#50 - Digital Tithing, Influencer Based Cloud Kitchens & Uber Driver Revenue Streams with Stu Iverson

Alright, we're here. Sam— nope, that's not Sam, that's Stu.

Wow.

Tell the people, who is Stu?

Stu is a friend of The Hustle. Uh, I actually met Sam through a mutual mentor, Chris Redlet. Shout out Chris Redlet's Last Mile, uh, and Transmedia Capital.

And you work out of here?

I do work out of here. It's incredible, man. I was working out of home and so was my partner. And for the people that know me, I'm on the phone about 12 hours a day. Most of my things are just brokering deals, and she kicked me out. Right. So here I am. Sam took in one of the refugees like you guys talked about last time.

That's me. Yeah. And we— after the last episode, you were, you were listening in. And normally after every episode, we're like, yo, how was it? To the people that were kind of in the room. And it's usually like, good. Yeah, I liked it. And you were like, it was good, but here's 3 things I think you guys could do better. And I was like, nice. Who is this?

No one likes a yes man.

Yeah, no one likes a yes man, especially if you're trying to make something great. You always wanna, nobody also likes a hater. So you need an honest person, you know?

100%.

And so you were honest, I like that, and then we started talking about, I don't know how, we started talking about ideas. We just bumped into each other, started immediately jamming on some ideas, and I was like, hold on, this should have been recorded, come by next week, let's do this. And also—

Here I am with Sam gone, and we gotta say, he's with the GaryVee Podcast and you're stuck with me, so I don't know who's winning on that one.

Yeah, oh, I'm winning, dude, I'm winning. I'm not trying to be on one of those Instagram posts where it, Starts out with his signature on the screen, his autograph at the start.

I will say, this office now compared to last week, we gotta say, Henry put in a ton of work. This office looks 1,000 times better than GaryVee's podcast.

Shout out to Henry, do you have a Twitter handle? Uh, yeah, HenryBillings5. HenryBillings5, give him a shout for turning the studio up.

This is incredible. For everyone that's just listening at home, what the studio used to look like is if—

Close your eyes and imagine.

Yeah, two wealthy guys went on Amazon and they searched by highest price for comfortable chair and they bought it and they found— Bright red chair. And they found a broom closet and put it in there with some of their books. And now it looks like a legitimate studio now. Studio.

Yeah, there's like the soundproofing shit on the walls. There's posters behind us. There's like a very like prestigious looking book that just says Sam Rump behind us. And his glasses. It's like he died and we have a tribute here.

Shouts out to Sam. Come back safe.

So Sam did the GaryVee podcast and he did Pomp's podcast. If you don't know Pomp, you're not in the crypto world. This guy who's always talking about Bitcoin. So Sam's on tour right now doing a couple other things. They did a meetup of listeners and Trend subscribers in New York. I saw it, it was awesome.

They're popping off. Did you see the feedback from that?

I saw the feedback. More importantly, I saw the videos. Like, yo, this is some nice Airbnb. Like, yeah, you guys went all out for this.

Yeah, how big's the business around here?

Yeah, exactly. We're spending now. Okay, we're spending. That was cool.

It was really incredible. I think what I love about the hustle and what you guys are building here is the engaged, passionate community.

Yes.

It's the only way to build something successful is to be surrounded by people like yourselves. And everyone that was there was saying, hey, it's not like you just go somewhere, shake hands, share a business business card, it's like businesses are coming off the back end of that.

Every great brand that we've seen, especially in the D2C space, customer centricity. It's at the heart of what they're doing. I, I don't know if you saw yesterday, Moïse was saying about at the start, 24/7, he was on the phones, in the emails, responding to everything personally. Yeah. He's an animal. It's a $900 million billion business.

And he brought this up when I did the interview with him. He goes, uh, I forgot who he was mentioning, like whatever, the big Old Spice, like the big deodorant brands that he was going up against. He goes, they don't know who their customers— their customers, Target. Target buys their shit and puts it on the shelf. If they wanted to get in touch with the people who love their product, they wouldn't even have their email address. They don't have their connection. And he, so he realized early on with, you know, he was doing D2C before D2C was the buzzword. It was just called e-commerce back then. Yep. And it wasn't super sexy to be doing. Um, but he was doing, you know, the deodorant sales and he realized, Hey, I have this relationship directly with the customer. I could talk to them, they could talk to me, I could send them more products and say, "Hey, try this out. Is this better?" I can write them a thank you note, that sort of thing. And that was underrated at the time.

The big difference is if you go to Mois and you ask him who your customer is, he's gonna give you a specific example. And if you go to other competitors, they're gonna show you a slide—

A demographic.

Says, "Oh, this is Sarah the Shopper." Right, yeah. Sarah the Shopper is between the ages of 15 and 50.

Right, and then all the marketing guys with MBAs sort of nod and clap.

Exactly. Yeah, customer centricity. But yeah, again, happy to be here. Love what you guys are doing.

Yeah, we're gonna get into a couple ideas. The second principle that I think is really important, so I just bumped into Stu just doing the podcast, and I would say two, two things come from this. Um, there's this phrase, proximity is power. Shout out Tony Robbins. Um, if you don't know any better and you wanna build your network, you wanna be around more successful people, you wanna be more successful yourself, one of the best things you can do is just get near them. Like, yes, I was just in the office, you were in the office, and boom, connection made. That's what happened with Mike Brown, the kind of guy who was on the podcast earlier, who does oil and gas in Texas. We're just here, we bump into each other. I moved to San Francisco on a lark just for that. I was like, I just better go get in the mix. I was in Australia, I was as far as you could be from San Francisco.

You're from Australia?

No, I was just there on a different adventure.

I was gonna— for the Commonwealth. Yeah, I'm from Canada, so a similar story if you don't mind me saying.

Yeah, go for it.

Uh, before what I'm doing now, I helped found this company called Factory and then, uh, led it at the end, and it was literally We were a handful of guys between Stockholm, New York, and Calgary, and all we wanted to do was not just read in books about how success is made, but meet them. We wanted to get where are people solving the biggest challenges in the world and actually come here. So we moved, used the Field of Dreams approach. We said, if we build it, they will come. Went on Craigslist, found the biggest house we could find, put our money together, got it. Shout out 711 Scott Street. Right. And legit.

Oh, is the factory that co-living coworking space?

It was anything and everything you could possibly imagine.

Oh dude, I've heard so much about this.

That's us. Oh, okay, great. And so, but all it was, was a network of thought leaders, entrepreneurs, executives, where we put on everything from workshops, talks, dinners. All we cared about was having the best people in the world come to our house to tell us what is making you different? What is making you tick? How are you building products? Right. 'Cause if you're reading books, which is fantastic, I do a lot of it, I know you do, you're gonna say, hey, product is everything. No, marketing is everything. Customer centricity is everything. But really, you have to go there, find out for every industry, for every vertical, for every product, What makes it different, right? And who are the entrepreneurs that are actually making it happen?

Yeah, and just get around them. Like, you don't have to— you don't have to figure out step 2. Just get around them. It's the fastest path to, uh, you know, sort of improving your odds of success is get really close, literally proximity. Get nearby other successful people. Work out of their office, hang out with them, go to a coworking space, whatever it is, but get around successful people.

Even— there's a lot of people on this podcast, I imagine, that are probably living in like the rural states, rural Canada. Yep. You know, people like we were, cold emailing works. Like anyone that cold emails me, I respond. I know you guys are the exact same way. Even all these executives, it's been really big on Twitter, uh, how fast the response time was. It's like if you have a clear, concise message and you either A, want mentorship, you want to ask a question, or you want to give them a piece of feedback, they will respond to you.

And how not to do it is just, hey, can I get some time, some of your time? Hey, I'm Sean. Love you. Get, can I have a minute, 30 minutes or an hour of your time? Or can I get a coffee? That's the worst way to do it.

Best way to do it is, hey, I'm Sean, I'm whatever, 22 years old, I'm from this place, I'm doing this interesting thing, or I really want to do this interesting thing. You, I really appreciate the things you're doing. I've shared out your blog post, I've told my friends about your podcast. Would you take a look at my slide deck? Would you play around my product and give me 2 bullet points what you think I could be doing better? Hey, I'm gonna be I want to be in your city, and you know, the next event you guys do, I will organize it for you. Tell them you're doing something interesting, be humble about it, and then make it clear and simple, a lightweight ask. Don't ask for time, don't ask for coffee.

How many generic in-mails are you getting a week? 100?

On a daily basis, um, this is kind of how I measure the success of the podcast, on a daily basis I get 30 to 40 inbound new messages from people, and that's across Email, LinkedIn, and, and Twitter DMs. Uh, LinkedIn I get to like 3 months later, but like Twitter DMs and email I check every morning.

Yeah.

And so it's about 30 or 40 unique people doing that. Not a huge number, but for me that's like the best part of my day is that wake up. All right, who reached out? Who said that, you know, they like something from this, they're doing something interesting, they wanna work together. I've invested now in 2 companies from the, wow, from listeners. Uh, I'm like in conversations with several others. And so this has been a big deal for me.

Wow. What set them apart?

So the first guy, I think some people might have heard him on the live show. He was a super credible entrepreneur. So he was like, yeah, I, you know, I currently, you know, right now I run this division of the self-driving department at Uber. Yeah. And I'm leaving to start my own self-driving car company, and here's what I'm doing differently than everybody else. Wow. So I was like, okay, to get to that position at Uber, you got to be pretty legit. You have a unique insight that you can, you can tell me very clearly. And then the third thing was like, as I probed— the story just got better. As I got to know him, I was like, wow, more impressed. Yes. As I saw what he had done, more impressed. And I was like, okay, here's—

you invested?

Yeah.

Okay, how long did it go from email to close?

Wow. That's like, uh, did you see, uh, First Round? I think it was First Round came out and said that if they look back 10 years ago, it took them 9 weeks to close. And if they look now, it's taking them 9 days.

I agree.

Uh, cuz everyone's gonna say that they can help, and a smart entrepreneur knows, like, A, you're not going to help that much, and B, everybody says they help, so how can I tell who's actually super helpful? Until you have a great track record, then you're like, okay, this person was a part of these great successes already.

I agree with you fully. Just to go on that, do you mind if I plug something really quick? Do it. I'm going to actually— I'm going to plug The Hustle. Okay. So going into talking about investing, how you move forward, what's that first step? Did you read the trends report this week?

Yeah, I saw they were like —They're gonna invest some money into startups that came out of the community?

100%. If we think about, and you talk to Sam a lot about it, over the last 4 years, when he got the deal flow, he heard those first ideas that were coming out that are now billion-dollar businesses that he completely missed, or they could have helped earlier on and helped them get to where they are now much earlier. Right. It's incredible.

Do you know of any of those examples? You might not, because it's Sam's.

I know a couple of them. I don't know if I should share.

You can't share, okay.

But there's some big ones out there. And so, I know these guys have been talking about it for a while, it's like, how do we help the community? And like, how do we be that catalyst? So now, it's not just for Trends subscribers either. It's like, obviously, shouts out to Trends, we want you to get on there and get those nice ideas. Right. But for anyone listening, I want you to email Henry, actually. HenryB@thehustle.co your best business idea, and if it is chosen, we'll give you $1,000. Henry B. Not just $1,000, we'll also find any resources that you possibly need to help this thing scale.

That's pretty good. All right, I like it.

It's like, did you read Atomic Habits?

I've read about a third of it so far.

So what really stuck out, what these guys are doing great here, and on what I want kind of every entrepreneur to hit on, is understanding the difference between motion and action. Every entrepreneur thinks they're in action, but legitimately they're talking about the idea, talking about you with the idea, tweeting about the idea, but how are you taking that forward? Mm-hmm. And so the big thing here, it's like, I want to help you and Trends, and you want to help them go from motion to getting into action. And if it's a $1,000 $1,000, it's gonna be that catalyst. That's what makes sense.

So what's the difference? Motion, action. Okay, motion, talking about it, thinking about it.

Right. So use this as your excuse. Obviously the $1,000 not gonna make or break your situation. But just treat it as the catalyst to take the thing that's been in the back of your mind and bring it to the forefront. Take some action on it.

I want to see all the ideas. And as a Trends community, we'll all vote on them. I like it. And we're going to— we're going to also follow track and show the community the progression of the company.

Cool. Okay, let's take a quick break and let me ask you a quick question. When did Noah build the ark? After the rain? After the flood? No. Before the rain. So as an entrepreneur, Quiet Light Brokerage wants to remind you to prepare before you want to sell your business. You don't just sell it right when you want to. You plan your exit for 6 figures, 7 figures, or 8 figures. Quiet Light Brokerage is a group of trusted advisors that can help you not just survive the tides, but exit on your own terms for the price you want, at the time you want, to the buyer that you want. You know, as you chart your way towards an exit, you gotta first start by understanding the value of your business. If you want to see a 25-point checklist to see how well your business scores across the 4 pillars that they have seen drive value when they, uh, for all the sales that they've seen in their portfolio, you can find that checklist at quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion. That's quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion. Check out the free assessment, see how your business scores. If you want, you can get a free consultation for your business as well, but no pressure, no gimmicks, no sales pitches. Uh, you know, Quiet Light is an entrepreneur-led organization. The founders have built and sold businesses, bought businesses before themselves. They're not just, you know, sort of quick fly-by-the-night brokers. And they advise you to use the best data to help business owners like you reach your financial goals. So grab the free guide. It's over at quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion. Support the pod. Go check them out. Um, okay, we got some topics that we wanted to talk about. So, uh, where do you want to start? So, uh, let's do a couple of the ideas. So let's scroll down. We're going to skip this one. Um, let's do a couple of the ideas that, that we were chatting about last time. What are some of the ideas that are interesting to you?

Well, last week when I was sitting in, you guys mentioned that religion overall is declining, and I didn't think that was right. And so I looked at the numbers and actually there's 66 million people coming. And I'm just going to speak towards Christianity. Sure. 66 million new Christians every single year, right? People being born into it, people converting and so on, with only 26 million people leaving the church, which means 40 million. Right. Net, net That positive. 3.3 billion by 2050. Right. Which is pretty incredible. And I don't know on Instagram if anyone that's listening to the podcast follows, but there's a lot of actual Christian entrepreneurs and Christian influencers. So you have people like Carl Lance, Rich Wilkerson Jr., Voo Church, even—

let me ask, are you a religious guy or are you interested in this from a just a curiosity and business point of view?

Both. Both. Okay. So I'm part of a men's group, like a men's Christian group. And it's interesting and like kind of diving into the idea itself. A lot of my friends have kids that are growing up. Every single way that the church traditionally engages with this younger, uh, this younger demographic is outdated, right? Read the Bible, read the Bible, you know, listen to me talk, but sit down and listen. Exactly. There it— there's no way right now, there's no media company coming out, there's, there's really nothing out there for new age consumers, Gen Zs, Millennials, to actually engage with the church, right? So we're thinking, this is not like— this is an area where there's 40 million people every every single year joining. That's a pretty fantastic growth rate. Billions of built-in customers. And by 2050, obviously they're getting born right now for the most part, or they're people like us. It's like, how are they going to engage with the church itself? There's, there's only a handful of companies that are somewhat looking into this. But if we look at even the way that culture is trending, look at Kanye West's last album. Yeah, legitimately a gospel album. Look at some of the brands that are really taking off right now. Fear of God, Jerry Lorenzo, right? A Christian-backed fashion company, right? But there's only a handful of them. The opportunity is massive to create either a media company, or, you know, you could be selling books, you could— whatever it might be to engage with those younger consumers.

Even if we think about this from a church's perspective as well,, it will help them with all their accounting. Every week, every Sunday, Saturday, whenever you are going to church, they are accepting cash.

Right. Someone has to sit down and—

Like, sit down, you know, is this tithing money, is this for something else? So just the accounting of it, imagine how much more simple that will be.

They said 15%, I was looking into it a little bit, 15% of all donations now in the churches is digital, but I bet that that's already, you know, a 5-fold increase from where it was a few years ago, and I bet it's going to go further. I think it gets to 30-40% over time, and so this is just church churches and this, you know, just one faith. So there's a— you can copy an existing model, take it to another faith. You could just compete against these. Um, so let's say tithing is one, let's say, uh, you know, surface area where you might go for. What's another?

Well, just going on that, that one point right there, what is really interesting is— did you see Bird come out with payments this week? Yes. Do you think Bird is going to get into— they're going to have Bird payments at the front of all of our churches?

Yeah, exactly. No, I don't, I don't think— I think Bird is in the sort of last-minute Hail Mary type thing. Yeah.

Okay. Okay, well, interesting. Uh, what is another one? The biggest one to me just comes down to engagement, right? You already have a, uh, passionate community of young people that want to be engaged with the church. What we've seen a lot of is merchandise, right? So how can you physically show that you were engaged with the Christian or Catholic or whatever your church actually is, right? So influencer marketing obviously being big. Uh, Preacher Sneakers is a really interesting Instagram.

Is that happening? It's big. Preacher Sneakers.

Preacher Sneakers. Well, Preacher Sneakers shows what all the preachers globally are actually wearing right now. So it's like, how can you create a brand directly for them themselves?

And that's the perfect bridge of like the faith and, you know, Gen Z, uh, you know, crossover there.

So that really gets me excited. Yeah.

So I like the media business idea. I think that's a pretty straightforward one, although probably not the most lucrative. Um, we had talked a little bit about, uh, Beautiful Bibles or Beautiful Bibles. Talk about this. I, I like this idea a lot.

Yes. So number one most selling book of all time. Yes. The Bible. That's a good place to start. Um, the IP, again, you can print your own Bible, so it's not like you're going to go reprint Fifty Shades of Grey and get sued. Yeah. Uh, you can go reprint this and it could work. Um, you can remix it so you can simplify, you can distill, you can pull out certain anecdotes. I love this idea. So the only reason I'm not doing this idea is because I'm not religious. Uh-huh. But even me, I'm just like, well, maybe I would do this.

Even— no, it's like, I love how you just said pull out specific books. Yeah. So Netflix did a really, a pretty interesting movie on the Book of Mark, right? And so like, how can you take some of the stories that were within there and actually have them come to life?

Double-click into those. Yeah. Yeah, I like that a lot. So, so I think this, generally speaking, taking the sort of number one most best-selling book of all time, or if you look at the Gita or the Quran or whatever, these are all in the top sellers of all time. And if you can, you know, put a remix on it, so aesthetically pleasing is where I would go with it first. The other side of it is, you know, distilling it down for kids, making it more kid-friendly, or like you said, going into sort of some of the lesser told, or pulling out some of the anecdotes and stories and really bringing them to life in a different way. 40 million new customers a year, right? Do it as a YouTube channel, do it as a book. I think these are— I think this is really interesting. If someone's doing this, reach out to me. I want to help you make this successful. I put a lot of thought into, into how you would go about doing this, um, and I genuinely think this is a really, really, really, uh, fascinating idea. And this influencer preacher thing, what's up with that?

It, it's so— it's funny, I've thought a lot about it, and guys in my men's group, and I think it's a really great way to bring kind of the youth back into like Christianity, for instance. Um, but they have millions of followers, you know, they're with Bieber all the time.

Karl Lentz is the first one I saw that was doing this. Karl Lentz, the biggest.

You got to think he was leading Hillsong, right?

And if you dressed a little differently, you could pass as like a Carl Lentz.

That might be, that might be my next move after this. We'll see if they reach out.

I saw him and I was like, this guy's good looking.

This is a handsome fella. Stylish, funny, fantastic speaker. Speaks in like common, you know, common tongue.

Not like, you know, he'll use slang. Yeah. Um, and I was like, no wonder this guy's friends with all the basketball players and, you know, musicians that everybody knows about. He reformed Bieber. 100%.

No, it's really interesting. And he's speaking to them on their level. That is really the biggest thing. And so people understand that this is like being— I want to be a strong Christian, let's say, and I want it to be aspirational yet attainable. I can be him, right? Instead of like the typical preacher you'll see at a lot of the churches, it's like you could look up to someone like Carl Lentz being like, that is someone I want to aspire to be, right?

And there's also, um, sort of a musical component. So he's with the Hillsong Church, I think, and they put out like tons great faith-based music. I think that faith-based music is a pretty big space. So here's a question I had about this, right? Because I've brainstormed these, I broke some of them down, I've done a bit of research, and so then I asked myself, I believe in these ideas, but I'm not doing these ideas. A big part of it for me is just time. I do the podcast, I have a job, I have other stuff going on. So for someone like you, entrepreneurial Christian, why don't you do this idea? Idea.

I, I'm one of these. Well, I'm in the same place as you. I'm also very limited. It's all time limited. I will do anything to help these get off the ground. Any of the ideas we'll talk about, right? It's like, you want to see people take these really nascent, interesting ideas that are big and help them come to life. And so if I had more time on my hands, I would love to help it.

And where do you stand on, um, where do you stand on ideas where you don't have that same founder fit? So let's take another— so let's say I did have the time, okay, right?, I magically get 48 hours in my day so I can play with my baby, I can do my job, I can invest in companies, I can do the podcast, I can do the side hustles, I can do it all. So let's say I had double the time and now I'm not time restricted. You know, the second question for me would be, should I do this? Is this the right business for me? Uh, because there's one thing to understand it at an intellectual level. There's another thing to really like love the product, care about it, and get into all those details. So I think a lot of people come into this question of like, should I go for something I'm quote unquote passionate about or know about, or I am the customer, or should I do something that that's sort of, I see the opportunity, and it might be a great market opportunity, but I have to figure out, you know, it's like our buddy Ramon, who, you know, created the most popular soap opera blog in the world, and never watched a soap opera in his life, and sold it for $9 million cash. So I've seen both examples. Where do you stand on this?

My whole thing, I think entrepreneurs have to be at different stages in their life. So for where Ramon was at, he's not saying soap opera blog, this is the 100-year brand. This is something that, when people say, what did Ramon do to leave this earth? He changed the lives of people watching soap operas. He said, how can I, especially where he was at in his life, how can I make money? Right. And he says, this is something that could generate money tomorrow. Yeah. And so now when you're talking about things that are really passionate, that, that you really care about, where you, like when you were building Bebo, when time slips away, when you have that feeling, you care so much about what you're building that you look at the clock and it's 4:00 AM and you're with your co-founders and you said, wow, we're really changing the world. It's a whole different place. There you're trying to build a brand, not just to flip, but to literally make an impact, right? Like, so I think you have to look at yourself, where you're at in your life. Can you take risks? Like you're saying, I know you've been successful, so you have kids, you have a family, but it's like, can I take this risk? Do I have the right time? And do I care about this? Because it's— if I just want to make money right now, become an affiliate marketer, right? Something like, take one of these ideas that you could just easily flip around, start making money tomorrow. Or do I want to build something long-term? That is probably much higher risk, but it's something that I want to really put my name to, right?

you summed it up. Oh my god, I've optimized for different ones.

When I moved to San Francisco, I told you I just wanted to be near people. Yeah, I decided at that time I had done two startups already. I said, next one I don't want to do myself because, you know, I've made these two startups happen with mixed results. You know, some good, some bad. I think I've done better than I thought I would do, but I don't know what I don't know. So I was like, this next chapter is all about learning. So I hooked up with Michael Birch. I was like, this guy's done it before. He's a billionaire. He's built multiple successful companies. Great head of hair. Great head of hair, British accent. Yeah, can't go wrong. And I said, I want to learn. So I said, I don't want to just— how can I— my thesis was, how do I pack 20 years of experience into the next 4 years of my life? I love that. And so I said, I got to work with someone who's done it before. I got to be around really smart people, and I got to work on a portfolio of projects so I get multiple reps and not just one. Yeah. And then I found Michael Birch, who's done it before, and an idea lab where he's working on a portfolio of startup ideas. Boom, perfect. Wow. So I went all in. I was like, this is what I want. Other times, right now I'm in the earn phase. Sold my company. I'm trying to collect the check. I'm gonna cash in the asset that we sold and collect the check. Yeah, of course I'm gonna still learn things, but I picked, you know, there are other ways I could be learning more. I decided this chapter right now, I'm going to cash in some chips.

I'm going to earn. And if we look at your earn as well, going back to the first question, it's you have a portfolio of bets. You have— you've made your money from selling your company. You get paid, I'd assume, on the 1st and the 15th from Twitch or however the payment works. And you've also made higher risk, longer term bets itself that could have a high payout at the end. Right, right. And so you have multiple different streams of income that could be coming in that are going to help you achieve the long-term goals of the type of earning potential that you want to be hitting.

Getting. Right. And so if, if you're listening and, and the other one is legacy, and I've thought about this, okay, what would I do next? Mm-hmm. Would I optimize again for learning? Sometimes I'll just do little experiments that I know I'm not gonna stick with beyond 3 months. Yeah. But I'm like, how hard is it to start a podcast? Yeah. Could I grow that? That's how this, this started as an experiment to just learn. I didn't think I'd earn any money off this. I didn't think it's good for legacy necessarily. I just did it to, to learn. Um, and sometimes you, you know, you think about what's a project I wouldn't want to exit from. Yep. It's a powerful question. Tough to answer, but it's a powerful question.

Wow, I absolutely love that. That's incredible. And you know what, it kind of— what you're saying with, uh, earn, learn, legacy, uh, a lot of the work that I currently do is with corporates still. So I work with both like growth stage startups, but mostly with corporates. And when I help them kind of look at what does the future of the business look like, we actually go through a very similar lens. It's like, how are we going to make the next billion, right? So like, what does a Horizon 2 project look like, right? Then what does the future of our business actually look like? And who are the types of people that we want to be surrounding ourselves with, network startups, investors, whomever it might be, that can help us understand what that is, but not just help us understand and get those insights, but help us build that. Like, that's a lot of the work that I do right now. That's cool.

I like that. Uh, let's talk about this other idea that you had mentioned last time.

So, um, Uber driver revenue streams, Uber driver revenue streams and Lyft. Uh, you know, I, I'm neither.

We don't discriminate.

Yeah. Heck no. I love them both. Right. Whatever's cheaper. Uh, um, but for me, I try to think a lot about, there are resting assets that are currently sitting idle, right? And so how can you— what's a resting asset? A resting asset is something like how Uber has scaled because they have drivers that are sitting out there for themselves, or people just driving around that want to make extra income. So for Uber, for instance, how can we take that a step further? You have people that are online with Uber that are currently waiting for rides, and they have— when they get someone in their car, they have a captive audience. There's been a handful of startups that have somewhat helped alleviate this because the big thing that has come out a lot lately, especially with some of the new regulations coming in, is that Uber and Lyft drivers driving full-time are making far less than minimum wage, right?

Like, far less when you account for all the expenses and the idle times.

Right. So how do you give them a $3 an hour raise?

How do you help them make more money? So people have tried this currently. Interactive Media, I think, we— there's, uh, Octopus Interactive has done this. Everyone's seen it. It's in all cabs in New York. It's in a handful of Uber.

A little screen on the back of the chair type thing.

You play a game. Yeah, it's not targeted. So you and me are getting in there, and I guarantee you, if we sat in there right now, we're going to get served personal injury. Call me if you've been hurt in an accident. Right. Right. Has nothing to do with us.

Right. Okay. But that's one way.

Yeah, that's pretty interesting because I don't know how many rides there are per day, but there's millions of rides per day. And so those are all sort of audio impressions that you could use. And if— I think if you played ads out loud, that would be sort of obnoxious. But if you're playing awesome new music You know, that could be, that could be really interesting where it's sort of non-invasive. It's actually, you know, sort of behind the scenes. Yeah, you don't even have to tell the rider, hey, this is, you know, you're listening to this because of X. It's just this is what the driver has on. Yeah, and the driver gets paid to have their radio on. Exactly.

Specifically to a certain station, a lot hooked into their app, because a lot of the time either you're telling them what to change to or they're putting on something you don't like, right? And so now this is, okay, we think we understand you as an individual, so we're gonna try to serve you music that you like. Bike, right? And I'm helping the driver make more money, right?

Yeah, I like this idea a lot. I think this is cool. Uh, Firefly put the big kind of thing on the top of the, the Ubers.

Is it Firefly that raised last week, or was it the other one?

So Firefly raised prior, um, and they may have raised again, I don't know, but they raised a huge round prior, and like $20-30 million. And then, um, I believe Lyft announced that they were doing this themselves. So one of the ridesharing companies announced that they're doing this themselves, which is going to be now interesting to see what happens with that. —but I like the idea. I also just generally like the underlying, uh, reason this was interesting to you, which was, oh, something's changed. Mm-hmm. Uh, so what's changed? Okay, well, now we have this fleet of drivers that are all connected using these apps that are on the road all the time. That's new inventory that we could do something with, new opportunity that we could do something with. And the second thing was, hey, the wages have gone down from making $25 an hour to $10 an hour. They're gonna be very receptive to ways that they can get their earnings back up because they're being advertised to that, hey, you're making $25 an hour. Yeah, but that's not your true rate when you take into account everything.

And if you find a way to make the drivers more money, even— I bet you, I'm just gonna make an assumption here, that if Uber doesn't get a cut but they're keeping more drivers on the road, that they will love you alone. Yeah, they will love you if you find any way to make drivers work exclusively. Like, I think Cargill is an exclusive partnership with Uber. Right. And so if you can help just them, like their, their—

Driver retention. Yeah.

I, I think it'd really take off. Yeah.

I like that idea. Uh, what else you got? You had some other good ones last time. So we get, we touched on, uh, sort of how religion should, should be engaging with Gen Z, whether it's through the Beautiful Bibles or tithing or one of the other ideas there. Love tithing. That is— What are we gonna call this Uber Driver Radio, uh, network?

You know, we need to hire a brander from our network. I am I have, I have one name and it's coming up for our next idea that I've come up with. Okay. Yeah.

But besides that, all right, so give us that, give us that name.

Well, you should see a lot of the domains that I own there. It's just awful, awful domains. Awful domains. I should never be in branding. Um, but so the next idea that, that I have that we kind of talked about, I'm actually talking about it with one of my friends right now. So anyone that wants to join this next idea, email henryb@thehustle.co and he'll help connect us.

Henry, you're getting blown up today.

I'm excited to see how many he gets. Charge your phone. So I'm really big into cloud kitchens. You give a great summary of what cloud kitchens is. Do you mind?

So, 100%, what's happening in the beauty space, what you're saying, this could happen in the food space. So who's a— well, how would this work?

Give me an example. I'm just— so in my mind, it's someone— you can do influencers a handful of different ways. If you go on Instagram right now, how many different food influencers are there? I mean, I don't know, thousands. Thousands. Joe Wick, Ella Delicious, you know, all these different ones that, like, my partner, for instance, she— we own every cookbook, I feel like. Yeah, we own legitimately every cook.

My wife's vegan, so any vegan influencer, like, I know, I know the name Erin Ireland. She's, 'cause she sends me every recipe that this woman posts, which is a, you know, vegan recipe. 100%.

I go on Instagram right now. I guarantee you I have 4 messages from her from different food things that we should try. Right. And I will say I eat out too much. So instead of going in, figuring out, okay, how do I build this recipe? Oh gosh, I gotta buy, I gotta make couscous. I don't even know what this is. Instead, it's like, how can you leverage the name of this influencer? Help them with some of the recipes that they have on their Instagram itself.

Create the menu.

Create the menu and create all these cloud kitchens like across the country or wherever it might be so that everyone can have access to it.

I like it. I like it a lot. So this is sort of like the Gordon Ramsay. He has several restaurants, right? Like he's got his, uh, Bobby Flay has the burger bar. Gordon Ramsay has his thing in Vegas and other places.

I feel like every somewhat decent airport has like a Wolfgang Puck, right? Right. Right. Yeah. And so, or, uh, you guys talked about it with Lance, Jimmy Buffett, you're going to Margaritaville, you're somewhere warm. And so what is the Margaritaville? What is the Gordon Ramsay? What is that next generation working with these new age influencers to actually create full menus online, just in a cloud kitchen with none of the upfront costs. And as you know how high the churn rate is on restaurants itself, your startup costs are incredibly low. All you need to do is find the right influencer. The right demographic, build out the, uh, menu with them, right? Of things they're already building. They have cookbooks. You're just giving access to everyone.

And then you grab off-the-shelf chefs essentially, who can actually just implement and cook the food on a daily basis, right? It's trivial to find people who could do that. I really like this idea, uh, because I just think it's a really fun idea. And there's a lot of times where you have passion. Actually, the music one's very similar. There's all these passion areas that are just garbage businesses. Yes. And, uh, this is, you know, food is another one where it's like, great, you love food. Um, okay, what are you going to do? You're gonna be a foodie? What does that mean? You're gonna be a food blogger? That's a little bit tough. This is actually like a sort of cool novel way, and again, it's because something has changed. Yes. These food delivery apps have paid billions of dollars in customer acquisition costs to acquire hundreds of millions of users across the world.

You don't have to get— you don't have to pay for the views.

Look at— what's, what's that chef, or what's that show on Netflix? Open— not Open Table, Chef's Table. Chef's Table. Like, that— oh, like, that just took off, right? And so yeah, I'm 100% with you. The one thing I want to add is I want someone to do this. Yeah, I don't just want us to talk about about this, anyone that is interested, I want them to email Henry. I'm not even joking, we're starting this. I have someone on the other end that is gonna help with this. I'll help it get off the ground. Motion to action.

I love it, and again, literally we did this when we did our restaurant. So we started a sushi restaurant. I don't know shit about sushi.

You did that at Duke, right?

I did that right out of Duke, and we found a chef from the Food Network. So we saw this guy who did the Bobby Flay challenge. He beat Bobby Flay at a sushi challenge, and he was super charismatic, and he was obviously knew his shit about sushi. And so we were like, oh, that guy, we need that guy. And so we literally partnered with this guy and it was really hard to get him to take us seriously because we were 18 years old and there's a whole story about how we did that. But we partnered with a Food Network chef and we created this, this restaurant concept. And then we ended up because we just didn't have money. We did it as a cloud kitchen because we were like, look, I don't want to sign a 10-year lease with a personal guarantee. And that's what I needed to do to get a restaurant space. So, you know, just getting resourceful, we created this thing. And at the time there was no Postmates, Uber Eats, Those didn't exist. That was the missing piece. Wow. We still had to go get customers to come to our website to download, to order the food. Is this— if that had changed, this whole, you know, I wouldn't even be sitting here. I'd be still running a sushi bar. Is this gonna be your legacy?

I feel like we just hit on something. I feel like this is next.

No, I ran away from the food industry because it's tough, but that's just— I was doing too much, too many dishes every night. Oh, that's incredible.

I love that. Anyone that wants to do it, honestly, Honestly, henryb@thehustle.co. I love it. So, uh, did you watch the Tyson Fury fight? I did. I'm a—

I'm not a huge boxing fan, but I'm a fan of greatness, and I like combat sports in general.

There we go. I, I was lucky enough, I actually watched it with Sam, and Sam, as you know, a big boxing fan. And I think— I know a lot of Patriots fans will say the 28-3 is the greatest comeback story in sports. I think Tyson Fury is the greatest comeback.

So explain the Tyson Fury story.

So just so we can— I'm gonna start at the end. Okay. Tyson Fury knocked out Deontay Wilder in the 7th round. Deontay Wilder is known as the baddest man on the planet, right? Never, never been defeated. And he's— he has a 96% knockout rate, right? 42 fights, 41 knockouts.

Exactly.

Like, the only person he hasn't knocked out was his last Tyson Fury fight. So Tyson Fury started off— he's this English boxer also known as the Gypsy King. He was 8 weeks premature, weighing in at 1 pound. Right. Okay, almost didn't make it just from the beginning.

Right, 1 pound. 1 pound, which is crazy because if you see him now, he's 6'9", 275 pounds. Exactly, exactly.

And that's slim for him, which we'll get into. But his dad knew greatness. His dad was one of those people that understood that this guy's gonna be a champion, and so he named him Tyson after the great Mike Tyson. Obviously, years go by, years go by. Starts training. His dad was a boxer, his uncle's a boxer, everyone in his family is boxers. And he gets to this point where he's like the next contender coming up. He's, uh, 23 years old. He gets invited into Wladimir Klitschko's actual, uh, fighting camp itself. And kind of going back to your guys's point last week about hearing doubters, everyone always told Tyson Fury, you're going to go to this camp, but Wladimir Klitschko is the king, right? Even when you're there, he's going to batter you as a sparring partner. And so He was training with me. He's like, this guy's not that great. I'm gonna get into his head. These guys, they weren't even boxing against each other at this time. They're not opponents. So during the training camp itself, they go into the sauna. Okay, have you heard the sauna story?

I have not heard the story. No, you haven't heard? I'm excited.

This is maybe my favorite story in sports. So everyone knows and everyone tells Tyson Fury, Wladimir Klitschko is not just the king of the ring. Wladimir Klitschko is the king of the sauna. Okay, look, everyone here— Henry, post a photo of what Wladimir Klitschko looks like this time. He's a monster. Yeah, he's enormous.

He's a Russian monster.

Klitschko's the champion.

Klitschko's the champion. He hasn't lost in something like 11 years. 11 years hasn't lost, right? Everyone's like, Tyson Fury, you cannot beat Klitschko. Klitschko. Tyson Fury goes, you know what, I know all of you think I can't do this. I'm gonna do it on his home court. I don't come to the UK. I don't want to fight you at Wembley. I want to fight you in like Eastern Europe. So they fight in Germany. And then so in the pre-fight, they do a face-to-face similar to how we are now. Tyson Fury brings up the sauna issue, and Klitschko— everyone look up the clip— is so like, pretends like it didn't happen, like he couldn't remember it. And Tyson Fury says after the fight, he knew that's when he beat and he goes in and he batters, right? He batters Klitschko, wins, right? Becomes the lineal champion, 3, 3-class champion, whichever.

By the way, I love this lineal champion. Lineal champion, for those who don't follow boxing, is just you're— you beat the man who beat the man who beat the man who beat the man all the way back in time to the first man. Exactly. And so you have taken the champion— you took the champion out. Yes. And nobody's taken you out yet. You were the lineal champion.

He's the lineal champ. So this is 2015. So the thing was is that after this fight, Tyson Fury didn't go on and actually, uh, fight Klitschko again, right? He balloons up to 400 pounds.

He's at the mountaintop. He's like, is this it?

Is this it? And he's hearing from everyone he couldn't do it again, he can't do it again. And it's finally somewhat getting to him. He becomes addicted to drugs, he gets addicted to booze. He's 400 pounds. And everyone says, I knew it, I knew Tyson Fury was a bum, Right, right. And so finally something in his mind clicks. 2017, this video comes out, him jogging. His face is monstrous, size of a mask.

He's red. He looks like someone who ate Tyson Fury. Exactly. And he—

there's this video, everyone's gonna see it. And he said, he says, it's like, Deontay Wilder, I'm coming for you. And everyone says, he's never gonna do— what are you talking about? He's failed so many times, he'll never come back. Yeah. And let him— obviously he fights him, he comes back. He drops 150 pounds. It was a draw the first fight. Time comes back, they're like, you know what, Tyson Fury, he's not going back. He's gonna do the WWE thing. He got his payday. He's gonna go drink again. Comes back, obviously this past Saturday knocks out Deontay Wilder.

Actually knocks out the knockout artist.

100%. No one thought he could do it, right? And so I just thought it was this really interesting story for a lot of the points that even we were talking about last week, or you guys were talking about last week, when it came down to people saying no. Out, right? People not wanting to see success happen. Everyone wants to see you lose. And he took that as energy, came back like 4 separate times, right, from the brink, like 4 separate times, and made it happen. I just thought it was just something—

I could tell you're kind of like me in that maybe the thing I respect most is someone's mentality. Yes, their mental toughness. And, and I don't, I don't even think I'm particularly great at this, but it's something that I've decided is sort of the number one most important asset is how how is your mindset? 100%. How is your mindset when things are good?

Are you grateful?

Are you appreciative? Are you a giver to others? Yes. How is your mindset when things are bad? Yes. Are you resilient? Do you, do you turn the disadvantages into advantages? And mindset is number one. That's why you love Fury. Yes. Doesn't matter that he knocked out a guy, it matters how his mind worked when he was at a point where most people break.

Angela Duckworth would call it grit, right? What this guy has, right? Like, when I read that book, all I could think about about was Tyson Fury. Yeah, but it all comes down to mindset. All the great leaders have it. Uh, Admiral William McRaven is another great example, obviously one of the greatest admirals in Navy SEALs history and special ops history. Same thing, he's a great leader because of how his mindset is, right?

This is why sports is great. It's the metaphor, it's the grand metaphor for life. Uh, who cares about these guys punching each other in the head or throwing a ball in a hoop?

Uh, but it is the great— and we'll post a bunch of the things that we talked about. I want everyone to go to the and My First Million, everyone on Twitter. And I want you to all look at these links and be inspired.

Yes, love it. And it was a great fight. It was very— and he gave us a nice little ballad. Oh my god, he sings a song when he wins, which is hilarious. And part of like his marketability is that he's just like crazy character.

He's crazy. He was dancing before the fight. Yeah, Deontay Wilder was stretching and he was literally dancing.

By the way, super lame excuse by Deontay Wilder that his costume was too heavy and that's why he lost. No, you lost because Tyson Fury punched you in the head. Yeah. Yeah, uh, all right, so we got a little bit of time. Let's see, see how we're doing on time. Okay, we don't have too much time. All right, we have, let's say, one last thing. Is there one last thing you want to bring up?

This is Stu's Power Hour. Not the Power Hour. I have so many ideas. Hopefully you have me back. Uh, I fully understand. I feel like I yell into this mic as much as Sam, so I'm going to apologize to everyone for listening. Um, well, we want to bring you back.

We want to have basically these recurring sort of friends of the house. So there's certain people that are fun and have a bunch of ideas, and it's not— like when I was doing the interviews before, you know, you tell your story once, I'm not gonna have you back to tell your story again. Like, that's just too much. Nobody wants that. But with this, you know, every month or every 2 months, I want to be bringing, you know, our guests, friends of the house, back as a recurring cast of characters. So that's the game plan.

Count me in. You can catch me at my desk about 15 feet from here. Yeah, but something that I've been thinking about a lot— you're a big Notion user, right?

I use it. I wouldn't call myself a big Notion user because I have a love-hate with it. Okay. The app loads so slow for me.

Uh, it does load slow.

That's like a deal breaker for me, but everything else is dope. But you guys made the website.

We made our whole website off of it. It's honestly, it's one of the most powerful tools I've ever used. The hard thing is I tell everyone and everyone knows I am an evangelist of things that I love. I must have signed up 200 people on Copper, for instance. I'm calling people. Everyone's like, what CRM do I use? I'm done with— I'm like, no, you get on Copper right now. I haven't taken any affiliate money for this, by the way. Right. And so Notion is the latest thing. I'm addicted. My life journal's in there. Everything. My whole life is in there.

And what do you love about Notion that you didn't get— what were you using before? Docs?

Evernote? You name it. I was using the whole G Suite. I was using obviously Copper, but I've actually ported over a CRM into it because there's a lot of really great integrations. I'm using a physical journal itself. Like, you name it.

A sauna. And what is it about Notion that got you?

Ready to go CRM, ready to go journal, ready to go whatever, all the different common use cases that people want to do.

100%. I think it's a massive opportunity. Like, they raised, what, $10 million at an $800 million valuation? And they have such an engaged community, but nothing is tying them together, right? Like, people are hacking together templates. I use it, but it loads slow.

I can't get over it. It loads slow.

You put in so much information.

Yeah, that's probably what it is too. It's like so feature-rich that— all right, uh, I like the I like that Notion, you should pay us for that. I mean, that wasn't an ad read, but that was better than an ad read.

Yeah, they did, they actually sponsored the Hustle morning newsletter today, but it has nothing to do with that. I'm not an employee of the Hustle.

Right, yeah. Me and you didn't get any of that money, so let's get Notion on here. All right, Stu, great having you. Where should people find you, follow you?

Twitter. Twitter. @stuiverson, follow me on there.

We'll put it in the show notes.

Yeah, I'm active. DM me, I'll message you back, I promise you. Yeah, that's where you can find me.

Nice, okay, love it. We're out.