#177 - How a City Tour is Making Millions, Selling Manhood & the Barstool for Tech

If you're building one of these, please reach out to me. I want to invest in all of these. I want to invest in like 20 of these companies. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off.

On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

So we're going to talk about what you guys can expect in today's episode. But before we do, so My First Million, we actually just went from 80th in our category on the iTunes store, which is a big deal to us, to like number 14. And one of the reasons why we did it was because you folks who are listening have clicked the subscribe button. So if you're using iTunes or using an Apple product, can you please do me a favor? Uh, I want you to go and click subscribe. So go to, uh, our My First Million page and click that subscribe button. And then we have this email address, um, MFM. So My First Million, MFM@thehustle.co. Send a screenshot of you subscribed and we're going to do a call out of you on the podcast. So say like your name and then show me that you subscribed, send it to MFM, a screenshot, and we're gonna give a call out. And actually, we're gonna give a call out at the end of this episode for all the people that did that previously. And now, let's hear what we're gonna talk about in this episode. Go ahead, Sean.

Yeah, we got a bunch of topics I'm excited about. We talked about creating Barstool Sports for the tech industry. We talked about internal company podcasting platforms like Spoken. We went on a crazy detour for crime walks, manhood as a service, rent a chicken. Uh, we got a bunch of good topics in this week's, uh, in today's episode. This was probably— if you like ideas, I would say you're gonna love this episode. Sometimes we're a little bit light on ideas. We were super heavy on ideas today, so I think you guys will love it.

Great, see you in the episode. So we, we just were talking for a few minutes about the podcast updates, uh, and what we're doing to make it grow. But what I was about to tell you, Sean, is I have this doc that I'm gonna send to you. And so, you know, have you seen how, I don't know if you've seen this or not, but the podcast goes in the email I think every day now.

Oh, I have not seen that.

Yeah. And I'm the one writing it. And so I have a, we set this up, so it's gonna, the, you're gonna see the clicks in this document that I sent you every day. Um, but anyway, it's going well today. Did you see that graph I sent you?

I tweeted it out. I was like, this is what I'm talking about. Uh, there's a— basically you sent a graph of the iTunes rankings for us, business, for the business category, I would get, I guess, pretty big category. And, um, maybe we usually hovered between 80 and 100, like we were number 80, number 100, I guess, like that was kind of like our norm. And then Sam takes over growth and like boom, step change, we're up to— we're, we're now ranked number 20 for the last, I don't know, week or two. Um, You could just see when you started working on it. It's like a direct thing, which reminds me of like a very, uh, a lesson I always teach everybody on our team, because there's lots of marketing things you'll do where you're like, did it work? And it's like, I don't know, we got to look into it. Oh, it wasn't trackable. It's like, no, no, just show me the revenue graph, show me the user graph. Like, if I can't notice something happened on this day, or hey, we started growing around this time, then it didn't work enough, right? Like, because usually when you're in a small project, you need step changes. You don't need 1%, you need 10%, 30%, 50% type of changes to work.

And basically where we are now is, I mean, you and I are both very capable of doing this. You just kind of look at the— it takes about 2 weeks. It took about— took me about 2 weeks to talk to people and to look at the numbers. And it's like, oh, okay, I now know that if I only do this, I'm going to be mostly there. Right. Um, and what I've learned now is it's getting people to click the subscribe button on iTunes. If I get people to do that, mostly everything will, will be fine.

Okay, but that's gonna sound, uh, overly simplistic. It's like, yeah, all I gotta do is get checkmate and then I win a game of chess. Like, well, yeah, but, uh, how do you get people to click the subscribe button?

It's kind of the question. I mean, it is, it is not overly simplistic. It is simple. It is get people to click that button. Now, the not simple part is how I'm gonna get people to click the button.

Right, exactly.

But the way to grow is simple. I just get people to click that button. And we've got loads of ways. For one, I'm just asking people. So we asked people to leave a review the other day, and when I asked people to leave the review, that day we had 600 reviews. Do you know how many reviews we have now?

I don't know, there's at least a few hundred that came through, yeah.

1,400.

Okay, so we added 800 reviews just off of a quick 1-minute ask. Hey, if you like the podcast, go review it. Uh, we really appreciate it. That's kind of all you offered, really?

It wasn't quick. I like begged and I begged them, but yeah, right.

Yes, I completely agree. And like, that's why I always make a joke that when I meet really smart people, like we interviewed Balaji the other day and I don't know when that's going to come out in relation to this, when this podcast is coming out, but soon. And he was like one of the most high IQ people I've ever spoke to. I think he might have been the highest IQ person I've ever talked to. And it was very obvious. And when I was talking to him, I actually was wondering, I'm like, you know, for the longest time I actually thought that the lower your IQ, like you want your IQ to be just above average, but not really high because the really smart people I meet other than him, they typically talk themselves out of anything. And so anyway, I actually think that being just slightly above average is optimal.

That's the sweet spot.

I didn't get to ask him that, but I would want, I would love to know his opinion of that, of, of like, cause like when you meet him, And he must know that he's like a kind of a genius.

Um, right. He can't say it because, you know, he's gonna be humble about it. He's not gonna say, yeah, clearly I'm smarter than everybody, but he is clearly smarter than everyone.

So I know where you're going with this top one, and I think I've got a, I've got a strong opinion on it. You want to do your bar stool for tech?

Yes.

We've talked about this many times.

Okay. Yeah. So, so maybe we'll keep it short, but well, I don't know.

I mean, you, I know what you said, but we have listeners, they probably don't.

Yeah. So I don't disagree with you. I think it would work if you could pull it off. I want to explain to you why this is hard to pull off. So when you're a sports journalist who happens to be funny, which I actually think a lot of those people start, they're like, they love sports. And they happen to be funny. And, and, and that's typically how it works. Now, you don't really have that many options. You can work for the local newspaper. You can try to get one of the few jobs at ESPN. But regardless, if you're lucky, you make $150,000 a year, right?

Right. And you're tabling the comedy side. 9 times out of 10, you're like, you know, I would say this joke in my text message group with my buddies, but I can't put it in my column on ESPN.

If you're smart enough to do this for business, and you're funny, you— now here's the, where the rub— you likely can get paid a ton of money as some type of analyst or some type of investor or some type of operator. Right. And so it's really hard to retain those types of people because they say, well, why would I make— like, if I'm this smart, I'm just going to go and trade stocks or invest in companies or start a company versus give you my opinion and make you laugh for $80,000. And this is the problem I've always had at The Hustle, which is How do you actually— like a lot of the people who are best at analyzing companies and giving opinions, they sold their company for $80 million. And so I have found it's quite hard to retain those people. Whereas if you are a journalist in sports, that's like the end goal is to be a journalist in sports, right? Do you know what I mean? Whereas when you cover this stuff, the end goal is to start or join an early-stage company that's going to be massive. And so I agree with you that you could pull this off. Or that if you could pull it off, it would be a huge hit. It's just that, that's one of the hard parts, right?

And that's actually what I was going to say is I think That would work. But you need to be a VC fund first who then hires content people and offers them like some upside there.

You're a VC fund in disguise is kind of how I would start it because you do have to build up, you know, good distribution. And it's not— again, I don't think it would be hard because there's nobody really creating this type of content. There's nobody that will just straight up make fun of Zuck when he's talking like a robot somewhere, right? Like, and that's the type of stuff that Deadspin and Barstool that they do. They find funny memeable moments. And they talk about him. And, and that's why Trump came to mind, because he did a tweet the other day about, uh, Steve Ballmer, and it was like information. It was like, Steve Ballmer, did you know when he first joined Microsoft, this was his salary, and then he renegotiated and was able to get this much equity? That turned him into a $30 billion or whatever he is now. And by the way, he did the whole thing, and he has this like Steve Ballmer in 4 decades, and each time he's wearing the same white New Balance dad shoes. And he's like, he did this the whole time wearing these New Balance shoes. Like, anything is possible. And I was like, this is the perfect blend of a useful information nugget wrapped in a joke poking fun at the bear. And, um, and so I think that that's a, that's, that's the model. So anyways, I'm bullish on this. Sorry for trying to poach, uh, Trung to convince him to go do this, but I think that would be the ultimate manifestation of his talents or somebody who's like Trung. If you're the next Trung out there, I don't know you.

So I'm not, I'm not saying Trunk is this. I'm also not saying Trunk is not this. But when you hire these types of people, because what makes them good also makes them a pain in the ass to work with sometimes, you know, like what makes them good is that they're, they're hilarious. They're, they come up with stuff like off the cuff, but they're incredibly challenging to contain. Um, and you don't want to contain them necessarily, but like there is some shit you need people to do.

I'm kind of like this, right? I showed up 10 minutes late today. I know you hate me being late. I wasn't trying to be late, but I'm late. But also I'm good. I'm good at what I do. You could find somebody who shows up on time for the podcast, but it's hard to find somebody who's going to consistently create great content. Right. That is the— that's the rub with talent. The talent of the talent business.

I've learned how to put up with that, but that is the part where sometimes I'm like, Oh, I should just start a software company where the code is never late and the code never complains about X, Y, and Z. Not saying this isn't a Trung— Trung, I love you. This is just me as well. I'm a creative person as well. I'm like that. And so creative people are hard to contain. Um, you want to talk about slips? Because you were quite, uh, interested in this one.

Okay, so check out—

dude, why do you always say I don't think you're gonna like— am I like a default?

I posted it in Slack and you go, I hate course businesses. So that's what I'm basing this on. You're like, why are you saying I hate this? Like you literally told me an hour ago you hate this.

A company that publishes courses I think is awesome to own, horrible to invest in. Am I wrong?

Uh, I don't know. Maybe. What do you mean company that publishes courses? So who's that?

Like what? Like Teachable? Well, no, Teachable is a platform.

This is a platform. So, so let me explain what this is. So The domain is slip.so and it's a company I'm looking at potentially investing in. I saw it and immediately was like, oh, this is a smart idea. So what did they do? They make it easy for any developer to create a course to teach, you know, some programming, you know, either a language or how to make X or how to make X go faster or whatever. Right. Any developer teaching other developers. So why do you need— why do you need a new platform for this? Why can't you just use Udemy or Udacity or one of the other 10 platforms? Well, those platforms are all teaching through video. So you upload a video and maybe some text or PDF and, and then people go take that course self-serve. What they did was a little bit different. They took the— today, the best ways to learn how to code online are interactive. Like we talked about Codecademy or is it Codecademy? I don't know. But Codecademy.com.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm going to say it fast so I don't— you don't know what I'm saying if I'm saying it right or wrong. Codecademy.com. You go there. I think they have like 40 million users or something. It's, you know, it's really grown over time.

It's a thing.

Have you done the math behind this? How many?

So he charges, I think if you are a developer who's using it, I think he charges $30 a month plus 10% of the sales for your course. That's his business model. He himself taught a course. So how did he arrive here? He created a course on learning Vim. I don't even know what Vim is, but it's some shit developers use. So Vim's basically like your, it's kind of like your your virtual machine, basically, of how you organize and write your code, I think. Or maybe it's something completely different. Sean doesn't know. So he created a Vim course, and in order to do that, he built the infrastructure for himself so that his students would have an interactive way to learn this instead of just watching videos and trying to figure it out themselves. They'd have a sandbox to go and write the code to learn. He made $10,000, $15,000 selling that course. And then he was like, oh dude, I should make this so that any developer, like, I know Vim, But what about the next guy who knows Solidity and they're trying to teach Ethereum programmers, you know, how to, how to write in Solidity? They can now create their course using the same toolkit that I create, I use for myself.

So I wish you would have started this like 6 years ago. So right now these course businesses are actually these course platforms we're going to call them. They're not publishers, they're tech companies. They're actually booming right now. So do you know a company called Thinkific?

I've heard of it, but it's, it's kind of like a Kajabi, right? It's like just a— it's like a Teachable. It's the same thing, right?

Do you know they went public yesterday?

I did not know this. How, uh, how about it? How, how big is it?

They went public yesterday on the Canadian Stock Exchange, uh, the Toronto— the TSE. Is that what it's called? Toronto Stock Exchange? And look it up right now. For some reason, when, when companies, right, like in the first couple days of going public, it's like impossible to find the market cap. I don't understand why it's so hard, but it never shows up. But anyway, they only had $20 million in sales and they broke even or lost a little bit of money. So they went from $10 million to $20 million in 2020. And guess what their market cap is right now?

It's going to be like, I don't know, $2 billion or something stupid.

But the way I would think about it is these are just Shopify. So what did Shopify do? Shopify made it so that anybody can create a storefront. What they're saying is it's Shopify, but instead of selling, you know, hats and shirts, You sell information, which is super high margin. And if you think, okay, Shopify, there are now X number of hundreds of thousands of sellers, and Shopify is a $100 billion company, um, okay, maybe retail is bigger than the sort of, uh, you know, additional education business. But, um, but, you know, we have like 100-fold, you know, from $100 billion, which is Shopify, to $1 billion, uh, you know, you, you can, you can be 100 times smaller than Shopify if you create Shopify for education, if you make it so that any educator can come and create a storefront to sell their, their information. And that's what Teachable was trying to do. That's what many companies try to do, and they're all splitting that pie in a way. Um, but I like this one because I think it doesn't compete with all those. I think the developer ecosystem, you know, developers teaching other developers or want to be developers, is quite differentiated. And the product is quite differentiated from what Teachable— like Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific, they're all the same. It's just You create a video library, you charge students, they get access to the library, and then, you know, the teacher can communicate with the students or whatever.

How'd you find this guy?

Um, I was on Twitter, I think. I just saw— I don't know, I don't know, maybe one of my guys sent it to me. I don't really recall. Um, I think Zach actually, who is my scout for my fund, I think he saw it and was like, this is cool. And I was like, as soon as I went to the landing page, something clicked with me. Now this is still very small.

I think—

can you— I think he's under $1,000 of GMB right now. Like, I think He's got like a couple teachers who— it's been live for a couple weeks and, uh, you know, he's got like $1,000.

What's that? What's it called?

Slip.

What's the URL?

Slip.so.

Um, yeah, look, it's neat. I think I've always had a little bit of a problem with this type of stuff because whenever— do you know what the finish rate is for courses? You know, it's like 10%. Yeah, like, so, uh, 100 people buy it, only 10 If you consider using the product, doing the whole thing, only like 10 of the 100 are actually gonna do it if you're lucky.

I have a friend who just sold, he's doing a course, it's a couple thousand dollar ticket price, right? So people putting down a few thousand dollars to learn this thing. And he said, "Guess how many people are finishing the course?" And I was like, "Oh no, don't tell me." It was like, I think 12 people had finished the course. So it was like, you know, whatever, less than 6% I think had actually finished the course. He also said, guess how many people got to 50%? I think it was like 20, 20-something percent of people had gotten halfway through the course. He's like, did I make a shitty course? And I was like, no, dude, this is just what self-serve education is. When it's self-serve and there's no peer, like peer pressure, there's no like accountable teacher who's like training you every week or, you know, you're showing up to a live, live thing when it's, it's Netflix, it's on demand. I can go, I can go learn more whenever I want. I paid for the thing. Even paying thousands of dollars is not enough skin in the game to do this. It's very counterintuitive.

You would think it's not even— you paid $60 grand a year or whatever you paid, or someone paid for you to go to Duke and you missed classes.

Oh yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, I was— I basically, you know, for 4 years I took a 4-year piss down the drain of my college tuition is the way I would describe that experience.

So anyway, that's one of the reasons why I'm not like all gung-ho about course businesses, because I'm like, Damn, like no one uses your shit.

Dude, you have so many ideas here. Where did you find all this? So what the hell is, um, uh, Spoken?

You inspired me, dude. You were working on growth and I was like, I, if he's doing growth, I better bring the fucking heat on content. So I was like, I'm coming with a bunch of ideas.

What the fuck is Spoken? Sounds sick.

Yes. Okay. You want to do Spoken? So Spoken, S-P-O-K-E-N, It's podcasting inside companies.

What's the URL?

Spoken. I don't know. You'd have to Google it. I don't have the URL.

I did. I did. It's so new they don't even show up really. Oh, shit.

Sad because I'm giving this guy a shout out. They're growing fast.

Got it. So it's getspoken.com or if you just Google Spoken in quotation marks, you'll find it, right?

And tell them I sent you. So, okay, so what is this? So I, when I first started this podcast, I used to record out of a studio., and, uh, in San Francisco there's like this old radio station place and they were like, ah, radio's kind of dying. What if we converted these radio studios to podcast studios? And so they were the only one in San Francisco. Uh, if you just like Google for it, it's kind of amazing. $100 an hour, you go, go record. And, um, and so I wanted good quality, so I went there and I used to book like on their little scheduler. And some days I would see it was just like all booked. And I was talking to the dude and I was like, who the hell is booking? How many podcasters are using this thing? I feel like it was like not many people.

Would do. And he was like, "Oh, sorry, that day Facebook booked all the hours." I was like, "What do you mean Facebook booked all the hours? Facebook doesn't have a podcast." He goes, "Oh, Facebook has tons of podcasts internally." I was like, "What?" He goes, "Yeah, they have like a manager's podcast that is just an internal podcast for Facebook managers to talk about managing inside Facebook." And I was like, "Oh, that's actually kind of smart." Like we've talked about this before, internal media companies. I think this is a big opportunity. You think it's a big opportunity. We've talked about it from a blogging point of view, newsletters. We've talked about it talked about it on like, uh, like kind of like that, like, uh, central announcement dashboards. So building tools for companies to better communicate, building— basically build the internal high school newsletter, uh, news— high school newspaper, I think is what we called it. What is the high school news— newspaper for your company?

Yeah, I think this is so awesome.

Ever since you said that, I can't get that idea out of my head. If you're building one of these, please reach out to me. I want to invest in all of these. I want to invest in like 20 of these companies.

I'm trying to find that episode. Do— what would I search to find it on Google? My First Million internal— what do we— what—

MailChimp for companies, I think. I don't know what we called it at that time, but the core idea is just like a high school or college will have their, their school newspaper, why don't companies have the same? And if it's going to be a newspaper, it's not going to be literally a physical newspaper. In this case with Spoken, it's a podcast for inside companies, and companies will clearly pay for the, like, kind of like the platform, the recording, the library, and the like private, uh, private feed, um, that others can't access. That's for your company. And, uh, you know, the companies that need this are very large companies. And so I don't know realistically, like, okay, so I think that's all cool. I don't know realistically how many people at Facebook are like, fuck yeah, on my commute to work today, I'm gonna listen to the Manager Podcast. Like, maybe nobody wants to hear this shit. Uh, but maybe they do. Like, maybe there's interesting personalities. I know that if at Twitch, if Twitch had an internal, like, podcast, I would do one. I would do one on, you know, managing or product or innovation or whatever. I don't know. And I don't know how many people listen to it, but I think it's a very interesting niche that turns— it's a niche of podcasting that is highly monetizable. What do you think?

Uh, yeah, so on, on the surface, I think this is so badass. I'm— I've been a fan of this idea for a long time. I don't know where we came up with this idea, but I've, I've, I think that at the time we discussed this, we were like, oh, this might be one of the most straightforward ways to make a lot of money on this podcast that we, at that time. Um, I'm looking at this.

That's kind of one of the ways we talk about it. So there's a great company called Recess. It's called recess.io.

Okay, I'm glad you grabbed it. So by the way, episode 53 is where we talked about it if people want to go listen.

Episode 53. All right, I'm going to write that because I'm actually doing this, this series where I'm going to go back and look at old ideas and this is a good one. Recess.io. It's started by this guy named Ryan Dice. It never really got off the ground, but it's called easily send internal email newsletters and track results. So it's basically what you're describing and it hasn't taken off. I'm also looking at Spoken. They went to Y Combinator. They're in class of W21. So winter '21. Does that mean they're still in it?

Yeah, that's like now.

And they cut— the company launched in 2009.

Not even now. It's fucking spring '21. I don't know how that works.

Wait, yeah, what the hell?

It says— guys, he's lying.

It says W21. No, well, it could be Winter '21, January, January '21.

Oh, okay, gotcha.

I guess, yeah, not December, January. Uh, and it started in 2018, and I'm wondering why it hasn't taken off a little bit more because 3 years in, you would think it would have a little bit more traction. And so on surface, I think this is a brilliant idea. I'm wondering what's going on and why it's not kicking ass. I think this is a fantastic idea.

All right, uh, I, I like this idea a little better as the newsletter one because I think it's just more accessible than podcasts, but, uh, both are cool. And we should— Ryan Deiss is your buddy, right? You should ask him like, what's, what's the deal?

I feel like I can tell you why. Well, I don't— he's never told me this, but Ryan Deiss has loads of companies, right? So this is because of— because this is pretty innovative, you have to be all in on it, I think, to make it work. And so I wonder what's going on with something like this.

So if you're building this, let us know. If you're like, no, I want a project, I want to build it. This is one where if you're a credible person, uh, me and Sam will invest in this, I think, to get something like this built.

By the way, um, we have a new email. It's called mfm@thehustle.co. I'll give you access, Sean, but basically, um, any— because I get too many emails and I think you do too. So if you guys want to contact us and if you are building this, mfm@thehustle.co, uh, so you can email us if you're actually making that. Uh, we want to go then another one.

Yeah, let's do another one. All right, so Crime Walk. Okay, what is this? So I was— I don't even remember what this was. So basically there's like an air— so Airbnb has this Experiences thing, and you probably know much more about this, and your wife works there, and you're also, I think, the type that would do something like this. So I saw this and I saw how much money it was making, or I don't remember what it was exactly. What's it called? Okay, so if you go to Airbnb Experiences, there was an experience, and there's a in our doc, there's a link to it just slightly below, where it's a retired NYPD officer will guide you through a walk through New York. And it's a guided mafia and crime walk. I'm like, wait, mafia?

I've been wanting this for so long. This is so cool.

So here's the description. I'm just going to read it word for word. First, let me say that most gangster tours in New York are total BS. This experience comes right from the horse's mouth. No tour guide, no filter. Get real stories while visiting notorious gangland locations as we walk from East Village to Little Italy, experiencing what it was like to associate— to be an associate of New York's famous mafia families. You'll hear firsthand accounts of the New York City mafia and crimes in New York and taste local cuisines. So I saw this. I was like, this is such a good idea. I think I saw that this crime walk was making a lot of money. So it was very successful, which is not a surprise to me. I would do this if I was, you know, in New York. This is great. Um, but a couple things kind of— here's the business idea. So first is, this is cool, quick reaction, then I have an idea.

Exactly. So I think that's what originally caught my attention was, here's who has built an experience. I think that was my kind of curiosity. Who's built an Airbnb experience that has made a million bucks, right? Because this is a big platform. Certainly somebody's doing well. And so this is kind of how it caught my eye. Okay, so what's the idea? The idea is this is a cool thing for a cop to do in retirement. I told you we had that, that police situation where I had to go do a shakedown. We brought a cop with us and because became friends with that cop later and was getting to know, you know, as the first cop I really become friends with as an adult. Um, I loved her, she was great. And so I was like, well, um, what's, you know, how do cops— can cops make more money? Because she was describing how hard it is to be a cop nowadays. There's like kind of like a lot of cop backlash because of BLM and all that stuff. She's like, but I'm a good cop. And like also like budget cuts, like defund the police, budget cuts are happening all around. And so anyways, long story short, I think this is a cool thing for a retired cop to do. Also could be applied to retired kind of anything. Anybody who has a cool job, like whether you're a SWAT officer, a, you know, military veteran, firefighter, or whatever it is. I think there's a lot of people who— there are a lot of people who are like me. We're like little weaklings that spend all of our days behind a desk and we want this like safe way to taste, you know, an adventure and like what the real tough world looks like. And so that's why like Spartan Race and stuff, that's why they do well. And similarly, I think that these like kind of crime walks would be, would be cool. So then I took it a little bit further. Well, why don't people do this with more things? So why don't you take every physical venue where something interesting is happening? Breweries do this, right? Breweries say, hey, we got this brewery, but we also have this side business of people come through, they get a tour of a brewery, they get to see how it's made. They get to taste the beers, they get to take some photos, they get to buy our shit on the way out. And they've turned brewery tours as a like additional income stream for breweries. So why doesn't this happen for more things? Like when I visited, you know, the warehouse for my wife's, you know, e-commerce business, I was fascinated. It's like this 80,000 square foot place. You get to see all these forklifts coming around and how it works, how the fulfillment works. When an order comes in, how does it get put in a mailer? How does it get taken out of here? And so I think that for everything— factories, warehouses, police stations, firefighter stations— I think they should all have this as a business.

that was $10,000.

Yeah, it's called the— if you go to Boehner Media Eventbrite, you'll find it.

It was called— so this is I'm an age— I'm a small agency owner. GaryVee is my hero. VaynerMedia is like where we want to be someday. I'll pay $10,000 to basically get to go check it out, see how it works, meet Gary, shake his hand, uh, spend 20 minutes there, and then like leave. Is that, is that basically it?

Yeah, it's called the, uh, VaynerMedia Daily Digital Deep Dive. And if you look it up on Eventbrite, you can—

stupid name.

Yeah, it's a dumb name. Am I right, Abreu? Is that what it's called? And so if you look up Eventbrite VaynerMedia, you'll see it and you could look at the past events and you could see how full it is and you could see the price. It's pretty ridiculous. Not bad, but like—

so I didn't look this up beforehand, but I'll tell you another version of this. That's cool. Are you a basketball fan? Do you know who Coach K is?

Yeah, Duke guy. I know. I'm not an idiot, but I'm not a fan. Okay, so the Four Ds, by the way, it's called the Four Ds. Uh, it's called the Four Ds, uh, VaynerMedia Four Ds. I guess that is Daily Digital Deep Dive.

Okay, cool. So, um, so Coach K, who is the Duke basketball coach, he's the most famous college basketball coach probably of all time, uh, and he was the men's Olympic coach for the dream, the, the latest dream teams or regime teams, like LeBron and Kobe and all those guys. So he's a pretty popular guy. And he does a thing every year called Coach K's Fantasy Camp. It's almost identical to what you're talking about. And now you got my brain spinning that how many more of these are there? And how many more should there be? And maybe we need the My First Million Dream Camp. So here's how this works. Coach K's Fantasy Camp, you pay $10,000 and you get to go. Who are these people? They are, you know, Duke students who like, you know, there's a bunch of Duke students who are like kind of investors now, CEOs of companies. And they were big basketball fans. Now they got a bunch of money, they're kind of in their 40s or, you know, 50s, and they pay to go to this thing. What is it? You go for the— for, I think, a 5-day program or something like that. You go back to Duke campus and you live like a player. So you stay in the dorms, I think, or, you know, you stay kind of on campus or right next to campus. Um, there's like a bus that basically brings you onto campus and you, you come into Cameron Indoor Stadium, which is the Duke basketball stadium. It's like the hallowed ground. And, um, Coach K takes you through a camp where you, you're, you know, you're on the court, you're shooting, you're doing the drills that the players do. You get the motivational talk that Coach K gives. He brings in old players to come. Oh, that's Carlos Boozer. Oh, that's JJ Redick. Um, you know, you get autographs and kind of, you know, but, but it's more intimate because it's $10 grand. So there's, you know, a few hundred campers, I think. And, uh, so they actually get to meet those guys and actually hang with them. And for the players, it's cool too, because these are all like CEOs or high-level hedge fund guys. They actually kind of want this business network also. And, um, you get to wear the jersey, you get to go into the locker room, they play the sounds when you come out, and like, you know, you've got your dad bod, like your fat's coming out the side of the jersey, and it's all, here comes, here comes Duke! And you get to run out and there's like no fans there because it's not real again. Um, anyways, this thing's awesome. He must make a ton of money off this thing. I haven't really done the math because I heard about this when I was in college. My roommate was a manager on the team, so he was part of the kind of the team program. So he would stay during the summers to be the kind of the Uber, the shuttle bus driver for these guys. And he's like, I was like, why are you doing this? Sounds lame. Like, why do you want to do this? He's like, oh, I make a killing in tips. These guys will just hand me hundreds when they get out for the 5-minute ride of like from the, from the dorm or the hotel to the gym. He's like, I'm getting $100 from these guys every time I do one of these shuttles. It's amazing. And, and the network is great. Like, I meet some of these guys, they're like, hi, you know, this guy started this, this guy started that. So I think this is cool. And I wonder how many more people do this or could do this because it's a very interesting little—

why don't you do it for every sport? And, and I'm so into this. I don't know what— I don't know what I could do it with, but I'm on board.

Here's, here's a version of this. If you're a hustler. Okay, so, so if you're a hustler, here's what you do. You go to, um, Grant Cardone, you go to, you know, people who are— yes, they've made it and they have a high profile, but they actually don't make as— they still need money, right? So like, you can't— I don't think you could do this with LeBron James necessarily, but I think you could do this with a college football coach because college football coaches, like, you know, at every program don't make tons of money.

Or a really famous high school coach.

Dude, I think, and this is actually what I've thought about doing because I enjoy using, I enjoy physical work. Uh, I, whenever I'm done working here, whenever I'm done, I like, before I start my next company, I'm, what I'm gonna do is I'm either I'm gonna go and read a book and I'm gonna master like a niche, like like crime in New York or the Gold Rush in San Francisco or something like that. Or I'm going to start a landscaping company, something that I'm going to have to be outside all day working really hard. And I think I can turn it into a million-dollar-a-year company like inside 6 months. I truly believe it. The reason why this fascinates me is because, A, I love it. I love like being physically exhausted. I enjoy that. But also because I think that far too many people are trying to make money on the internet, which is cool and all, when they could probably crush it and become quite wealthy by just doing some something outside that is totally like, oh, it won't scale, yada yada. I'm like, fuck it, dude. Who like do like, you know, first of all, everything could scale at least a little bit.

And second, like, I would love to see somebody do manhood as a service. Okay, what's manhood as a service? So in the same, again, same way that Spartan Race and Tough Mudder, they're kind of like these like pseudo tough guy events that you can go do. Oh, I did something hard outdoors, I got muddy, I got cut, you know, I climbed this mountain, I got this headband, and I drank a beer at the end. You know, you get your man card. Now if anybody who really knows knows that this is not a real man card, this is a fake ID. But you know, this is your McLovin.

That's pretty funny.

But that's what these are offering. They're offering manhood as a service. And, um, I would like to see somebody take this to the extreme. So I'll give you the example, uh, Brother Aaron, who comes on here. He's come on here twice or something like that. And people know him because people like him because he's kind of a nut. Like, he comes on with conspiracies and rabbit holes, and he just goes all in on things. He has gone all in on like manhood. He's sort of like, dude, we're all too soft. So he trains like jiu-jitsu and boxing, and he just wants to do an amateur fight. Why? Because he's like, I just want to see what I'm made of. And I think you could take that concept and make it a weekend traveling circus. It goes from city to city, and you just say, step up and face some pain. You want to see what it's like to get like kind of tortured? You want to get— can you take a punch? Can you get like, like a Tough Mudder? There's the electric shock at the end, and you kind of want to know that like, what does that feel like? You know, like, can you go in this isolation tank and like, could you last an hour? I don't know what the actual product is, but I know it's a counterintuitive thing. It's like, wait, people are paying to get like, kind of like do physical labor. They have to like chop down this fucking tree and they don't get picked up until they're done. So yeah, that's what this is. It's like hard work slash pain slash like manhood. Like, what did we used to have to do that we don't have to do anymore? What's hardship? That we are sheltered from because other people do it for us or machines do it for us or whatever. And, uh, I think there's actually like a very big craving in society for, um, for those types of experiences.

I totally agree. I've been going boxing every Friday and I just like love— I'm like, I need to get punched in the face so I can feel alive. Um, I gotta do it.

In. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like it's like a TV version of Disneyland.

Yes. Yes.

Exactly.

You take the IP from TV and you make Disneyland out of it. And as— or, you know, yeah, like any kind of carnival or fair.

If they had like— do you remember, you know, that TV show The Challenge that both you and like like, so Sean and my wife Sarah, like, do I remember the show I watched last week? Yes. Yeah, they like text each other about this thing called The Challenge. I don't know how it ended. I mean, I see it in the background when Sarah's watching it, but they, they love it.

I thought you were a fan. You didn't even watch the finale.

If I don't have anything to do, I'll sit with her and watch it. I, I have literally no idea how it ended. Uh, I think the ending was like last week, right?

Yeah.

Um, if they have like a challenge location where you could do— I know there's like a famous one called like Wall Brawl or something like that. Hall Brawl. Yeah, like if they— like we would have gone—

let me describe Hall Brawl for, for people who don't know, because you know there's not many people— the crossover between people who care about business and tech and watch The Challenge, you know, it's a lonely, lonely island. So Hall Brawl is a— imagine a narrow hallway like 2 feet wide, it's just plexiglass, uh, so 2 plexiglass things with a 2-foot gap in between. And on one side there's one person wearing football pads, another person's Someone else is standing on the other side and then the guy says go and you have to run straight at each other in this narrow hallway. You smash into each other and then it's like whoever gets out to the other side and rings the bell first wins. And it's the famous thing there. But this is exactly what I would do in my kind of manhood as a service fair or my, or my TV fair, which is, yeah, you can do hall brawl. Come step up, sign the waiver, step up and you get to do hall brawl. You get to experience this. We— there's video cameras already positioned everywhere and you get to share this content on Instagram. At the end of it, just like the Museum of Ice Cream, just like Tough Mudder. It's done for photo opportunities.

I've got— we're probably going to have to wrap it up soon, but I've got two stories that I'm going to bring up. The first is I was at my friend Nick Gray's house the other day and I met the founder of Museum of Ice Cream and I told him we talked about him and he was like, I know. And I— and we were never disrespectful about him, but I think we were like, not bullish on the idea. So we will have to—

I think we were both like, this is a great business idea. But hey, if you go, kind of underwhelming. I think that was like our— both of our like true user opinion of it.

So we're gonna have to have him come on. But second, have you heard of Museum Hack?

No, what is this?

That's cool. I like that one. You had two stories. Is that the one? Is that both or is that one?

That was both.

Okay, that's both. Can I do one more idea?

Yeah.

Do we want to try to slip it in?

All right.

So this is related to manhood as a service, more like back to the roots, which I think kind of like what you were talking about was like, I'm going to buy a farm, I'm going to own the farm, and I'm going to offer tours of the farm and let people come farm with me., or a ranch or something like that, right?

And you're talking about Rent the Chicken? I'm looking at the site now.

Rent the Chicken is what I want to talk about. So what I saw this little thing that showed that— that's talked about how the chicken rental business has been booming during the pandemic. Okay, what is this? People are renting chickens like pet. It's like a pet in a box. So chicken kind of owners, breeders, I don't know who you— real farm people basically are taking chickens and basically saying, hey, Hey, Sam, who, you know, lives in Austin and, you know, has his house, do you want a chicken coop in your backyard? Here's what you get. Hey, there's 2 chickens back there. Cool. You kind of got a little pet. I'll bring the coop. I bring the feed. I bring the instructions. I kind of boot you up. I let you know how it works. They're going to lay like 6 eggs, you know, a day or whatever. Like, you're going to get fresh eggs that are awesome from your own coop. And you got this pet that's back there.

Oh my God, this is awesome.

And like, you get to talk to them and pet them and And like, I know, for example, my daughter is like 18 months old. Like, kids love animals. And so I want to get her like some kind of animal soon. That's like a, like, because we have cows that come in our backyard or like to our fence. And it's like her favorite thing in the whole world is to be like, cows, cows. And then she says like, you know, cow see moo, cow see moo. Like, it means like, I want to go see the cows. They go moo. And so I take her to the fence and she sees them and she's like, wants to touch them. And it's like her favorite thing. Our friend Ramon had a little chicken coop in his backyard. Yeah, 3 of them, 3 chickens back there, and his son liked it, and they used to go out there and, you know, feed the chickens and get eggs from them. And so this is booming, so they're all like sold out. So all the chicken rental companies can't get a chicken right now. They're all like totally booked. Demand during the, during the pandemic like tripled. I think it's still small numbers because they were like, oh yeah, demand tripled last year. We need 70 70, we had 70 chickens to rent and now we have like 200 chickens to rent. So it's like that's still not that many coops that you're renting out.

Pretty amazing.

But I'll call this my— this is my new segment called Blue Collar Side Hustle. I may never do the segment again, but at least for this—

No, we're going to do that. That's a good one. Blue Collar Side Hustle.

This is a way to make a few thousand dollars a month.

This whole episode is blue collar side hustles, I think, actually.

Dude, and this website Rent the Chicken, they also have a thing called Buy the Eggs or something like that. And you can find out where the— so Rent the Chicken, yeah, they put you a thing near you and then they have a thing where you could find out where the nearest one is and you could buy the fresh eggs from your Which is cool, right?

So you can go farm to table, but you're just in the city and you're just getting it from somebody who lives 2 miles away. They also do this with schools, which I think is again smart because kids love the schools and offices. Hey, you're a school and office. Great. We can do a 6-week program where you get chickens for 6 weeks. You guys get to name them, take care of them, pet them, blah, blah, blah. Take, you know, kids are going to have fun and then we move on. Which back when I was in school, we had the same— we had like a class pet for like, you know, Everybody got to take them home for 2 weeks or something like that. Um, you know, so we had that. You have like a beekeeper thing, or like you're a beekeeper, you have bees, bees and honey. Maybe bees and honey is like another little genre besides chickens. Uh, but I think anything where it's a simple, low-maintenance pet that is unorthodox and ideally provides a little bit of food you can eat, so eggs, honey, something like that, I, I think that that is a really fun thing to do. Again, dude, your growth— you were working on growth. I said I gotta find something good, and then I just closed my eyes and started typing buttons, and this came to me.

This is, uh, very cool. So it— Rent the Chicken is not— okay, so it's— here's the price for Houston. Houston's near San Francisco. They deliver to you for free. It's only $285 for a 5-week rental, February to October. They deliver and set it up for free. You 7 eggs that are gonna, uh, be hatched. You get, uh, a box. I think you get 1 chicken. This is so interesting.

What a cool— a week, right? $60 a week to have, you know, a chicken or 2 in your backyard making eggs.

Oh, Rent a Chicken. Rent the Chicken is cool. I'm into Rent the Chicken. I went to, um, a party the other day and it was— they had a backyard petting zoo and like a petting zoo delivery service.

Kids party or an adults party?

It was an adult party and they had— it was basically all the backyard. It just means they, they have chickens, they have a guinea pig, and I think that's— oh, and rabbits. And that's what this reminds me of. Rent the chicken, backyard petting zoos. I'm into all this shit, man. I like all this stuff. This is, this is a good one. I actually think this is something I might sign up for, but they're not in Austin. My— but my friend who had a chicken, he said the eggs looked different, but they didn't taste different. But I would feel a lot better eating backyard eggs than store eggs.

For sure.

Can I— then let me switch gears real quick. How do you stay focused? Because when I'm doing this, so I'm all in on podcasts right now. That's all I think about. It's almost all I work on. I have 200 unread texts. I've got hundreds of voicemails. I get phone calls from salespeople selling me crap. My email is ruined. Twitter sucks. My Slack is constantly beeping. It is so hard to get in the zone and focus. How do you do it?

Yes. Well, I would say this. I am not a details person in general. So I would say one of the ways to stay focused or one of the ways to get shit done, instead of saying stay focused, I'll say get shit done, is to correctly identify, like you said, the 80/20. Of any project. So for you, you were like, for the podcast, okay, what do I ultimately need to do? I need to get people to smash the subscribe button. So how do I get more people to hit subscribe today? Right? So you focused on the thing that matters and you threw away the rest. And then you did the, what's the one step I can take today to get that to happen more? And then tomorrow I'll come up with another one and the next day I'll come up with another one. So that's what— you didn't say it in so many words, but that's how I operate. I identify what is the thing that if I just did this one thing, it's going to get me 80% of the return or the reward or the impact. And then I try to just set out, okay, today I got to get this one outcome done. And that one outcome might have like 5 tasks, 5 like subtasks underneath. But I'm like, okay, if I can correctly identify the high impact thing and then secondly, if I can just narrow it down, you know, make it a memorable— like I don't do a to-do list. It's one thing that I can remember in my head all day that this is the one outcome I got to get done. I'll find a way to get it done. It won't leave my brain. I don't let my brain get cluttered by all the 10 other things. And this bothers the hell out of my wife. Or like right now, my mom's staying with us, right? She's helping out with the baby and she's like, oh, you got to get your car insurance thing done. Oh, and hey, did you know your trash thing? We should upgrade the thing so you get the bigger bins because your bins are overflowing. And like all these people texted you because it was your birthday on Sunday.

You—

did you reply to any of them? Like, no, I didn't do any of those things. I don't plan to do any of those things. None of those things are in line with my chief aim right now. Now. So like, I'm gonna like focus on that. And it doesn't matter what the chief aim is, right? Like, we just had this baby. My chief aim was like, I'm gonna be so helpful with this baby because like, I can see my wife is like, she's gonna drown otherwise. This is too hard to have 2 kids under 18 months old. I need to be like Mr. Mr. Helpful. And so I like went all in on Mr. Helpful. But if it's a project, like let's say growing the podcast, that's what I would do. Identify the 80— the thing that will give me 80% of the impact Make it every day. Just choose one high-impact thing to do. Like it might be get booked on other people's podcasts, other big podcasts, because I know that's going to drive attention. Cool. I'll only do that thing. I won't do anything else.

So what you're describing, I actually wrote about this. I have this article called I'll Do It Later: Why You Shouldn't Worry About Procrastinating. And it was written in 2015. So I wrote this 6 years ago and basically— and I stole a lot of ideas from other people. So I won't take— I don't want to act like I invented this, but there's basically 3 types of procrastination. There's the first type, which is you do nothing, and that type is easy. A lot of people suffer from that, and that's what you want to avoid. You don't want to do number 1. The second one is doing something less important than what you should be doing. A lot of people do that too, and that's basically when you, you know, you have to do this school homework, but you play video games instead, right?

No, no, it's like you clean your room. It's like you do some false productive thing when you didn't need to do that. You should have been studying for the test tomorrow.

Tomorrow. Yeah, it's called— it's busy work and it's meaningless. And that's actually the worst type of procrastination because you actually think you're doing something productive. In reality, you're not. Um, and that's really dangerous. But the third type of procrastination I think we should all embrace, and it's actually the good type of procrastination, so it is when you, uh, when you do something that's more important than the stuff you should be doing. And that's actually what you just described. So getting your car insurance is actually important, but what's more important— let's say this relates to business— it's just making a ton of money to the point where that car insurance kind of is you understand that it's less important. And the best example of this is like the brilliant scientist who accidentally wears two left shoes or who forgets to shower or who doesn't take their trash out. Is taking your trash out important? It's important, but it's far less important than creating the theory of relativity. You know what I mean?

And so I actually— Balaji said something about this the other day because we said, what's your day like? And he goes, I, you know, he's like, we said kind of like, dude, you're thinking about all these topics. The future of X and the future of Y and the past of Z. These are heavy, like these are meaty topics to think about. Like, how do you do that every day? And he was like, actually, that's not so hard for me. That feels like play. Like I enjoy doing that. What's hard for me is remembering that I have a call I got to be on in 10 minutes and like stopping what I'm doing, getting there on time and remembering to go do that thing. He's like, because I get completely engrossed in what I'm doing and that becomes easy. But what becomes hard is like normal life. And I was like, yeah, you are the absent-minded scientist who's got like his desk is like, you know, totally messy. It's like to someone else looks like chaos, but you know that you're piecing these things together and you don't care about organizing your desk right now. It's just not what's important to you.

Yeah, like, I actually got into an argument with my wife yesterday about this because we have some bill that's like— we have like a $700 late fee on it. And she was like, oh my God, we're so wasteful. Like, why didn't you just pay this bill? I told you about it. I put it on your desk. And I was like, uh, and I was like, yes, you did put it on my desk, but I was so knee-deep in learning about DeFi the last 3 days. And hey, guess what? Like, we've made, you know, $68,000 in 3 days on— in this DeFi trade that I was making. And, um, like, that's cash in the bank now. Like, could we not worry about the $700 thing? And so for me, it's so black and white, but she comes from a totally different value set, which is like, it feels worse to her to take something that was avoidable, um, that you could have just taken care of, that would signify adulthood, uh, that you're on top of your bills. And, um, and for me, it's the exact opposite. My values are, you know, focus on the things that matter and like let other shit fall on the ground. And like, that stuff is on the ground for a reason. I just hop, skip and jump around it. Um, and, and so we are so different, and we constantly get into these arguments. And I feel like financially I'm on the right side of history, but, um, you know, in the house I'm definitely losing rounds every time we do these battles.

So if your wife is listening to this, and she does, by the way, my wife does, which is weird, um, but if— show her this episode. And to anyone else out there who like fits in this like scientist type of forgetful scientist thing where they forget birthdays or they do this and they do this, but they're really actually focused on like some interesting thing that will actually change their life or others' lives, let it slip. Let it slide. Do not give in to this societal pressure of like having to focus on these unimportant things because you should instead be focused on things that actually matter. Your health, whatever you're working on, and your family. Everything else is pretty much bullshit.

Yes.

So can I—

I'm doing all that shit now. I can't stand it. So I agree. I think we had a good little rant on procrastination, on productivity.

Okay, great. Good episode. That's it. That's a wrap. Abreu, give us the grade. People hated when we put the grade up front. I got like 5 messages being like, "I prefer it at the end." All right.

That's good. All right everyone, I asked you to either leave a review or subscribe and send me proof, and hundreds, maybe even north of 1,000 people did. I'm not going to read all your names right now, but I'm going to get to everyone eventually. But I want to give a few shout out, or I want to give a shout out to a handful of people that did it. So, uh, here's everyone who subscribed and sent a screenshot. If you want to get a shout out, you can do the same. My email is mfm@thehustle.com. @thehustle.co. So it's My First Million, MFM, MFN, MFM, sorry, @thehustle.co. Subscribe to the podcast and send me a screenshot and I'm going to read your name. So give a shout out to Sam Dickey, to Alex Kana, to Apostolos. Ooh, this guy, I think he's a Greek guy. Apostolos D. Delandes, Adam Gusky, Ryan Bennett, Zach Rosen, Rob Borowski, Alex Rudolphi, Brydon Sanders, Will Sweat, Rob Phillips, Richie Dawes. And then here's a bunch of people on Twitter who hollered at me with, um, with, um, a review and a proof of subscription. So Paul Hallsop, Jimmy Montreif, Warren SMP, Cameron Walker, Willie Salksy, Salksy, Mooney Millions, Ms. McLean, Ellie Lager. Oh my gosh, I'm really sorry, guys. I just, for some reason, I have an issue where I struggle to pronounce certain stuff. Danny Dolly, K3 Goodman, Louis Schulman, Dave M. Smith, Cheese 3, Solar Wolf, Faff Coffee, Wade W Wireless, Landon H7, uh, and that's, that's it for right now. I'm gonna get to the rest, um, next week, but we'll see if, if this is even good and people like this. But go ahead and subscribe to the podcast, send me proof that you've subscribed via a screenshot, send it to mfm@thehustle.co, and I'll try to read your name.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off.

On the road, let's travel, never looking back. Life.