Hey Sam Parr

Working with people is hard. Someone wants a raise, someone has a sick spouse, or you don't know but turns out they're pregnant. Dealing with all those types of personal issues is what makes business hard, not pretty much anything else.

What is up, you sexy, sexy bastards? It is your boy Diaper Duty, aka Cleaning a Booty, aka Rabbi Can't Lose, aka Noah Kagan, back At it again with a monthly episode. Today we're talking with one of my best, best, best homies in the world. That is Sam Parr. Now I was just reading off his businesses and it's impressive what this guy does. And he shows up and prioritizes being a good husband and father. He's got samslist.co if you want to find bookkeepers and accountants. He's got joinhampton.com if you want to join a high net worth networking group. He's got copythat.com if you want to learn how to do copywriting. He's got tryrosedale.com if you want to get full 360 assessment about yourself. Plus he helps run two huge podcasts, Money Wise, where he talks to people who are worth $30 million or more, and My First Million. So people who are trying to get their first million. Sam is a bundle of energy. I love talking with him. I love that he's got so many different things going and he's just a great guy to talk with. We're gonna talk about those businesses plus a few other gigantic things. Number 1, what it was like for him to hang out with MrBeast and a few other billionaires who had security and stuff like that. Number 2, how did Sam set up one of these businesses and make $1 million without a website in 24 hours?

No AI involved.

And we give a bunch of book and other fun topics in this conversation. If you don't know Sam, you'll know him after the show. You can also check him out on Twitter @thesamparr.

Enjoy the show.

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How's Sam today? I'm awesome. I'm happy. I'm healthy. I'm wearing my patriotic American sweater that's made in Mexico. I feel wonderful. How do you feel?

Dude, I was like, I'm so sweaty because I was rushing home and then the nanny left at 2 because Mafi wanted to go to the mall for shopping. And I was like, well, I want to be a good husband, so I'm like, of course, go to the mall. But then I have this chat with you at 2, so I was kind of a little stressed.

What is she doing at the mall?

I don't know, shopping. I was like, go shop, have fun. She's like doing all the mom stuff. Now she can relax. Is Sarah stressed out a lot?

I think that compared to a lot of moms, No, I don't think she's stressed out, but I do like give her a hard time. I'm like, why are you stressed at all? You have help and you don't work and like resources are not limited. There should be no stress.

Yeah. I'm reading this really good book for parents called Brain Rules for Baby. And it basically was like, guys are like, yeah, why are you stressed? Because you shouldn't be doing anything. And mom's like, well, the baby shat. I haven't ate all day. I've just been stressed. It's a different type of work.

Are you going to read Anxious Generation?

I didn't see a point to it. There's certain books where I'm just kind of like, what am I going to get out of it?

It's like the book Die with Zero, where it's like, yeah, that sounds good. I got it. You told me the title. It sounds great. And so with Anxious Generation, it was just don't use my phone or don't let kids have phones. Okay, great. Done.

I have two friends, their kids can have iPads and phones and the kids are ballistic. I have other two friends, they can only watch on the big screen. They can watch movies like Disney movies or shows, but only on the TV. And the kids are so calm. Kids are so chill.

Samir does that where I think his children only watch maybe 30 minutes a day, but they can only watch TV that was like created before analytics were a thing. So it's like old Ninja Turtles, or like Mr. Rogers. They watch Scooby-Doo, so it's like '80s Scooby-Doo. And I'm actually on board with that because anything that's older, it's just slower.

Damn, that's a really—

I like—

Samir's good, man. I was thinking about stress. I read this random article about Matthew McConaughey's mom. It was one of these magazines, you know, like Austin Lifestyle, one of these ones where it's like $8,000, like architects and super bougie stuff. But it had a story about her, and the one thing that stood out is she's like, I'm never stressed. My whole life I'm not sure. She's 93.

Yeah. You know, there was one time where we were hanging out with Neville and he was, you know, I stayed up late at night last night because I'm looking to buy a home and I thought homes in Austin cost like $800 grand. Turns out like they're more than that. And it's the only time in my life that I can't buy something that I want. If I want like a $10 million home, maybe I can't buy a $10 million home. I've never had that feeling before. This whole idea of staying up at night and like thinking about things, is that what stress is? He had never actually felt that feeling of, oh, I, I'm worried or I can't do something I want to do.

When's the last time you were stressed? Or what's the last thing you stressed about?

Usually like working out. For example, right now, like I usually set like targets for working out. You know how you wanted to ride your bike across the country or you like have a race or for your hobby you want to learn Hebrew or you want to learn how to fly and you got to pass a test. For me, I do similar things with working out. So like right now I want to run a 5K. At 21 minutes and bench 300 pounds in the same day, which is like not terribly challenging, but to do both, it's kind of hard. And every week when I do my runs, I have to like run at a certain time. And if it's like a really hard run, I can like stay up the night before and I'm like, I gotta go to bed early to do this like really hard workout tomorrow. And I get nervous before I do the run cuz I don't wanna fail.

Did you do it today or when was it?

I did it today. I did my, a hard run today and I had to run 2 miles at 7-minute pace and I did it at 7:08 pace. Cause I just failed. I was nervous before I did it.

How'd you feel after?

Oh, I'm pissed off. I'm like, oh, I should have gone harder here. I should have gone harder here. But do you get that with like certain athletic endeavors? Like your hobbies, like where you're like, I have to pass this flying test or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much all day long, dude.

I do this thing called negative visualization with business. Where I just assume that the company has gone out of business and I've laid everyone off. And then every day that I'm like, the business like survives, I'm like, oh, all right. That's like icing on the cake. That's pretty fun. I'm happy that it hasn't gone out of business yet. Therefore I'm happy.

I think every time people are stressed just about like, what's the plan? And like, if it's off plan, like how do you get back on? Or how do you be okay that the plan can take some time?

You know what makes me stressed out is thinking with planning when people are like, 'What's the plan?' And you think they want some grand, like, vision. And in my head I'm like, I just want to have fun and make interesting stuff. And I'm nervous that that won't be inspiring for this group of people. Do you ever feel that way?

Yeah. It's interesting what's inspiring for you, maybe not be inspiring for others. Like sometimes people are doing things like doing emails and doing content and I'm, I don't know, I just don't find it inspiring.

Yeah. I'll read about like Elon and I'm like, oh, you have to go to Mars in order to inspire people. And I get really self-conscious that I'm not doing some grand big enough idea to inspire the right people.

I've been thinking about that word. I don't know if it has to be grand. I think the two components is like, what is something you're excited about for the future? So you're excited to hit your 7-minute mark. You have probably some excitement about Hamptons. I was talking with Ilona at AppSumo and I was like, we're working on different things cuz I've stepped out to kind of be more chairperson and she's putting together a plan and a lot of it comes from fear. And the other side of it, I'm like, well, what are you excited about? Like, what are you hyped on that you're going to then convince people as a leader to go do?

I do think that in business, too often we default to data and growth and not enough to what's awesome.

I think one, I 100% agree. The other thing I reflected on, I think with Bezos, I really like him. Bezos to me is like the man. He's like 55, he's like, I did it, I'm out. But I wonder the difference for them and some of these people is how big they're thinking.

Yeah, I think the big thing is where I get self-conscious. At the same time, I listened to a podcast with the first angel investor of Amazon, and he was recounting the pitch that Bezos gave him. And Bezos was like, look, if this works, I think we could have a $100 million company on our hands. And he was like saying how Bezos was this brilliant guy, but he was like, there's a 50% chance this works, and if it does, we're gonna make $100 million. And I do think that like your ambitions can scale with your success. You think about Elon and all these crazy people, but he had a company that he sold, Zip2, and he made $20 million from that. And so that's a lot of money, but that ain't like a trillion-dollar money like he is now. And I do think there are like step functions. I don't know, maybe Zuck was a little bit different. But in general, it seems people grow into their ambitions. Do you think Zuck was like, take over the world on day one?

No, but like, like a year in, he was like, I'm taking over the world. But go back to something you said. What are you self-conscious about with this stuff?

That my ambitions are not large enough to inspire a group of people. Do you know what I mean? I'm a little bit self-conscious about it, but also I'm a little okay with it because this past weekend we did this thing called Camp MFM with MrBeast. And we went to MrBeast's house in the Carolinas, 25 of us. It was me, Sean, MrBeast, the founder of Airbnb, the founder of Reddit, and then 3 or 4 other billionaires, Jesse Itzler, like a lot of really successful people. And so I got to experience like the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. And what I learned was that these people who are billionaires at the age of 35, I'm not willing to live the life that they have to live in order to achieve that. It's a tormented life for many of them, not all of them, but many of them. And so I'm okay not being like crazy ambitious if it means living that lifestyle.

What's the example?

MrBeast, Jimmy, I think he's happy, but to me, his existence is miserable. He works all the time. He has 3 or 4 assistants. And I met a bunch of the assistants. He calls them his second brain and they basically live with him. And I talked to one of his assistants who only could last for 6 months and now he has a different job at the company. And he was like, I lasted 6 months and that was long. No one could keep up. He works super hard. He doesn't do anything other than care about YouTube videos. And I was like, that sounds miserable. And it was crazy. There was one time we were playing basketball and he made a comment. He was like, oh. I need a banana. And literally 45 seconds later, a guy is running in with a banana. Like, he has like people like surrounding him that are there to like wait on him. It was pretty intense. It was wild.

What other things did you notice about the billionaires and this event?

So there was like two types of people. There was like the Joe Gebbias of the world, and Joe Gebbia is a serious person. And then there was these other types of like billionaire guys who were like alpha, intense, like center of attention, the loudest, pushing everyone, the most competitive, and they fit into like a very particular stereotype, which I didn't particularly love. But then there was guys like, you know, Jesse Itzler.

Yeah.

Jesse's been very successful and then his wife sold the company that was worth a billion dollars and he was like easygoing, very average in terms of like he could get along with anyone. He was a good example of someone who was uber successful and fun-loving and easy to be around.

Do you think that to be a billionaire, I don't know if that aspiration is what people should be aiming for, but do you think it's more achievable than people realize? Like Airbnb, they could have started a different business. Was there something special about them? I guess what I want people to think or know if they have a chance. I would argue they do.

I would argue they probably don't. And how many billionaires are there? Maybe 5,000. I think like on Forbes, I think there's 2,000. So let's double that for the folks who aren't accounted for. I think that it's significantly easier if you aim to make like $20 million by the age of 50. I think that's very doable. But making a billion requires a stroke of luck.

And the Airbnb guys, starting anything is impressive, but like getting it successful and doing it over a period of time they did.

Yeah. And Brian's the man. Sarah worked there for years and during COVID they would do their all-hands meeting and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, so I would hear his all-hands meetings. He's the real deal. Brian's a proper CEO. He's the man. He's just like Zuck in the sense of where I'm like, I would bet it all on him.

Damn. Did all the guys have security?

Joe had it and I won't say who had it other than I'll say MrBeast had it. He's famous. He had security the whole time.

Did it make you consider your safety and security in general?

I felt awesome that they were there.

Does everybody, they don't protect you. Like if there's a shooter, they push you in front. In front of everybody.

One of the guys who had security, he ended up hurting his ankle, like playing basketball. And I like made a joke with him. I was like, good job. You know, you didn't do your job very good, did you? But no, it did not make me fear for my safety at all. Do you fear for your safety? Like when you go to conferences and stuff like that?

I haven't gone out as much and I've reduced my public presence since I had my daughter. I looked into it in the past, like how much actually a security guard costs. And it's, I think it's more affordable than I expected.

I'm not afraid of something that requires a physical security guard. I'm nervous of a cybersecurity crime. I'm not like a crypto guy, but I have a Coinbase account and like people try to hack my Coinbase. Like the other day I got a call from Coinbase and it almost tricked me, but it wasn't Coinbase. It was like a fake call center trying to get me and it almost got me.

Dude, I had such a good one yesterday. You ever get a class action thing in the mail where it's like you get money from like AT&T and you didn't realize it and you're supposed to get like $100? Yeah, like $650. So I got one from Barclays. You know Barclays? It's in New York. Oh man, it was like a lot of pages and very formal. And you go to this website, all right, fill out all of your personal information to collect your settlement check. So I start filling out some of it and I'm like, let me check the root domain and then Google the domain plus scam plus Reddit. And the root domain was like their website, 69. But what they did, which was clever, is they bought similar domain to the actual company that does these settlements and created their own form on it.

I mean, that's amazing. It's really good. And my Twitter has been hacked before. They got me. They like— it was like a reset password email that I was confused by. So I'm afraid of that stuff. I'm afraid of hacking, cybersecurity stuff, identity fraud stuff. That's what I'm fearful of. I had a guy on Facebook Threads who like claimed my name and also was just duplicating my Twitter stuff stuff on Threads, and people were like, hey, why'd you message me this? And I was like, what? So I had to report them. But I'm afraid of like happening because of those things.

Yeah, I am more afraid of my security. I'm not at the level of wealth you're at, or definitely these guys, but I think I— it just— the upside of being known does not feel worth the downside of getting killed. I think if it's like how you make money or certain areas, it kind of makes sense. But I actually more, as I'm getting older, it's like if you can have your success or money and whatever and not have notoriety, to some extent almost seems as appealing.

If I would say more, our friend Neville told us to read Dan Bilzerian's book, and I went and read it, and there was a few takeaways, but one of the big takeaways was Dan was like, I'm really rich and I'm really famous, and I can tell you that being famous is 10 times more intoxicating than being rich. If you're famous, you get more stuff than if you're rich. Like, you get more girls, you get more special perks, He was like, being famous is a drug and it's horrible. It's a bad drug.

This is a really good book. This is a really good book.

It was a great book.

What are other elements you admire or you don't want, or I don't know, despise is too strong of a word, that from the billionaires you've observed?

I think that if you're a bad husband and you're a bad father, I think you are a failure at life. I think that it doesn't matter what you have achieved. If you fail at those things, then you are just objectively a failure. Unless there's some weird thing where you've dedicated your life to like serving others. If you let down your family, then you are not good to me. So I really don't admire people who are bad husbands and bad fathers.

What else did you admire about these billionaire groups and what are their elements?

What was really obvious to me in this particular group of people was that confidence was significantly more important than IQ. And what I mean by that is a bunch of really wealthy people, they would say stuff to me that I was like, you're not that smart. You know, everyone there is smart, but you're like normal intelligent, but you are so confident and you believe that your opinion is so right. But I don't think you're any more informed than me. The only difference is, is that you think that you belong and you deserve to have a seat at this table. And because of that, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that everyone's going to follow you. So let me give you an example. There was one guy who was a billionaire. He became a billionaire in his 30s and he worked in a very regulated industry. Let's say insurance. And now he's also involved in politics. I was like, man, you were a nobody and you just inserted yourself into these national conversations. With me, I think no one cares what I think, this and that. Did you ever have those self-doubts? He was like, I felt like at a young age I deserved to have my opinion heard and I felt like I deserved to lead other people. That attitude is the difference between winners and losers, is that you just went out there and you said, I'm going to be heard and my opinion is better than everyone else's. And this particular person was not that much smarter than me. I don't think he was any smarter than me, but he was 100 times more successful. And I think confidence was more important than IQ.

I think that was my comment I was saying to you earlier, where there's no knock, like, for anyone who's created, but I think people don't realize, like, most of these people are pretty similar intelligence. They've had the effort, maybe the conviction, and done the thing, and they're like, yeah, I believe I should be here. That's interesting.

There are geniuses. I do think Bezos is a genius. I think, have you ever read a Warren Buffett biography? Yeah.

Snowball.

Yeah. So Warren Buffett, he tries to get off this image that I call the aw shucks, like, oh, I'm just a guy from Omaha. But for anyone who's studied Warren Buffett, he was a mathematical prodigy. When he was 12, it was evident that he was literally a genius. Like his IQ is higher than everyone else's. And so he, I think, is successful among other reasons, because he's just really smart. But there's a lot of other people, you and I, and a lot of our friend group fall in this category who were probably normal-ish IQ, but we're pretty tenacious and we are somewhat courageous and we just do it. Do you know what I mean? I do. Like a lot of our friends in particular. I mean, I think we have some friends that are uber successful, but let's say you look at our friend from Jungle Scout.

Oh yeah. Greg Mercer.

Greg Mercer. Greg Mercer is uber successful. And there was one time when Greg took me, got us like a booth at F1, which is like really expensive. And it was like so cool that he asked me to come with him. And after the race, he was like, let's go walk across the track. And I was like, there's like a fence there. And he's like, what do you mean? And he just like walked over and he hopped over the fence and someone tried to stop him. And he goes, no, it's okay. And the guy listened to him. The security guard backed off. And I was like, that's why Greg has a nearly $1 billion company.

That is funny, man.

Yeah, he was like, oh no, it's okay. That's what he said to the security guard. And he said it with such confidence that the security guard listened.

I think it's the theme that you've been saying about you believe in yourself that you're supposed to be at these places. Maybe hard to get there if you're not believing you're supposed to be there.

I love hearing stories from your perspective because you are a Silicon Valley OG, which I think people forget. Who out there that's a billionaire or a baller or a tycoon today besides Zuck, when you knew them, when you guys were in your 20s and you were like, that guy is going places, I don't know where, but it's somewhere.

You know who I've been thinking about lately? I think he's been getting more attention. I think he's more aggressive than a lot of other people is Mark Pincus.

What about Mark?

So I was able to meet Mark because I built Facebook Games at Mint, and then Mark tried to buy it. And then I started just friending him through that experience. And everyone was taking Facebook games like me. I was the number one Facebook game developer at the time. He was trying to buy it. And I built the games and I had one Filipino and then I hired one other person. Mark raised $10 million, built a team, and then went for it. And it's, I don't know if it's multi-billion dollar company public, but I thought he was very impressive with how aggressive he could be. And he was also one of the first investors in Facebook.

It looks like it was either acquired or it's publicly traded still, but in the $10 billion range. Not bad.

But you know, first investors in Facebook, I think he did LinkedIn. Just a really, really savvy guy. Really savvy. I don't know. I think it's also figuring out like, how do we take these different elements and then how do we want to be ourselves? Like right now I'm, I'm kind of back into a tinkering mindset where I don't know how the future's going to be or what I'm excited about. I'm just like playing around different areas.

Who inspires you when you think, I would like to be similar to this person or that person?

I think about my buddy Tynan. Have you ever interviewed Tynan or talked with him?

Yeah, I've hung out with him. He was a pretty quiet guy and he was really adamant about what he enjoyed, if I remember correctly, like in a really polite way.

I think I admire that he has strong conviction, but he's also open to changing, which is two opposite sides. And I think what I'm jealous of him is he's very just content with himself, just really enjoys like The things he does fully, like he drinks his tea, he does his crosswords, he builds his cruise sheet.com, he creates 3D things, he works on his house, codes, does some other things, and he feels very satisfied. And I think that's what I aspire to be. Yeah, I think I admire people that seem really content with themselves. You see some of these billionaires or these people that are creating or doing, I wonder though, at least for some of them, Are you ever satisfied? What is it? You're going to have a lot of money at the end of your life? Like, what's the goal of all this? Where does this all go? I think I admire the people that have money that have worked for it and then seem satisfied with where they're at and they're trying to do more things still.

Yeah, it's pretty cool that we've been able to meet a bunch of these people. I feel like really lucky that I've met a lot of people who are admired by millions of people or who are in magazines, and it's been so exciting to see how they really are.

Who do you actually admire?

Okay, so Ryan Holiday, I don't know how he has so much output, but he writes an email called the Daily Dad. He also has a stoicism email called the Daily Stoic. He owns a bookstore in Texas and he has like a small team. If I had to guess, of 15 people, I bet his business does $10 million in revenue. He seems like he runs every day. He seems like he loves writing. Just seems like he knows his values. He knows what he stands for and he doesn't bend or break his values to live a certain life. So I really admire him. Someone who I also admire that everyone knows, Peter Lovells, dude, I dig his vibe. I think he's fantastic. I think he's weird in the coolest way.

How so for you?

He's just like an internet geek. He like is fascinated by trying new technologies and I love that. And I like how he shares all the things that he's thinking about. He's building a gym right now and like, I know all these things because I've built a gym and it's funny that he's like going through it and learning, but he He does it publicly and I find that to be really fascinating. It's weird, dude. He shares his net worth, he shares his revenue, and I think that's so insane and crazy and I would never do that. And I love reading his stuff. Nathan Barry, I think is badass as well. Pretty cool. In my head, you are one of the more successful people that I know for sure in like traditional success. Like you have a company that's been around for well over a decade. It's huge. You had a great office. Everyone I've met who works there is pretty amazing. And you've done it for how long? 15 years? And like whenever you release a project, like a small little side project, and I know if Noah has had his hands on it because the design is really good. I mean, I, when I think of like people who are in the category of Nathan, you're easily in that category as well. No? Yeah.

I think I believe the whole belief thing is like a whole nother story. I think believing to be a billionaire, I don't think that's my inspiration. And I wonder if you just also get used to where you are. This is just where we've been for some time.

Yeah, but you've been the man for like a long-ass time. Oh wow.

Thank you, sir. I'm going to do a podcast with you every day.

I remember I, 10 years ago, I like read OK Dork, like religiously. Thanks.

Yeah, I've been doing this a long time. I mean, I think that's what I'm trying to get back to, which is doing the things without money and without risk. If there's no money and risk involved in either side, like, what do I want to spend time on?

What's an example of that?

I mean, right now I'm very curious about personal finance. I'm texting you about it, and there's these wealth managers that charge percentages. That's stupid. These funds, even like these index funds that everyone puts their money in, those charge like 0.1%. Why? So I'm just kind of curious about that. I've been spending a lot of time in that space, just playing around. I don't have like a clear thing.

Do you think that you'd start a business in that space?

I think I just want to start more of a hobby that becomes a business, if that eventually happens.

What's the hobby? What would the first iteration of the hobby be, other than learning?

That's it. I was talking to my friend Dan Andrews from Tropical MBA, and he was saying you need to make a lot of waste. You need to be in the workshop cutting, and there's wood everywhere, and there's dust everywhere. And so I think some of that is just being outside or I've been cooking a lot. I'm looking up a lot of recipes and like baking and just doing random shit. And the business for the finance one, I don't know yet. I just keep exploring the problems I'm having and I don't like the fees. I don't know. I want access to certain things. Like I don't like interviewing people. I don't know about you, but hiring to me is like the, lately it's such a hard thing to do. And so I think there's just finding a bookkeeper. I had a meeting with an accountant today, but I canceled it cause I didn't want to do it. Finding a tax person. There's just these things that feel like should have been solved at this point. This is a question I hate when people ask, but I want to know your answer is like, what keeps you hungry right now?

I enjoy it. Like, I enjoy working hard. I enjoy having a team. After I sold the company, I took 6 months off and I got really lonely. And so it was really fun to have a business partner who could be in the trenches with me. I found that to be exciting. I enjoy creating jobs. It feels good to like spot undervalued talent and to pay them money and watch them grow. I have a goal to have at least $100 million by the age of 40. That's an exciting goal.

How old are you now?

35.

Can I just give you like $50 mil and call it a day then? What are you gonna— all right, I'll give you $50. Let's just—

I'm not gonna do anything different. It's just like a fun goal.

No, I think that's important.

Yeah, I'm gonna get there, but it just seems like an exciting goal. But like, I like what I do. Like, I am a very passionate person. I'm an enthusiast. Everything that I do, I'm an enthusiast of. Like, I'm into history and I'm an enthusiast of history and I like to go to museums. Just, I get excited very easily.

You're curious.

Yeah, but I have fun doing it. I legitimately enjoy doing stuff. I have this website called copythat.com and I made it 4 or 3 years ago and it makes $10,000 to $40,000 a month. And that money is not meaningful, but I love working on it. Like I work on it by myself and I get so much joy doing it.

One of the things I admire and I love about you is you like start these businesses super quick. You're like, I think one of the best blueprints of how you've been able to launch really interesting businesses.

Well, thank you.

And so you started Hamptons 'cause you wanted to connect with other people and then you grew it to like, you know, an 8-figure business. Really impressive. What's it like to be back in the day-to-day of running it? And then what are you excited about?

Well, I have a journal that I write in every day and I wrote, I'm so excited to be doing this. This is so wild. And I think after 6 months it might be like, all right, this is hard. But right now I feel like alive. It feels fantastic. Most companies don't have this until some amount of years in where it's like, all right, I have money. I have a good team. Like we have stability. Let's get after it and wreck all this in order to create something even larger. So what we're doing with Hamstead is basically we have well over 1,000 members, maybe thousands of members, and a great company. But when I launched the business, if you're part of YPO, it's a YPO competitor. We have people all over America meeting digitally once a month. So you have an 8-person core group who you meet with monthly. We're pivoting the whole business to be in real life. And what I am most excited about is in 5 or 10 years, I see a world where we have tens of thousands of members meeting in real life and we have local chapters and it becomes this massive thing where all over the world there's a Hampton chapter in your local town. And I think that's awesome because the majority of new job creation in America happens from new companies. And if I can get, let's say, 10,000 members And on average, each member has 100 employees. That's 100,000 people whose occupation and salary relies on a thing that my business has just a small influence over. And if I could make every company just 10% better, we're talking about 10,000 new jobs that we are like indirectly responsible for. And it's kind of exciting to think like some shithead in my house built this thing And it's now like meaningfully impacting the economy. And that's like crazy to me to think that like we had this idea and now Hampton's an institution where businesses around the world go to their local chapter and they rely on this. That's exciting to me. So that's what I'm really excited about.

Remember in the beginning where we were chatting, you said, oh, I don't know how I'm going to convince people. Like I was convinced right there.

It's awesome.

But I think that's what people are looking for is excitement about a future.

So this is like an easy pitch because when you run a company, you're lonely. Like, I never have done a lot of the things that I'm having to do. I'm in my 30s. A lot of people are in their 20s or 40s and you have no idea what you're doing. And I can't go to my employees and be like, dude, I'm lost. Tell me what to do because they need me to be strong. I can't go to my spouse all the time because they don't know anything about my work. And yeah, I have hundreds of people who are looking towards me for the answers, where am I going to turn to? I can't Google like, what's it like to be 32 years old and worth $40 million? And how do I talk to my spouse about getting a prenup? Because there's literally only like 10,000 or 20,000 people in the world that fit that category, and they're not talking about it on the internet. Like, there's literally no place on earth to get this information. And I hope that we could be that place to get that information. And I think that's like really cool. It's almost like being a miniature Illuminati, and that's exciting to me.

Stuff, you started it really quickly. What was the problem you identified and how did you validate it?

Basically, my partner Joe and I wanted a company to work together on. Him and I, he previously had a company that was doing hundreds of millions in revenue. You might know him actually, Joe Spicer. He, uh, had an ad tech company and we like shared everything with each other and we're like, this is like pretty life-changing that you and I have gotten this close on the internet. Let's do this for other people. And so I tweeted out, actually, I'm hosting a dinner for other founders. In New York City. Let me know if you want to join. You have to have at least $3 million a year in revenue. And I got 300 people to sign up to that form. I called all of them and I'm like, look, I didn't actually want to post about this publicly, but I'm not actually hosting a dinner. I could host a dinner, but I'm starting this thing called Hampton. Here's what it does. Do you want to join? And they're like, maybe. And I go, okay, cool. I'll email you afterwards and let you know all the other 15 people that I talked to today. And I sent an email afterwards and I said, here's the 15 people that I'm going to get to join this group. Are you in? Eventually I'm going to charge $12,000 a year for it, but right now I'm going to charge $5,000 just to get people started. If at any point you think it's lame, just tell me, I'll give you a refund and you're going to meet once a month and it's going to start in 4 weeks. Are you in or you out? I sent them a Stripe link and we did that and we got $1 million in sales doing that. And I did not have a website. There was no website. There was a landing page at like hampton.squarespace.com that hosted the Stripe page. And collected people's email. That's it. We had $1 million in the bank before there was a website.

There was demand.

What's your take on businesses having podcasts? Because I noticed you launched the MoneyWise podcast as a part of Hampton.

Because to build a company, you need distribution. You need a place where people hear about your product. And I know how to grow podcasts. And so we started MoneyWise. MoneyWise is a podcast where high net worth people, so people worth at least $30 million, come on and either anonymously or sometimes they'll use their real identity they share their finances, which is like the easiest podcast on earth to grow. 'Cause that's like, who's willing to do that? And so we actually get most of our customers from MoneyWise.

Do you think more businesses should start podcasts?

No, they shouldn't. They should not. It's really hard to grow. So you should only start a podcast if you already have a channel. Starting a podcast and growing it from scratch is really, really hard. But if you have an email list, if you have a social following, if you have a following somewhere else, and you launch a podcast, it's way easier.

Coming back to running Hamptons, what was different being on the outside of Hampton versus being on the inside running the day-to-day?

The outside, I complained all the time about something that I disliked and I just expected that it would get done perfectly. Being on the inside, I complain about something and then I realize how hard it is to actually make anything come to fruition and it's like, oh, this is really hard. What was it that I complained about? I complained about everything.

You know, as my mom would say, Sam, you're just making observations of improvements.

I would make observations like crazy and I would just expect it to get done. Working with people is hard to have personalities. You forget that you're like, just get this done. Like I can just log in and do this. And then you realize that you can't log in and do everything and you need other people to do it. And you're, you know, someone wants a raise, someone has a sick spouse. Or you don't know, but turns out they're pregnant. And like dealing with all those types of personal issues is what makes business hard, not pretty much anything else.

It's been interesting to go back to the shed and then just kind of see what's like coming out. It honestly is just open space of doing nothing and kind of enjoying it weirdly.

What's going to be really cool is your first YouTube video out after taking a break. I'm curious what the traction is going to be like. Your YouTube page you had over a million subscribers, right? Yeah. Does a page just die? Because a lot of these creators, myself included, like right now I'm killing it as a creator number-wise, and I'm like, I can't kill it for forever. Some people have done well for a long time, but not everyone's Joe Rogan. Like a lot of people are Adam Carolla where they— or Mark Maron where they got big and they just fade away. Or what happens if you want to like quit? It's like, I don't wanna work for 3 months. Does your fee just completely go to shit? Is it like starting from scratch?

Two things are, one, I feel more self-conscious if I'm honest about putting out another video. Like I've had some stuff that I was like, I wanna make a video and put it out, but I'm like, ah, I don't know. Is it good enough for the channel now that here's the standard? Do I wanna put out videos in general? Then I second guess myself.

I think that the first way that you're thinking is the reason why channels suck. I was writing an email to someone today and they were like, the hustle bootstrapped and you guys were profitable often. What was the secret? And I go, the secret is to act like I'm a Korean who owns a convenience store. I was like, there's this convenience store down the street from my house owned by this Korean immigrant. And like when I walk into the store, he greets me. He goes, hello Sam, how are you? It's great to see you. Would you like the usual? I see the wife come from Costco with all of the supplies that she went and got. He gives me free stuff every once in a while because he knows that I'm a good customer. And he doesn't ask himself, does this scale? He doesn't ask himself, what process should I go and create? He just says, I have to pay my mortgage and I have to get customers and nothing else matters. That's all he thinks of. And so he thinks, how am I going to make my customers come back every single day? I'm going to smile. I'm going to make sure I've got tons of merchandise for them. That's all he thinks about. He doesn't think about, if I get too big, is this okay for me to put out? He just thinks, I just have to do it. So I just think that you should treat your YouTube channel like a Korean store. Like you're the owner of a store a little bit and you're like, dude, I'm just going to like do whatever. You just have to act like you're small, no matter how big you are.

I like the analogy for the Korean person. I love my Korean people out there, by the way. Kimchi, I love. Korea, I love. Shout out to that.

Dude, all of our friends are either Asians or Jewish folks or Indians. Like I only hang out with 3 people. It's Asian, Jews, or Indians.

Yeah, there's probably a little bit of timid, but it's also more of just like what I actually want to do. What am I doing when no one's watching? What am I doing if no one cares?

You're definitely creating content.

But I think it's like, how do I do that for myself? And I think that's what I'm tinkering around where, you know, I think a lot of the content was created because I knew it was going to be popular.

What I'm saying is in terms of the numbers, our RSS feed, so that's like the Spotify, iTunes, whatever, like their numbers are up and to the right. And our YouTube numbers are pretty big. So like last year we had 100 million people download or watch the podcast. And so that's like a lot of people. And I get paid on downloads and I'm getting paid a lot right now. So that's how I know I'm killing it. Now, I don't like love creating content all the time. So on one hand you could say I'm not killing it, but your best content is the stuff that you do with old people. That shit is so good. And I know those videos, if I had to guess, they're the most fun.

Oh, those are so fun.

You also have this video where you've met this guy on his private jet or something, and he was like a commodities trader. And then you have this other guy where you hung out with this Hispanic and he was like a trader and he was in Dallas or Houston.

He's a good guy too. I like that guy, Rafa.

Dude, that was an amazing video. I think you met him like on the racetrack or something like that. Those videos are so good. The ones where you would knock on people's homes, I hated because I'm like, dude, Noah, you're more successful than any of these people whose door you're knocking on.

I, I think I'm just tinkering still with that stuff. And I like making content. I like marketing. I love marketing. I like promoting. I like who I get to connect with. The YouTube channel's, it's just taking a break for now.

You say you would bring back okdork.com and do more written content because your written stuff was really good.

I'm working on it. I think that's kind of some of the areas, like. There's two kind of concepts I'm like really excited about lately, which is this Dominance Friction article by Dan Shipper. Such a banger. And he just talks about like customer surplus.

No, I've not read that.

Highly recommend that. And then the other article that I've liked is a firstround.com article about urgency. So I think that's kind of what I'm thinking with AppSumo and just in general, but like, how do you have more urgency and get people to feel urgent? Because you don't, you can't have urgency forever, but you and me, I think naturally do.

Yeah. You should watch the documentary on HBO about Ted Turner. It's pretty new. Ted Turner is one of my heroes. He was a very tormented individual. Ted Turner created CNN. I think he had bipolar, so he like was up and down with his moods. But a lot of people don't know this, CNN started as a billboard company. They were a small billboard company that Ted's father started in Atlanta, and they owned just billboards. It was probably the equivalent of like a $15 million a year billboard company. So not huge, not small. And he took over when his father killed himself. And he was like, I'm going to make this company huge. But he would do small things. Like he would go, you guys, we're going to go get this a big account, but I got to go call the advertiser from a payphone because I think the competitors have tapped our cell phone or tapped our office line. And he would like create this like us versus them mentality by doing all these crazy stuff. Like he would like lie and be like, the bank is calling our loans. We're going to get destroyed if we don't do X, Y, and Z when like the company was doing fine. And it was a really cool way to create this urgency.

It's an interesting thought. But I think right now I've only started finally getting into the routine of I have time to do nothing.

It feels good, right?

It's been a while and you know, and also I don't feel the urgency to, to create a business personally.

By the way, neither do I. I think it's normal to go through like an unambitious season until your children are like 5, and then when they go to school, you're like, all right, I want them to be proud of me, so I'm gonna get after it. Whereas right now you just want to spend time with her, right? And so I think that that will go away once she goes away to school a little bit.

Yeah, I think that's why I wonder about my hunger. Like, when people ask about motivation, I think motivated people are motivated. Everyone's motivated for something, like food, porn, movies, whatever. No, but I think a lot of people like Amir, it's hard to stop us. But I also am happy not needing to go and like try to make more money and being satisfied with where I'm at. It's like It's a nice moment.

Dude, it feels great. So funny, you're a couple years older than me and you're a little bit further along on the business journey and I've always admired you, but we got lucky in that our fatherhood has synced up and I think I'm 6 months ahead of you on that. But it's funny that we are feeling the, all the similar same emotions towards our spouses, towards our career, and it's, that's kind of cool.

Yeah, the fatherhood part and like happy wife, happy life. I used to think that was such bullshit. But I was single at the time. Like my wife being happy really makes everything, dude. And then the baby part, I think it's just readjusting to a new lifestyle. I was telling someone the story when I was at Facebook, we had 40-year-olds and I remember looking at them and being like, you guys are so weak. You're so weak. I can't believe you leave here at 5. Like, I'll leave here whenever it's finished. They were working more productively.

You had 40-year-olds at Facebook when it was like 50 people? Yeah.

Yeah. A lot of the guys were from Yahoo, actually. I don't know if people know that. A lot of the hires were from Yahoo.

Did they stick around?

The 20-year-olds that were with me are now the C-suite. The 40-year-olds, I don't think any of them stuck around. But the point being though is that like now that I'm 40, I look at the 20-year-olds who are like, yeah, we're sleeping in our apartment and we're working all night and we just raised money. And I'm like, I was like, oh yeah, me and my wife went to the Gucci store. I don't even wear that shit. I told the Gucci person, I was like, can you take off half a G and charge me half? Take off one of the Gs. I guess there's two Gs in Gucci. I think when you get to different phases, you understand the era that you're in or the decade that you're in. Here, final question. So what are they, lightning rounds? I want you to finish this line. I was thinking about it this morning with my baby. Sam Parr is—

Sam Parr's a really good-ass family man and a very loyal friend.

Cool. I know you read a lot. What are the top 3 that everyone should be reading?

The book that changed my life actually this year that came from you. Replay, probably one of the best books I've ever read. So Replay was up there. Another book is by Bill O'Reilly. It's called Confronting the Presidents, and he spends about 10 pages talking about each president and what they did and if it was interesting or not and what the impacts were. That was a great book. Something like half of the presidents, their children died before they went into office, which is like pretty crazy. Another takeaway is that like you can be the president of America, which is like one of the most powerful positions on earth, and yet like I totally have forgotten all about you. A year later. There's presidents that you don't even know. And then a final book that I read, Competitor, about Timothy McVeigh, was a real page-turner. I'm rereading American Kingpin about Ross Ulbricht. That was, that's an amazing book. But let's see, one that's a little bit off the wall. Five Decembers.

Oh, that was so good. So excellent. What was the other one that you recommend? Five Decembers is excellent.

Oh, the John Wilkes Booth story. Oh my God. The 12-day manhunt. It's such a good book.

Dude, such a banger. That was such a good one.

Yeah, man. If you want another good one, there's one by Stephen King. It's a historical fiction. It's an alternative history book. It's about like a guy who goes back in time and prevents the JFK assassination. In my opinion, it's the greatest Stephen King book. 11/22/63.

Oh dude, this looks good. It's not found on the list. Yeah, I, dude, it's funny.

I'm reading that The Confederacy of Dunces and it's like, I set that down after 50 pages. Like Tucker Max said it was the funniest book he ever read, but it didn't land with me.

I'm giving it a shot. It's just like, when do you read? I read in bed lately. That's like the only time I'm reading.

At night between 10 and midnight.

Did you read Brain Rules for Baby? This has been a good one.

No, that one's, uh, pretty damn good.

It's like good stories, real data about parenting. One of the things I took away today was just you should be talking a lot of words to your kid, especially early on. I'm enjoying it. I thought it was pretty damn good.

All right. I just put that on my list.

I told you, did you read Cost of These Dreams?

What's that one?

It's, it's like crazy stories about athletes.

Oh, this looks sick. And it has a 4.3 on Goodreads, which means in my opinion, it's good. Dude, the book is insane.

It's like Michael Jordan post-retirement, Messi, but his, it talks about like Messi and like his hometown and how like they don't even know him in his hometown in Argentina because he left to Barcelona really young. The writer, his other books are on my list. So final thing in Sam's book, when they write your biography, what do you want them to cover?

How do you want it to be?

Ah, man. Hopefully everything that I've done so far is just like a very short chapter. So I don't know, it's still being written. Quitting alcohol was like a pretty big deal to me. So I hope that's like part of it, but I hope that everything that I've done so far is just a very small footnote.

Any idea what you'd want in chapter 2?

Lately I've been interested in politics. I think that like when I think about what it means to run for government, I think that it seems pretty achievable. Like I'm, I used to think that government was like impossible. And then I realized, oh, you don't need that many votes. And I know how to like do marketing. I think I could maybe do something here, but the downside is that I don't want my life to be dissected because I've said a lot of dumb stuff before and I've changed a lot as a person.

Dude, that sounds rad.

But I think running for Senate or something like that is very doable.

Dude, I'd vote for you.

I think that could be fun.

And then do you say your daughter's name publicly?

Uh, Naomi. Yeah.

What has Naomi taught you? And that's our final dun-dun.

Like the easy one is that like not a lot of the stuff that I previously cared about is really that important. Like just like seeing her smile and being present for her brings me more joy than most everything else regarding my career. I think she's taught me that I want to make her proud, I think are similar where it feels as though post-baby, we're trying to act like a more stand-up person, like a more ethical, not that we were unethical before, but like we're trying to live in a way that I think our children can look up to us. I'm a bit surprised at how much that has impacted me. Just trying to be an example, even though they're too young to know. Yeah.

Before she was born, I was like, oh, what would my daughter think of doing that? And I was like, one, she's like a baby. She wouldn't think anything. But I think your comment though, which is good, is just the role model. What are you showing her?

If she knew I did this, would that make me proud? Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's nice.

That is a wrap.

I hope you love the episode as much as we did making it for you.

Go check out my many episodes with Sam Parr. You can just search it on your podcast app or it's episode 292 in this feed. Also Sam on Twitter and Instagram, it's @thesamparr and he's got a lot of different businesses. Tryrosedale.com for self-improvement, joinhampton.com, which is a networking group, copythat.com, which is a copywriting course he teaches, samslist.co to find an accountant, and you can check out his podcast, My First Million and MoneyWise. Finally, special thanks to the team. It's only Jay Yang and Jason Sanderson, my Jay boys, for keeping the show wheels spinning each month and doing the newsletter. Have a perfecto day. What's your favorite sparkling water? I've been drinking Spindrift. Shout out to my Spindrift boys.