GTA 6 Goldrush, TBPN's $100M OpenAI Deal, The OG Clickbait King Who Burned $4B/Year

Very important question is where is there opportunity?

Well, yeah, I want to do an Oz Pearlman style. I'm going to write something down and we'll see if I'm right. Go ahead.

All right. Do you write it down? Tell me when it's done.

All right. It's done.

So obviously there's a big opportunity in AI right now. Obviously there's a big opportunity in peptides or like biology with AI, something like that. What I'm about to talk about is I did not write that down.

All right, carry on then.

I was looking at like, where, where is there opportunity right now?

And when you open your laptop, like, what does your to-do list say? Scheme?

Yeah, it's not even a laptop. It's like a notepad. It's the hotel notepad. I don't think most people actually ask themselves this very important question. Where is the opportunity right now?

That's like, like, you know, I was sitting there as a 14-year-old, how do I have sex?

Like, no, that's literally what you should be thinking. You should be thinking, uh, as a 14-year-old, you're like, which girl's gonna kiss me? Where are the girls that might kiss me and how do I get them to kiss me? Right? That's like actually what you should be thinking about. I think entrepreneurs need to think like that. It's like, sounds caveman, sounds stupid, but like, it's actually the thing. Where is the opportunity right now? You, you met me back in, I don't know, 2013, '14, something like that. Do you remember what I was working on back then? Like the types of stuff I was working on?

Yeah, it was a, uh, the first, it was a Bebo, which was like a, a past its heyday social media network. And then that pivoted into a Twitch streaming competitor or a plugin for Twitch streaming. I don't think you ever totally fully figured it out.

So early on, I was working on, like, like you said, like messaging apps, social media apps, basically. And, um, hey, guess when all the social media apps were made? Between 2004 and 2012. And then I'm, you know, so I'm 10 years late to the party and I'm starting to think about like, hey, what if I, what if I made like a place where you could post photos and send videos to each other? It's like, yeah, it's called Snapchat. Uh, like, hey, what if we made a way for you to message each other? Like, yeah, it's called WhatsApp. It was actually created in, you know, 2007. And so the things I was working on was the last wave's opportunity. Now that sounds stupid. Why would you do last wave's opportunity? Well, the answer is it's pretty understandable because that's proven to work. And I'm trying to— I'm so insecure and like have such a lack of a spine that I'm just going to go towards what I think might actually work. And I'm using what has already worked. But the problem with what has already worked is in business, what's already worked is is now done in the game of—

No, that's not true.

Winner take all.

You just talked about Groons.

No, no, but I'm saying what I was working on, like social media, like, like venture tech is winner take all.

It's—

there's, you know, you don't work on Airbnb 5 years after Airbnb has been proven to be successful and you're going to be like another Airbnb. There's not going to— because there's no network effect businesses. The winners have these like runaway escape velocity. That's why they get so big. That was the game I was playing. So I was in the venture game right, doing venture technology companies. And in that I was doing the venture technology companies of the last 10 years. Pretty stupid. So, and what should I have been doing during that period? Well, like during that kind of like 2012 to 2018 range, like the most interesting things were basically anything in crypto, which by the way, it's not like it was invisible to us. Like people in our office loved crypto and you were into it. Yeah, I was buying crypto. We just didn't, we didn't think of it as like we didn't put two and two together.

Everyone has to Google this, that if you Google Sean Perry, there's an article from an Indian newspaper that says famous entrepreneur Sean Perry puts 25% of net worth into Bitcoin. And I think this was any pre-acquisition. I think this was pre-Wealth.

So like, yeah, what's 25% of $300? So yeah, crypto was, was an interesting space to play. The other one was basically like, um, anything in machine learning or, you know, big data. And lastly was like different, like new mobile, mobile apps. We had one mobile, we had one iPhone engineer in our company when I joined in 2012. The iPhone came out, I think like 4 years before that or something. So like, you know, we were, we were just not even on, forget about like we weren't surfing the wave, we were in the lazy river and then the ocean is over there and we were just going in circles in the lazy river like idiots. And so I think the very important question is, where is there opportunity?

Well, yeah, I want to do, I want to do an Oz Pearlman style. I'm going to write something down and we'll see if I'm right. How's that? How about that?

There is 0% chance you're going to get right what I'm about to say because it is so random. In fact, you're going to laugh when I say what I'm going to say because you're going to be like, after that huge ramble about big opportunities, this is the thing you just told me.

Okay, go ahead. All right.

Do you write it down?

Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about dog names.

I'm going to close my eyes. You show the camera. You show the camera. I'm going to close my eyes. Tell me when it's done.

All right. It's done. I showed it. All right.

So obviously there's a big opportunity in AI right now. Obviously there's a big opportunity in peptides or like biology with AI, something like that. I don't know if those are the ones you're thinking about. What I'm about to talk about Is Grand Theft Auto 6.

I did not write that down.

Did you get that right, Ose? What did you write down? GPUs and power plants. Okay. These are also good. Uh, these, by the way, there's not one answer to where is there opportunity.

I thought that's what you were going to say based off of things that we had seen on Twitter, but I am hearing about, uh, I, there was someone just did a big shtick on, on Grand Theft Auto, didn't they?

Well, the important thing is the new one is coming out, um, is the big deal. So I don't know if— let me just do a quick little— I'll do the personal story and I'll do the primer on GTA. Okay, so the personal story is this. I have this friend who— I don't know if he wants me to say his name or not, so I won't say his name just right now. But I have this friend who was— you know him as well. He was one of the first guys to convince me that I needed to put a huge chunk of my net worth into crypto early on. And he was basically saying like, why aren't you 80% in crypto? And I was like, 80% is insane.

And he's like, younger than you.

Yeah. He's like, this is obvious. He's like, what are you talking about? This is what it's going to be, blah, blah, blah. So he's been early on a few different calls with me in my life, to the point where now when he says something that I find outlandish, I have learned through trauma of missing out on his prior— not fully backing his prior things— that I should really pay attention. So he came to my house. About a year ago, and he was like, yeah, I'm thinking about putting together a hostile takeover of Take-Two Interactive. I'm like, Take-Two Interactive? What is that? Is that the— do they make video games? He's like, yeah, they make NBA 2K and they make Grand Theft Auto. And I was like, hostile take— do you know anything about a hostile takeover? We don't even do that. He's like, yeah, well, this will be my first. And I was like, you're insane.

All right, so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they want to hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. Now, a lot of people message Sean and I and they say, all right, I want to start something on the side. Is this a good idea? Is that a good idea? And again, what they're really just saying is just give me the ideas. Well, my friends, you're in luck. So my old company, The Hustle, they put together 100 different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's a list of 100 Pretty good ideas, frankly. I went through them. They're awesome. And it gives you how to start them, how to grow them, things like that. Gives you a little bit of inspiration. So check it out. It's called the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's in the description below. You'll see the link, click it, check it out. Let me know in the comments what you think. Dude, I saw the, uh, the CEO of, uh, Take-Two. I've, uh, I've had some interactions with the, um, New York City guy, ripped. Have you seen him?

Zelnick, right?

Dude, Google him and the word shirtless. Oh my God. No, seriously. This isn't like a Sam being weird. Like, this is his shtick. Is that easy?

It's not. Are you sure?

This is not me being cute. Seriously. People do stories on how ripped he is.

He is absolutely ripped.

See, this is what I'm saying. This is not like me just like commenting on men's bodies. This is—

he's like 60 years old.

No, he's— no, he's almost 70.

He's almost 70.

Okay.

Yeah, because this article is from 2018. Yeah, you're right.

Good luck, Hustle.

Take over these.

Yeah.

My point is, he was telling me, he was like, he's like, I think Grand Theft Auto is an incredible asset. And he basically made this case like Warren Buffett describing a business with incredible moats. So he's like, here you have a product that's, you know, the last one when they released it, it blew away all the analyst expectations. They did $1 billion in sales in 3 days. It's bigger than any movie ever created. It's bigger than any video game ever created. By the way, the video game industry is 3 times bigger than Hollywood. This is the most defensible product in the world. 10 years later, it's still selling $500 million a year annually. It's not like a thing you buy once. They figured out how to make it a recurring revenue business. And there is— there's no substitution. So there's not a second place thing that you go buy instead of, uh, Grand Theft Auto. If it was $90 instead of $80 or $110 instead of $80, it's not like you go buy, uh, Pepsi instead of Coke. There is no Pepsi. There's only Coke. And so he gave me this impassioned investment case for why this is such an important asset. So just like some of the numbers, they've sold almost 500 million copies of the game. So, you know, $20 billion in lifetime revenue. You know, it's one of the top, uh, grossing entertainment franchises, period. Like all media, Pokémon and Harry Potter and others. It's up, it's like at that level. It's in the upper, upper, upper pantheon of all IP ever created. And it's the fastest, fastest entertainment product to ever hit $1 billion. 12 years later, still doing $500 million a year. Now, a lot of their revenue comes from GTA Online, so they figured out how to make it a recurring revenue business. The new game, which we've been waiting for, for, you know, 10+ years, is almost ready.

Whenever some of these games— like, I'm a— I like Call of Duty. I don't play any video games except I like doing career mode on Call of Duty because it's like a war movie. Like it's like a movie.

Career mode? I didn't even know they have that.

That's like the only one I like.

Like an infantry, you know, like a lower tier guy or what?

You like, you know, it's like James Bond career mode. You remember like you like hit complete missions, but these things are like movies. And so like, I don't even own an Xbox. I buy an Xbox to play the game and then I like, it sits there for 3 years. I never touch it ever again and it gets old. And so now when GTA, uh, Grand Theft Auto comes out, I'm going to have to like buy a thing just to play it for 6 hours and then I'll never touch it again.

So yeah, exactly. And it's actually worth it because these are incredible products. I mean, they spent $1 billion just developing the product, like just on the actual like development time. So the, you know, the predictions now are like in year 1, they'll do like $3 billion of sales. They'll probably do $1 billion of preorders before they even launch, which is bananas. But you know, there's, there's a whole economy around this. And so, um, I just wanted to bring this up, not because it's the biggest opportunity, Obviously, if you're saying what's the biggest opportunity, go do AI. Gotcha. Right? Like if you want to, what's the biggest opportunity? Great. Go into energy, go into biology, uh, you know, go into drug development using AI.

Yes.

But what's fun to talk about on this podcast is this little economy around GTA 6.

By the way, I think we have, uh, I think we have Mark, is it Marcus or Mark? Pinkus, the founder of Zynga. I think we have him coming on soon and they're owned by Take-Two. So he could give us his take on this.

Uh, the Hostel— Hostel Takeover. Is that— by the way, the Hostel Takeover has been shelved now. The stock went up too much. So like, I don't know if you know how a hostile takeover works, but you have to buy— you have to kind of acquire like, I don't know, like 5% of the company silently and then like announce your bid. And you really want it when it's like Snapchat right now, when the stock is just going down, down, down, down, down, and you can rally support that a change needs to be made.

Can this guy come up with $1 billion?

So he was raising, yeah, he was raising, you know, $300-400 million to do this, but the stock went up. And so then there was no, uh, once the stock popped, then there was like not going to be enough enthusiasm and the price went up and, you know, the value, the return would go down on the activity. So there's a whole economy around this. So there's people who do content around this. There's people who create like mods and tools and data scrapers and Guides, and then there's people who sell things in the game. And like, we don't know exactly how the game's gonna work, but the game might work like some of these other video games now where you can buy and sell in-game items.

Like outfits or something?

Yeah, like skins, guns, outfits, whatever. Like the different, different aspects of the game. And so there's, there's going to be a lot of people who get wealthy off this. There's, you know, for example, in the last wave, when GTA 5 came out, these guys made this thing called NoPixel. So they created their own like mod version of the game. and they ended up selling it back to the company after it got really, like, mega popular. It got more popular than, like, the real game on, uh, on Twitch. So I just think there's gonna be a lot of opportunity for, like, if you're in this kind of 13 to 25-year-old range, you know, you're, you're fun-employed, basically. There's gonna be an interesting chance to have fun, do something that's in your circle of competence, like, in an area you know about, and to actually, like, learn business by doing a starter business in this little Grand Theft Auto economy. And I'm saying little, but like, it's probably— the game is obviously like a, you know, tens of billions, but the economy around it is probably going to be in the hundreds of millions. And it's this weird thing where you know it's coming, but it's not out yet. And so there's no— like, nobody has a head start necessarily in doing this. And so whoever moves fast, whoever builds interesting things, whoever creates interesting content is going to benefit from this.

Did you, when you were doing this, you were in the video game world, who, what were some examples of shockingly large businesses that were like accessory, accessory businesses for games?

So, uh, well, I'll say for gaming. So like there was this company I remember discovering called G Fuel and like I had never heard of G Fuel. Did you, do you know what G Fuel is? No. It's kind of like an energy drink type of, type of deal. They might be a little shady, the product might not be good for you. I'm not saying any of that stuff. As a business, I thought it was very smart what they did.

You are saying that.

No, no, no. I was just like, Red Bull. Is Red Bull good for you? No, it's not. Red Bull's not good for you. But like, Red Bull could be— you can admire Red Bull as a brand and a business and not be like, I think you should drink this.

One of their energy drinks is called Fuck Shit Up Collector's Box.

So yeah, got 3 of them at home.

I don't think that's shady.

Yeah, I don't see the red flags. What are you talking about? It's like the red flag is wrapped around my eyes. But they did something really smart. They figured out that Twitch streamers were undervalued assets, that people were going for influencers based off of their, like, following size. And so as like a following size, the Twitch streamers on Twitch, they didn't have huge numbers. But they realized like the depth of trust was insane because when you watch somebody on Twitch, you're watching them live for 8 hours a day. These gamers had a lot of influence and the influence was disconnected from their price sheet. And so what G Fuel did was it went to all of them and it ran basically the Nike playbook with streamers. So they would go to the popular streamers, they'd say, hey, we want to develop a flavor just for you, a shaker bottle that's your colors, your branding, and you're going to get a cut of the affiliate revenue. And they partnered with all the top streamers, which was not that hard to do at the time. Even though these guys were really popular, traditional brands weren't coming to them at the time. And so they went 0 to $100 million in sales. And like, guys like you and I had never heard of them because they did it just within this gaming bubble using just the gaming influencers. And so they did that. There's obviously like Elgato, which sells accessories for streaming that now has become even more popular with, you know, podcasting as well. Like they got they got both of those waves. And so Elgato is another company that sells like picks and shovels to the streaming industry.

Wait, can I ask you a question about streaming? I actually like don't play video games at all, but I do occasionally will watch clips of like gamers because like it's for some reason it's like fun. I don't, I can't figure out why, but these streamers like, um, what's the guy's name? Clavic— Clavic—

Clavicular.

Clavicular, whatever his name is. But are they, when people watch them, is it mostly from clips, which I do see and find them funny, or is someone literally watching them on their TV, like just walking around, goofing around? Both. But they're just like, so they have to be funny all the time?

Um, no, they don't have to be funny all the time. In fact, they're not, they're not that funny. They do, they do do crazy stuff. So like, yeah, you're right. Like, so right now if I go to Twitch, the top category is called just chatting. The top, the top category is people not playing video games, just chatting. The second, uh, the third top category right now with 45,000 live people watching is IRL, which is basically them streaming. So you can watch right now. I will do crazy stunts. I will risk being in trouble. I will go meet these people. I will travel the world. And you, from the comfort of your, you know, your bed, can kind of like, watch me do it. Watch me make a fool of myself.

There's one guy who's selling hot dogs and he has 80 people on Twitch watching him. But are they watching this on their compu— like, what? Okay, so when people do podcasts, they're normally working out or going to work. When people watch YouTube, it's usually on their phone when they're in public transport or they're just goofing off on the couch or they're watching it on their TV. When people watch Twitch or other live streamers, are they— do they have it on a TV and then they're playing games on their phone? Do they just sit there with the computer and watch the whole thing like a movie? What are the— what's the— what's the consumer habit?

Obviously there's like, because there's hundreds of millions of people, there's like a little bit of everything. But the 3 major use cases are young people just on their phone because their phone is their like personal entertainment device. So they'll just watch a stream. In, like, on their phone, and it's the main thing they're paying attention to. Then there's like second screen, background screen, which is either you put it up on the TV while you're chilling on the couch.

Yeah.

And, or like what we saw a lot of at Twitch was like second tab. So like, I'm a programmer. My main thing is like I, I'm working like all day, but while I'm doing it, I have like a second monitor or I just put it in a background tab and I just have the audio going.

Yeah. Like waiting room noise.

My favorite streamer hanging out and I'm watching. I'll glance over what he's doing, but I don't have to pay full attention to it. So that's like the behavior with this stuff. But it's pretty insane, the level of trust. You know, I was talking to a guy who's 21, 22 years old, and I asked him, I go, you know, back in the day, like, you know, Logan Paul, Jake Paul, they were like popular YouTubers. There was Casey Neistat, there was, you know, MrBeast. I was like, who's— I go, not who is the most followers, but who has like the minds and hearts of young people? Like, who do all the young people agree is like the shit? Who do they think is really cool? And so instantly he was like, oh, Speed, definitely Speed. And he was like, you know, Kaisanat, Speed, like these are, they're the top. They're the, the, like both like the multiplier of popularity times like approval rank, approval rating, or, uh, you know, you think you kind of admire them in some way.

And where's he stream?

YouTube, Twitch. Some of the guys stream on Kick because that's like a big competitor that's owned by a stake, like the casino company.

Okay, that's crazy.

You mentioned clips. We should talk about this. So our friends from TBPn just had an incredible 2-year run. Less than 2 years. 18 months, right?

All time.

Is it even 18 months? Is it 12? I don't know what it is. Our friends at TBPn. So the story is TBPn, which is a tech live show, just got acquired by OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, for an undisclosed sum of money. People rumor it to be $100 million, maybe $200 million, which is bananas for not just any product that's 12, 18 months old, but specifically a podcast or a show, specifically one that doesn't even get that much viewership for its actual flagship show. And Jon and Jordy are awesome. I'm super happy for them. But we haven't had a chance to talk about that. So what was your, what was your reaction? Where were you and what was your reaction when you heard this?

Where was I? It's not like 9/11. I don't remember where I was, but I think my reaction is amazing deal for them. I would have taken that 9 out of 10, 10 out of 10 times. If it's anything north of $100 million, take that all day. Yeah, I would. And my second reaction is they're going to win even bigger in 2 years when the board of directors of OpenAI says, guys, we got to get we gotta buckle our belts and, and get profitable. We gotta look at why do we own all these things? Whose idea was it to buy a media company? Can we please just say that we're gonna sell it back to 'em? Just give it to them and we'll own 5% and they're gonna own it again.

So that's the prediction. Not only was this an incredible first deal, but there's gonna be a, a Barstool-style second deal on the other side of this.

It was really dumb. I think it's really dumb for OpenAI. I think that HubSpot bought a media company, my media company, and it makes sense because they were using it to sell $20,000 a year software and there's a direct attribution. When HubSpot bought The Hustle, we had 90, I think, or HubSpot had 90,000 users, I think something like that. Now they have 200,000 users, something like that. I don't know, just look it up. And there's direct attribution of where they get their customers and they could say we got this much revenue from this customers, it came from this podcast, this news or whatever, this thing, this thing. With OpenAI, they already have a billion users. I don't understand like how there's like any growth related to this other than it's just a cool thing to own.

Yeah, I do think it was— it's very interesting, right? Because they didn't really release any rationale for it.

There is no rationale other than it's cool.

And, you know, after a couple of weeks you're like, I guess if there was a rationale, they would say it, right? And I think the closest thing that they mentioned was, I guess back in the day, Apple bought this ad agency and it was like, yeah, bringing that in-house was like transformative for our marketing. And we think that like having Jon and Jordy and TVPN in-house is going to— but it's not trans— they're also saying they're speaking out of both sides of the mouth, right? Because they're like, they have full editorial control. We're not going to exert our influence over it. It's not going to become a propaganda tool for us. Like, we're not going to use it, but we just paid $200 million for it or $100 million for it. So, so which one is it?

Do you think it was a good— it's— there's no debate. It was awesome for these two guys, right?

Yeah. Oh, incredible. Epic for, for, for the TVPN guys.

Okay.

For sure.

Do you think this is a smart move for OpenAI?

Let me make the case because I think on the surface it's like, what? It's a head scratcher, right? You know, for example, ChatGPT has something like 900 million monthly active users. TVPN might have 90,000, you know, viewers including, you know, across their, on their show. And then maybe if you include clips, it's like A million people see a clip. I don't know. It's not going to move the needle for—

maybe like, um, getting an executive to buy OpenAI is a $200 million deal.

I mean, you'd have to get a lot of— but again, who's already not— I don't know, like buying, uh, no, like it's not like an awareness play. Like normally it's like media has attention and you have lucrative product, so you use media to get your lucrative product into more people, to have more attention. In this case, ChatGPT has so much attention, I'm not sure what you get out of that. But I think, you know, here's the case, because I think we should— you should assume that these very smart people don't do very dumb things. But as a default, uh, you should try to figure out what they— what they're telling themselves. So, okay, let's spitball real quick. Even if it's $100 million, what is that? What is $100 million out of $800 billion, divided by $800 billion, right? Because that's the percent of the company they gave up, assuming it's a like mostly stock deal.

But that's not how a disciplined company thinks, I would think. It's—

let's start with this, like, because you might say if I was to give up 0.001% of my stock to a uniquely talented group of guys who understand media and marketing and communication and like the modern media playbook, and just having them in our office and having them be, you know, working on our comms or strategically guiding us.

That could work.

Is that, is that going to make our company 0.01%, whatever, right? I don't know the math, 0.01% more valuable?

For sure. Maybe just one ad campaign for sure. Maybe could pay for that. Yes.

One, uh, insight into how we should be doing our comms differently. One insight into how we should be positioning ourselves. Because right now it's kind of crazy. America hates AI. Like, I don't know if you've seen this. Sam Altman has had two, like, attack, like, assassination attempts.

They don't just hate AI. I think they specifically hate him. I think, I think A, yes, hate AI, and B, he's the face.

He's the hateable face of AI for whatever reason. Like, he, somebody went, drove by his house and threw a Molotov cocktail like a week ago and then went to the office. and then they, no, then they drove by and shot like a bullet at his house also in like 2 days later.

And so that's why he threw— No, but the same guy who threw a Molotov cocktail, they arrested him at the OpenAI office because he was trying to do the same thing there.

He was there too? Oh my God, that's insane. So literally, like, you know, uh, obviously there's a public perception, uh, obviously there's like a public brand issue here with like, why is AI so deeply unpopular? Like I've, I've seen some charts where it's like, it's more unpopular than Trump. You know, it's like, wow, this is like, it's not like, it's not like a, it's extremely polarizing, you know, um, uh, for AI. So people don't like AI. They don't like, uh, what's going on with that. I'm not sure exactly why. It might be because of fear of job loss, data centers being built in my backyard. It's too powerful. The government's watching us. Like, what is it?

Well, it's that, but also like, I, I'm on this weird feed where I'm, I think I clicked one of them and I'm getting more. There's so many people who are doing these breakdown videos where they're like, I work so hard. I work 60 hours a week. I don't have my parents to support me, and yet I still barely have enough money every single month to pay rent. I'm so angry that I'm— I've been struggling for 8 years. I went to college, I did what I thought I was supposed to do, and yet I'm still struggling. And I feel like I'm always one paycheck away, which is a totally fair sentiment. I 100% get that.

So you say if my baseline state is a deep state of dissatisfaction, like I'm already, I've already feel like I'm dying without AI. Yeah.

And now you're telling me I can't get a job.

You're telling me that I'm not going to have a job and that my energy prices are going to go up. My electricity costs are going to go up because they're building this like megawatt data center. And then I hear that they're raising billions and billions of dollars and individual people are getting paid $100 million to go do this and that. That's what you think is the kind of the main—

All after I've spent a decade doing what I thought I was told I had to do. It's okay to get debt to go to this college because it's going to be worth it. I'm going to get a good lawyer or accounting job that pays me enough to just live amazing life in a vicinity of a city that I want to live in. And yet I can't have kids, so I can't afford them. I'm single because a lot of them are single now, and I'm still struggling even though I'm putting the effort in.

Why?

Why is this broken? That's the sentiment.

And then why the hate of Sam and ChatGPT? Is it just the winner's curse? You hate the Yankees, you hate Duke because they're winning. Is that why? Or is there something else to it?

And also I think people, when they see him talk, one of the big sins that anyone who's a public figure can make is being inauthentic. And being inauthentic is what he screams, because what he screams is, I'm just saying what you want me to, what you want heard. That's one of the reasons why people like Elon, even though he's an asshole, he's very authentic. With Sam, it definitely feels you are just telling me what I want to hear. That's the perception.

Yeah.

Which he admits to, by the way. He says, I'm horrible at confrontation, and sometimes I'll just say things that I think you want me to hear.

Yeah, but I think he's saying it a slightly different way. Um, I mean, I think ChatGPT is an amazing product. Uh, I think that what the TVPN guys did, what John and Jordy did, I think is, um, nothing short of incredible. And that's putting aside this exit. If they had never exited, we were saying this before, like, I think what they built as just a brand—

it's awesome—

and the fun they had, the brand they built, the way they captured, uh, people's minds. And I would say, like, the way they broke the right rules. Like, what's the, what's that phrase where it's like, you know, amateurs don't know the rules, pros, pros know the rules, and the masters know which, when to break the rules. If you look at a couple of the things they did, it's kind of incredible. So first they changed the, the playbook for, for the podcast. It was like, nobody's watching the show. We don't care. We produce the show. And the show's perp, the functionality of the show was to produce clips. So what everybody else was doing in the industry was let's post clips to promote, and the clip's job is to promote the real show, the long-form show. And I think they inverted that. Um, they didn't say this, I'm putting words in their mouth, but let me speculate for a second. I believe what they found was that it's not that the clip's job— the clips are there to promote the live show, it's that the live show is there to produce the clips, and the clips is the product. And we do this 4-hour livestream as a farming exercise to just farm 20 great clips a day. And if we do 20 great clips a day and we're on your feed where you're already browsing and where you're hanging out, and we give you 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 seconds of entertainment, of insight, of a great soundbite, well, that— we've done our job. That's the show. The show is this distributed thing, not one central long, long-form thing, right? Like the way we and most podcasters think of our show is what we do is like the podcast. Listening to the hour-long thing is the thing. And we're going to use social media to hopefully draw you into the main thing. They did it the exact opposite way. They're like, we'll sit here for 4 hours and talk. The product is the clip. You know, that's the end product, uh, that we're actually trying to create. So I think that was great. I think going all in on Twitter was smart and interesting when nobody else was doing that.

I agree.

I think, you know, they—

hey, for the record, I made a prediction, uh, 3 years ago Do you remember the prediction?

Yeah, you were like, every social media platform has like their star creator, somebody who was born on the platform, becomes super famous and super successful and wealthy from the platform. Instagram had it, YouTube had it, Vine had it, all the platforms. And you were like, who is that on Twitter? We were like, kind of couldn't think of who's that person, that Twitter star. And then your prediction was that there will be— I don't know the exact prediction, but it was something like, well, I said that there's an opportunity to do that. Somebody's going to do it and they're going to, you know, make $1 billion doing this essentially.

Yeah. So, and it wasn't totally wrong and it wasn't a brilliant prediction, but it was just an observation. But that, uh, I still think it can happen. I think that there's like, by the way, TP— TBPn was tiny even on Twitter. Like it's only in a very niche of niche on Twitter. I still think that there's that. For example, I think that It's not in my world, but like sports Twitter is awesome. I think, uh, political Twitter, Twitter is awesome. I don't like it, but it's an awesome category to be in. Like, there's—

Meme Twitter is awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, there's still like those, those categories.

Can I give you two lock-in stories that I think anybody can take? Because, you know, we, we like to nerd out about media, but most people don't care about media. Yeah. Um, can I just tell you two Jon stories? So I don't know Jordy as well as I know Jon. So I was in a mastermind group. I created a little mastermind group for media, like guys like me who are like content creators. And we had this text group and we would do these calls. And at the time, John was doing a YouTube channel where he would do like, explanation of the history of Donald Trump, the history of Xi Jinping.

Pretty, pretty good stuff.

High quality. And it was actually getting like a lot of views. Like his videos could get like a million views or 200,000 views, 2 million views. So he was like doing well too. He was like successful at it. We had him on MFM during that point, but he wasn't like, he wasn't married to it. It wasn't like, this is my thing, I'm going to do this forever. He was exploring. And so I was kind of helping him and talking through like, what are you thinking about? He was like, I'm thinking about this and this and this. And he tried several experiments before he landed on TBPn. So the first thing was massive credit for walking away from the metrics. So like How many subscribers does he have on YouTube?

450,000. And his last video did nearly 1 million views. And it was people still don't under— it was about Visa. So a pretty nerdy topic, but he did a good job. But that's like a high quality audience. This is, I would say, imagine financially, I'm sure this could have been a huge success. And he had half a million subscribers. That's a lot.

So he had half a million subscribers. He was doing videos that were getting a million views, but it wasn't what he wanted as a, as a creator, as like the artist in him. Was not like, this is it. This is the thing I want to do for the next 10 years. And he walked away. And I just want to point that out because walking away from that and then not just walking away from that and trying to build back up to that, but like when you're doing TBPN and you're going live every morning and you don't get to go on vacation because you got to be live every morning and you're, you're dressing up in your suit, you're showing up at the studio, you're preparing, you're doing 16 interviews in a row. You're, you know, you're then going into cutting the clips, you're preparing for the next day. And you look at that number on your livestream and you've got 3,000 people watched today. Do you know how hard that is mentally as a creator who was just seeing that same number on YouTube be 1 million?

Did he say anything about that?

To now see 2,000 and show up with enthusiasm the next day?

He—

I mean, I didn't bring it up like this with him, but like, I can tell you why. Because when you're doing the thing that you actually enjoy doing, you'll sustain even in the face of bad results. Right? It's like, for him, I think talking to Jordy is fun as hell. Talking about venture tech was more fun than talking about, like, the history of Xi Jinping. I think he's, like, more in that— the scene of, like, true tech. And I think having the creative freedom to, like, build the brand and the show the way they wanted, I think was fun for him. And so, like, I think the fun sustained him when the numbers would have been discouraging to the average person. That's the first part of, like, massive credit, because as a creator, I know how hard that is. I know how hard it is to go— like, Naval has talked about this, that the hardest— the true masters are people who can go back down the mountain and start again and take a new path. Because going back down the mountain once you've climbed up once is like, you know how exhausting it is. You actually know what goes into it. And it's so hard to give up the vantage point you have to go back to being a beginner again and seeing where that new road might take you. The second one, I invited John to our basketball camp. People don't know this. John's like, freaking like 6'8" or something like that.

He's huge.

He's like the tallest guy in the tech industry. And I was like, oh dude, you should come to our camp. It's amazing. We got all these amazing— the founder of Airbnb and Reddit and, you know, MrBeast. And then this famous guy, this famous guy, this famous guy. Like, you should come, man. We want you to come this year. We'd love to have you. And he's like, oh, that's amazing. He's like, I just got to figure it out with TBPN. I was like, dude, it's 2 days. It's over the— you know, it's like just like Thursday, Friday. You'll be back. It'll be fine. Also, who cares? TVPN, it's nothing yet. It's just a baby, right? At that time, they weren't even doing the live show.

But wasn't this like 2 months ago? No, no, this was the year before. Oh, got it.

And so at the time, all they were doing was replying to tweets. They didn't even have their show yet. It was literally a Twitter account where they would reply to a tweet with them in nice suits recording a response to an interesting tweet somebody had. So it wasn't even like we had to be live. It was just, he was just like, I got momentum. So first he asked me, he goes, can Jordy come too? And I was like, dude, we're super constrained on the number of people. He's like, could we come and could we record from there? And I was like, I don't know, man. I'm not sure.

Like, big miss.

Well, there's no miss. I'm saying incredible for him at that time to turn down that invite, to be like, no, even 48 hours, I got to just be locked in. I got to just like, there's something here. I just, I don't want to lose any momentum. And as a founder, as like a— is anybody who tries to like make a project happen, the amount of like manual cranking you have to do at the beginning to get something off the ground is like so underrated. And I know that me, I would have been like, ooh, I got invited to this cool event. Ooh, all these cool people are going to be there. Oh, it's only a couple of days. It won't be that big of a distraction. Like, whatever, I can come back to this. Like, I would have done that. Like, mad props to him for being like, no, no, I got— I got to stay with this. And so he stuck with it. So he didn't come. He stuck with it. And when I texted him about this, about this outcome, about this, like, incredible outcome, he goes, it's a testament to the great lock-in. And I was like, the great lock-in. And that's really what they did. They just locked the fuck in for 12 months. They're like, every day we are going to be balls to the wall at doing this thing. And it doesn't matter if other people think this thing is important. We think it's important. It is a testament to the great Lockhans. So I give them all the credit. That's amazing.

Have you seen this other drama? It's kind of cool. So Jason Lumpkin, friend of the pod, he said, okay, it's weird. Now I don't see TBPN on my feed as often as I did a few weeks ago. Anyone else noticing the same? And there's like tons and tons of people, which, yeah, it could be conspiracy theory because that's usually how things work. Like, you're like, oh, I don't see it. And like, dude, like, like people tell us all the time, they're like, oh, I don't listen to the podcast MFM anymore. I'm like, Well, our numbers are like through the roof high, so someone is, um, that's a juicy story.

So you're saying Elon, who's got a competitor to OpenAI, maybe, uh, it would turn down that knob a little bit.

It doesn't seem crazy, does it?

Yeah, it doesn't because he did, he, it's been proven he did that with Substack. You know, you know this story?

No.

He tried to buy Substack. They didn't cut the deal. Founder walks away. It's like, Dude, total respect. You're Elon Musk. This is amazing. But like, we just, we want to be independent. And then the next, like, day, all traffic to Substack from X goes to zero, essentially. They basically shadowbanned Substack links, and then they bought Review, they launched their competitor of X Articles, they like did a whole bunch of things. So it is not beyond Mr. Free Speech, uh, Elon Musk to, to put his, uh, you know, um, what is it, what do they say, put his finger on the scale, put his thumb on the scales. To tilt, you know, to be competitive with, with other products. So I would not be surprised if the TBPN visibility going away is not a conspiracy theory and in fact is a, is a fact. I wouldn't be surprised.

I think in 2 weeks. So right now Elon and, um, Sam Altman, they're in a lawsuit and I believe it goes to— I don't, I don't want to sound— I'm an idiot, just so you guys know. This deposition— wait, should we set this up in front?

They're doing the Home Depot.

Like, I don't even know. I don't know how courts work, but like, is it the deposition? Is that the thing where they get the best clips from when they're in like a small room and they're going to ask him like, has he like, what size is his penis? Like, can you describe his penis? And like, it's like going to be insulting. That's like what the best videos online are about. But anyway, they're doing something that's— something is happening and it starts next week. But I think, I think, I think that starts in 2 weeks though.

Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing how I have some friends that are basically like, they get sued and then they won't, uh, they're like, we have to settle this because we just don't want to go to discovery. We don't want discovery because discovery is like unearths a lot of stuff. And so like one of my, one of my absolute favorite accounts is, uh, Internal Tech Emails.

Yeah.

Did you follow this on Twitter? It's like one of the best accounts and it basically just nicely formatted, goes and digs through all of the discovery that happens in these like antitrust cases. And then you see, you know, Mark Zuckerberg texting his, you know, CFO about buying Instagram versus Snapchat and how much they should offer. And what if he says this? And then let's— no, let's try this instead. And you could basically piece these together and see the internal thinking and conversations, the stuff that's never public. This is the real stuff that goes into the strategy behind a lot of these companies.

My sister's a corporate attorney and she's represented a lot of the guys that you just mentioned. And she always tells me, don't text or write stuff because it's gonna get discovered. And so one of my jokes is her and my wife and I are all in a group chat. I love to say the most offensive things, then I'll say hello to the person doing the discovery.

Sir, it was humor. Um, like this is the top pinned tweet right now on internal tech emails. It's from Elon Musk. Subject: Re: Honest Thoughts. And this is his email to Sam Altman. Guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw. Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit. I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a final commitment to stay, or I'm just being a fool who's essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup. Discussions are over, right? Or, um, the next one, Zuckerberg texting Elon Musk. Hey, quick heads up, we sent a letter to the California Attorney General supporting your lawsuit against OpenAI. Someone, not us, Leak the letter. It'll be public in the next hour. Wanted to make sure you heard this from me. Elon. Okay. Zuck, I have an idea to run by you. Not urgent, but let me know if there's a good time to call in the next few days. These are, these are, these are my Epstein emails. This is what I love to, love to read in my spare time. All right.

I have a story that I think is going to be right up your alley. You're writing a book on this topic. So have you heard of William Randolph Hearst? Do you know who that is?

I've heard of like the Hearst family. I feel like I've heard that.

Yeah. Let me give you a little bit of background on this because I went into reading about the story because I wanted to learn about how to build a company that can last 200 years, which he has almost done. But you're going to like it on how to manage creatives. That's like a big learning that I've had from this. So check this out. So William Randolph Hearst, I think he was born in something like 1860. I forget the exact year, but around there. The reason I liked him at first was his father was a Missouri miner. He kind of moved out to San Francisco where you live, where we used to— where I used to live to kind of make it big in the mining industry. And he had like a boomer bust type of career where he found a little bit of gold when he was like 40 and became quite wealthy, lost all the money. And then when he was 60, became the richest man in America. So he basically like married this amazing young woman named Phoebe, got her pregnant, and basically only saw her like once a year plus the kid. But he like was out in the mines up in like Yosemite Valley, like mining, and like his kid and family, his wife was down in San Francisco just kind of living their life. And the kid's name was William, William Randolph Hearst. And there's this amazing book called The Chief that I've been reading about it. Have you ever seen them or have you ever heard of the movie Citizen Kane? It's regarded as one of the best movies of all time. And the main character in the movie is based off of William Randolph Hearst. William Randolph Hearst was a larger-than-life character. So he went to Harvard and, like, kind of took over the club system. You know what that is? Like, basically it was sort of like frat—

Skull and Bones.

Yeah, like times 10. It was like frats times 10. It was like where all the cool kids would go to, but they, like, had a ranking system. They even would rank, like, the best clubs. And he was, like, a very natural leader and also He was very rich. His parents gave him like a lavish allowance and he just like spent and spent, but generally seemed like a good guy and was very well-liked. And so he convinces his father, Dad, I graduated college, I need something to do. Can we please buy the San Francisco Examiner? Which at the time was one of the, I think it was an important newspaper in San Francisco, but I don't think it was the biggest, but it was kind of like important and mismanaged. And he was like, let me buy it. Let me do this. So his dad's like, all right, dude, fine. And his dad was actually on board with this because his dad wanted to run for office. And he was like, William, run the newspaper, help get, get it popular, and then just like promote me. And William did it and it worked. His dad became a senator of California and it worked. It was very effective. But William Randolph Hearst, he realized that he loved newspapers. He loved them like crazy. And so he builds up the, the Examiner a little bit. And what he did was sort of what modern journalism and media is today. Have you heard of this phrase called yellow journalism?

No, sounds like an insult.

It's not. Well, it's, it's, it sounds racist, which is what I heard. It's not racist. Uh, so basically, uh, up until like the early 1900s, newspapers were boring. They were just like facts. They were just like sheets of paper with like black text with the headlines were not significantly larger than the text. And if you go and look at old New York Times articles or like if you've ever seen like archive New York Times, you'll kind of notice this. There weren't photos at the time. But this was a big deal because radio and movies weren't a thing. And so newspapers were how everyone got their information on a daily and weekly basis. And so the news industry was— had this massive TAM, but like it wasn't like the most exciting thing. And so William Randolph Hearst, who's this young charismatic guy, he was like, make the headlines bigger, add photos. And then the phrase, if it bleeds, it leads, it came from that era. And he was the guy. So there was basically him and this guy named Joseph Pulitzer. You've heard of the Pulitzer Prize, right? Joseph Pulitzer, another St. Louis guy. He started the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and then eventually bought other newspapers because newspapers were kind of like software companies, except local software companies. You start one in one market, then you go start one in another market and another market and another market. And they're subscription-based and people will stay for decades. So it's a very good business and it's like a land and expand type of business model. Well, anyway, it was Joseph Pulitzer who's like the man, and then this up-and-coming young Hearst, who's funded by his dad. They go back and forth for years and years, and one of the ways they go back forth is through this thing called yellow journalism. Basically, the idea was they put cartoons in their newspapers, and one day Hearst made the cartoon like a yellow guy, like he wore like a yellow shirt and the yellow background, and he had these huge headlines. Like, for example, one time a U.S. Navy ship was bombed, and we weren't even sure if it was the Spanish who did it, but he was like, the Spanish were the ones who bombed this thing. And that is one of the reasons why the Spanish-American War started, was because Hearst riled up all these people using this.

The yellow thing means— it says a style of reporting that prioritizes eye-catching headlines, scandals, emotional narratives over factual news to boost circulation. It started, like you said, Spanish-American War with Pulitzer and Hearst.

Yeah, so kind of interesting stuff, right? Now, he was a— he was a crazy man, Hearst. He was sober, he didn't party, but he loved women and he loved spending. So at the peak of his, the Hearst media empire, at this point, like decades down the line of doing it, he owned so many different newspapers that something like 20% of America got their news from Hearst. He was spending the equivalent of $20 million every single month just to live. And a handful of times there was— what? Yeah. A handful of years, he spent $2 to $4 billion building homes. So Ernest Hemingway, you know, I think it was Ernest Hemingway or another, like, reputable author was like, if God were to come down to America and build a home, it would look like one of Hearst's homes. So he was famous for just being an insane spender. So at one point—

he's not spending in the building case, right? He's just, he's doing it as a business. He's selling the homes or no, he's just building them to have them.

To have them. So his empire, he was amazing at building companies and he was amazing at spending all of the money. He was famous for telling his accountants, just find out where the money is from. And he was also famous for collecting, and which is what I'm going to talk about. He used to collect journalists. That was one of his skill set. He would find talented people. The thing is, is he collected everything. So he collected homes, he would collect rare coins, he collected cars, he collected exotic animals, he collected everything. Have you heard of the Hearst Castle? No. The Hearst Castle. Google Hearst Castle. So it was a 40,000-acre estate in middle of California. Not quite middle, but like, a little bit outside of LA on the water of the ocean. And he had, this thing called Hearst Castle, and he had zebras and camels and polar bears. He had a zoo there. This was his personal home. And it was so big that when he died, he was like, I can't give this to anyone because it costs too much to run it. I'm just gonna give it— I'm just gonna give it to the California government and they're gonna turn it into a museum. And that's what Hearst Castle is.

But okay, these numbers you're saying are kind of crazy. So you said $20 million a month, $2 to $4 billion annually of spending.

The best way to describe this—

what?

Imagine, imagine this. Imagine the—

those numbers don't even work. $20 million a month is $240 million a year, but then you said $2 billion. Give me—

explain these numbers because what I said was he, he was quoted as saying on average he spends X amount a month, which is the equivalent of $20 million a month. But there was occasional years where it was up to $2 to $4 billion when he had huge projects like the Hearst Castle.

And the money all came from the paper empire?

The money all came from the paper empire. So he used the company like his piggy bank, which wasn't wrong because he owned 100% of the business. So he's able to do that. The problem is, imagine this. Imagine. So at the time, he was actually— grew to be one of the top 10 richest men in the world, which let's say it's Jeff Bezos. Imagine the government saying, Jeff, you owe a lot of people a lot of money. We have to put Amazon under receivership. So like the bank is going to like run it for a couple of years, or you could still run it, but like we, we have to like step in here and get— everyone's got to get paid. And that happened multiple times. So imagine that one of the largest companies in the world when Hearst is in the, in his 60s and 70 years old, for multiple times, for 2 to 3 years in a row, the government would step in and be like, dude, you got to pay these people. So like, we got to put you on an allowance because that's how big of a fish he was. And that happened multiple times.

I'm just looking, I'm looking at all these. I'm just looking. I got 7 tabs open right now because I got to see what this guy's doing.

Google Hearst Mansion, Santa Monica. This is just like, the photo is just going to be insane. So he— it's no longer there, but he literally had a mansion. It's hard to even fathom, but literally on the sand to where you walk out the front door and your feet are in the water.

It looks like a— it looks like a resort hotel first because it's on— it's like on a beach and it's as big as a hotel.

So he had dozens of these homes. But not only that, he had the most expensive art collection on earth. He had the best car collection on earth. He had everything. He loved collecting. So let's— let's review.

What do we love? High charisma at a young age. Leader of men, took over the Harvard social scene. We like that. The second thing you like is land and expand newspaper monopoly. Third thing we like, media innovator decides, eh, why are we just doing transactional informational news? Let's sell stories, baby. Let's sell emotion. Creates this yellow journalism, triggers some wars. Ah, it's okay, whatever. So that's the third interesting piece. Then the fourth is lavish, extravagant spending, man of taste, collecting cars, animals, clothes, jewelry, homes, all the things that we like. So there's a lot we like. There's a lot of things that, like, if his Tinder profile matches our— what we like out here, over here on MFM. So, so far, so far, so good. Well, we haven't even got to the part you mentioned, which was about, like, creatives.

And I don't want to, um, we don't have to dwell on this, but I don't— I can't give him a pass. He didn't like the Jews. So Joseph Pulitzer. He used to call him Jusuf Pulitzer. Like he— and he also, he also had— before Hitler was— before the 1940s happened, Hitler was like a leader of Germany who like revitalized Germany. And he had Hitler as a columnist and everyone knew Hitler was anti-Semitic, but they didn't know that he was like killing Jews. So anyway, he doesn't get a pass. So he did a lot of bad stuff there. But, you know, we're going to talk about a whole man. So, and so I'll last— I'll tell you what, what Hearst is today, then we'll get to get in the good stuff. So Hearst now, they are a media company, but it's still family owned. I believe it's 100% family owned. I believe it's the— they do something like $15 billion a year in revenue. And what's interesting is when he died, he set up this amazing trust. And I think it's the largest trust in America that's like this, where the trust runs the company. And basically the trust has 6 non-family members, 6 family members on it, and those are the ones who vote on the company. And it appears to be quite well run. So Hearst now owns Cosmo, Cosmo magazine, which, you know, they own. I think they own GQ and a bunch of other magazines, but they also own 20% of ESPN. Yeah, that's worth like $20 billion. They own half of A&E. They own like a lot of local news stations. They own Fin— Finch Ratings, which you probably don't care about, but it's like a B2B boring thing. They still own a ton of stuff, including the original newspaper in SF that he bought. So it's still a prolific company. And interesting story, they tried— they didn't try to buy The Hustle, but when we were selling The Hustle, we met with them. And my wife, her mom and dad lived next door to the Hearst Tower. So they own this beautiful tower in Midtown Manhattan. And I slept at her mom and dad's house when I had the meeting. And the next day I go to the meeting and they're like, where'd you stay? And I was like, look out that window. That's literally the bedroom that I slept in last night. Like, I hope—

That's the Parr Tower you're looking at. So, so you mentioned two things. One was managing creatives. I'm curious about that. And then I have a different question after that about— you said you wanted to build like a 200-year company, and I want to ask you some questions about that too. So first, give me the creative part and then we'll go the other way.

So here's what made him interesting. So Hearst was— he discovered so much talent. He was famous for hiring the best people. And at one point there was even in like a congressional hearing of like, should we— is there like a monopoly for creative talent? Like, is that like a thing? And so like people actually like questioned if that was a thing because he was famous for hiring the best people. And a couple of people who you'll recognize are Mark Twain. So he was very early in being one of Mark Twain's first employers or first like promoters. Jack London. Famous writer and a bunch of like these really great people. And there's a whole bunch of others that aren't particularly relevant to everyone now, but they were relevant then. And he was famous for basically personally recruiting these people, paying them more money.

How was he finding them? Because there's no social media back in the day. There's no portfolios. How is he even figuring out who's the diamond in the rough? What would he look at?

So this is where it's interesting. And I think that both you and I can identify with this a little bit. Even though he was like a clickbait guy and he would sensationalize stuff, he still loved words and he loved like beautiful prose. And so he was a very— it was like a dichotomy where he like was like all about like building big and like flashy headlines and also like beautiful, like, isn't this beautiful? Look at the sentence this author wrote. And so he would find like, for example, there's a story where he was based in SF. He found a little pamphlet that this one like 23-year-old journalist in Oakland wrote. And he wrote— he like read it and he immediately went to Oakland and he personally recruited the guy. And what he was famous for was, A, personally showing up. So at the time, imagine, imagine, you know, I think Phoebe Gates is like in the news now for being a startup founder, right? Imagine Phoebe Gates knocking on Sean's door like one year or six months into MFM and being like, because she read my blog, you know, like, like, and her saying like, you got it, you got what it takes, right? And he did that. He was famous for that. He would personally find these people. So he actually cared about that. And two, he paid really well. He was famous for like, he's like, my philosophy, which I think is a good takeaway. We see this time and time again. We're seeing this with Facebook Superintelligence, and that's to a way bigger extreme of like getting the best people under one roof, even if it means that your profits are going to be really tiny or break even or at a loss. It normally tends to work out. And that's what he did. And so his newsroom was famous amongst the guys who loved actual news as being the best talent. And he'd let them do what they want. Additionally, what he was really good at is he would take cover for them. So for example, let's just say that like, or for like you and I, right, we work with HubSpot on this. There's been multiple times where, where we maybe have done something a little bit controversial and like if HubSpot were to be like, dude, I don't like what you said, but I got your back. It's cool for you to say like whatever you want. Or imagine like Howard Stern and Sirius Radio and Howard Stern saying something crazy. That's what he did all the time. So there'd be times where they would say something shitty about the sitting president and Hearst would be like, it's cool, dude, you're safe to say that. I got you. And so he got like, right, he did that all the time. So he was, he got loyalty that way. And yeah, that's kind of what I wanted to talk to you about because I know you're writing a book on creativity. And so I'm the reason I'm interested in Hearst was because the legacy thing, but also managing creatives, because I'm managing creatives now at my company and I have set these like hard deadlines and these rewards for them. And I'm learning— when I'm learning about managing a creative team, that's the exact opposite of what I should be doing. And so that's why I was like learning about Randall Hirsch. So my rant a little bit on him is done.

Well, I think collecting talent— I think managing creatives is different than collecting talent. I think collecting talent is actually the, the more important part of the equation and the part that I think everybody wants to do. Let me ask you, you started this by saying I'm interested in these like multi-hundred-year kind of companies because I want to make Hampton that. What did you take away on that side of it?

Well, I think that when, when I tend to care about things, I care about a ton. And also I care about it not at all.

So like— Do you say also or either or?

Also. So it's like, I care. I care about it. I really want it to happen. I love it. But like, if it doesn't happen, I'm like, nah. You know, right.

By the way, that's the perfect disposition for an entrepreneur.

Like, yeah.

So it's like a deep desire for the outcome and then a complete detachment from the outcome as well.

Yeah. So that's sort of— so it's— that's sometimes hard for me to explain to people, but that's how I feel where I'm like, I want this so bad. And then if like it rains that day, I'm like, I was looking forward to play baseball, but video games are fun.

You know what I mean?

Like, it doesn't matter. But anyway, I'm interested in it just because I think it's A, fun to surround myself with people. And I think having a company is a great way to decide who I spend my days with. And B, I do want like my family to be proud of me and I would love to have something that I can bring them into the fold and we have an excuse to work together. So for example, Hearst Jr. was an entrepreneur. His father was an entrepreneur. There was some bonding that they had where it's like even if they weren't in the same company, they were still in the same family and they each had overlapping companies. There was like this really cool relationship that they had that I think is great. So that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in it.

I've told my kids, um, that we're going to work together, but in the reverse. So I think most people who, you know, build business and become successful, they want to— you know, they want their kids to inherit the business, to take over the business. That's the, I would say, default. That's not my plan. Other people want to leave money and be like, you start your own thing, but I will like this will enable you to chase your dreams. That's also not what I'm going to do. I'm more of a believer in the Warren Buffett money, which is Warren Buffett philosophy, which is you give your kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do everything. Not enough to do nothing.

Sorry. Sorry.

So, so, so that I believe in. But the, but the, what I've been telling them, because I, for my son and daughter who are old enough to kind of understand, they, I'm like, yeah, you guys, you guys can go do whatever you want. You can make movies, you can build things, you can do whatever you want to do. Be cool if you guys work together, but, like, you know, whatever, we'll see. But I was like, I'm going to work for you. I was like, when I retire, my goal, like, I want to be— I'm going to work on whatever you're— I'll be your intern, basically. And they're like, but you're going to have to pay me. And I'm like, okay, I guess I'll pay you then. I will pay you. How much you want to pay? They're like, you have to pay me 10, $10 bucks, which is what they call money. And I'm like, all right, I'll pay you $10 bucks, but I'm going to come work for you. And I think this is actually a better plan than being like, I will have this empire and you will someday run this empire, Simba.

But I'm open. I'm open to that as well. you know, you know, whatever, just as long as we can be together, right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I figured the best way to be together is for me to be their voluntary, like, intern of whatever the, whatever they're trying to do in life is going to end up being better for me. So that's a, I just wanted to throw that out there as like an alternate view to the traditional, traditional path.

I just want to ask you one question because you're learning about all this creativity stuff. So Sean's writing a book on the creative process. That's cool. But tell me about managing creative people. Are there any tips on that?

Well, most of what I've been studying is the individual. So how do you, how do you reach your max potential of being able to make dope shit? So like anybody in any endeavor doesn't actually matter what, what endeavor you're in. Like we think of artists as like whatever, painter, musician, whatever. And obviously that's true. That's like, you know, 100% of their value and sort of output is going to be based on their creative work. But, you know, even if you're a CEO or an entrepreneur, you're creating a company, you're creating products. Honestly, even if you're a dentist and you have a dental practice, like, you're going to— either you're going to be undifferentiated or you're going to be differentiated. Like, it's the game of stand out. And so do you care about standing out? Do you care about doing something that is beyond normal? And if you do, like, you probably want to untap as much of your potential as you can. So I've been first studying how do you get yourself to do it, which is like I would say 80% of the battle. Then the second is group dynamics. So how do you in a creative— how does a creative team work to make this work? Which is kind of like when Pixar makes movies and they have the brain trust and the directors all have to learn how to actually give feedback to each other. And how do you show somebody something at a raw stage and how, how do you bring it up and how do they interact with you so that 1 1 3 so that the product gets better? Versus your ego getting bruised or them taking it a different direction, or you feeling shut down or something like that from raw early work, which is usually not great. I haven't even worried about the other side, which is kind of what you're talking about, which is how do you hire and manage that talent? Because that's not like been the focus for what I'm looking at. So I don't have a lot to share there. I actually think there is an interesting, you know, just props to you. I feel like with the hustle, you spotted a couple of people, right? Like a lot of people now have seen Steph Smith on our podcast a bunch or, Trung has become a famous person on Twitter. And like, you found these people as diamonds in the rough. You brought them in, you empowered them.

You're forgetting one of the more popular ones.

Who am I forgetting?

You, bro.

Bro, I came to you. I came to you ready baked.

I was a DoorDash delivery on your doorstep and someone has to open the door. Yeah, sure.

Fair enough. Okay, you can have that. Well, we'll give you that one if it helps you. But I think you've done a good job of that, like identifying what is A+ talent. And I would say like the biggest thing when you said that stood out to me when you were talking was you talked about paying people more. And this is like one of the great asymmetric arbitrages that exists, which is that the person who is truly great is worth somewhere between 10 and 100 times the average person, but they'll never cost 10 to 100 times. Only, only maybe now with the AI researcher thing where the AI researchers are making like hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Maybe now they're getting paid their actual worth. But like, you know, in every other industry in all of history, it's like the A+ person versus the B+ person. Is getting paid 10% more, 30% more, 50% more, even 150% more max. But they're generating, you know, 1000% more of return of work. And so the mindset shift has to be there of like, the whole game is find the best people. I'll give you a little story. So before this podcast, I was telling Ben, because I've been hanging out with— I'm in Austin, I was hanging out with Ben, and I just said, I said, hey, what if our conversation in the last 24 hours do you think would make, like, be useful for people on MFM? Not just entertaining, but useful. And he goes, oh, the thing you said about one of our companies. So in one of our companies, we kind of hit a plateau. So we got into the like $20 million plus range of revenue, which is great because we were growing 50% a year, but then we plateaued. And I had stepped out of the company about 2 years ago. And so the question is like, what's— what do we do? And I had told Ben, I was like, we're in a little bit of a pickle because to be great in that type of a company, let's just take— let's use the analogy you were doing of Hearst, right? To be great in the newspaper business, you have to make the most compelling media, right? So you got to have stories that hook people, that get people to become daily readers. If you don't do that, it's pretty hard. Like, what are you doing? That's the main thing. And so identify the main thing, and then either the person who's doing it has to be like the world-class figure-it-outer of that. So it's like, you know, you were this with The Hustle, I feel, initially, which was with The Hustle, like, I remember you wrote this style, this writing style guide, and you're like, this is how we write. This is what we write about. This is what's a good story versus a story we don't do that other people might think is good, but we don't think it's good. This is what a good headline looks like. This is what a bad headline looks like. And you were the figure outer of the main thing that you needed to get right in order for that business to work in, let's say, e-commerce. Like, I don't know if you saw, Groove just sold the, like, gummies company or whatever, and they sold for $1 billion.

And what was it like? It's like they just picked the right category with the right model.

Obviously a bunch of things have to go right when you get a billion dollar exit in 3 years. So I'm not going to say you isolate it to one thing. Of course, what were the main variables? The main variables were like Yes, they were in a great category, like supplements are a great category. And then secondly, they were in like a, uh, they were on trend with like greens basically. So like you have Athletic Greens, but then you had greens as gummies. Um, and yeah, the product as a gummy is good and differentiated, but like, look, a lot of people were basically saying like the genius of Groon was that they turned Athletic Greens into a gummy. And like, guess what? Like a lot of people can do that, would do that if that's all it took. They would be copied like that. You know, it would be, it would be trivial for somebody else to create a gummy, a product equivalent of, of their product. The thing that was really hard to copy was their marketing excellence. And basically the dirty secret of all e-commerce and D2C businesses is that they are world-class at just marketing funnels. It's like they're world-class at the Facebook, TikTok, Google ad game, going to a landing page, getting you to buy a thing, and then emailing you incessantly and texting you nonstop until you buy again.

They were good at that.

They're not just good, they're, they're world class at that. And so anyways, back to kind of like the useful lesson. The useful lesson is figure out what the main thing you're going to have to get right that's going to be like 70% of, of the, of the battle. And then either the founder has to be so world class at it that they're going to do all the hard figuring out and then they're going to like delegate to anybody else, like to do the work, but they're going to do the figuring out at each, at each step. So for example, people don't know this, but at The Hustle, when you started, Um, you know, you started with the event and then you had to figure out how to— what was the main thing for the event? It was like, get speakers that I can use to sell the tickets. And you were just constantly playing this game of like, can I get a badass speaker? And then can I tell the world that this speaker is going to be here and that they have to come and buy this ticket to this event? And then when you started, before you started the newsletter, you were blogging and it was like, we have to have these articles that go viral. And being great at going viral is going to be the thing that is either going to make this company successful or not successful. Right? And then you had to grow, figure out. Then when you switch the newsletter, it was a different thing. But let's just take the going viral part. You got to be world class at that, or you're going to have to learn how to recruit world class people at doing that thing. There's only two ways to win. You are the world class person doing the figuring out, or you're a world, world class recruiter to get the people who are going to do the figuring out. There's really only two things to be great at with that. And so in terms of like your question about Hersh, like what stands out to me is it sounds like he was a world class recruiter. Of the great people. And we often hear about companies that are the opposite, where it's just, you know, the, the gene— the person is the genius, the product genius or whatever. But like, you go look at Apple or any of the great companies that do things over time, or like, I just read the Elon biography, same thing. Like, yeah, he's spectacularly smart, no doubt. But it's the legions of really world-class people that he's able to recruit, bring in, that are actually going to be able to, you know, develop the breakthroughs. You know, that's the other skill.

So what we just did is an example of a podcast alley-oop. So I did a good job dribbling down the court and just lobbing the ball up in the air, and you just slam dunked that shit and brought it home. That was a very good job. Uh, all right, is this it? Is that the pod?

Dude, I had the— I had a midlife crisis yesterday. I was— we were at the— I'm staying at this like nice hotel, and we were at the pool, and there was a girl there who was just her friend. It was her and her friend, and her She just was like clearly taking like Instagram, like influencer pics. It's like pretending she's having a good time. She wasn't having a good time, but she's like pretending. She's like posing as if like a really fun thing was happening and her friend was like getting the right shot. And then they would like quickly like drop the drink and then, you know, be like, okay, all right, next we need to— okay, come over here, make it look like I'm doing this. And that was happening right next to me. And I was laughing at her, mocking her and judging her. And then I was like, I guess it's not so different what I do as I— like, my vlogger is like right over there for my YouTube channel. I guess, I guess it's not that different what I'm doing. I just posted a video on my new YouTube channel of me like working out. It's not, it's not that different, I guess.

Dude, the worst is now that I am an Instagram superstar is when I'm walking on the street and I'm talking.

Yeah, what is the worst part of now being an Instagram superstar?

Is walking on the street and talking to a camera. And then the worst part is the people. If I'm around the same person and they hear me do a second take and so they know for a fact that I'm not on a FaceTime, that is the worst part. That's the good—

and they know for a fact that I'm not good enough to do it in one take.

Oh my God, that's the worst part.

They know for a fact that I'm self-conscious about it and felt like what I said was a little bit wrong and that I am insecure and I wanted to do it better. Yeah, do it, do it, try again. Like, honest question, is the, is the loss of self-respect worth the gain of influence and money?

Yeah.

All right, carry on then.

Yeah.

What are you talking about?

See you later. Is that the stupidest question ever? That's it. That's the pod.