 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer and Justin Andrews. God, Sam Parr. HustleCon, man. If you guys have not checked out this, dude, I mean, I bet you we, I mean, we have a decent amount of millennials that listen to us. They probably already know or they probably already subscribe. He's got over what, 600,000 now subscribers to the HustleCon, Hustle. It's basically a newsletter that he does through email. He is a pretty fascinating young entrepreneur. I didn't realize how young he was because he sounds so mature. He's a 28-year-old kid, right? Yeah. Within a year and a half, he's built himself a multi-million dollar company. He gives a lot of gold in this episode in terms of building a business, starting a business. Very interesting, fascinating story. Fun to listen to, fun to do while we were doing it. No, no, I was really excited to talk to him because he has, there's a lot of people, there's like two camps right now in the emailing world. And because we have all this ability to connect to people on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram instantly. You have one camp that thinks that email is dead. The future is for you to have this personal connection through social media and those guys that are still living in the email world are silly. Then you have the other camp, which he stands in, which I was excited to talk to a young entrepreneur like him who is like, absolutely not. It's not dead. It's just that people are using it incorrectly or they haven't evolved with how to use it properly because They don't see the value in it. It's extremely personable. In fact, it can be more personable than all the social media bullshit. And he has mastered it. Mastered it to a point where his open rate is like 46%. That's insane. We talk about keeping our open rate over 20-something percent. Right. So, and I think that we connect with our audience really well. So, to see somebody do that and then to be able to get some tips for him. So, if you're an entrepreneur, you've got to tune into this episode. I have through his stuff. Share this with any of your friends that are entrepreneurs. They're going to love this episode. Check out his stuff. His website is thehustle.co. Also, this month, what do we got going on, Adam? Aren't we giving out shirts? Giving away shirts for all the bundle people. So, if you're getting hooked up with any of our bundles. Any of our maps bundles. We have the sexy athlete bundle, which combines maps aesthetic and maps performance and melds them together so that you can train like an athlete but also have a focus on balance and symmetry like a bodybuilder. Build your butt bundle. Build your butt bundle, where we teach you how to wake up what's called a sleepy butt where if you're not connected to your glutes, you can do all squats and deadlifts in the world. You're not going to build effective glutes. Well, this build your butt bundle includes a modification that teaches you how to wake them up, but it also includes maps anabolic and maps aesthetic both together for like 20-something percent off. And then we have the super bundle, which is maps anabolic, maps performance, maps aesthetic and maps prime and maps anywhere. So, you have a year of exercise programming. All those programs together about 30% off. You get any of these bundles. You get a free limited edition t-shirt. You missed one of our most popular bundles that we have going on right now too. It's our correctional one, which is our prime probe bundle. That's right. A lot of people that are just getting started and they're kind of weary about what program they should do and they're not certain if they're ready for it. They've got aches and pains going on their joints and they kind of want to ease their way in. We always recommend to these people that invest in the prime probe bundle because this is all centered around correctional. It comes with a compass test to see where your imbalances are and then you can focus on addressing that first. It's a great way to transition. It's going to set you up for success. You can get any of these bundles and if you want just information on mindpumpmedia.com. Without any further ado, here we are talking to Sam Parr, the CEO of The Hustle. Talk to us a little bit about because we're going to have some listeners who aren't familiar with The Hustle, with what you do and what you guys are. Let's give just a quick breakdown of that and then talk about how you got that started. Yeah. The Hustle, we call it a membership company. A lot of people call it a media company. Yeah. I think of us as a membership company and basically we have about, now we're getting at close to 600,000 members, so 600,000 people a day who consume our news. Every single morning at 9 a.m. Pacific, we have our team. They send out all the business news you need to know throughout the day to 600,000 people. Our content is like a combination of the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg meets the Daily Show. It's witty and funny, but it's accurate. Awesome. And it's all through email. Yeah. So when we started, we made the decision early on we're like, what if we built a whole media company via email as opposed to having a website? What if our email was the website? And so that's when we launched. And we also host huge events. So we have an event called HustleCon where we'll get like 3,000 people come and it's where we get some amazing entrepreneurs and they come and they tell their story and we're going to be launching other products soon. So what's interesting to me about this is we got into this business and we're a media fitness company, right? And we're talking about producing lots of media. And when people would bring up things like email, they would say things, the way I would think about it is got email. It feels old. It doesn't feel as new as some of the other tech, like websites. But the reality is it's the opposite, right? It's more effective to work through email to deliver people directly. Yeah. And when you think about it, think about it really at its core. Email is like a protocol. Email, email is the internet. And it has not, I mean, email has existed since the internet has been around. And email, like, realistically, it's been static for decades. I mean, what's like the biggest change that your email has had in like two decades? It's like the fact that Google put a promo tab in a social tab. That's like, that's kind of been it. And so it's just like really, really stable. Whereas companies who have gotten traffic from Facebook, it changes every quarter. People are like, I'm getting way less traffic from Facebook. Or Google just made a change this, that. It just like changes all the time. We were just talking about this. I, you know, know a guy who, his business was based off of Facebook and Facebook advertising. Yeah. He's gonna be fucked. Yeah. He was, no, not a joke. Explain that. That's a fucking great point. Well, I'm gonna tell you what happened, and then I want you to explain maybe to our listeners. But this is what happened to him. The guy was making something like $90,000 a month in revenue through Facebook advertising. And overnight, he made something like, he went down to like $7,000 or $8,000 a month. Like a ridiculous reduction in revenue. Zuckerberg has an opinion. A farts or whatever. And things change. And your business, and your livelihood has just changed. So basically, the history of this is basically, Facebook came out in 2009 or 2008, whenever it came out. And media companies were like, okay, great, this is awesome. We're gonna get a ton of traffic from there. Everyone liked our page, and they would get, let's say, for rounding numbers, a million people to like their Facebook page. Every time they posted an article, one million people would see that article, and a smaller percentage of that would click on their article, and go to that website, and they would earn money from advertising revenue, right? Well, over time, what happened was, every other company was like, oh, great, likes couldn't turn to traffic, which turned to customers. Awesome, let's get a Facebook page. And then some people, like for example, the guy who started sites like Viral Nova, they're like, oh, this is interesting. We can use this for arbitrage, basically. And so Facebook, it's a supply and demand thing. They only have a certain amount of demand, which is eyeballs, and they started getting way more media companies, and they could post, like every media company went on there, and they would post 25 articles a day. And so what that meant is like, okay, well, look, you're only scrolling through a certain amount of content. Therefore, now we've got to pick and choose. So although you have a million likes, now only 80% of your audience is gonna see each article. And then these guys like Viral Nova were like, oh, only 80% are seeing our article. We gotta make our shit more click-baity in order to reach 90%. And then everyone started making it more click-baity. So then Facebook said, okay, that's A, that's a horrible experience, and B, now we've got more supply than demand. There's more content than acts actual eyeballs. So let's bring it down even further. And so now, if you have a million likes on Facebook, on average, you'll probably reach 7% of your people. Damn, that's it? Maybe nine, but yeah. That's a fucked number, man. It's horrible. And so basically, you can go and look at this right now, go to Elite Daily's Facebook page. You'll see they've got maybe 10 million likes or five million, something like that. And an article will get like three likes and two comments. Now, did you have the foresight to see this, Sam? Because I feel like I've heard people just, I remember when we were first building this, I'd hear guys talking about how email is dead and that the future is Facebook. Did you foresee this happening and that's what made you go the email direction? A lot of people saw this happening. So I'm certainly not the only one, but yes, it was so clear. It was like, guys, do the math. This is not working. And now you have instant articles on Facebook, right? You guys never see that shit loads fast? Yep. It's clear what they're doing. They don't want anyone to leave their website. So now, you're like media companies who built them back to Facebook. In a way, they're just like people who have built like apps on Facebook. So, you know, like those games, there used to be like Farmville. Oh, yeah. And what happens? Gone. Where are they? Do those even exist anymore? Do you know what I mean? Right. So like that shit's just going to happen. Is this why now when I go through Facebook, because I noticed something very interesting, pages would post lots of pictures, then it turned into... It's different trends. Video, and now what they do is, and what the video was, because I think they were trying to get around the algorithm, is they would post a video, but it would just be a picture. So it's just one picture, I guess, because that got around the algorithm. And then Facebook said, oh, the image isn't changing. We know how to figure that out now, so we're not going to give you any airtime or whatever. So now what they do, you'll see this on some of the videos you hit. You'll scroll through and it'll have these weird like little arrows and stuff floating around on this picture to trick the algorithm almost into thinking of playing a video. Exactly. And you don't have to be you and me. We don't have to be smart like marketers or techie guys to know this. Everyone knows this, right? You start seeing these patterns, you're like, oh, that's things changed. So the new thing that's going to happen is, and I know this because I have friends who work there, and this is public knowledge. The new things is, Facebook's going to be making more changes this quarter, and what you're going to see is that they're going to prioritize group content over pages. So you'll see that soon. So basically, it's going to just get people who are mostly reliant on Facebook. This is different from their ad product. This is strictly organic content. You're going to see less and less of that, even more of pages content in your feed. Wow. Wow, that's crazy. Now, talk about some, I've watched videos and interviews of you before, but I want our audience to hear you talk about this. One of the things that fascinated me was your guys' open rate. Your open rate for the size and the amount of people that you have that you're emailing. Talk about some of the things that you hacked into that I had first time ever hearing some of them were the stuff that you were doing. Yeah, so we have, I don't even know the specific number at the top of my head today. We grow at like 2,000 or 3,000 people a day. Today it might be close to 600,000, but on average about 45, sometimes 50% of people will open that email. Yeah, that's incredible. What's an industry average in comparison? Or what's considered good, I guess? Because that's obviously great. I think like 20 or 21 is average. Yeah, we're double. A lot of people treat email as just like a newsletter and we treat it as like the product and because of that it's created a habit amongst our users and we also have built a ton of technology to make that a thing. The idea was like, look, what if we sent content to someone and when you're on your phone, what do you do in the morning? You pull out your phone and you look at your email. What the hell? What's the difference between what you're looking at if it's in your email or on a website? I mean, content is content. The screen is the same. If you show that to someone, you literally just see a white page with text. If anything you could argue it's more intimate because it's coming from your email, right? It is more intimate. It's way more intimate because how many websites to go to a day? You don't literally type in that website each day. Not a lot, at least. Except for Pornhub. Except for Pornhub. I took that one in. Pornhub and Reddit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's just like, why would we even have anyone click off? In the same way that someone was like, look, podcasting is different from blogging and blogging is different from movies. A lot of people thought, oh, it's content. It's actually totally different platforms. And so we're like, what if we just treated it as its own platform and went all in on it? And that was the idea. And so, yeah, we've had to create a lot of technology to make that a thing. But it's working. Now, when you look at all platforms, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, emailing, I would love to talk to a guy like you and hear your opinion on all of them for building a business. What do you see each of those, their strengths and their weaknesses, and how do you approach that? I'm not an expert on a lot of them, but I am an expert, I think, on email. But basically, we call our business a pirate ship and every email is a little bit of wind in our sails. And the idea was like, how can we create something that we own? And basically, my life is like, I hate being told what to do. And how could the business be the same way where we never have to be told what to do and no one will be in control of our destiny? God, if I could fist-bump you. And that was the goal. And email seemed like the best one. Now, unfortunately, that doesn't, we still, I guess, technically, if Gmail made a change, that would hurt us. But we have a lot of... Gmail isn't the only one. There's only one Facebook, there are many. Right. If you really think about it, I mean, if I built a business on YouTube and I'm making millions of dollars on YouTube, if YouTube wanted to, they could fuck me completely. Which they are. Which they do to a lot of people. Same thing with Facebook, same thing with other platforms. Even podcasting at the moment, iTunes is like the big dog that's primarily everything. If iTunes wanted to, they could basically sever us from our audience. But what you're doing, you own that. Nobody can really mess with you as easily. Yes. And it's not to say that we or anyone else shouldn't go deep on some of these platforms that they don't own. They should. In fact, they should. They should go where the attention is. But they should diversify. I want our traffic to look like a peace sign where it's like a third, a third, a third. And before all that, you have to have good shit that people love and people want. It's like if Jay-Z is on title or Spotify, I don't care. If I want Jay-Z, I'm going. But let's say he's not on any of those. It's like, well, it's not accessible. It's kind of difficult. Or like I can't discover it. It makes it a lot harder. Let's talk about your content here for a little bit. What kind of information, what are you transmitting to your readers? What is your specialty? What is the hustle all about? Yeah. So we're tech and business news. And so we have a very aspirational audience. Like my parents are in their 60s now. So I almost explained it's like my parents who are professionals, they own companies and they've done well. Just like imagine them like 35 years ago when they were younger. People who want to make a dent in the world. So people who are builders and makers and entrepreneurs, we basically give them the content that they need to be intelligent and sound intelligent with their peers to actually be more intelligent and to get shit done. And so a lot of that is news. So like Kodak had an ICO the other day, which was interesting. We talked about that. Or Uber is always doing something crazy. So we make sure people are informed about that so they can make better decisions. And we also recommend like different products to you. So like I love the reason I asked about that Jabra set you have there is I'm always into like gadgets and how to just be more efficient throughout the day. So we'll talk about that. So like I nerded out in the email the other day and wrote about my favorite notebooks because I liked it. I like tested a series of notebooks. I want to know like which paper is the smoothest and which one's actually the best. Oh, very cool. And so we'll talk about that too. So whatever's going to benefit like the entrepreneur mind and their processes with that is pretty much what you're gearing it around. Entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurial. Yeah, exactly. We just help. We want to help. We want to help people make a debt in the world and we'll give them whether that's a product recommendation or the news. At the moment it's mostly news. But like I said, we're going to we're expanding into we're expanding. Now I'm going to make an assumption and I'm going to assume and you correct me if I'm wrong that you have a large percentage of your audience are in that millennial age group. Was that a is that a safe assumption? That it's a safe assumption. Okay. And now we saw at that event. Really? So that's CS? Yeah. Oh, wow, really? Lots of millennial activity. So the reason why I first I'll made that assumption but the point I want to make is there's this stereotype that millennials live at home still. They don't want to really do anything. They're unmotivated. You know, the other feelings hurt really easy. This that and the other. But what I'm seeing and maybe there's some truth to that maybe not. But what I'm seeing is this. They seem to be one of the most entrepreneurial generations that I can that I've seen since I've been alive. I'm not super old, but it seems like more and more people in that age group more than almost any other is trying to do something for themselves. And maybe part of that is technology is enabling them, you know, like never before. Like I couldn't, you know, 30 years ago, I couldn't just post a video on something and then, you know, potentially go viral. And the other part of it is the heroes of millennials are entrepreneurs. Whereas when I when we were kids, a lot of our heroes were celebrities. Yeah. Now these people are looking up to like people like Steve Jobs and Gary Vee and that kind of stuff. Well, I think part of what you said is right. Like getting their feelings hurt and living at home. I mean, I do think that, you know, our generation could be, it could be sensitive, but there's a lot of pros to that. There's a lot of cons and pros. But the pro is that I do agree that we, our generation millennials are very aspirational, but not only they're aspirational, and this is like a pro and con thing. There's a lot of downsides and upsides to this is that they expect to be great and they expect to do great work and they expect to be happy with their work and they refuse to just have a job. They want a career and they want a mission. I think that our generation is more mission driven than my parents' generation. Part of out of necessity. But if you think about it, a millennial has mostly grown up in a fantastic market. So like I was, I was 18 in 2008 when the financial crisis hit, right? I didn't know anything about that. I wasn't, that didn't meant nothing to me. Right. You weren't heavily vested somewhere or didn't have a house probably before that. Right. So unless they live in New York, I lived in Missouri so it didn't impact me at all. I was just like, I see this on TV and that's all I know, right? And so I've come, I've grown up in a bull market, in a great market. And so I see money flowing and I think I'm badass and I know that greatness is attainable because I also see my peers, whether it's a YouTuber or my actual friends. I see people living great lives and so I expect that if I work hard I can do the same and I think a lot of people feel that way. It's like the Gold Rush, you know, except, and like the Gold Rush, a lot of the people making all the money, the ones selling the shovels, you know, you, I can't think of another time that's more disruptive than right now. I mean, we're seeing the biggest, most powerful markets ever being so disrupted, like music, you know, movies, TV. Transportation. Transportation. Hotels. Hotel business. Like these are established, like they've got their roots deep and they've got their hands in the pockets of politicians and they're fucked. They're absolutely screwed. The taxi cab industry is just getting decimated. It doesn't exist anymore. It's insane and these are some of the most I don't miss it either. We did get in a taxi cab. We were down in L.A. for the L.A. FedEx code. Last time I ever do it. And we got into it. We got in a taxi cab. It was right there. What an asshole I was though because I'm asking him like Uber questions. I'm so used to using Uber now. How long have you been driving for Uber? Oh, that's funny. You could tell he was totally offended by it too because I guess he had left and actually tried to do Uber for a while and then went back to driving for the taxi cabs. Before, for him, he made the claim that it was much more difficult for him to build a full-time service than it was to work for another company. Yeah, I imagine so. And that's just like a, you know, that's just a hazard, I guess, of trying to quote disrupt shit is that some people lose out and that's unfortunate. Right, right. Now, what companies, I'd love to hear from you since you geek out on stuff like what's fascinating you right now? Do you have specific companies you'd love to watch to see what they're doing? What do we need to look out for? Well, I love the YouTube stars. These guys, even if I don't like his content, I love seeing Logan Paul just disrupt things and break stuff. Oh, he's been all over the place lately. I love seeing how these media, like, so Casey Neistat spoke at Hustle Count one of our events and like it's just so crazy that this one guy has more clout than a CNN. A celebrity, right. Yeah, and when Trump did the band from Iran and Syria and the five or six country band, Casey Neistat filmed, did a thing on some of the folks who were being banned in the JFK, in the airport and I thought that his, this one person did a better job of explaining some of this information than CNN did. Wow. And so that was incredibly interesting to me. So I think that these YouTube guys are, I think that they are really going to change and they might replace a lot of media companies. Oh, I think we're seeing it happening. I think it's fascinating to see all these guys falling right now. Are you watching all these celebrities? It seems like every day we have a new one that's getting busted for some Hollywood ones. Yeah, you can't do bad shit anymore. You're already going to hide it really, really good because one person has a big loud voice and if you do something wrong, everyone will know. I know. Well, talking of YouTube, you were saying something you mentioned and we moved on, but I want to go back to it, like that YouTube is starting to regulate more and what do you see happening in the future of that? You think it's going to be just as fucked as Facebook and as challenging? Oh, well, yeah, this is just like, I just love looking at numbers. Just look at it. I mean, it's just a supply and demand thing, right? Facebook has so many users that they have this new thing called internet.org where they put, you can look at stuff where they put these huge gliders over India and they transport free internet to these folks who are in poverty and can't afford internet because Facebook says, look, we have so many users on Facebook right now that literally the only people who are on Facebook are the ones who don't have internet, so we're going to give them free internet because it makes sense for us. Oh, yeah. Market solution. Right, and it's just a supply and demand thing. You need more eyeballs, you need more pages, whatever. So YouTube inevitably, yes, it will go through this and it is going through this. I mean, this is what like Ethan at H3H3 complains about all the time. I don't know if you guys follow him, but he's a... I don't, tell us. He's just a YouTube comedian, but they're starting to get more serious about how... In Casey Neistat and Logan Paul, I think all these people, I've heard them all talk about demonetization on YouTube and how they're getting pissed off that YouTube isn't treating their creators properly. So yes, YouTube is going through this at the moment and it will continue to do that. Wow. So when the whole net neutrality thing was going on, that must have been big news with you guys and your readers. Yes, it was. I think our readers, our audience, our community is more interested in like a little bit more business oriented than net neutrality. Right now, everyone cares about crypto. I mean, that's just like the hottest thing going on. Oh, that's a big one, yeah. I'm so sick of hearing about crypto. Everyone talks about it, but that's like, that's way bigger than the net neutrality, but net neutrality was quite large. And also the Uber, what they're going through is a big deal with our audience and Amazon just taking over the world is huge too. What's going on with Uber? You brought them up a couple of times or something? Well, so about a year ago or maybe half a year ago, the CEO got... Always getting in trouble, right? Yeah. Well, he got forced out. The guy who started it got forced out because he, well, he did a lot of things or he was accused of a lot of things, but whether it's true or not, his image was that he was like pretty much a smug asshole. So he got kicked out and then he just sold like three billion dollars worth of his shares the other day, which is like huge news. Big news. Who knows what he's going to do with it? And this guy is like kind of crazy. He's going to start the next one. How important do you think image is now for a CEO of a big company like that? Unfortunately, it's huge. Because Uber's not even a publicly traded company. It's a private company. It's different when you... How the fuck does that? You have a private company you built up and you get fucking exited? You get pushed out. It's the worst. It's got to be a motherfucker. I've put my foot in my mouth. I'm a nobody and even I have put my foot in my mouth and it's crazy that you just have to be aware of your public perception. It's so important. And you know, most of the people who are starting companies nowadays are just computer nerds like myself. We're just like nerds who started shit behind our computer screen in kitchens. Like for a lot of people, the goal is not to be like... Famous. A cool guy. Popular. You just became cool on accident. Well, I don't know. I don't know if you become cool, but you certainly become loud. You certainly have a larger platform. $30 billion makes anybody cool. Oh, yeah. So how did you start this? Like, take us back to when you... Which is one that long ago, right? No, our company is pretty new. Our product is about 20 months old, but we changed what we did early on. But basically... So I'm from Missouri. I went to school in Nashville, Tennessee on an athletic scholarship, so I'm familiar with all this awesome gear you guys out here. What's bored? I was a 400-meter runner. Oh, awesome. You got the fast-switch muscle fibers. Yes, but it also makes it easy to get fat. Oh, okay. If you stop running. Yeah. So I was an athlete there, and then I met a guy named Mike Wolf. Have you guys seen that TV show, American Pickers? No. Oh, I have. Oh, yeah. Were they going to pick a beard or the other guy? The other guy. The skinny one. The skinny one, yeah. And I met him on the street of Nashville because I was a huge fan and he offered me a job at his store where we sold junk, basically. Right. So I learned what an entrepreneur was. My parents are entrepreneurs, but I didn't really put, I didn't really care about that when I was a kid. But anyway, I threw this guy, he taught me how you could start a business, and I ended up launching a hot dog stand in Nashville, Tennessee, called Southern Sands. Weeners is as big as a baby's arm. On your own? On your own? Yeah. This is as big as a baby's arm. Yeah. That's amazing. So I quit working for him and I started a chain of hot, it ended up becoming like a chain of hot dogs stand. Shut up. How old are you? Awesome. I'm 20. Oh, fuck yeah. 19. And so you have, how many stands do you have at this point? Just a couple, but I had spots all over town. And so like during the day, you're in the good spot, you're like in one spot. And then in the evening, you're where the drunk people are. And you double your prices. I know a guy that did very well doing that. He would set up right at all downtown San Jose where all the night clubs and he would work from like 10 to 4 a.m. and just rake in. Yeah. You can kill it on some days. You know, I could walk home with like two G's in cash. Yes. Oh, shit. It might be like 100 bucks. But on other days, it could be like two grand, you know? Yeah. And now it's like a big deal. But it was, it's really hard work. It's physically demanding, especially in Nashville when it's 110 degrees some days. Oh, man. It's really hard. And so I was like, there's got to be a better way to like make a living. This is so like physically challenging. Like I'm sunburned all the time. And so I ended up starting an online liquor store called Moonshine Online where we sold whiskey, white whiskey. It's not really Moonshine, but we call it that. Wow. And so I was like, yeah. And so I ended up Wait, let's physically demanding. Yeah. It's way easier. So I left school a little early, moved out to San Francisco because I just Google it and they said that all the internet companies are in San Francisco. And I met a guy and he had this idea for a roommate matching company. So I joined him and we kind of built that up. And then after like 11 or 10 months it got acquired. And so after it got acquired, I was like, all right, what should I do next? And so I ended up starting Hustlecon which was a conference for entrepreneurs. And I was like, and hopefully it will I'll meet someone or it'll lead to some type of inspiration for starting my next big thing. And I did this conference and unexpectedly about 360 people came and it made a whole lot of money in profit. And I was like that. I didn't expect that to happen. How do you do that? That's just like Lewis Howe's story with LinkedIn. I don't know if you know his story. Yeah. Very, very similar. I mean he was one of the first guys in LinkedIn to like make a name for himself and then he just started to hold. Set up these conferences. Yes. Set up these little conferences and he was like blown away by what he was able to make off of it. So you sold the one business with good money off that? Did you make a little bit of money to set you up? No, not a lot. Enough that I didn't have to work for a little bit. Okay. No, not a lot. I sold that conference. Did you go buy a Lambo or anything like that? No. I rode my motorcycle across the country for about 80 days and chilled. That's what I did. Oh cool. That sounds awesome. That's looking cool though. Yeah. So you do that. You start Hustlecom and it's an idea for a conference. Where do you find these people? Like how does this all start? Because one of the hardest things for people to understand about entrepreneurship is, or one of the biggest questions I should say is how do I get started? Like what do I do first? Yeah. I learned from a very early age that you just make shit up and if you act confident people will follow along and most of the time if you're smart you'll figure it out. I hate to say it but that's exactly what it is. It's like our MO. Yeah. You'll figure it out. That's the jump out of a plane with no- You'll figure out how to make a project on the way down. Yeah. You'll figure it out. You kind of figure it out and just act confident and people will believe that you'll know and you'll figure it out. Most of the time. Sometimes you don't. But anyway, I just like would eat. I had like 16 people in mind who I wanted to invite and I just kind of lied to them and I told each one that the other 15 were coming and thankfully it worked out to where most of them said yes. So I was like it's not a lie if it does. As long as it works it's not a lie. And so I did that and they said yes and then I also knew a little bit about, I'm a self-taught copywriter. I'm not very good but I understand how it works and I knew email was powerful and so I started a newsletter. That's what I did. And so in about seven weeks it made like 60 Gs in profit. Wow. And 360 people came and I was like, oh that's crazy that that worked. I didn't expect that to work and so I did it again after about six months and this time I called my co-founder from my old company and I said John come do this thing with me. It might work. I don't know what's going on but maybe something's here and then this time it made like a quarter of a million bucks nearly. Oh shit. 80 days, 82 days. And we did the exact same thing of email and then throughout this period I had, I read the biography of Ted Turner. He's the guy who started CNN and I was like, that's kind of a cool life and that's like, you're kind of doing stuff on culture that's really neat. Like he, they covered, CNN covered the first Iraq war in 1990 and they had some pretty revolutionary coverage around it and I read all about it and I was like, oh that's kind of neat. You really put a stamp on the world, that's cool but then I saw the average Fox News and the average CNN age was like 70 years old and I was like, clearly opportunity here. There's like, you know, hundreds. Very smart. Yeah. I mean there's like a big opportunity. There's like a hundred million millennials in America most of which are college educated. There's a market here. I don't know what it is. I don't even know how it's going to make money but there's something is going on here and so we're like, my co-founder and I were like, look if we're good enough to create content to convince these strangers to come to our event like people flew from Dubai from Nigeria from Asia all over the world. Maybe we can like make this bigger and at the time Business Insider had just sold for 500 million bucks. Vice had just raised a whole bunch of money at like a five or six billion dollar valuation just a lot of money and we're like, if they did it we could probably figure this out. So we on in August of two years ago we launched the hustle and the idea was like a Business Insider meets a Vice type of blog and so we did these articles where like we did like crazy articles like where I had a friend who would basically write books on how to get laid and he made like 60 G's a month on Kindle and I thought that but he told me about it where he basically just like ripped off like copied other people's works and like send it to the Philippines for a guy to just like slightly change the words and then he bought like a fake or not a fake but he bought a dumb sexy cover and named it some stupid thing and then had people review it that he paid like five like fake reviews and then he would make like 30 50 60 G's a month and I was like that is so shady very shady I was like, so we wrote about it and then the next week what we did was we had my co-founder he was doing this whole time he we realized that the most volatility in the Kindle market was romance novels and so we had him become a best selling romance novelist by doing this guy's method it worked it worked shut the fuck up are you serious captivating Claire by John Havel it worked Wow and he made money he made good money off of that it made a little bit of money but it got to number one and so these like fake authors like I'm a best seller we're like what's that mean how hard is that really how did you get there so he became a best selling author of romance novelist and then in a way we did like these crazy blog posts like this and it did well we got millions of views but we're like the economics of this is really challenging like not that many people are going to go to your website every day and it's hard to make money that way and so on April 20th so 420 of it'll be two years this April we said look email only worked for HustleCon and you guys know the website Thrillist Thrillist.com it's like a travel and it's huge it's like a maybe a billion dollar company now it's called group nine it's a big thing they own now this it's just a big conglomerate type of deal anyway they started as email only as well and we're like well if those guys did it like and we're pretty good at that what if we just did that and so yeah 20 months ago about 20 months ago now we switched to email only and since then the numbers just kind of blew up so you guys celebrate 420 differently now for yeah or the same yeah he's had that moment different reason to celebrate but the same way what are some of the do's and don'ts what have you learned yourself and seen during this whole process of building this email business let's see some things that happened early on that I tell people to know early on I tell people when they're starting now is basically you know how you do like a double opt-in for emails yeah get rid of that don't do that you'll increase your subscriptions by like 30% wow so when someone enters your email you know how it says like now click this thing just get rid of that what else treat email as its own platform so a lot of people just treat their email as like an RSS reader or a message yeah I think that's silly I don't think you should do that a few other things were like you're welcome email and your confirmation page after someone subscribes those are really really really important those are really great opportunities to be different a lot of times people just use the generic like you just yeah it's just like the basic stuff that they don't think to change or the subscribe page or even the unsubscribe page they just make it the same thing if you make those like on brand for us that was kind of humorous and funny people will love it you have a very similar style like your voice when I read your stuff as we do give some examples that your subjects even the stuff how you sign off on it I mean talk about some of those things yeah so voice is really important with us so it's not the welcome email anymore it's the subscriber page after you subscribe but when we first launched it was like the welcome email the headline was the subject line was look what you did you little jerk and it said like you can read it if you google the hustles welcome email there's like 12 blogs we've written about this but basically oh there it is there it is I assure you there's a whole page about how all these people in our office like Kara just took a whole bunch of shots of tequila because she's so pumped you just signed up or like that's so cool right outside of the hug the stranger like it's like a long thing which a lot of people wouldn't think this is all these things that just happened right and a lot of people wouldn't think that this would work because it's like kind of long form but it does it works really well now I also notice spacing the size of it are these all things starting to get into writing I tell people try to keep sentences below 25 words and keep paragraphs three sentences or less it makes the readability increases the readability it does remove needless words try not to use too many adverbs right at like a 6th grade reading level and you can do that by going to hemmingwayapp.com oh shit I should be good for this then we should be fine you should do all of our ride you will do blogging everything so I was so excited to have you here is we actually built this thing without using email whatsoever was probably one of the biggest mistakes that we ever did was we were so focused on the content and providing as much free good content to our people and the podcast was the main source of that that once we woke up one day and said oh shit we got a million plus downloads a month of people listening to us you know how do we reach them and touch them on a regular basis and sure we're we really had kind of dropped the ball on email and we just started really capturing emails this past year and we haven't even put in place any sort of sequencing or anything yeah so sequencing is great my buddy Neville who's a big email guy he calls him his little his little slaves because basically he creates a sequence one time and they go to work for him all the time so basically if one person subscribes you have a drip sequence and you know by like sequence or by email 5 that 30% of people will buy whatever he's selling so then you just get a bunch of people to sign up for the email then you got yourself a machine right do you think a lot of people overthink those sequences and maybe like cause you're just saying sixth grade reading level I mean keeping it well they definitely over they think too much about the writing you know the writing is incredibly important but like a lot of people use jargon like they'll talk like you know like resume talk like I ensure that we hit goal yeah like they just use jargon it's like you know what if you ever said ensure like I made sure we did this just say that just talk like right like you speak that's what I noticed is that it's like I'm listening to someone talk to me rather than reading exactly it's like people like automatically assume that that's unprofessional it's like that's not unprofessional if I met the president I would be like Mr. President how are you it's great to see you I wouldn't be like hello sir like what's going on like you know what I mean like sure what's up it's great to see you and if you think about it everybody's on text so much it's so important that it's changing the way we read like copy whereas before there was a very professional you go back 30 years you wrote a certain way and you read a certain way but now we're using these emojis now yeah now we're so used to text like it's almost like this is more personal I believe this more than the super you know kind of regiment and type of writing and we call that the John Stuart effect that we use now which basically we are silly and funny yet intelligent but because we're because we write in a relatable tone people trust us more kind of like when John Stuart would like you know make jokes and shit but he was actually incredibly intelligent so like you trust him a lot more because he's like oh you're kind of self deprecating but yeah and like Slack, text, messenger I mean like you spend most of your time email you spend most of your time in the text world get good at get good at that right yeah now with your how do you guys monetize with this is it a fee to subscribe or is it because you've got okay so we make you know we're we grew we're at close to 20 full-time people now so it grew quickly and it's very it makes good money and 100% not 100% 90% of the revenue is made through advertisements in the email and so in the same way that HuffPo or Business Insider you see advertisements on the website we built our whole it's literally no different it's no different it's just in an email the only difference is is that we had to build all of our own stuff so that's stuff you see on Business Insider it's technology that's like third party technology that like you just plug in it's like boom you just are making money that didn't exist for email so we had to build it all we built it all ourselves are you impacting and helping a lot of people do you get a lot of messages from people saying man you totally yeah if we like tell people to respond and we say like hey like let us know what you think about this thing we'll get thousands and thousands of just people reaching out or we'll get people mailing us stuff or just showing up the office it could be small like you made me sound more intelligent when I was interviewing for this position and I was able to shoot the shit with this guy who was interviewing me and it kind of built rapport and I got a job other times it's like you inspired me now I just started a company like we've had people who have come to our conferences and they've started huge companies and they've recently sold them it's like we just helped create like a generation of wealth for this person I was bummed today and you just made me a little happier so it's yeah we get that type of stuff all the time it's cool do you guys have a way for connecting like these subscribers besides like your events that you do sort of live and in person yeah so we have about 4,000 ambassadors an ambassador is someone who's gotten a unique URL and gotten their friends to join the hustle and we have a Facebook group where they hang out and we have a lot of really cool investors like Tim Ferriss or the guys who do these and we'll have them do live question and answer sessions in the Facebook group so we talked to that's like where our most loyal folks will hang out and then we're expanding to other types of content so we'll be able to talk to them throughout the day soon but right now it's besides live events and email our company is like so simple a lot of people are surprised that it does what it does just off that but that's pretty much what it is kind of that was just simple just keep it simple stupid with your events you do them once a year how big do you get well we do a couple other ones oh you do we have this one called 2x and it's basically what it's like to succeed and all about the struggle from females in the tech world and entrepreneurial world and so we do that in LA in San Francisco we've got some coming up in Chicago New York and Austin and we'll do those and we'll have like the one in San Francisco we sold close to a thousand tickets in like 24 hours so that one's more a female-centric type of deal and so what do they get when they go there are there like booths or is it speakers so I'm from or I moved here from National Tennessee I'm a huge music fan I studied music business and so the whole idea early on was like let's take let's try to make it as exciting as a concert and so they're all most nearly every one of our big events is done in like a music venue or something that feels like a theater a theater music venue and so it's typically like a talk okay we do have like booths and stuff like that but it's more like a show as opposed to a trade show okay and then what about your is it called Hustle Con? Hustle Con Con what is that one all about? so that's at the Paramount in Oakland we had close to 3000 people show up last year wow and Casey Neistat there Casey Neistat so we've had all types of cool people so we've had Casey Neistat the guy who started Bonobos we've had how about this one the guy who started Men's Aware House you know like you're gonna like that guy founder of Trubbies founder of Casper oh wow you had some great ones who was the most interesting? the guy Miguel the founder of WeWork he was probably the most interesting Casey was cool Tom from oh Tom Villu yeah he was interesting Buddy of ours yeah he was cool yeah Casey was interesting hanging out with him for like or just talking to him was pretty interesting I'm curious to hear from you because we notice something when we interview or talk to like these you know YouTube type celebrities they tend to be very different than the personality they have on the show did you find that at all? with Tom I did Tom was like so personal and just like just like a guy hanging out but then when people were surrounding him he was like this inspiration he turned it on right he turned it on hard for stuff yeah Casey was very hyper and I like Casey pay attention to me here's your microphone and he was like oh look a flashlight like when you try the flashlight in his eye and then he was like oh if you watch the talk he's got like duct tape on his leg because in the back he's like oh look at this tape and like he started tearing it just like sticking it on his legs and I was like Casey look at me I need you to pay attention please look at me squirrel yeah that's exactly what it was so he was like way more hyper than I would have thought I find a lot of him were like that because it takes this camera and look at it pretend like you're talking to millions of people with all this energy right yeah I find that they're a lot different I also think it's just entrepreneurs in general tend to be a little bit I don't know a little different I mean you're obviously an entrepreneur kind of the prototype do you find like that you see certain characteristics kind of are similar between entrepreneurs yeah well I think most the time to have extreme success it typically takes an extreme personality and it's a struggle I mean hell I just came here from my therapy so like like so it's like there are it's fucking hard to do this shit and it's stressful every single day and it makes you weird so I don't know if you start weird or if it makes you weird that's cool that you admit that I was going to ask you because you referred to yourself as a nerd a few times but you actually seem to have this really outgoing personality has that been something that you've developed over time no it's gone the other way so I feel as though I was very outgoing now I'm way more introverted so I am pretty outgoing but at the same time I don't drink alcohol I don't do drugs and so when I'm not working I just like to be at home and I don't like doing anything I don't like being around anyone like really quiet and stuff yeah because I get enough of this like well not like this but like people messaging you on Facebook or tweeting at you or emailing you I don't want to talk to people because I need to like turn off my brain I actually find that very common I think we all would agree we're the same way too we're living and you're constantly interacting with hundreds sometimes thousands of people when I go home I just want to shut off completely yeah and it's like once you like let's say that you want a lot of money in life and once you like get a little money you're like oh okay that's cool what else is there like you know what I mean and it's almost like that with the tension so like it's like oh I wanted a lot of attention and then you start getting attention you're like my real father committed suicide my mother married into an abusive relationship so I'm no stranger to going to therapy whatsoever was that something that you just recently started in your adulthood or is it something you've been doing for a long time I've always when I was in seventh grade I read how to win friends and influence people so I was always like kind of weird about like understanding my own emotions and like how to like manipulate in a positive way but manipulate other people's emotions so I've always been weird about that and I've always had like depression and anxiety issues so I've always been I think that I'm a little neurotic and just high strung and like very aggressive and that's kind of made me succeed in a lot of ways but it's also like just makes me a little nutty like a little high high you know just like wow tight and I also I feel like weed would be so good for you yeah I hate weed I don't do any drugs I do not I know I heard you say that I thought God it's such a good one for you I hate it don't you think it's serendipitous 20th is such a great day for you too dude you had the wrong string this is common when you get first off anxiety is strongly correlated with high intelligence and oh thanks yeah yeah yeah it's actually no this is a real statistic and marijuana I've found that certain people especially very smart people just get more like they start to analyze themselves even more and get really paranoid is that what happens to you I hate it yes I've smoked very few times in my whole life and when I have I'm like I'm never doing that again it's like I don't like to fly either I try never to fly and it's the same thing it's like you're in a thing and you can't get out if you wanted to get out it's the control yeah it's like that freaks me out it's so much so I don't do that at all and also I get addicted to shit so I don't you know that about your personality already yeah so I don't I try what are some things you've been addicted to well alcohol oh okay I had to get off that and that was a huge deal when did you realize that how long were you it's been about five years okay so I just kind of went wild between ages like 19 and like 22 no 19 and 23 okay and I just tend whenever I'm into something it's all I ever think about it's all I ever want and so I just like well so I'll do it as much as I can I just get obsessed with it so I try my hardest to only get obsessed with healthy things for a long time it was sugar that was my thing sugar I just love sugar like M&M's I just eat so much of it or just like whipped cream whipped cream very specific yeah it's just like cause that's like a way you can consume a lot of sugar and it doesn't fill you up I just love that shit or like right now it's Coke Zero that's my obsession for a long time it was watermelon I just get obsessed with like certain types of food particularly sugar based food that's funny so through this process with the therapist and knowing this about yourself and you're not a drug guy are you somebody have you found other things to help you with that like do you meditate do you finally read you travel like what are the things that help this create balance for you well so like the unfortunate part is that most those things that give you that immediate dopamine rush are bad for you so drugs and alcohol sex could do it but it's not as immediate and running does it but it takes like 20 minutes to like really get those endorphins going you just take a shot and you feel it so running has helped I'm a runner so that has helped I do meditation every morning sugar was unfortunately my thing for a while but I'm trying to stop that and reading reading biographies has been like a real drug that's like I get pretty obsessive about certain types of people and I'll just like research and learn everything I can about them any favorites in the last year too? Joseph Kennedy JFK's father he's super interesting because at age 24 he said I'm gonna get so wealthy that all of my kids I'm gonna have a I'm gonna have a fuck ton of kids and all of them are gonna be so wealthy that all they're gonna be able to do is being government because I'm already taking care of money and that's exactly what happened and so basically Joseph Kennedy was interesting because he basically made modern a lot of people don't know this he made modern Hollywood Hollywood so like back then there was a whole bunch of issues where they were like oh we don't trust these Jews you know like it was a lot of anti-Semitism and he was a white guy and so basically he kind of came in and changed shit and then Spielsburg came in yeah and changed it all it was basically a ton of anti-Semitic thought and he took advantage of that because he looked like me he was a blonde hair white guy that people happen to trust even though he was incredibly unethical and really shady oh really? yeah he was very unethical and he was not a good guy in some sense of the some sense of that but anyway he and he also helped delay World War II and so he was very had his hands in culture and that's why I find him to be incredibly interesting are you ever worried because you get into things you really get into them and then you seem to move on do you ever get worried you can get bored with what you're doing now and you're gonna have to do something else? worried no but I embraced that that's my thing no I'm not worried about that but I don't really get bored about it with shit too easily I guess like I'm obsessed with business and making money and so I don't think I'll ever get bored of that maybe I'll get bored of a certain type of of like business unit but the cool thing about media and what we do is there's like lots of different business units in it or there can be at least how do you see Sam how do you see business evolving in the future for us like what are we in the middle of right now and what do you how do you think things I mean to me being someone who's 36 I already saw the difference I didn't have a Facebook I don't have an Instagram I don't have any social media because that wasn't that cool when I was a kid growing up I did without it I actually had built successful businesses without it but now it's like a necessity right so what do you see now and where do you see us going well in my small world of Silicon Valley I don't know how involved you guys are with that but in my small side of the world of this whole Silicon Valley venture capital type of thing money is flowing freely money is good anyone with a any idiot with an idea can get a million bucks same thing with this crypto thing anyone with that puts ICO next to something it's gonna be huge that's gonna change in the next decade for sure and so what I think is gonna happen is like these guys who think that they can get a five million dollar valuation off just an idea and raise a million bucks or sometimes a ten million dollar valuation just off of like a stupid idea of like let's say have you guys seen HQ that trivia game okay it's like Jeopardy but it's basically just a guy it's cool but anyway it's just like a trivia game that you'll see it it's everywhere now anyway they raised money they raised money at a hundred million dollar valuation and it's only been around for six months and they have a lot of users they have a million users they've only been around for six months but I mean where's the business yeah what is it where is the business and it's only six months old and anyway a hundred million dollars fuck no so anyway that type of shit happens all the time why though why is that happening right now well because just because there's a bunch of VCs that are just excited to give all these Silicon Valley kids fucking money yeah but that's how it works you only need one Facebook to return a whole fund and so basically that's how the game works it just right now wallets are looser so like we could have hated on when Instagram got bought a lot of people thought it was the stupidest thing ever and now they make a probably I don't know they probably make 15 billion bucks a year and they were bought for a billion dollars that's a great deal but they there's just like now people are just making lots of bets like that so the strategy kind of works it just won't work like a lot of entrepreneurs they'll understand that a venture capitalist is going to make a hundred bets and only really like three or four of them actually need to work in order to make a fuck ton of money like they don't understand that like one investment is going to 1,000 X and all the rest are going to die and a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand that that look like this you're only one of a hundred to this guy you're not important necessarily to him and so but they think that they are the one and they could be the one but anyway the thing that's going to happen I think is that profitability is going to matter real soon once the markets go to shit which they inevitably they will there'll be some kind of correction right right and they will and people are not going to make a 10,000 X like off Bitcoin that shit's not going to happen all the time and you're going to have to have fundamentally sound companies which people do not have right now many people do not have and so I believe that's the in my world of venture capital and technology that is going to change probably definitely in a decade probably way sooner than that well I would think it would favor a guy like you though because you guys tend to have a very well oiled machine right now we make profits it's good for us and I understand the idea behind some of that you know with a big business a restaurant it'll take a year to make back your money a restaurant in San Francisco that probably takes a million dollars I get that and you won't make that back for a while understand I understand that but many of these companies who are raising large large rounds I don't think will ever make anything and I think that will change the hype so big right now right have you ever gotten to a conversation with someone about ICOs no do you know about ICOs no explain an ICO is a okay this I'm going to sound like an AD explaining it but this is how people believe it and it is kind of true but an ICO is a initial coin offering so these companies create their own coins their own crypto coins right and then people buy them and they hope to trade them it's basically like stock but they want these coins to be like currency but basically you have all these like basically the guys who used to live in like Las Vegas and like post photos of them with money and cars they got into this world because they're like fuck we can basically get all of these we can tell these people we have this amazing technology and get them to buy all these coins and then pump it up it's like penny stocks pump it up and then sell it and then they're left with it and who cares yeah pumping up is happening big time with it's pumping dumps this is exactly what it is and I do think that there is some great there are some real folks in there there's just a lot of charlatans and it's if you go and look at some of these big ICOs and Google the founders and look at their Instagram and you can kind of tell I want the person who looks disgusting and like an alien to be doing like you know what I mean like I don't want like a good looking guy to be crushing this right it is Ferrari and shit right that guy is not the guy I want to be doing this I want the guy to like have like like spaghetti stains on his t-shirt because he's in the computer already right because he like doesn't leave his room I want him to have like shit under his eyes because he hasn't slept I don't want him to be good looking and I don't want him to talk about how fit he is and I don't want to see his abs if he has abs I'm not doing it he's working his ass off for that right right right and so basically what's going on is you have all these people with these ICOs and it's gonna fail really any time you have an emerging market that's exploding you have a bunch of shit that comes along with it and eventually it clears out and then the winners or one of my favorite Joe Kennedy's stories is he's like look anytime that he goes he pulled his money out of the markets during the great or right before the Great Depression started because they were in a bull market right before that and he goes the shoeshine boy gave me advice on which stock to buy and at that point I go this is not a good idea I gotta get out of this there's too much hype I've heard that quote before that's brilliant so once the shoeshine boy gives you stock advice you know it's time to bail and once like bros who have abs are telling me what to do with this ICO it's still about crypto right crypto's now getting the point where it's reached so many people that you're hearing about it everywhere like I got a hairdresser doing my hair the other day and she's telling me like oh fuck yeah it's about time for me to sell all my coins yeah and I own a bunch I do too you know what I'm saying and I'm gonna make it's gonna do well I bought it a long time ago I'm happy and I think there's like cool stuff around the technology and I believe in that no I believe in blockchain I believe in totally this is the future of how currency is involved in it so my theory was listen I'm gonna buy in it when a lot of these are low I've already more than doubled a lot of my money pull out when I've invested and then I'll just sit on the rest if it goes somewhere and it goes what everybody thinks it may do then I'm sitting on some good money and I agree with you I'm doing the same thing but like some by that logic there will be losers right oh yeah and I just I feel horrible for what's gonna happen I think so looking looking in the world of tech right now they look really good but we're doing some bus check there's a lot of that don't you think I feel like we continue to meet people you meet them they look so great on social media and then you see they're displaying magic what the fuck and it's never that way right it always is in actuality you guys know entrepreneurship is like 90% like this fucking sucks this is gonna fail this is not gonna work and then it's like oh fuck we got it it worked anyway what companies do I think is just totally inflated there's a company called Magic Leap in Florida they've raised maybe two billion dollars right and they create artificial like a virtual reality experience and they've like never released a product and it's been like that for like six or seven years two billion dollars maybe more maybe more we're gonna be the ones that did holograms yeah that's what it is okay and but they haven't released it yeah they just like tell they've like a video that was really cool they've had videos and that was it that's all they've had they've had videos yeah exactly there it is right there yeah so Magic Leap I don't know how much money they've raised but it's in the billions and they have this like video and shit that you can use but you can't actually buy any of this yeah okay so yeah that's the thing they just released this thing two weeks ago or three or four weeks ago it looks cool as fuck yeah but that that doesn't exist yet that's hilarious oh man see why don't we just make up some shit do a website get a bunch of money promise a lot of things yes let's see what else there was this company called Theranos where they raised a couple billion dollars and I the founder seems really cool she's just like like 31 year old like Stanford a dropout which is interesting I'm like oh that's cool I would like that I'd like her to win but she's raised billions of dollars off this claiming to have this technology where it can you barely have to poke your finger and you can give blood and so you can test your blood very very very easily turns out that might be a fraud so I'm not yeah Theranos that might crash and burn soon so I would be nervous about that company if I was one of the people who invested a ton of money yeah they claimed to do all this crazy shit what about winners who do you think are like looking really good our most underrated companies right now that you see you're going to be badass in the future let's see there's this company called Flexport and what they do is basically there's you know like shipping container like ship the ships that ship like fucking everything there's actually not that many of them in the world but they like is it Amazon trying to get their hands at all that I would bet they are I mean that's probably like a trillion dollars I mean that's actually huge like how you get like it's so Amazon's on their way for that but it's so intertangled with government and all that stuff gangsters and all that it's already in the works bro in the book the four they talk about that yeah Amazon's on their way towards it so are these guys this company called Flexport they're trying to build really cool technology easier to track where your stuff is and also basically my father like all my father's in the shipping industry and a lot of times what they do is they'll be like go make phone calls like hey you got room for this alright where are you can you come here and like it's pretty kind of ghetto still and so these guys are building really cool technology to make ocean frates like the whole that whole industry more efficient and I think that is awesome and I think it's awesome because the guy who runs it I've seen talks of them he's a badass and it's like a sexy industry and so therefore there's probably not a lot of young competitors and they could they could crush it totally disrupt that for sure yeah they've already raised a bunch of funding but I had heard about them about two years ago and if I was who I was maybe four or five years ago and I wanted the job I would have applied at Flexport what are your thoughts on you made a comment too about the drop out at Stanford what are your thoughts on education right now in the future of that I think that I did not go to that good of a school and I left early I ended up getting my degree but I left early and it was maybe $50,000 a year tuition and it was not a good school schools like that should you know those are kind of scams you know like I used to make fun of like this guy Ty Lopez I was like that's a scam and then I was like wait a minute that might not be a scam this is the fucking scam that people are a quarter of a million dollars in debt for this bullshit degree that they were told they had to do right so I think that those schools are really screwed but I actually do like my girlfriend went to an Ivy League school and I see the access that she has and the education she got and I'm like that was actually probably worth that so I think that like the top like the top like my children I'll be like look if you can't go to Ivy League just go to like a cheap state school or go to a trade school because I think that's really important to know trade if they exist in that form at that time because it's some information so accessible now it's good it's kind of crazy to think that you would spend a quarter million dollars on you know learning something by that time probably be over half a million dollars and you know $300 books when you can download something so cheaply yeah and so that's what I'll tell my kids is like look like go to a state school that's like I don't know what's a state school now $10,000 a year so you can get your experience because that's super important to learn and talk to people and party that's all incredibly important but if you can't like I'm not giving you like 40 grand to go to a mediocre reputable like it doesn't make sense still gonna give you any leverage by doing that right you're just gonna end up like getting a $45,000 a year job and being debt and you're gonna be left off like you're gonna be screwed like you're gonna thank me for doing you know what I mean I know so many I'm thankful my parents helped me out and I got a scholarship so I'm I'm way more lucky than most people but imagine do you guys graduate with debt dude my best friend is a vice principal but he he has $100,000 in debt so that's gonna let I mean you're fucked right whatever what's the interest rate 7% I don't know his interest I think he has a pretty good deal though on his interest rate but he's pretty much just guaranteed he's gonna be paying that loan for the rest of his life couple hundred bucks a month for the rest of his life you're fucked if I was if I did I moved to San Francisco to start a company I only had a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars at the time there's no way I could have done that if I had to make even $500 a month payments like it's you're at such a disadvantage I'm so fortunate that I didn't have that and I got lucky to teach kids there's no education around that it's starting to happen you think so it's starting to happen people are starting so if you look at the trends here's a good example so I used to train a lot of people in the medical industry and like general practitioners are dropping off considerably because the cost of going to you know going to school then getting you know becoming a doctor and then you have to do your internship and all that stuff and then you graduate and you're gonna make not a ton of money because amongst doctors general practitioners are they don't make the you know they're like as much as a surgeon so a lot of them aren't doing that they're like well if I'm gonna go to school be a doctor I have to do this because I know I'll make this much because a general practitioner is not gonna earn enough to pay that back and you're seeing a lot of people do that with a lot of different types of careers there are certain careers you need to go to school for but there's other ones where it just doesn't make any sense like why am I gonna go to school and get a hundred thousand dollars in debt for a business degree or I might be better off learning as an apprentice working for another person who started a business or something like that I think apprenticeships are the way to go without a doubt I think that's what we used to do we've done that for a long time and we don't really do it as much anymore internships they try to make that happen but apprenticeships are the way to go and that's why I think trade school is super interesting I think that Americans kind of look down upon that type of work and I think that it's incredibly honorable and really needed and it's incredibly important to have that skill and I think that now what we see is an over supply of literally unskilled workers that graduate from expensive schools it's like okay so you just spent four years in this much money what's your skill set what are you like what can you do what are you great at they don't even know yet and what can you be world class at because unless you're world class at anything you're not gonna achieve shit so like what are you great what are you great at and it's like well I don't know you know like you don't have to be great when you're 22 but like what are you pretty good at what kind of advice do you have for young entrepreneurs no fuck that Sam what advice would you go back and give the you know 15 year old version of yourself what would you go tell yourself I don't think you should tell them anything this kid's great this kid's hustler man for real seven years old he's reading the yeah how to win friends and influence people I remember I read that summer of seventh grade and that was like what I was into that says everything to me you like hacked me popular yeah exactly I'm gonna figure this out well really it was like how do you meet girls and I was like a nerdy guy like how do I make girls like me how well that will play out for you it did okay it was all part of the process it did okay let's see what would I give people well a couple things like if I had to do if I had to like start over again or I would definitely like you know it was kind of cool in eighth grade and ninth grade and to like kind of make fun of reading but you know to believe that I do believe the whole thing that everyone says if you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with most and when you're 18 you don't can't really pick to hang out with like superstars but you can read about them all the time and that's kind of the same thing so I think that's so important I would just like read a ton you know there's not a lot of people who have made massive dents in the world who rather most all of them consider reading a hobby that they do a ton of right so reading is incredibly important I wish that I would have known what meditation was earlier on in my life I used to think of it as just like a monk and like an orange like blanket like hum that's nonsense that's not true so meditation has been incredibly important to my emotional development and I wish I would I would have known that early on because it would have saved me a lot of pain and a lot of time I would have been able to know being more self-aware I would also I would get what I tell people I read this book by Robert Green called Mastery early on in my life have you read the power yeah yeah I love that one if you look if you search the 48 Laws of Power summary you'll see my my summaries number one on Google oh no shit yeah I'm a big fan of that one but mastery is the idea of just how important it is to be really really good at something and so I would encourage everyone if they're young I'm like look it doesn't matter if you use this thing in your career or not the act of learning and becoming great at it it's not only is it practical because there's always you can always make income the best at anything regardless if it's I mean like the if you're the best like cartoonist like you can make a job just like drawing cartoons for people at a conference like you will always be able to make a living at something it may not be a lot but you always be able to make a living at something but the act of like dedicating yourself and becoming world-class at something is incredibly important so like just get a skill like pick something and make that your thing and be great at it and don't be a generalist dude I the best advice is to stop focusing on the things that you're not good at focus on what you're good at and be fucking great that was the best piece of single advice I ever received as a young kid young entrepreneur growing up it's made a world of a difference I think that's so true it's really important it doesn't even matter if you use that all the time just get great at something right you know that's just so important because like I think of things really practically like I even have like money set of sides if I go bankrupt I can like get a flight home like I'm like very practical right and like if you think about really practical like be very practical like let's say this doesn't work this doesn't work out well I can always get a job that pays probably 90 to 120 thousand dollars a year at a big company doing this because I am good at this right so that's like so important just to have something you're good at yeah there's no way you're going bankrupt bro because if you did we'd be the first ones to call you up to hire you for that side of our business like do I know someone there who can like forward my application so you go even further I like to because then if I know that I have the worst case scenario already planned out for then I'm okay swinging for the fences because I've accepted the worst case scenario and I know how I will find my way out that's actually a very effective strategy if someone taught me that years ago and it's I mean because I can get paranoid about certain things like health and whatever and they told me well so when I rode across the country on my motorcycle I was like okay how do I feel with this homelessness like do I feel comfortable with this I feel okay with this like I can manage I kind of got it that it's like okay am I okay with this thing that's a little bit higher it's like okay I'm okay with all this stuff therefore let's swing for the fucking fences and if I miss I'm okay that's super cool what's in the future for your brand so we want to become a huge media company a huge membership company whatever you want to call it we want to become a massive thing that it creates lots of hopefully hundreds or hopefully thousands of jobs for people and so what we have coming up is we're going to be expanding our brand and so you'll see us in a bunch more places that we haven't announced yet but basically you'll just see us a lot more places I hope and so we've got these conferences coming up called 2X which you'll see in San Francisco Chicago Austin New York and it's all about succeeding from a woman's point of view because they go through a lot of different issues that most dudes have no idea about and so it's kind of bringing those guys together and so that's coming up and we're also really going to hit our first million our first millionth user so we're laser focused on getting to a million users and just continuing pumping out great news any thoughts of moving into this space in the podcast you know no not yet because I don't think it's our core competency you like a lot of people you guys get it but most people don't about how different that is than writing and stuff like that what do you think of the space are you interested in it at all or do you mean what do you think about the space I'm incredibly interested in it I want to figure out how advertisers can track their their spend because right now advertisers will track and like a lot of people don't use like you know mind body slash 99 designs right right right you know what I mean that's the way that's the only way right now and so there needs to be to track that and so until that comes once that comes it's going to shoot up it's in the middle of it's in the middle of evolving podcasting's exploded and we started a podcast three years ago three years ago I would tell people about I'd have to ask them first do you know what a podcast is and now I just ask people what do you what podcast do you listen to so it's growing very very quickly oh it's huge so I love expanding markets this is going to be I mean this is obviously it's going to be way bigger than radio even I mean it's going to be huge right like so but I I'm looking for a technology that will solve or a solution to that advertiser problem because if that gets solved I don't know how it could but if it did then there's no stopping it yeah because they weren't able to do it with radio either right well you have like Nielsen you know that kind of like oh well this many people heard it what's that like Nielsen ratings where they have they would basically put these black boxes on TVs and they could track what people are watching and you have that for podcast too but I'm not positive if the data is always accurate no I don't think it is at all and right now the way we handle our sponsors back and forth so we know I mean as long as they I think the way they look at it as long as they get their you know ROI on it they're they're fine you know they don't think because you can't track exactly you know that person could have came they listened to our show they first heard about it there but then they came around and bought it another way and you have no idea to prove that you did or didn't right right and I think I bet that could be solved somehow smart guys working on this we'll get solved for but like what was the I think the industry last year in 17 I think it was only like $220 million spent on podcast advertising you're going to see that quadruple this year it needs to it needs to like keep going we already see it right now we already see what's happened I mean we the real estate on podcast is I mean it's limited right because you only run one two maybe three commercials if you're really good at it and so it's limited real estate and you have all it's very intimate this year we're starting or recently we're starting to see companies now that are that have a budget for podcast marketing whereas before maybe we should be considering this there was no podcast marketing but we'll talk we'll talk off air about some of the numbers and things like that I mean I was really excited to meet you and talk to you about the side of the house that we're currently building and working on right now and we're open to share all of the stuff that we yeah it's interesting I know Barstool is doing I mean Barstool sports they're just like podcasting network at this point it seems and they're just crushing it Tim Ferriss he's one of our investors he tells me or he told me some of the numbers and I was like what yeah he's crazy he's obviously crushing it awesome very very very very fascinating awesome well thanks for coming in man yeah thanks for having me you're a real cool kid I say kid but you're a really fucking cool guy man I'm really happy to see you succeed like this this is awesome well hopefully it's anyone hopefully it's early good stuff alright check it out go to YouTube subscribe to our channel Mind Pump TV this month we have 30 workouts or 30 days of fitness free for all of our listeners thank you for listening to Mind Pump if your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com the RGB Superbundle includes Maths Anabolic Maths Performance and Maths Aesthetic nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks feels and performs with detailed workout blueprints and over 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