So that article tells a story of multiple 80 -something -year -old guys who own publications that are making—that are fine businesses.
Maybe they make six figures a year in profit, but they can't find anyone to take it over, so they're literally just shutting it down.
I feel like I can rule the world.
I know I can be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no day's off.
On the road, let's travel, never looking back.
Should we start with this?
This tweet? It's Media Gazer, which I guess some media— Publications.
commentary on media companies it says small town newspapers are shutting down due to lack of a succession plan not financial issues in nearly a dozen u .s states this is a growing problem okay and so that article tells a story of uh multiple 80 something year old guys who own publications that are making that are fine businesses maybe they make six figures a year in profit but they can't find anyone to take it over so they're literally just shutting it down And here we have a tweet from Matthew Prince.
I think his name is Matthew, is worth, I think, something like $4 or $5 billion.
He's the CEO of CloudFlare.
Do you want to kind of read what he says?
Yeah. So he says, actually, this is a recipe for a really rewarding life.
If you're a recent college grad and not sure what to do, find a small town you could love with a local newspaper whose owners are ready to retire.
Raise the capital to buy it.
Run it with the community's interest at heart.
You'll not get too rich, but you'll do well.
More importantly, you'll be a hero to the community and have influence even early in your career.
You'll meet the love of your life at some point, at some event you otherwise wouldn't get invited to.
You'll have kids who will proudly call you their parent and make this corner of the world meaningfully better.
If anyone wants to seriously follow this recipe and just lacks the capital, happy to talk.
So I think that's an amazing insight, but the true insight, so someone chirps at him and they say something like, go ahead, what do they say?
I can't read it all.
So literally the guy's name who's replying is some guy.
So I'm not not even disparaging this guy.
Some guy tweets Adam and says, this is the sort of unwittingly funny stuff that wealthy people say that 130 IQ guys should be content with an imaginary small town life lived in anonymity near.
I don't even know what this word is being 180 degrees from their own choices, which deliver untold wealth and influence.
I don't even know what is this guy saying?
I don't even understand the tweet.
He's basically saying, like, this is something that wealthy dudes say that's so funny because it's so wrong that a guy would be happy doing this.
Is that what he's saying?
And here's why I like Twitter.
So Matt Prince, I don't—he's not high profile.
He's not like an average—like, the average person has no idea who this is.
But he's worth $5 billion.
And it's so interesting to get his insight.
So this is the tweet that I really care about.
And I just—the rest was for context.
Read this next one.
All right. So he says, I have—he just replies to some guy.
He goes, I have untold financial wealth and I own a local newspaper.
So I have some perspective.
Like Warren Buffett likes to say, surprisingly little changes when you move from upper middle class to truly rich. Houses are houses, cars are cars, and watches are stupid.
That's so good. What's more important is meaning.
I feel lucky to have achieved financial wealth while chasing meaning.
That is super rare and I feel incredibly fortunate to have gotten both.
But if you're early in your career and decide I'd rather optimize for meaning than financial wealth, I think this is a better path than most would consider.
Example, volunteer for the Peace Corps.
It will actually make you a good leaving and you'll have incredible influence and meaning within your community.
And if you later decide to go for untold financial wealth, always remember Rupert Murdoch's empire began with the Adelaide Advertiser, which he bought when he was 21.
How fantastic is that?
This is really great.
Although, you know, not to be a reply guy, but like Cloudflare is not the Peace Corps or owning a small town newspaper in a community.
So like, Like, is he saying that CloudFlare was his meaning thing or he did something before that?
Do you know? That's his meaningful thing.
But the point is, for one...
He has another one.
So he's like, some guy goes, how is one supposed to make a good living from a small town newspaper?
Do you have a new model for profitability?
Blah, blah, blah. I want to hear a breakdown.
And he said, Matthew Prince says, the local paper we bought cash flowed around $600 ,000 when we bought it.
We wanted to run it as a nonprofit.
So we plowed it all back into expanding coverage.
But it is not the case that these are bad businesses.
They're just not big businesses.
So the takeaway is multiple things.
One, newspapers are dying.
Local newspapers, we're talking towns that have 5 ,000 people, 10 ,000 people, 30 ,000 people.
They are not dying.
And if you read the replies, you'll see people who are saying, I own a local newspaper that does $500 ,000 in EBITDA.
Like there are replies here.
And Matthew, Matt just said one of those replies where he explains the numbers.
But two, it's just so fascinating to hear this guy's perspective who has so much. And I actually agree with him.
And I also think that there is a big opportunity to buy a bunch of these, but you can just start with one.
And I don't think local newspapers are going to go away anytime soon, to be honest. I think that they have a very stable subscriber base.
And what Matt says in there, he says something like hospitals and other like local businesses, they are dying to advertise in local newspapers.
And that business, while small, is doing great and is very – it's a monopoly.
All right. This episode is brought to you by HubSpot.
They're doing a big conference.
This is their big one they do called Inbound.
They have a ton of great speakers that are coming to San Francisco September 3rd to September 5th.
and it's got a pretty incredible lineup.
They have comedians like Amy Poehler, they have Dario from Anthropic, Dwarkesh, Sean Evans from Hot Ones.
And if you're somebody who's in marketing or sales or AI and you just want to know what's going on, what's coming next, it's a great event to go to.
And hey, guess what?
I'm going to be there.
You can go to inbound .com slash register to get your ticket to Inbound 2025.
Again, September 3rd through 5th in San Francisco.
Hope to see you there.
Okay, I love this one.
10 out of 10, fine, good job.
I gave a talk at Berkeley that was about starter businesses are called white belt businesses a few months ago wait let's reflect on that that's pretty cool what given a talk at Berkeley I don't know that sounds cool to me like I never got to be go to fancy colleges it was hilarious so I'm like I'm going to give this talk and I think I've told this story before but my entire life shifted because I was in a random class at Duke I planned to be a doctor I'd taken the the MCATs, all of it.
And then I took this one class by this amazing woman, Lisa Keister.
And she had, she was, she herself had graduated 10 years earlier and gotten, gotten wealthy, lived an interesting life and came back to teach. And she decided like, what class did the kids actually need?
And the class was called Getting Rich. It's kind of like this podcast, My First Million.
It's like sort of a pretty crude title.
Her class was called Getting Rich. And actually it was two things.
It was personal finance.
So you'd learn about like mortgages and savings and how that all worked, compounding, shit like that.
And then secondly, she would invite speakers in just so that we would get exposed to other ideas of what a life could be besides doctor, lawyer, consultant, banker, which was like, you know, at a school like Duke, that's where 90 % of the students are devoting their energy.
And a guy came in and he gave a talk and it literally changed my life.
It's not even something he said, I just kind of was like, this guy seems like he's having fun.
He doesn't seem like he's that much smarter than me, like, you know, maybe smarter now, but he's, you know, he's saying at the beginning, he didn't know shit about shit.
And that's where I am today.
And like, why don't I just do what, what this guy's doing?
And the last thing he had said was like, he's like, look, if you go try to do something entrepreneurial or interesting and it doesn't work out, this is America that baby, like the story is, is a currency for you.
And look, I hire kids like you.
And guess what? You all have the same top three fourths of the resume.
You go to school, you got a three point something GPA.
PA, you have some stupid extracurricular activities, you got an internship at some big corporation where you didn't really make an impact.
The only thing that differentiates any of you guys is the other section at the bottom of your resume.
Like, have you done anything?
Have you gone on any interesting quests?
And so he's like, go on an interesting quest. You have nothing to lose right now.
You don't have kids.
You don't have a mortgage.
Just go try some shit.
And if you fail, if it works, fantastic.
If it fails, don't worry.
It creates a great story that guys like me like to hear.
So that like really shifted my life.
And so I get, I get invited to go give this talk at Berkeley and I'm like, I'm going to do this, man.
I'm going to change someone's life.
Oh, I'll be a life changer today.
And I prepped my ass off.
Like I really tried.
I like, I like thought about it.
I spent two days really, really like full, like just 10 hours a day, just working on this one talk.
Two days doesn't sound like a lot, but like I show up to these podcasts pretty cold.
Like I can wing it with the best of them.
So for me to really put 20 hours into one talk, I'm going to give to 50 kids that didn't, you know, That was unusual for me.
You sound like the Kenny Powers of giving a talk, man.
You're like, get ready, kids.
I'm going to make you piss tears.
Exactly. Hold on to your butts.
I'm about to rock your world.
So I go in, and guess what?
These kids really just don't give a fuck.
Within two minutes of the talk, And again, I'm trying to fire on all cylinders.
It's interactive. I'm cracking jokes.
I got a story. I'm doing, I have a big promise at the beginning.
And I look around and I just remembered vividly in that moment.
I was like, oh, I remember being 19.
You're not even out of school yet.
Like the whole, the real world is a, it's a distant land far away at this point.
You're just trying to, you're like, okay, I have to be here till five.
And then I'm going to go eat.
and then I have that paper to write three years out of your target demo too like they're Indian they go to Berkeley and you're like thinking like all right perfect this is my demo and then you're like shit they're still 19 I need to wait till they're 21 until they have heard of me exactly so honestly it was a kind of a giant waste of time I don't think I shifted anyone's life I think I changed exactly zero lives but I really tried and one of the principles in there was like when you get out of Berkeley instead of getting a job like consider you know doing a company but But for most of you, you don't
have the next Facebook, you don't have the next big idea.
And maybe you're not even talented enough to handle it.
That's like, kind of like if, if, you know, Jessica Alba walked through that door and she's like you, it's like, dude, you couldn't handle Jessica Alba right now.
Anyways, don't worry about it.
That's not your problem.
Like you need to go, you know, put your hand under Mindy's shirt in the back behind the bleachers over there.
Like that's the level you're at right now.
And so I basically was like, you need a starter business, a white belt business.
and i was giving him ideas for what simple starter businesses are what was this your analogy did you just no i just did that one just now it's pretty good yeah well see the funny thing is i have you and i'm like sam's gonna love this he's gonna love hate this and then are i'm like ari's just gonna hate this and sure enough as i'm saying it that's what i got i got sam laughing but face bombing and ari just looking off into the distance wondering how did i end up here why do i have this Oh my God, no, that's a fantastic analogy.
Because it's very true.
Everyone dreams of like the Jessica Alba doing that.
And you're like, wait, what do I do?
What do I do with my hands?
You know what I mean?
It's perfect. Exactly.
You are not prepared for Jessica Alba yet.
And that's okay. You just need some reps.
And so what's the point of this?
What are you going to show me?
Oh, I guess the tie to that was, I think owning a local newspaper is a fantastic version of a starter business to run.
Was that not obvious?
So crystal clear to me, the connection.
Show me this story about Steve Ballmer.
And then also I want to see the Gary Vee one.
Okay. Two great choices.
Excellent choices off the menu.
All right. This is from, I believe, Steve Ballmer goes on the Acquired podcast. It was really good.
It was so good. I agree.
I didn't watch it, but I agree.
And the clips have been good.
And so he's telling this story, and they go, do you guys know the story of Keylu at Microsoft?
He was one of the most pivotal things at Microsoft. And then the hosts go, I knew he was important, but please tell the story.
And Steve goes, he was pivotal in a way that you won't even know.
So he goes, first of all, he's a brilliant guy, great guy.
He's at Yahoo, and he went to grad school with the head of Microsoft Research, Harry.
Harry. And so the setup here is that Satya Nadella, who's now the CEO of Microsoft, was running Bing at the time.
Bing is trying to compete with Google.
And Harry runs the research program there.
And Harry comes and he goes, look, this guy Key is a genius.
We have to hire Key.
I don't know if Key wants to work for us.
We've got to learn from this guy.
We've got to hire this guy.
So he's like, Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer, and Harry all fly down to California to meet with this guy Key Liu.
And they talk to Key and they're like, dude, you're right.
this guy is brilliant and we're learning about him and then at one point Key walks away leaves room goes to the restroom or something and he goes Satya throws out this idea he goes we should hire Key and I should work for him he goes so Harry who's all in because he worked with him Harry works for Satya and Satya is like we should not only hire this guy I should work for him I should report to him like gives up power basically so they they call him and they're like Key listen listen, you know, he was thinking about taking a job somewhere else, but he ends up joining.
And he goes, and then the host goes, so what did he do at Microsoft?
He goes, what I just told you.
He told me about Satya.
He goes, I love Satya.
And we were giving him more and more responsibilities anyways.
But when I saw that this guy would do the right thing for the company, he would give up power to bring in a more talented person and agree to work for him.
He didn't have ego that got in the way.
I knew that Satya was the guy.
And now Satya has become the CEO of Microsoft and led Microsoft on this incredible run.
That's so good. That's a great story.
It's up 1 ,000%. And for a company as big as Microsoft to go up 1 ,000 % and now is a $3 trillion company, all under Satya's kind of regime, I thought that was just a badass story, right?
And later on in the podcast, Steve Ballmer talks about philanthropy.
And I don't know how rich he is, but I think $100 billion or plus.
And the acquired guys were like, your wealth is growing, I think, 20 % a year, $20 billion, whatever.
He goes, yeah, I'm trying to give it all away.
And he goes, you're forgetting about something.
And the host goes, what?
He goes, you know, Microsoft pays a dividend.
So just my dividends are making me $1 billion a year.
And he goes, I'm trying to give it all away.
way, and I can't find enough people who can accept the money.
Well, Steve, we would love to help you with this problem.
We're a helpful bunch over here.
Yeah, he was talking about how he's like, I forget the capital appreciation of this or the stock appreciation.
Lately, it's been what, 15 % a year?
I forget. It's something like magnificent where he's earning tens of billions of dollars from that.
And yeah, he corrected the guys when they said how wealthy he is.
he goes, you're forgetting about our dividend, which pays me $1 billion.
You know he's just been sitting on that, by the way.
You know, he's like, these motherfuckers out here don't know.
They don't know how I'm balling.
It was a really great podcast. It was like three hours long, and it was fantastic.
And he gets made fun of, or Balmer gets made fun of a bunch for that one video where he just looks goofy.
But he's a great salesman, and he's way more technical than people realize.
Balmer's a genius. That's cool.
i mean you gotta you gotta be special i mean there's luck is involved but i think it's it's so easy to write people off and he's a great example of uh enthusiasm as a skill i've talked about this in a bunch of other podcasts but enthusiasm is a actual skill and that video that people make fun of them the developers developers developers developers to me that's like watching uh you know vince carter dunk or something like that right it's like uh this is a guy who probably brought a shit ton of energy and enthusiasm and belief belief and to the team in an unwavering way and at an unusual level and yeah
that was obviously funny to laugh at I get it I thought it was funny as shit too but enthusiasm is a skill and I love it because people don't even think of it as a skill but we all know it when we see it like if you ever worked with somebody who's really enthusiastic and is a believer in what you're doing and brings good energy every day and doesn't get like doesn't get worn down and doesn't get buckled by adversity you love that person that person person's clearly valuable to the team you would hate if that person left your team yet nobody talks about enthusiasm as a skill or something you could practice
or develop or at least even celebrate that you have it's something that you know seems like something sort of for dumb people this episode is brought to you by HubSpot Media they have a cool new podcast that's for AI called the next wave it's by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lanz and they're basically talking about all the new tools that are coming out how the landscape is changing what's going on with AI tech so if If you want to be up to date on AI tech, it's a cool podcast you could check out.
Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.
What's this Gary Vee one?
This is really funny.
All right. Love, Gary Vee.
Gary, I love you. This is also hilarious.
So they're playing a game called Bullish and Bearish, where the host is going to tell him a company name, and he has to decide, is he a bull or a bear on it?
Watch this. Meta. Bullish.
Reddit. Bullish. Alphabet.
Bullish. Way low. I'm not educated enough to give an answer to that, to be honest. Invidia.
I feel like if I spent 10 hours educating myself, I'm like, okay, this is not sustainable to be this crazy.
Disney. Disney? Very bullish.
I think intellectual property is one of the most underrated businesses of the future, VR and everything.
I don't think people understand how big owning IP is gonna be.
Tesla. Bullish. Microsoft. Very bullish.
Open AI. I'm bullish.
Amazon. amazon very bullish bullish alibaba bullish bullish even though it might be banned bullish bitch i'm bullish okay don't even before that word gets out of your mouth i'm bullish what am i gonna do i'm bullish um how funny is this i love gary i mean it sucks because she picked like on honestly i can't hate i'm also pretty bullish on all the all the tech companies that all the best companies in the world amazon and chat gbt uh so funny he um dude people forget i i think vayner media i track it because um i like gary and i think that it's easy to dismiss him as like a guru but i you know vayner
media is doing something like 300 million dollars a year right now i did not know that and would you say you track it where are you getting this information from so i actually um do you remember how i told you i had this document where i track companies and i like i i i track people where i will make a timeline of their life and like at different ages they do different things i track it with a variety of companies as well and vayner media i was curious about their trajectory and he was growing the company like at a really good clip like it was doubling for a couple years and it was still growing
at like 50 for a couple years and so i just wanted to check in and add to my document and over the last three or four years he's grown it to something like 250 million a year in revenue and if you google vayner media revenue he actually is fairly public about it lately of where it's at but it's in the 200 hundred, three hundred range.
Two hundred to three hundred million a year.
Yeah. And what do they do now?
Is it just marketing services or what what's going on?
So Vayner X, which is now the holding company in twenty twenty four, was on track to do three hundred million in revenue.
And this was written in December of twenty four.
So, yeah, you could assume that did in the three hundred million range.
Yeah, it does. They do social media.
It's the same shit.
Just they manage people's social social media stuff i mean it's got to be more of that managed people social media stuff's got to be more than that i think that's the bulk of it they do social media advertising and campaigns so like if you're samsung and you want to run ads on facebook and you want to make really good ads i believe let's ignore vaynermedia i'm bored what is the most interesting thing that's come out of you're tracking people manually year by year borderline creepy stalker thing that you're doing in uh what's interesting to me is a few things one the ability to grow is it gets
harder and harder but like the people who are like really big animals they just figure out how to do it and that's really fascinating to me but occasionally even companies that are growing quickly they'll have two or three years of no or little growth and the reason why i like to do this research is it helps me understand i think that it's the same way when you talk to your rich friends and you talk about money with them, you start to normalize money.
And that's why I do this stuff where like it sounds like it's like a almost like an emotional regulation because entrepreneurship is this long, longer than you want, more up and down thing than you want.
And seeing that the people the things you admire today, either a took a long time or had, you know, multiple flat years, years it makes you not feel like shit when you're in one of those you know periods that is that it yeah yeah exactly because i think i showed you the revenue chart or no the so i've shown you charts before a business insider which is a company i also used to do this for and they've grown like crazy but there was like three years where every single month they actually didn't grow and i was like this chart looks great because we've zoomed out to 15 years but zoom in on those three
years. And imagine feeling that way for nearly 1000 days.
That doesn't feel good.
It doesn't feel good at all.
The whole life of the company right now is three years.
Imagine this whole time, just flat, you know?
Or I'll give you another example.
Replit. You know, we've had Amjad on the podcast, and that was one of our biggest ones.
They just announced the other day that they hit 100 million in revenue.
That's huge, right?
Well, what he kind of said, like in a small comment, like in a reply, is that I believe believe last year or the year before they're at 10 million in revenue.
So they went from 10 million to 100 million in record time, like one year or two years, something like that.
But what he told us on the podcast is that he started the company eight years ago, which means from years zero to eight, he got to 10 million in revenue, which is not impressive.
That's neat. That's not impressive.
And that's just insane to me that he kept at it for eight years.
And tell me if I'm getting my numbers wrong.
But he kept at it for that long, And then success was like in two years.
Yes and no. I think you're right, but it's not like it was just failing that whole time.
Because if you look at the user growth of developers, and I think I tweeted this out with it, I'll find it.
But like basically they grew, they were growing exponentially in number of users who were developers.
So that was also happening at that same time.
And so it's not as it's not as like, oh, man, you know, it's just, you know, suddenly it starts to work.
Like, I mean, look at this.
This is Paul Graham tweeting about Replic before before they even turned on monetization.
This is back in 2020.
But like, what years does that go to?
This is 2015 to 2020, like midway through 2020, like end of 2020, basically 2021.
and so they had 5 million developers programmers using their thing and he paul paul talks about he says this graph is impressive not just for the perfect exponential shape but the numbers 5 million users is a lot when those users are programmers imagine how many users their users will have of their apps and um i think the crazy thing about replit is that basically they pivoted the entire company when they're at a billion dollar valuation valuation.
I invested in Replit, I think at an 800 million ish valuation, eight or 900 million valuation.
I invested in the fund and I invested personally, cause I was like such a big believer in this.
And they had pretty much no revenue at the time, but it was this type of growth.
And I love the product.
I loved Omjad. I was like, this guy's a savage.
And they have a, they built an incredible product that I think will have a network effect over time.
And then Then they pivoted the entire business to say, it's not about like young programmers.
Because I thought, oh, they're getting young programmers to start coding on Replit.
And maybe those people will never leave. They'll code their whole career on Replit.
And then when AI happened, they pivoted basically the entire company to now it's not even for programmers.
It's for people who don't code typically to make things, right?
It's for non -engineers to suddenly be able to be engineers, to be able to create software for software creators.
and now that's ramped to 100 million at 10x the 10x the revenue in one year so now i look like a genius investing in this thing but i really didn't even invest in this because they pivoted they like basically shifted the entire user who is the user and what is the use case uh you know afterwards yeah i mean this is just insane i i use replit um probably three or four times a week it's really fun i just asked chat gpt to make this this is sam stocking all all these businesses dude I do this like crazy I'm gonna have to share this doc I just I like tracking numbers to me when we first met you were like
I took every billionaire and I tried to figure out what they were doing at age 30 and I was like what and you were like Jack Dorsey you do at age 30 his net worth was only one and I was like how do you know this and why do you know this what are you doing and you're like by the time I'm 30 my goal is to have x I think we were well Well, we probably met when we were 24, 25 years old, something like that.
25, yeah. And you were like, when I'm 30, I want to have $20 million in the bank.
Yeah. That was your number.
And you were like, look at this.
I'll be ahead of Jeff Bezos and Jack Dorsey and these guys.
I was like, yo, this guy's a sicko, but I like it.
It was the, I should call, like, if I teach a class, it's going to be called, like, how to become an economic animal.
Unfortunately, like, there's way levels.
There's many levels to this.
And there's many people who are way above me and I didn't understand like how exponential growth works.
But hey, you know, I think I got in the arena of what I was aiming for.
All right, so we got to talk about the new mayor.
Not because this is a politics podcast. I don't know.
Actually, I didn't even know this guy existed until three days ago, to be honest with you.
But you're moving to New York and you seem to know about this guy and I am following him only from a business and marketing perspective.
I have a business and marketing take on this guy.
But can you first set the context for people like me who are not following who this New York City – he's the mayor, right?
That's what he just became?
He's going to be the Democrat who's running for mayor.
So it was – the Democrats were – I don't even know the right terms. Not a nation.
And he won. So basically it was him and Cuomo.
And because New York is very Democratic, he's most likely to win.
Is that why people are freaking out?
Because normally if he's just a candidate.
More likely than not.
The issue is the issue has a bunch of issues.
Basically, every politician is corrupt.
So Mayor Cuomo or Cuomo is running for mayor.
He was previously the governor.
He got in trouble for, like, asking his co -workers have sex with him.
And he was the guy running against this guy.
The current mayor, Mayor Adams, he has accepted bribes.
He is going to be running as an independent versus this guy.
And so we're kind of like stuck with like a rock, paper, scissors.
Yeah, it's like, you know, South Park.
It's like a douche or a turd sandwich. Who are you going to vote for?
That's kind of like what we're working with here.
The gist of this guy is that he's incredibly charismatic.
He's 32 years old. He believes in a lot of crazy things.
That's my opinion, crazy, but basically a lot of socialist things.
So for example, he wants to freeze rent, meaning you can't raise rent on, I think, something like 2 million different apartments, different rent -stabilized apartments.
He also wants to create government -owned grocery stores and a handful of things like that that that are very controversial to people who don't like socialism, but amongst young people who are very angry about a lot of things that they should be angry about, like housing costing a lot of money versus the wage growth.
But he's super charismatic, and so he won over young people's votes.
And so, okay, great, great summary.
Now, again, I don't care about the politics of this, and I don't live in New York, but I'm fascinated by this guy.
Like, I literally had never heard of this guy, and then I watched this video.
I saw this tweet. He killed it.
So this tweet right here has 3 .7 million views.
So that's just the Twitter part of this.
Forget Instagram, TikTok, anywhere else that I'm sure he's posting this type of content.
But first of all, the branding.
So like that was the first thing that stood out to me, like literally the branding of this guy, like the font, et cetera.
So what is this video?
It starts like he's a TikTok content creator.
It says, New York is suffering from a crisis, and it's called halalflation.
And then he talks about how halal from, like, the food trucks – you know, chicken and rice from, like, a halal food truck now cost $10, but it used to cost $8.
And he basically goes and he's interviewing them.
He's like, you know, how much do you sell for?
$10, $10, $10. Whatever.
We'll play the video.
This pork is suffering from a crisis, and it's called halal inflation.
Today, we're going to get to the bottom of this.
How much does a plate of halal cost right now from this truck?
$10. $10. $10? Yeah.
When you're a street vendor, you have to pay for the food, the plates.
How much do you have to pay for your permit?
Before it was $22 ,000.
$17 ,000. How much does a license cost if you get it from the city?
I think $400. Who are you paying?
The permit owner. You're not paying the city?
No, no, no. You pay the permit owner $22 ,000 just so you can sell this food?
Yes. And who is this?
Random guy. Have you ever applied for a permit?
Yeah, I applied and no come anything.
It's long wait. Number 3 ,800 something.
After two years, you're number 3 ,800?
Yes. These are the four bills that are sitting in the city council right now, which would give these vendors their own permits and make your halal more affordable.
But Eric Adams hasn't said a single word about them.
If you own the permit, then how much would you charge for the plate?
Would you rather pay $10 for a plate of halal or $8?
I think $8 is the way to go.
If I was the mayor, I'd be working with city council from day one to make halal $8 again.
Tastes like $10 but it should be $8.
So I was blown away because I have never really seen a politician doing this type of like, I want to call it like kind of natural influencer content.
I don't know what do you even call this, but this is not what politicians typically did.
He's making like a Vice documentary, but in two minutes, it's very good.
Well, he's doing UGC content.
Okay. I think that's the way I would put it.
So the same thing happened in business, especially e -commerce.
So Sam, I don't know if you remember remember like in the earlier days of e -com, right?
Like let's say 2012, 2014, you know, you mostly did just static images.
Okay. There was not really a lot of video on let's say Facebook or Google at the time.
Um, so you would do static images for your ads and, but those images you would pay a professional designer to make, and they would make it look slick.
And then that's what people would click.
And then when video came out, people tried to do the same thing.
They would basically film professional looking videos.
You'd hire a videographer, you'd have somebody holding in the camera and then you would you would have a good background good lighting and you would say your thing but it turns out that commercials didn't really work as well on the internet as me picking up my phone and just making something that looks very raw like I'm doing my you know it'd be a girl doing her makeup while talking about a different product right and it just feels like it's a get ready with me video or it's a you know a mom who's in a rush who's just being like Like, y 'all, I got to tell you, this is a lifesaver.
Like my husband, my husband can't believe how much of a, how much, how much happy I am since I got this thing.
And then they ruffle in their bag and grab something out.
And it's ads that don't look like ads.
And they call this UGC, user generated content.
And that's the new style that works best in ads.
For the last, I would say five years, that's dominated most of e -commerce advertising.
This is the first time I've seen a politician do this.
So if you compare, I don't know, Kamala and how perfectly manicured everything was, her image, her pantsuit, her professional photography, her fake phone call with somebody, but then you see that the phone wasn't even on and she's just chuckling to nobody.
It was all super, super fake and polished.
And this guy's doing man on the street interviews, holding the microphone.
phone you can literally hear like that you know it kind of rubbing against his jacket sometimes accidentally like it's like it's wabi -sabi dude it's the perfection in the imperfection to go full circle there this kind of blew me away i don't know if i'm just like overly nerding out about this but from from the topic like halal chicken and rice is 10 bucks it should only be eight to the style of the video i immediately was like i get why this guy won and on saturday the election was taking place yesterday.
He was he spent the whole day walking around New York and like doing like these very raw looking videos talking to people.
And I think that this is just proof which we already have had this proof that charisma matters more than ideas and reality.
And this is not like a takeaway that like this is a very obvious takeaway.
But this is just another example because his charisma is off the charts.
And he has just been like like killing it when his ideas, in my opinion, are just absolutely insane.
But because of the style of marketing, it's done wonderful.
Young people react to this stuff.
And by the way, this is what we need.
Like Governor Cuomo, the guy who was running for him, he's an old guy.
He's in his 60s, maybe 70s.
And he would never in a million years grab his cell phone and just start talking to it.
But that's what you need.
I think my friend or our friend Austin Reif tweeted something out.
and he said, the next politicians and the next presidents are going to be podcasters and sub stackers.
And that sounds like a ridiculous statement.
People who write newsletters and people who have podcasts, that sounds ridiculous.
It's not ridiculous.
And I totally buy into it.
Yeah, definitely. There's going to be a podcaster president.
Why? Because they're going to have a built a following before they run.
So they're going to build the audience before they go run to they're going to be trained with 10 ,000 hours of storytelling, storytelling, communication of, you know, how to make a point.
So, you know, that's going to be one archetype.
The other one is going to be short form video creators.
I think Roberto, our friend said this thing, he goes, whether this guy's agenda is good or bad for New York is irrelevant.
He told the best story.
This is why Steve Jobs said that the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world.
A lie told as a good story can never, can never beat the truth trapped in a bad story, or I think it's can always be the truth trapped in a bad story.
And then I had, Because I tweeted this thing.
So when I saw this, I saw the second video.
I don't know if you've seen this one, but can you hear this?
Dude, you know, what's funny is I don't have to hear what he's saying.
And I could sense the charisma.
Well, okay. So he's speaking Hindi in this video.
And I think he does actually speak Hindi, but it made me realize, oh, dude, 11 Labs is going to make like a billion dollars next election cycle because every politician is translate everything they're saying into all languages using ai instantaneously like you know why would you not you're just going to pick up free views like we did this we started doing this with our MFM episodes Ben uh was like hey I think I can get more views if we dub our episodes into another language so now if you're on YouTube and you click the settings wheel and you click like audio track you could select Spanish or Hindi
on uh on some of the episodes and it's going to be all the episodes soon because we went to 11 labs we're like hey dudes will you guys help us like translate this and immediately we now get tens of thousands of views a month that we weren't getting before in spanish and in hindi there's probably people in mexico right now that think we just speak spanish that we're their favorite spanish podcast and if they meet us they'll be sorely disappointed that's a really good insight i didn't i have not seen this video of him is he is this Is this video dubbed?
Is this a fake video?
This I think is real.
He kind of looks like he might speak in there or maybe it's not.
I can't tell exactly, but I guess that's the point.
I wouldn't know. AI tools have gotten so good that I would never know.
And I actually tweeted this out.
I said, I could 1000 % create an AI politician that could win over a city election.
Now, of course, you can't actually run if you're not a human being, but whatever.
And I said, here's how I would do it.
I would make a likable sort of guy next door character like this guy.
I would create 100X more video content than my opponent, because Andrew Cuomo is not going to be able to keep up with my AI engine.
I don't know if you've seen people who do this, they basically, they create an AI workflow, that's an agent that scrapes, like, it comes up, it's, there's one agent that's just brainstorming topics.
It's like looking at Reddit, it's looking at TikTok trends, etc. And it's brainstorming topics.
Then they have a scripter agent that writes a one minute TikTok script.
Then they And then they have a video generation agent that creates a video that has your AI avatar speaking it like HeyGen or Eleven Labs.
Who's doing this? There's people that are doing this.
They run what they call faceless channels.
They run channels on Instagram and TikTok that get millions of views.
Like with B -roll and narration?
But it doesn't have to be B -roll anymore because now they use an AI avatar.
So they just put a person there.
And they're like, cool, I don't want to be an influencer.
I don't want to wake up and get ready and have a nice house and all this.
But I'll just make an AI character that does this.
And you can just create an AI character that does exactly this.
And then – but the cool thing is they automated the entire workflow from coming up with the idea, scripting it, recording it, and then actually like scheduling it, posting it, analyzing the data, and feeding that back into the engine.
Who – what's an example of a channel?
Dude, if you guys applied your talents to something useful, this – you'd be incredible.
But it's amazing that you could even do this.
I'm reading a book called A Promised Land.
It's Obama's autobiography.
He wrote it. But it's old.
It's 10 years old. But I was at the airport and it looked cool.
I'm at the point in the book where he was like, I was getting my ass beat in the election because I was too long winded.
And my campaign manager criticized one of my debates.
And he's like, dude, you're answering the question.
And he's like, yeah, they asked me a question.
I'm giving them an answer.
And like, it's kind of nuanced and it's long.
A thorough answer. Yeah, I'm giving like a good answer.
And he goes, yeah, that's bullshit.
That's not how you win a debate.
And that's not how you win votes.
You don't give an answer.
You're not answering the question.
the question is irrelevant all people want to know is can they trust you with their vote and like are you a brand that they want to get behind stop answering the question and tell a story that lets them know that they can get behind you and he was like he he goes um that rubs me the wrong way but that's the game and I will play that game and there's like a distinct difference in like you know we know him now Obama is regarded as a fairly charismatic good storyteller he was was like that was the change yeah exactly uh do you know lulu no uh she's uh she's really cool very interesting person to
follow on twitter and whatnot so lulu i think she was the head of comms at like palantir or something like that i don't know or andrew i think it was but she does a good job what she posts regularly is basically comms advice communication advice pr slash how executives should communicate and i think andrew was always an interesting one because like instead of trying trying to conform as this like boring government contractor, you know, they let their freak flag fly.
So she, she tweeted this out.
She goes, it sounds so basic, but he is too likable to lose friendly demeanor, smiles with his eyes, seems earnest. Being liked outweighs policies, experience and nonsensical plans.
Quote, I just have a good feeling about that person can override almost anything.
And then Harley, the CEO of Shopify said vibes.
It's like, Oh man, we're sort of vibe voting now.
And it's like, actually, we're kind of always we've always been doing that man we've always been doing that you know JFK was one of the most um JFK had like a 70 approval rating when he was murdered um and he was well loved he was our princess Diana or whatever for that generation like he he was well loved and he was well loved because he was incredibly likable that's like his policies were fine but it was because he looked great he had a beautiful wife who was poised he had a a lovely family with really white teeth.
That is why he won because he was very likable and good looking.
So you guys know this, but I have a company called Hampton.
Join Hampton .com. It's a vetted community for founders and CEOs.
Well, we have this member named Levon and Levon saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem within Hampton, which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a PDF.
It's tedious, it's annoying, and it's a waste of time.
And so So Levan, like any great entrepreneur, he built a solution.
And that solution is called MOKU.
MOKU uses AI to automatically transfer data from any document into a PDF.
And so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract, you just put a file into MOKU and it auto fills the output PDF in seconds.
And a little backstory for all the techners out there.
Levan built the entire web app without using a line of code.
He used something called Bubble .io.
AIO. They've added AI tools that can generate an entire app from one prompt.
It's pretty amazing, and it means you can build tools like Molku very fast without knowing how to code.
And so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you, check out Molku .ai.
M -O -L -K -U .ai. All right, back to the pod.
So, likable might not even be the word because you might look at Trump and be like, wow, is he, would you say he's likable?
Well, he's funny. funny he's funny he's charismatic so yeah i ever tell you about the time where so i had this friend who's like a billionaire successful tech guy and he sends me a google doc one day called the president and i'm like okay what's this and i open it up and i have no idea what to expect i think he might be running for president i don't know what this is and it was basically a pitch for a television show and he laid out a case and he basically said if you look at the last i forgot what it was like let me just make up some numbers if you look at at the last 10 elections, you would look
for a pattern. You'd say, is it always Democrats?
Is it always Republicans?
Does it always switch between Democrat and Republican?
Is it based on the economy?
Is it based on the person's height?
Like if you tried to look for a correlation, where would you find it?
And he goes, the highest correlation you could find is that the more charismatic candidate wins.
And he goes, ever since the advent of radio and television, when our primary way of getting messages out scaled up like crazy, the more charismatic candidate wins, whether this was clinton or reagan it wasn't reagan like an actor or something like this yeah he was good looking he dressed great he's going through history and basically 2020 was kind of the only exception where biden won and i would say biden was the less charismatic candidate than trump it seems to be like the outlier but the guy's case was basically he's like i think in his case he didn't he didn't want trump to win and he's like
problem is trump is incredibly charismatic um he's able to capture people's attention he says things that are very very memorable.
He says things that excite certain people and inflame certain people, but it's all attention that he gets free earned media.
So he had this idea to create a television show.
And he's like, this sounds a little bit silly, but he's like, I think for the Democratic Party, which is the party he was a part of, he's like, I think we need to start nominating more charismatic candidates.
And if you look at the last few, they have not been the most charismatic.
He's like, we're sort of, it's a captured party and we lack putting forward charismatic charismatic candidates since Obama.
Obama was the, one of the most charismatic candidates.
And he said, here's what I think we should do.
Just like, you know, American Idol or The Voice or whatever, there's The Apprentice even.
There's been proven shows where you can have like, let's say an eight to 12 week period where you start with 10 people and then they get eliminated.
And in the end you have a winner.
He's like, what if we did this for presidential candidates?
So you would take 12 candidates, not random people off the street, but people that genuinely are thinking thinking that they want to run.
And so you'd get Pete Buttigieg and others in this batch. And he's like, week by week, let's say they go to a small town in Pittsburgh and they're going to actually meet with the car manufacturers there or whatever, some presidential type of shit that they do.
And they have to present a plan.
And then it's actually like, and the judges for that week will be the car manufacturer people.
And then they'll sort of pick which candidate they felt best understood them and was able to address their needs.
And week by week, you sort of eliminate candidate.
He's like, by the end of this 12 -week thing, we'll have captured so much attention and hopefully found a candidate that's won the hearts of people.
People will know their backstory.
They'll know what they're all about.
They'll have seen them in a more human light.
And we will have filtered out the less charismatic candidates for the more charismatic candidates.
I'm not saying charisma is the end -all be -all.
Ideally, at the beginning, you try to screen people that you think are worthy candidates to lead.
But amongst that worthy pool, give a boost to the most charismatic charismatic candidate.
I thought this was fascinating and I really wanted him to do it.
And he had, he was friends with Mark Burnett, the guy who created Survivor and maybe Bachelor or whatever, like a bunch of other major, major reality shows.
And he's like, I'm going to talk to Mark.
I think we're going to do this.
And I hit him up recently and I was like, whatever happened to that idea?
And he's like, I just decided I didn't want, I didn't want the avalanche of of problems in my life for creating this and I decided it wasn't worth I have a great life and it really wasn't worth the you know what it was going to do and Biden won in 2020 and so he felt like maybe maybe I was wrong maybe there's not as much of a need for this but isn't that interesting dude yeah that's pretty fascinating I um I wish I wish you would have done that I feel like that would work too like it sounds like it's an idea that I think is easy to make fun of it's also an idea that I think would be effective
at the stated mission it's easy to make fun of because we don't want it to be true but it is true like um you know who's a really good example this is arnold schwarzenegger yep he was just he's a he was such a charismatic interesting person he was good to look at like he wanted to look like he looked like even the people who aren't even the people who become our leaders who aren't really good looking they're still sort of interesting to look at like donald trump is intriguing to look at he looks like remarkable in a weird way you know i'm saying uh arnold schwarzenegger is a perfect example of this can i
show you one uh last thing which one i think is funny so i found this and i don't i i think i've talked to this guy brian and he was cool so i don't want to shit on him but i'm more so shitting on people who this line of thinking maybe this line of thinking and uh let's let's explain what it is brian says he says i asked quote what company is worth less than 10 billion today that you could be worth 500 billion plus in a few decades i have received 710 answers here's the top 20 picks that have 50x potential and this tweet has 18 000 likes you know it's probably i don't know how many views but like
what year was this over a million this is in 2021 july of 2021 when times were good when everybody's making a ton of money in the stock market and he lists uh 20 companies um and uh And these are ones that this guy who I think he has a whole YouTube channel towards picking stocks.
And I don't know if these were his picks necessarily or if they were his audience's picks.
And this guy has 600 ,000 followers.
His bio says, I teach investors how to analyze businesses, stock fundamentals, and valuation teacher.
DM Buffett for premium courses, free e -book in my description.
Okay, that's this guy.
So this was in 2021.
and I just was curious like how it was he right like what's his deal I'm almost positive that not only did none none of them 50x I am pretty sure that most of them are down from from down even from this tweet but of the of the 20 that he hand selected somebody somebody says this has to go down in history as the best case of stupidity of the the crowds here's where we're at three years later so three years later only one company is up and it's up six percent the average company is down 70 on this list with several of them minus 95 minus 95 minus 98 minus 90 minus 97 minus 86 minus 99 and of course
ozone which was an e -commerce platform in russia which is delisted and i think open door is now and so this tweet that you're you're looking at.
That was even six months ago.
I'm almost positive that Opendoor is delisted and Virgin is down even more.
I think Lemonade is delisted or out of business.
Context Logic, I think, is out of business, which is Wish.
All right, we should post an update here.
And now we're at five years later.
Here's how the stupidity of the crowd has done.
And my point in bringing this up isn't the actual results.
The results are not good.
that's the summary the results are actually really bad um but it's just crazy how hard it is to pick winners it's very challenging uh this guy has 600 000 followers i assume that he does this all the time for his job and you still can't nail it it's just so challenging is it though okay i'm gonna tell you what i did back in 20 i graduated in 2010 and i started my stock portfolio i think right around like senior year of college and i um i bought i believe six stocks and my dad was telling me just buy the index but i'm like dad i got this right i had the dunning kruger effect I thought I knew a lot
more than I knew. And I think I bought five or six stocks.
How much money? I mean, I didn't have any, but I had $25 ,000.
I had probably $60 ,000 total.
That's a lot of money.
Well, I guess what I'm saying is even though the results were great, it didn't, you know, on a very small base that doesn't, doesn't do a whole lot for you.
I bought Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Tesla.
What years? it was basically 2010 2011 uh oh my god what those stocks so I did the thing you're not supposed to do I picked I didn't pick with any sort of brilliance I was like these are like obviously just seemed like the good companies of the world to me at the time and uh you know I did make a mistake because I sold Tesla earlier like I sold it probably 2014 or something like that um so that and that would have been a much bigger return so you know I think I still I still am in the case study of like, it's really freaking hard to do, even if you buy right, you'll sell wrong and shit like that.
Like I bought Bitcoin early and sold some early and then bought it back again and sold it again, bought it back again.
You know, I'm not saying I'm smart.
I do dumb things. But I guess what I'm saying is, sometimes it's actually kind of obvious.
I think one of the reasons that what this guy did was so hard was he was looking for a 50x.
He's like, what company small today that's going to be massive tomorrow, which of course, if you knew that'd be fantastic.
But there is a simple way of looking at things like right now, for example, I put my money into what my own little AI index. And I didn't spend much time on this.
And I'm going to go back and do a little more research. But basically, it's very obvious, I think at this moment in time in the world, that AI is going to be a very big deal.
That the biggest winners over the next five to 10 years are going to be ones that are benefiting from AI in some way, whether they're NVIDIA, they're selling chips, whether they're companies like Google or Facebook that are able to use AI, in order to make all their services better and slash tens of thousands of employees that they don't need, shit like that, right?
Like, I think it's pretty obvious that AI is a big deal.
And I think if you put in the time to just think about, like, instead of buying the generic S &P 500, like, what's the equivalent of the AI 50 or the AI 20?
And it's like 20 companies that I believe are well -positioned.
It's hard for them to lose given the AI tailwind.
And again, it's a little bit naive because you might say, well, well, Nvidia today, they have 90 % gross margins and that they're going to get competed away and blah, blah, blah.
I'm not saying it's like easy.
I'm just saying, I think an index of AI, of AI focused companies, that doesn't mean companies that are like, you know, all chip makers or whatever, but I'm just saying companies that are going to disproportionately benefit from AI and are going to adopt AI and get the benefits of it.
I just feel like that's an obvious thing today.
That's the version of me in 2010 being like, I don't know, me and all my friends use the internet like crazy.
I think I should just like own the big internet companies.
that seems like a good idea the the issue is not can you pick winners because i think that like we when we saw facebook was valued at when it was hit a low i think a year and a half ago everyone who has ever bought any facebook ads was like yeah this is undervalued this is a great company the issue is the amount of times that you have lost using that same logic um like and so if you were to take a lump sum of money and you would buy and sell uh like occasionally or rather often versus just letting it sit and ignoring.
Like if you average...
I'm actually going to go back and just backtest this for me specifically and I'll publish my result.
I'll bring it to the next episode because I'm curious.
And I would say I think there's a more likely chance that buying and selling and picking has underperformed.
I would assume that to be true.
I think there's a chance it's not been for me, but I really want to go get the exact answer because it'll include...
I think I should include crypto because I think that was kind of like buying and selling, picking.
And I want to see the returns of if I had just invested the same amount of money in the same times in just the index versus my picking.
I just want to see for myself what I've done and give an honest, be able to look reality in the face of like, you know, how is this working for me?
So let me tell you this.
Let me tell you this crazy stat that Ankur told me.
So Jerry Buss, the guy who owned the Lakers, you know, they recently just sold the Lakers for $10 billion.
So he bought the Lakers for $67 million in 1979, and he sold it for 150 times his money at $10 billion in 2025.
And yet, had he taken that $60 million and instead just invested it in the S &P 500, he would have been able to have had $13 billion.
So he would have had more money.
That's stupid. It's not stupid.
But listen, the top comment was, think of all...
It sounded correct.
I mean, it's just math.
It's acting like he didn't take money every year in gains from the business.
He could have lost money every year.
The Lakers spit off cash flow every year.
Do they? Yeah. Most winning teams do not make a profit.
That's not true. They could show paper losses.
I know team owners.
I talked to them about this.
I was like, is this true?
Do you guys actually lose money on this thing?
And they're like, no. Most years we're making money.
Occasionally, if we're way over the luxury tax, we get a huge penalty.
Then, yes, we could lose money in that one year.
But no, we're not idiots.
We're not burning hundreds of like people say like oh they lost 200 million dollars as music I'm not losing 200 million dollars every year Some the top comment was like yeah But are you adding into the p &l all the women that he was able to get because of he because of him owning the letters forgetting the joy of owning the Lakers which is already congratulations, you owned the s &p 500 Versus you own the Lakers and forgetting that the Lakers are a business that has been generating cash cash and so all he's taking into account is just the exit price and none of the 30 years of cash flow well i don't
really look at the facts when whenever i'm making a statement but i think it did make for a good headline uh and it is kind of stunning what i don't know 11 compounding over 40 years actually does pretty crazy i like doing this all right that's it that's about I feel like I can rule the world.
I know I can be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off.
On the road, let's travel, never looking back.
All right. So when my employees join Hampton, we have them do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff.
But the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing I made called Copy That.
Copy That is a thing that I made that teaches people how to write better.
And the reason this this is important is because at work or even just in life, we communicate mostly via text right now, whether we're emailing, slacking, blogging, texting, whatever.
Most of the ways that we're communicating is by the written word. And so I made this thing called Copy That.
That's guaranteed to make you write better.
You can check it out, copythat .com.
I post every single person who leaves a review, whether it's good or bad, I post it on the website and you're going to see a trend, which is that this is a very, very, very simple exercise, something that's so simple that they They laugh at it.
They think, how is this going to actually impact us and make us write better?
But I promise you, it does.
You got to try it at CopyThat .com.
I guarantee it's going to change the way you write.
Again, CopyThat .com.
