. I'm doing the same thing. But like some by that logic, there will be losers. Right. And I just, I feel horrible for what's gonna happen. I think. So looking in the world of tech right now, what company would you say is the most smoking

marriage right now to you? Like what company would you say? They look really good, but they're not doing some bus checks. There's a lot of that, don't you think? I feel like we continue to meet people who get, you meet them, they look so great on social media. And then you're displaying magic. What the fuck, dude?

What are they doing? And it's never that way, right? It always is, in actuality, you guys know, entrepreneurship is like 90% like, this fucking sucks. This is gonna fail. This is not gonna work. And then it's like, oh fuck, we got it.

It worked. Anyway, what companies do I think is just totally inflated? There's a company called Magic Leap in Florida. They've raised maybe $2 billion. And they create artificial, like a virtual reality experience. And they've never released a product. And it's been like that for like six or seven years.

$2 billion and maybe more. Maybe more. Maybe more. Look at the ones that did holograms. Yeah, that's what it is. Okay. And but they haven't released it yet. They just like tell it. They've been like a video that was really cool.

They had videos. And that was it. That's all they've had. They've had videos. It's a total match. It's like a Kickstarter video. Yeah, exactly. There it is right there. Yeah, so Magic Leap.

I don't know how much money they've raised, but it's in the billions. And they have this like video and shit that you could use, but you can't actually buy any of this, yeah. Okay. So, yeah, that's the thing. They just released this thing two weeks ago or three or four weeks ago. It looks cool as fuck.

Yeah, but that doesn't exist yet. That's hilarious. See, why don't we just make up some shit to do a website to get a bunch of money, promise a lot of things. Yes. Let's see, what else? There was this company called Theranos, where they raised a couple billion dollars, and the founder seems really cool. She's just like, like 31 year old, like Stanford dropout, which is interesting. I'm like, oh, that's cool. I would like her to win, but she's raised billions of dollars off this

claiming to have this technology where it can you barely have to poke your finger and you can give blood And so you can test your blood very very very easily turns out that might be a fraud So I'm not the authoranos That might crash and burn soon. So I would be nervous about that company if If I was one of the people who invested a ton of money. What yeah, they claim to do all this Crazy. What about winners? Who are who do you think are like looking for most underrated companies right now? You see you're gonna be bad asses in the future. Let's see. There's this company called Flexport and what they do is basically There's you know like shipping container like a, ship the ships, that ship, like, fucking everything.

Right. There's actually not that many of them in the world, but they, like, Is it Amazon trying to get their hands and all that? I would bet, I would bet they are. I mean, that's probably like a trillion dollar ship. I mean, that's actually huge. It is, like, how do you get like,

and Amazon's on their way for that. But it's so intertangled with government and so it's downstairs and all around. You gotta get around. It's already in the works, bro. Yeah. In the book, the four, they talk about that. Amazon's on their way to our town.

So are these guys, this company called Flexport. They're trying to build really cool technology that makes it easier to track where your stuff is. And also, basically, my father, like, my father's in the shipping industry. And a lot of times what they do is they'll be like, go, Mike Funkall's like, hey, you got room for this. All right, where are you?

Can you come here? And it's pretty kind of ghetto still. And so these guys are building really cool technology to make ocean, freight, the whole that whole industry more efficient. And I think that is awesome. And I think it's awesome because the guy who runs it, I've seen talks to them, he's a bad ass. And it's not a sexy industry.

And so there's probably not a lot of young competitors and they could crush it. Totally disrupt that, for sure. Yeah, they've already raised a bunch of funding, but I heard about them about two years ago. And if I was, who I was, maybe four or five years ago and I wanted to job, I would have applied at five years. What are your thoughts on, you made a comment too,

about the dropout at Stanford? What are your thoughts on education right now in the future of that? Ooh. I think that I did not go to that good of a school, and I left early, I ended up getting my degree, but I left early, and it was maybe $50,000 a year, tuition, and it was not a good school.

Schools like that should, you know, those are kind of scams. You know, like I used to make fun of like this guy Ty Lopez, I was like, that's a scam. And then I was like, wait a minute. That might not be a scam. This is the fucking scam that people are in a quarter of a million dollars in debt for this bullshit degree that they, like, were told they had to do. So I think that those schools are really screwed, but I actually do like my girlfriend went to an Ivy League school and I see the access that she has in the education she got

and I'm like, that was actually probably worth that. So I think that like the top, like the top, like my children, I'll be like, look, if you can't go to Ivy League, just go to like a cheap state school or go to a trade school. Because I think that's really important to know a trade. If they exist in that form at that time, because it's some information so accessible now,

it's kind of crazy to think that you would, someone would spend a quarter million dollars on, you know, learning something, by that time probably over half a million dollars, and you know, $300 books, when you can download something so cheaply. Yeah, and so, that's what I'll tell my kids is like, look, like, go to a state school, that's like,

I don't know what's a state school now, $10,000 a year. $10,000 or $20,000. So you can get your experience, because that's super important to learn and talk to people and party, that's all incredibly important. But if you can't, like I'm not giving you like 40 grand to go to a mediocre school, that's not reputable. Like, it doesn't make sense.

It's gonna give you any leverage by doing that. Right, you're just gonna end up like getting a $45,000 your job and being debt and you're gonna be left off, like you're gonna be screwed, like you're gonna thank me for doing, you know what I mean? I know so many, I'm thankful, my parents helped me out and I got a scholarship, so I'm way more lucky than most people. But imagine, do you guys graduate with your debt?

Dude, my best friend is a vice principal, but he has a $100,000 in debt. Hold, my best friend is a vice principal, but he has a hundred thousand dollars in debt. Hold this, he's worth 36. Okay, so that's gonna let, I mean, you're fucked. Right, let's pay you that forever. What's the interest rate, 7%. I don't know his interest rate. I think he has a pretty good deal though on his interest rate,

but he's pretty much just guaranteed. He's gonna be paying that loan for the rest of his life, a couple hundred bucks a month for the rest of his life. You're fucked, right? If I was, if I did, I I moved to San Francisco to start a company. I only had a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars at the time, there's no way I could have done that if I had to make even five hundred dollar a month payments.

Like it's such a disadvantage. I'm so fortunate that I didn't have that and I got lucky, but like. It's crazy they don't teach kids that are no one, there's no education around that, you think so? It's starting to happen, people are starting, so if you look at the trends Oh, here's a good example so I used to train a lot of people in the medical industry and

Like general practitioners are dropping off considerably because the cost of going to You know going to school then getting you know, you know, you know Becoming a doctor and then you have to do your internship and all that stuff and then you graduate and you're gonna make Not a ton of money because amongst doctors, general practitioners, they don't make as much as a surgeon. So a lot of them aren't doing that.

They're like, well, if I'm gonna go to school, be a doctor, I have to do this because I know I'll make this much because the general practice isn't that gonna earn enough to pay that back. And you're seeing a lot of people do that with a lot of different types of careers. There are certain careers you need to go to school for, but there's other ones where it just doesn't make any sense.

Like, why am I gonna go to school and get a hundred thousand dollar in debt for a business degree when I wanna be an entrepreneur? I might be better off learning as an apprentice working for another person who started a business. Just like that. I think apprenticeships are the way to go without a doubt. I think that's what we should do.

We've done that for a long time. We don't really do it as much anymore. Internships, they try to make that happen, but apprenticeships are the way to go. And that's why I think trade school is super interesting. I think that Americans kind of look down upon that type of work and I think that it's incredibly honorable and really needed. And it's incredibly important to have that skill and I think that now what we see is an

over supply of literally unskilled workers that graduate from expensive schools. It's like, okay, so you just spent four years in this much money. What's your skill set? What are you, like, what are you, what are you, what are you grade at? And they don't even know. Yeah, and what can you be world class at? Because unless you're world class at anything, you're not gonna achieve shit.

So like, what are you great at? And it's like, well, I don't know. You know what? It's like, you don't have to be great when you're 22, but like, what are you pretty good at? Hmm. What kind of advice do you have for young entrepreneurs? No, fuck that Sam.

What advice would you go back and give the, 15-year-old version of yourself? What would you go tell yourself? I don't think you should tell them anything. This kid's a hustler, man, for real. Seven years old, he's reading the book. Yeah, how to wear friends in every way of people. I remember I read that summer of seventh grade

and that was like what I was into. That says everything to me. You like hacked being popular? Yeah, exactly. I'm gonna figure this out. Well, really, it was like, how was into. That says everything to me. What would I be like hacked being popular? Yeah, exactly. I'm gonna figure this out. Well, really, it was like, how do you beat girls? And I was like, I was like a nerdy guy. Like, how do I make girls like me?

How old that would play out for you? It did okay. It was all part of the process. It did okay. Let's see, what would I give people? Well, a couple things, like if I had to couple things, if I had to start over again, or I would definitely, it was kind of cool in eighth grade and ninth grade to make fun of reading,

but to believe that I do believe the whole thing that everyone says of you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with most. And when you're 18, you can't really pick to hang out with super stars, but you can read about them all the time. and that's kind of the same thing. So I think that's important. I would just like read a ton. You know there's not a lot of people who have made massive dense in the world who, rather most all of them consider reading a hobby that they do a ton of. Right. So reading is incredibly important. I wish that I would have known what meditation was earlier on in my life. I used

to think it was just like a monk and like an orange blanket, like, hum, that's nonsense. That's not true. So meditation has been incredibly important to my emotional development. And I wish I would have known that early on because it would have saved me a lot of pain and a lot of time. I would have been able to know, been even more self-aware. I would also, I would get, what I tell people, I read this book by Robert Green called Mastery early on in my life. Have you read the power? Yeah, yeah, I love that one.

If you look, if you search the 48 laws of power summary, you'll see my summary is number one on Google. Oh no shit. Yeah, I'm a big fan of that one, but mastery is the idea of just how important it is to be really, really good at something. And so I would encourage everyone of their young, I'm like, look, it doesn't matter if you use this thing in your career or not, the act of learning

and becoming great at it. It's not only is it practical, practical, because there's always a, you can always make income for being the best at anything regardless if it's, I mean, like the, if you're the best like cartoonist, like you can make a job just like drawing cartoons for people at a conference.

Like you will always be able to make a living at something. It may not be a lot, but you always be able to make a living at something. But the act of like dedicating yourself and becoming world class at something, it's incredibly important. So like just get a skill, like pick something and make that your thing and be great at it

and don't be a generalist. Dude, I, the best advice I ever received, I remember I was only about 21 years old and it was a buddy of mine and he told me to stop focusing on the things that you're not good at, focus on what you're good at and be fucking great. Yes. That was the best piece of single advice I ever received

as a young kid or young entrepreneur growing up. It's made a world of a difference. I think that's so true. It's really important. It doesn't even matter if you use that all the time. Just get great at something. Right. You know, that's just so important. Because like I think of things really practically.

Like I even have like money set aside. So if I go bankrupt, I can like get a flight home. Like I'm like very practical, right? And like if you think about really practical, like be very practical, like let's say this doesn't work, this doesn't work out. Well, I can always get a job that pays probably 90 to $120,000 a year at a big company doing this

because I am good at this. So, that's like so important, just to have something you're good at. Yeah, there's no way you're going bankrupt, because if you did, we'd be the first ones to call you up to hire for that side of our business. But that's not even, that's not even how I think.

I think like, okay, like, how would my application get seen if I applied it into it? Like, do I know someone there who could like forward my application? Like, I'll see you in further. I like to because then if I know that I have the worst case scenario already planned out for, then I'm okay swinging for the fences

because I've accepted the worst case scenario and I know how I will find my way out. You know what I mean? I'm actually a very effective strategy. If someone taught me that years ago, and it's, I mean, because I can get paranoid about certain things like health and whatever, and they told me, well, become okay with worst case scenario

and you'll never be afraid. Yeah, so I'll like write out, like the worst case scenario is that I'll be homeless. So when I rode across the country on my motorcycle, I was like, okay, how do I feel with this homelessness? Like, do I feel comfortable with this? It's like, yeah, I feel okay with this. Like, I can manage, I got my tent, I kind of got it. That it's like, okay, am I okay with this

thing? That's a little bit higher. It's like, okay, I'm okay with all this stuff. Therefore, let's swing for the fucking fences. In my midst, I'm okay. Right. That's very cool. What's what's in the future for your brand? So we want to become a huge media company, a huge membership company, whatever you want to call it, we want to become a huge media company, a huge membership company, whatever you want to call it We want to become a massive thing that it creates lots of hopefully hundreds or hopefully thousands of jobs for people And so what we have coming up is we're going to be expanding our brand And so you'll see us in a bunch more places that we haven't announced yet, but basically You'll just see us a lot more places, I hope and so we've got these these conferences coming up called 2X, which you'll see in San Francisco, Chicago,

Austin, New York. And it's all about succeeding from a woman's point of view, because I go through a lot of different issues that most dudes have no idea about. And so it's kind of bringing those guys together. And so that's coming up. And we're also really going to hit our first million, our first millionth user.

So we're laser focused on going, getting to a million users. And just continuing pumping out great news every day. Any thoughts on moving into this space? In the podcast, you know? No, not yet, because I don't think it's our core competency. You, like a lot of people, you guys get it, but most people don't about how different

that is than writing and stuff like that. What do you think of the space? Are you interested in it at all? What do you think about the space? I am incredibly interested in it. I want to figure out how advertisers can track their spend, because right now advertisers will track. And like a lot of people don't use like, you know, mind body slash 99 designs. Right 99 designs right right right you know what I mean that's the way that's the only way right now and so there needs to be a better way to track that yeah so until that comes once that comes it's gonna shoot up it's in the middle it's in the middle of all the right yeah podcasting is exploded I mean we

started a podcast three years ago three years ago I would tell people about I'd have to ask them first do you know what a podcast is? And now I just ask people, what podcast do you listen to? So it's growing very, very quickly. Oh, it's huge. So I love expanding markets. This is gonna be, I mean, this is obviously, it's gonna be way bigger than radio even.

I mean, it's gonna be huge, right? Like, so, but I'm looking for a technology that will solve a solution to that advertiser problem because if that gets solved, I don't know how it could, but if it did, then there's no stopping it. Yeah, because they weren't able to do it with radio either, right?

Well, you have like Nielsen, you know, that kind of, there's like, oh, well, this many people heard it. What's that? What's that? Like Nielsen ratings where they have, they would basically put these black boxes on TVs and they can track what people are watching. And you have that for podcast too, but I don't know positive if the data is always accurate. No, I don't think it is at all. And right now the way we handle our

sponsors back and forth so we know, I mean as long as they I think the way they look at it as long as they get their ROI on it, they're fine. They don't think, because you can't track exactly, that person could have came, they listened to our show, they first heard about it there, but then they came around and bought it another way and you have no idea to prove that you did or didn't, right? Right, and I think that I bet that could be solved somehow. There's got to be smart guys working on this. This will get solved for it.

But what was the, I think the industry last year in 17, I think it was only like $220 million spent on podcast advertising. Yeah. You're gonna see that quadruple this year. It needs to, it needs to like keep going. We already see it right now, we already see what's happened. I mean, we use the real estate on podcasts. I mean, it's limited, right?

Cause you only run one, two, maybe three commercials if you're really good at it. And so it's limited real estate. And you have all. It's very intimate. This year, we're starting, or recently, we're starting to see companies now that have a budget for podcast marketing.

Whereas before, maybe we should be considering this. There was no podcast marketing budget. We'll talk off air about some of the numbers and things like that, for sure. I mean, I was really excited to meet you and talk to you about the side of the house that we're currently building and working on right now. And we're open to share all the stuff

that we know. Yeah, it's interesting. I know barstool is doing, I mean barstool sports, you guys follow those guys. They're just like a podcasting network at this point it seems. Yeah. And they're just crushing it.

Tim Ferris, he's one of our investors, he tells me, or he told me some of the numbers and I was like, what? Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, obviously crushing it. Tim Ferris, he's one of our investors. He tells me, or he told me some of the numbers and I was like, what? Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, obviously crushing it. Awesome. Very, very, very fascinating. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming in, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. You're a real cool kid. I say kid, but yeah, a really fucking cool guy, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm really happy to see you succeed like this. This is awesome. Well, hopefully it's anyone. Yeah, it's definitely early. Good stuff. Alright, check it out. Go to YouTube, subscribe to our channel Mind Pump TV. This month, we have 30 workouts or 30 days of fitness free for all of our listeners.

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