There’s 98 days until 2027...Do this and you’ll thank yourself on Jan 1st
There are 99 days left in the year. 99 days. I almost feel like this 100 days left in the year is more important than the New Year's resolution.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. I
just encourage anyone, man, this is the end of the year. Use this last sprint and treat it like an athlete does the 4th quarter of a game. and really ask yourself, like, what do I want this year to be all about? Have I, have I kind of made my mark on the year? And 99 days might sound like a short amount of time, but that's an eternity. You can make so much happen in 99 days. And I just encourage anyone to just hear that today and just ask yourself the question, like, have I made my mark on this year yet? And if not, let's, you know, there's one sprint right here we can, we can use.
I have 2 comments on that. The first is I I think the idea of quarters is so stupid. Quarters should be months. Don't make it Q4, make it like M6 and then M7. Like 4 weeks is a significantly better— I've like, the time that something takes is often dictated by like the increments that we measure them in.
Yeah.
Yeah. I can't stand that. Like in Google Calendars, it defaults to 30-minute increments. I'm like, no, make it 5-minute increments. Right. The second, I joke with a bunch of my Jewish friends, one of the reasons why they're so successful is the Jewish New Year is in September. So Rosh Hashanah, I can't even say it correctly. That was in September. And so I'm like, dude, you guys have like 3 months head start in terms of New Year's resolutions and like reflecting on your year. Right? So I was thinking about that where like, I've actually liked that where you make New Year's resolutions like 2 months in advance. And so you got a 2-month head start on everyone.
Well, there's a— I think it's called Parkinson's Law, which is like work expands to fill the time you give it. It's like, um, it's like modeled after physics. Like a gas will expand to fill whatever container it's in. So if you shrink the container, the gas will be more compact. If you have a bigger container, it'll spread out. Your projects take the work the same way. And so if you default to, like you said, Google Calendar, if the default meeting is 30 minutes or an hour, guess what? You'll find a way to talk for 30 minutes. If you had moved that same meeting to 22 minutes, You would've got it all done in 22 minutes. So yeah, I think take this 99 days and make it happen. I don't know. What, what, where are you at with that? Do you, do you think this way? Do you, I know you're trying not to be the kind of ADD entrepreneur or the cortisol entrepreneur anymore. That's like spiking in stress.
Yeah. I'm trying to fight my natural instincts. Um, how's that going? So it's, it's good. I think my theory is that you can't change your weaknesses or it's really hard to make your weaknesses a strength. You can potentially neutralize it, but that's like the best case scenario. And so instead you do something where you just create a system where your weakness like can't really show itself. So like, for example, if you don't work out, you're like, well, I'm never going to be self-motivated. But if I prepay for this trainer to show up at my home, like I'm still going to be lazy, but like they're going to— I just have to do this. Like there's no choice. So with me, I've got a CEO, my co-founder Joe, And so we have set it up to where we only talk mostly about personal stuff throughout the day. But there's only one day of the week where I can come and complain to him or suggest improvements for the business. And that one day a week, it's only 45 minutes and I have to write it out in advance. And so because of that, I'll like see something and get pissed off and I'll be like, 6 days later when we talk about it, I'm like, I'm not actually that angry.
Right.
And so like, I'm a big fan of creating systems, so it's worked for me. Uh, do you have anything, um, major that you want to do over the next 90?
Um, yeah, I want to— there's like one more event I want to create. I've realized that as the world is so online, so digital, I think it's just put premiums on everything that's IRL. So I want to create one more IRL event. We have Hoop Group, which is our basketball event that we do once a year, and I want to create a second. And that thing's been like such a blessing, right? It's like super fun, super fun to do. unbelievable crew of people that come to that thing, and it's built this awesome network around something that I would just do for fun anyways. And, uh, I want to do another one of those. The problem with that one is it's so exclusive. Like, not only is everybody there like kind of like the top of the top, like, you know, uh, in terms of their careers, but also you have to be like really into basketball, which is fundamentally limiting for A lot of people, they're just not that into basketball. So I want to create another event that is not limited in that same way.
Launch it or host it? Yeah,
it's going to happen before the end of the year.
Okay.
And I don't even have the concept yet. So that's okay. Um, but you know, how long does an idea take? Like, that's how long an idea takes, right? How long does the decision take? A decision takes that long too. So, you know, I kind of, people would, would normally say, oh, that's not enough time. If you ask any professional event planner, They'd say, that's not enough time. Thankfully, I'm not a professional event planner and I will make it happen in that amount of time.
I think the best way to become successful is to see how other people did it, whether you're gonna copy them or just use it as inspiration, because then now you know what's possible. So starting at the age of 24, I did this relentlessly and I was very methodical about it. And I created a spreadsheet where I tracked roughly 50 people who were uber successful. And I looked at the year that they were born, the year that they started their apprenticeship, And then the year that they started the first thing that made them successful, finally, the year that they broke through. And I aggregated all this data along with the stories of what they did to be an apprentice and what they did to finally break through. And I put it together in a database. And HubSpot went and found this thing that I frankly even forgot about, but it did change my life. And they resurfaced it, they made it even better, and they put it into a thing that you can download for free right now. So if you click the link in the description or click the QR code right here, you can see this, database that I made when I was 24 and it changed my life. And so if you're looking to become successful or you're already successful and just want some more inspiration, check it out. So, uh, for the listener, my last company was, it was The Hustle, it was a newsletter, but it started as an event and it was basically one event that I would host, like basically when I needed money. So like every 9 months, like, uh, I would do it, use the money and go hang out for like 2 months and then like do it again. I did that for like 3 events in a row and then it became a newsletter, but The first event that I hosted, I'm gonna try and get the dates correctly. The event happened, I think, on July 1st. I started working on it on May 15th, so it was roughly 6 weeks. And so I sort of had first mover advantage, and so I could kind of be crappy and it'd still be kind of interesting. And, uh, I think I charged $300, and I think roughly 350 people came.
I, I'll frame it differently. I think what you did brilliantly was The name of it was HustleCon, and the vibe of it was scrappy entrepreneurs, the real deal. And the beauty of that was you didn't have to provide a polished, luxurious thing because that was off-brand. So thank God I don't have any of that because that would be off-brand anyways. It's like, uh, I have a friend who, who created Summit Series, the big like event they do on like the mountain. They bought— they ended up— the event that where they ended up buying the mountain where they—
They bought a summit. Yeah.
Yeah. And he said the best thing Burning Man ever did was create the ethos of like, hey, like, it's a piece of dirt. You create the town, you clean up the town. It's like there's no— there's no, uh, there's no signs. It's like an RV. Yeah, if we didn't have the right sign where the bathroom was, people would get upset. Burning Man, they just changed the expectation where it's like, of course we're not gonna baby you. You, you set up your own tent, you survive, you bring your own supplies, you clean up everything. And he's like, he's like, from an event planning perspective, brilliant. Yeah.
Um, it's great. Um, and so I'll be eager to see how you pull this off. It's definitely pull-offable. It's just like a lot of pressure. It is a very stressful period and it's sort of like running a marathon where leading up to it, you're like, this is kind of cool. It gets closer and you're like, I'm scared. This sucks. Never doing this again. The day happens. You don't really remember a lot of it. It was a lot of work. A week later you're like, I can do this again and I can make it better. You know, it's like giving birth and hosting and hosting an event and running a marathon are all—
Hosting an all-male tech conference. Those are the 2 similar, similar events. Yeah. I also think, you know, constraints are very, very important. So time constraint is one constraint. You said money. You know, we do the events out of pocket. We don't make any money off of them intentionally. So, well, that's a little bit silly. Why do you do that? Well, Because the constraint is, what is an event that is so good, that is so fun, so valuable, so meaningful to us that we would be willing to spend $150,000 to $250,000 to make it happen? And that literally just eliminates like 99 options of what you might do if the goal was to try to make $100,000 or try to make $200,000, make $300,000, or make $1 million. Um, and so the constraint, so using the constraint of what's an event so good I would pay, I would pay to host it is what's led us to creating, you know, some very unique events so far. And that's, that's kind of what I want to do again. I want to give you a little anecdote that I thought was pretty interesting. So there's this guy, Joel Greenblatt. Do you know who that is?
Um, he writes books on stock picking, right?
Yeah. He's like one of the, one of the best, uh, investors, uh, you know, of all time. So like, like Warren Buffett, he outperformed the market for decades. Using a different strategy, but nonetheless outperformed and did really well. So he goes to give a talk, and he puts in the front of the auditorium, he's got this jar of jelly beans inside. And so he says, hey, anybody can come on up, come on up to the front, take a look at the jar, and I want you to write down an estimate. Don't show your friend. Don't tell your neighbor. Write down an estimate for how many beans are in this jar on this piece of paper. And he said, you can't open it, but you can do whatever you want. Come up here and take a look. So everyone goes, they take a look. Some people are counting the beans in the row and then the height and kind of try to estimate it. And so he tallies up, he gets all the results, and the guesses are 1,771 beans.
That's the average of the guess?
That's the average of all the guesses. Now guess what? only 5 off from the actual. There's 1,776 beans in there. The average of this group of 100 people was incredibly close. Um, but he doesn't tell them how close they were. Then he goes around the room and he says, actually, you know what, let's make this a little, little faster. Um, why don't you just tell me how many you think are in this thing? Say it out loud. So the first person says, uh, 850. So the next person, who might have been thinking 2,000. Was like, oh shit, 2,000, maybe that's way off. Um, 1,300. And then the person who was thinking 1,700, like, 850 and 1,300. And they— so they, they all say their guesses out loud. When they all said their guesses out loud, they went from being off by 5 to being 50% off. The average, I think, came down to like 900 or something like that. So they were off by a mile now. Same people, same jar, The only thing that changed was hearing what other people thought. And he gave this example. He goes, this is the stock market. For most of you, if you, if you were able to independently think and analyze a business and try to come up with what you think the true value of that business is, you're smart people, you'd do pretty well. But the reason smart people don't do well in the stock market is cuz they're listening to the news and Jim Cramer and the analyst reports, and then they look at the ticker and it's going down. I guess it's bad. And as it gets going up, ah, I gotta get in. And so it's gotta go higher, right? And they let everybody else influence their thinking as to what the business is actually worth. And goes, if you remember one thing about how to be a great investor, it would be to look at the jar and write down the number on the piece of paper and know that on average, you'll be much closer to the true value than if you just listen to what everybody is saying. And he goes, now, this is so difficult. There's a reason Warren Buffett says you should buy low-cost index funds. even though he doesn't. And I say you should buy low-cost index funds, even though I don't, because it is so hard to do what I just told you.
So we had Joe Hudson on the other day. So I consider myself to be a fairly easily influenced person. Like, I'll hear about Sam Neuhaus and I'm like, that's awesome. I love that. I'm easily excitable, maybe is a good word. And so he said something that was interesting. Um, where he was like, um, I forget exactly how he phrased it, but whatever the way he phrased it, I went and started reading this book called Untethered Soul, which is kind of a fine book. It's only fine, but there was like one concept that I found was interesting. So have you heard of transcendental meditation?
You basically, uh, sit down and instead of being quiet with your thoughts, you're chanting and you're chanting something. It doesn't even matter what you're saying, but it's the rhythmic auditory thing. It almost drowns out the other thoughts in your head. I've done this before. There's a Buddhist practice that's like this that I was once taken to it. I thought it was really pretty awesome, but I don't do it regularly.
Yeah. And I've done it as well, and I don't do it regularly anymore. But like, there was one line from Untethered Soul where he talks about the guy who created TM, Transcendental Meditation. His name was, his last name was Yogi. But he like tells the story where he's like, basically like the most important key to have like a happy life Is when you have these thoughts in your brain, you you should treat that that thing in your brain as a roommate. And so, if you were to have a roommate that said, "You totally screwed that up. You suck." Like that was not good what you did. You are never going to make up for it. Like everyone has these like negative thinking. You have to be like, "Dude, you are not me. You are my roommate." And with this guy who created TM, he was like, "You just have to ask yourself all the time for every thought." You have to ask, why am I thinking this? And like, I'll just, I'll, I'll hear it, but I'm not gonna listen to it. But I have to ask myself on a consistent basis, who am I and why am I thinking about this? And what does this mean for me as opposed to just listening? And just the act of asking yourself that is actually really important. And that simple question oftentimes can have breakthroughs for self-enlightenment. And so because I'm a very influenced person, I have to like read something and I'll be like, Why does this excite me? Okay, but is this the— is this actually who I am? And like this constant, like, who am I? Is this who I am? It's okay to like this person's story. That doesn't mean I'm going to copy it. Like this, this like constant inner dialogue, because I've been asking myself, how do you become less influenced by people who aren't aligned with what your life's calling or like your mission is? And so when it comes to like this memetic discussion of like, how do you not let this person influence you? I'm just trying to look for exercises on how to actually combat that because it is incredibly hard.
Yeah. Although you're talking about the— you're saying you're taking it to the extreme where you're like, even the voice in my head, don't let that necessarily influence me because that thing is a monkey throwing feces all over the room. It's not necessarily the most reliable, aligned, Source for me.
Like, it is not you. It is just a roommate.
I love the roommate thing. I love the roommate thing. That's great. Have I told you about my 5 voices in the head theory?
No. Is one of them telling you to kill? Because we should talk about that.
So I believe that people, it's not one roommate. I think there's these 5 voices in the head. And once you know that these, uh, these parts of you exist, you'll start to recognize them because they'll pop up. It's kind of like the movie Inside Out, if you've ever seen it. And inside the girl's head, there's like, she, they do it with emotions. There's like the red angry guy. There's the blue sad girl. There's the fearful one. And then there's the grossed out one. So Inside Out showed this in a movie with emotions, but I think there's a similar thing going on with voices in your head. Who are the 5? The first one is the critic. And the critic is like David Goggins in your head. You're never enough for him. You did, you did 100 pushups. You should have done 200. You could have done more, you pussy. And he's there for a reason. He serves you, keeps you honest, prevents you from getting high on your own supply. There's a reason that he gets to have a room. But goddamn it, if you listen to that guy too often, life doesn't end up very well for you. Then you have another voice, and I call this the voice of the mother. And the voice of the mother is a more caring voice, but it's also the one that's protective. It's trying to— it's slicing your grapes for you even when you're 19 years old. It just doesn't want you to get hurt and wants you to live a nice, safe life and be protected and wants everything to go well for you. And that's great too, because it's nice to be protected. It's nice to play it safe. You don't want to take too much risk. But at the same time, the dose makes the poison. Too much of that can also ruin your life because you'll play it too safe. And you go on and you go forth. And so there's these different voices. I could go through all of them, but that's the idea, is that there's these 5 different voices. And then at the end of it, if you're able to hush up all these voices and get them to go back to their room for a little bit, the thing that's left, that's you. The last voice is you. That's the self. And the problem is it's so noisy in there because these other voices are constantly chirping that it's hard to hear what you truly think, what you truly want, because it sounds so easy. Well, you should just do what you want. Most people don't even know. So why do we do things like meditation? Why does sleep help? Why do we do therapy? Because you're trying to get these other voices to just shut the fuck up for a minute so you can actually just figure out what you want and then go do that. It's pretty easy once you get there.
Have you ever described anything to AI and you describe this really interesting thought? You're like, I think I just came up with this cool idea. And they're like, yeah, dude, that's called the theory of relativity. And you're like, so I'm as smart as Albert Einstein. We both, we invented this concurrently. Um, is
this a thing? Is this a thing that exists?
Yeah. Well, there's this great book called The 6 Thinking Hats. I found this to be a very productive book.
Edward de Bono? Uh,
I believe, is that, I'm looking it up. Who, I think that might be him. Uh, yeah. Yeah, you're right.
The lateral thinking guy. Yeah.
And it's like, basically like oftentimes at work or like, um, when you're working on a project, like typically there's always the guy who like defaults to like, that can't work because.
Right.
And I remember reading that and I'm like, how are I thinking about that? I'm like, how do I change this guy or change myself? And so there's the 6 hats of thinking. And one of them's like, the guy, the white hat is focused on facts. The yellow hat is be optimistic. The black hat, be devil's advocate, whatever. And there's like 6 hats. And like, when you're having a discussion, you're like, okay, I hear what you're saying. Can you go ahead and like, tell me, like, if you were an optimist, what would you say about this idea? And like, you, it just, it, creates a significantly better conversation where you're like, okay, listen to this voice. Getting character. Okay, I hear you are, you're being this person, that might be who you are. I need you to pretend that you're an optimist person and like tell me like, or like, okay, you're this creative, like we used to have creative people at the Hustle and it's like, okay, you're saying this crazy idea. I need you to be a manager right now. Think through a manager's perspective and tell me how this makes profit so I can continue paying everyone's salary. And it's like, okay, let's think through that lens. And it starts like actually changing the conversation meaningfully. So what you've described is a little bit similar to what one of my favorite business authors of all time has described. So congratulations, you are now my favorite business author.
Yeah. All right, sweet. Well, that's a win for me. By the way, I like doing this, the physical version of this. So I actually have like 2, 2 hats that I use. So when I was— I told you I was studying the creative process.
Do you literally put your hat on?
Yeah. So I was studying the creative process and one of the biggest things in the creative process is That you need what Jerry Seinfeld calls 2 minds, the 2 minds of a creator. And the first mind is this childlike mind. So when you want to sit down and create, you're sitting in front of a blank page. The reason people have writer's block, the reason people struggle to create daily is because you're afraid. You're afraid of failure. You're afraid of looking bad. You're afraid of— you want so badly to be great that you're not willing to do something bad, to not put something bad down on the page. So you put nothing down at all. It has a self-protective mechanism. So he talks about how you need the childlike mind at the beginning who's just gonna grab a crayon and just scribble. And, and then he, and you almost wanna have this attitude towards that, that version of you that's like, oh my God, sweetie, that's amazing. Could I hang that up on the fridge? And like, you need to nurture that, like that energy because it's what's gonna get you going, right? It's gonna get you to put things on the page. Yeah. And then you'll, you'll eventually figure out how to make it good. Good comes later. Don't worry about that. So you need this childlike mind. He's like, and then what happens is about 4 hours later when you come back and you, you now have a bunch of scribble on the page, you have to completely change into a ruthless asshole. And now this is the editor. And the editor is basically saying, no, no, no, less of this. Trim the fat. Too many words, too many syllables. Cut down, rearrange this. And you gotta be able to do both. You know, somebody who can only do the free play and never edits. never has any kind of discernment or taste or judgment. Doesn't work. But if you bring the judgment into the room early on in the brainstorm, you're not going to have a very good brainstorm. And so we created these 2 hats, literally, like Diego got them made for us, which was like, it says Rick Mode, which is like Rick Rubin. So it's like Rick Mode when it's like, dude, we're just messing around. We're playing. We trust ourselves. And you're Rick Mode. And then we have Prick Mode. And you put on the Prick Mode hat, it goes the other way. It's a different color. And if we were in Prick Mode, then it's like, well, that's who I'm supposed to be right now. So let me go ahead and do that. And I, I, at first I felt kind of silly and then I started noticing there's a lot of examples of great people who do this. So Warren Buffett has a, an actual thing on his desk called the too hard pile. Because his investing philosophy is that, look, you can't have a great opinion on 100 straight stocks or investment opportunities. He's like, you should be able to pretty quickly figure out the 5 that are very interesting, probably like, you know, good, good no-brainer things to do. The 5 that are absolutely terrible duds, stay away, red flags everywhere. But then 90%, it's too hard to judge. It's too close to call. Can't tell. And so he literally creates the too hard pile on his desk so that he can put things in there, just mentally say, look, I don't have to come to an answer. It's just in the too hard pile. I don't need to worry about it. There was a guy, Zak Dell, so the son of Michael Dell from Dell Computers. And Zak Dell's got this really interesting company called BasePower now. And he was on a podcast and he was saying, he's like, I have 2 notebooks. So he's like, so I got the, I forgot what it was like, the red notebook and the blue notebook. And I think you'll like this because this is every business, like CEO, business owner has this. He goes, the red notebook is working in the business. So if I have an idea of what we should, you know, what we should do, what we should change, this, you know, this customer thing. And then the blue is working on the business, which is, oh, you know, this person's not in the right role, or we need to hire somebody for this, or, you know, we need to, We need to get an office space. We need to rearrange our office space so these 2 groups are sitting closer to each other so that they're going to have better chemistry. And so in the business and on the business, and he's like, I have 2 separate notebooks, so I know which one I'm doing when. And I know if I'm spending too much time in the business, it's like I'm all over the red notebook. Is that it? Do you have the same thing?
2 notebooks, baby.
Can we just admire the showmanship? Can you just do that again? Instant replay. Sam picks up the notebook, shows it like that, where it looks like one thick notebook. Turns, fans it out. Two notebooks.
Yeah, I have got two notebooks. I actually have a third. Hang on.
But wait, there's more. The ultimate showman.
Hey, Zach, suck on this.
In the business, on the business, and out of business.
Well, one is like this is like feelings. It's like the five day, five year journal that I write where it's like here's how I feel today, like right now. The next one is like. content ideas, like just random ideas. And then the next one is like, here's what I actually have to do. And like, I need to like work through the actual problem. Hey,
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What's your system for this?
Um, so this one I, I do almost religiously every day. So this is the 5-Year Journal. So every day I write like, here's what I, here's what I did today. Here's something to be grateful for.
So this is like 5, 10 minutes in the morning. What do you do?
No, 3 minutes. So it could be like, uh, uh, today I, I read about Aristotle and I loved it for these reasons, and I need to be reminded to do X like Aristotle. Or it could be like, today I went to San Francisco. It was amazing. Um, we brought, um, help with us and it made the trip so much easier. So it could be like, just like, just, it just like, I'll look back at it here. I'll be like, ah, that's a good reminder. Uh, the next one, this one, uh, will be more like, uh, Uh, like, you know, like, um, let's say I'm reading a book and I'll like have like an interesting idea related to that book. So I just need to get it on paper. And then the next one is like, here's what I have to do today. Uh, and like, uh, it's mostly checklists, but I'll like kind of brainstorm solutions to the problem. So your boy's got books. Um, and by the way, that's like a consistent thing I've noticed amongst creators that I like is that they I think the easiest way to say it is they write drunk, edit sober.
Yeah.
So I've noticed that consistently. But then you have stories like Eminem, his— the famous story where he walked in with Dr. Dre and like Dre plays the first beat and then within 5 seconds he goes, hi, my name is— like, you're like, okay. So like, it definitely could just happen. But typically the people who are systematically great, including Eminem, like people I've seen, I think Anderson Cooper did a thing, a story on Eminem where they're like, Dude, he writes like crazy. Like, I've never seen someone write down so much stuff. And another thing that they would say about him and Eminem when he was younger came off as this like party guy. Maybe he was, but they were like, he's at the studio at 9 a.m. and he goes home at 4. Like, it's a workday. And like, I noticed that there's way more systematic ways to being creative than there is examples of epiphanies.
Right. Well, the analogy I would use, because I think it's, yeah, both. Like, I think, yeah, you have those moments where the song comes on, the beat comes on, and he starts doing Hi, My Name Is. Or that you hear this a lot where somebody, it's like, in 24 hours, they wrote both of the hit songs that defined their careers in one day. All it took was one day. And it's like, no, all it took was every day for their whole life. And then they had that day. And the analogy I use is—
You have a 2% conversion rate, and the conversions just came like in number 98 and 99.
Yeah. Well, the analogy I use is imagine your brain as this old mansion. Old mansion on a hill, and you go to it. You inherited it. You find out you inherited this gift from your great-grandfather. You didn't even know you had it, but it was yours. So you go, you walk in, you're like, wow, this thing's amazing. It's in terrible shape, cobwebs everywhere, but this thing could be amazing. And you decide, you go to the restroom, you go to the bathroom, and you see this wonderful, this old tub, this amazing tub. And you're like, man, this is crazy. I've never had a bath like this. I'm going to turn it on. You turn the water on, and of course, right when you turn the water on, it's creaky, takes a second, it sputters, and then out comes brown, muddy water, like the most disgusting. And you flinch. You're horrified. You're like, oh, disgusting. You turn it off. This is the first thing you write when you sit down to write. The first thing you say, if I said, hey, freestyle right now, it's what would come out. You'd be horrified at your own disgust. It's your own output is going to disgust you. But what do you do? So most people just turn the water off and say, ooh, never again. That bathtub is nasty. Don't go in there. But a few people are like, they leave the water running, and sure enough, it's brown, it's brown, it's brown, it's brown, it's brown. And then eventually it starts to— little spurts of clear come out, and eventually the water starts running clear. And I think what happens in that example where Eminem goes in and freestyles is that he's had the water running and he's running clear. Yeah. And so when the moment comes, he's able to perform. He's able to come up with an idea. He's able to have a good idea because it's warmed up. The whole system is warmed up. The muddy water is gone because he's putting in the daily reps along the way. And so I think that's a lot of how this works. And I feel that way about this podcast. Let's say we didn't do this podcast for 3 months. One might think that Oh, we're going to have so much saved up material. We're going to be awesome. It's going to be so much better. And then, as you know, it would be way worse. It would be terrible. This podcast gets better the more often we do it. Obviously, there's some limits to that. Like, if I did it again in 2 hours, maybe I'd be out of— I need a little fresh feedstock, a little inspiration, a little fresh air in between.
Yeah, you got to get warmed up.
But by and large, the more you keep the water running, the clearer it eventually starts to run. And it's when you stop using it for a while that it's Like, there's this flywheel where the more it generates, the better it generates. And the less it generates, the worse it generates.
There's this story about Tupac Shakur who died when he was only 25. And so he was very prolific for a very short amount of time. And there's a story, he goes to, he went to prison for doing some bad stuff and he's there for like 9 months. And someone was like, well, it must've been like, you know, let's find the icing on the cake. Like, at least you had like a lot of solitude so you could like write. He goes, I can't write in here. It's the worst. Like, A, there's like very little inspiration and B, like, I can't get it out. He would write way better when he was like a machine gun in the studio, like, just go, go, go. All right, we did that one. All right, let's try another one. Can I tell you an interesting story? And this is sort of related to like someone who followed none of the rules that people default to. And I think it's really interesting and I think it's going to interest you because, A, it's an obscure billionaire who I'm sure you've never heard of, but you know their work. And B, it's a family dynasty business, which I think you're tiptoeing into like your interests.
I'm tantalized.
Okay. Have you ever heard of Advance Publishing?
No, but you said I know their product. What's the product?
Well, the most popular ones, but not necessarily the most profitable, are Iron Man, GQ Magazine, Reddit, Charter Communications, Warner Bros. Discovery. Some smaller ones that you probably like is the— or that you've heard of— American City Business Journals, turnitin.com. They just bought a mountain biking event. Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue.
They owned Reddit before it was public. So I can, I'll tell you, and they still own, I think they own 30% of it still. But I'll tell you the story. So there's this guy named Sam Newhouse. Sam Newhouse was born, I think, in like 1895. He's born into this like Jewish family. He's like 5'2. He's like a little guy. He's tiny. And he, his father gets sick, gets really bad asthma. And so his He can't work, and so he's got like four other siblings, and he's like at the age of 13 and 14, the mom is like, "Hey dude, you're the man of the house. You gotta you gotta drop out of school and help me pay the bills." And so he does like a mail-in order course, basically the equivalent of an online course in bookkeeping, and he convinces this local business person to give him a job. He's like, "I'll do your bookkeeping." So he does his bookkeeping starting at the age of 15. By 16, a year later, the business guy who owns a very small local newspaper, and he's like, "Hey, I have this newspaper that I own. It doesn't really make a lot of money." And it made like the equivalent of like $800,000 a year in revenue today. He's like, can you just like keep an eye on this? You seem very trustworthy. You know numbers, figure out how to make this work. Within 6 or 7 months, he turns it around and starts making money. And he's at this point 17. And the guy's like, dude, good job here. I'll give you a percentage of the profits now. And I'll also give you a little bit of ownership. And Sam Neuhaus is like, I like this. I think I'm pretty good at it. So he does it for a couple more years. And then after about 3 years, he convinces a bunch of family members to all pitch in and loan him money, and he buys his first new It was called Staten Island Advance, which is why the company today is still called Advance Publishing. And so his whole shtick is basically he bought this newspaper and he goes into it with a few things in mind. The first thing, he's like, look, we're just here to sell ads. Let's, let's keep it real. The, the, the content that we create, we can make it as good as we possibly can within our constraints, but like, we need to make a profit. And so he's very, very, very good at selling ads and he's very good at keeping cost controls down. And for the next, I think, 60 years, he buys a new newspaper every 3 years and it slowly accumulates roughly 15 to 20% per year in revenue growth. And he grows and he grows and he grows and he grows. And by the time it's like 1980, he has one of the largest privately owned companies in America. And he's doing like, well, today Advance Publishing does like $8 billion a year in revenue. Back then it was doing like $1 billion in revenue. But what's interesting is this little guy named Sam Newhouse. He never had an office. He worked out of a briefcase. All he had was a briefcase. Most of the deals that he did was handshake agreements. He had zero partners. He had zero executive management team. And by the time the company was doing $1 billion in revenue, it was literally just him, like just him making these decisions. And he would— he would hire a publisher, which is basically a GM or like a CEO of a newspaper. And he would go to each one each week and be like, hey, what's going on, man? How's everything going? He was very polite though. He
was the headquarters just driving around.
He, and he would drive from thing to thing to thing. And he kept doing this and doing this and doing this. And then after a while, when he's like close to 60 and 70 and 80 years old, he starts getting his sons involved. And they've now created this like dynasty. And it was his sons who was like, okay, our dad bought all these like kind of low prestige local newspapers where like they pretty much just exist to buy ads. Basically the way that he thought about it, he was like, his whole thing was like, how much profit can I make in 10 years off of this particular newspaper? That's how he would value things. So he was like, okay, I can make $8 million in profit over the next 10 years off this newspaper. I have no problem buying it for $4 million, which is like, I think at the time that like he would buy them for 6 to 8 times annual earnings because he was like, I'm looking for 10 years at a time. That's how I measure it. And he kept going. And then eventually his kids were like, okay, dad built like a cool company, but like, it's not like well regarded. We want to do something great. And so they buy The New Yorker, which was at the time a very prominent magazine. They buy this little thing called Condé Nast. And Condé Nast was a series of magazines including Vanity Fair, Vogue, and all this other stuff like GQ. And they were like, we're going to make this like, we're going to make our family great. And so they come up with this idea of Vanity Fair, which is hard to Describe now because it's not as relevant, but they were like, "We're going to hire these amazing editors," and that's where they get this woman named Anna Wintour, who, if you've seen like The Devil Wears Prada, that's her. And their whole shtick was we're going to give the hire these amazing editors, and we're going to give them like do whatever you want, as long as it like makes some profit. Do whatever you want; we don't care. And that's what they were famous for. And so they've had a bunch of editors of these really awesome magazines. For like 3 or 4 decades. I think she's been doing it for like 30 years. And then come the dot-com era, they were like, okay, we've got to figure this out. What do we do? And so they buy Reddit for $10 million and they hold on to it and it grows and it grows and it grows. And eventually they spit it out and do its own thing. And so their $10 million investment into Reddit is worth, I think now, like between $2 and $3 billion. Yeah,
that's Wow.
They've like done this over and over and over again. They're still a privately held company. I believe his name is Stephen Newhouse, who must be the great— the grandson of the founder. He recently bought Ironman, the triathlon series. They've bought— they just bought a mountain biking event. They own Turnitin.com. I think they recently bought that for over $1 billion. They own 4% of Warner Brothers. which owns HBO, CNN, Discovery Channel, all this other stuff. They own 14% of Charter Communications. And so it's just this big, like, playground where they, like, buy these really cool things and they own them forever.
This is fascinating. What, what's something you're going to, you know, you're like, I can steal from this playbook?
So something that he did that I believe Warren Buffett did, when you're buying multiple businesses, something that you tell yourself that's cool is to consolidate the back end, the back office, It's counterintuitive. That is not the way to do it. Every entity should be its own thing that can run itself and is completely independent. That is the best way to make sure that they can move fast and act on what's good for their local business, as opposed to having like some HR or sorry, some HQ that's helping make decisions. Another thing is I need to be reminded of this all the time. I think everyone does is how if you know what business you're in, even if it's not sexy and you're able to stick with it for a long time and you are what you are and you know what you are, it can really work a lot better than pretending to be something else. For example, he knew, he was like, guys, ads are first. Okay? So if we hire journalists, that's fine, uh, that are great journalists, but you have to like stick within this playbook. We aren't going to like appeal to like be sexy. It was his kids who got into that because they wanted to be that. But he was like, nope, this is what we're doing. This is the mission. And we're going to do it over and over and over and over again. Like you and I will like talk about this podcast oftentimes and we're like, this is a fake example, but we're like, should we talk about politics? And like one could say like, yeah, we should. It'll get more popular. It'll get more, it's like, or we just stick to what we know and like enjoy our niche and just be kings of that small niche. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
So that's a big takeaway.
Very tempting to, um, and I wouldn't even say tempting. I think it is interesting when people don't really understand the business that they're in. And, um, that can be from a customer point of view. Like, why, like, you know, for example, why do people listen to this podcast? Just to, just to use a personal example, right? It's like, if you can't really understand why somebody's listening, what are the odds you're going to be fulfilling that, you know, at the highest level that you're going to be delivering to the person the reason they came, the job to be done for why they're here, right? Because on one level, you could say for this podcast, Well, they're listening for business ideas because you would say, well, often we talk about different business ideas or opportunities, and certainly it's for somebody who's looking for their next business. So then we should go market this as a great podcast for somebody who's looking for their next business. And if you did that, it would be a shockingly small number of people and a small percentage of our actual audience. Because what our actual audience likes to do is be entertained by the talk of business. Right? Like, I like to hear about business ideas that I have no plan on ever going and doing. It sounds irrational. Why would you do that? Why waste the mind space there? And it's like, well, because it tickles some part of my brain to hear people brainstorming about an idea or teaching me about an idea that I never am going to do. Or I hear about a business that's completely different than mine, but I'm fascinated by it and I take inspiration from it. And I, for some reason, Hearing about this dude's old newspaper business and how he was a traveling, you know, traveling in his car, checking on each, each HQ and how he took a simple idea seriously and he stuck with it for, you know, 100 years. It made me reinforce what I'm doing over here in the restaurant business, what I'm doing over here in the oil business or whatever other business you're in. And so we have to understand that for us, it's inspiring stories. So stories of people doing badass things to make it so that you go do badass things in your business. And secondly, people who are just business junkies, they just like to know, they like to hear, they like to, the, the fantasy football of the whole thing. They don't have to go plan to actually go do that thing. And once you understand that, you might like run your product or run your business a little bit differently.
So a lot of times people after the podcast, they'll reach out to me and they're wondering, hey, Sam and Sean, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs? How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least $3 million in revenue, although we do on average something like $25 million a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figure, of Bluechew. All these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to My First Million, we have a very unique, high-trust environment. When people apply and go through this vetting process, they're put in groups of like 8 or 9 other entrepreneurs and they get real about every everything that's going on in their life and in their business. And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business. That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life-changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least $3 million in revenue and you just want to go ahead and pull forward 5 or 10 years worth of success, then check it out. The URL is joinhampton.com. Again, the URL joinhampton.com. Yeah, like a good example of what not to do is, do you remember Jaguar had like a rebrand like 2 years ago?
Oh yeah, everyone hated it, right? What were they doing?
Yeah, so basically like Jaguar, they're, they're historically, I think they were like, it's a British company and it was like a cool guy car. Like, uh, James Bond would drive a Jag. Yeah, it was like a cool guy, like a, like a man's man kind of thing. And I think they drifted a little bit away from that, but that's like the heart of it. And so they, they, they were trying to figure out, they're like, look, we kind of been like this middleman car company for the last 15, 20 years. We got to get back to our roots. And they go and do this rebrand. And somehow when they did it, they had like their spokesperson was like an androgynous woman, which isn't exactly in line with a manly man who loves to smell gasoline. It sort of seemed like a little like, it was like related to the LGBTQ thing, which is like fine, but that's not exactly the Jaguar customer or like the reason why people turn to Jaguar. Yeah. And when they did that, All the customers were like, what is this? This doesn't speak to us. And so it was like the exact opposite of what you should do.
Well, right now Nike is in the news for the same thing. Nike stock is down 90— what is it down? 80%, 90%, something like that from its peak. Um, I don't know if you've been following this, but—
Yeah. What's the, what's the gist of it? I know it's down.
Peak was 170 and it's currently at 36. So Nike stock has fallen dramatically. It's now a $53 billion market cap.
And just to put that in perspective, they do $46 billion in revenue. So they're trading almost at 1x their revenue.
Like a shitty DTC brand, right?
Yeah.
And there's lots of reasons people can attribute to this. One of the popular reasons, I don't know if this is the full reason, right? I think there were some business model things they did, but one of the popular kind of complaints or things that people say is like, look, Nike, the brand, the premium you were getting was because you had this incredible brand and it was worldwide recognized and respected brand athletes everywhere wanted to be a part of. And it used to— Nike used to celebrate greatness. You know, famously they would never show the shoe. They would talk about the athlete and the athlete being great, the athlete pushing through, the athlete achieving what others said was impossible. And they just so happened to be wearing Nikes. And the implication is if you want to be great. Nike stood for greatness, stood for excellence. And if you wanted to be great, if you wanted to be truly excellent, then you should wear Nike. And it drifted. And so they started having all these body positives. So it's like, all right, there's a fat person wearing Nike. Great. There's this person who's not great wearing Nike, not great at their sport. And it's like, well, nobody wants to buy the brand of non-excellent athletic performance. for an athletic shoe. And you could see how a large corporation could drift and could lose that. And then they're going to have— now they're going to have their back to their roots moment where they're going to trim the product lines and they're going to go back to their roots. They're going to overpay some athlete to go back and they're going to have this new campaign. They're going to fire their ad agency and hire a new ad agency. They're going to get back to their roots. And I think—
Think about the athletes. They're like, I could be Nike's next mistake. Let's like, I have to get in before they realize how dumb this is.
So yeah, like I shouldn't have a chance at being on the Nike billboard, right? Like that should be impossible.
Can I wrap up here with this, um, a segment that I want to call I Created a Monster slash How to Turn Shit into Gold.
This is brought to you by Jiffy Lube.
Yeah.
I feel like every segment needs a sponsor, even a fictitious one.
Yeah. This is, this is called the I created a monster slash how to turn shit into gold. So, and it's where this is like a positive episode. So this is perfect. So a few months ago, I kind of alluded to it, but I didn't want to like say it. My sister-in-law got breast cancer recently, and what sucks because she's pregnant, she's due in October, and she got cancer like the same. So the same day Ben called me, she called me. She called my wife and she was like, Okay, this is horrible. I'm pregnant and I have cancer. How can I make this awesome? And so she got inspired and I guess got inspired by me because everything— that was taking way too much credit, but, uh, but it runs in the family.
I pulled you over for a speeding violation there on that sentence, but go ahead. Citation, back on the road.
Yeah, I'm the pregnant one with cancer, but you are the hero, Sam. But I guess what I'm saying, like, you know, as you know, being a creator, you get a lot of free stuff. And I think everyone's like, I want that. I want a free mattress. And so she started making TikToks about being pregnant and having cancer. And she's like doing amazing where like the video I don't like watching is like when she finally shaves her head, it always makes me cry. But then there's like her working out and doing stuff and like she's like basically starts off every video, I'm 30 years old, I'm pregnant and I have cancer. And like, here's my workout today. And she now is on TikTok. She's getting like tens of thousands of views on a bunch of videos. I think she's doing like a video a day. But I just thought this was really awesome. I thought this was really, really, really cool and admirable what she's doing because getting cancer and being pregnant, that's literally like one of the worst lots that can be drawn ever. But she— and I like to tease her because I'm like, the shitty thing about both of those things, your shtick, is that ideally they're going to end. You're gonna have a baby, and the cancer is gonna go away. So you better get everything out of this, you know, while you can. But I think it's pretty cool, and I thought you'd get a kick out of this. What she's doing?
I do. I am getting a kick out of it. I think this is awesome. I'm gonna watch some of these videos after this. I do have a suggestion now that she's taking suggestions. I do have a suggestion.
Well, she's in the arena now.
Well, kind of like you said, like you know the the. That initial hook is like obviously like a shock, right? Like I'm 30 years old, I'm pregnant and I have cancer.
By the way, let me let me give her a shout out. It's Sid Glander. Her first name is Sydney. Yeah, first name Sydney, last name Glander. G-L-A-N-D-E-R. Okay, go ahead.
Yeah, everyone, let's go follow her. I think she should tweak it a little bit. Maybe try. I'm 30 years old. I'm you know I'm an expecting mom and future cancer survivor because I think the words. matter, the label you put on yourself, the identity, especially as a content creator. You— there's this weird thing where the more public you are about an identity, the harder it is to ever switch it. And this is one she would want to switch, not having it, but surviving it, you know, like conquering it, you know, beating it. And so that's my, that's my, my only suggestion is, uh, is consider, consider that.
Yeah, I actually think that's great advice. She's been texting me. She's like, Kettle and Fire reached out to me. They're offering to send me free bone broth and it's like, I made it. Like every influencer has this moment. It's sort of like making your first dollar. The first time a brand reaches out to you and offers like product, you're like, I did it. And so I think it's really cool that she's, she's done it.
I got a, I got a huge box of Chomps from Pete from Chomps at my door. And like all the kids on my, my son's soccer team just thought like, they don't know what a podcast is. They actively don't want to watch this. But the fact that Chomps sends me free Chomps. They were like, this is unbelievable. Because I don't know if you know this, but kids, kids freaking love Chomps chopsticks,
dude. Pete from Chomps DM me. I want some Chomps. That's, that's like one of the few things I would gladly accept.
It's like a lifetime supply of Chomps that I have at the front door.
Is it really?
Can I tell you, uh, can I tell you a fun, uh, a funny, uh, just like this is the, uh, the Tales from the House episode. So yeah, I don't know about you.
Who's this sponsored by?
This is— no, I need like a, like a, like an insurance, home insurance company, maybe like,
uh,
yeah, Geico or something like that for this one. So it was unrelated to the, to business or anything like that, but I don't know if you, if you're, if you guys are like this, but does, uh, does Sarah like panic when guests are coming over? She seems cool as a cucumber. If anybody's ever met her, she's cool as a cucumber. She's literally cool as a cucumber. Maybe you're the one who would be, who'd be panicking, but my wife,
she's pretty, pretty stoic. But I do, I do empathize with that. Like, when you clean before the cleaning lady comes?
Yeah. So this is like the extreme version of that where my wife, like, we have the Tesla Model X, which is awesome, but the, she hates the doors. And I was like, oh, why? Look, it's so convenient to get in and out. She's like, no, everyone can see in our car at school drop-off. Like I open up the kimono every time everyone sees every goldfish that's on the ground. I'm like, they don't see your care. She's like, no, like park over there farther away. So nobody will see when we open our trunk. So anyways, we're cleaning out the house, we're getting rid of some toys. And so my, uh, she doesn't wanna give, she doesn't wanna waste it. So she posts on her IG like, hey, does anyone wanna take these toys? Like pick up these toys. Um, and, um, her friend who's a kindergarten teacher's like, oh, perfect. I'll take 'em for the classroom. And she's like, oh, great. Okay, great. I'm so glad these are going to a good place. Awesome. She puts it like as like up front, like right by the door. Just come grab 'em and go. And so 5 minutes before she picked it up, she's picking it up. She's like, hey, we're on our way. And, and then my wife's like, who's we? Oh no, who's coming? And she's like, yeah, it's me, husband, all the kids. We're just gonna come over for real quick. We're just gonna do this. And so we're in emergency clean mode. So she's cleaning downstairs. She starts going upstairs and I'm like, like, nobody's gonna go upstairs. Like, don't worry. Like, this is like comical. Nobody's gonna go. Nobody's gonna see that room. Don't even worry about it. Yeah, if you want to pick up some stuff here, that's fine. But like, don't worry about it.
You've seen those videos where like, uh, people get pulled over by the police and they want to prove a point and they barely roll their window down? And they just like, I don't answer questions. That's like, basically, that's what she was trying to do. Yeah.
She wanted to like crack the thing open and like do like an exchange through the like slot, like a prisoner in like a solitary confinement. Uh, anyways, they come over, kids are playing around the house, it's time to go. And, uh, and they're like, oh, and they're like, cause they're like calling his name, the kid, their kid's name. And they're like, oh, he's doing that thing again. And we're like, what? And they hit— they're like, he always does this. We go to someone's house. And he just goes and finds a random room in their house and just hides there. And we're like, oh, that's funny. He's so silly. And they're like, no, it's not funny because he won't come out. Like, he'll go an hour, 2 hours. Like, you won't find him. And then we're like, oh. And then my wife starts to panic. She's like, let me go upstairs and just see real quick. And they're like, no, no, no, you don't know this kid. I know how he thinks. We will go send a search party up and find him. So they go upstairs.
And by the way, exactly. By the way, the husband is a real estate agent, so he's like, you know, just finely attuned to just paying attention to the home.
Scoping the sitch.
He scopes the joint out. And so he, he's going room to room and my wife's just following him, making excuses in each room. Like, we haven't had a chance yet to clean that up. We're actually, we're moving. That's why this is like this. And like, I don't know who did that. Somebody came here and did that. And so she's just making excuses while he's opening up every closet, every drawer. looking under the beds, everywhere you would never think anyone would go. Linen closet, what's in there? Because he might be anywhere. And finally, in the last room, finds him inside of a closet. And they're coming downstairs, and I feel like my wife just saw a dead body, and I think it might be hers that she saw on the way out. And we didn't talk for 15 minutes after they left. It was just like silence as she just processed her worst nightmare playing out. But you know, like the, the Stoic thing where you like visualize your worst fear?
Yeah,
she lived it. And I feel like she came out a better person now that like she survived her worst nightmare. So I thought I'd share that with you.
Does she know that you're going to talk about it?
No, no, no. So she gets to relive it now. Thankfully, she's never listened to an episode of the podcast, so we're safe. This is a safe space here.
Just when they thought they were out, you want them back. Yeah, dude, that's such an easy way. So funny.
This is your zombie newsletter. This was a pod full of laughs, full of goodness. Congratulations. We did it. And that's it. That's the pod.
No days off on the road. Let's travel, never looking back.
All right, let's take a quick break. I wanna tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Siu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real-world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you.
Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.