He Bought a Local Newspaper… Now He Makes $600K/YR

So the article tells a story of multiple 80-something-year-old guys who own publications that are making— that are fine businesses. Maybe they make six figures a year in profit, but they can't find anyone to take it over. So they're literally just shutting it down.

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.

Should we start with this? This tweet. It's Media Gazer, which I guess some media publication commentary on media companies. It says small-town newspapers are shutting down due to lack of a succession plan, not financial issues. In nearly a dozen US states, this is a growing problem.

Okay. And so the article tells a story of multiple 80-something-year-old guys who own publications that are making— that are fine businesses. Maybe they make six figures a year in profit, but they can't find anyone to take it over. So they're literally just shutting it down. And here we have a tweet from Matthew Prince. I think his name is Matthew, is worth, I think, something like $4 or $5 billion. He's the CEO of Cloudflare. Do you want to kind of read what he says?

So I think that's an amazing insight, but the true insight— so someone chirps at 'em and they say something like, um, go ahead, what do they say? I can't read it all.

So literally the guy's name who's replying is Some Guy. So I'm not, not even disparaging this guy. Some Guy tweets at him and says, this is the sort of unwittingly funny stuff that wealthy people say, that 130 IQ guys should be content with an imaginary small town life lived in anonymity near— I don't even know what this word is— being 180 degrees from their own choices, which deliver untold wealth and influence. I don't even, what is this guy saying? I don't even understand this tweet. He's basically saying like, this is something that wealthy dudes say that's so funny because it's so wrong that a guy would be happy doing this. Is that what he's saying?

And here's why I like Twitter. So Matt Prince, I don't, he's not high profile. He's not like an average, uh, like the average person has no idea who this is, but he's worth $5 billion. And it's so interesting to get his insight. So this is, this is the tweet that I really care about. And I just, the rest was for context. Read this next one.

All right. So he says, I have— he just replies to some guy. He goes, I have untold financial wealth and I own a local newspaper, so I have some perspective. Like Warren Buffett likes to say, surprisingly little changes when you move from upper middle class to truly rich. Houses are houses, cars are cars, and watches are stupid. That's so good. What's more important is meaning. I feel lucky to have achieved financial wealth while chasing meaning. That is super rare, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have gotten both. But if you're early in your career and decide, I'd rather optimize for meaning than financial wealth, I think this is a better path than most would consider. Example: Volunteer for the Peace Corps. It will actually make you a good living and you'll have incredible influence and meaning within your community. And if you later decide to go for untold financial wealth, always remember Rupert Murdoch's empire began with the Adelaide Advertiser, which he bought when he was 21.

How fantastic is that?

This is really great. Although, you know, not to be a reply guy, but like, Cloudflare is not the Peace Corps or owning a small town newspaper in a community. So like, is he saying that Cloudflare was his meaning thing or he did something before that?

Do you know? That's his meaningful thing.

Okay. I love this one. 10 out of 10. Fine. Good job. I gave a talk at Berkeley that was about starter businesses, or called white belt businesses. A few months ago.

Wait, let's reflect on that. That's pretty cool.

What, giving a talk?

At Berkeley? I don't know. That sounds cool to me. Like, I never got to go to fancy colleges.

You sound like the Kenny Powers of giving a talk, man. You're like, get ready, kids. I'm going to make you piss tears.

Like, exactly. Hold on to your butts. I'm about to rock your world. So I go in and guess what? These kids really just don't give a fuck. Within 2 minutes of the talk. And again, I'm trying to fire on all cylinders. It's interactive. I'm cracking jokes. I got a story. I'm doing, I have a big promise at the beginning. And I look around and I just remembered vividly in that moment, I was like, oh, I remember being 19. You're not even outta school yet. Like the whole, the real world is a, it's a distant land far away at this point. You're just trying to, you're like, okay, I have to be here till 5 and then I'm gonna go eat. And then I have that paper to write.

3 years out of your target demo too. Like, they're Indian, they go to Berkeley, and you're like thinking like, all right, perfect, this is my demo. And then you're like, shit, they're still 19. I need to wait till they're 21 until they have heard of me.

What?

Was this your analogy? Did you just—

No, I just did that one just now. I thought you might.

It's pretty good.

Yeah. Well, see, the funny thing is I have you and I'm like, Sam's gonna love this. He's gonna love-hate this. And then Ari, I'm like, Ari's just gonna hate this. And sure enough, as I'm saying it, that's what I got. I got Sam laughing but facepalming and Ari just looking off into the distance wondering, how did I end up here? Why do I have this job? Oh my God.

No, that's a fantastic analogy because it's very true. Everyone dreams of like the Jessica Alba, Alba doing that and you're like, wait, what do I do? What do I do with my hands? You know what I mean?

It's perfect.

Exactly.

You are not prepared for Jessica Alba yet, and that's okay.

You just need some reps. And so what's, what's the point of this? What are you going to show me?

Oh, I guess the tie to that was I think owning a local newspaper is a fantastic version of a startup business to run. Was that not obvious? That was so crystal clear to me, the connection.

Show me this, um, the story about Steve Ballmer, and then also I wanna see the Gary Vee one.

Okay. Two great choices. Excellent choices off the menu. All right. This is from, I believe Steve Ballmer goes on the Acquired podcast.

It was really good. It was so good.

That's so good. That's a great story.

It's up 1,000%. And for a company as big as Microsoft to go up 1,000% and now is a $3 trillion company, all, you know, under Satya's kind of regime. I thought that was just a badass story. Right.

Well, Steve, We would love to help you with this problem. We're a helpful bunch over here.

Yeah, he was talking about how he's like, I forget the capital appreciation of this or the stock appreciation lately. It's been, what, 15% a year? I forget. It's something like magnificent where he's earning tens of billions of dollars from that. And yeah, he corrected the guys when they said how wealthy he is. He goes, you're forgetting about our dividend, which pays me $1 billion.

You know, he's just been sitting on that, by the way. You know, he's like, these motherfuckers out here don't know. They don't know how I'm ballin'.

It was a really great podcast. It was like 3 hours long and it was fantastic. And he gets made fun of, or Ballmer gets made fun of a bunch for that one video where he just looks goofy. But he's a great salesman and he's way more technical than people realize. Ballmer's a genius.

That's cool. I mean, you gotta be special. There's luck is involved, but I think it's, it's so easy to write people off. And he's a great example of, uh, enthusiasm as a skill. I've talked about this in a bunch of other podcasts, but enthusiasm is an actual skill. And that video that people make fun of them, the developers, developers, developers, developers, to me, that's like watching, uh, you know, Vince Carter dunk or something like that, right? It's like, uh, this is a guy who probably brought a shit ton of energy and enthusiasm and belief and, to the team in an unwavering way and at an unusual level. And yeah, that was obviously funny to laugh at.

I get it.

What's, um, what's this Gary Vee one?

This is really funny. All right. This is a Gary— I love Gary Vee. Gary, I love you. This is also hilarious. So they're playing a game called Bullish and Bearish. Where the host is going to tell him a company name and he has to decide, is he a bull or a bear on it? Watch this.

Meta. Bullish. Reddit.

Bullish.

Alphabet. Bullish. Waymo. I'm not educated enough to give an answer on that, to be honest. Nvidia. I feel like if I spent 10 hours educating myself, I'm like, okay, this is not sustainable to be this crazy. Disney. Disney. Very bullish. I think intellectual property is one of the most underrated businesses of the future. VR and everything. I don't think people understand how big owning IP is going to be. Tesla.

Bullish.

Microsoft.

Very bullish.

OpenAI.

I'm bullish.

Amazon.

Very bullish.

Zoom.

Bullish. Alibaba. Bullish.

ByteDance.

TikTok's parent company. Bullish.

Even though it might be banned. Bullish.

Maybe.

Bitch, I'm bullish, okay? Don't even— before that word gets out of your mouth, I'm bull— Bullish. What am I going to do? I'm bullish. Um, dude, how funny is this?

I love Gary. I— it sucks because she picked like—

honestly, I can't hate. I'm also pretty bullish on all the, all the tech companies that— all the best companies in the world. I'm pretty bullish on them too.

Amazon and ChatGPT. Uh, dude, So funny. He, dude, people forget. I think VaynerMedia, I track it because I like Gary and I think that it's easy to dismiss him as like a guru. But, you know, VaynerMedia is doing something like $300 million a year right now.

I did not know that. And when you say you track it, where are you getting this information from?

So I actually— do you remember how I told you I had this document where I track companies and I like I, I track people where I will make a timeline of their life and like at different ages they do different things. I track it with a variety of companies as well. And VaynerMedia, I was curious about their trajectory and he was growing the company like at a really good clip, like it was doubling for a couple of years and it was still growing at like 50% for a couple of years. And so I just wanted to check in and add to my document. And over the last 3 or 4 years, he's grown it to something like $250 million a year in revenue. And if you Google VaynerMedia revenue, he actually is fairly public about it lately of where it's at, but it's in the $200-300 range.

$200-300 million a year?

Yeah.

And what do they do now? Is it just marketing services or what? What's going on?

So VaynerX, which is now the holding company, in 2024 was on track to do $300 million in revenue. And this was written in December of '24. So, yeah, you could assume that in the $300 million range. Yeah, it does. They do social media. It's the same shit. Just they manage people's social media stuff.

I mean, it's got to be more than that. Manage people's social media stuff. It's got to be more than that.

I think that's the bulk of it. They do social media advertising and campaigns. So like if you're Samsung and you want to run ads on Facebook and you want to make really good ads, I believe they—

Let's ignore VaynerMedia. I'm bored. What is the most interesting thing that's come out of your tracking people manually year by year, borderline creepy stalker data? That you're doing?

What's interesting to me is a few things. One, the ability to grow is— it gets harder and harder. But like the people who are like really big animals, they just figure out how to do it. And that's really fascinating to me. But occasionally even companies that are growing quickly, they'll have 2 or 3 years of no or little growth. And the reason why I like to do this research is it helps me understand I think that it's the same way when you talk to your rich friends and you talk about money with them, you start to normalize money. And that's why I do this stuff where it like—

It sounds like it's like a, almost like an emotional regulation because entrepreneurship is this long, longer than you want, more up and down thing than you want. And seeing that the people, the things you admire today, either A, took a long time or had, you know, multiple flat years, it makes you not feel like shit when you're in one of those, you know, periods. That is that it?

The whole life of the company right now is 3 years. Imagine this whole time just flat, you know, or I'll give you another example.

Replit. You know, we've had Amjad on the podcast and that was one of our biggest ones. They just announced the other day that they hit $100 million in revenue. That's huge, right? Well, what he kind of said, like in a small comment, like in a reply, is that I believe last year or the year before they were at $10 million in revenue. So they went from $10 million to $100 million in record time, like 1 or 2 years, something like that. But what he told us on the podcast is that he started the company 8 years ago, which means from years 0 to 8, he got to $10 million in revenue, which is not impressive. That's not— that's, that's neat. That's not impressive. And what's— that's just insane to me that he kept at it for 8 years and then and tell me if I'm getting my numbers wrong, but he kept at it for that long and then success was like in 2 years.

Yeah, I mean, this is just insane. I use Replit probably 3 or 4 times a week. It's really fun.

I just asked ChatGPT to make this. This is Sam stalking all these businesses.

Dude, I do this like crazy. I'm going to have to share this doc. I just— I like tracking numbers.

You said to me when we first met, you were like, I took every billionaire and I tried to figure out what they were doing at age 30. And I was like, what? And you were like, Jack Dorsey, you know, at age 30, his net worth was only whatever. And I was like, how do you know this? And why do you know this? What are you doing? And you're like, by the time I'm 30, my goal is to have X. I think we were— well, we probably met when we were 24, 25 years old, something like that.

Yeah.

And you were like, when I'm 30, I want to have $20 million in the bank. That was your number. And you were like, look at this, I'm— I'll be ahead of Jeff Bezos and Jack Dorsey and these guys. I was like, yo, this guy's a sicko, but I like it.

It was the— I should call, like, if I teach a class, it's going to be called like How to Become an Economic Animal. Uh, unfortunately, like, there's way levels. There's many levels to this, and I— there's many people who are way above me, and I didn't understand like how exponential growth works. Uh, but hey, you know, I think I got in the arena of what I was aiming for.

All right, we gotta talk about the new mayor. Not because it's a politics podcast. I don't know, actually, I didn't even know this guy existed until 3 days ago, to be honest with you. But you're moving to New York, and you seem to know about this guy, and I am following him only from a business and marketing perspective. I have a business and marketing take on this guy, but can you first set the context for people like me who are not following who this New York City— he's the mayor, right? That's what he's—

that's what he just became. He's gonna be the Democrat who's running for mayor. So it was, uh, the Democrats were, uh, I don't even know the right terms, but nomination, um, and he won. Um, so basically, uh, it was him and Cuomo.

New York is very Democratic, he's most likely to win. Is that why people are freaking out?

Because normally if he's just a candidate, you know, more likely than not, the issue is— the issue has a bunch of issues. Basically every politician is corrupt. So Mayor Cuomo, or Cuomo, is running for mayor. He was previously the governor. He got in trouble for like asking his coworkers to have sex with them. And he was the guy running against this guy, the current mayor, Mayor Adams. He has accepted bribes. He is going to be running as an independent versus this guy. And so we're kind of like stuck with like a bunch of like—

Rock, paper, scissors.

Yeah, it's like, you know, South Park, they— it's like a douche or a turd sandwich. Who are you going to vote for? That's kind of like what we're working with here. The gist of this guy is that he's incredibly charismatic. He's 32 years old. He believes in a lot of crazy things. That's my opinion, crazy, but basically a lot of socialist things. So, for example, he wants to freeze rent, meaning you can't raise rent on on, on, I think, something like 2 million different apartments, right? Different rent-stabilized apartments. He also wants to create government-owned grocery stores and a handful of things like that that are very controversial to people who don't like socialism. But amongst young people who are very angry about a lot of things that they should be angry about, like housing costing a lot of money versus the wage growth. But he's super charismatic. And so he won over young people's votes.

And so, okay, great, great summary. Now again, I don't care about the politics of this and I don't live in New York, but I'm fascinated by this guy. Like, I literally had never heard of this guy and then I watched this video. I saw this tweet.

He killed it.

So this tweet right here has 3.7 million views. So that's just the Twitter part of this. Forget Instagram, TikTok, anywhere else that I'm sure he's posting this type of content. Uh, but first of all, the branding. So like, that was the first thing that stood out to me, like literally the branding of this guy, like the font, etc. So what is this video? It starts like he's a TikTok content creator and he goes, it says New York is suffering from a crisis and it's called halalflation. And then he talks about how halal from like the, like food trucks, uh, you know, chicken and rice halal, uh, from like a halal food truck now costs $10. But it used to cost $8. And he basically goes and he's interviewing them. He's like, you know, how much do you sell for? $10, $10, $10, whatever. We'll play the video.

Is suffering from a crisis and it's called halalflation. Today we're going to get to the bottom of this. How much does a plate of halal cost right now from this truck?

$10.

$10.

$10. When you're a street vendor, you have to pay for the food, the plates. How much do you have to pay for your permit?

Before it was 22K.

20—

uh, 17,000.

How much does a license cost if you get it from the city?

I think, uh, 400. Who are you paying? The permit owner.

You're not paying the city?

No, no, no.

You pay the permit owner $22,000 just so you can sell this food?

Yes.

And who is this? Random guy, have you ever applied for a permit?

Yeah, I'm applying and no come anything.

It's long wait. I'm number 3,800 something.

After 2 years, you're number 3,800? Yes. These are the 4 bills that are sitting in the city council right now, which would give these vendors their own permits and make your halal more affordable. But Eric Adams hasn't said a single word about them. If you own the permit, Then how much would you charge for the plate?

$7.

$8.

$8.

Would you rather pay $10 for a plate of halal or $8?

$8. $8. I think $8 is the way to go.

If I was the mayor, I'd be working with city council from day one to make halal $8 again.

So how does it taste?

Tastes like $10, but it should be $8.

So I was blown away because I have never really seen a politician doing this type of like I want to call it like kind of natural influencer content. I don't know. What do you, what do you even call this? But this is not what politicians typically did.

He's making like a Vice documentary, but in 2 minutes, it's very good.

Uh, he, he's doing UGC content.

That, I think that's the way I would put it. So the same thing happened in, um, in business, especially e-commerce. So Sam, I don't know if you remember like in the earlier days of e-com, right? Like let's say. 2012, 2014, you know, you mostly did just static images. Okay. There was not really a lot of video on, let's say, Facebook or Google at the time. Um, so you would do static images for your ads and, but those images you would pay a professional designer to make and they would make it look slick and then that's what people would click. And then when video came out, people tried to do the same thing. They would basically film professional looking videos. You'd hire a videographer, you'd have somebody holding the camera, and then you would You'd have a good background, good lighting, and you would say your thing. But it turns out that commercials didn't really work as well on the internet as me picking up my phone and just making something that looked very raw. Like I'm doing my, you know, it'd be a girl doing her makeup while talking about a different product. Right. And it just feels like it's a get ready with me video or it's a, you know, a mom who's in a rush, who's just being like, y'all, I gotta tell y'all, this is a lifesaver. Like my husband. My husband can't believe how much of a, uh, how much, how, how much happier I am since I got this thing. And then they ruffle in their bag and grab something out. And it's ads that don't look like ads. And they call this UGC, user-generated content. And that's the new style that works best in ads for the last, I would say, 5 years. That's dominated most of e-commerce advertising. This is the first time I've seen a politician do this. So like, if you compare I don't know, like Kamala, uh, and how perfectly manicured everything was, like her image, her, you know, pantsuit, her like professional photography, her like fake phone call with somebody, but then you see that the phone wasn't even on and she's just chuckling to nobody. Like it was all super, super fake and polished. And this guy's doing like man-on-the-street interviews, holding the microphone. You can literally hear like the, you know, it kind of rubbing against his jacket sometimes accidentally. Like it's like It's wabi-sabi, dude. It's the perfection in the imperfection. To go full circle there, this kind of blew me away. I don't know if I'm just like overly nerding out about this, but from, from the topic, like halal chicken and rice is $10, it should only be $8, to the style of the video, I immediately was like, I get why this guy won.

And on Saturday, uh, the election was taking place yesterday. He was— he spent the whole day walking around New York and like doing like these very raw looking videos talking to people. And I think that this is just proof, which we already have had this proof, that charisma matters more than ideas in reality. And this is not like a takeaway that like— this is a very obvious takeaway, but this is just another example because his charisma is off the charts and he has just been like killing it when his ideas, in my opinion, are just absolutely insane. But because of the style of marketing, it's done wonderful. Young people react to this stuff. And by the way, this is what we need. Like Mayor Cuomo or Governor Cuomo, the guy who was running for him, he's an old guy. He's in his 60s, maybe 70s, and he would never in a million years grab his cell phone and just start talking to it. But that's what you need. I think my friend or our friend Austin Reif tweeted something out and he said the next politicians and the next presidents are going to be podcasters and Substackers. And that sounds like a ridiculous statement. People who write newsletters and people who have podcasts, that sounds ridiculous. It's not ridiculous. And I, I totally buy into it.

I, yeah, definitely. Uh, there's gonna be a podcaster president. Why? Because they're gonna have, A, built a following before they run. So they're gonna build the audience before they go run. Two, they're gonna be trained with 10,000 hours of storytelling, communication of, um, you know, how to make a point. So, you know, I think that's going to be one archetype. The other one is going to be short-form video creators. I think Roberto, our friend, said this thing. He goes, whether this guy's agenda is good or bad for New York is irrelevant. He told the best story. This is why Steve Jobs said that the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world. A lie told as a good story can never, can never beat the truth trapped in a bad story. Or I think it can always beat the truth trapped in a bad story. And then I had, because I had tweeted this thing. So when I saw this, I saw the second video. I don't know if you've seen this one, but Um, can you hear this?

Dude, you know what's funny is I don't have to hear what he's saying and I could sense the charisma.

That's a really good insight. I didn't— I have not seen this video of him. Is he— is this video dubbed? Is this a fake video?

Who's doing this?

There's people that are doing this. They run what they call faceless channels. They run channels on Instagram and TikTok that get millions of views.

Like with B-roll and narration.

But it doesn't have to be B-roll anymore because now they use an AI avatar. So they just put a person there and they're like, cool, I don't want to be an influencer. I don't want to wake up and get ready and have a nice house, all this. But I'll just tell the— I'll just make an AI character that does this. And you can just create an AI character that does exactly this. And then, but the cool thing is they automated the entire workflow. From coming up with the idea, scripting it, recording it, and then actually like scheduling it, posting it, analyzing the data, and feeding that back into the engine.

Who, what's an example of someone?

And it's almost like, dude, if you guys applied your talents to something useful, this, you'd be incredible. I, but, but it's amazing that you could even do this.

Yeah, exactly. Do you know Lulu? No. She's, she's really cool. Very interesting person to follow on Twitter and whatnot. So Lulu, I think she was the head of comms at like Palantir or something like that. I don't know. Or Anduril, I think it was. But she does a good job. What she posts regularly is basically comms advice, communication advice, PR, how executives should communicate. And I think Anduril was always an interesting one because like, instead of trying to conform as this like boring government contractor, you know, they let their freak flag fly. So she, she tweeted this out. She goes, it sounds so basic, but he is too likable to lose. Friendly demeanor, smiles with his eyes, seems earnest. Being liked outweighs policies, experience, and nonsensical plans. Quote, I just have a good feeling about that person can override almost anything. And then Harley, the CEO of Shopify, said, vibes. It's like, oh man, we're sort of vibe voting now. And it's like, actually, we're kind of always—

we've always been doing that, man. We've always been doing that. You know, JFK was one of the most, um, JFK had like a 70% approval rating when he was murdered, um, and he was well-loved. He was our Princess Diana or whatever for that generation. Like, he, he was well-loved, and he was well-loved because he was incredibly likable. That's like— his policies were fine, but it was because he looked great, he had a beautiful wife who was poised, he had a lovely family with really white teeth. Like, that is why he won, because he was very likable and he could— and good-looking.

So I'm likable might not even be the word because you might look at Trump and be like, wow, like, is he— would you say he's likable? Like, well, he's funny. He's funny. He's charismatic. So yeah, I ever tell you about the time where— so I had this friend who's like a billionaire successful tech guy, and he sends me a Google Doc one day called The President. And I'm like, okay, what's this? And I open it up and I have no idea what to expect. I think he might be running for president. I don't know what this is. And it was basically a pitch for a television show, and he laid out a case, and he basically said, if you look at the last— I forgot what it was, like, but I'm just gonna make up some numbers— if you look at the last 10 elections, you, you would look for a pattern. You'd say, is it always Democrats? Is it always Republicans? Is it— does it always switch between Democrat and Republican? Is it based on the economy? Is it based on, uh, the person's height? Like, if you tried to look for a correlation, where would you find it? And he goes, the highest correlation you could find is that the more charismatic candidate wins. And, um, he goes, ever since the advent of radio and television, when our primary way of getting messages out scaled up like crazy, um, the more charismatic candidate wins. Whether this was Clinton or Reagan— it wasn't Reagan like an actor or something like this.

Yeah, he was good looking, he dressed great.

Yeah, he's going through history. And basically 2020 was kind of the only exception where Biden won, and I would say Biden was the less charismatic candidate than Trump. Seems to be like the outlier. But the guy's case was basically, he's like, I think in his case, he didn't, he didn't want Trump to win. And he's like, problem is Trump is incredibly charismatic. Uh, he is able to capture people's attention. He says things that are very memorable. He says things that excite certain people and inflame certain people, but it's all attention that he gets, free earned media. So he had this idea to create a television show and he's like, this sounds a little bit silly. But he's like, I think for the Democratic Party, which is the party he was a part of, he's like, I think we need to start nominating more charismatic candidates. And if you look at the last few, they have not been the most charismatic. He's like, we're sort of— it's a captured party and we lack putting forward charismatic candidates since Obama. Obama was one of the most charismatic candidates. And he said, here's what I think we should do. Just like, you know, American Idol or The Voice or whatever, there's The Apprentice even. There's been proven shows where you can have, like, let's say, an 8 to 12 week period where you start with 10 people and then they get eliminated, and in the end you have a winner. Um, he's like, what if we did this for presidential candidates? So you would take 12 candidates, not random people off the street, but people that genuinely are thinking that they want to run. And so you'd get Pete Buttigieg and others in this batch. And he's like, week by week, you know, let's say they go to a small town in Pittsburgh and they're going to actually meet with the, the, the car manufacturers there, whatever, like, you know, some, some, like, presidential type of shit that they do, and they have to present a plan. And then it's actually like, and the judges for that week will be the, the car, car, uh, manufacturer people. And then they'll sort of pick which candidate they felt best understood them and was able to, to address their needs. And week by week, you sort of eliminate candidates. He's like, by the end of this 12-week thing, we'll have captured so much attention and hopefully found a candidate that's like won the hearts of people. The people will know their backstory. They'll know what they're all about. They'll have seen them in a more human light. And we will have filtered out the less charismatic candidates for the more charismatic candidates. He's like, I'm not saying charisma is the end-all be-all. Like, ideally at the beginning you try to screen people that you think are worthy, you know, candidates to lead. But amongst that worthy pool, give a boost to the most charismatic candidate. I thought this was fascinating and I really wanted him to do it. And he had a— he was friends with Mark Burnett, the guy who created Survivor and, uh, a bunch— maybe Bachelor or whatever, like a bunch of other major, major reality shows. And he's like, I'm going to talk to Mark. I think we're going to do this. And I hit him up, uh, recently and I was like, whatever happened to that idea? And he's like, I just decided I didn't want, I didn't want an avalanche of problems in my life for creating this. And I decided it wasn't worth, I have a great life and it really wasn't worth the, you know, what it was going to do. And Biden won in 2020. And so he felt like, uh, maybe, maybe I was wrong. Maybe there's not as much of a need for this, but isn't that interesting, dude?

Yeah, that's pretty fascinating. I, I wish, I wish you would have done that.

I feel like that would work too. Like, it sounds like it's an idea that I think is easy to make fun of. It's also an idea that I think would be effective at the stated mission.

It's easy to make fun of because we don't want it to be true, but it is true. Like, you know who's a really good example? This is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Yep.

He was just— he's a— he was such a charismatic, interesting person. He was good to look at. Like, you wanted to look like he looked. Like even the people who aren't— even the people who become our leaders who aren't really good looking, they're still sort of interesting to look at. Like Donald Trump is intriguing to look at. He looks like remarkable in a weird way, you know what I'm saying? Arnold Schwarzenegger is a perfect example of this. Can I show you one last thing? Which one? I think it's funny. So I found this and I don't— I think I've talked to this guy Brian and he was cool, so I don't want to shit on him, but I'm more so shitting on people who this line of thinking, maybe this line of thinking.

And, uh, let's, let's explain what it is. Guy says, he says, I asked, quote, what company is worth less than $10 billion today that you could be worth $500 billion plus in a few decades? I have received 710 answers. Here's the top 20 picks that have 50x potential. And this tweet has 18,000 likes.

You know, it was probably, I don't know how many views, but like, what year was this?

Over a million. This is in 2021, July of 2021, when times were good, when everybody's making a ton of money in the stock market.

And he lists, uh, 20 companies. Um, and, uh, and these are ones that this guy who I think he has a whole YouTube channel towards picking stocks, and I don't know if these were his picks necessarily or if they were, uh, his, uh, his audience's picks.

But— and this guy has 600,000 followers. His bio says, I teach investors how to analyze businesses, stock fundamentals, and valuation. Teach you DM Buffett for premium courses. Free ebook in my description. Okay, that's, that's this guy.

So this was in 2021, and I just was curious, like, how— was he right? Like, what's his deal? I'm almost positive that not only did none None of them 50x. I am pretty sure that most of them are down from, from down even from this tweet.

And I think Opendoor is now— and so this tweet that you're looking at, that was even 6 months ago. I'm almost positive that Opendoor, uh,, is delisted and Virgin is down even more. I think Lemonade is delisted or out of business. ContextLogic, I think, is out of business, which is Wish.

All right, we should post an update here. And now we're at 5 years later. Here's how the stupidity of the crowd has done.

And my point in bringing this up isn't the actual results. The results are not good. That's the summary. The results are actually really bad. But it's just crazy how hard it is to pick winners. It's very challenging. This guy has 600,000 followers. I assume that he does this all the time for his job and you still can't nail it. It's just so challenging.

Is it though? Okay, I'm gonna tell you what I did. Back in 20— I graduated in 2010 and I started my stock portfolio, I think right around like senior year of college. And I, I bought, I believe, 6 stocks. And my dad was telling me, just buy the index. But I'm like, Dad, I got this right. I had the Dunning-Kruger effect. I thought I knew a lot more than I knew. And I think I bought 5 or 6 stocks.

How much money?

I mean, I didn't have any, but I had $25,000. I had probably $60,000 total.

That's a lot of money.

Well, I guess what I'm saying is, even though the results were great, it didn't, you know, on a very small base, that doesn't, doesn't do a whole lot for you. I bought Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Tesla. What years? These were— it was basically 2010, 2011.

When I got there.

Oh my God. Hot dog stocks. So I did the thing you're not supposed to do. I picked. I didn't pick with any sort of brilliance. I was like, these are like, obviously just seemed like the good companies of the world to me at the time. And, you know, I did make a mistake because I sold Tesla earlier. Like I sold it probably 2014 or something like that. So that would, and that would have been a much bigger return. So, you know, I think I still, I still am in the case study of like, It's really freaking hard to do. Even if you buy right, you'll sell wrong and shit like that. Like, I bought Bitcoin early and sold some early and then bought it back again and sold it again, bought it back again. You know, I'm not saying I'm smart. I do dumb things. But I guess what I'm saying is sometimes it's actually kind of obvious. I think one of the reasons that what this guy did was so hard was he was looking for a 50x. He's like, what company's small today that's going to be massive tomorrow? Which, of course, if you knew, that'd be fantastic. But there is a simple way of looking at things like So right now, for example, I put my money into what my own little AI index, and I didn't spend much time on this, and I'm going to go back and do a little more research. But basically it's very obvious, I think, at this moment in time in the world that AI is going to be a very big deal, that the biggest winners over the next 5 to 10 years are going to be ones that are benefiting from AI in some way, whether they're Nvidia, they're selling chips, whether they're companies like Google or Facebook that are able to use AI in order to make all their services better and slash tens of thousands of employees that they don't need. Shit like that, right? Like, I think it's pretty obvious that AI is a big deal. And I think if you put in the time to just think about, like, instead of buying the generic S&P 500, like, what's the equivalent of the AI 50 or the AI 20? And it's like 20 companies that I believe are well positioned. It's hard for them to lose given the AI tailwind. And again, it's a little bit naive because you might say, well, Nvidia today, they have 90% gross margins and that they're going to get competed away and blah, blah, blah. I'm not saying it's like easy. I'm just saying, I think an index of AI, of AI-focused, um, companies, that doesn't mean companies that are like, you know, all chip makers or whatever, but I'm just saying companies that are going to disproportionately benefit from AI and are going to adopt AI and get the benefits of it. I just feel like that's an obvious thing today. That's the version of me of 2010 being like, I don't know, me and all my friends use the internet like crazy. I think I should just like own the big internet companies. That seems like a good idea.

The issue is not can you pick winners? Because I think that like we— when we saw Facebook was valued at— when it was hit a low, I think a year and a half ago, everyone who has ever bought any Facebook ads was like, yeah, this is undervalued. This is a great company. The issue is the amount of times that you have lost using that same logic. Like, and so if you were to take a lump sum of money and you would buy and sell like occasionally or rather often, versus just letting it sit and ignoring, like if you average—

I'm actually going to go back and just backtest this for me, me specifically, and I'll publish my results. I'll bring them, I'll bring it to the next episode because I'm curious. And I would say I think there's a more likely chance that I— buying and selling has— buying and selling and picking has underperformed. I would assume that to be true. I think there's a chance it's not been for me, but I really want to go get the exact answer. Because it'll include— I think I should include crypto because I think that was kind of like buying and selling, picking. And I want to see the returns of if I had just invested the same amount of money in the same times in just the index versus my picking. I just want to see for myself what I've done and give it honest— be able to look reality in the face of like, you know, how is this working for me?

Now, that's stupid.

That's stupid. It's not stupid. But listen, the top comment was, think of all— it's not incorrect. I mean, it's just math.

It's acting like he didn't take money every year in gains from the business.

He could have lost money every year.

Lakers don't cash flow every year.

Do they? Most winning teams do not make a profit.

Most winning teams, they could show paper losses. I know team owners. I talked to them about this. I was like, is this true? Do you guys actually lose money on this thing? And they're like, no, most years we're making money. Occasionally, if we're way over the luxury tax, we get it. We get a huge penalty. Then yes, we can lose money in that one year. But no, we're not idiots. We're not burning hundreds of— like people say, like, oh, they lost $200 million. He's like, I'm not losing $200 million every year.

Some— the top comment was like, yeah, but are you adding into the P&L all the women that he was able to get because of he— because of him owning the Lakers?

Forgetting the joy of owning the Lakers, which is Already. Congratulations. You own the S&P 500 versus you own the Lakers. Forgetting that the Lakers are a business that has been generating cash. And so all he's taking into account is just the exit price and none of the 30 years of cash flow.

Well, I don't really look at the facts when, whenever I'm making a statement, but I think it did make for a good headline.

And it is kind of stunning what I don't know, 11% compounding over 40 years actually does. Pretty crazy.

I like doing this. All right, that's it. That's a pod.

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.