My First Million - Samir Chaudry: Why 99% Of Content Creators Fail At YouTube

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

Episode 491: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) talks with Samir Chaudry (https://twitter.com/samirchaudry) — Youtuber and co-host of the Colin and Samir. You’ll hear Samir share how he prepares for interviews with folks like Tim Ferriss, MKBHD and Dream, where he thinks the creator economy puck is heading, what he’s learned from working with MrBeast, which Youtubers are building billion-dollar empires, and much more. Subscribe to Samir's newsletter → https://www.thepublishpress.com/ Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:00) High stakes interviews (5:15) How Samir preps for big interviews (11:45) Learnings from Tim Ferriss interview (19:45) The next wave of creators (26:00) The future of the creator economy (34:30) AI tools Samir uses (37:30) What’s MrBeast actually like? (44:00) If Samir was advising MrBeast… (49:00) Why Samir made a newspaper (56:00) Creating scared (1:05:30) Hiring a collaborator (1:07:45) Most interesting creator businesses (1:18:55) Which Youtubers are building billion-dollar empires? (1:39:30) How long does it take to “make it” on Youtube? (1:44:10) Dabblers vs. Masters — Links: • Publish Press - https://www.thepublishpress.com/ • Autopod - https://www.autopod.fm/ • Dude Perfect - https://tinyurl.com/4jdpsbkj • Cody Ko - https://www.youtube.com/c/codyko • Chicken Shop Date - https://tinyurl.com/2wbfu9xc • Deestroying - https://www.youtube.com/@Deestroying • Paul Rabil - https://www.youtube.com/c/paulrabil • PPL - https://premierlacrosseleague.com/ • Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. — Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Tell me about Mr. Beas. He, like, is so unique in the fact that he is laser-focused in a way that I've never really experienced. And maybe at times, like, in a way that... I don't want to experience. Yeah. He doesn't want to... No. I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. You're about to hear a conversation I recorded with Samir when I went down to L.A. I've been following these guys. for a little while, they are knee-deep in the YouTube game. And if you're a content nerd like me, somebody who really thinks about, okay, what is great content? How do I use content to build my business, which is what I've done?

Then these guys are very interesting because they know everything about YouTube and all the YouTubers. They've done interviews with Mr. Beast and Dream and all a bunch of the large YouTube channels. We talked about a bunch of things. What makes a great interview? How do you do? What are the questions you ask? How do you prep?

and how do you show up the right way if you're going to do an interview. We talked about quality of audience versus quantity of audience. How do you think about not just the numbers, but like the real trick, which is getting the right type of people to actually watch your stuff?

Hanging out with Mr. Beast. So they've spent days and days with Mr. Beast. I wanted to ask them, what do they learn about this guy? He is the most popular YouTuber in the world. He's one of the most popular entertainers in the world, period. It's rare you get that kind of access to that type of person.

and I wanted to hear some stories and he told me some good ones. Then we did five great creator businesses that you've never heard of and some predictions. What YouTubers does he think have the potential to build billion dollar empires under their content? He gave me three that he believed could be the case. And there's a bunch of other frameworks. So things that you only really have these insights if you've been doing something for like 10 years. You've been thinking about the same thing from every angle for 10 years. Those are some of my favorite people to talk to.

All right. So enjoy this conversation with Samir. Colin and I, you know, spent a lot of our career making documentaries. And what we noticed was like if we were interviewing a subject and we were just interviewing them head on, we wouldn't get good answers. And then we started taking them like driving or have them do something else. And then you would get the truth. Oh, that's interesting.

It was like the truth comes out in the car. I think it's something that some documentarians say where it's like if someone's doing something else, they're much more open if their mind isn't 100% all. on the interview. Why is that? You think they're just performing, basically, when they sit down in an artificial environment? Probably, yeah.

There's a lot of like self-perception stuff that's going on, right? It's like, how am I coming across? Who am I? Is this sounding right? And if you're distracted, then you. But you guys do your interviews at a table, basically. Yeah. So you don't do that.

Well, we've been trying to explore, like, the concept of creating the right energy for the conversations, right? Yeah. Like, you think about, like, this has a completely different energy than if there was a table. has a completely different energy than if we didn't have mics and we were laughed or had booms. So we've been trying to explore like where our show is moving and what type of space we want. That's essentially exactly where I wanted to start, which is basically you guys do.

So we came down here and we were like, oh, let's get like a place. Let's have some in-person interviews with people that we think are awesome. And it's different than the like at home thing for sure, right? The vibe is different. You get a different energy. But also you can. You can do like high stakes interviews almost. It's like the whole day kind of gets built around this interview, which is not really the

case when you do it online. And you guys have been doing some high stakes interviews. So you're doing stuff with, I mean, just recently, as I saw the Tim Ferriss one, that was great. And I'm guessing you're like me that you grew up kind of like really into Tim Ferriss's stuff and I kind of admire him. Yeah, it was pretty surreal. And so that's a high stakes interview. You did Mr. Beast.

You did Dream. We did a bunch of these things. First, do you prefer, like, being the interviewee? Or in this case, you're kind of like more the guest on the show. Do you prefer a guest or host? I like to talk. So, like, I like when we are the host and it is a conversation. I think that's the most fun for me.

Like, I do, I am a naturally curious person. And, you know, along with higher stakes, it's also, like, very, very interesting people that I'm inherently curious about. So that, to me is really fun. I think where it's, you know, where it gets challenging is if you don't have chemistry, but we actually now do pre-calls and kind of, not like chemistry reads, but we try and gauge what our chemistry is with the guest because we've been in situations where the chemistry is not good. And then you're like, okay, how do I, like, where do we go from here?

How does this work? And when you're the producer of the show or it's your show, in the middle of it, you're like, okay, is this going to perform? The voice in your head starts going on. Yeah, how do I edit this? And that then puts you into a whole, like a decision. Yeah. So let's say you were doing one of these kind of like interviews you're pumped for a I'll call it a high stakes interview. How do you kind of walk me through how you're preparing for that

and how you're like just kind of like getting ready to perform that. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, we've been really trying to establish our relationship with prep because we found that sometimes if we're overly prepped, I'm barely listening to the other person. I just know where I'm going. Yeah. I know where I'm going. And also how much of them I listened to prior. Because if I know there's I know their beats. I'm kind of like, you know, a bit. Curiosity wanes. Yeah, the curiosity wanes. So, um, been trying to explore that relationship. We do have a, like, we have a team that essentially develops a research doc, like someone on our team who does that. He was like, here's, here's kind of like some origin story. And we, we structure it like a act one, act two, act three

structure. Where, where is their origin story? What's the inflection point? Right. Where has that put them today? Right. Because it's like, what was the tense part of the journey? What, what didn't work for them? Do we know any of that? Is there something we can ask about that creates an inflection point? Because we are trying to tell a story with it. Yeah.

So we need to know the general themes of what's happening in the origin, right? The act one, what's happening in the conflict, the act two, and then the resolution and the future. Right. So that's like the most- Without knowing all the details. Without knowing all the details.

Yeah. So, yeah, we're trying to establish a new relationship with that of how much is it like curiosity and how much is it prep? And I think that's become more substantial for us as the landscape of interview shows is getting more and more saturated, right? Like when we interviewed, you know, certain creators three years ago, no one else was interviewing creators. So it was kind of like, okay, this is a talk show for our own community. Right.

Doesn't exist anywhere else. Now we're a part of a group. And that then pushes you to try and become more singular and more differentiated. And chemistry, how you show up, who the hosts are matters. Right. I think you guys have done actually a really good job of that. I think about your show a lot because I think... Tell me more. What are we doing well? Well, I think you have to be... It's similar because there's two hosts, right? Which is really hard. Which is really hard in interviews, but probably you have a better reception when it's just you and Sam on a lot, right? It's like when you're building a show that's guest dependent or all about the guest bookings, it's like, some people will look at this and be like, I don't know who that is. I'm not going to click on it. Some people will give it a chance because they trust you. But really, it's... If it's you and Sam, you can carry the show and then you become less reliant on booking.

So I do think, like, Colin and I have been thinking a lot about that. How do we instill some of that? How do we think about that? But we are just like, the show takes us to really interesting people like Tim Ferriss. And so right now in this moment, it's like, yeah, you keep riding it. Like, this is cool. The type of outreach we have is really cool. The people we get to talk to is really cool.

You said something like, how do I show up? I think about this a lot because when it comes to like sports, we're used to an athlete. having like a pregame routine, a meal, a nap, a stretch thing, a warm up. They're wearing the headphones or listening to their song. Yeah. They get the motivational speech. They run out there. They do the warm ups.

And then they play. Yeah. And but for other types of people who need to perform, it's like, what are you doing? Why do you need to sit down and talk, right? It seems so easy. It's definitely presence. Like, you have to become very present. Right.

In the conversation. And so there's a couple different things to try and do that. For me, personally, I've discovered this. 11 minute Wim Hof breathwork online. Dude, I think it's brutal. I do that a lot. Have you done it? Yeah, yeah, there's so many people who know this exact one. It's like 11 minutes. He's just like his free YouTube like top ranked YouTube one.

And he's, his accent is amazing. Come on. All right, guys. Yeah. It's so good. And like that just gets me in the zone. Like I love doing that. It's so good.

I want to do that right now. Oh, guys. Yeah. Do you do it laying down? Yes, I do it laying down. Because that's his way. That's his way. On your back.

Yeah. So we made a documentary about WIM years ago. And so like I've just been... Which one? I might have seen it. It's, uh, it's on Yes Theory's channel. It's called Frozen Alive. Colin and I actually edited that. Okay. Um, yes. This is it. Yes, this is it. It's so good. Yeah. So, so good. So... Lie down. Sit down. Whatever it sticks. By the way, this is good as a like, uh, I do this. Like, whenever we have like a team retreat or like, we need to do something. Um, I'll be like, hey, guys. Like, like, if you're down, let's do something. Um, I'll be like, like, if you're down, if you're down, let's do something. something a little bit weird. Yeah. They're like,

what is he going to say? And this is not so weird. Totally. They're down with it. And you definitely feel energized right at the end of it. Yeah, I try and get present. Like I try and take out a lot of the variables.

I think as we've built a team, what's been great is like, it used to be me and Colin being like, okay, where do the mics go? Where do the cameras go? Or does the lighting look good? And that can be really stressful. Yeah. I mean, for example, our most recent interview with Mr. Beast

when we went out to North Carolina, you know, we were there for a full day prepping for the pod, but at the last minute, realized we didn't have a table. And Colin and I went to a furniture store in North Carolina two hours before we sat down with him and we're just scrambling to buy a table and then have to arrange for it to be delivered. And basically it all happened within a matter of, you know, that was a very stressful two hours prior to sitting down. And I felt very not present

in the first half of that. Right. You know, I was just coming off like, okay, that, that was intense. Why didn't I think of that kind of immediately already being retrospective of the process You know, and so all of that stuff, I think you just have to eliminate. I made a bunch of mistakes like that when this podcast started with me doing long form interviews. Like the first 20 episodes were just me interviewing people at a studio and whatever. And I kind of like got reps there. And then it switched at like, I don't know, episode something 40 or something like that to me and Sam as like a recurring thing, which was like way different prep. You know, turnkey set up, already have good chemistry.

don't have to book guests, don't have to research guests, just like be ready to talk about interesting things and like just turn up the sort of charisma as much as you can. But now that I got back into being like, all right, let's try to like, we have this amazing network. These are fascinating people to talk to. Let's just, let's do it. And I told Ben, I called Ben after the first one. I was like, dude, that was like an hour or too long because I did three hours. I thought I was Joe Rogan for a minute there. I did three hours way too long. And then I was like, I overprepped like crazy and the thing you were saying where you're like, yeah, I'm listening. But in my head, I'm like, okay, I'm supposed to beat to this next.

I was like, that wasn't right. And so, it's hard. Before this, we went to Daven Busters in between interviews and, you know, play Popper shot and I got in a good, good zone and now I'm here. It's either that or Wimhoff, you know, David Busters or Wim. If you don't have a local David Busters, so you're unfortunate enough. I thought you're going to say if you don't have a local Wim off of us. You always got Wim. You've had a bunch of these, yes, who's somebody that's been a lot of fun that you guys have had on recently that's like, you know, giving you those kind of like mind blown, my brains leaking out my ear, like, who's done that for you recently?

Yeah, it's hard to not say Tim, Tim Ferriss. You could say Tim, it's cool. But tell me what was dope about the Tim one. With Tim, it was the fact that he's been doing this for so long. And he really opened my eyes to this concept of having a very high quality audience. And I look at Tim and I think he has like an incredibly high quality audience. And I think we make a lot of sacrifices because we distribute our stuff on YouTube for viewership. Right.

Right. Like it is, it's very odd that we have public performance metrics next to our work. There's very few other places where that happens, right? Like in business, it doesn't happen where you're like, here's how well I'm doing. And anyone can see that at any time. If you go to a Shopify store, it doesn't just show you sales. Yeah. How many sales is this had?

Exactly. The truest, rawest, like, benchmark is invisible. Imagine walking into a grocery store and it just has like revenue under every product. It's just, it's a very odd thing that pushes us to make decisions for larger viewership rather than higher quality viewership. And I think sitting with Tim, it was a deep understanding of how he's built a very high quality premium audience and a premium brand over a decade. And I think that- He said something in that interview to you. He was like, there's always a market for like the best.

The best, yeah. And he's like, so I wanted, whatever the ads were priced at, I was going to go like double that and be like, that's, how do I get that to be the thing? Because that will always be there. There will always be a market for whoever's got the highest quality audience with the best ad read, you know, that's, that'll always be there. And I think that's played out. Yeah. And I think what's important is to, for us as creators to realize, like, what we are doing is not novel. It's been done before. We're building audiences, we're media companies. You know, like, this has been done before. And we should look far. back at who's done it really well. Yeah. You know, and I think that sitting with Tim was that opportunity. And, you know, almost as a self-fulfilling prophecy, like the type of people who reached out to us after the Tim episode really was emblematic of, it is a high quality audience that watches

Tim and that's interested in him. It was not our highest performing episode. Right. But it's one of my favorite and it's one that drove a lot of high quality outreach. Right. And it reminded me of that, of we can get really caught up in, you know, high viewership, but I think that was something that really pushed me in. There's a lot of stuff in there.

There's something that I never forget that he said, which was if you do something that is even slightly energy depleting, it will compound over time. And to like really look at your day to day and recognize what is depleting your energy because it'll compound over 10 years. When you say that, it's like, I feel like everybody can think of like the one thing right away

that you haven't been like really paying that much attention to. But when prompted, your brain is like, of course it's this. Yeah. And this is, you know, this is four hour work. week from his book, but he talked a lot about who are the right clients to have. Like what, you know, money is not, we look at it as like, well, it's a lot of money, so I'll sacrifice these things for it. But if it, if the client relationship isn't good, if it's depleting your energy, if it's causing a strain on your team, it's not worth it. And all those viewpoints are almost antithetical to our,

the internet age of us being like, all of this is infinite. Right. You know, we can always be making more money. We should always be pursuing more viewership, more money, more of everything. He came in with the perspective of what's the right money. What's the right view? So he said that energy depleting thing. What did you think of for you? I thought of like meetings. Yeah.

I'm like a creative person. I like to be creative. And I've kind of just spun myself up to be like, we run a media company. So I need to operate like a media company owner. And like I think about hosting meetings or being on Zoom calls. And I'm like, I really don't like it at all. So on the podcast once, Sam did a really funny rant where he was like,

you know, he's like long buildup. He was like, you know, I've been, uh, you know, we sold the hustle this many months ago.

It's been six months. I've talked to this person, this person. I've thought about all these things. You know what I realize? I'm a fucking artist man. And he just like, and I was like,

it's not what you think is coming when he, when he says it. And he also doesn't like, like, like he doesn't come across like an artist. Like some people that the way they dress, what they do, you're like, that's an artist.

Yeah. And he's like, I'm a fucking artist, man. I just need to create. And I'm going to keep doing that. No matter what the situation is, I should have. They said be an investor. I tried. I don't want to do that.

I don't want to do that shit. You know, I stopped doing it altogether. I just want to be an artist. And I think about that a lot, actually. I think there's like a great way to like kind of draw a line in the sand or I'm like, you know what? This is what I am because it gives me a bunch of energy and like, what is, what is that not like? You know, and how do I just not have to do it?

Maybe I don't have to do it at all. I think sometimes. I operate from an old model with a new business where, you know, I grew up, my dad's an entrepreneur. I'm from an Indian immigrant family. Like, it was all about going to his office, you know, clocking in the morning, clocking out, like being there every day, being present in front of your team. And I think we're just in a new world where it's like, is that, do I need to operate like that as a creative, as a creator?

I found myself that another thing that Tim said was, it was a quote from Whitney Cummings, but he said, if art imitates life, then you have to have a life. And I think that the mentality of like, I really want to succeed is, hey, I'm going to go to my office, I'm going to grind every day. I'm going to work really hard. But then as a creative person or as someone who's on a podcast, it's like, well, now I have very little experiences to talk about or, you know, it's kind of like I can tell you about the coffee shop down the street from here where I get coffee every day and then I come and sit here all day. Right. I'm so routine. Why does somebody want to listen to this? Why does anyone want to listen to if I don't have interesting life experiences?

There's a thing I realized, which was my, so my grandfather, like, what does your grandfather do or one of your grandfathers? Like, did they, like, have like, like, a factory job or like any, like, kind of like. Yeah, my grandfather that I knew, because the other one passed before I was born, had a, like, train engineering job in India. Yeah. Almost exactly the same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. some engineering, like a chemical plant of some kind. He worked there and, like, to him, work was you come to the factory where the ingredients are coming in, they're getting processed, there's fumes everywhere, and like, that's what work is and there's like a shift supervisor. Yeah. And then if he saw what my dad did, which was like, go to work with a briefcase, there's a computer on your desk.

You sit in a, like, kind of cubicle or desk, like, oh, sorry, office. And, you know, you take phone calls or you get on a flight and go to a business meeting where you're going to shake a hand and maybe do a paper contract deal. Like, that was kind of my dad's job. That's like what work became. Right. It's just kind of unrecognizable and looks much less serious than the chemical plant or the,

in the fertilizer factory or whatever. Yeah. And then like to my dad, what I do, he's like, are you ever going to work? Like, what are you doing? You're sitting in front of your phone, you know, you're talking to who? Who's listening to this? You get paid for this? Like, well, if I get a bunch of views, then yes.

or like, you know, sometimes, you know, if it's like, I'm working. It's like, no, you're just fucking around on YouTube. It's like, right. That's exactly what I do. I'm looking for the most interesting things in the world. I'm synthesizing. And I'm going to talk about it. But it's like our version of work is unrecognizable to like, you know, our parents.

And then I'm like, oh, like, I just have kids and I just have two little kids. I'm like, whatever they're going to do is probably going to blow my mind. It's going to be so super unrecognizable. It's super unrecognizable. But every generation does that. I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting. Like I should kind of not write off those things that look like complete not work. And like our company got bought like Twitch, which is like if you watch people playing

video games for a living, it's like, what? This is not work. That was a very confusing era. I mean, even now at, you know, in my mid 30s, when I look at what a 20 year old creator is doing, it's hard for me to track. You know, I spend a lot of time on YouTube. I spend a lot of time talking to YouTube creators. But this next wave of creators is kind of like, wait, what's happened?

what's going on? What's the name of the girl who's like going viral because she's like a NPC? Yeah. Pinky doll. Yeah. I was like that's like that's the thing? I don't know.

Is that what our kids are going to do? They're going to be a vending machine. All of this is so like it brings so much about like who are we as people like what what is that we're into? Have you seen this thing? It's really strange. Have you seen Pinky doll? Basically she's she's just standing there and like people are donating using the TikTok

live thing. Have you guys seen this? Yeah. There it is. Gang gang. Mmm, ice-fews so good. Thank you, Jackie. Gang-gang, gang, gang, gang.

Oh, special. Gang-gang. Rha. Rha. Gang-gang. Gang. Gang. Balloon.

Gang-gang. That was good. Lemonade. He-ha. So, she just, whatever. If they donate the cowboy, she always says the same thing, the same way, like a, like, she's a bot. And she's just making, like, I don't know, like, whatever she was she making, like. $7,000 a day.

$7,000 a day. Yeah. Gang-gang. Gang-gang. Geng. Geng. There's all these funny memes too of like guys filming their girlfriend like doing this now. Right, right, right, right.

I know. I think it says a lot about what we crave as audiences. Obviously, there's like a lot there to unpack of what we're into. But the interactivity, like you think back to entertainment, even when we were growing up, it was like the TV told you what was on. It was a lean back experience. Right. Turn on TV. If what you wanted wasn't on, you just waited.

And you may not even know. You don't know. You're super into these like. niche cooking shows until the yeah till chopped comes out and you're like oh exactly i didn't know i wanted to watch other people cook and i don't know if you remember the tv guide channel it was a tv guide channel you just waited told you what was on channel 12 and if you missed it you had to wait a whole other hundred channels scrolled by so that was like a very lean back experience where we were like okay you tell us what's what to watch right um and then as we progressed there was like tvo and it was more

on demand it's like oh shit we can record a show and like have it on demand or see what's coming up um and now you accelerate it all the way to YouTube or Instagram and it's like I can search for what I want. I can curate my own entertainment. Now it's I can create my own entertainment, right? I can pay money and she will do something. Yes. That's like in that's the next level, right? It's like interactive entertainment where I'm not consuming it. I'm creating the entertainment. I'm part of making part of it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's what, you know, Twitch, I think is a great example of that too, right? Like people watching long live streams, why? It's because they can have an impact on it. Yeah, I think people don't really even actually understand what's going on with Twitch.

Like now I think it's accepted that Twitch is a thing, which took a while to be like, is that like a big deal? And it's like, yeah, it's actually a pretty big deal. But I think unless you use Twitch, I think people still sort of think the default is probably like,

uh, Twitch is people watching other people with video games live and so maybe they're really good at the game. It's like, yeah, that's part of it. But then some people are, you know, like a lot of people are just there for the chat.

A lot of people just using this background noise in another tab. Like I remember looking at some data when we were there about how many people are literally just, that's not the focused tab on Chrome. And some people are like, well, we should, we should like discount that.

And it's like, you talk to users. Like, no, that's like how I like to use Twitch. I'm not just, it's not like an accident and it's just running in the background. Like,

I listen to it while I work and I'm coding and I'm listening to this and I'll check back in. Like every, every time something interesting is happening, I hear the crowd war, basically I go look at the score and I go see what's going on. To me it's like the reinvention of the radio, right? Twitch has really operated like that.

But then again, where you get to play a part in it, Ludwig was another creator that we talked to on the show where he has developed this kind of adversarial relationship with his chat. Yeah, because the way you said it was interesting, you go, it's kind of boring if everybody's, if there's also just supportive, right? Yeah. It's like, you're right.

And I was like, I never really thought of it that way. And he's not adversarial like they hate each other. How would you describe it? Like what is, what's an example of like what's going on on his channel? It is so odd. There's so many different things that go on. I would say his subathons are probably the thing to, to bring into focus, which is essentially, you know, he'll go live for, he initially started as 24 hours. But every time you subscribe, every new subscriber, he extended it.

Right. So essentially they were. Like torture me. Yeah. It was an adversary, right? It was like, I want this to end. But when you take this action, it extends. Right.

Right. It extends an hour. So he ended up doing it for 30 days straight, live streaming for 30 days straight. But again, like, he's dead now. But it was okay. It was fun while it lasted. But that's an example of like having an adversary relationship, which is kind of like you can interact, but you're bringing me discomfort.

Right. You know, by doing this. So it makes it fun for the audience to play with that. And it's obviously like a joking relationship. Yeah. But there's something that's, you know, fun about that. And I think we should really think about these audiences, the young, audiences that are growing up with this, what do they want next, right? Because we are, we are thinking

about like the advancements of entertainment in the context of what we had and how advanced this is that we can self-publish on the internet and that people can comment and we can have Discord servers and we can engage with them. But there's, there's a whole other, you know, version of participation. Even think about TikTok, like, why do, why did TikTok become such a big thing? It's participation. It's like it was easy to participate. Oh, for anybody to make. Yeah, it's easy to, and they told you what to do. Right. Here's the trend.

Here's the dance. Here's the dance. Here's how you do it. Here's a hundred videos of people doing it. Right. Here's the sound. You try. Click this.

You try it now, right? Yeah. So even you look at Pinky Doll, right? What we're just talking about for you to do that, for you or I to start doing that. It's, we just start a live account. That's it. We just start. Like, there's the participation is so easy where we can either participate in the actual

live stream or become that creator within a matter of minutes. Right. What do you think next? where do you see the puck going with that? Obviously hard to predict. It's hard to predict, but I think. If anyone could, it might be you. Yeah, but I think what we have to realize is that TikTok taught us a lot about the fact

that the platform is the creator in that context, right? Like, if you take the top 10 creators off of TikTok, TikTok's still TikTok, right? You still open it and it's a for you page. You wouldn't even notice. It's almost reverting back to the lean back experience. I open TikTok and I say, you tell me what's going on, right? back to what we were just talking about with TV. It's just that it's personalized to every single person.

Yeah. So it's hyper-personalized, I think, is number one, right, when we think about the trends that are coming, which is already happening. But I think also, like, participation forward. So it's like, it's personalized, but it's really easy for me to engage in the action, too. And I think that's where maybe there's, like, two extremes. There's the Mr. Beast where it's like, I can't do, I can't buy a train and have it go into a ditch, which is something he didn't. this last video. And then the opposite end of the spectrum is like, here's what's happening on

YouTube shorts or TikTok. And actually really easy for me to do that. And I can try it myself. I'm in San Francisco. If you walk around SF, you, you know, you can't like, you know, you, you stub your toe. It's like, what did I step on? Oh, AI. It's like nothing is, the answer to everything is AI. And I kind of wonder if the answer to this is also AI, meaning you see the AI can draw, amazing art. Like a paint, you know, it can paint better than,

you know, a human can paint. It can paint anything you want instantly, whatever. It can write. It can make, you know, chat chPD can make rap lyrics.

And so I wonder, you know, do we just get to the point where actually the creator is, the algorithm is the creator. It just, it's hyper personalized. And here's just like, it's going to just deep fake and create something that it thinks you like.

And it's just going to try 10,000 variations per second. And then if anything starts to work, it starts to like go more down that rabbit hole for for more creators. Yeah, it might not even be a creator. It might just be self-generating video, right? That's what I mean. Yeah,

the algorithm is just making the video. It's just making the content. It's been like, because they have, I mean, an unreal amount of data, right? They're like, people like,

people like, have you and Sam been deep fake yet? Have you heard of my first million? Yes. I've heard a, I've heard of audio only, not a video one, but an audio only version.

That's a fake conversation. And how close was it? I mean, it's like, like, okay, if somebody listened to it, if my family member who doesn't listen to the pod, listen to it, they would just think this is the podcast. Yeah.

Because it doesn't sound robotic. Right. There's little moments, but it's like kind of passable. If you don't know what deep fakes are, you'd be like, I guess it just sounded like that. If you listen to the pod, you'd be like, oh, you're cool, but you're not really like substantively saying anything. Like, did you hear the one where they did Joe Rogan talking to Steve Jobs?

Yeah. And that one was pretty good. That one was good. I think they kind of edited it to like, make a cool demo. I listened to Joe Rogan and Sam Altman. which is it's a YouTube channel called the Joe Rogan AI experience. And I- Genius idea.

Yeah, it's a genius idea, but I clicked on it to find out, like Joe Rogan and Sam Altman talking about open AI and how chat GPT works. Right. Started listening to it to be like, what does this sound like? I want to hear one. And then I just was like, wait, this is just good and interesting.

Right. And then I just found myself listening to it. And then I was like, do I care? So if we can do that with the like V0.1, then you just have to believe like, okay, inevitably, that's where it goes. There's been a few of these that go viral, right? Yeah. The kind of AI, fake AI things.

Like there's one on Twitch. I don't know if you've seen the Twitch one of Biden and Trump debating. Yes. I think where we're going to see this all really skyrocket is during the election for sure, right? And it's going to get really weird. Crazy and weird. I brought it up about you because it happened to me and Colin recently where it was a video of me, Colin, and Mr. Beast talking about an online casino that he has.

had started. And it was also our lips were also deep faked. And was it on YouTube or? No, it's taken down. We got it taken down. We got it taken down pretty fast. But it was cool. Fuck that. Yeah, it was really compelling. But I mean, it was too compelling. Like people could click on it. It's like to the to just the untrained eye. It's like, oh, that could have been a moment from the podcast I didn't watch. I've had to have conversations with my parents about like, hey, be careful. Be careful. If someone calls you and it's, you think it's, it's, you think it's it's me, let's develop like a safe word, basically. With all of this, like, when you ask me what's next, the thing that's been on my mind the most

is physical experiences. I actually think that we're going to want things that are uniquely human in the coming years. I think we're going to want things that are like collective human experiences where, like, stand-up comedy. I think we were going to want to sit and be like, that human is standing there delivering that entertainment to me or plays in theater. I think we're going to want that.

And I think there's a lot of digital creators who are building really promising communities where people will show up, but a lot of online creators who are building high viewership, but no one would actually show up to something that they do. And I think that's, and what's the difference? I think the difference is the amount of personality that you inject into your videos and if people are willing to connect with that, right? Like long form podcasting is, there's people who, spend more time with you and Sam

than they do talking to their own mom, right? Or their own best friend. So they have this really in-depth parasycial relationship. You guys have done live events. People come. Right? And I think there's other creators who rip all of that out because they're looking at the algorithm and they're like, you know what?

When I inject my personality, 10% of people stop watching. But they're looking at it on a view of like 5 million people and they'd rather have 5 million views than 4.5 million views. but when I look at it, I'm like, I think I'd rather have a hundred thousand views or 100,000 dedicated fans who are, who walk away knowing something about it, like one more unit of trust.

Exactly. Who are down to listen to me talk and understand my personality, then try and rip all of that out to make sure they get to the end of the video. And that is how the business of YouTube is predicated on, do they click and do they watch till the end? But I think sometimes that can give you the wrong signals of what should I keep in, what should to keep out. And again, back to the conversation of high quality audience. I think the young creators, it's like it's like playing video games on YouTube, right? If I try this, then this number goes up.

Right. Right. And I think that is too easy to manipulate right now. And there's so much information. I think we're part of that of like sharing information on how that all works. But you do have to take a step back and be like, am I building a brand? And a brand is about trust, credibility, depth of connection. and that comes from some stuff that might not be optimized for the algorithm. Yeah, there's, it's sort of like drop shipping versus like building an actual brand around what you do, right?

Yeah, that's a good comp. There's, I don't know if you ever saw when Sony got hacked. Do you remember that? When the emails got hacked, yeah. There was one email that I remember came out that was like pretty interesting. And I think it was one of the early Sony guys talking to the CEO. And he was, or one of the,

it wasn't maybe the early center guys. Maybe it was like one guy from like a, like a music, a record label talking to him. And he was like, you know, here's what we're seeing. And he's like, basically the more popular this gets like, you know, people streaming music at home, blah, blah, blah. He's like, it's also creating a pent up demand for what do you call it. He's like, I think out of home entertainment's going to be big. And he's like, out of home entertainment.

Like, he's like, festivals will do well. This was like a while back. And there was like this kind of like pretty big music festival craze that kind of came out of it. But there was also a couple other like trends like that. like even things like tough mudder and Spartan race, all of a sudden people were like, you know what? I just want to like go and voluntarily crawl through mud this weekend.

Right. It's like, why would somebody want to do that? It's like, yeah, kind of because you're sitting in front of a computer all day. Yeah. Life got too easy and you kind of feel soft inside. Totally. So you go voluntarily have this like hardship, but also you want to be able to Instagram it and put it online that you did it.

Yeah, I think, uh, I totally agree with that. And I mean, obviously that, that's what happened. Yeah. But I think AI is going to create like this. homogeneous nature to content, where everything's going to feel the same.

And that is going to make us create something completely unique and different. Almost like looking for, like AI has brought a lot of efficiencies into our studio. We use AI for a lot. Like what? Do you guys use Autopod?

Are you familiar with that? No, what are that? Okay. So there's three cameras right now, right? And so basically you would bring these three cameras in and you want to get a clarity on like, If I'm talking the cameras on me, if you're talking the cameras on you. Oh, it does those cuts.

It just does those cuts automatically. If it's a three-hour conversation, it'll do it in 90 seconds. Oh, that's amazing. And it'll be very precise. When you start talking, it'll go there. If you have a human here live switching, which I don't know if someone's watched it. He's not live-sitting right now, but we talked about it right before we started this. So if he's live switching with the switcher, he actually can't predict when you're about to start talking, right?

He's going to be a second late. So now, do I trust the human more? Do I trust the AI more? I mean, the reality is it's brought a ton of efficiency into our office. That's cool. We also explore YouTube titles and play around with AI to be like, hey, here's the title we thought of, but give us 10 variations. Right.

And sometimes maybe it's ours that we like. Right. But if we keep going down that path, you know, the other day we were in a- That's just chat GPT or it's a different tool. Chat GPT, but there's other like creator-specific AI tools. There's some that aren't public that can only be used if you're partnered with certain, you know, creator companies, specifically, there's a company called Spotter that has a really great AI tool that I was using this morning. And the funny thing is, like, you're sitting in a room with

your team, and is it more efficient to sit alone with AI and get hundreds of variations, or is it more efficient to sit together as a team for 30 minutes? I don't know the answer to that, but I think probably it's AI, right? So the question for me is, like, if it's driving so much efficiency, I think I'm going to crave inefficiency in other places. Right. It's like the slow food movement. Totally. It's like on the table. Exactly.

Fast food gets too present. Yeah. It creates the demand, the craving for the other. For the inefficiencies. What I've seen though is that even though that gets created, it does usually end up getting dwarfed by the thing that's, you know, better, faster, cheaper, you know, like style of stuff. But entertainment, I think, is different.

Like, you go to a concert. It's the most inefficient way to hear the music. Right. The Taylor Swift concert, right? If you like Taylor Swift music and you just want to hear it, just go on Spotify. Right, you're one tap away. So why do you want this collective experience?

Why do you want to drive, deal with parking, get in there, you know, get to your seat? It's kind of a pain in the ass to go to a concert, right? So what is it about that that's, you know, it's a, it only happens once, right? It's like an experience that you get to happen. But, you know, by the numbers, a lot more people will stream Taylor Swift. Yes. We'll go to that. Agreed.

But, you know, she'll make a lot of money. and can monetize totally, totally differently. Yeah. Tell me about Mr. B. So I've gotten to go to his place and hang out with him a little bit. Pretty remarkable dude. And not like, oh, he's like an alien or whatever, but just like very interesting to kind of see him in his like normal ways of working.

And you can kind of see some differences between how he approaches things. Like, you know, for me, I was like, oh, how does he approach things? How does he see situations and approach things differently than I do? And he came on the pod, but it actually was like, nothing he said on the pod would have given me that insight, but actually watching him work and like kind of being in a brainstorm with him, then you do start to see those differences. I think you've gotten a lot of access to those moments.

Yeah. What's, uh, what stood out to you that you've kind of like picked up or noticed just by spending a little time with him? I always say he's like the most unique human I have ever met. Uh, I think he's like very, very unique in what he cares about. You know, I think what he cares about is very different from, you know, what I care about or what a lot of people care about. What does he care about?

He, like, is so unique in the fact that he is laser focused in a way that I've never really experienced. And maybe at times, like, in a way that I don't want to experience. Yeah. He doesn't want to experience. No, I mean, him and I have this conversation a lot. Like, I don't crave what he has. I like to have more of a wide perspective on life and a view of different.

types of experiences and he's very committed to his craft and very like he can laser focus in on something like if you've been in one of those brainstorms with him he's just like very blunt he's very you know he's just like why would we do that that doesn't make sense like no doesn't exist in the same way for him that it exists for other people based on social context or based on like well wait so saying so you said no doesn't exist for him yeah the same way it exists for other people I think that's really accurate. Yes. I have a story of an example of that.

I have many stories of that. Yeah, I think the time where I saw that the most was at the Mr. Beasburger opening in New Jersey at the American Dream Mall. Colin and I went. That was insane, right? We spent the 24 hours with him before and after. Yeah. And lived with him through this like what felt like a hurricane storm of fandom and new experiences for him and Reed and the whole team. Did you think it was going to be, go to the part where he was.

walks out. He walks out. Dude, that was, so I was the only camera behind him at that moment. Are you this camera? On this camera? I'm this camera. Yeah. Like later. I know he's famous, but I was like, this is not what I thought was going to be. I mean, there was multiple times where I had the chills filming this video. So I filmed that. Yeah, I filmed that clip. And then Jimmy was like, that's crazy. Send me that. And I sent it to him and then he tweeted it. And it was just like, it's completely insane. But so that experience, there was, you know, the night before there was a question around like, how many burgers they could serve. And there was already, I think, you know, 15 or 20,000 people there the night before, right?

It was completely insane. And they were sleeping in the mall. Mall security was there. And they were just like, okay, all right, I guess. No, I don't think anyone fully understood how big he was at that moment. And so they were like, okay, we don't know if we can serve all these people. And Jimmy was just like, what do you mean? Let's just figure it out.

Like, what do we need to do? And they're like, it's just not possible. We can't get more supplies here? And he was like, well, can we pay for it? Can we just pay someone to do it? And he was like, well, I don't, you know, I don't think so. I don't think that's possible. And basically what ended up happening was it was possible.

And Jimmy just kept pushing. Right. At a point where, again, it's like, a lot of people would be like, okay, that's a no. If I ask three times, it's a no. Yeah, yeah. There's no other possibility. Oh, the fire marshal said it. He's like, whatever.

Yeah. And I think he thinks in different ways, too, of like, you know, his immediate. it thought was around the staff. He was like, I need the staff to be really into this. I need them to be on it. And so he's like, I'm going to pay everyone an extra $1,000 today. And that is 30,000. There's 30 people working. It was $30,000. And it's in our video where he says, I'm going to pay all of you guys an extra $1,000 to whatever you're getting paid today. Right. That's like an irrational thing to do. A lot of people would look at that and be like, that's kind of irrational to spend an additional $30,000. But, you know, he looks at that and he was like, this is what I need to make this excellent.

Right. We're just going to do that. You know, and you look at what he tweets about now, too. He spends, you know, a million or $2 million on a video and it makes $200,000 in AdSense revenue. And, you know, obviously his sponsors and stuff, but some of his videos don't make money. And he's just like, but that's, they're good. Right.

You know, he thinks in just different ways like that. Yeah. It's just very unique. I feel the same way. he also said some things. He also said some things that were like really funny to me. Like he was like, I was like, so do you want to like have kids or like what's your like what do you want out of life? Yeah.

I've heard the YouTube part. And I was like, what else do you want? And I think he said he was like, I want to be president. I want to do this. I want to be a billionaire. I was like, okay, cool. But like what about just like out of your life? Like forget the big cool sounding things.

Like do you want to get married and have kids? Like what do you want to do? and he was like he's like yeah you know I he's like yeah I think I'll I think I'll probably like you know date or get married or whatever

he's like I wouldn't want kids no fuck no I don't want kids and I was like oh why not he's like he's like actually you know like Steve and Elon they have kids there's probably something to it so I'll do it and I was like I'm first just hilarious

to be like yeah just like the first name base literally like the dead Steve Jobs who you never met and be like he's just like that's the class of people I'm in Yeah. You know, if those people did it, might be something to it.

So I'll do it just kind of for that reason. But I don't feel the need for that because I'm on this mission. And like, you know, that's where I'm, where my head's out right now. I have seen him, you know, just being friends with him and having conversations. And we just did another podcast with him recently. I have seen him mature quite a bit. Like I think we do have to remember like, that's a guy in his mid-20s. Of course, yeah.

You know, actually he wasn't even, I don't know how old is it? I remember laughing at something. And I was like, dude, he's so much smarter, more mature than I What was that 24, 23, whatever he is? It's just different, though. Again, it's, that's not, I don't, I didn't have any friends like him when I was in my early 20s. I think he's, he's a very rare individual and he's 25 now and he's maturing into, he runs a company

with over 100 plus employees. He's, he's got this like whole massive operation, this massive platform, and he's 25. It's, it's going to be interesting to watch the next five years. If you were to advise him, what would you tell him? I think he's already experienced. some of this where he's looking at his content and injecting more storytelling into it, which I think is really, really smart and something that Colin and I've been talking to him about for a long time.

You know, it's the same thing I was saying earlier of, I think it's okay to have a deeper connection with him and with the content and with the contestants that he has on there. And he can sacrifice some of the, you know, hyper retention editing for that. I also, you know, a year ago probably would have told him he potentially is doing too many things and he's already, you know, refocused, right? He's really just focused on the main channel and feastables. And if you think about a year ago, Beastburger Feastables, main channel reacts, gaming, right? These are all different things he's doing.

Right. Plus 25 other amazing opportunities. Yeah. People who want to meet them and this is not right. Everything will tug your attention away. And it's, he's, he can be excellent in all of those things. But as you, as you grow up, as you mature, it's like, what do you say yes to? What do you say no to?

And when you're at that platform where you have any and every opportunity, how do you focus? It's hard. Well, the way I put is he can be excellent at any of those, but probably not all of them simultaneously soon. Yeah, yeah. Not at the same time. Yeah. You can do anything. You just can't do everything at the same time.

Because as a creator in a creator-led business, you are the bottleneck for everything. And I've spent time with him. He is the bottleneck. like he needs to be pulled into the room to look at something he has uh you know say on on all of that stuff and he also has the right you know mind for it he that's the reason that company so big and why he's built such a big platform so where do you inject that is it across 20 projects or is it across two and um you know i think they've they've really refocused and focused on on two primaries every one of these platforms has like a guy at a certain time or a girl at a certain time that's like

the one they're like you know you know whether it was like Casey and Istad or PewDie Pie or like kind of they have these like epic arcs and they're the top of the mountain and then most of them either literally stop creating because they kind of they transition careers they get burnt out whatever it is or they're still creating but they're just not like there's the new wave of new people doing new cool shit um he is kind of remarkable though so you know he may have a different path or trajectory than than most if you if I was to say, all right, make a prediction. Five years from now, what is, like, today, if Mr. Beasts is like, you know, the number

one YouTube creator and, like, launching a couple of these businesses underneath, like, feastables, whatnot, five years from now, do you think he's still the number one creator on YouTube? I think he's probably the number one online digital media company. I don't know that, you know, I don't know what creator is going to mean in that many years. Like, I think he has the best pulse on online storytelling right now. And I think, you know, we saw some people try this, like the BuzzFeeds, the, you know, like these massive media companies that emerge. I think he's more akin to a media company than he is a creator. So that's what I think.

I think he'll be the biggest media company. The way he's building is like a true company. It's a great vibe there. If you've been there, you know, like it's, they have good people involved. So I don't know. I don't know what the content looks like. I don't know what he as the creator looks like, but I think it will be a media company.

Like when we sat with him in our last interview, he has a ton of aspirations to make content for Netflix. He has a ton of aspirations to produce stuff. And, you know, I don't think he's that keen or intent on he has to be in everything or he has to be the lead in everything. I think that's been the, that is the draw right now. But I think in the future, Mr. Beast is a content studio. You know, it could be, we could be looking at, like, we don't know if we're not looking at the next Disney or Paramount or, you know, some massive studio that can build IP and monetize it in different ways. Like, Mr. Beast is the first, if we look at it and saying, that's the first show that was built out of there, right? It's a game show that has a couple different formats. It's distributed. It's the biggest show. They built a chocolate brand out of that that operates kind of like a game show. You can win stuff when you buy the chocolate, right? So it's like, okay, that looks,

feels really similar to like a Disney and a Mickey Mouse, right? Okay, let's let's build this big media platform. Let's build a product connected to it. They have that skill set. They could probably replicate that, right? And as you look at their cast of characters, you know, there is a cast of characters there that can be built out. There is more IP that can be built out. It's like build IP, connect product to it. Right. You know, or connect experiences to it. It could be an experience too. Yeah. If he chooses to go that path, I want to talk about this. This is amazing. Yeah.

So your content company did something pretty dope. You guys did, I think, what is it, 100 editions or a thousand editions? We did 500 of those. No, no, no, but this was to celebrate. Oh, it was to celebrate two years of our newsletter. Two years of the newsletter of the published press. So you got this newsletter of the published press, which is dope. It's like what you guys do on the YouTube channel.

Sort of like creator, a great newsletter for creators. I mean, it was largely inspired by like the morning brew hustle movement, right? which was like, okay, we are subscribers to these newsletters. What if we made one about our own community? Yeah. And then you made actual physical newspaper. Yeah. I'm very honored because you pretty much sold out of these.

Yeah. This was dope. Why do something like this? Because I'm asking because this isn't like an economic move. This is not going to grow your audience. It's not going to get you rich. Yeah. It's not going to do any of those things.

It takes effort. Yeah. It's a risk in a little in a way. What's your philosophy on just? do dope shit like this. Why? It's just, it's fulfilling. Like,

it's, it's hard to say that we have a hard-nosed philosophy on it. It's just like, we are creative people. And as we've built a business, like, one of the things that's so interesting about being a creative is you're really good at kind of zero to one

and the like, let's just do cool shit until something works. What becomes startling is when something works. And then you're like, okay, so what now? I just keep doing this thing. Yeah. And that's like, that's the really funny thing about Colin and I always say that creatives aren't consistent people. Right.

And so we've surrounded ourselves with really consistent people who help us be consistent in the formats that we found. But you need that occasional pop of just like, you know, it'd be cool to make a newspaper. Right. Like we, we were rebranding the published press. That's the new logo for it. We just were like, how do we tell people that we've been doing this for two years? How do we celebrate? It also was we had just crossed 100,000.

subscribers on the newsletter. And it was like, how do we celebrate this moment? Right. What is it? Do we just put out a tweet that's like, hey, it's been great. And we were like, well, as things are getting more increasingly more digital, what if we did something physical? And that was it. That was the impetus. And then it was just, hey, is everyone excited about this? Okay, cool. Are we down to stay up late at night for this? Great. And that's, it just organically happens when you're, there's a lot of people who we asked about this. And they were like, that's, you know, that's not going to happen in the time period that we wanted to happen in. And then that's another exciting thing for a creative person. Oh, I found the challenge. That's another exciting thing. So, yeah, I would say that it's, again, like it cost us money. We did not make money from this. There's no sponsor in it or anything. It didn't dramatically grow our audience.

But it has been a moment where a lot of people could understand what the brand was. And a lot of big creators reached out to say, can I have one? Yeah. You know, I want one in my house. And then we're seeing that creators have framed it and put, in their house, seeing that. There's just something. Yeah, you asked you for one.

You DMed us and asked for one. And that to me is like, again, back to this concept of high quality audience. It's like the people who reached out about this. It's a premium group of people. And the real ask is because it's like in retrospect, once you see the final product and it's cool and then you hear these stories and it's like all these things make sense in hindsight. It's up front when it's kind of unknown, kind of unproven, tight deadline, you know, a lot of things to do.

That's when it's hard to do this or sometimes you say yes to too many of these things. Right. So it's almost like, what you just said kind of reminds me of like Google had like the 20% time. Yeah. Like, I, we hired the best engineers in the world and like this guy's fixing the bug and the AdSense platform. But like we got to give these guys like 20% time to just tinker and hack on stuff that they, you know, get motivation from. And like, logically you'd say, well, you're losing, you know, 20% time is basically one day, one day out of out of the week that they're not working on on their main job. But the reality is that like sometimes those hit and also it makes the other four days out of the week more productive.

You don't actually lose anything. Totally. Because you attract the best people and you gave them an outlet to like be creative. And also if you're not following what's exciting you, then you're just, you built yourself a job. Right. And that's like, then you have to look at it and be like, wait, what did I just do? What did I just do? I also think that, you know, what we do with our merchandise and what we do with anything physical, like most of it at the moment is not drive.

crazy revenue, right? It's not like a revenue driver for us. But we think about building our community and we're very niche. And so for niche creators, we think about collectibles. Like, we want to create collectibles. That's right. Yeah. And when we have collectibles, then you get to be a part of our community and be like, I'm, it's the feeling of going to see a band when you were younger and keeping the ticket stop. It's like, I was a part of this community at this moment. Right. So these are collectibles along the way of our journey. You think about the massive creators like Logan Paul and Mr. Beast or Emma Chamberlain, they're creating consumables, which is great for mass creators, right? So these things are like cool collectibles that we think are cool.

Like we're planning another drop in October and our merchandise does not, you know, drive like crazy amounts of revenue for us. It's relatively nominal. But it's awesome when you walk down the street and see someone in the merch. We've sold, you know, 2,000 of these hats and they're out in the world and right. Two thousand people are wearing them. And we've, We see stories where people connect because they saw someone else wearing the merch. So that to me is like the symbol of community building this tight knit group who can connect and be like, I'm part of the same group as you, identify in the same world as you do. Totally.

We, I love the way you put it. It's a great frame on that idea of consumables versus collectibles. When we were about to launch like merch for the pot or whatever and it was like, oh, yeah, merch. And it's like, okay, here's two things I know. Number one, people don't want to wear our like, for us. It was like, they're not going to wear a shirt that says my first million. Like, this is not going to happen.

It's not cool. I don't want to wear that. They don't want to wear that. Let's just all agree on that. What they will wear is like inside jokes and slang that only, if you know you know and if you don't, you don't. No small boy stuff. Yeah, no small boy stuff. Or like I have this shirt that it's a, we made that's a Polaroid of, it's like a fuzzy Polaroid of Sam when he had his hot dog stand.

It's like in the style of those like Kanye shirt or whatever. It's like some like cool, cool looking like it's like an imitation of that. It's great. And it's like, nobody will even know who that is or what's a hot dog stand. But like, if you know, you know, and that's it. And I was like, we should just do. I was like, my rule is like the Tim Ferriss rule is basically, if you're not going to make a ton of money on it, it should be free. Or it should be like as just sell it at cost, but like and do like a limited run so that it's more interesting.

Totally. And just only like if you're going to try to make money, only make money when you're going to make a lot of money. Don't try to like trickle a little bit of beg for money everywhere because that doesn't like. nobody likes that and that's not the right approach for something like this. A lot of our merch is also a right way to think about it. A lot of our merch shipments are driven by a referral program through the newsletter, right? Right. So that's like, you know, again, that's like pulling from the playbook.

Same thing. Yeah. Yeah. The whole, the newsletter playbook. You had this tweet or this video that I saw that was like a Naval quote that I really liked. It was, it said like, was it was like, your problem is that you're writing to be read. Yes. that resonated with you and me

I want to like talk about that why did that hit because so simple it's like you know seven words or something I think it hit me at a time where I felt like we were creating very scared the beginning of this year I felt like we were creating very scared like we had crossed a million subscribers last year we felt like we had built a brand in the space

and opened up the year we made a few videos that we just canned we just didn't put them out because we were like oh those aren't going to work for the audience but we liked them and got really in our heads around And, you know, again, you're playing this dance as a creator of what you want to make, what the audience wants to watch, and what the platform wants. Those are the three things that we think you're constantly playing with. And if you overvalue what the audience wants, you will, you're catering to, you know, this group that obviously they have created your career if, you know, you've made it.

But you can't forget that it came from what you wanted to make. I think on one side of the spectrum of, you know, being a publisher or being a creator, there is the artist. who's like, I do not care what you think, I'm going to make this. And that has financial implications, right? That are essentially very hard to make money like that, but very cool. We respect artists like that, right? There's some most respected artists, like are misunderstood, maybe understood once they pass or just didn't care about what the audience thought.

Right. Your interpretation doesn't matter to them. Right. Then you go on the- It's like, love that you exist, but like, sure. I like guacca on my Chipotle. Exactly. I'm just going to have a job. It's okay.

The other side of the spectrum, is being a distributor. It's like, why do we have so many Spider-Man movies? It's because they put butts in seats. Right. So the person at the studio, the movie studio, is not an artist. They're thinking about, what do we make? What are we greenlight?

Spider-Man, that's going to get people in the seats. That's going to sell tickets. And I think as a creator, you have to be in the middle of that. And some creators slide heavy on the side of distributor, just like, what does the audience want to watch? I'll make that, whatever, you know? And then on the other side of, what do I want to make? And so I think that Naval quote really,

hit me in this feeling of losing. You know, I did grow up. I went to film school. I, you know, took playwriting in college. I'm like really into artsy stuff. And I think when money gets involved, when you start commercializing your creativity, um, and when it doesn't work for years, that's an important part of our story, right? It didn't work for a long time. We didn't make any money for a long time. You get terrified of losing it. And when you get terrified of losing it, you start creating to be watched or writing to be read. What is it? Creating scared? Yeah, creating scared. Yeah.

Let's take a book title right there. I like that one. Yeah, it's something Colin I talk about a lot. It's like, let's not create scared. You know, what are we scared of? You know, again, it's all this mix of the public view count, the perception, the tweets of like these guys have fallen off or whatever you think is going to happen if you put out a video that people don't like.

And people can feel that, I think. I think you can feel it as a creator. It feels really uncomfortable to create scared. Right. Yeah, it's not fun to watch. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you had Hussein menage on the show. I love Hussein.

He's very much on the artist side. I think he like drew a line in the sand for himself. He's like, okay, I either I'm going to get on TikTok and I'm going to dance for the algorithm. Yeah. Or I'm going to go the other way and I'm not. And he's like had like the soul searching moment. It's like like, you know, he sent me a voice memo once. I was just like, bro, I'm going to just create great art.

I'm an artist and an artist creates art. That's what I'm doing. I'm not a businessman first. I'm not a creator first. This is what I'm going to do. And he's like, so I got to be true to that. And I'm going to work on projects that are like interesting to me from that perspective. And it's got to hit my bar on that.

And like, that's the vibe I got from them. But, you know, this was a few years ago when I, when we were talking about that stuff, you had them on, I think, more recently. Yeah. End of last year. Did he say anything that kind of resonated with you on that? Totally. Yeah.

I mean, he talked a lot about, he kind of changed my whole perception on making YouTube shorts. because he, what did he say? He got to made, he got to made fun of it. You know, Hudson's like so funny the way he talks,

but he described making YouTube shorts as being a skinned rat for the engineers in San Bruno. Which is that was really funny. He was just like, you're a guinea pig, you are, you know,

essentially creating more data points for them for their, you know, you're, they're your boss. You know, whatever works on their algorithm, you then pander to that.

Right. And so he, he kind of pushed us in that, that direction of recognizing, like, are we artists or are we creating for the algorithm? And the second thing he said, which I heavily resonate with, he's like, everything is about the PDF, which means, like, what is the idea, right? Write it on a piece of paper. Is the idea good? Show it to someone. Pitch it to someone. Do they immediately go, that's a good idea. Do they laugh? Do they feel some sort of emotion? Before it's packaged in. Yeah. Yeah. And he was like, people,

even when we got on our pre-call with him, he was like, all right, what do we? we making together when we sit down? Right. And he asked us that question. And I was like, oh, you're right. What is the Hussein Minaj, Colin and Samir interview? Let's write it out. Let's not plan it, but what is it? Like, what's the idea? Why is this a good idea to do this? Right. What was the answer? We talked about like how can we, like, how can we bring forward his creator story of starting on YouTube and using YouTube to go through kind of this crazy, windy, path up to Netflix,

right? And how he's now kind of left YouTube. Because Hussein's origins are on YouTube. He used to upload. He came up with shows and put them on YouTube.

If you go to his channel and search by oldest. Like kind of like sketch shows. Yeah, sketch shows. He did hosted shows where he talked about the news, like almost like Tosh. Touch.0, yeah.

That for us was like no one's, no one has told that story. That's interesting. Let's talk about that. And let's talk about your relationship with online contact. 1819 doing like comedy clubs, right? Like he's doing stand-up at like San Francisco

or something like that, I think. Totally. Yeah, I watched him do King's Jester live. Like we went out to go. Did you go to one of his shows? Yeah, it was really good. So that's a stand-up special. That guy's like a performer, man.

Like he really inspired me to be like, this is a comedy show. Yeah, it's a one-man show. It's a performance. And that to me, it really inspired both Colin and I to be like, this is a craft. You have to work on it. You know, performing is. part of this craft.

Ideation is the biggest part of it. He has a writing partner that he sits and writes. Did you meet Pratt? Yeah. What's he like? I've never gotten to meet him. But I'm very, very fascinated by kind of the wingman. Yeah.

There's a lot of popular people, but almost all of them are not. Nobody's solo. Everyone's got some kind of a team. And usually they have like, they're confident. The person who's in the bunker with them figuring things out, compliments them, does all the shit they're not good at. but like kind of like keeps them going in the right direction. And those people are actually really,

really fascinating to me. And nobody really like asked them a ton of questions. I have a million questions for them. Tell me a little bit about him. I think oftentimes as, as creatives and creators, we think we want to hire an employee, but actually what we want is a collaborator. And if you're lucky enough to come up with a collaborator,

then those are the people in my opinion who typically make it, fully make it when they have a collaborator. So Pratt, limited time with him. But I find comedians to be like astute observers of the world. And I found Pratt to be like very much that, right? Like he had a notebook and pen during the King's Jester taping. It was a, I don't know if it was a taping or if it was just one of the shows, but they were prepping for the Netflix special. Yeah.

And he was sitting there during the entire show, sitting right in front of me, just voraciously taking notes on what was working, what the audience was reacting to, when there was too much of a pause when there wasn't. Like he was, and right after the show, before Hussein came back into the green room, him and Pratt were talking. I love that. Yeah, I love it when it's sort of like, we're going back to the lab. Yeah. It's like we kind of like, we do our thing. But like, because I tell Ben's my collaborator, basically. So like we did a couple businesses together, but also when it comes to content.

Like we recently did, we're kind of new to YouTube, but we did. We used to just basically put the podcast on YouTube. Yeah, I remember. And it was like, you guys are growing now, though. It started really bad. It was like we would first time we did. I remember we had like 4,000 views. I was just like, oh, man, like, which is fine for when you start, but we already had the podcast

was significant. So it's like, it's kind of like if you play poker at one stakes and then you go down to the micro stakes like, you know, quarters 10 cent table doesn't feel very fun because you've now experienced a different level of stakes. But those aren't even in the same casino. Spotify or Apple pods and YouTube. Yeah. And it's a completely different group of people.

Exactly. So we were like, all right, we think we could do this. And so we started a grow, but recently we did one. And it's this, uh, this is this is money. one that's on the right there that has how many views I have now? Nice. So 300,000 views and this was a video. It was the first video that I made YouTube first. I was like, okay, I'm going to create a video that I think is going to be like YouTube, it's not just a podcast. And me and Ben were like, what if we just took three days?

It's like, we just tried to make one great video for this. And we did and we made that and we were basically collaborating on that for the first time we had done that that way. But the cool thing is now we've been working together for a couple of years. And you get like mind meld where it's like, it's almost like, you only can, you can speak in shorthand or reference, like, it's like if you say something, I already know what part he's going to be like, oh, we got to talk about that later. Right. Because that relates to these other three things. And then earlier we talked about this, but that's, and it's like, if you can get to that point, that's like a a pretty like formidable thing that I think most people don't have. But when you have it, it's like,

oh, fuck, this is, that lets you go places. I think you need someone who's excited and wants to, to be a part of a team where their name isn't at the forefront, right? Which can be really complex, right? But we know who Pratt is, but if you're a fan of Hassan Minaj at scale, you're not going to know who he is. Right. So you have to find someone who's really into that too, right? Who likes to be that person. If you've ever tried to hire a lot of people be like, I want to work for you because I want to be you. Yeah. And it's like, okay, cool, but that doesn't really work. Like, especially with this group. It's not what I need. Yeah, yeah. This group right now, it's hard to hire someone who doesn't want to be the creator or, you know, is trying to become a creator and

and working with you to be like, okay, now I get it. Now I'm going to go. Right. Do it. But yeah, you have to find someone who's down for that. But it is kind of like being an athlete where, you know, you guys, when I leave, you're going to talk about the performance. Yeah.

You're going to probably watch game tape back. You're going to watch it back and be like, oh, maybe I should have asked this question there. Or maybe this would have been more interesting or he went a little long here. I should have stopped him. You know, like there's so much that goes into this that if you deeply care about the craft and you have someone who cares that much about the craft, you can get better at the craft. You can get better faster. You can get better way faster.

Yeah. It's hard to find. Right. It's typically happens just organically. And then you're like, oh, okay, this is my guy now. Right. How much do you guys, you guys have your business off the back of your thing, which is the newsletter. The newsletters are kind of a different type of business.

It's actually a separate company now. And there's separate people writing that thing. It's not you guys creating it necessarily. Have you seen, and I'm keeping track of these kind of creator-driven businesses where you have like an audience co-founder. And like the way you used to have like a technical co-founder for a business. Now you have almost like a distribution co-finding. or a little bit's cool what have you seen that maybe everybody hasn't heard of right because i think everybody's kind of heard of mr beast and maybe a couple others but um what are some cool

ones that you're keeping an eye on or i should know about or other people should know about the typical creator business is make content sell ads right which is like that's that's baseline some people never need to grow out of that because that's just a good business yeah um but like when when you go through those extensions like i think ali abdall has a fantastic education business. He's a creator out of the UK who talks about productivity and he's built a series of courses. Wasn't he a doctor too? He was a doctor prior. Yeah, you're right. He was a doctor. He's an excellent teacher. But he has built a great business that is, you know, very much focused on online education. I think he publishes his numbers. He publishes his numbers. He does like four million a year on his,

like, four or five million on his-pushing to six this year. Creator Academy, which is basically like become a Yes, yes. And he has a ton of courses on Skillshare about like studying for the MCAT or like he's just figured out that, okay, I'm really good at making online video. Yes, one of those ways is to monetize through advertising, but another one is through teaching your online video. And that's the classic like build one, sell twice, right? It's like you build it. It lives on Skillshare or on your own website for years to come. People can buy it. Right. So I really like the digital product business because it's just scalable. And we do very few things that are scalable as creators, right?

I also think there's a, there's a future model now, which is potentially, there's a creator named Amelia DeMoldenberg, who has a show called Chicken Shop Date. It's a great show. Are you the one who showed me this? Yeah, it's a great show. She's had Jack Harlow on it. She just had Jennifer Lawrence on. And what's the stick?

It's like at a chicken shop, like a fight chicken place. Yeah, it's a date at a Friday. chicken place in London. And the chicken shop in London is like the last place you would go. Right. To have a date. So there's comedy in it. She's a comedian.

And through, yeah, through this. So she's had like, this has now spun her into essentially creating her own production company where brands come to her and say, we love your schick. We love your comedy. We love the way you've created this show. Like this show has no advertising in it, no advertisers, and we'll never have advertisers. And this thing does, you know, the Jack Harlow episode has 15 million views. This regularly does, you know, one to five million views in the first week.

But no advertisers. And what it operates as is like, it's a production company. And Nike just came to her. So she kind of created an agency. She created an agency. Yeah. So like Nike came to her. She proved like I can create cool, likable content.

It's vertically integrated where she can come up with the idea. Then her company can shoot the idea. Then she can be the talent. the idea. And then the thing that I think we forget is like she's the distribution outlet for that idea too. Where does she post on her own feed? On her own YouTube channel. Yeah. So she she doesn't do ads, but she'll put like full episodes of like, because I saw Barbie. Yeah, she went and posted the Barbie premiere. That's smart. So I like that. There's another creator named Amanda Raysh Lee who's based in Canada. And what she did is she started YouTube by showing bullet journaling

and how she was setting up her bullet journals. And what is it? I don't know. So go to the channel, Amanda, R-A-C-H, and then Lee. And now, yeah, like, go to, like, one of these bullet journal setups. This just looks like Etsy of YouTube. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how many views does it have? Three million. So when she started, she was doing these bullet journal setups.

Like, here's how I set up my journal. And then what she did was swap out the journals she was using and create her own custom journal company. And that, to me, is, like, epitome of creator. business where it's what Colin and I call content product fit. She didn't have to change the content to integrate the product. Yeah. Right. You just, I mean, to talk about a big example, it's Chamberlain coffee when Emma Chamberlain launched that. She drank coffee in every episode. Right. Swap her coffee out. It's like product placement, but done at like a whole other level.

Yeah. And I think, you know, it's something we're actually struggling with with our newsletter, which is like, how do we integrate that in every episode? Sure, we can bring it up, but that doesn't drive subscribers. Right. So it's, Logan Paul said this about Prime. He said a lot of creators, when they talk about their own product,

it sounds like they're doing a brand deal. Yeah. They don't know how to integrate it regularly, you know, and like the Nelk boys with Happy Dad, right? Their alcohol is in every single episode. Right, because they're still present. Yeah.

Logan has Prime everywhere with him. So, you know, I think creators who have this, like Amanda, they can build really substantial business. What do you call it content product fit? Yeah, content product fit. So this is a really impressive business to me because it's just, it's niche, but three million people watch this and she sells this journal.

Yeah. That's insane. Yeah, she's got to be doing, I mean, what do you think? She's making on something like this. I've spent time with her. She's never told me, but I will say that she speaks out a lot of Shopify events as like a very good case study for them. I know she's doing well.

She has a good team. the thing I love about this business too, it's repeat purchases. There's a new journal drop. You can run out of pages in a journal. Once you have allegiance to this, it's like, yeah. You know, great.

So I've had this idea for, because I'm a big journal guy. Yeah. And so I was like, oh, dude, I want to create my own because, I don't know, I have an idea of what I want mine to be.

I just haven't made it. It's like, if I'm going to make it for myself, maybe I'll make it for others. But the best example, my favorite example of this is actually a really small stakes one, which is the Ryan Holiday coin.

Totally. That's like such a good example. of this because he was like he's the way he described it so first it was like the content product fit where he's just like stoicism here's the like reminder coin that like you're gonna die whatever remember you're gonna die or whatever but he was like you know I've done like t-shirts t-shirts suck yeah and he's like I wanted something that was like I could fit in an envelope a normal envelope so like mailing was easy I wanted something like I can manufacture here so I don't have to like produce overseas whatever he's like no sizes no colors it's like just like there's

So good. Yeah. Like there's one skew and I'm going to sell. And I think he sold like $20 million of this one skew over the years. Yeah. I'm pretty sure he said that on. I think he's amazing. I think pretty sure he goes on our our episode or we like, you know, water boarded him out of it.

Like, you know, where we were like, I think you've done $20 million. Is that wrong? Is that in the ballpark? And he's like, you know, not wrong. I think probably one of the biggest creator-led companies right now that that maybe isn't as as prominent in the mainstream conversation is Mark Rober's Crunch Labs. which is like a subscription box of stem or something right like it's like a science kit exactly it's a science kit i got it for my nephews it is excellent they are hooked on it nice like it is excellent i text

mark about i'm like dude this product is crazy like that's huge that's a big business huge that's a big business um yeah yeah and i and i know he said now that that that makes more than his channel yeah for and his i mean his channel's massive that's a that's a other rate because he does basically crazy science experiments, right? That's right. Yeah. And he has big versions of that in his video. So, like, he'll make a big version of it.

Right. And then he'll be like, and you can make a miniature version of this at home. I think this content model, this, what you're just describing here, these examples is, like, I always think about when I meet someone, I'm like, wow, you had so much success. Like, what'd you do? And there often the story is basically like, you know, there was like a moment in time where, like, if you realized, like X, like X thing works, which is like, like, X thing works, which is like, Like in the early days of Google, it would be like, I could buy clicks for a cent for like any

keyword. Like, that's insane. Like, okay, let me just work backwards. What's the best keyword? And like, so that's how I got into like selling leads to lawyers or whatever. Like, you know, asbestos, you know, removal company or whatever. And then it's like, um, like our buddy created native deodorant. And he's like, yeah, basically like, I started this when Facebook ads were kind of like underused

and people were only using them for like, like media companies are trying to buy Facebook ads. But then they were like driving them back to a blog. post and monetizing with a Google ad there. Right, right. It's not really a good model. I realize, like, you can sell just like a product through Facebook ads with really simple ads and do you don't, like, things that you used to have to go into Target, get target to carry you.

You could just start selling directly to consumer through Facebook, D to C. I mean, there wasn't really like as much of a category yet, but it's like, if you knew, if you knew that secret during that time, it was kind of an open secret, but not like, it wasn't obvious to everybody yet. Yeah. I mean, I think Movement Watch is another great. Influencers with that. Right.

marketing. But I think what's incredibly hard, especially for creators right now, is what you have to sacrifice to have that view and that long-term view of building a product. Because advertising revenue is so available right now to us. And again, you kind of pull the levers when it comes to YouTube. It's the highest margin advertising dollars that I think, you know, has existed in video content ever, right? Because you don't get on the phone with the advertiser. You're not negotiating a contract. There's no sales team. There's no back and forth. There's no revision. Yeah, but YouTube takes what, like, 45%. Yeah. But still, it's like this. Dude, but there's still like, you don't see it. You don't see it. It's just like, and the, you don't have to do any work. You don't do any work. You don't do it, right? You just, you upload content and you get a check in the mail.

So creators who make really viral content that has reasonably high CPMs, it's like, I should, you know, I should make another video. And then a brand deal comes and that can be, you know, anywhere from, from 20, 50,000 dollars all the way up. to $200,000. Right. And you're like, well, okay, all right, I'll make another one of those videos. And then what I find is that a lot of creators never get to that moment of, okay, now we should stop and put our focus in over here.

And how do we even do that? And it's all totally different skill set. Yeah. How do I even do that? How do I hire someone? I think that's the biggest need in the creator economy right now is operators are the biggest need. Yes.

And education on how to hire is so, it's just not there, right? Because it's all young people who grew. Which is funny, by the way, because there's so many operators because I'm coming to an operator room. And all the operators are like, dude, I can, if I just had the right influence or this,

this is a soap, we could sell a lot of this soap. Or whatever the thing is. They're going to pick your favorite widget. And for them, it's like a total black box. Like, how do I go meet these people, get them to trust me enough to do this? And so it's like this inefficiency in the market. And then also they have to have the temperament to want that, right?

Like a lot of creators have to, they might conceptually think they want it. But then when they get into it and their, name is on a soap product. Right. And they don't really like that it went out to a customer and it wasn't perfect. And then they're like, oh, I don't want to do this. Right.

They freak out. They freak out, right? Because it's like, I have so much control over how my brand shows up that when you start to scale that, it gets uncomfortable. Right. So. And do you, I have this question up here. I put on this last.

I was three creators likely to become a billionaire. I gave you the one freebie. You can say, Jimmy. And he could be one. Yeah. What other creators do you think have the potential? to build a billion dollar empire around what they're doing. It's a combination of their content plus businesses, whatever.

I think dude perfect. I saw they did like an amusement park or something, right? Well, they're working on it. Yeah. A hundred million dollar project. Yes. What does that mean? That's what they're investing into this project?

I don't know the specifics of it. I've spent a lot. They're actually, I've known them for a really long time. Like I've been on YouTube and around YouTube for 12 years. They were the first group that I got involved with early on when we sold our last company. And they're kind of like, they trick shots with their thing that worked.

They make sports accessible to, you know, young kids through trick shots and, you know, viral sports videos. And the reason I bring it up is like, I think those guys have been at this now since around 2006 or seven.

And they have remained at the top of their game throughout that whole experience. They also went through a long period of time where, you know, They've done the work. Like I watched them hold the cameras for years. Even when they were at 30 million subscribers, they would just go out themselves and hold the cameras and edit the videos. And they still sit there in the edit base and make sure they're perfect.

And I think they, if you've seen images of they just did a tour, see images of like the fans turn out. They're young kids who turn out for that. The parents, I had a conversation with them one time where they said their goal is to be the most trusted brand and entertainment. and I actually believe that they are on track for that where parents really trust that they can take their kids to a dude perfect event

and that when you take that to an amusement park when you take that a couple steps forward I think that matters a lot in the future and I think they're on track for sure that makes sense I like that pick anyone else come to mind that you think has the potential to do something large like that

I think of some creators who have the potential, but I don't know if they want to do it. You know, like, I think Cody Coe is actually someone who's... He's coming here tomorrow. Oh, he is? Yeah, yeah. I love Cody. I know you went on his show.

Yeah. I think Cody is like one of the most intelligent people I've met in the space. I think he, he, even as he's like in starting to invest now and I can just, I was thinking about it because him and I were texting yesterday and I was thinking of my head, I was like, who's Cody Coe in 10 years? He's either like in the woods, you know, like, chilling. He's a free man. man DJing and running or he's like running the biggest capital company.

You know, like I and I think that's just a personal choice. Up to him. It's all available to him. But yeah, I don't, I don't know that, I'm sure there's others that I'm not thinking of, but they're my favorite brand on YouTube. TMG is my number one favorite channel on YouTube. I think Noel Miller's like a true artist and special. Like I think there's very rare people like him and also very not very much.

many people like Cody Co. Right. So yeah, their music videos are so goddamn good. It's actually kind of annoying. It's kind of frustrating. Yeah. It's like a bit,

it's a bit off-putting like, dude, what like you can't just do that. Right. At that, you can do it as a joke. It can't also be amazing. It can't also be good. Yeah,

it can't also be good. It can also make me want to listen to it multiple times. Right. It's funny and amazing. And you just did it like for kicks on the side. Right. On top of your other successful thing. I find this like pursuit.

of being a billionaire to be very fascinating. Like, I, I, I, I don't really have interest in it. I don't, if it, if it's the outcome of what I decide to do, that would be interesting. But it's not, like, I don't find myself to be, um, focused on that outcome. And I also found most creators I talk to are not focused on that outcome. Totally. Um, but I think it's in the video game of entrepreneurship, it is the final boss, right? So you're kind of like, if you're final boss is actually walking away.

Sure. Yeah. The person who says they have enough is like, like, you know, Paul Graham who created YC, which is I think probably the most successful tech startup actually because it created all these other tech startups. And like it created Dropbox and it created Airbnb. Like they probably wouldn't like to say created, but like they, without them, there is no Reddit. There is no, there are, there probably aren't those business being successful, including open AI

because right. He saw Sam Altman and made him president when there was tons of other more qualified candidates on paper. But he's like, this even says something. He was like, this is like what it would be like to talk to a young Bill Gates. Like saw that before. And now he's created open AI, which is today the most, you know, one of the most valuable private startups. So anyways, YC gets to the peak of its powers or gets like, you know, does amazing, amazing stuff 10 years in. And Paul's like, Sam, here you go.

I'm going to the woods in the UK and I'm going to live in the woods with my family and I'm going to basically like write essays, paint and code and like, you know, that's what I'm going to do. And that is the final boss of Silicon Valley because you see most people just go right back into the hamster wheel and they start running again.

But that's like the final boss of life, right? It's like making that realization is not wanting anymore. Yeah, being like content and developing a relationship with the term enough. Yeah. That's a hard thing to do. but totally do you have that do you have a number or like a do you do you feel like you have enough like what are you in pursuit of um i'm in pursuit of a really specific thing which is um i heard a quote once that i think neval said he goes uh the the day you stop trading today for a better tomorrow

you've retired so he's like um basically if the things you do today in and of themselves were the reward what you did today, you've now, you've actually exited the game. You've retired. Retirement doesn't mean you go sit down and do nothing. It means you're not saying, all right, I'm going to do the shit today that I don't really want to do or I don't like to do, but I'm doing it because it's going to pay off in the future. It's going to pay off from the future and like, your whole life goes by doing that. Yeah.

And so when I heard that, I was like, oh, you know, guilty. Like, you know, put me in cuffs, take me to jail. Like, that's me. I'm, I've spent the first, you know, 15 years of my career, like, you know, you know, you know, from 20 to 35, basically was that. I was like, oh, I'm going to do X. And I'm going to say I didn't enjoy it necessarily, but like, definitely I was like doing X because it might lead to why. I totally agree.

I've never just done X. I've never just made my main thing. Like, I'm doing X because I just doing X seems fun. Yeah. And so that's the, that's the game I'm playing now is to try to achieve that, to craft my life sets that that that's true. And so, even though it's like weird, it's like, you know, awesome. It's like, what are I like? to do best. I don't know. I like to do this podcast. I like to read. I like to talk.

I like to like, you know, work on these little tinker with these little things or, you know, just understand, go down rabbit holes and just see how things work in the world. And it's like, those are the things that I do without thinking about some like future payoff. I don't think they even like, or they don't clearly have one. Well, you can also have the, there's another Tim Ferriss moment in our, in our episode together. He was like, something to the tune of like you can decouple the non-financial reward and the financial reward. Right. So like this experience, there's a non-financial reward to this, which is like, we have a good

conversation. Right. Cool. This is fun. We both go home. That reward is complete. Then you put it out. If there's a performance reward to it, amazing.

If that leads to financial opportunity, great. You know, like, but that's a separate reward. Exactly. And if you can decouple those things, then that is. Yeah. And just basically, like, the way I think about stuff is like there's a car. and you can have a bunch of passengers in the car. It's like, you know, I have like my ego,

but hopefully it's in the trunk. It shouldn't be driving. Like, you know, let's put him in the back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's kind of annoying, but he's there. And you got like, you know, the thrill of things, that's in the car. But I don't really want thrilled to drive because he takes us off the cliff. Like, who gets to drive?

And so, you know, that's kind of like, so to me, I'm like, all right, who gets to drive is like the version of me that is following my curiosity, creating shit consistent, like just creating things and is content with life and has like a... I'm doing it because I want to do it. I'm doing it because it's enjoyable to do. I'm doing it because it's challenging.

So even though it's not that enjoyable, like I'm struggling at it, I'm enjoying the struggle of doing this thing. Yeah. And so that's who I want to drive. Meaning that's who gets to ultimately make the decision of where are we going in this car.

Other people might have input. Other parts of me might have input. Like, I want money. I want this. I want that. Yeah. But I can't like, Like basically money was driving for a long-ass time.

And then it's like, hold on. Wait, the deal was you get to drive till we get to this number. We got to that number. You don't get to drive anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe you shouldn't have been driving for the first place, but at least in my life, I was like, I want to get to basically a financial freedom number, a number where I can spend whatever I want in my lifestyle and it's coming off of my investment income, not out

of like my work income. Yeah. Because then it's like, all right, cool. Money works for money. I work for me. Man, I think that is a big opportunity with. with creators, it'd be like a smaller group. But I think as creators were really good at generating money, but we don't know how to turn

money into money. Right. Because it's like, it's a totally different skill set. It's a totally different skill set. And then we don't know who to trust with that. You know, I think if there was a creator-focused group that helped with that. Well, we went to this athlete thing yesterday with a bunch of basketball players there. And it's the same thing.

Like, literally we were joking. We were like, this event would be cool if it was just the athletes, you do what they do and us. but then you have all the clingers. Yeah, and you're like, who do I trust? And like, yeah, yeah. And like, some of the clingers are the people they trust and they're like kind of safe choices.

They don't actually know how to do the thing for them. Sure. It's like, you know, actually if they asked, I would for free help them or tell them exactly what they should be doing so that their money works for money and they don't piss it away. Yeah. But, um, the incentive is not for me to go chase them and reach them and then beg them to listen to my advice. Yeah.

The guy who's trying to take their money is incentivized. Sure. to chase them and beg them and try to convince them that they're the guy who's going to help them. Right. And it's like this weird, like, perverse incentive is like, the guy who's going to like work his hardest to break into your circle is the one who wants something. Yeah.

You actually don't want to work with someone who's like... Needs something from you. Yeah. Yeah. On the sports topic, there's one more, um, destroying. Uh, he is a sports creator, a football focused creator. Right. He, he played football at UCF.

And this is pre-NIL days. Right. So he played football. He was making YouTube videos. They brought him into a room and said, you have a choice. You can either continue playing football or you can continue with your YouTube channel. He chose YouTube. And built this really substantial YouTube channel. He has this series called one-on-ones that just partnered.

Does he go live to places? He goes to like a city. Yeah, this is like live events. And they get crazy. Like in Arizona, it had to get called off because it was too many people there and the police had to get involved. I was going to go. I think he messaged or management somebody messaged. Okay, okay.

And I was like, I mean, like, he's an hour away. I was like, oh, that sounds kind of fun, but I didn't make it out. What does he do? So it's one-on-one. So basically it's wide receivers versus cornerbacks. And they line up and they go one-on-one. And one dude wins $10,000. And for some of the communities he's going into, that's life-changing thing, right?

For a lot of communities, that's like. Is he the guy in the thing or it's two other guys? He's the host. You know, and like, you can see, like, this is what it looks like. If you go to his channel and go to most viewed. That's in my old high school. Oh, cool. So if that guy had caught it, he would have got 10 grand.

No, he'd advance. It's a tournament. And then you start to know these characters and they travel to different markets to compete. This is the new N1 mixtape. Exactly. This is great. This is N1 mixtape for football. And Colin and I spoke with at a YouTube event with Dee and he was speaking with Roger Goodell.

And we were talking to Roger about destroying and he was like, this guy's like really impactful for football. Oh, wow. He's creating new fans. And the NFL just partnered with him. on this series, the one-on-one series. And I think when I look at D, like the leagues are starting to get involved with him in a way where I'm like, wait, he is single-handedly a really important part of the future of sports viewership. Yeah. And that to me, I don't know that he, I don't know if he has aspirations to be a billionaire, but to solve that problem for the NFL is a

big problem to solve. And if you solve that for the CFL and you start solving that, you know, you go down the line, this can also become camps. Totally. This can become, you know, so many things, right? The world is his oyster, right? He can become a host. He probably should be one of the hosts for the NFL, like, or like the pro bowl, which no one's watching.

I think he can also create a, yeah, I mean, he can redefine the pro bowl because this is more interesting. This is way more, yeah. I'm like, half looking at you because I'm like watching this. I mean, we pulled this up in our office and we have a ton of people who don't watch sports and then they got hooked on it. They're like, this is primal. It's primal, yeah.

And so he could redefine the pro ball. He can also create an NIL agency, right? So you have college athletes who he represents this, you know, where college athletics didn't let you monetize. He knows how to do this, right? So, okay, now can D.E create a NIL agency where he's signing athletes and getting them contracts. He, the world of D, like the world of sports, no one is really approaching it like him. And I think that, like sports is still high, it carries a very high dollar value.

Live sports. Yes. It carries such high dollar value that I think he has that opportunity as well. There was a guy at that event we were at that was, you'll know him because he's a lacrosse, Paul. Paul, Rayball. Yeah. Yeah. He's a groomsman in my wedding. It's one of my best friends.

Amazing. He is, I don't know much about this. So you're at the boardroom event. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me about it. So basically he, what he was saying on stage was like, okay, we created this professional lacrosse league.

Yeah. What was interesting, he was like, there's like, whatever, I don't know, eight teams or something. But he's like, we own the teams. Yeah. It's not like a franchise model. And I think he's like, we pay the costs, but then like all the players have upside and the thing. Like, what is the business model of this? This sounded pretty fascinating.

Yeah. So it's, it's a good model also. I'm an investor. So a bias opinion, yes. But I've, you know, what I've always seen in lacrosse, if you pull up, go to the premier lacrosse league YouTube channel and play the last vlog from their All-Star game, you get a sense for like the community. That one, the fastest shot. Right.

Yeah. So you get a sense for like one. It looks like. I mean, they were going wild, but like, they packed this stadium out in Louisville for their All-Star game. So basically what he did was there was a pre-existing league called Major League lacrosse. They paid their players terribly. They treated them not well.

That was the best league? That was the only pro league. It was like, and no one really cared about it. I mean, like, it was, it was kind of interesting, but it was empty stadiums. They didn't have health care. It was like they weren't treated like, it was tough to be a pro athlete and not get paid much, right? And Paul became the, you know, number. one lacrosse player he had the biggest media platform Colin and I actually ran his

YouTube channel that's how we became very close we were running a lot of different athlete YouTube channels at one point and so we became really close to Paul that's how we met and he had the best head on his shoulder for like media how do you build a brand how do you you know he had the biggest he was called lacrosse's first million dollar man he had deals with Red Bull and new balance and he had created the model for like how do you make money as a and was he just was he the best and he was the best at media or he was actually the best at media and really good. No, he's the, he was the best.

He was the best player too. Yeah, he's best player. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So those are those like Cona McGregor at one time. He's the champ and he's like the most marketable guy. So he decided, uh, you know, at one point just to say, hey, you know what? We're going to go raise money and create our own league. Like this league sucks that I plan.

Um, that's what he did. He turned to Joe Ty, who's, uh, the Nets owner. Yeah, Nets owner, uh, who played lacrosse in college and loves lacrosse. Right. And he's a great dude. Met him a couple times. And, uh, uh, He became the lead investor and then they partnered with Rain Group and they raised a bunch of money and said, we're going to pay the players a reasonable salary.

We're going to give them equity in the league. We're going to give them health care. And we are going to create media around them. We're going to create media opportunities for them. We're going to teach them how to, you know. And the last thing they did was they said, we're not going to stick these teams in local markets. We're going to actually take the whole league on tour. Makes sense.

So they developed a tour. That makes more sense. It's like a touring, you know, circus where it's like, is it coming to San Diego this weekend? Okay, everyone descends upon this major, major market. Yeah. You know, if you have lacrosse people, they come to town twice a year. Exactly. It's like, oh, we'll go to that.

We may not go all the time or there may not be enough people to support a stadium. Well, I think also what he knew and what we saw was that the model in lacrosse that we made money was by doing camps and clinics. Right. So you have youth camps, right? Like, there's a lot of young kids who want to play. They come from affluent backgrounds. their parents are willing to pay $1,000 for them to get coached by their favorite lacrosse player.

And Paul built a massive camps business. And so alongside this, you go to a major market. Now you have a weekend dedicated to, you can have camps. You can turn all these players into camp counselors and trainers. They earn extra money or whatever. They can build their own bespoke businesses,

but that all connect to the league. So him and his brother are really sharp. And they didn't sell franchises. Not yet. Yeah. And they, uh, Barstools involved in one of them. Okay.

Uh, they, they got to name the expansion team and, uh, part of my take, like, they're the owners. What'd they name it?

Uh, the water dogs. That's a ridiculous name. Yeah, but like that, you know, that creates a kind of that, that inside joke with the part of PMT community that it's like,

they have their own team. That's smart. It's a collab. It's a collab. It's a collab. It's a collab. Because when they play, big cats tweeting about it,

uh, when they, they won the championship last year, he got his own ring. you know, it's like, amazing. They're able to build, again, they're very media savvy.

And so they understand that this is a long game. Lacrosse is not. Well, to build any league, I think I texted you this during the event, I was like, I think what this guy's saying is actually quite smart. We should look at investing and I go, I'll go, man, building a league is hard.

Like, fun if you do it. Crazy. That is like one of the hardest games you could play in the world of entrepreneurship is creating a sports league from scratch because it's like kind of a 20-year arc to actually get there. You have to have such a long view.

on the world and on your life to do it. And you're doing live events. You're doing all the hardest things. I mean, every weekend he's in a different city. You know, I'm watching these and looking. The most promising thing is look how young the kids are who are there, right? Right. So if they grow up with this league, these teams, these franchises, like they are playing a very

long game here. And I credit that for doing it, but it's not an easy thing. They signed like a $10 million deal with ESPN. With ESPN, yeah. Yeah. The media rights deal. Yeah. That's good.

Yeah. So when they first started, Colin and I made a documentary about them for NBC. We've had like many, many different lives of, you know, Colin and Samir. But, yeah. That's amazing. Do you think that's going to be, you know, good investment for you? Were you like the first one in because he's like your buddy? I was first one in, which was great.

So it's doing good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm having. Isn't that funny how like, like you're going to get like, let's say this works out, hopefully. Like, you know, like we all were rooting for this.

like you're going to make a bunch of money from this thing that was so impossible to predict that that's how this whole thing would pay off. It's like, all right, mom, I know, I don't have health insurance, I don't have a job. I know I'm kind of filming this like failing league. This like lacrosse thing. It's like, and it leads to the thing, right?

So it's the Steve Jobs quote. You look back, you see all the dots how they connected, but like, you go even further back. And the way this happened was my first idea when I was 21 was to set up a laptop and make YouTube videos about lacrosse. Commentating, right? That was a bad idea when you really, you know, you zoom out. But if you're into it, like, a lot of creators ask me, like, how long does it take to make it on YouTube?

Like, how long does it take to make it? I'm sure entrepreneurs ask that question too, right? Or have that thought in their head. Like, how long is this going to take? And I was like, I always think it's such a ridiculous question because I'm like, well, what's your relationship to making videos? Do you wake up every morning and you can't not do it? Like, you're just like, all I can do is make videos.

Then you made it. From day one. Yeah, you made it and it will, there will be an outcome from that. There will be. It will lead you somewhere. But if you wake up and you're like, this sucks, it's kind of what you were saying. It's like, I'm doing X so I can get to Y. Well, the entrepreneurship version is startups fail, but founders don't.

So like, I moved to San Francisco in 2012, so that's 10 years ago. And I met a bunch of people and we used to have like these like underground founder like meetings or like trading tips and tricks and being like, you know, what do I do? this person, I need to fire them. What do I say when I fire them? Like, basically there's a bunch of CEOs being like, I can't like tell my team about this. I can't tell my customers about this. I can't tell my investors about this.

I can only tell you guys because you guys understand. And unlike YouTube, everybody who was doing startups at the time was like all living in the same seven mile radius city. And so we would just all meet up all the time. And sure enough, like as you watch, if you track that cohort, there's basically only two outcomes. one is got so burnt out from like the grind and failure that they just stopped after like you know three, four years, more than five years. They just like did that company. They're like, screw this. I'm taking a job.

I'm moving back to Connecticut. And like I'm going to live in a low cost place. I'm going to de-stress and I'm going to do that. But everybody else who stayed in the game won. Like literally like almost like 100% of my friends who stayed in the game. Yeah. And someone in year two, someone in year five, someone in year nine. now we're in like year 11 or 12 people are winning like now but like and it's kind of like it feels

like a real long time like wow 12 years it's like yeah but we all started this when we were 21 so like yeah um okay we're mid 30s yeah for us we're 34 and rich like you know yeah yeah it worked in the 15 year arc you get like then the odds flip from like 90% of new business has failed to actually like 90% of you guys will succeed if you actually enjoy this enough where you'll keep doing this even though you have easier options. Yes. I always, I've said that multiple times,

um, whenever I'm having something that feels like I'm struggling. I'm like, this is the, uh, the least rational path to making money, right? Is what I do. At this point also now,

I have enough exposure and enough, uh, of an abundance in my network that I can go and get a good job, right? But like, I do this because it's, it's just what I do. It's just who I am. I don't even know what to do in another context.

I know what that looks like. I will say, though, like being, it's hard to be not outcome oriented, you know, like, I think as an entrepreneur, you think about like exits and you think about, you know, like these big paydays. And I would say that even with our newsletter, like when I saw Milk Road, I was like, okay, I want that outcome too. But whenever I get too attached to that outcome, I'm like, okay, wait a second. Right. That's like, that's creating in a way that's just like, the product probably will not be great if I don't just put my head. head down and go, okay, it's Monday. Is this Monday issue really great? Okay, it's Wednesday. Is this Wednesday issue really great? And I've really tried to refine my focus on process and impact.

Like, I have to focus on the process of creating the thing. And then the second thing is like my, a lot of my reward is seeing if we're having impact. Is this actually impactful what I'm putting out? Right. Or is it just going out and, you know, no one's saying anything about it or we're not getting any, like I find I gauge the success of our stuff from like the texts I get or the DMs or like, hey, that episode is really impactful or hey, that really changed the way I think about this. Or hey, that newsletter taught me about this. If I see those, then I'm like, okay, we're doing something. Let's keep doing that.

Hopefully that takes us to an outcome. But you also have to accept it might not. It might just be this. And we might just get, you know, 5% better, you know, over the next two years. Right. And that's it. And you have to accept that that is a, that is maybe the most likely reality is that you just keep doing it.

Right. And as long as you can accept that, for me, that's how I, you know, explore it for myself. Yeah. The best test of a project is basically,

would we regret doing it if it didn't work? Right. Like, obviously we don't want it not to work and we might be upset if it didn't work, but like, would we actually regret doing it if it didn't work? Because then it's like, oh,

I'm just actually dependent on the success or failure of what's usually a low odds of success endeavor. Totally. Whereas other things are like, I wouldn't really regret it because like, well, I'm still going to get this, like, still going to be fun to do, still going to learn a ton. I'm like, this is the type of thing I like to do. Yeah.

So, you know, if this doesn't work out, it doesn't really matter. Like, I'm just going to ping pong to the kind of the next version of this, but it was a forward, it was a forward step either way, right? Yeah. Like, there's this, uh, like Tony Robbins does this thing where he does this, um, dabblers versus masters. I don't know if you ever heard this. So he tells a story at his events where he goes, um, he goes, uh, there's some people that

they go and they discover racquetball, which maybe now pickleball would be the thing. But it's like, you know, they go to the gym, they're like, they see somebody think racquetball. They're like, oh, try it. And they go and they have some fun. And they're like, for racquetball,

this might be my thing. And they're like, okay, I'm going to play racquetball. And so the next day they come back, play again. Next day, they actually go and they, you know, they get better shoes because they were like, oh, that was the problem last time. They buy the racket. They start playing, blah, blah, blah.

And they're doing well, but then they play somebody who's been playing for like 10 years, who's like way better than that. them. And that's, you know, for three days straight, they're playing and they can't hit a good shot. Everything's going off and they're losing all these games. And they're like, this stupid, like stupid racquetball, like, right. Why am I in this box? I'm trapped? Like, you know, this is, it's too loud in here. It is weirdly loud. This is a sport for old people. You start to find all these reasons to quit. So they quit. Like, I'm going to play real game. I'm going to go play

tennis. So you go outside. You play tennis. You're like, oh, so much better on my doors. This is way better. And, you know, they're hitting the ball. They're starting to learn the strokes that they're enjoying learning a little bit Same thing happens they start to play somebody who knows what's going on They're hitting the ball in the net they can't really serve well and it's getting frustrated It's it's hot out and they're like stupid game like you know what is this thing? I like this is this is like this is like a girly game I don't want to play it someone play like a real game and golf and they're like just fuck from day one and he's basically like you know Most people go through their whole life doing a series of these dabbling yeah and they're dabblers and they're dabblers and they're dabblers and they're

And he's like, what's the difference between a mast? There's like, there's three categories. A dabbler. A dabbler is basically like, try it. As soon as it gets hard, bounce. Then he's like, then there's the stressor achiever. Stressor achiever is like, when it gets hard, they just start gritting their teeth and they just are going to keep going, but they don't enjoy any of it.

And like all the hardship stresses them out. But they've just been trained since they're a little kid to like, push through it. Just keep pushing through and like you'll get a gold star later. Like the joy will be later. He's like, then there's the master. And the master basically like, they're like, they know that when you start something new, there's the initial like joy of discovery. There's the learning curve.

There's the hard plateaus. And when the plateau comes, they greet it like an old friend. Like, oh, there you are. Like, I thought you'd be showing up soon. I've been playing for a week. And usually that's when I'll hit. That's when you arrive plateau. And I know how to like deal with you because I know that after the plateau comes the next

uprise and I'm excited for that upswing. But let me work through this plateau. And they don't really get like flustered by it. So they get. the same or they get better results than all three way better than the dabbler significantly better than the stress or achiever but the difference is like the whole way they're kind of actually like enjoying the dance or playing the game yeah because they actually understand that this is like these are all normal for the game and you find that like the people

who um get really like into like struggling or grinding or like get really overwhelmed by like you know the adversity it's really just like you haven't played the game enough to know that this is this is how the levels of the game work yeah You shouldn't be surprised that the roller coaster is going up and now. Like, you remember, you got in line to get on a roller coaster, right? That's a good point. You know, one thing that, I don't know why this made me think of it. I think just because like the ups and downs of the game and the conversation we're having

at the beginning of the show about interviewing, one thing that both Colin and I did was go to improv class to learn how to be. To get better. Yeah. Just to get better at like being present, working with whatever the other person says. Like, what we found was my wife was listening to our interviews and she was like, you're not listening to them. You're just not listening to your guests.

They're saying something and then you say something completely different. You're just waiting to talk. And so I went to improv class and it was really this incredible lesson in the craft of how do you sit in the pocket and just be like, I can't have any preconceived notions as to where this is about to go. You're going to say something and I have to let go of where I want it to go. I found myself in the first day of improv. I was like, we were playing this game and I was like, okay, I know exactly how to make this funny. This is going to be funny. I know where to take it.

And the person right before me said something. And I was like, why the hell would you say that? And then I had to deal with it. And then I was like, oh, this is the work. Right. This is the craft or building the craft. And I think, you know, in the roller coaster of being a podcaster, like, you have to be willing to do all of that in public as well. Right.

Right. Like you go back and you watch it really. episodes, that roller coaster is, there's a record of the roller coaster of like, times where it was going really well, times where it wasn't going well, times where views were up, times where views were down, it's like all public. And I think it's challenging because we have to practice in public. I think that's like as, as, you know, you build in public as an entrepreneur, but there's something incredibly just, you're like naked as a content creator out there. Everyone can see everything. So, yeah, well, you guys are doing an amazing job. I'm a fan. Thank you, man. I look forward.

to kind of see if this is your kind of like learning phase then like you know I'm excited to see what it's like as you guys master this so appreciate thanks for thanks for doing this I really appreciate thank you so much man I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on the road let's travel never looking back like