This 20 Year Old makes $3.6M/Year interviewing strangers

I got the best opener. May I meet you, Sam Parr?

Oh my God.

Did you see, did you see this? The may I meet you thing?

I did see the context, but I saw the quote. Bill Ackman said, this is how you meet women. May I meet you? Is that right?

Yeah. Oh dude, this is, we're doing a deep dive by the way. This is not a, this is not a casual reference. I'm going all, this is my first topic. Okay.

So tell me about it.

What happened? The great Bill Ackman. We won't just call him Bill Ackman. He's going to be called the Great Bill Ackman. Not only has he proven to be a prolific billionaire investor, he's also just the best at Twitter because he uses it all wrong. It's like, uh, have you seen how Magic Johnson uses Twitter?

No.

All right. So Magic Johnson, the great basketball player, does not know how to use Twitter. So he just tweets. The most obvious thing. So it'll be like, Lakers playing the Celtics tonight. Whoever scores more points tonight's gonna take it home. And it's like, what? Yeah, that's how all games work. Whoever scores more points wins. Or he'll be like, they're losing now. If this stays this way, they'll lose the game. But he's not joking. He's been doing this for like 7 years.

And so Bill Ackman, if you don't know, originally famous for being a controversial and prolific investor, Yeah, he basically owns this company called Pershing Square Management.

He's an activist investor. So what he would do is he would buy stakes in companies that, you know, he either really believed in, that he thought were undervalued. But he's also an activist in that if he sees sort of corporate wrongdoing or he thinks a company has had some sort of, you know, malfeasance, then he will come out and talk about it while taking a big short position against it. And so he did that with Herbalife because he's like, this is an MLM and This is not right the way that they do their MLM. And he got kind of burned on that one. But that's what he does. Okay. So he's a billionaire activist investor. Awesome. Whatever. Great, great story. I want to have him on the podcast. His life story and his approach to investing is pretty legendary.

Yeah, he's got one of these stories, I think, where he was like successful in his Harvard dorm investing, like that type of thing.

I think he's also like hit bottom many times and like bounced back. Okay, so he So he said, I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting. In other words, online culture has destroyed their ability to spontaneously meet strangers. I'm reading this. I say, yeah, true. I'm glad you're speaking on this. Nodding head, nodding head, nodding head. So he says, as such, I thought I'd share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone.

Don't go there. That's when it stops.

That's when you start thinking, oh. Now the head nod went from put everything I was doing down. What is he about to do? It's like when I saw like like that dude from Red Bull jump out of the space station and skydive. I was like, oh my God, he's talking about pickup lines he used in his youth. Let's hear this. He goes, I would ask, may I meet you? Maybe I got to tell him that. May I meet you? I don't know. I don't know how you say this, but may I meet you before engaging further in conversation? I almost never got a no.

Oh my God.

That's— this inevitably opened up the way for a further conversation. It got really— I got to meet a lot of really interesting people this way. He goes, I think it's the effectiveness of proper grammar and politeness. Oh my God, you might try. And yes, this will also work for women seeking men as well as same-sex interactions. This is versatile. Just my two cents from a happily married guy about our next generation. So this thing goes wild.

May I meet you? You know, you know what I told my wife when I saw her? I picked her up in real life. I said, what's the difference between a chickpea and a lentil? I don't pay $500 to have a lentil on my face. I made a joke about peeing on my face and it worked. I said, thank God I didn't say, may I meet you?

Yeah, actually, I don't think we're allowed to make fun of this given what you did to actually meet your wife.

If a girl will reply to, may I meet you? I think that she's not someone I want to go out with, which I'm just joking, by the way, a little bit. I do think that you can walk up to a girl and be like, What's going on? Like, do you want to hang out sometime? Like, I do think that like casual, like a straightforward and casual can crush it. But may I Tinder meet you?

Tinder with the may I meet you billboard. Love it. There's people who are just going around doing may I meet you.

Dude, wait, wait, wait, that video, I already know. It's just walking up to hot girls like, man, may I meet you?

So people are just going crazy with this may I meet you thing, and it got me thinking. Number 1, Bill Ackman's the best. Number 2, do you think that this actually would work? And number 3, this is totally improvised, the top 5 MFM formal pickup lines in addition to that. So we're going to go there in a second. But first, what do you think of this?

Okay. May I meet you? Like, I have a joke that I say— not a joke— when I— when it comes to flirting, I think as long as the girl laughs, you could pretty much say anything. And so like you can kind of get away with anything. So if you say it in a certain way, yeah, it could work. But that's— may I meet you is probably not the best, right?

Do you think if you were 22 or 23 and you read this, you're a big Bill Ackman guy, you're on Twitter all the time, do you think you would have laughed and then secretly that Friday gone out and done it?

No, I would not have used this line. Would you have?

I probably would have. So desperate. Beggars can't be choosers, try everything. I read the book The Game, and then for like 5 years my opening line to anybody I saw at a party was, uh, hey, I need you guys to help me settle this argument I'm having with my friend.

How many oceans are there, 5 or 7?

Oh, that'd be better. We had this whole elaborate story about an ex-girlfriend, and then, uh, it was like too much. And then if it was just loud, if it was loud in the bar or the club or whatever, They were just like, what? And then I was like, I'm telling— I'm giving the background of a story first.

No, I'm just, I'm just peacocking. That's the— it's— I'm just trying to attract you.

All right, Sam. So I'm going to take a second here. I'm going to write some of our own pickup lines because why is Bill Ackman the only one who can give young men this sort of advice? I think we too should steer the next generation. So here we go. You want to take a second? Let's, let's write down a few.

Sean, I can't— there's not a chance that I can come up with great pickup lines. First of all, I've been married for like 12 years. So.

All right, I will give you 3 then if you can't give me any. All right, ready? I just wrote one down. How about this? This is actually a close cousin to may I meet you. May I take your jacket? So now, first, she's already undressing. Second, you're in. She's not going to say no, right? She's very kind of you to do a generous act. She will think you work there and that you're the staff. So now you just have to bridge that gap. But you're The hardest part is done. You're into the conversation now. She's going to say yes and start what we call in sales as the yes ladder. So I like that one. I think that one's pretty good. Another one. Are you cold? I found that women are always cold. Uh, there's, there's a cold species. And so I just think you have a good chance of them being like, you know what? Yeah, I am cold. You see me, you understand me. And then from there you can maybe, you may have to give the jacket from the previous girl that you talked to and give it to this girl.

I can't believe you have children. I can't believe that someone let you do that.

I had a big advantage, which was my wife was looking for a guy like me. I always hit the lottery. She was like— I was like, what? You— your type is me? That's insane. Are you crazy? Is there something wrong with you?

For some reason, at my company Hampton, we have 20 or 25 employees. 20 of them are women. We have just— for men are getting left behind, as Scott Galloway says. I don't know, something about it. And so I overhear all these conversations that they have. They brag about their boyfriends being uglier than them. Did you know that women do this?

They brag about it?

Like, they want to date someone who's uglier than them. Is that the craziest thing you've ever heard of?

That doesn't even make sense. So what is the— because it implies something else, or is there more to the story, or that's the fact?

Because they want to be the hot one in the relationship.

But have you—

you've never seen this, Sean, that women like— they want to be the hot one.

No, but it explains so much.

Yeah, same. What's your third one?

Okay, my third one is, hey, I'm Bill Ackman. I'm the billionaire founder of Pershing Square. Nice to meet you. That one can work too. That would want to work, but it needs some pre-work.

That's actually— this actually makes a ton of sense. I'm pretty sure he was like worth $10 million when he was like 27 years old. And so here, Bill Ackman— and also, he's like 6'9", by the way. Do you know this about Bill Ackman?

He's 6'3".

Yeah, yeah.

So they were like, oh, you're a handsome 6'3" rich guy also.

You may, you may see me again. So yeah, this is not like the best person to get advice from.

He might be on to something though, because you know what show women love? Bridgerton. And they love the formality of Bridgerton. So maybe he's tapped into this, like, secret desire that they have to just, like, be incredibly formal or be treated like a princess.

Dude, I used to think that as a kid, but I looked like Napoleon Dynamite whenever I tried to, like, be proper. Like, it was as if I was like, uh, it just never worked, okay? Like, when you have braces and you have afro, like, uh, Sam Parr high school yearbook photo, like, hello, Miss Thing. Like, it, like, like, it never worked, okay? It never worked. Frankly, nothing really worked. So who am I to say? But no, that never worked.

All right.

So a lot of people will talk about how you need $1 million and 3 years of experience to start a business. Nonsense. If you listen to at least one episode on this podcast, you know, that is completely not true. My last company, The Hustle, we grew it to something like $17 or $18 million in revenue. I started it with like $300. My current company, Hampton, does over $10 million in revenue. Started it with actually no money, maybe $29. Or something like that. Nothing. And so you don't actually need investors to start a company. You don't need a fancy business plan, but what you do need is systems that actually work. And so my old company, The Hustle, they put together 5 proven business models that you could start right now today with under $1,000. These are models that if you do it correctly, it can make money this week. You can get it right now. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description now. Back to the show. Let me tell you about something. Let me, uh, I have two things I want to get your opinion on and just riff on. The first, let's do, uh, let's do— all right, this one's short. Let's do this guy. Okay, so have you heard of this thing called the, uh, go to the203media.com?

Oh, oh, I've seen this.

So it starts with— so first of all, if you've ever been on TikTok, you see these videos where it's like a young guy interviewing other like good-looking people, like at Washington Square Park and asking them like what they think of this deodorant. Or like, you take a bite of this brand's chocolate and like, what do you think? And it's like a review, but it's supposed to look organic, whatever. This guy named Josh, he started working with Oliver at Tabbs Chocolate. You know, Tabbs Chocolate?

Yeah.

Yeah. Is and was a popular product. So this guy Oliver, who was like a 20-year-old entrepreneur, 22-year-old entrepreneur at the time, hired this other guy named Josh, who at the time I think was only 19. And he's like, hey, I'm going to pay you money to go to Washington Square Park, which is a popular park here in New York City. And I want you to interview people about my chocolate and like get good clips that are testimonials for TikTok, whatever. And it worked. He killed it. So eventually Josh is like, I should do this for other people. So at the age of like 19 or 20, he drops out of Syracuse University and he starts doing this for other people. And, uh, he's now making $300,000 a month in revenue doing this. So he's got something like 46 employees, which are a lot of freelancers. And he has, uh, he goes to parks in New York City, uh, LA and Miami interviewing people. And he tells a story about how he started, but in, um, actually the Wall Street Journal wrote about him and he's like, I just would DM founders on Twitter constantly. And I would show them these videos that I'm doing and I would do free work just to get like some videos that maybe look more legit. And he starts filming these videos and now he's killing it. He's building this business and I'm not sure if this business is going to be his like big thing. Who knows how like huge this could be, but anyone who's bold enough to go to one of these parks and walk up to someone at the age of 20 and build a company doing $3 million a year in revenue, this kid's going to be it. Like, it's— this is the guy.

We talked about how door-to-door sales is like this weird breeding ground of incredible entrepreneurs. Also, you know, why Mormons are so successful. Like, well, one of the things they have to do is their mission where you for 2 years you block out the world, you wake up every day, you go knock on doors and you try to spread the gospel about something you believe in. And like, that also happens to be incredible training for entrepreneurship and sales. And this is the same sort of thing. Not only is the agency kind of working because, well, he took a format that works on social, which is a street interview, but no founder really wants to go do this. This is like, you know, extremely exhausting to go do. And you're basically putting yourself out there for rejection and humiliation along the way. And he just productized that. It was like, let me productize this one ad format. And so that's kind of genius. When he does this, I don't know if you see, like, he basically walks like 30,000 to 50,000 steps a day when he's doing this. Like, he puts his, like, uh, you know, Apple Health tracker or whatever. And it's like, yeah, he's just, I'm just walking around the entire day. I was walking like, whatever, 10 miles a day doing these street interviews. It's pretty incredible hustle.

So first of all, just being a college kid and doing this, I bet you, I don't know for what the numbers were, but I bet you just him, he was probably could have potentially have been making $300,000 a year doing this. Yeah. And there's a skill here, but it's honestly mostly boldness and it's mostly just like getting after it. Like pretty much anyone could do this, but no one will do it, right? Someone's paying him that money because they're like, I'm too embarrassed to go talk to a stranger in the park and film this. This feels stupid. But then he's operationalized it. In fact, our friend, I originally heard about him because Ramon, he was— Ramon was like, I'm in New York City because I paid this kid some, he said the money, some absurd amount of money to like do these things. And I was like, what? He goes, yes, man. I just gave this kid tens of thousands of dollars and he's just walking up to strangers. And I'm like, that's so interesting that that's how scared we are, which me too. I don't want to do it.

Dude, I saw this guy's Twitter feed and I just called him because I was like, wow. I just DM'd him. I was like, what's your number? And then we call. I called him because I was like, you're—

May I meet you?

You are. Yeah. May I meet you, sir? And it totally worked, by the way. I think he listens to the pod, so I'm glad we get to shout him out now. He's, he's a real hustler, man. And I think this is such a cool, like, like I have this phrase that sounds a little condescending and I don't mean it that way at all. In fact, I'm— I think this is like one of the best things you could do, which is what I call like a white belt business, like a starter business. So it's like basically what's, what's a great first business to start? Because your first business probably going to be one of your worst businesses. You're going to be at your worst because you're just getting into the game. You're not your best yet. And you maybe don't have the network, the capital, the skills, or the knowledge of what you— the big things you want to go do in life. That's fine. Just get in the game. And this is one of the best examples of a just get in the game business that he's doing this cool in New York. Guess what? There could be— after listening to this podcast, if you're, you know, I don't know, between the ages of like 18 and 25 and you're like, oh man, I just want to be successful so bad. I'm willing to work. I'm a hard worker. And you listen and nothing's working for you yet. If you listen to this and you don't go do this, you're basically— I'm calling your bluff then, right? Because this is a business that's available to anybody. You could be in Miami doing this. You could be in Los Angeles doing this. You can be in pretty much any city do this. Hell, you could be in the burbs doing this and it doesn't really matter. In fact, that could be your shtick is that it's like you go to Costco and you talk to ordinary people type of, type of deal.

Did you see this kid who has this page called The School of Hard Knocks?

Oh, this podcaster who's getting 5,000 times more views than us. Yeah, I saw that kid.

He's not a podcaster. Well, it started like man on the street, like short Instagram stuff. Now he's turned it into like a real thing.

The funny thing is it is a podcast. It's just so short, right? Like he does the same thing. He's like, oh, like I talk to successful people, I hold the mic and then I ask a question, then they answer. It's an interview. It's a pod— it could be considered a podcast. But you're right. Like he— what he did was he shrunk it into first, a more authentic format, catching, bumping, bumping into somebody on the street. But at this point, he's not bumping into Shaq and—

dude, he had Tom Cruise on.

Tom Cruise on this. Yeah, it's like those guys see his content, they follow, he sets it up where he can bump into them. But he's real young. I think that guy's, I don't know, like, he's got the F-boy, he's got the broccoli haircut. Like, he looks— he's got to be like by law under the age of 27 if you have that. So I think, uh, it's kind of amazing. It's this 1-minute compilation where he just cuts up quick question and answer with a star on the street and it just works great. All right.

I want to show you one more thing. So I sent you the article in The Wall Street Journal. So check this out. So in 1981, Warner was, you know, the big cable company or entertainment company, and they decided to create a music channel where they were basically just going to be music videos and it was going to be called MTV. And so they had a group of like 4 or 5 basically like punk rock slash hippie guys who they said you're in charge, figure this out. And one of the guys, the guy's name was Tom Freston. And Tom Freston had this amazing article about him in The Wall Street Journal the other day. And I want to get your take on this. But basically he tells the story of like founding MTV and MTV. You know, you and I were raised with it, but the people who are in their 18, 19, 21 years old now, the MTV they know, they know now is not what it used to be. So what it used to be was basically music, music videos, and then also cartoons and like some TV shows that was like Real World and things like that. Yeah, yeah. But eventually MTV, they became— they owned Nickelodeon and they owned Comedy Central. And so listen to like the things that this guy Tom, he was the head of the pro— he was in charge of programming. Listen to some of the shows.

This guy's a billionaire of the week, right?

Yeah. Listen, listen to— I think he's a billionaire. I don't know. But listen to some of the shows that he— that came because of him. Blue's Clues, Beavis and Butt-Head, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, SpongeBob, Daria, The Daily Show, Jackass, South Park, Crank Yankers, The Fairly OddParents, Chappelle's Show, The Last Airbender, The Colbert Report, Ren Stimpy, The Real World, Dora the Explorer, Rugrats.

I'm going to have a nostalgia seizure over here. You just saying those names, names I haven't heard, thoughts I haven't had.

And so it's like he— like this article goes really in deep. But there was one thing that really stuck out to me. So listen to this quote. So Tom, like, tells a story and he has like all these hilarious bits. So he was like, basically he was like, we were like the rejects. He was— he goes, the receptionist sold cocaine and the office had one clothing rule: no frontal nudity. Like, like he was— these guys were the real deal, man. But he's got this amazing line. So he says, he goes, I had this idea. I said, let's find the type of pot smoking guys in high school who sat in the back of the class that could draw well. And have some character living inside their heads like this crazy guy named Steve who made up SpongeBob. Let's get these guys who don't know anything about how to make a TV show or a series and school them. And we're going to crank these things out.

Dude, so good.

That's great, right? And the reason I thought that was interesting is because first of all, there was like 4 founders of MTV and like they are now like the mafia a little bit. Like one of them was Bob, Bob Pittman, who is the CEO of iHeartMedia. Another guy runs the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They're all like You know, big shots. But I thought it was interesting, this line, because in business, I think you and I at times have fallen in this trap, but I think we're actually better. And I think a lot of our listeners do this where they come up with an idea and they kind of like iterate their way like to this idea versus taking a stance and saying like, for example, I think Barstool has done— I don't particularly love Barstool's content, but I think they've done an excellent job of like planting their flag and saying, this is what we are and this is the bet we're making. Or Vice did a good job where they're like, we're youth culture and we're going to like give inexperienced guys cameras and send them to Africa and maybe they get something. Or Pixar saying, we think that computers and animation can tell stories just as good, if not better, than real-life actors. But the idea of like putting your— you're saying this is the bet, we're taking this bet. And even if it's a silly bet of saying we're going to give like potheads like jobs and like let them create content. But when you— when I look back at that, I think that's actually like brilliant and very romantic and very cool to like take a stance.

Yeah, that's— I feel like you did this with The Hustle. Um, I gotta give you some props here. When I think about who in my kind of group did this, I would say there's really two groups of people. One, Alex Tew and Michael Acton-Smith, and they were doing Calm. They had from the beginning this idea, this, this like a problem that they wanted to solve, which was like meditation is this thing that's incredibly good for you and so few people do it. And even when the initial results were like somewhat lukewarm and it was unclear what to do and investors didn't want to fund it, they did not iterate and pivot like crazy around into like other ideas like, oh, today we're a messaging app and tomorrow we're going to do delivery of, uh, weed and, you know, whatever else. Like they were like, no, we're going to do 50 different attempts to make meditation a thing because that's the thing we think is important and that's what we believe in. And so like, that's what we're going to do. So they did like, they launched this app called Do Nothing for 2 Minutes. It's like meditation in disguise, right? Like almost like a gimmick. It was an app where if you touched your phone in a 2-minute period, it would start over, like try again. And it would just play calming music, like waves crashing on a beach. And just for 2 minutes, you just couldn't touch your phone. You couldn't use it for anything. The next one they did was this app called Checky, which is, again, they did this viral app about like, how many times a day do you check your phone? So, right, like, we've heard of this idea of screen time. It's like, oh, you know, whatever. I can go to the settings app and find this. Checky would be like, hey, you don't— do you know you've checked your phone, like, you've unlocked the lock screen 398 times today? Like, you are the little rat in the maze who's addicted to the pellets, you know, like the cocaine pellets. You're pushing the button over and over again trying to see if you can get the prize out. And so they did many different versions of this. Ultimately, sleep stories was the thing that worked for them and helped them really accelerate growth. But it was the same. There's meditation at night instead of just during the day. And, and they did it. They pulled it off. And I just remember when it was so uncool and so lack of, like, lack of momentum, lack of investment traction, lack of sex appeal. There was no other comparable in the market that was like, we're just, we're doing what they're doing, but in our category, which is what entrepreneurs use to validate themselves. And they kept going. So I thought that was a plant your flag. And I thought you did too, where you were like, I'm betting on email.

Yeah.

And we're going to be independent. I was like, dude, Facebook videos right now going viral.

Snapchat just came out.

You got to do— start doing Snapchat. And like, I tried to dangle every shiny—

we didn't even have an Instagram handle. We didn't have an Instagram. I think when we sold, I don't think we had Instagram.

And you were just like, no, we're going to be— and you kept calling it a pirate ship. And I was like, brother, it's a newsletter. And you're like, no, I'm building a pirate ship.

I said, I'm building a pirate ship and every email subscriber I get is just a little bit more wind in my sails.

And I was like, why is he reciting poetry? And then I also kind of liked it. I was like, damn, I don't say cool stuff like that as a CEO. I should probably have lines like that. And, and then you had like a tattoo of a pirate ship on your thigh. And I was like, I don't know what's going on, but this guy—

Bold, fast, fun, baby. That's the, that's the male version of Live, Laugh, Love.

You wearing shorts right now? Pop that sucker out.

Well, I wear pants all the time now because I don't want people to see it.

Sold the company. Still got the tattoo though. Um, so yeah, I thought you did a great job of the plant your flag in the ground.

Let me tell you where I messed up. I messed up not— I messed up not believing a couple things. One, I messed up. Okay, so when people start something, most things don't work right away, even though whatever you see on our podcast and all these things, they don't, they don't work right away. The, the thing is, is can you deal with the pushback and stay the same? And that's really hard to do that every day. It was really hard for me to do that every day. But the second thing is underestimating how big something can get. I drastically underestimated how big we could get. So I think the year we sold, we did $12 million in revenue and I was like, I think I can get this to $50, $60, $70 million. And I was like, but looking back, I was like, this is foolish. So Morning Brew, our competitors who, they only sold part of the business, so they were able to keep running it. They're at $90 million in revenue. And I could give you other examples of people that are doing hundreds of millions of revenue. And so same with Barstool. If you say that to Barstool, if you look at them in like 2014, you're like, this company's gonna make hundreds of millions a year in revenue. You would say, that's insane. That can't happen. Same with Calm, a meditation app. It's gonna be a multi, multi-billion dollar thing. And I think the issue is you underestimate how big something can get because you don't realize that the TAM, once you have a really cool product, it can expand. And I think that that's really hard to see because the numbers don't say that, but you just have to have faith.

Right.

Yeah.

Everything takes longer than you think, but it can be bigger than you think. That's kind of the weird, like, rule of thumb for an entrepreneur. You think it's going to happen faster? It's not. Sorry. It's going to take way longer than you want and way longer than you think, way longer than you expect. But on the upside, you've probably underestimated yourself, even though you think you're being Mr. Ambitious.

Yeah, exactly. And I have this— I want to hear about your mistake, but let me tell you one quick thing. So the very first— okay, so before my company, The Hustle, before we were an email newsletter, we were an events business, whatever. And we had Tim Westergen. Tim Westergen is this guy who founded Pandora. Pandora, it doesn't get talked about enough nowadays, but I'm pretty sure it's still a multibillion-dollar revenue business. And at its heyday, it was, I think, worth tens of billions of dollars and is one of the early pioneers of the app on the iPhone. And Tim Westergen has this amazing story where basically he— it was the He told the story at my event and then I wrote about it on The Hustle. It was the very first article we ever published and it got like, it went viral. And the title of the article is, Here's How Pandora's Founder Convinced 50 Early Employees to Work for 2 Years Without Pay. Basically, the company started the music genome. And what he did was he raised $5 million and he convinced 50 to 100 musicians, struggling musicians, to come work for him. And he basically had a, I think, I think it was legitimately an Excel spreadsheet and he created 50 attributes for a song and they would sit all day listening to music and they would write the attributes in the spreadsheet. And eventually, after doing this for years, they had this massive database. But unfortunately it didn't find product-market fit. They just had this database, but they're not— they're like, what do we do with it? And so originally they had it in Best Buy where you can listen to a CD in Best Buy and be like, here's 10 other CDs that you could potentially buy that fit that CD, that song. But it wasn't really working. And so he ran out of money. And but he was like, this thing is magical. And he convinced his employees to continue working for him for, I think, like 18 months without pay. And someone in the crowd goes, what speech did you give on a weekly basis to convince these people to work for you? And he goes, yeah, I got the exact quote. He goes, man, it's hard. If I close my eyes though, I think I could figure it out. And he says, we all know that we have created here is very unique and it's solving a gigantic problem. No one on earth is going to do what we've done. And when you use this product, we all know how magical it is. It will find its home. Everyone on the planet loves music, and there's millions of musicians who produce great music and they can't find each other. When this thing finally finds its home, it's going to change culture. How many times in your life can you say that you've had a chance to do that? That's what this is about. Fucking A, right? How good is that?

That's almost a separate skill, which is you make everything bigger than it is. Elon is the master of this. So, you know, he'll— he doesn't just say, Hey, we're going to build a company that launches satellites. He's not even going to say we're going to build a company that launches, you know, the best rockets, reusable rockets. He's like, we're going to take humans from being a single planet species to a multiplanetary species, which is basically going to save the human race and all consciousness as we know it in the universe, because something will happen to the Earth at some point, and there's no plan if we don't do something. So he creates this incredible grand scale vision, sense of urgency and purpose around what he does.

But you can do that with anything.

Like he did it with when he got like a coworker pregnant and he was like, he was like, the biggest risk to civilization is underpopulation. You know, the population collapsed. We need to be having more children. And I was like, this is the Teflon Don. Like, how is he? How is he Judo Jirasshiki Neo in The Matrix away from these bullets that are coming at him for Impregnating this world.

He just rebranded, uh, cheating like, uh, aioli is tomato. Yeah.

He was like, it was the most noble cheat I'd ever heard of. I was like, this is incredible. How did he tie this to the collapse of population and civilization itself?

It was amazing. But you could do this for anything. Like, have you read the biographies or, uh, listen to the Founders Podcast on Patagonia or Dyson?

Sure. Haven't.

Okay. Well, do you know anything about Dyson?

Uh, I know that. Dyson's so hot right now. Every, uh, it's like the cool thing for a successful CEO to be into is like, you know who my hero is? Not, it's not Musk and Jobs. Dyson. It's the cool thing to say.

Dyson basically, uh, I think they do 3 things: vacuums, uh, hand dryers, like in, in restrooms, and blow dryers. So blowing and sucking, basically. That's not like inherently cool, but they're, why are they such a cool company? It's because the CEO has done such a good job of like grand, like making like, in my opinion, Dyson is the standard of excellence. And so when I think of like if I'm an employee wanting to work at Dyson, I'm like, vacuums? It's like, well, no, like it's excellence. Like we are going to make the best. And there is something very appealing about that. And so you don't have to be going to Mars, I think, to give one of these speeches. And by the way, any time you have more than 15 employees, your job is basically like 40% this, like, right? Like, and so you have to get good at this. And so I don't think you need this world-changing product to say like, this is cool. I mean, we're talking about Rugrats and fucking SpongeBob and we look back at it and it's dope, right? Like, it's like, how cool would it be to be part of that and changing culture?

Yeah. Yeah. I've really come to appreciate this, that everybody who's successful in life has just taken a simple idea very seriously, way more seriously than you would expect, way more seriously than was necessary, way more seriously than everybody else. And whether that's bringing cartoons to, you know, to TV sets around the country, or it's making a vacuum cleaner that's better than the last vacuum cleaner, better than any vacuum cleaner that sucks more than anyone else can suck in the world. Like, you know, like whatever it is, like, if that's your thing, you know, that's your thing. It kind of doesn't really matter what your thing is because your experience of it, it's going to consume your world.

Dude, one of our most beloved person is Nick Gray, who hosts cocktail parties.

2-hour cocktail parties. Yeah, he took it very seriously. He's like, I'm gonna write a book about how to host a dinner party. And it's like, are you sure? You need to— it's not an email? And he's like, no, it's a book, and it's a science, and it's an art, and I'm gonna master it. And that's why he's, you know, that's why he's fallen in love with it. That's why he's done such a good job with it. That's why he's— it's really opened up all these doors. It became much bigger than somebody would expect something like that to become. And so a lot of life is just picking a simple idea and taking it seriously. Of course, some ideas are a little bit more impactful or fulfilling than others. But I think the take it seriously— I think, you know, I spent so much of my life focusing on the pick an idea part, right? Pick a simple idea. And actually it was the take it seriously muscle that needed to be built better, right? That was the thing I was, I was weak at. And it didn't really matter what simple idea I picked if I couldn't— if I didn't learn how to take it seriously.

So you're writing this book series, uh, I'm trying to find the URL, onehourbooks.co. So Sean's talking, uh, is writing, um, a really cool series of books. So onehourbooks.co, go to your, go to his website, sign up. And you, your first one is on creativity. You should really Google MTV and Comedy Central and Nickelodeon in some of the early years because, um, I started going on this rabbit hole and I started reading about the guy named Steve. Um, I forget his last name, Steve, who started SpongeBob. And so this guy basically was a teacher, like a grade school teacher in San Francisco. Then he became a marine biologist, and then he quit doing that at the age of 28 or 29 and went to school for animation because he loved drawing comics in his free time. And he eventually, like, kind of worked his way up to Nickelodeon, and he worked on Rocko's Modern Life. And then from there he got in and he was able to pitch SpongeBob. And SpongeBob was like a silly show. It's almost like a show that our parents didn't want us to watch. A little bit because it was— there's something weird about it. Uh, but it wasn't inappropriate, but it was like silly. But his passion for marine biology and everything led to creating this. And I thought it was really beautiful. And something that I don't know what's going on with the world of creators on YouTube is this like fiction style content, or in particular animation, which I loved as a kid. And so I would love to see some of that stuff because a lot of the stuff on YouTube now, it doesn't talk about that. I mean, I don't think that that's like That's not really a thing, but I do think, do you think that there's room for that? Like, do you think that, like, do you know anything in that space or does this interest you? I know that our friend Dylan Jargon was trying to do something where he was doing comics and I actually thought it was pretty awesome.

We've met the guy who was doing this. Have you, do you remember The Amazing Digital Circus? Go to YouTube and look up The Amazing Digital Circus. The pilot, the first episode of this currently has 398 million views on YouTube.

Yes. Yeah. Okay. Of course.

You remember this?

Yes.

So this guy, Kevin, and his brother, they are based in Australia and they had like a passion for, uh, animation. They didn't really know what to do with it, but they just decided like, look, we're sitting in Australia. We're guys who've never done this before. The odds of us getting a deal with Netflix or Hollywood is super low. but maybe we could just make something and put it on YouTube. And so they worked on this. They, they basically were using, uh, gaming engines, which is not what you use for, for normal TV shows, uh, for animation. So they started using like Unreal Engine or whatever, Unity. I don't, I don't remember which one. Instead of making a video game out of it, they animated this wild show with a little bit of a dark humor. And it's basically like anime, but done for the West. So they remixed the idea, which is one of the core creative tools, I guess. Find a new connection of old dots. And so they connected the old dots of anime and like, you know, sort of like Pixar animation. And they created this show on YouTube and it gets hundreds of millions of views every episode on every single episode.

And like, we were there. I was— I, I don't know Jimmy MrBeast that well, but I said hi to him and I started talking to him or whatever. And he goes, do you want to meet like the guy who inspires me or who I think is even better than me? Or like he like deferred to this guy.

Yeah. Yeah. Like with, with Whoop Group, we basically say like, all right, Jimmy, like, do you have 3 or 4 people you want to invite that are not in our network? We're bringing a bunch of people from our network. Who's in your network that you think is awesome? And he— this was one of the guys. And so, and he was, he was an awesome dude. And, you know, they're doing— and I was like, so wait, so you, you spend all this money and time, you make these crazy animated things. You know, it's kind of like this, the SpongeBob guy, right? It's like, just a guy with an idea and a sketch and then turns it into a show. And they were making like tens of millions on just merch drops, just fans buying the merch of their thing. That was the business model. It was literally selling t-shirts at this point. And then I was like, what?

Look at it. Damn, they got sick merch.

I think they got a deal with either Amazon Prime or Netflix. And, um, so now they're going to bring their show. Now, like, Hollywood wants them basically. And so now they're going to show to one of the big streaming platforms. Uh, and they cut a very unique deal where they didn't have to take it off YouTube because they were like, no, no, we're keeping it on YouTube. YouTube's our place where we're building a giant fandom. And, um, I mean, you know how few videos get 400 million views? Like, you literally have to have made Despacito to get 400 million views, or like Gangnam Style. Like, this is not like a number that a normal YouTube video can get. And this is their own original content.

There's also something interesting here going on where I'm romanticizing '80s MTV and then you're romanticizing this, this guy now. But like this guy, Kevin, Digital Circus, like he's only a handful of years into his journey. And when we were with him, I thought that that was neat, but it was just like, oh, that's cool. Now I'm looking back and I'm like, that's very romantic. That's very badass. It's, it's very interesting that you don't see that at the time when you're doing it. But I do think that I have to work on— I think everyone does have to work on like reframing things because it would make it so much more fun to work on and you could like keep going for a lot longer because now I see this and I'm like, oh, this is amazing. Keep going, keep doing this. But when I talked to him, he was one of 20 interesting people.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, so true what you just said. I noticed a few people who do this now. In fact, we just had Ben Horowitz on and after we stopped recording, he had told us the story on the podcast. About this incredible, like, uh, leader in Haiti. I think a guy who started off—

Toussaint L'Ouverture.

Yeah, Toussaint L'Ouverture. He's like, you have read this book about him or read multiple books about him. There's a book called Black Spartacus. And he told the story about how this guy, who I think was a slave, became like the leader of a 500,000-person army and was like one of the few places where, uh, slavery ended as like out of like a successful revolution. Like, and they like changed the norm and it was just like, just incredible. And so, you know, as a guy who's investing in world-changing leaders, I think he was just fascinated by how somebody pulled this off. And so we were like, how did you—

That's actually a really good take. I didn't put that together. That's actually, that's, that's a really good insight actually why he liked him. Yeah.

I mean, I'm not sure if he consciously did that or not, but yeah, obviously there's an appeal to it. So he, uh, after the pod was over, we were like, and on the podcast, you know, uh, What was your impression of Ben Horowitz? Like, oh, cool, you did a pod with Ben Horowitz. What's he like? What would you have said?

A top 10. So we've done 750. He's in the top 10 of wisdom people.

But would you say he's outlandish personality? He's outlandishly smart? Is he outlandish in any dimension? Surprisingly good hang.

Well balanced. Well balanced.

Surprisingly well balanced. Good hang. Seemed like a, like a more normal dude than your average tech billionaire type of guy, right?

He seemed like a really good father. I mean, he was, he's probably 30 years older than us, so I can say that, but he seemed like someone who I could like ask for advice and it wouldn't be extreme.

Right. So I was thinking about that. I was like, man, this was just like a great hang with just a great dude, but more on the normal side of the spectrum than I would've expected. Just 'cause I've gotten used to every time I meet these extreme outliers of performance, they often come with these kind of sharp edges.

I think his partner Mark has that. His partner Mark seems sharp, like, uh, polarizing.

His— literally his head has like 30% extra headroom. Like, you know, you just hold more brain in there, dude. Like, you know, it's like, oh, I mean, it's hard to— it's like seeing LeBron James. It's like, well, okay, I could see that we're different. Like, yeah, we're both, you know, both humans, but like, you're 6'9" and you could fly, and I can't. So like, I get there's a difference. That happens a lot of tech guys. You're like, oh, you're literally just super smart. You process information differently. He even said it. He was like, people get confused because he knows Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel and all these guys. And he goes, people get confused. They think that those guys have like low EQ, like they don't, they don't understand people because they kind of stutter and stammer and they, they, they're a little awkward. He's like, no, they actually have a pretty deep understanding of people. You wouldn't be who they are if you didn't actually understand people. But they are processing data at such a high rate that it's a little bit awkward when you hear them try to talk and reply because they're processing— they're just literally processing so much information. And I was like, oh, that's an amazing way of putting it. Anyways, back to kind of what I was saying on him. At the end of the podcast, we stopped recording and we asked him, we were like, how did you get into that Toussaint guy? Like, that's crazy. Like, where'd you— how'd you hear about this? And he said something. He goes, I was thinking about, um, why slavery ended. And I was like, oh my God, I'm glad we stopped recording because that's, you get canceled for saying something like that. Like this is, you know, rich white billionaire wonders why slavery ended. It's like, that's bad PR for you. No, but then he, he, he had a really good answer and I, we didn't even say anything, but he's like, because, you know, slavery was not just a, a human rights issue. It was actually also the economic model of the times. So he's like, you know, slavery had been around for a long time and in many different places it sprung up organically. It's not like one system that was ported everywhere, like different countries each came to the same.

I think he said he goes, the aqueducts in Rome were built by slaves.

Yeah. Pyramids were built by slaves. The aqueducts were built by slaves. He's like, it was the success. It was the functioning economic model. So it got me curious, why did it ever end?

Yeah.

And, and, but he didn't mean it like, just be super, super clear. He was not saying it's a good thing. He was, of course, Literally thinking from first principles, like, huh, isn't that interesting that this, this thing that was working for thousands of years and then all of a sudden, thousands of years, and suddenly it stops. You'd be kind of curious, like, what stopped it? And he's like, Haiti was the only place where it was like a bottoms-up successful revolution where they just decided to change the rules without, well, without like, uh, I think, I don't know how he was saying, but he's like, it was different than like the Civil War, for example. And so he was like, that's what got me curious. And I thought, ah, there it is. There's your weird bone. Like, you know, you have your funny bone in your elbow. Like, I found it. I found your special sauce. You asked a question that the rest of us would have never asked. You leaned in and got curious about something that we would have all just accepted at face value. And there are so many of these in life. You realize this when you have kids and they're like, um, Well, how does this building get built? So there's people. What? Where do people come from? And you're like, oh my God, people come from this. And it's like, but why didn't this just happen? And you realize how shallow your knowledge of the world actually is. Not just scientific, by the way. It's like, like my son was like, why can boys show their nipples and not girls? We're going to the pool. And I'm like, I'm telling my daughter, like, no, no, you need to wear your swimsuit.

And my son, Socrates, man, couldn't find his.

And I was like, it's fine, just go in. He's like, But why? And I was like, honestly, I have no idea why. That would be horrible if she did it. And it's totally fine if you do it. I have no clue. Do you know?

I don't know. Yeah.

And so there's all these things we just sort of accept. We just take it because it's like too much mental energy to go try to answer every question. And the great ones get curious about obvious things. They see things on the floor that the rest of us aren't looking at and they just pick it up and that's where they become great.

I love this topic because Eddie Murphy has a documentary on Netflix. It's so good. It's a 2-hour—

I got to watch this.

It's 2 hours. People forget we grew up listening to him or watching him. People forget how impactful he was. I mean, he—

turn off this podcast, go on. If you're on YouTube, just go to the search bar, just type Eddie Murphy Raw and just go watch that.

And we talk about that. And so basically, Eddie Murphy was famous starting at the age of 18. Eddie Murphy was on SNL at the age of 18. And it's a whole documentary about his creative process. But also it's really interesting. Eddie Murphy was famous at 18 in New York City. When he was 25, or actually 22, I think he was the star of Beverly Hills, you know, the police movie. And he was the most famous guy on earth. And he hung out with all the craziest people. And all of those guys now, you know, Prince, Rick James, all these guys are dead because they were drug addicts. And he was like, I was sober the whole time. He goes, I don't drink, I don't do drugs. And so they talk about that. And so anyway, he talks about being funny and he's like, I don't really think of myself as a comedian. I'm an artist and I express myself via comedy, but I could do anything. I've done serious movies, I've done everything. And he's done— I've done action movies. It's very inspiring. But he has one line that has stuck with me and he was like, the thing about comedians, I think what makes us special is that we're actually more sensitive to everything. And so the best comedian, you know, if I buy a new car and a car gets and the car comes home and the dealer is standing right in front of me and I can like point out a scratch that no one noticed because I just noticed it first. And that becomes the comedy and that becomes the bit. Or if I walk into a house and there's just one little tiny smell, I'm going to be the first person that says it because I'm the most sensitive. And what the thing that you're describing with Ben, I've always noticed this with like good comedians, like Shane Gillis does this whole read history and he'll retell this very funny bit about George Washington, like this one little thing that I read tons of history. I would have like, I would have skipped over that 3-sentence story. And I think that what separates this— I'm all putting this together right now. I think what separates these really insightful people like Ben, who ask the right questions, is that they're very sensitive and they find one or two lines and they're like, that, that is like very interesting to me. That is the truth. That is the right question. And I think Eddie Murphy did the exact same thing when he said, he goes, we are just more sensitive to everyone and we could do— and so our threshold of like something that grabs us is lower.

It's a great observation. They notice what the rest of us ignore. And if you think about great investors, what do they do? They just sort of notice that this company is not being understood properly. It's mis— it's mispriced, it's misunderstood. And, um, they go— they bet against consensus in a way. And why do they do that? You first have to notice in this pile of stocks which one is the one that's mispriced. And, you know, there's just Great stories about Buffett, and he'd read the Moody's Manual front to back. So he's reading just company profile. It's like whatever, 2,000 pages or something like that. It's like a Bible and it's just company financials and company prospectus. And he would read the whole thing. And all he's trying to do is just notice for something that makes him curious. Hmm. That's weird. Has this much earnings, but price is only this. I wonder why. Oh, it's because this is believed. Is that true? How does that work? And what if this happens?

It's very hard.

And so you see it in investing, you see it in comedy. Comedy is the art of noticing. I have this running doc on my, uh, on my phone called Seinfeld premises. It's basically like, if you— like, what would be the premise of a Seinfeld joke? Seinfeld's the master of observational humor. And so when you turn this part of your brain on that starts to notice the, like, hilariousness of human life, you start to notice things that don't make any sense. So for example, Seinfeld talks about that when he talks about this power of observation. He's like, uh, he goes, you know when somebody's on the phone with somebody and the call drops and they call you back and they're like, hey, sorry, I don't know what happened. He goes, of course you don't know what happened. You don't even know how this is happening. Do it. Does any of us even know how a phone works? As if we could know the reason the call dropped. Like, you know, what a hilarious What a ridiculous thing to say. And then he, then he builds off that premise, which is like, we all say this thing and what nonsense. Of course you don't know what happened. You don't know how a microwave works. You don't know how anything works. And then he could build off that and like turn it into a joke. And so I started doing this. And so I have this list of like just things that I've noticed over the past 3 years. And I'm like, I've never done stand-up comedy. I always secretly like want to.

And like, dude, you've been talking about it for years. You just got to pick a date.

But like, I'll give you like one that's on this list that I just had. So I took a flight and right before the, right before boarding, they're like, you know, Platinum America Global Elites, whatever, right? And they're like, any military vets or whatever? And like a soldier basically walked up and got to board the plane 30 seconds before us. And I was like, I looked around, I'm like, that's it? That was the perk he got. Like, this guy fought the war. He still had to go through TSA, like security. He is security. Like, we're like, this guy should be getting like a blowjob on the plane. Like, this is insane that all he got to do was board after Global Elite but before Group 1. I was like, what a shame. Like this.

Dude, I always felt that way about medals. When they give you like a medal, I'm like, all that for a medal?

The same thing my son got after soccer this year.

A medal?

So it's just like this art of noticing the, the, the sort of things that is just taken at face value. And I think as an entrepreneur, you want to be doing this. As a technologist, you want to be doing this, right? Like a big part of technology, like the big wave right now is AI. And the funny thing about AI is that all the big companies, all the companies that were winning in AI and all the people who are leading those companies, they were not the OGs of AI. Like AI has been around and talked about for 50 years and the study of, you know, neural networks and all the underlying technology. There were experts. None of the experts are the ones who started this, these companies. So like, why is that? And it's because they were so far in it, they actually didn't notice that something changed. It's like they were so lost in the sauce that they did not realize, like, this time it's different. Even like the, the core thing that changed it all was this Transformers paper was written by Google. Google, which had been pouring billions into machine learning and, uh, you know, neural networks and all this stuff.

Who is this guy, Sam?

No, Sam was an outsider to this whole thing. That paper at Google was written by these like 7 or 8 guys. The seminal paper called Attention Is All You Need. And Attention Is All You Need was this breakthrough, this realization that like, wait a minute, all you need is this. And then suddenly the outputs change. This is written inside of Google, who has spent billions of dollars on this. And Google wasn't the one to use it. They just released this paper, nothing. And then it was others out in the field that were like, huh, that's actually pretty interesting. That's new. That's novel. So that means if that's true, then we could try this and maybe we'll get a new result this time. And suddenly the computer could figure out what's a cat and what's a hot dog. And you know, all these things that were previously kind of hard. Were now actually like very doable. And so then that's where, um, you know, this wave happened. And now all 8 of those people from Google have since left and they're a part of the big, like, you know, the big AI companies now. Um, but like, it's amazing that Google itself, which was looking for the treasure, you know, the metal detector started beeping and they just kept walking down the beach. You know, they just didn't stop and dig. And so it takes, because it takes a beginner's mind to be able to stop and dig, right? Um, so, and to answer your question of like who did notice, um, I would say first it was DeepMind. So this guy Dennis, I don't know how you say his last name, Habibis.

That's a Google company, right?

So Google ended up buying, having to buy that company. So DeepMind was doing really interesting work. Google buys it for half a billion dollars or something like that. Uh, I want to say nothing many years ago. Then Elon notices he's like, wow, what DeepMind can do is like what they've been talking about with AI for 40 years, but nobody's freaking out about this. And Elon's like, I shall freak out about this. So he starts realizing that Google has all, Google has a monopoly on AI. And he viewed AI as an existential threat. And he viewed Larry Page, which was his friend at the time, as somebody who does not care about AI safety because he would talk to Larry about AI safety and Larry would brush it off. Larry basically viewed it as, this is, this is the evolution of man. We're going to go from Homo sapiens to this, like, kind of this new species of, like, AI, AI plus human, whatever. It'll be like a new thing. That's what's going to happen. And Elon was like, this is crazy. And so he decided to help create OpenAI, which was a counterweight to Google, which had a monopoly on AI talent and research. So he's like, we will get researchers and we will open source the material because Google would never do that. And that will be like a good counterweight to this. So he noticed kind of the difference there, which is kind of crazy.

I don't know what we're going to call this episode, but this is one of the most interesting ones that we've ever had. You had a really good thing in your, uh, Five Tweet Tuesday, uh, email. You had a Jerry Seinfeld quote. You said the context of this quote is that, uh, Jerry Seinfeld sold, uh, or turned down the most amount of money ever in TV history. Apparently he turned down $110 million for one more season of Seinfeld. The reporter asked him why, why not do one more season? And Jerry says, the most— this is so good— the most important word in art is proportion. How much? How many words? How many minutes? Too much cake, too much of anything changes the whole feeling of it. Getting proportion right is what makes it art or makes it mediocre.

So good, right?

So good.

So good.

We should end there. That's beautiful. That's it. That's just the best.