The Pomp Podcast - #1179 Sam Parr | The Founder Creating Insane Internet Companies

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Sam Parr is one of my most interesting friends. He previously built The Hustle, which has over 3.5 million readers, he also is the host of My First Million podcast. Sam recently co-founded and launched Hampton, which is a private community for super successful CEO's and founders. We also talk about his personal operating system, how he builds various companies, why tinkering is such an important skill on the internet, artificial intelligence, and who some of our heroes are. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Sam Parr is one of my most interesting friends. He previously built The Hustle, which has over 3.5 million readers. He also is the host of My First Million,

one of the most popular podcasts in the business category in the entire world. Sam recently co-founded and launched Hampton, which is a private community for super successful CEOs and founders. I'm a member and many other people that have been on this podcast are as well. So please go check it out. We discuss it in this episode. We also talk about his personal operating system, all the different tools he uses, how he builds various companies, why tinkering is such an important skill on the internet. And then we pontificate on everything from artificial intelligence to who some of our heroes in business and personal life is. This was a fun episode. Sam and I could literally talk for hours and hours and hours.

So I hope you guys enjoy it. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you think. Here is my conversation with Sam Parr. time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. If you pull a muscle, all of a sudden you realize how often you use that muscle. So the bladder is exactly like that. When it's working well, we don't think about it.

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Bring it with SAP Grow, AI cloud ERP for any size business. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Sam here with me. Sam, you have become this connoisseur of the internet. Everyone is like, that guy's got tons of ideas. He's got crazy questions. So I thought a great place to start would just be, what is the craziest business idea that you've attempted? Whether it was successful or not, looking back when you're like, man, that was pretty crazy that we tried to build a business around that. I'll tell you one that I did in college. And it's not that crazy, but it's more stupid than it's anything. So one time I got poison ivy uh and it's very coincidental i was trying to like learn seo and i got poison ivy

and i was like well i'll just pick a project and i'd bought my poison ivy treatment.com and i was like i'll just like make a wall let's just see if i can rank for like poison ivy stuff and i didn't know how i was going to do that and i did a bunch of research and i found that there was this thing called xanfil have you heard of xanfil i have not it's like a it's like a poison ivy treatment but It costs, like, $50 an ounce. Like, you get, like, half an ounce on Amazon for, like, $40. And I started researching it, and I realized that in the comments, someone had said that Xanfil is basically just this mechanic.

Like, you know how, like, when you ever – have you ever, like, worked on cars or anything, and they, like, use this special, like, degreaser on your hands, like, when you're done? Like, mechanics use this, like, bead – it's got, like, a bead. It feels like that stuff that, like, you used to get rid of blackheads on your face. It's got, like, a bead in it. and someone was like dude this is the same thing as this thing called mean green and you can get like a whole barrel of it for like fifty dollars obviously i was like bingo so i i and then i was like i need a name so i created a product called itch juice and and it was basically just repackaged

mean green which was the same ingredient as xanfil but it was like i would sell it for like forty dollars it cost me like a dollar and it started making money like pretty much right off the bat i just got like someone on fiverr to make a logo and i started packaging it and then i realized like a few months in even though it was making like you know five hundred thousand dollars a day i was like i'm like doing something serious i need to like do this legally in the right way and i don't want to sell poison ivy treatment this is the stupidest thing ever and so it was kind of like a get rich quick scheme but i didn't really get rich but i i figured something out quickly but i yeah i used to do like little like schemes like that all the time in high school and college

and and and like constantly how big does something like that get like when you're like okay i figured out quickly are we talking like ten dollars a day a couple hundred dollars a day like how quickly could you scale it like two to three hundred dollars a day in the first week okay and so yeah i do things quickly i like it my whole shtick is like when i get momentum and an idea i have to act like within 24 hours do you do that out of fear that if you don't act then you'll never do it or do you do it because you see like offensively hey this is how you actually build the momentum and make them successful because i'm ocd and i'm obsessed about stuff and also early on in my life like anytime i had an idea i had to do it so i used to have i used to be afraid to talk to girls

and i like i was like from now on if i see a girl i want to talk to you i only have three seconds to like make an introduction and so i just got in this habit of like when you get an idea you have to act immediately because then the dopamine of seeing any type of results is like addicting and you keep going. Otherwise, you're just like, soft and you never do anything. All right. So you have like this skill set, which I like to think I have and a couple of other people that we're friends with have, which is like, you get these ideas. And if somebody else was like, I should sell poison IV cream on the internet, they would not go about it the way that you just described, right? They would not think of like, how do I find a way to get better unit

economics and then package it and get the SEO and get to a couple hundred dollars a day in revenue. but once you learn the skill set you can pretty much apply this anywhere right how do you pick up that skill set did you just like figure it out did you read a book did somebody tell you that was like a mentor like how do you acquire the skill set to basically build these like online you know cash flow machines so i call this sounds cheesy but it's funny i call it being like a manifest cowboy which is like i'm like addicted to like manifesting things like if i have an idea i have to do it and in my head i tell myself like you're a sissy you're soft you never can pull this off i love like that like self-hate it's very weird and i think it like stems from i think i got mad at my

parents when i was a kid because like we had a burnt out light bulb and like they didn't it took them forever to replace it and i'm like screw that in my life i'm always gonna fix things right away and create an act right away and so i don't know i just have been doing it since i was a kid where i just like i'm ocd i just think it stems from impulsiveness i think that a lot of successful entrepreneurs have a really nice balance of long term vision, but also being impulsive. When you've done these in the past, are there certain things you know not to do? Everyone always wants to know what did you do? But like, when you have a new idea, are there certain things now you're just like, okay, I'll never do that again. Or that specific type of approach doesn't

work. So once you get popular on the internet, and you have some success, it does change a little bit so like I don't know about you you could tell me but when I have an idea now I try not to talk about it until it's like a little bit successful because you know how people say like I don't want people to copy my ideas well when I was like a nobody and I still am a bit a little bit of a nobody but when I was like when people just like would dismiss me it was no big deal I would just talk about everything constantly and I'm like just watch I'll figure it out somehow and it's no big deal now when you have an audience you actually and when you have like a smart audience people do rip you off and so i don't talk about i try not to talk about things so we just launched hampton

i we got it to multiple seven figures in revenue before we ever mentioned it on the pod or anything like that like i don't talk about anything are you the same way i am the same way but uh it's for a different reason which is uh i'm not worried so much about people trying to take it and like run with it uh i end up trying to find someone that i can work with on it uh and usually what happens is if you talk about it too much, the wrong people get attracted to it. So I try to find people who like, I'm like, Oh, you can do like 10 different types of ideas. Okay, here's my idea. Like you're like the right person. And then I tell them the idea, rather than if you put out the idea, you get like all of the industry experts on that you get all the people who come

from those companies, you know, like, actually, those are the wrong people. I want the person who like, is coming at this from a completely new perspective, and they end up being the right person. Well, and there's reputational risk. So you don't want to like put your brand behind something that still sucks and then there's uh just getting this sounds this is first world problem but like getting too many customers early on um and so there's things like that so now i'm a little bit more thoughtful i also focus way more uh i don't just like i i do a pretty good job like you you have to like put out breadcrumbs and like test things quickly but you can't go all i i'm a big fan of like not going all in on like um when i'm sorry when i do go all in on something

it's all in and you can't do multiple things at once. I'm a big fan of focus. When you were on my pod, I was like, pop, how do you balance all this stuff? And you're like, well, and you had a great answer. The first time I've ever heard this answer, you're like, I don't balance. I'm only focused on one thing, which is building audience and then hiring really good leaders. And I was like, oh, that's actually great. But a lot of people don't focus. Yeah. So I was going to say like, what is your thing that you do focus on? Is it just one idea at a time? Is it a skill of building internet companies? Like, how do you describe, okay, Sam is focused right now on what is the thing? Dude, I plot. So like, so like I plot hardcore. And so like, all right. So before

I started the hustle, I was plotting, I spent like 12 months. I'm like, all right, what are the economics of this? Like, what do I think they can become? Who's winning in the market? Where's their weakness? Like I plot pretty hardcore and while throwing little breadcrumbs out to like test my hypothesis. And then when I make that decision, I go all in and it's like, you know, I bet you this is like you where people are like hey uh it's wednesday at 11 you want to go like hang out i'm like no dude i gotta work like i have a job and so like when i go all in it's like it's like it's like a job you know it's like a nine to five well it's usually longer than that but it's like i'm all in and i focus on on things so um i plot hardcore so i've got like a notion doc that has

all of my notes on a variety of different businesses and what i what i tend to do is i'll go and find out who the bankers were that sold the companies in the space and I'll just cold call them and they'll like tell me all types of details I'll call the CEOs or the founders of a lot of these companies I'll call ex-employees and I use LinkedIn like crazy to find that and I'll call them like where was the weakness why did this suck I'll read Glassdoor I'll look on Reddit I the Apple reviews store I look at all this stuff and I just plot and I have this document that maps out how different things work and then I think about what are my skill sets and interests and which ones can misalign to

and which one can I actually kick ass in. But I call it plotting. And so like Sean, my co-host Sean, he just sold Milk Road, his company. And he was like, what should I do next? And he was immediately throwing ideas at me. And I was like, dude, just don't do anything. Just give yourself six or 12 months,

no timeline and just plot and be very strategic about this. Because once you have a little bit of audience, getting customers isn't that hard, but making a product that's good that you want to do for 10 years is hard. And so I call it plotting. I'm just like constantly plotting.

You know what I mean? I don't know if you're like that, though. Like, I think this idea of building something that is sustainable and having the both the benefit and the downside of an audience is completely undiscussed. So having an audience, everyone's like, I want an audience. I want an audience. One, it's very hard to test things and have your name on it when you have an audience because everyone expects it to be the finished product. But actually, most of the people who I think you and I hang out with, like we built our careers on testing a whole bunch of different things. And the thing that worked, we kind of like went all in, as you described.

uh you really can't do that right now unless you like explicitly set the expectation up front this is an experiment i may shut this down i'm going to try it for two weeks like you almost have to like oversell the fact that like you're not serious about it which could dilute some of the results as well because if you just are like hey we're launching this thing and then all of a sudden two weeks later you like shut it down most people think that like that was your next company or that was the next thing that you were going to do and they put too much like seriousness on it and it can actually work against you if you do that five, six, seven times before you find the thing. Do you see that as well? Yeah, totally. Dude, with Hampton, I created a Google Doc and

I just wrote out what it was and I just sent it to like 50 friends and I said, I don't sell friends. I'm just letting you know this thing is going to exist. If you want in, let me know. And I just was curious what the response was and that's how it started. And we got to many millions in sales before we even um or run rate before we even like had a website and so now i i mean i'm a big fan of doing things hand-to-hand combat and i'll just get people i call it hand-to-hand combat that's what i call i'm like so there's times where it's like monday or uh monday tuesday wednesday no one is allowed to talk to me because i'm on the phone talking to people customers constantly and i just like my it looks like my calendar looks like it's got chicken pox there's

like little like marked out times on every like little 30 minute slots taken all over the calendar basically 9 a.m to 9 p.m just talking to customers and i don't even like building a website until we get sales all right so explain what hampton is because i think this is like a perfect uh anatomy of like how to start a company in the internet age today what was the big idea that you had and i'm gonna guess actually when you came up with the idea but i want to first hear what the idea is so it's called Hampton joinhampton.com it's um so basically when I was running the hustle Sean and I uh would meet once a month it was me him our friend Sieva do you know Sieva I I know who it is but I don't know this many time uh he has a big like PE firm and then like

Ryan Hoover would come a bunch of times it was basically like six of us we would meet once a month and it was like business group therapy like we would like express like I gotta lay people off how do I do that? Or I'm making good money. What do I do with my money? Or I'm going to sell my company. How do I not look desperate? What's like a good negotiating tactic? Like all these things that like you couldn't really Google, but we're kind of life changing. But you couldn't like tell your employees because you have to look strong in front of them. And you can't really tell like your friends back home because they don't know anything about like, it's embarrassing to talk about like certain money. Or it can be like really silly, but important things like, hey,

I want to fly private. How much does that cost? How do I do that? Like these things that you don't want to tweet exactly and so we did this thing and we all kind of like sold our companies around the same time and it was really successful but when you're someone like me in silicon valley i have a lot of like connections and a lot of network uh a big network and it was easy to create that group and so we created hampton so we could uh make a like a highly vetted group for other entrepreneurs and so what you do is people apply they tell us about their company their revenue their traction their wants and desires and what all that stuff we interview them they're placed in a group of eight people that have similar sized companies in similar industries they meet

once a month with a facilitator that guides it the conversation and that's like the business group therapy and then we have like an online community that's popping so like when the silicon valley bank stuff was going down like the day before it happened people were like i'm hearing rumors about this this stuff and like we everyone got a call and then people took their money out So anyway, it's kind of like almost like a YPO, if you know what that is. It's like a YPO, but for digital-first entrepreneurs. Most people, you have to have at least a million bucks in revenue to join, but the average revenue size is like $30-ish million.

But we have people from like a million in revenue, like a one-person company with a million. This one lady named Anya, she's got a company called Rooted. It's a one-person meditation app that does a million in revenue all the way up to publicly traded companies. So when you had, I think it was the Tiger 21, guy on the pod i've never it's cool right i've never heard you so excited before and i remember thinking to myself sam is doing like the napkin math like he's trying to figure out because you

were asking all these questions and i was like he's like dissecting this business at a level that uh he normally doesn't do on the pod uh and i don't know if you had already kind of thought about hampton or uh you during that call were like wow i should just do this for like digital first entrepreneurs but i remember specifically listening to that episode and being like oh man Like Sam White loves that idea. I want to explain why I did that. So I've been thinking about this for years. I almost did this instead of the hustle.

And then I always thought it could be big, but I didn't have the confidence that I could pull it off. And then we had trends, you know, we were an advertiser with you, with trends, trends.co. And I screwed that up, but that had kind of Hampton-esque qualities, but I messed up parts of it. And I was like, I need to get this right. And so I remember people like chirping at me saying like, of course you can build, like people always ask me and I bet you get this all the time if you had to start from zero what would

you do and I always say like well I would do the same thing I would start an email list I would do this exact same thing it works and they're like well of course you could do it now because you have an audience and I was like I'm gonna do this without telling any of you about it to prove that I can do it and so the reason why I had Tiger 21 on the pod Tiger 21 is a like a it's like Hampton or YPO but for wealthy people I think the average net worth is like 40 million dollars or something you have to have at least 20 million I think to get in and it's the same thing where people like wealthy people meet and they discuss private stuff that you know you can't talk about publicly and i remember thinking i'm gonna interview this person in public so everyone has the same

information that i have and i'm gonna prove that i can do it and so i did that a little bit out of spite to prove that i could pull it off it was definitely a chip in the chip uh on the shoulder type of thing and that guy was awesome um what was his name uh michael um he didn't like me at first when i interviewed him but then we got along and uh yeah it's a good business all right so when you get started uh you have the idea walk me through like how do you launch this thing and i know some of the people who are in this uh they are the highest quality people so how do you go from like i have this idea i have to execute immediately to okay now this is to a point of success where i feel comfortable putting my name on it building a website like we're gonna go do

this i created a google doc that outlined what it was and at the bottom of the google doc it was a type form that says if you're interested uh fill this out i sent it to 50 people on twitter like in their dms and then uh i got them each on the phone whoever clicked on the type form i interviewed them and i by myself and my partner joe i have a partner joe spicer he uh went and hired a bunch of executive coaches and negotiated their rates and together we created a curriculum and then him and i would i would we would record our zoom interviews that i did with all these people and we would say i think this person would match with these other seven people and we just by hand created these groups and then i because i sold the hubspot i get for a free

hubspot account and i did we just did it all on hubspot and we like emailed them a stripe link we said all right pay and then and it was very very very very manual at first and now we have hundreds of members and it was mostly all manual and i started working on it basically in the summertime and we didn't have a website until december um and so it was all manual so as you get started, from my understanding is you guys have raised no money. You literally if you texted me, you said I'm starting another company, I would just be like, how much money do you want? And I think a lot of your friends would do the same thing. And I think most of our friend group kind of just would like bet on each other. Why not raise money versus kind of go it alone from an

economic standpoint? Okay, well, there's a bunch of reasons. And I'll start with like some selfish reasons. One, I think if you have a little bit of cash, and you could self fund it, I think you can get wealthier owning something i think the lifestyle of just owning most of a company that you can grow at your own pace is significantly better uh not for everyone and not in all cases like i think an uber wouldn't exist if they didn't raise money so i understand that but with this i just looked at which businesses i think i could i could self-finance uh number two with a community based product it's not like software we can just throw tons of customers at the problem and it just can scale like almost seamlessly you just have back-end issues so i wanted to make sure that

i wasn't forced to grow it quickly um but mainly it was just freedom um you know my partner joe do you know who joe is i know he is yeah so joe spicer he's my partner listen to this so he sold his first company was 25 for like 112 million dollars then he started little things which was like a pet blog it was like uh like almost like an upworthy style website he scaled that to 100 million in revenue and he got all of this traffic from facebook and then zuckerberg was like oh we're changing and he had a term sheet to sell the company for over 100 million dollars and two weeks before closing date zuck made that change and his traffic tanked the term sheet got pulled and the business basically went out of business like uh eight weeks later it was like it was like

a tragic like horrible thing so um anyway I did we we partnered and um wait what was the question uh explain not raising money oh and uh we were so I was like Joe so Joe and I were also part of a group when I was running the hustle and we would share everything with each other we were sharing like I would share like our net worth like I would say here's my spreadsheet of my net worth let me see yours let's like help each other like figure out like what we want to do with like allocation and whatever like we were like or we would talk about relationship problems that we're having with spouses or girlfriends we would talk about everything and it like changed my life and so uh when i i go joe let's start a company together but before we do let's write out what we each want

in life and so i created a notion doc that says like what does success look like how do you want to spend your day um what are your values and like we aligned to where we both had freedom up there where we're like we want to do whatever the hell we want whenever the hell we want we want to work hard but we don't want outsiders telling us what to do and we said great we both align let's start this together and so that's why we just said all right well let's self-fund it how much money are we each willing to risk and things like that i mean you raised money for one of your companies right um but you have like three others or something like that that you didn't raise money for and i just think it's if you have a big idea and you have a machine that can turn one dollar

into $5, I think you should fill up that dump truck with money and just back it into that machine. But if you can do that without raising money and use your own capital, I think that that's ideal. And that was the situation that we were in. I mean, what's your perspective on raising money versus not raising money? I think you and I think about it almost exactly the same is the default is don't raise the money, especially if you have the skill set, the distribution, the tools at your disposal, where you can get revenue very quickly, then that basically replaces fundraising, right? If you're able to get to thousands of dollars,

tens of thousands of dollars in the first couple of months, then you're able to basically use those funds just as if you had raised money, but it's non-dilutive, right? There's no better kind of capital pool to tap than customers in order to fund the growth of your business. But at the same time, raising capital, I think there always a time and a place for it. And one, there's some capital-intensive businesses.

Two is probably the weaponization of capital. Like there's somebody who worked at Uber who – I won't mention his name because I don't know if he'd be okay with his name being attached to it. But he was like, yeah, like Uber's greatest advantage was like they knew how to weaponize capital. They could tap the capital markets. They could get that money, and they were able to use it in specific ways. And in a marketplace business, they had all sorts of things where they were basically subsidizing both sides. So they would pay drivers extra money. They'd pay riders extra money.

And they could really use that in a very methodical kind of math driven way that would lead to liquidity in the market, which would lead to revenue growth and then kind of tap the capital markets again. And so like that business needed capital and they were very good at implementing the use of the capital. And then the third thing is like acquisitions. And so like I actually believe what Andrew Wilkinson's done, he has it in a holding company structure. But if you look at some of these other organizations and companies, there are many public companies that literally all of their growth over the last 10, 15 years has just been acquisitions, where they basically just grow through acquisition. And they sometimes grow with those acquisitions and they leave them as standalone brands. Sometimes they buy them and they kind of tuck them in and rebrand them. But if you're a startup, there is this huge opportunity to buy things and kind of grow quicker.

you got to be smart about it. But a lot of times the startup doesn't have enough balance sheet capital to do it. And so raising dilutive funding to be able to go and buy things is a great way to do it as well. So it's like, if you want those specific outcomes or those specific applications of the capital, go raise the money, but everything else, like don't raise money because you own more of it. And I don't think there's anything wrong with saying like, Hey, the economic incentive is for me not to raise the capital. And Joe previously had a company called a pet flow, which was like Chewy before Chewy came around. It was an online pet store.

And he was like, we're going to be profitable the whole time. And he got creamed because Chewy came along and they raised all this money. And their whole thesis was like, we can lose money for the first year on certain customers. And we're going to provide such good service that they come back. And they were right. They won. And it created a multi-billion dollar exit. But that isn't the case in every other business.

And also, selling a company is, well, first of all, building a company that makes like a substantial profit, that's pretty hard. Building a company that can sell, that's really, really hard. And actually getting to the deal, like when we sold The Hustle, a week after we sold, Brian, the CEO, he got into a really bad accident and nearly died. And like, that could have like changed the outcome. So like, there's all these things to sell a company where like the stars need to align. It's very rare to sell a company. And then finally, to sell a venture backed company where you need a really large exit in order to make the founder a substantial sum, that's really hard. And so it gets harder and harder and harder. And I would think that I made a significant amount more money from my relatively small acquisition, because I own most all the company versus compared to someone who raised, let's say $50 million. dollars and even if they sold for a billion dollars dude i met a guy i know one guy who sold a company for a billion dollars and he had four partners and he made four million bucks and so like getting like a substantial amount of wealth then wealth is not my main thing while i'm starting this company it's like i just love adventure and dopamine but but like with the hustle it was wealth creation and getting to like a substantial amount of wealth creation by raising money it's possible i just think the odds are less so than creating a company that you

could own most of and sell for 30 or 40 or $50 million. Still rare, still uncommon, but I think it's easier. One of the questions that I know I've told you that somebody asked at a dinner, which I thought was just a fantastic question, is they were like, how many of your friends actually got really, really rich by participating in venture-backed tech? And that was defined as 50 million liquid, right? Or industrial assets. Correct. You have to define what success is, right? And really, really rich. And so for the purposes of the conversation at dinner, they said $50 million liquid.

And what I think we ended up coming to the conclusion of was like, you could have joined Facebook as a relatively early employee, but you didn't need to be like the first 10 or 20 people. And you probably still could have made $50 million on the IPO and kind of the future growth of that business. There are a handful of other businesses, but really since like maybe 2014 or so,

there hasn't been that many companies where the non-founders walked away with 50 million liquid. And so, yes, you could start a company as a founder. That's just not what most people are going to do. And so really what this person was getting at was like, is it better to go after the venture-backable tech startup founder opportunity, or is it easier to build something that throws off $5 million of cash flow and just do that for 10 years, and then you end up with $50 million,

but it's a much higher probability $50 million liquid than it would be if you basically were illiquid for 10 years, hoping for that exit. And it's a very interesting question because you don't know what the answer is, but like people have different risk profiles. And so it sounds like for you, you've said, Hey, look, I know that I can build companies and sell them, but now let me go do this, build a cashflow machine, not necessarily be forced to sell it because I've raised capital. And like, let's just see how big it can get. Yeah. And I think there's a third option. So on the pod, we have this thing called Sarah's list, sarah's name and my wife and we um we made it because when she was looking for a gig she was

like i don't want to start a company i don't like that i like having a job i prefer that and we were looking at so i was like help drop like all right well let's figure out what you want to do and i think that there's a lot of wealth to be created for an individual contributor who joins like a series c startup so you have like 250 to 500 to a thousand employees you get good like maternity paternity leave you get good benefits you get very competitive pay but the equity on that company still has a 10x opportunity so for example she joined airbnb when it was worth i forget 18 billion so it was already very established but we were wondering like could this become a hundred billion dollar company and we thought yeah

maybe so then if you get like some equity in that like a competitive package that can very quickly become like a really good net worth for an individual contributor who didn't take a significant amount of risk. And while they worked hard along the way, there wasn't like the whole entire startup grind. Of course, I would argue that that's a pretty boring life. But there's a lot of people that want that. And you may be like still even at 300 people, you have like big company problems that a lot of people just don't have the patience for. But still, I think it's like a really, really good way to live life if you want like a relatively chill life with a relatively low risk and a decent upside but uh i think that most people definitely should start if they're going

to start a company and their main goal is well i think not raising money is actually the way to go for sure when you had that conversation what did what did the other people say and were they tech founders who raised vc uh there were a lot of tech founders and there's a little bit of like the grass is always greener so like all the tech founders like oh man it'd be amazing to like have a cash flow business and not have to you know do the board meeting and have to answer to my investors and all of that also this was happening during the big drawdown so like there's all the pressures of uh uh tech compression and and uh public market stocks coming down whatever um but i do think that there is uh this belief that like now the tools are available where you can actually

build pretty big businesses without needing to raise tons of money which used to be equivalent to like, you raise a lot of money, so you can have a lot of employees, those employees can do a lot of work, that work leads to a big business. But now, given all the tools that are available to you, you can easily build companies to 10 $20 million in revenue, and have like three or four employees. Right. And like, even if you say, okay, like, that sounds crazy. If you think of venture capital firms, right, or asset management firms, there are a lot of asset management firms that they have, you know, I don't know, 20 employees or less, and they manage a couple billion dollars of uh, assets, which ends up leading to tens of millions of dollars of revenue.

And like, nobody thinks of those as businesses because they think of them as investors, but like the business of building an asset management firm is like a pretty good ROI on the number of employees for, you know, revenue per employee, I guess. And so like, if you then say, okay, well, I don't want to do asset management because I want to raise money. I don't know anybody, you know, that would be an LP or whatever. You can almost go through every single industry. And there's somebody who has figured out how to build a eight figure revenue business with maybe, you know, 10 or less employees. And it may not be something you're interested in, but I do think a lot of tech founders are like, okay, what does that path

look like? Because it is a less pressure, more freedom type path. And I'm actually going to make more money. Like the other thing that a lot of people don't talk about is most of these tech founders are paying themselves like between like, I don't know, a hundred, 120,000 is probably like the average salary that I see once a company's hit like a series A. They're not paying themselves 500 grand. And some founders are starting out, they're paying themselves, you know, 60 to 80 grand. And so like, yeah, that's a lot of money to the average American, but there's, you know, public company CEOs that get paid $25 million a year. Yeah. Your CEO, same in title, but like 25 million to a hundred K, like that's a huge difference. And so like that same founder to

your point about, you know, joining an Airbnb or one of these like serious companies, you probably could actually make more cash just by going and getting a job as an individual contributor than would as the founder of the company dude i have a bunch of stories like i have a friend who sold the company for many many hundreds of millions of dollars and i was with him when the wire hit because we were celebrating and he had 2500 that's how much he had before the deal closed and so like you know on paper yeah 2500 bucks because he was like i didn't pay myself anything and um i just thought i was gonna sell it so i just kind of lived that way and uh yeah i mean what are the the economics so let's say of an asset management company first of all how hard is it to get to like

500 million to a billion in assets under management very hard yeah 500 to 500 million to a billion is the equivalent of probably building like a real uh you know 100 to 500 million dollar company in like the tech world right so then what what about 100 million in assets under management is that like achievable if you work for 10 years for 10 years? Yes. And so on a hundred million dollar fund, let's say that there's one partner. What, what would their income be each year? I mean, there's 2% management fee has 2 million bucks right now. Now they have, they have expenses. So they've, they've got to be able to, uh, you know, pay the back office. They've probably got to pay for, uh, legal fees. Like, like there's a bunch of things that go in that, but for most

venture funds, they should be able to take as top line, you know, kind of take home pay somewhere into like 1.25 to $1.5 million. If there's a 2% management fee, and they're the only employee. And then you pay taxes. And so like, you know, take home could be depending on where you live, 750 million bucks. And that's consistent. It's not like what you and I sometimes do where it's like, you know, we got to like make something sometimes in order to like make it work. I mean, that's a good business. What other companies do you know of? And you can like hide the name of the company and like be vague about it. But do you know other businesses that are doing like 10 million plus in cash flow for the owner that only have 20

employees? And what type of businesses are those? So I definitely don't want to say the name of the company nor the industry it's in because I'm actively looking to try to buy a company in this face. Um, but there are, uh, brokerage businesses in like traditional industries. So like if you go into, um, like industrial spaces and things like that, uh, there's the same mechanism as Uber. Like if you really think of what Uber is, it is a asset light marketplace. So it simply has on one side drivers on the other side, it has riders and a writer requests a ride. And then they match you with a driver, the driver comes and picks you up and Uber gets paid a fee for basically brokering that transaction. And it's grown into this multi-billion dollar business. Uh, but that's

like super sexy consumer, you know, whatever. There are tons of brokerage businesses throughout like the industrial space where let's say that you're like, Hey, I am, uh, on a construction site and I need, uh, bricks or I need aluminum, right. Or maybe I'm a, uh, a warehouse and I need, uh, some sort of materials or whatever, rather than you go source it yourself, like you call these brokerage businesses. And a lot of times they're doing the exact same thing that Uber does in that, uh, ride, uh, sharing transaction, but they do it with like call centers, right? Like you literally call and somebody answers the phone. It's like, Hey, what do you need? And you're like, I need, you know, uh, I don't know, 500 bricks. You're like, okay, hold on.

And they're like, go source it from some brick, uh, maker. And then they like match you. Those businesses tend to be incredibly high margin. And so then it's just a question of like, how big do they get but i've looked at a bunch of them and like they're doing 50 plus million in revenue with 20 or less employees that's what my dad does with onions by the way wait really i swear to god yeah he's so like he'll uh you know he will work with like walmart or white castle or like you know i don't entirely know all of his clients but like like some fast food chain or something and they're like you know we need a million dollars worth of onions or we need 20 truckloads of onions uh and then he'll call farmers and he'll go and buy them and then sell it and take a little fee for

connecting it and it's just him and one other guy and they made a great living um but yeah he's an onion broker so literally this is i i think you can take that idea of the onion broker or the industrial broker whatever and you can just pull it across every single industry and in every industry there's an opportunity to do this and one of the the mechanisms as to where to identify uh, like that could be a big business is when you have some sort of national provider. So for example, Walmart, they have stores all over the country. They don't want to go figure out like, what is the onion farm in Kansas? Then what's the onion farm in Missouri? What's the onion farm in, you know, Minnesota or whatever. They just want to call the same number or call the same company

every time and be like, Hey, we need this many onions in this location. And so whenever you can match like national reach with local production, there's an opportunity for these brokerage type firms. And the beauty of it is like, you don't really need much. Like you basically need a phone and you need to network your way in, get the contract, start fulfilling orders as the brokerage and you immediately start to drive revenue. And so it's like a very, very simple business that is industry agnostic that if you can figure out how to launch it, you can make a lot of money. who is your like business hero like who do you emulate who do you when you think about what you want to become in the next five or ten years and you think this person's nailing it or I want a

life like that who do you think about well I think that there's different people for different parts of that question right uh who I think has been the smartest when it comes you laugh by the way when I ask you that because one of the people I'm going to say people will get all worked up over Um, there's people who have done things in business that I really respect. And I think are still, even though they're well-known are still drastically underestimated. And then there's people who have like a lifestyle that I think is something to emulate. Unfortunately, uh, as with most things in life, the extremes are like hard to bring together. So the people who, uh, may be the most impressive business wise may not have the most balanced life. And so you kind of have to

choose like Elon's probably the best example. Everyone wants to like build wealth, but would you trade being the richest guy in the world if you slept on the factory floor hell no I would never want his life right like well forget his life just in general just like if you had a really shitty personal life but had all the money like that doesn't seem very fun right no I I wouldn't trade spots with him at all all right so on the business side uh let's do uh we'll each go so I'll say one person on the business side then you say one person business I'll say one person personal you say one person personal uh on the business side I still think that Peter Thiel is drastically underestimated for what he's been able to do and it's mainly because he's been able to

make so many contrarian bets along the way and be right more often than he's wrong but also he's been able to do it in a very smart economic way what i mean by that is like just by creating paypal and putting those shares in his ira he ended up creating billions of dollars of wealth that deferred the taxes and so basically what he did to the listener is i think what he did was he invested five hundred thousand dollars into facebook from his ira is that correct uh i don't know about that investment but when he created paypal which um uh came before the facebook uh investment he actually bought the initial shares so like if you which is like which is like a which a lot of people don't know when you start a a corporation i don't think an llc does this or maybe it does but an s corp

in a C Corp, I think it does. When you start a company, the owner literally has to write a check. It's typically for like a hundred bucks or it's under a thousand dollars. I think at the Hustle, it was like $89. I write a check and I send it to the IRS. And that is when I bought my shares. And that's like the cost basis. And that's what he did with PayPal. Yes. But rather than do it out of his personal bank account, he did it with money that was in IRA. So the quote unquote shares that he owned in the company actually were his IRA ownership. And so what happened is when they sold the business, those shares were not taxed because they were inside of the IRA. But he can't spend that, right?

He can't spend it, but he can continue to compound it until he turns like 60 years old, when he can actually access that money. Can you take a loan on your IRA? I don't know the answer to that, but I'm sure if you can, people have figured out how to do it. And so it's just like, one of the interesting parts of this is like, how much do you have to think in the future? Like how forward thinking and long term thinking do you have to be to be in your 20s? And say, I am going to make a decision now that will set me up for 40 years in advance, which is hard. It's hard, right? That's like very, like, whenever I meet like 21 year old kids who like have these startups, they're saying these big visions. I'm like, wow, that's like pretty bold. And you meet I meet people like this. And I was not like that. Yeah. I mean, I think most people are like, hey, I'm trying to get to Friday, right? Let alone like 40 years from now. So I think that, and then also- I just want that Bloomin' Onion, baby. I want that Bloomin' Onion at Outback. I'm not thinking about IRAs, bro. I just need to get that Bloomin' Onion at a softball game and I'm cream cheese. Exactly. And so the last thing on Teal, I think, is he has created a number of businesses and also continued to invest in great deals. But the most impressive part of all that is just like, he has consistently been one of the best selectors of talent. And he's found all of these great operators, great thinkers, you know, really contrarian type people that it's not like, oh, he got lucky once or twice, right? It's like very obvious that he has an ability to identify and select talent that I think

most of us are envious of. And so if there's one skill in business that I personally wish, if I had to like lose every skill and just have one, I actually think that's the most important skill is just like be able to identify and select talent consistently better than everyone else. And if you do that, like you always have a shot to build something successful. Do you, what do you think his personal life is like? Well balanced or no? I don't know.

um, I, I tend to think that, uh, you know, everyone has pros and cons. And so like, if you were even, if I was to ask you, if you asked me, if you asked, you know, uh, Peter or anybody else, like they're probably harsher on their own life than other people are. Uh, because it's really easy to be like, Oh, uh, this sucks or this sucks. And everyone else was like, yeah, man, but like, I wish that I had that. Right. And so I, it, it, uh, it's a weird thing. who's your business person? So I like a lot of historical figures. So I, uh, there's a book called Titan. It's about John Rockefeller. And I really like him. He, um, he lied famously one time about creating like a monopoly, but besides that, he was like mostly always honest when it came to

business. He was like a handshake type of guy and was like pretty, pretty honest. And he also knew when to bail. And so he basically resigned when he was in his early forties and had CEOs run the companies and so i admire people who uh like i admire people who know when to get in and get out and let other people do the stuff and not take a lot of the publicity so i like john rockefeller we had rob deardick on the pod have you talked to rob deardick i've never talked to him but uh the fantasy factory is legendary dude he was dialed in went to his life and i felt like he had a really really good way of like looking at life he was super dialed in so i'm really uh I really like him business-wise.

Do you know a guy named, have you heard of CB Insights? Yes, fantastic episode. Yes, I love him. So this guy's name is Anand. So Anand, he's a Hampton member. And so I've gotten to know him through that. And basically, CB Insights, they've only raised maybe $10 million in funding. They're close to, they could be over, I'm not sure, but like nine figures a year in revenue.

And CB Insights, it's basically like, it's a database product. So what he does is he loves to find messy data, publicly available data, and just makes it really clean and easy to read. And the reason I like him is he's been patient. So he's been growing this really steadily for 10 years. CB Insights has an awesome newsletter that I love reading. But besides that, they're really low-key. So I love people business-wise who are a bit of the opposite of me. You know, what do they say?

What does Lil Wayne say? He goes, real Gs travel in silence like lasagna. Real Gs move in silence like lasagna. Yeah, yeah, yeah. so i love people like that who are just like quietly doing stuff and you know there's another uh i always think of this song you know the damn it feels good to be a gangster by ghetto ghetto boys he goes you know real real gangsters don't flex nuts because real gangsters know they got them so i just i love people like that and he's one of those guys who he just doesn't talk

about it he doesn't make a fuss he tweets funny stuff but he's not outrageous he's pretty professional but has having a good time and he's just quietly doing stuff and i love people that just shut up and they do stuff you know i have a big mouth and so sometimes i admire people who don't because i'm like man i wish i could have a little bit more self-control and be like that so i like anon he's someone i really really admire he just shuts up and he does work and you don't hear from him but he's just killing it and uh so i really like people like that um because of hampton i've met all these people and i can't reveal their names but i've met like five or ten people who they have like these software businesses that do 20 million in revenue and they're based out of

like kentucky or idaho and you'll talk to them and they kind of look a little schleppy and they just look like normal guys you don't have no idea but like you know i'll like talk to them about cars and they're like yeah i got i have one of those bentley's um okay i'll like i i'll talk to some members i'm like oh i love cars what do you like because i like this this and this and i was like oh what do you guys like oh i have one of those ferraris i have one of this thing and they just have cool stuff because they love it but they don't like brag about it and they don't flex and so i love people like that anon is not like a fancy car guy or anything like that but quietly building this monster business. And he doesn't talk about it. And I really admire that

when we wanted for him to come on our pod. He didn't really want to go on at first. He like just wasn't after it. He just like he was like, No, man, I like just chilling. And I kind of had to like ask him a couple times to join. So anyway, I like people like that. And then the last person is Dharmesh, the founder of HubSpot. So Dharmesh, Dharmesh Shah is his name. He started HubSpot. And business wise, he's kind of my hero because he had a company. I forget what it's called. I think it might have been a consultancy. He sold it. I don't remember how much he sold it for, but he probably made 10 or $15 million. And that was like in the early 2000s. So that was probably enough money where he's like, I don't have to do anything anymore. But he went to MIT. And he was

like, I sold a company, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go get a degree at MIT, which is odd. And at MIT, he met this guy who was a salesperson for a software company. And that guy was Brian. And they put together a school presentation on this idea they have for CRM. And that is what HubSpot became. Dharmesh funded the company with $500,000. So he owned a lot of the company. And he said, I've got one rule, Brian, you've got to be the CEO and no one ever reports to me, but I'll hack away and I'll build great stuff that the company loves. And that's what he's done. And he's always been a hacker. So he built HubSpot. So HubSpot's like, give or take a $20 billion company, depending on the day, but he still has side projects. So have you seen his project called

Wordplay? I've seen a couple of the ones that he's done. Wordplay is pretty cool. And then I think he just launched spot chat.ai or something too yes he loves he loves spot chat so wordplay is a game that he made he goes i wanted to teach my son how to code so we work together on this game it's like what's that thing called wordle it was like it's like wordle but there's like not on you can play as much as you want and i say uh i said well how big is that and he goes oh and like by month three we had like three or four million people using it and i was like what how much money does that make he goes well i let my son run ads for one month just so we could understand monetization and it made ninety thousand dollars uh and we just donated the money and we have this thing and it's just

like killing it and i'm like why'd you do this he goes i just got to keep my skills sharp and i just love i love hacking on projects and so he does that in his free time um and i just think that someone like that who again he's just kind of he's just a g he doesn't flex too hard and he just builds stuff because he loves it and he won't tell you about it unless i ask him and so i like that. He also built spot. What's it called? Spot chat, which is like this add on that HubSpot is going to like incorporate where you could like use AI and talk to HubSpot like it's a person and it'll do stuff for you. So anyway, he's actually building it and coding it. And so I love that. I love people like him. And if I asked him to come on the pod, he'll be like, maybe next

month, like he's just not like interested in bragging about all of his accomplishments. So part of what I love about these types of people is like they're tinkerers, Right. They just want to kind of do these little things and figure out if it works or not. And I tend to find that there's two questions I ask in interviews now that very quickly help me understand a person better. And it doesn't matter what they answer with. It's like, what is the type of answer is really important. It's like one is like talk about something that you built recently that has nothing to do with your day job. And usually what you find is like most people have to think for a second what it is, but it's not always tech. Like it could just be like, Oh, I went in the garage and like, I, you know, I fixed my car or

I had one guy come on the podcast. Do you know this guy, John Finkel? He has a newsletter called books and biceps. No, but that's awesome. Tell me more. I'm in all right. All right. Books and biceps. And so he's got his home gym, but I saw him tweeting one day and he kept referring to the flex factory. And I was like, what the hell is the flex factory? And it's his home gym. And he was like, growing up, I always wanted to have a home gym. It's like, I built one. I named it the flex factory. He put up like all this stuff on the wall. I'm like, it's awesome. Right. It's like every like washed up middle-aged man's dream, but he is like that on steroids and he's killing the game. And so he, uh, if I was to interview him and be like, Hey, talk about something you're

proud of that you built, like not related to your day job. If he just started to describe the flex factory, I'd be like, got it. Like check the box. Like you're great. You know how to build cool shit. Like you get it. Um, and then the second one is, uh, I always ask them like, what podcast do you listen to? Or what books have you read recently? And, and again, less because I want to actually like, Oh, this book is good. This book is bad, but it's like, you quickly understand the type of person they are by what they're reading. And then if you even take it further and be like, what's one thing you agreed with in the book. And one thing you disagreed with, you very quickly can kind of wash away all the bullshit. And it's like, Hey, this person can

think critically or not. And so I've had a number of people who I'm like, Hey, what did you disagree with in that book? And they're like nothing. And I'm like, you read, you know, 300 pages and you disagreed with nothing. And then they kind of think about it and they'll eventually kind of answer. But there is this skill to tinkering. There's this skill to critically thinking. And I think the internet, some people end up getting washed away and it ends up getting worse and they don't tinker, they don't think critically. But then the internet can also help you do it more. And somebody like Dharmesh is a perfect example where he is like an all-star of the internet because he likes to tinker and keep those skills sharp, right?

Yeah, totally. When I at the hustle, I used to have this phrase where I used to say, you come work here, I want you to let your freak flag fly. And so I would look for like oddballs and like weirdos. And I love those types of people because the world wants you to be vanilla. And if I could find someone who isn't vanilla, and like, it's just quirky and odd, and they have to be good at their job. But I want to surround myself with like, I love a freak show. That's what I want. I want like weirdos. And like, um, I would always surround myself with the, with those types of people. And typically they, they tend to be pretty good because they're quirky and that quirkiness can carry over to like the extent that, that, like that, that it's that type of eccentricity is like kissing cousins with like person who's willing to take risks. You know what I mean? So like, it's like very related. What about, um, why do you think, why do you think that those people are so good work?

Why are they, are they compensating for like the quirkiness or like, what, what is it that makes them great, uh, people to hire? And they're just original thinkers, usually, you know, like a lot of people, like, what I don't like is if someone tells me like, they read all these business books, and I'm like, Oh, dude, fart, like, you're just so lame. Like, I can't I don't want to, like, you're just going to regurgitate the same thing over and over again, you're not going to come to the table with anything unique, and you're going to be fearful all the time. So I want people who aren't fearful. I think when you hire when you have employees at a company, like there's this weird thing at a company where even though a person knows that the right thing is to do option A, They'll do option B because I don't want to be embarrassed and look stupid. And it's really hard to find people. And I think it's actually intrinsic. I think it's built in for the people who are willing to take option A, even if it isn't like the safe, like that risk-taking genetic factor or whatever it is.

I think that you either have it sometimes or you don't. I think it's really hard to like get people to change. How do you know that somebody is an authentic freak? Like they didn't just read some book in there or they watch this podcast like, oh, Sam likes freaks. Like I'm going to like be a weirdo in the interview. So he thinks I'm a freak. Like, how do you make sure in the interview that you can tease out like who's real, who's

not. So if some people are like, like, I'll have people like you joked with me where you like said, let's fuck. And like, I said that to a non and like, I'll say to like my friends, but if someone is like obnoxious, uh, like in an interview with me, I think, Oh, you're just, you're just lame. I could tell that that's not authentic. And even if it is, you don't, you got to learn how to like be polite and shit like that.

So I don't like people that like, you can tell who's turning it on. So I do the same thing as you. I ask people, I go, what content do you read every morning? And they'll say like newspapers and stuff. I'd be like, no, no, no. Tell me like, who do you follow on Instagram and what subreddits you go to every morning and why? And like, I'll, I'll get all types of information.

I also use this tactic that I created called, I asked him about the bottom fourth of the resume. So meaning in the bottom fourth of resume, that's where you put, where you went to college and like the clubs that you joined. And if they say they're a part of a club or something, or if they say they studied philosophy, I don't really care about philosophy, but I'll say like, what's the, what's the most interesting class that you took and why? And if they can do a good job of explaining and having passion about something that's relatively obscure, then I think like, all right, this person's oven burns hot, and they have got some horsepower there, and they're kind of interesting.

So basically, if you can entertain me in an interview about what you read each morning or about what you studied in college, then I'm interested. If you can't tell me with passion what you spent four years and $100,000 studying, then you're probably a loser. What is your personal operating system? like you have so many different things going on you're always kind of tinkering with things you're running Hampton like what are the tools you use do you use certain things for email calendar note-taking like what are those things that make you so productive I use this notepad right here and this is a pen you see I have it like I write stuff I just use a notepad a pen I don't have an assistant I use gmail notion and that's it I have like a it's

pretty effective but also like i get overwhelmed pretty easily do you have an assistant i do now for years it was like pride that i didn't have one but eventually i got one and uh um i will say that is it full-time full-time uh but across all of the businesses so only one person across everything uh and there's two advantages that i realized after the fact one is uh i never screw up or forget the big things but like tons and tons of like little things that are actually not very important from like my day to day, but maybe super important in blocking somebody else. Those things, getting your car registered or something like that, like little things like that. Yeah. So like, I don't really do a lot of the personal stuff. Like I don't, I don't ask

her to do that stuff, but it's more so like, let's say that you and I work together. You have a business that we are helping with capital and distribution on. And you have a list of five things that you're like hey we got to get this done this week right and one of the things is something that is uh requires coordination with an external source around like scheduling something or sending an email to me that may not be the most important thing because this is the fifth most important thing on your list for the week right but like i'm obsessive i want to make sure i get it done and so rather than let it fall through the cracks like it's like that is her one of her jobs is to make sure that we have a list of every single thing we need to get done

this week and we don't finish the week until we have that stuff uh uh kind of done the second thing has been really helpful with is she creates a report at the end of the week that audits the calendar and basically says, here's how you spent your time. And so it allows for like week to week self-correcting of like, Hey, that's, that's a painful, that's a painful exercise. I love doing it because all it tells me is like, I, I know what's the most important thing right now. And then I can look and see in a quantifiable way, how did I spend my time? And if the most important thing is like company a, but I spent all my time with company C, like there's a mismatch. I got to get back on track right but it's your calendar booked from block to block uh for the most part

yes i try really hard to push everything between 10 and 4 because i write in the morning and then i try to like just go back to back and squeeze everything into a six-hour period calls meetings all that stuff um but like you gotta be you gotta pay attention that's what you're gonna do you gotta pay attention to where you're spending your time because it's very easy just to say yes to a lot of stuff. So she helps with that. And then there's actually one other piece that is a super encouraging. She understands context around a bunch of questions people have for me that I'm not needed to answer because she's there. So like in some way, people now they just ask her the questions. Right. And so like, you got to really have a high degree of trust with this person for

them to be able to do that. But like, I don't need to answer every single question that people have, especially internally so having her as a go-to rather than wait for me for an hour or two hours to get done doing a podcast with you all of a sudden they can just ask her and maybe 80 of their requests she can answer for them point them in the right direction get them you know the document they need whatever and then for the 20 she can't hey it's got to wait and i'll just do it when we get done why don't you your life wait sorry what are we gonna say i was gonna say why don't you have one what what is what is the the reasoning um a little bit is pride like you like you were saying. And a little bit of it is, I've always felt uncomfortable having an assistant. It just

feels I don't know, I it feels weird, right? Like asking people certain to do certain things. I don't know, I've been uncomfortable with it. But I need I do need to get that is your person in America or overseas in the office with me every day in Miami. Yeah, I think I should do that. I think that's awesome. I don't know why I think it's just pride. I let's see, I tried a virtual assistant. They were great at some things. They were horrible at other things. And so, uh, what I eventually decided was like, it was worth the additional money to have somebody in person that I could meet with that could attend meetings that, uh, could do all the things that like are now available in person, uh, that a virtual assistant can't do. But I do know, uh, like there's one CEO.

i know uh he's very much like performance oriented he has a american-based uh assistant but they're remote and lights out like he one time was driving uh with his wife on uh like a uh like a vespa scooter like almost like a motorcycle thing and they got a flat tire he literally like pulled over to the side of the road they were late to this dinner he got an uber he basically messaged her and was like hey this is what happened here's where the bike is like help and went to the dinner ended up getting there a few minutes late but not as bad and like even though the assistant was remote was still able to coordinate and kind of do everything so i think it's like a lot of not just having one but also having the right person for what you need is a

is a big piece of it who's your um hero personally like uh you said business-wise what was the personal side so i tend to think that the people who are uh best optimized on the personal side is like not hey i have this like perfect life it's hey i am doing the thing that makes me happy and sometimes like the external vision of like what the perfect life is actually would be super uh shitty life experience like i go to dinner sometimes and there's people there and from the outside they have everything that quote unquote like people want right they have wealth they have what appears to be a great marriage they have this great job what you know company they built whatever. And then you talk to them and you're like, you are a hollowed out soul. Like you are

dead inside and they know it. They just haven't like fully, uh, kind of confessed that to themselves. And so like, I don't want that life. And so when I think about, uh, kind of the quote unquote, uh, personal heroes, it's all of my friends who don't give a shit what people externally think about, uh, them. And it's just the people who are happy. And so I'll tell you a story that uh i think kind of highlights this i was driving um with uh my wife in the car we were uh driving down the street and we stopped at a red light and she goes what are you thinking about because i was like looking out the window and i just like was honest like maybe mistake number one and there was a guy he was edging you know the grass uh like by the curb and i was like i

don't know why but i just thought like that guy has such a great life like like he had like he doesn't give a shit what is happening on twitter or this or that or like like he is going and he's doing something with physical labor which is a hard life but it's also something where it's like the stresses of it are much more physical than they are mental and emotional and like all of those types of things and i remember thinking that like at some point in your career you have to make like a fork in the road decision very few people have both physical and mental uh stress at work and so that path is not one that i chose but like it's a different path and when things are going wrong on the path you choose sometimes you look at the other path you're like man

that is like a simpler life but vice versa that guy probably is like looking at the car and he's like man that guy's life is simple and so like how much of it is expectations versus reality and i i don't know so like what's your answer you uh well i'll give you two the first is laird hamilton do you know who lair oh yes yes legend laird hamilton is the surfer guy he like looks like if you think of like what a surfer 80s hunk would look like he looks like that you know he looks like a kendall he's just like this buff dude you know he's probably close to 60 now so he doesn't look like as buff as he used to but he's this guy who basically helped pioneer big wave surfing and then eventually he created this thing called uh layered creamer i think it's

called i forget what it's called but it's like a coffee creamer it's like a big business you know tens of millions whatever but he has a person running the company but he said uh they have this thing where if so he basically has his house in malibu with like a pool that he works out in and all these people come to his house to work out and he's on the beach but he has this thing where everyone knows that if a wave if like the the forecast says that the waves are going to be above 20 feet automatically you can't talk to him because he will not talk to you or have meetings because he has a rule that if the waves get above 20 feet he goes surfing so it doesn't matter like where he is in the world if it's above 20 feet near his place he flies back and he goes we're

going surfing that's my rule so i like that uh because he like lives life to his own standard and also his wife is uh like they're partners in a lot of his businesses and like they're they're truly a partnership so i value that but another one do you know sam corcos from levels yes i'm investor in levels same same same same um i uh they um so there's a guy named sam he's got this company called levels and it's basically you put this glucose monitoring thing in your arm and it tells you about your blood this guy is as freak as they come so i hung out with him one time i hung out with him one time and he was with his girlfriend um and she just made a joke uh because i said like uh i don't remember we were just talking about like you know spouse stuff and

he was like oh sam always gets mad at me because he says i take too long to pack but that's only because he just has that bag and i look at sam i go wait what is she saying and he goes this bag that i'm wearing and it was like a drawstring bag like you know those things that you'd play soccer football with he goes this bag and what's in this bag right now as well as the clothing that i own or that i'm wearing i don't own anything else i go what do you mean he goes this pair of jeans i've got what i've got a jacket in this bag i have this white t-shirt i have my shoes i've got my computer, my computer charger, my cell phone, my cell phone charger, and my toothbrush. And that is all I own. And I was like, Are you serious? Because, yeah, I've been doing this for like 10

years. I just don't like owning stuff. It stresses me out. I'm like, what if you have to go to a funeral? It goes, I go to a thrift store, I buy a suit. Afterwards, I bring it back. And I was like, Are you kidding me? He goes, Yeah, I just don't like things. It doesn't make me happy. And I live nomadically. And I've been doing this for years and years. And Sam is interesting, because this actually might be public to everyone i don't know if it's investor only but he writes these in-depth investor reports and i invested a small amount of money early on in their in their round and in a way i feel like the value that i've gotten from the investor reports is worth the amount of money that i put in the company he they're rid of they're literally like novels they're like they

must be like 5 000 or 10 000 words every single month he sends one he goes here's an update in the business and he tracks everything i was like why do you do that he's like this is just how i like to run the company and I hire people who enjoy doing it this way. It's just easy for us to be on top of things. And I love it. What do you think about his investor updates? They're crazy, right? I think they're amazing. And he knows, I call it the warning system, right? Because he has such great understanding of what's going on in the business that he will know something is wrong before most CEOs do. And so it takes a lot of time, care, attention to detail, all the things that go into writing that type of report.

But if you have the early warning system, you probably are better off for the type of business he runs than not doing it. But also I think there's a lot of businesses where like that would be overkill and people would be like, this is absolutely insane. Why are we spending so much time on doing it? So I think a lot about like,

is that the culture of the business or not? And he specifically, you know, he even told you, right? He hires people who like, that is what they want to do. But did you do that with the hustle? Like, did you have like super crazy, you know, long investor updates where you had every single metric laid out? No, I didn't.

But I was pretty good at sending updates and keeping things updated. But I ran it much more simply. So every Monday, we would have a meeting. We called it the numbers meeting. And for the first 10 or three years of the company, we would meet as a company and we're like, did our email list grow by 3% or not this past week?

And why? And it was the whole presentation was just one. And so we would pick one number, one metric. And then eventually we picked two opposing metrics. So it'd be like a new customers and then like renewal rate, because you don't want to go just after one because you can manipulate that to hurt long-term, but eventually, but it was basically just like, did the email list grow by 3% or not?

And I wanted to grow it by 3% every single week because Paul Graham said, if you can grow something by 3% that like, it ends up like, I think, I don't remember what the math is, but that's like 12% or 12 times growth per year or something like crazy. He's like, if you do 3%, that's considered good. So I just said, all right, we're going to grow by 3% every single month. And we're just going to have a meeting every month. And each person is going to explain how they contributed to making us grow by that rate.

And so I was like maniacal about that. And I think that was really effective. If you had a email today, which a lot of the people who listen have some version of email, whether it's their company email or personal email they send, it's a business they're trying to build, whatever, how would you grow it? so the hustle has like close to 3.5 million readers a day now so it's pretty big when i sold it we had a little less than 2 million and 3.5 like that's hard to fathom it's because like i just have a little like a side hobby email list of 10 000 and i could see that that like makes a

lot of money i mean your email list is what what do you have 250 000 maybe 150 000 uh 230 000 yeah And that can make like a substantial amount of money. And so with a 3.5% or 3.5 million email list, we could probably made, I don't know, maybe 40 or 50 million a year just off email advertising. Like you can make a lot of money. And so I look at it now, I'm like, I can't believe how big it is, but if I had to grow, so our first 100,000 customers or a hundred thousand users came in year one.

And that was from me blogging. I would just write these like crazy blog posts and I would post them on Reddit and it would get traffic and 3% of people would sign up and that's how we got it. And I would do that the same way now, but I would start probably on Twitter. So instead of a blog, I would do Twitter, but I would still do part of the blog. But then what a lot of people do nowadays, so me and the skim and morning brew,

we were all building our businesses separately, but we were all building at the same time. And we all learned that you could do paid marketing. once you understood how much your CAC was and how much your LTV was. And so back then we were able to acquire customers for $2. Nowadays, people are still doing that, except they're doing it early on.

With like me and Morning Brew and The Skim, we got to like hundreds of thousands of customers, hundreds of thousands of users. Then we did paid marketing. Now people are making the mistake of doing that way early on. And I think that that's a huge mistake. Why?

So if I had to do it, because you have like a leaky bucket, most likely. Like paid customers can be good, but they're not going to be as good as an organic customer. They're going to churn out sooner. And so, and also paid marketing will give you a false signal that you're doing good. The whole point about an email list is attention. And so like the value of an email list is like, if you had to make it an equation,

it would be something like number of subscribers multiplied by the amount that they're engaged and the amount that you have influence over them multiplied by the spending power. So 10,000 Fortune 500 CEOs who own software companies or something like 10,000 software company founders, or let's do 10,000 CTOs of software companies that have at least 1,000 employees is going to be significantly more valuable, I would bet, than 500,000 stay-at-home moms, things like that. And so the buying power matters. And also the amount that you're able to influence, you're able to have over them. And you know, you have influence over them when you tell them to buy something or you recommend a book or a product, or you say, I'm hosting a meetup, come and hang out with me. That's really how you know you have influence. But a lot of times what people do when they're starting their newsletters, they think, oh, well, my list is growing. Therefore, I have influence. where it's like, no, dude, you can just throw money at that problem. I'll get you subscribers. You need subscribers, dude. I'll get you subscribers.

You know, it's like Big Lebowski, you need a toe, man. I'll get you a toe. Like getting subscribers is not hard when you're just paying money to do it. The problem is you're throwing them into a leaky bucket where people don't actually love your content. And so a lot of times people who create newsletters, they don't think of themselves as like, they'll think of themselves as like growth acquisition experts,

not creating content. And it's like, dude, you got to get the content first. not the growth. The growth is actually significantly easier. What's harder is getting someone to subscribe to your daily email and have them to want to stay for three or four years. And so I think you shouldn't do any paid marketing until you have like 20, 30, 40,000 people. And that's like a really big ballpark. But that's like if you're doing a somewhat mass produced email, that's around maybe when you'd be ready to do paid marketing. Do you do paid marketing? We do no paid marketing and, uh, only have used Twitter really to, uh, to grow, uh,

the email. And, um, it's great because it's super organic, really high open rates, you know, all the things that you want. Uh, it's also incredibly frustrating if you don't do paid because you naturally just hit a limit, right? Like it doesn't matter how many, uh, uh, how much you push it. Like if you only have, um, a certain Twitter audience, like eventually you just saturate them right and so like if if we wanted to turn it into a full-on business then yes paid marketing is the way that you scale past like the organic growth um but but uh but it's difficult uh let's talk a little bit about agora uh because i think agora is like this like really interesting uh business have i talked to you about that no we've never talked about it but i know that you

probably have opinions about this um and so for those that don't know agora is like a newsletter company um that really from my understanding doesn't just do advertising on the newsletters it's really a way for them to do distribution for video courses training programs like a bunch of things in the background my understanding is that they do close to a billion dollars in annual revenue usually more okay explain explain uh what your thoughts are so agora is a company started by this guy named bill bonner out of baltimore and he started it maybe in the 80s So before the internet was really popular, it was like newsletters, like they would mail it to you.

And Bill Bonner is like this libertarian. Sometimes it's a lot of times it's politically charged, but it's a financial like publication. And so I'll tell you where to invest. It's kind of like Motley Fool, but has like a political slant. And he started it and it was doing fine. And he had it for like 10 or 20 years. And it was like slowly after a while, got up to like 10, $20 million a year in revenue after like 15 years.

then he some of his employees wanted to branch off and do their own thing. And he goes, Well, hey, instead of starting your own thing, why don't you go start a new publication for me, and we'll do some type of equity split. And so now Agora is a company that owns probably 20 or 30 different publications, they do north of a billion dollars in revenue. And they've helped pioneer like a lot of direct marketing stuff. And a lot of stuff that they do is shady, but you can learn from it. And here's what they do. And I actually have a screenshot of their financials, I can send it to you. And what they do is, like I said, I do research, I talk to people who work there. And I'll send it to you. Like, so usually what they do is they have a free newsletter

or a free webinar, something like that. And it's about like, like picking stocks or something like that. Then they have $100 product, which is like better picks, then they have a $2,000 product, And they make all of their money on what they call the back end, that $2,000 product. And now they've gotten so big that they sell like supplements and they sell everything. And they've been sued a ton of times. They recently got sued by the FTC because they did two things. One, they claimed that they wrote a book that can help you cure diabetes naturally, which is bullshit. So they got sued for that.

And they got people to pay money for the book. And they also created this thing called the Republican tax, where they like said that like, Nancy Pelosi is going to come after you because you're a Republican and tax you more. And they like would write a direct response email where it looked like it was Nancy Pelosi wrote someone an email, the recipient clicked reply all to the Agora email list that said, Hey, everyone, Nancy just sent me this email. We can't let her get this done. And here's why. And they would write really long-form articles. And for people who are in marketing, what they're famous for is long-form copywriting, direct response copywriting. And we're basically talking a website with nothing on it but 4,000 words and a really small link at the very bottom that says buy now. And those pages convert beautifully. I don't agree with everything they say, but the numbers show that they are like the best performing things. And so this guy, basically, Bill Bonner, you can look him up. He's a billionaire. And all along doing this newsletter, he started investing in Baltimore real estate, and he owns multiple skyscrapers in Baltimore. Or if you Google Bill Bonner, France, his wife owns literally palaces, or what do they call them in France? I forget what they call it. These like estates. And they own all of these like estates in France.

uh what are they what's like an old palace in france called uh like a villa or something like that but they like own all of these and they do like interviews with like home and garden and all this stuff of like his wife like showing off he's like they're literally like uh like like old they look like old stone castles and so anyway he's like this kind of like an eccentric crazy person but this company does collectively like one to two billion a year in revenue and like three billion a year in profit and he owns all of it dude it's incredible what people can do if uh they have a lot of time right 30 40 years and they keep at it and perfect something like again dude and copywriting the copywriting on their shit is like crazy and you read it and you think who reads this

and then you start kind of like digging into the story and you're like oh this is a page turner this is a like i'm into this it's like it's pretty wild how important is copywriting still today given that uh you know there's the rise of ai it's the internet everyone's got slick websites like i know that you're a big uh copyright is uh drastically under indexed on but like explain what should people do if they want to get better at it i read your article on substack about uh what was it titled the one you sent me the other day um where the body crisis uh yeah dude i read that article and i didn't go to bed last night till 3 a.m i've been reading all your stuff like it kept me up all night and like it's gonna i'm gonna make you know like a pretty

substantial financial decision based off of your article like please don't do that please don't do that what i mean is like it spurred it like you like got me thinking like your point of that article wasn't wasn't to make me act it was to make me think a little bit but like it spurred me to action and that's an example of copywriting where your little rinky-dink sub stack article with no design just beautiful words i told you you have this one analogy called where you said uh bodies are floating up to the water and then you had this other line talking about lennon you said um you know with the economy nothing can happen for decades and then a decade can happen in a few hours or a few days and like those phrases made me act and made me feel and my point

of this is that as we get more tech space which we already are you know you text people you use online dating you use twitter uh blogging email whatever copywriting in my opinion is the most important skill because copywriting isn't just about using words that sound cool copywriting is understanding what motivates people and then uh using the written word or spoken word using words to get them to do what you want them to do so if you want them if you're martin luther king you want people to be uh treat one another nicer so you're gonna use i have a dream and like we all remember that it's like understanding what motivates people if you want someone to buy something you're gonna you're gonna use certain language if you want someone to go on a date with

you you're gonna use certain language like it's understanding the words to use that meets the person needs to get them to do what you want them to do and so in that regard when if we phrase copywriting that way in my opinion it's the most important skill because you're gonna recruit people to join your company you're gonna want to meet a spouse you're gonna want to uh convince someone to donate to your charity you're gonna we're always trying to sell something and i so i think copywriting is the most important thing the most in the best way you're a great copywriter i don't even know if you like have ever like tried to get good but you are very good but the best and most effective way is this thing called copywork have you heard of copywork no what's that so copywork

is this uh way of learning that isn't popular anymore but it was and so if i'm going to teach you how to play the piano i'm not going to sit you at the piano and teach you a little bit of theory and say write a song i'm going to ask you to play happy birthday and then jingle bells and then I'm going to give you like eventually some maybe a little jazz and then like once you get good we'll play like an Elton John song like you're just going to copy other people and you're going to do that for a year or even a couple months and you're going to start oh wow these chords usually go together like my favorite artists tend to use this structure I'm just going to like steal a little bit from this person a little bit from this person a little bit from

this person now I've got my own art and that's how copy that's what copy work is and so literally what you do is you get writing that you love it can be like Hunter S Thompson used to do this with books um judd apatow the famous director with seth rogan he did this with like saturday night live scripts um i do this with really famous uh copy um sales letters you literally just print it out and you get a pen and paper and you just sit there and you write it by hand and you do that every day for a little bit of time and you'll get better at writing it's like one of the best techniques that i know to learn how to write and it's been effective for years and years and years and there's actually science behind it that shows that like when you write it it imprints in your

brain you start feeling the texture and the flow and that's why we're so good at learning instruments learning an instrument is not very hard like if you just give enough time you will get at least okay um and so anyway that's the most effective way to learn how to write so i advocate that everyone actually does this because like once i learned how to do be uh be a copywriter my online dating sure got a lot better uh you know what i mean like i was able to like effectively communicate to like my friends what i do for work i could uh like i could like i could do anything and so now I've made a substantial amount of money with just like a, I can just use like a,

if you just give me a plain like webpage where all I can use is words. And then you give some other person like a traditional, like New York designer type who wears common project shoes and have them like design the fanciest, slickest page. I will bet a lot of money that I can create a website that collects more in sales or conversions than that person can. Because copywriting is I think the most important thing when it comes to like getting a sale or a conversion.

Have you seen along these lines, um, there's a guy on Twitter, I forget his name, but he went to chat GPT four and he was like, you are now my co-pilot. I want to give you $100 and your job is to make as much money as possible. I will do whatever you tell me to do with my $100. Have you seen this thread? No, but that's crazy. What happened? Dude? He, uh, so he's on like day seven i think now uh i'm gonna have to try called so um let me look real quick uh and then by the way i don't know people are asking me are copywriter and content people going to be needed even with artificial intelligence i feel uncertain about my answer for that but in one regard i could be like maybe if everything's automated then maybe there's more

room for like craftsmen but on the other hand i'm like fuck these ai people are like really good like they're like the best all right ready so this is what this guy's doing his name is jackson great house fall and he tweeted out i gave gpt for a budget of 100 and told it to make as much money as possible i'm acting as its human liaison buying anything it says to do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business follow along 100 000 likes on the original tweet and so his instruction the exact one was you are hustle gpt an entrepreneurial ai i am your human counterpart i can act as a liaison between you and the physical world you have 100 and your only goal is to turn that into as much money as possible in the shortest

time possible without doing anything illegal i will do everything you say and keep you updated on our current cash total no manual labor and so what happened what was the first idea long story short is uh it ends up suggesting to set up an affiliate marketing site making content around eco-friendly and sustainable living products it initially suggests a dot com uh that was too expensive for the hundred dollar budget so they settled on green gadget guru dot com amazing the The guy buys the thing and then they take a prompt, they put it in Dolly, they make the logo, you know, he's like going through the whole thing. Long story short is as he's doing this, the audience starts getting big, like there's

100,000 likes on the first tweet. So he then starts to ask permission of GPT, hey, do you think that we should like run ads to the website or maybe we should take some advertising dollars to put people who want to advertise sustainable products into the Twitter thread that we are doing around building this business. And so he starts driving revenue initially by literally just getting people DMing him and he starts posting their ads in his Twitter thread as he's doing it. How much revenue is that? So cash total after day one, $163. No way! Right? So he basically got $100 initial investment. But then somebody put $100 in as an investor, right?

Like all these people start like DMing him stuff. So he starts to kind of gather money, whether it's through investors, whether it's through revenue, whatever. But long story short is if we fast forward to the most recent day, he is now, let's see, he's now at, when it started, zero blog posts, zero revenue, zero members on Discord. He now has one blog post, $130 in revenue, and almost 2,000 people in a Discord as of two hours ago. And seven days ago when he started this, the GPT was telling him all these different things to do.

And so the major update yesterday was that after launching, they now have Greenovation Market. So Greenovation, like innovation and green put together market. It helps people find eco-friendly products. And they made their first sale on Sunday. and so now what they're seeing is that they also have dream you later dream you later which is a short adventure game co-created by humans and gpt4 and then they now own meow matters which is a guide to cat essentials tips and tales to cater to your perfect companion then they have atlas adventures which fuels your wanderlust like a passport for world discovery embark on a journey

across continents and time and so these are all the people inside of their discord that are building all these different things furry friend supply company blah blah whatever and so the reason why that becomes fascinating is like this dude literally is just told artificial intelligence like tell me how to make money and like regardless of whether he makes 60 bucks ten thousand dollars or like a gazillion dollars i tend to think that like the ai is better than some portion of entrepreneurs oh my god like i don't know if it's like okay ai is better than one percent of all entrepreneurs right now or like 20 but it's not hard to see like 10 years from now like you'll literally just be like hey ai here's my money like make me more money and i want a cash flowing

business that does a million dollars a year in profit like figure it out and it just does it i'm like writing all this down this is the craziest thing i've seen in a long time this is wild so then what's your take on how this is going to impact like content creation I mean, it's basically you and I, like this is our job. Yeah, content creation is like pretty simple, but I don't know if it's to the place where like you can easily just like create something and then just publish.

Like I still think you need some human editing, whether it's you, me, or like actual editors. But I do think that this idea of like asking this like supercomputer for instructions. If you said to it, hey, tell me how to build a blog with a million readers a month, I bet you it could show you step-by-step exactly how to do that. And as you give it more information, it just simply says, okay, this is working.

This isn't working. Try this. Here's something else, whatever. Like this is going to be a productivity tool. It's going to be like a co-pilot. And so if it increases the odds of you accomplishing some of this stuff, maybe you don't actually get to a million visitors a month, but like, damn, if it can help you get to a hundred thousand, which is one 10th of your goal, like why is everyone not going to go do this?

do you use any of this stuff for your newsletter you're not right you don't write daily anymore right you don't now you're only doing like a couple times a week so whenever you have an idea so i still pretty much write daily every once in a while i skip if i don't have an idea but but uh i try to write daily if i can um i actually didn't tell anyone this uh like two weeks ago when the day the day after gbt4 came out i used it to it probably wrote like 60 percent of the newsletter right so here's what happened is like i knew that i like i had in my head like here's what i want to write and so i wrote like the intro paragraph and then i like asked it a question it gave me like three or four paragraph answer and then i really had to go in and kind of like edit

and massage it to make it uh kind of make sense and then i asked it a second question it gave me another like three paragraphs uh and then like those two things weren't connected so i had to put some like kind of uh connecting information in but when it was all said and done like it probably provided about 60 of like the answers to the questions i was having plus like the basics of what the the paragraph structure was and all i kept thinking to myself was like oh this is like having like a a research team right or like a ghost writer almost to some degree but i couldn't but what what was the problem so you went to just chat your whatever website you just went to the normal um open ai site yeah and i just was like you know uh i forget what i wrote about that day

but like let's just say it was like uh i don't know banking crisis right if i just simply was like uh what are the three uh largest bank failures in the united states before uh 2020 and it told me and it told me what that is right like it's like googling on steroids because you could google that probably click on a link find like some list of a bunch of bank failures figure out which the three are take those ideas then go back to you know the uh uh cms and then like write out the three paragraphs but chat gbt like does the research and then like basically gives you kind of an unfinished product in three or four paragraphs so it saved a bunch of time of like searching and then like transcribing basically the information you just found on google into the

into the text um and so like that's fascinating because could you compress let's say it takes you an hour and a half to write a newsletter maybe you still have to spend 30 minutes but if you compress it and then also uh are we all just going to become editors right like how much writing in the future if this becomes really powerful is going to be like i sit down i have an empty cms box and like i start from scratch versus like maybe you throw a couple of prompts and it gives you a bunch of text and then you more become like an editor putting it all together like it's fascinating to think about i um by the way tell your clip guy you just the way you told that story about this jackson guy jackson fall there's your there's your million view clip that

was a good clip but i um the other day i was having to write something and i did an okay job but i was like you know a lot of times when you're writing stuff you like keep thinking about like five different ways to say it you're like i'm just in this little box and so i have you heard of um this book called how to get rich by felix dennis dude i am uh 20 pages in i heard you say this on a podcast. I bought the book and I was going to wait to talk to you about it until after I read it. So I haven't read it yet. I'm like 20 pages in, but go ahead and tell what you want to say. So I think it's like the best book on business ever, but the way that he writes, it's beautiful. His language is the best. It's the, it's like, I call it elite cheeky. It's like, he's got this

like weird, like elite vibe, but at the same time, he's like an everyday guy. And he's got this like english cheekiness about him the way that i described felix dennis it's like richard branson and the rolling stones had a baby and that's like him dude that's a great description literally uh the word that kept coming to to mind as i was reading the first you know 20 pages or so was like enthralling it was just like it was just like literally like oh my god like this is amazing but you know what else i envisioned it's like you ever meet like a really really rich like maybe some guy in his 50s or 60s and you're just like dude literally me and that guy are like the same guy like he's like smoking a cigar chilling just like if people saw this side of you at home they

would never think you're that person like out in public and you realize like who that person is like that to me is as i've been reading the the first couple pages this dude is literally just like a regular guy and it's amazing and i'll give you the background in a second on who he is but he um i if you just google like his book pdf you can find it for free and i took the whole book and i uploaded it to to ai or to chat gbd3 and i said um rewrite my sales page as if you're felix dennis and it rewrote it and i go great do it again do it again do it again and i found like little bits and pieces where i'm like all right cool that's a beautiful line stealing that one that's a beautiful line so basically this guy his name is felix dennis he created uh maxim magazine that's

probably what he's most known for it's not even popular anymore but he made a lot of money but he also created this thing called micro warehouse which went public in the 90s maybe the 80s uh for multi-billions he died uh probably 10 years ago when he was worth like 750 million dollars he basically is famous because he says he's probably spent this is his words i spent 100 million dollars on crack and whores uh so basically he was addicted like for like a 10 period a 10-year period of his life he loved crack uh he got addicted to crack cocaine he um was single his whole life and he just he's like i just love paying for sex i just like it just that's just how I like to roll that's my thing and so he spent all of his money that way

and he has this book called how to get rich and the best part about this book is he just tells you like the truth because he's like I'm already rich I don't care if you buy this book or not but here's the here's what I think but there's two graphs in that book that are kind of life-changing there's a graph that says here's my definition of rich and he says like poor somewhat poor you're only doing okay you're wealthy now you're really seriously rich and he like has these like graphs and he has categories so he's like zero to like twenty thousand dollars and then it gets to like you know a million to like eight million liquid you're this and he like names these categories of like liquid wealth versus private uh company wealth and then he also says if i could do it all

over again i would have earned 30 million dollars by the time i was 35 or tried as hard as i could to get to whatever I could by the age of 35 and then just retired because like a punch drunk boxer I retired too late and I have so many regrets that I didn't get to spend time with doing this thing this thing that thing and he writes it in this the best prose I've ever seen it's just beautiful language it's a wonderful book we talked about in our pod and it was like the thousandth most popular book in the business category and then so many people bought it it went to like number two uh and so like people love this book it's so good I'm so happy you're reading it dude It literally, I think he even says in the beginning in the version that I have, where it's like, you know, like, why should you read this book? He basically is like, I don't care if you read the book, like, I'm just writing the book. And then he's like, did I write the book? Yes, I am writing every single word myself. Like, he's so self aware as well of like, the irony of a rich guy writing how to get rich. And people just thinking that it's like this, the guru, like, I made my money teaching other people how to get rich. Right. And he's like, that is not what I did.

I actually had real businesses and now I'm just going to do this to help all of you. So I'm excited to finish the book and see what I learned from. Do you think that the AI stuff is going to end up killing jobs or do you think that it is going to end up actually creating more jobs? Yeah, it's definitely going to kill a bunch of them at Hampton. We're trying to use it for customer service stuff. I mean, are you, well, what do you think? I mean, I think, you know, like usually with me is when i see this stuff frankly i'm afraid so i like bury my head in sand and i just like hope i'm like oh it's gonna go away i hope like if i just go into the covers it'll go away i'm afraid i think that it's definitely not there yet but the rate of which

it's growing it's like you know like did you ever like play oculus before yes like whenever i put and played a few games in oculus it was very clear there was two things that were clear one it's not there yet number two it will get there and when it does it will change the world and i remember thinking that when i put oculus on i was like all right it's not it's this is still prototype but i can see the future i just i just looked 10 years into the future and that's a little bit how when i use ai that's how i feel it's it's not there it will be there it's coming and that's kind of how i feel do you want to know the data point that uh has me convinced uh it's over for a bunch of these businesses that existed before is every young person I talk to

that is like related to tech. So they either work at a tech company, they're trying to start a company, whatever, like kind of like 25 and below, they all are using this product. And not like you and I like kind of like fooling around, like, oh, let me put up this paragraph and like, see what it does. Like, I have to get work done. Let me go do this. And a friend of mine, he met with a 16 year old a 17 year old he met at like some sports thing um and he asked them and they're like oh we use it for our homework like it's like basically for you and i google they're already using this as a bonafide product it's not a prototype it's not a maybe it'll be here one day it's like they were just given this superpower and now they're using it it's crazy and i actually

think there was this great article i think it was the new york times i forget but there was some reporter uh on the ground in san francisco and i remember when i lived in san francisco starting in like 2012 it felt magical like i remember there'd be all these like they weren't house they weren't like a party but we would all be in a house like working on computers and like toying around or someone would be like dude i i used to work in this place called the founders dojo and it was oh i know that place that was like my home for a while you heard founders dojo yes and so dave the guy who ran it he was he had a a pool company like uh it was just like a it was a company that was like a lead gen company for pool i don't know probably made 800 grand a year 500 profit

he had this office that he spent 5 000 for and he had like 10 desks and he would let freaks like me go and work there dude i would be like listen to the story so there's this one guy these two guys uh who had it was chris and uh well chris and raj they had a company called the worst drug dot tv and they were built they were building technology that would display high quality gifs really quickly so it was basically a full screen gif in hd and you would click space bar or you could type in a word and like the search functionality was like instantaneous that was the whole technology geeky stuff but they created a way that would aggregate the most popular gifs throughout the day and you could just click space bar and instantly it would refresh and that was the

technology turns out the most popular gifs on the web are super hardcore porn and he would have we had these massive high-def screens because they were working on it and it was just the hardest core porn all the time and we got desensitized to it and we would be staring he'd be like hey guys check this out look how uh like look you know look at look at her you know whatever you can see how and we're like oh yeah that's really it wasn't even it was like clinical we weren't even like it wasn't even about the sex it was like oh wow that's really high def you can really you know see what they're doing you can see inside of her like it was like horrible stuff and one time i had like a uh the founder of pandora he was going to come speak at one of our events and

he wanted to do like a pre-talk talk with me to figure out what we're going to talk about it was him and his pr people came in and they walked into the office and we were all just gathered around this computer and he's like now i changed the technology so when i click like uh the word p it auto fills with like the most popular stuff and it does instantly and he like clicks it we're like oh wow and they walk into the office and they're like hey guys and we're like oh hey come check this out look at this technology roger bill and like you like forget about how weird it is but it was like it was like the center it felt like of like a lot of like live streaming like when um meerkat came out we used to do these things called mirathons where we would stream

for 24 hours and it was like and then bitcoin came out and we were mining bitcoin in 2012 and 13 like it was like the center of a lot of like interesting stuff and at that period in san francisco it felt magical uber was just coming out and like it was just all this crazy stuff that was going on like we would um remember how uber would do like the get 20 credit yes like these guys were building these like this technology that created like a referral scheme and we were collecting like a million dollars in uber credit and we would just eat lunch for free like we would do all this crazy stuff it was like the center of everything it felt like and so and then covid happened in san francisco went away and san francisco was already getting a little bit

corporate leading up to that but now san francisco it's got all these ai nerds and then there's this beautiful article written about how these hacker houses are coming back and how it's like the center of an ai world and two years ago when covet hit before that i used to tell everyone if you have an idea for tech dude just go to san francisco and just be a freak for a little while and then eventually move away but like put in your time there and then covet hit and i was like dude just it's not even worth it it's dead now if you're into ai i think you should pack your bags and go to san francisco and hang out with all these people because it feels like it's the center and it is happening again it feels like it's like san francisco in 2008 you know like where

the web 2.0 is just starting to take off so anyway it feels magical there i'm going actually going there tomorrow um but a lot of that stuff i think is happening right now and i'm very eager to see what these young guys come up with what are you going to do my wife has to go for work and i'm just going to go hang out uh with her uh but i want to like i'm gonna i'm gonna go and like walk around Alamo square or park because there's like these AI meetups like in the park. And I just want to like, this sounds so weird, but I just want to be around the young people, man. I just, I love the youngins. Dude, listen, I will tell you one thing. If, uh, uh, if you were to ask me like, what's one of the, uh, realizations, uh, that I came to over, uh, over the last year. So

actually there's two. And then, uh, if I tell you two realizations that I've learned over the last couple years, you have to tell me too. The first is easy life versus hard life. So there's this whole idea of like, there's certain geographies, certain places you can live, and it's a much harder life. Sometimes that's weather, sometimes that's like traffic and transportation, sometimes that's an economic situation, whatever. And then there's certain places you can move and just like literally by being in that geography, it's easier, right? So weather's like the easiest one to know there's certain hard weather situations or easy weather situations. And I think that sometimes people get energy from being in easy or hard situations. And both Flynn and I like came to

the conclusion, like we're like hard life people, right? We actually don't like super, super easy, um, kind of like no stress, like the stress gives us energy to some degree. So that's one realization. The second is, uh, as you know, your career progresses and you become more successful and you get a bigger, uh, kind of network and all these things, you start getting invited to all these like quote-unquote uh um hyper successful or like really really rich uh people like events whether they're dinners or whatever and uh when i'm fucking pointless like they're still dude when i moved to miami there's a group of people i love these people but what they do is they all come together and they have dinner like all the time right and they like literally like twice a week

and so they would like constantly keep inviting me and i would go and then like eventually i realized i was like man i like hanging out with you guys but i like hanging out with you like once a week or once every other week, I really, really like hanging out with all the young people because that's where I'm getting tons of new ideas. That's where I'm getting a lot of energy from like all that type of stuff. And so I came to this realization that like people over index on the heroes and they under index on the people who are younger than them, who think differently, who have new technologies, et cetera. And so once you like realize that and you're, and you're like, I want to hang out with more young people, then you start to change your behavior. You start to

go to different things. You start to do things where you can be around those people rather than just like the older rich people. And so it's so funny because like, if I was telling my like 25 year old self that I'd be like, shut up, like find all the rich people, like go learn what they're doing, whatever. Right. And so like, I think different points in your life also are different times of who you want to spend time with. What are your two realizations that you've learned over the last couple of years? The first one is a little bit easy, but I used to read like every business book you could think of. And I would try to read like a book a week. And then I realized I'm not going to read any more business books. So now I only read fiction or I read, um,

history. I think I could, I learned more by reading a historical biography or something about history than I do reading about a business book. I try not to read any business books. The second thing is somewhat similar. So I used to, at the Hustle, we owned this conference business called HustleCon, where we would get speakers of startups to come. Our startup founders would come and speak and they would like tell the story about founding the company. And I would do this little trick where I would tell someone if they had to speak at three, I go, you got to be there by noon, because we have to do soundcheck, mic check. We didn't have a mic check, there was no mic check, it was already

set up. But I had this green room set up. And it was really just my trick to like hang out with them and be in the room with like five other the speakers and they would be like, for example, we had like Wade Foster, the founder of Zapier, the founder of Casper, Casey Neistat, Tucker Max, the founders of WeWork, like a lot of these companies that are like pretty big and successful, we had them and I would just hang out in a room with them and i would do like what i do and i would just start asking questions

and get just get them to talk and i would throw something out there and like i remember like these founders of companies that had multiple billion dollar exits they were like fearful like they were like one guy was like i'm afraid to fire this person who's my cfo because of the confrontation or there was like pay all the woman who started class pass which was like the darling at the time I had to like she was like pacing back and forth afraid to talk in front of 2,000 people and I remember she was like very nervous I was like hey you want to talk about it or the founder of OkCupid and now the he was the CEO of uh I think Match Sam Yagen he the same way he was I remember him being nervous and I just would hear all these people like they would explain

like behind the scenes stuff they would never talk about in public and I had the realization that only a couple of them are significantly smarter than me and have a higher IQ. Like we had the founder of Grammarly, Max, backstage. And I remember thinking like, we're not the same. You and I are different. You're just smarter than me. You have more horsepower.

But then I would have these other people, like the founders of WeWork and Casper. And I remember thinking like, you know, like you're 20 times wealthier than me, but you're not 20 times smarter than me. Like we're in the same ballpark. You're just pretty brave. you know you just like did the damn thing and that's when I learned that IQ matters so I think

Jeff Bezos and Elon I think they really are just smarter than everyone else or most others but there's a lot of people that have a whole lot of money we're talking billions but they're maybe a little bit charismatic or they're just a bold and they just went ahead and did the damn thing but they have massive massive doubts and I remember putting my heroes on a pedestal and I got to hang out with them and I'm like oh dude you have all the same anxieties I have you just have put yourself in a really cool situation where you have to succeed and it kind of changed my thinking to where i just now i believe i can do anything i want it's just a matter or not anything but most anything i i can't create tesla but i can create a substantial amount of money i can create

a certain life for myself if i act both bold and um follow through with certain things and that gave me a ton of confidence and i see that with hampton you know like like we have people that like cry in the meetings and i'm like dude you're my hero what are you doing and i'm like oh you're just human like we all have these similar amounts of insecurity and that in doing that it gave me a huge amount of confidence and a huge amount of like it's okay to be afraid that's a normal part of this process but i have to do it anyway this is just part of the process of creating art is to have self-doubt that i suck and that this sucks but this is just a normal process and a normal feeling and that normalized those feelings and it normalized success so hanging out with the people

in hampton hanging out with the people at hustle con with you my successful friends people think of us from the outside just like i would think of people from an outside of like well they are different they have a club and it's like well yeah we kind of do have a club but it's very attainable like to have a substantial amount of success and be quote normal you know what i mean dude confidence is one of the biggest competitive advantages in the world and the secret to confidence is like it takes a really really special person to be confident in an area where they're not surrounded by other people who can do the thing but damn is it easy to be confident when all of your friends are super successful and like it's just like that's what we do right i think it normalizes

it's like dude it's like jamaica like jamaica is a small ass country why do they just crush the 100 meter dash like you know like in america we have these awesome athletes as well but they're killing it when they're smaller well because they just like grew up expecting that they could be good at this and i think that like you see that in sports i think you see it in business you see it in art you see it in a lot of things where like you know why was Keith Haring and um what's the Basquiat and then um I forget the what's the Andy Warhol like they all were a crew like what magic came out of that or NWA you look at NWA Eazy-E, Dr. Dre uh and then like Snoop eventually came along Tupac like all these guys they were a crew and they all like elevated each

other to like they were like 23 year old kids and they just invented like this whole genre of culture changing music? Like, what is it about like creating a crew where you egg each other on and do something special? And I once I realized that, like, there's a reason why greatness typically comes from a certain area over and over and over again. And you got to throw yourself in the mix. Once I realized that I got a ton of confidence. I love that. That's my one of the best insights somebody's done this podcast in a long time. Tell everyone where we can send them if they want to check out Hampton and apply. Go to joinhampton.com. I'm on Twitter, the Sampar. um yeah uh we launched uh well i launched it in july but now it's officially live as of march

28th but go there and apply and if you fit the criteria we interview you all right sam we could do this literally for hours in the last two days you and i think i've done four hours of podcast uh and we still have plenty to talk about so we'll do this again in the future that was good i hope we got a good uh a few good clips out of this i i think that uh also anyone who uh is watching this after you subscribe to our channel you should go fulfill the my first million gentlemen's agreement you should go over to their gentlemen's agreement the ladies understanding watch those subs surge baby to the moon go subscribe to the my first million uh youtube page as well sam i appreciate it we'll do it again thank you