SPEAKER_00
There's TV show got canceled, but Discovery gives them a whole network. Discovery is like, yo, we're going to make the Magnolia network all around you guys. And you guys are going to create like hundreds of hours of like TV that's fixed rapper content, cooking content, gardening content, like all the like house shit, right? And now they've built this empire.
The kind of the bottom line of the headline of the story is this couple in a span of about 10 years has built a billion dollar brand around themselves. So it's that big. It's that big.
SPEAKER_01
They keep in what just happened. So before we hit record, it's like five, four, three, two, one.
SPEAKER_00
And Sam on three takes out a drink out of nowhere at three seconds left and just chugs it like tilts up.
SPEAKER_01
Not only just tilts it up, squeezes the bottle like it's a it's a Kool-Aid or like a Capri Sun or something and just chugs some carbonated drink. And then it goes to one and then he puts up the one simple like, hold on, looks to the side, burps, flexes, recenters himself and is ready for the podcast. That was elite.
That was an elite prep for a podcast.
SPEAKER_03
Dude, I'm on top of it. I drink so many beverages in. We had this fast company article written about the Hampton launch and the reporter in like the first paragraph called that how I left the
SPEAKER_02
interview to grab a root beer and I came back.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he skimmed the foam off the root beer like it was a Guinness and then finished it. Held up the one second sign to my lips. Tell me to shush as he as he drained his root beer during the interview.
SPEAKER_03
You know how men drink like IPA is a crap and then they look at the glass after they take a drink and try to analyze it. That's basically what I do at my Coke Zero.
SPEAKER_00
Dude, you should you got to have more weird quirks because like you can't really be a billionaire founder if you're not super weird. So, you know, you got to start picking up some things like, you know, all he only wears, you know, open-toed sandals with socks and like, you know, he wears shorts with, you know, EMF protection on his pockets because he's worried about radiation and what are the other weird things that you can do?
SPEAKER_03
Well, I had a I had carbonated water on tap for a while. That was pretty awesome. Like I like only drink carbonated water, no normal water.
SPEAKER_00
Only sleeps during full moons.
SPEAKER_03
Do you have a you don't have any ex-intricities to you?
SPEAKER_00
No, that's why I'm broke, dude. I need I need some of these before, you know, otherwise, how can I be? How can I be the weird rich billionaire I'm trying to be?
SPEAKER_03
We have Sean and I have these friends. I won't name who they are, but they're they're young guys. And the minute that they got like a mild amount of success, like maybe 500,000 in revenue, they clearly had read like Naval's book on like charging by time or something like that.
And then they sent all of their clients, the client services business saying, we don't do meetings anymore. And they were leading into that eccentricity thing. And I wanted to tell them, you guys are doing great, but you're not there yet.
SPEAKER_00
And the biggest customer dropped them. Yeah, it was like, oh, yeah, we kind of needed to meet to talk about the. I get. Okay.
SPEAKER_01
Well, I guess we'll just find another vendor.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I want to tell him like, it's great.
SPEAKER_01
I love the attitude, you know, showed up to meetings with the shirt off.
SPEAKER_00
And those are like, well, that's cool. It's one way. It's one way to wear your shirt.
SPEAKER_03
That's not the way that that particular client was willing to do it. So it's no longer their client, but that is our way that it's definitely a way.
SPEAKER_01
They do have a nipple policy.
SPEAKER_03
And unfortunately, they're not on board with the free the Nip campaign. Unfortunately.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Oh, we forgot to shout out.
SPEAKER_03
We're doing a live pod April 29th. That's a Saturday. If you live in Austin or if you want to fly in, Sean and I, along with MFM guests, Andrew Wilkinson are doing a live pod.
So if you go to MFM pod.com, you'll see the details and you'll see tickets. We're going to do a live pod.
We did this in Vancouver a couple months ago. It's sold out. This one's going to sell out as well.
So if you're interested in hanging out with Sean, me, Andrew Wilkinson, as well as five, 600 other guests and fans of MFM, we're going to be there. So check it out. MFM pod.
com and you'll see the banner up top where you can check out ticket.
SPEAKER_00
All right, let's take a second to talk about our sponsor today, HubSpot. They have two new AI tools that are pretty cool. I want to tell you about.
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All right, back to the show.
SPEAKER_03
Dude, we have a bunch of stuff. You have Chip and Joanna Gaines on there today and I went to Waco this weekend where they are from. Oh, no way.
And like, saw some of their houses.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. That's crazy. Okay, so you might know more about this than I do.
Okay, so let me tee it up and then you tell me what you know about these people. So here's my trail of events and I'll put the disclaimer out there right now. If you actually know about them, that this is going to all sound very elementary.
This is going to sound very, very beginner because I was a complete beginner about like, who are these people?
SPEAKER_03
I'm walking around and target for their listener though. Sean doesn't know like, I told him what Coldplay was last week. Like he didn't know.
He thought that was like baseball in the winter time. He didn't know anything about like pop culture. So this is you learning out loud.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly. Like I still use a flip phone. So I left my house.
I go to Target and inside Target, there's this one section that my wife always goes into and it's the only section in Target that looks like this where there's a giant picture of this happy white couple and it's their names like it's like, oh, here's I one, two, three, four, five, Chip and Joanna Gaines, six, seven, eight, nine, two. So why don't they have their own section? So I noticed that first and I thought, hmm, that's interesting. Are these YouTubers? Why, what is the, who are these people? Do they, is this the owner of Target? What is this? And so I noticed that and filed that away.
Then I was talking to Aldone who came on the pod or we talked about on the pod who runs Missouri star quilt company, the big quilt company, a huge quilt company. And he did this thing where he started buying up a section of a town. He basically bought a town and started to build it out and he wanted to make it like, you know, quilt heaven.
So basically a Mecca for where quilters would go as like a, as a pilgrimage to go and just like really indulge in their hobby. And he told me world for grandmas Disney world for, yeah, for, for your auntie. So, so he was like, all right, well, he goes, I go, does anybody else do this? And he goes, well, there's, there's Chip and Joanna Gaines thing in Waco.
And I go, there they are again. Who are these people? And, you know, fool me once, shame on me and feel me twice shame on me. Finally, I'll look you up and I looked him up and they got an incredible story.
It sounds like you're pretty familiar with them, but he had told me one thing
SPEAKER_03
that caught my attention. He goes, it's, it shocks me by the way, you don't know about these people. I mean, like in the Midwest and amongst like moms, like you are so California that you don't know about this.
They've been in the game for like 10 years, but I don't know too much about them. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
And you know, it's, it's quaint, but I looked him up. They, the YouTube videos are amazing, by the way, if you, if you watch the YouTube videos. So they own a part of town in Waco that they just branded as their own.
They bought these two abandoned, I think silos like grain silos. And so they call it like whatever, siloville or whatever. And they have the silo bration at the end of the year where it's just like this huge party for themselves.
So their brand Magnolia is the like everywhere in this little area. So they have the Magnolia market where you go buy your stuff. And then they have their Magnolia table restaurant, which is served by the vegetables from Joanna's garden.
And then there's the Magnolia other thing. And then there's Magnolia other thing. And it's just all them and they get about 2 million visitors a year just coming and making the pilgrimage to Waco, Texas, which is really the middle of nowhere for Texas.
I lived in Texas and I never went to Waco. Like it was not even in my top 10 places to go in Texas. And so they have made Waco a destination.
They literally have raised the housing prices in that area by like 24 percent because they have made it an attraction. And their story is kind of interesting. I don't know if you know their backstory.
Do you know pretty well? I don't. So they, the story goes something like this. And again, I'm a beginner.
So I'm doing the thing where you read the press release and you're like, oh, that's how they met. How fortunate are you know, like when you hear about somebody saying, like, how'd you think of the idea? It's like, well, I saw a single mother struggling and I just decided that that would be my mission. It's like, no, dude, you read a report that said this market was growing and that's why you, you know, you started this business.
But like, here's the PR version of their story. They live in Waco, Texas. Chip, the guy goes into this car repair shop that her dad owns, sees a picture of her on the wall and decides I'm going to marry that girl.
Suspicious. But okay.
SPEAKER_02
Keeps going back to the car repair shop. That story, it could, it could go a different route.
SPEAKER_03
It's totally, it's like, it's like when you whispered someone's ear like, I see you versus like right on their mirror when they're in the shower.
SPEAKER_02
You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_03
Like context matters here.
SPEAKER_02
The ending of the story really makes it a mix.
SPEAKER_01
It could go either way. She doesn't end up in a freezer.
SPEAKER_00
So he keeps going back and he eventually bumps into her, asks her out on a date. They go on a date. Whatever.
They end up getting together. This is back in like 2003. And so he was doing house flipping and she was kind of like, I guess like working with the, doing like commercials for her dad's car, car repair place or whatever.
And they get together and they decide they don't have anything to their name, but they decide to try to try to make something of this house flipping thing. She's like, oh, I could use my design sense. You're a contractor.
And let's say they move into this like 800 square foot house and they renovate it while they live there, end up flipping one, flipping two, flipping three. They start to, you know, successfully flip some houses in Waco, but still no big deal. Then a TV show from HGTV starts casting and they read about this husband and wife house flipper in Waco, Texas.
They said, well, wake up. We're kind of hoping for somebody in LA or New York or maybe Atlanta or something like that. But like, okay, whatever, let's go down to Waco and meet him.
And he's got this like kind of big personality. He's outgoing and she's really good looking. And so it like plays well for TV, so they get their show on HGTV called Fixer Upper.
And basically the show like from day one is a hit. And so they go from kind of husband and wife, small time house flippers, like very small houses that they're flipping in Waco to now on TV. And they they're doing this and they do five or six seasons.
They become very famous on HGTV. Show gets canceled. But what they did was they had built this following and they had built they had this brand in mind that they had called Magnolia.
Like they had opened up a retail store back in the day. They closed it because it wasn't really going so well. But they had this idea for this store called Magnolia.
So when the show ends, they do two things. They reopen Magnolia as a beautiful place in Waco. And then secondly, they go to the the channel Discovery Channel and they go and there's TV show got canceled, but Discovery gives them a whole network.
Discovery's like, yo, we're going to make the Magnolia network all around you guys. And you guys are going to create like hundreds of hours of like TV that's Fixer Upper content, cooking content, gardening content, like all the like house shit, right? And now they've built this empire. The kind of the bottom line of the headline of the story is this couple in a span of about 10 years has built a billion dollar brand around themselves.
So it's that big. It's that big. So there's no real numbers that like have come out.
So like if you go look for their net worth or their revenue, super hush hush, which you know, just makes those little hairs on my arms start to tingle a little bit. I know. I know when it's that hush hush that that means it's a lot bigger than you think, especially because you see it like target partnered with them to develop that line of goods in their store.
So like when target, it's not even like they got their brand into target. It's like target came to them and was like, let's make a brand. That's like a big deal.
SPEAKER_03
They have their killers move in silence, killers move in silence. And you hear, yeah, it's like, if you don't hear about it, if you don't hear about it in TechCrunch, you know, it's doing good.
SPEAKER_00
I thought you were going to hit them with a G's and lasagna type of line type of, no,
SPEAKER_03
no, no, no, no, you know, I think I've, I've milked that one dry.
SPEAKER_00
Dude, it's like my mom, when she was on the phone with like a customer service person and you're like, A is an apple, B is an bob, whatever she goes, K is a knife.
SPEAKER_01
I just lost it.
SPEAKER_02
I was like, I don't think you understand how that works.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it's like, they operate like K is a knife.
SPEAKER_03
I grew up on this street called Simpson and I would be like, I'd be like, you know, my address is this is this Simpson, like OJ Simpson and it works.
SPEAKER_00
Um, anyways, their, their app that has their TV show network has like tens of thousands of reviews on it. So that means that that app is doing pretty well and that's a paid, that's like their own version of Netflix, right? Like that's like kind of stunning. You never really see an influencer that has their own whole subscription network.
And so they have book cookbooks, journals, retail stores, brand paint brand, furniture brand, they have their TV show network, they got everything and this idea and they have their own town, which gets two million visitors a year. Like if your website gets two million visitors a year, you're doing pretty okay. You're right.
You're out there, let alone two million people making the pilgrimage to your small town and Waco to come buy shit from your stores. That's kind of impressive. I guarantee you that these people will end up billionaires off of this Magnolia brand.
This Magnolia brand has to be worth high hundreds of millions, if not over a billion dollars already. All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about a podcast you should check out on the HubSpot podcast network.
It's called the product boss. It is a podcast where it's like almost like a workshop style strategy hour around social media and marketing strategies that you can use to up level yourself in terms of sales and in your marketing strategies. So there's a couple of episodes that you could check out.
There's one called why being ready is a lie, which is don't wait to take action. You'll never take action. If you keep waiting, the truth is you'll never be ready.
And they talk about why it's important to take that leap of faith and trust that new doors will open for you if you just go ahead and take action. So check out this podcast. Go listen to the product boss wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_03
Have you been to Waco ever? No. And so I went to Waco this weekend because and I'll tell a quick story and we'll get back to this. But basically last year I randomly came across this guy who had this new Airbnb.
It was basically a piece of land that he built a lake on and he built seven Airbnb's. I was so curious. I couldn't find him on social media.
I call him up. I get him on the phone. Yeah, he built a lake.
Like it was like a plot of land and they built not a huge like more upon is a better word to describe it. It's a lake, I guess. But I call him up and I go, tell me your story.
He goes, well, I had a part. I was an accountant. I had my own small business for accounting.
I just built this Airbnb thing. I think it's going to be really successful, but I really describe myself as an artist. I love to paint and play music.
And right right away I'm like, I'm in. Do you want to hang out? Start hanging out with him. And he's part of this thing.
I mentioned it called homestead heritage. It's this religion slash community. It's like all different parts of Christianity and they believe in like sustainability and the weird part is they believe in craftsmanship.
So the way that they like find God is by like doing things with their hand and doing it well. So anyway, this weekend I went and celebrated Easter at his church and like they like had all singing thing.
SPEAKER_00
I stayed at his Airbnb. Has this been around for a long time or did this? It was like a reasonably creative religion.
SPEAKER_03
Okay. Basically the story is, is that one of the main guy, which is his wife's grandpa, I believe, the wife's Isaac's wife's grandfather lived in New York, was atheist, found God somehow and felt like the best way to like show that I love God is to like just be excellent at everything I do and be kind to people, among other things. But that was basically it.
For some reason they moved to Waco. They get 500 acres and they build a whole community on there. And then this guy Isaac now has built this Airbnb a few miles away and he tweeted out his profits and in his first year of business, he did a million in profit.
And so I went and I became friends with them and I went and hung out there and I drove through all through Waco and basically in Waco, Waco's sorry, Waco people, it's not nice. It's not, it's not, it's like objectively like a fairly rundown place as if maybe it was like an oil town. It feels like there was once something there and then now it's not.
And when you drive through that area, you see like not nice house, not nice house, nice house. And I told him that and he goes, Oh yeah, that's the chip and Joanna's house. Like they like started here remodeling homes and you could distinctly tell which one is their brand.
And it's and so like it's like basically like Isaac French who like brings in all these people and Chip and Joanne like, you know, way above him. But that's like my understanding of Waco at the moment.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there's these like these, these like kind of simplicity based communities or religions or cultures where it's like, like I'm on their homepage right now. It says, Homestead Heritage is an agrarian, craft based intentional Christian community. It stresses simplicity, sustainability, self-sufficiency service and quality craftsmanship.
And then there's literally like a video of a cow eating leaves and then like a boy stitching a baseball himself. Yeah, I never did.
SPEAKER_03
Well, I was like, Isaac showed me around. He goes here, let me show you the orchard I planted last week, you know, and it's like got as 200 apple trees. He's like, we did this for the community.
Anyone can come take an apple. I've been ready in like five years and that's what he does instead of watching TV. So if I like, I'll be like, Hey, if you see this movie, he's like, no, I don't really watch movies.
I'm planting trees.
SPEAKER_00
Not all a lot of by first million podcast listeners out there probably. There were a few.
SPEAKER_03
I think there was a few, but you know, they're more fans of like Johnny Appleseed than Sean Perry.
SPEAKER_02
I don't think, you know what I mean? Like, there are no like Johnny Appleseed posters in their room.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. But, uh, dude, when I, so I've told the story many times, I used to work for Mike Wolf from American Pickers and that was where I first learned about like entertainment and business and things like that. But Mike Wolf was American Pickers at the time was like the second most popular show on TV when I worked there.
Number one was Pawn Stars and like number four was David Letterman. It's like to give you an idea. And we know for real, that's the, that was the real rankings.
And then I would be at the store and some days we would sell $30,000 of t-shirts at the store and these like were not nice t-shirts. They were just normal, like with the logo on it. We would sell like 10 grand worth of mugs.
And so like these shows kill it. And what Mike did was he would film himself, basically the show is he would drive to Barnes, find old stuff, tell you the history about it, buy it and then sell it. And he would, uh, he spent like four years driving around with a video camera, filming this, trying to pitch it.
And then when he finally did pitch it, he got the production rights or I guess he kind of like what Rob Deirdic did. I think that's where the money is and it sounds like that's what Magnolia did too.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly. The, I mean, the breadth of this empire is kind of stunning to me, right? It's like, whether it's home goods, it's a restaurant, it's a coffee books, it's the, it's the bakery, it's the TV show network, it's the target line. It's like, and their brand is like, they're this relatable, you know, blue collar, you know, salt of the earth people.
It's like, yeah, like they are, but they also have some part of them that's Rupert Murdoch and they are, they are flexing that Rupert Murdoch over the last like, you know, 10 years. I wonder if they have like a manager or if they're just doing this all in themselves.
SPEAKER_03
Like Rupert Murdoch in Wrangler Jeans, you know, like it's, we're relatable, but we'll gut your heart out if we had to.
SPEAKER_01
Right. If succession was in denim.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. Uh, no, I dig these, I dig these people. The worst thing that would happen to them is a Johnny K plus eight.
You remember Johnny K plus eight? Of course. How can I forget? Man, there, there were some of the first guys to get popular, like in the reality TV world of TLC and then they get divorced and it ends horribly just like Honey Boo Boo, man. Honey Boo Boo.
Same thing. It always ends horribly. So hopefully it doesn't end that way.
SPEAKER_01
I remember like, if your shtick is just how many kids you can have, that is not a sustainable
SPEAKER_00
path, it's like sometimes you see these YouTubers and they come out real hot because it's like I'm buried alive with tarantulas, 10 million clicks. You're like, yo, but where to from here, son?
SPEAKER_01
Where are you going to go with this? Like this is not a sustainable path for you.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. I, but I like these people. I mean, they seem like pretty like, I don't know, wholesome, but we'll see how, how money impacts things.
SPEAKER_00
So you have Oprah on here and I think that Chip Ejuena Gaines and other people like them, like Brinay Brown, they're kind of filling this Oprah gap. Like Oprah left some big shoes to fill, I feel. And I've been amazed by the, do you follow Brinay Brown very much?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. My wife is reading all her stuff and like she's kind of killing it amongst like the empathy crowd.
SPEAKER_01
The vulnerability crowd. Yeah. Against those all, all offense who are all about authenticity.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. The capital E.
SPEAKER_03
Like if I hear one, one more person say the N word nuance. Like that's like, that's the thing, man. It's nuance, it's empathy.
SPEAKER_00
I didn't know where you were going with that joke. I was like, Sam, don't end it here, man. We've had a good run, but don't end it here.
Nuance. Uh, have you seen her Netflix special?
SPEAKER_03
No, no, I like her, but that's not my speed.
SPEAKER_00
That's a gotta watch. It's that good? Is that good? So go watch her first Netflix special. It's some, you got to watch it just because you've never seen anything like it.
It's basically Tony Robbins, Oprah and a standup comedian at the same time. Like she comes out on stage like a standup comedian and she's funny without telling too many like jokes. Like it's not like set up punchline, but she's funny.
But then she starts talking about vulnerability and herself and then people in the crowd are crying and you're just like, what is that? What kind of event is this? It's like, you know, twist her with my emotions. Like, I don't know what's going on. I got right leg on sad and I got left hand on empowered.
I didn't know what was happening. It's kind of an incredible little live show that she's created. And I could, at first I was like, why would Netflix give a special to this person? I don't even understand what that could be, but it's actually pretty, pretty well done for what it is.
And I could see why she's so likable, why she is so like relatable to people.
SPEAKER_03
You quickly went from like, wow, wow.
SPEAKER_03
No, I'll watch her. Do you do what? Can I tell you a little about Oprah? So we, we, we were going to talk about Oprah last time. We didn't really know what we were talking about.
So I dug in a little bit.
SPEAKER_00
I guess the theme of this episode then is, you know, what are the TV empires or female TV empire or something like that? I don't know.
SPEAKER_03
Let's, let's, let's see if we can go with this. TV, TV empires that everyone knows about that you and I are just discovering 20 years after the fact.
SPEAKER_01
Empires with empathy that the boys discovered seven years after they, they're off air.
SPEAKER_03
Capitalized both those ease. All right. I'll tell you a little bit about Oprah.
So she started at 17 by doing beauty pageants. She won Miss Black Tennessee at age 19. She got her first job at CBS station in Nashville a few years later, she moved to Maryland and then back to Nashville.
And eventually she was the first African American news anchor on TV. And that was in Nashville. She basically had an issue where she struggled to show objectivity because she couldn't really report the news because she was showing too much empathy and she was pretty casual.
And at the time like this was like, Hey, Oprah, you got to like, you know, keep it straight. You can't like express remorse or like show too much too much emotion. You know, like, well, let's let's take this a different way.
So she traded a show called People Are Talking and that aired originally in 1977. And she would improvise and she was casual. Kind of like you and I.
One point I could say. Yeah, she was like the MFM of the seventies. And by the end of the decade, so after like three or four years, she was beating Phil Donahue in the local ratings and Phil Donahue was God, so he was like the man in charge.
So eventually she keeps doing that for a little while longer. But in 1986, so about 10 years after starting that, she gets her own show. It's called the Oprah Winfrey show.
And she, along with a couple of outside investors, established her own production company called Harpo Productions. Harpo is Oprah spelled backwards. And at 32 years old, she became the first black woman to have a nationally syndicated show and she still owns 80 percent of that production company.
And all along the way, she started like innovating. So in 1996, she created her book club, which made 130 million in sales in year one and arguably set the groundwork for this like massive influencer industry that we have. Then in 98, she co-founded the Oxygen Media Group, which has programming towards all types of shows, mostly towards women.
She launched Oprah Magazine. She had a radio show. In 2010, the Oprah show ended after 24 years and she had, you know, all the best guests leading up until then.
2011, she launched own Oprah Winfrey Network. And then all along has been doing all types of stuff. So for example, in 2015, she bought 10 percent stake in Weight Watchers and then the stock 6X like within a year or two of that happening.
In 2008, she sold most of her stake to own to Discovery and she's done a ton of interesting stuff between now and then. But listen to her empire. So she has the Oprah Winfrey show, which had over 28,000 guests giving away 570 cars, had five presidents on.
She got 20,000 fan letters. The finale had 16.4 million views.
She also owns Harpo still to this day. They've collectively it's done two billion dollars in profits and made a couple movies as well, including the color purple, beloved and Selma. They have 200 employees in Chicago.
The own so her network Oprah Winfrey Network started with a hundred million dollars in funding. Eventually she sold most of the stake, but she's still CEO of that. She has Oprah Magazine, which in the first year did 140 million in revenue just from subscriptions.
And then she has Oprah and Friends, which is a XM radio contract or show where she got 55 million dollars in the first three years. She's invested in Weight Watchers, True Food Kitchens, which is basically a restaurant that has 42 locations. She helped start a food science startup back by Oprah, Katy Perry and a few others.
That has a billion dollar in valuation. And she also is a big investor in Oatly. Then and this is finally she has a 45 million dollars state in California, a 14 million dollar one in Washington in Colorado.
She has 60 acres for 14 million in Hawaii. She has over a thousand acres and she has basically her net worth grew from age 32. She got her first million at 41, 340 million, 97 at the age of 43, 550 million.
And at the age of 48, she became a billionaire. So that's Oprah's story. Super fascinating.
I mean, she's been in the game forever, it seems. And I think she's what, 60 something now and still killing it. I didn't realize she was the CEO and like active and all this.
I thought she was more so like a face, but I think she's actually not, you know, not just a face, but it seems like she's like actually like a like a mogul, a tycoon.
SPEAKER_00
Right. You know, what's one thing that stands out when we talk about these is that there is this like flywheel that happens once you become a certain level of famous. It's almost like, you know, that graph that's like going viral, the fuck around and find out graph is basically like fuck around to find out but the positive version.
So you could kind of like if Oprah was like, here's Oprah's maple syrup. Here's Oprah's, you know, like new line of spoons. Here's Oprah's, you know, new board game.
Does it really matter at this point? It'd be like her board game does 50 million in sales. Her syrup is the number one syrup in the world in the country right now. Like it's kind of at that point you just choose and because so much trust and distribution has been built up.
And I have a friend who this week, I can't say the details, but they went to a very famous person. And they said they had a business idea. They said, hey, my friend has a has a background in a certain industry and said, hey, famous person, you should be doing something that industry.
Let me walk to you. Show up at your door, knock at your door and say, here's a full business plan of exactly how you would dominate in this category. So they go, they fly out, knock on the door.
First they don't meet the famous person. This person sends a manager to them, sends a.
SPEAKER_03
By the way, are they are they like a list famous?
SPEAKER_00
They're super famous. Yes, super, super famous. Got it.
Okay. A list famous. And so they go to them and first they get hit with a manager and they say, they're trying to like look over the manager's head be like, hey, is a famous.
I just wanted to talk to. Just hoping to get a word in with the famous person. Can you get out of the way and they're like, no, no, no, you have to get through this wall first.
They talk to the manager first. They say, hey, look, here's my background. I've been super successful in this industry.
I think you guys could crush it in this industry. Why don't, can I meet the famous person now and tell them the idea? They said, no, no, no, tell me the idea. I'm in charge of this.
I said, okay, here's the idea. And then the person says, manager says, that's a good idea. Okay, cool.
And then they get the meeting with the famous and the whole time they were told, hey, you fly in on Monday, you'll meet with the famous person sometime this week. Just hang out in the hotel. Just be here, which is a pretty big time move to try to pull on somebody to not give you a time but say, hey, we'll hold this walkie-talkie.
Would you hear me? Put your pants on, get ready. The meeting's happening.
SPEAKER_03
But I can't tell you what it's gonna be. They've got a special calendar in Google. Everything ends in ish, but it's Monday-ish.
SPEAKER_01
It's all ish. Right. You're giving a window.
SPEAKER_00
And you better be prepared during that window to strike. Okay, so end up getting the meeting with the famous person. Famous person comes in, explain the whole idea, famous person likes the idea but also has a bunch of their own ideas, of course, as famous people do.
And so I asked my friend later, I said, so what happened? And the response was this. They go, well, I'm pretty sure we convinced famous person that they should do this and do this with us. And I'm pretty sure they convinced me that I should not do this with them.
And I thought that was just a hilarious takeaway. And I was like, okay, well, why? They said, well, you know, they have all their own ideas. They go, honestly, everything they're trying to do in this space probably won't work.
I think they're going about it the whole wrong way, but they'll probably end up being successful anyways. That's the crazy thing about this. Like, their margin for error is so large and they can kind of do anything and still have it work because their brand, their celebrity, their distribution, their trust and loyalty in their audience is so large that you can kind of mess up eight out of 10 things and still get it to work eventually.
Whereas most startups, most businesses don't have that margin for error. And so I don't know what the big takeaway is. It's kind of a no-dub, but it's, if you're mega, mega famous, it's not hard at that point to do the empire thing because it's like, what was his name? Like Moise from Native, when he was selling his company and they're like, you sell just deodorant, you know, you're asking for this big valuation.
He goes, yeah, because do you know how to write the word native on a bottle of shampoo? Do you know how to write the word native on a bottle of toothpaste? Cool. That's your expansion plan. Like, I left a lot of room for this to grow.
If you could still write the word native on something, it will work. And that's how I feel about these mega celebrity brands, which is like, if you put my face on something, it's going to work.
SPEAKER_03
So let's let's put this in a very realistic context. So you and I have that minus or no divided by a hundred. So we're Oprah divided by a thousand, whatever it is, but we have a very small taste of it.
And we also have friends, you know, like the Tim Ferriss's of the world and whoever else who have it, you know, times 10 or 20 for us and are in this like potentially billion dollar space. There's been three things I think that I've narrowed it down to that make this empire strategy that hold hold me back. And I imagine someone like Tim, who's a perfectionist or someone like that holds them back.
Number one is reputational risk. So putting your name on crap products and then how on earth can you actually like track it all to make sure that you're not you're not putting your name on bad on bad products that you actually stand by. And so because of that, it's almost like you have to pick and choose.
But then there's other people like Richard Branson that put, you know, virgin on everything. And it kind of has seemed like it worked out. So that's like the big thing.
Number two is finding people who you can trust. When you have five or 10 or 30 different things going on, you need really trustworthy people. And even if it's your family, even if it's your brother and your cousin, people can screw you and like you have to really stay on top of it.
You have to find a partner who's good enough to like really have your back. Like even my accountant or imagine if like your lawyer, your accountant and every once in a while, you're like, is this person actually thinking of me or how are they incentivized here and who's actually making the right decision? That's actually exhausting. And I think in quite hard.
And then the final thing is like, do they want the headache of that? So like a Joe Rogan, he just like, no, F this, like I'm on my island here. I have what I need. I don't want to put my name on anything.
Screw that. I don't need anything. And I want to keep things small and tight.
And so those are kind of the three things I think prevent like empires from being built like this.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think that's true. So say that say the first one again, what was the first one?
SPEAKER_03
Do you remember? Reputational risk, having people that you can trust and then just like not wanting more
SPEAKER_00
headache. And here's the counter to each. Okay, reputational risk, putting your name on crap products.
Do you have you drank prime?
SPEAKER_03
Once I tried it. It's fine.
SPEAKER_00
It's also the fastest growing drink in the country right now. And it's fine. And I think that that's the counter to that is yes, you can't put it on a crap product or do something that would, you know, hurt people or do something like that.
Like, you know, something, nothing on the sort of terrible end of the register. But there's a lot of leeway between the best product in the market and it's fine. And you just got to fall somewhere there.
Right. It's like a, it's like you're playing golf and the fairway is so wide, you really got to screw it up if to hit it out of bounds. And that's how I feel with these products.
And is Kylie's lip product, the best product on the market? I have no idea. Is, you know, for most of these products, I can't tell you that Conor McGregor's whiskey or the Rock's tequila is, is anything better than fine? They might just be. You're saying there's going to be a threshold.
There's a threshold and the threshold pretty goddamn low. So I think the reputational risk is a little bit less than what I think a lot of people would worry about. The rest is true.
You can't become a headache and you do have to find competent people to run them. The good thing is when you have that brand, it's like prime, the prime didn't start by Logan Paul and KSI saying, let's create a drink. Let's go to the flavor house and create a formulation.
There were some entrepreneurs who approached them that said, we do this, we've done this at, you know, medium scale with you guys, we could go super scaled. We will take care of everything. You guys take the cut.
You guys help us with the promotion. But like, look, we come with this track record. And I think that's what happens for most of these celebrities is their approach by people with track records, like even the example I was just giving somebody with a track record came and said, I know this industry.
I've done this before with your brand and your distribution. We could do this again in a big way. And I think those opportunities just come knocking at your door.
So it's not even like, where do I go find somebody great? It's like, can I filter? Can I just like recognize great when it shows up at my door is really the question for most of these people.
SPEAKER_03
Do you think you would enjoy that type of fame like Chip and Joanna?
SPEAKER_00
No, not only would I not enjoy it from a like, oh, I don't want to get bothered when I'm out and about with my kids and stuff like that. But also I more than that is I don't enjoy what it takes to get there. And that's actually what goes like, that's actually the most important question of business.
I was talking to Ben leave you about this the other day.
SPEAKER_03
We're talking about business ideas earlier. I asked you this while going to go, there's a price to pay.
SPEAKER_00
I will to pay it. Yeah, exactly. Know the price and then decide if you're going to pay it.
When we were talking about business ideas, it was like, oh, do we like this idea or this idea? And the easy thing to do. I think everybody gets this wrong is like, I love basketball. So I want to do a basketball based idea.
Or I love, I'm really passionate about like helping people. So I'm going to do this healthcare startup, whatever it may be. And they think that their enjoyment of the of the thing is going to be based on the product or category that they're in.
But in reality, most of the time you spend when you're an entrepreneur is trying to grow or sell, trying to get more customers and grow the actual business. And so you're not playing basketball. Your day to day experience is actually about selling and trying to grow.
And what ends up happening is that some ways are more enjoyable or suit you better than others. For example, they love Facebook ads or they love SEO. And for some people, they love phone calls.
And for some people, they love high level business deals, enterprise sales, where you're nurturing a long relationship for a long period of time. And the big mistake people make is they think, oh, I'm creating a basketball related startup. What they don't realize is that the only way for that business to grow is through enterprise sales.
And they hate enterprise sales or they're unwilling to go and sell to these facility managers of NBA stadiums or they're unwilling to sell to blah, blah, blah. They think they're in the basketball business, but they're in the enterprise sales business because 90% of their day to day work and the challenge that they're faced with and the stuff they have to do, whether they're selling basketballs or ping pong balls or books, it doesn't matter. It's the sales channel.
The sales process is where you're going to spend most of your time. So you got to figure out which sales process do I like the most or at least tolerate the best and then find a business that uses that sales process. I think that is like a, I wish somebody had told me that earlier because I got tripped up with this for many, many years.
And then when I look back, I'm like, oh, I just really like growing things through Facebook ads. It's like, it's me, it's way better than these other ones. And so like, so I have a list.
I'm like, my favorite sales channel is just mentioned it on the podcast. It couldn't be anything easier than that. Like if I could just tell people what I think about this product and then they go buy it because they already trust me and they like me and we have enough listeners to this product, to this podcast, that is the number one easiest sales channel most pleasurable.
So if I could think of a business that works in that, fantastic. Number two for me is Facebook ads. Why? Because I don't have to talk to anybody.
I sit behind a computer, I set up the budget and when it works, I just scale it up with the push of a button. I don't have to hire more sales people. I don't have to like go do something new.
You could take one image that works or one video, one 10 second video that works in Facebook ads and put millions of dollars of spend behind it and make multiple millions more off that ad. I love that. I love that model.
I like that I can look at the dashboard, see a number and know what to do. I guess that's like my number two. And my number three is cold emails because I'm good at cold emailing and it's kind of depending on the ass, but I've done it before.
I can train people to do that of how to cold email in order to generate customers. Those are my three favorites. Anything else I don't like as much.
And so when I think of an idea, it's got to fall in that top three.
SPEAKER_03
So we had, I guess technically the hostile kind of was enterprise sales. We had six, maybe once or twice, we had seven figure deals and that's like a long process. I wasn't allowed to go to those meetings because I remember I had to go and buy brown shoes and tight jeans and like tuck my shirt in and like a certain way I was like, dude, I'm Todd, huh? Nice to meet you.
SPEAKER_00
It wasn't for me. I was like, I don't know what to do with these details. Wrong.
SPEAKER_01
Just a tank top tucked in which are tucked into some brown shoes.
SPEAKER_01
You're like tunnel you've created with a tucking in everything.
SPEAKER_03
Right before the meeting, they're like Sam, the buttons are supposed to be in the front. Like, that is a breakaway.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. So I was like was learning as I went, but as the owner of a company that had enterprise
SPEAKER_03
sales, it is awesome because what I didn't realize there's this amazing thing that I learned, which is that sales teams can create demand. So even if your product, our product was great, but even if your product is okay, if you have a good sales team, you can truly create demand. And I didn't understand that until like your two or three of like having a team like this.
I'm like, oh my God, this is how the world works because most big companies, they just have a certain amount of budget. They have to spend it on something. And if you just get in with them and you wind and dine them and they like you half the time the product doesn't even matter, they just have to spend it otherwise next year, they won't have the same budget and they don't have the same budget.
They don't have a job. So and you can like that or you cannot like it. Frankly, I don't love that that that's like the truth.
But if you can make it work, it's pretty amazing. And I like learned that the harder way while running a company like this.
SPEAKER_00
And if you don't know which one you like, your best bet is to go get exposure to a bunch of them. So go go try your hand and do like a six month rotation where you're basically like, okay, how do I do this enterprise sales thing? How do I do cold calling? How do I do Google ads? How do I do these different things and figure out which one of these appeals to you because once you do that, then then you could kind of pick a choose. I know most most people and I think you would find this to be true.
Most successful people we know they don't really hop around sales channels that much.
SPEAKER_03
It's like, no, if they're good at one thing and you can kill it.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, they're always good at SEO. They just do SEO four different times and four different flavors. Oh, you good at Facebook ads? You do Facebook ads for one business than another business than another business.
If you're good at enterprise sales, you just figure out which businesses to plug into that over time and they kind of make a career out of really understanding one growth process because being a master at any growth thing is super, super valuable.
SPEAKER_03
Do you want to talk about hustle GPT three or do you want to go to another topic?
SPEAKER_00
Which let's do some quicker ones. I feel like we did a long, long winded thing. So I have a couple of quick ones.
Tell me. Okay. So I'm going to give you my two bad dating ideas. And by the way, I'd like to put another drunk ideas on the books to just put that out there.
This would have been in my drunk ideas thing, but we don't have it scheduled. So I'm just going to do a sober. So two bad dating ideas.
Number one, do you watch the TV show Love is Blind?
SPEAKER_03
Sarah does. It's on my TV all the time.
SPEAKER_03
So you know the proof. My wife have like the exact same TV stuff. Like for the listener, Sean and Sarah are texting about Bachelor or Bachelor or whatever it's called.
Yeah. No, what do you guys talk about?
SPEAKER_00
The challenge. The challenge, but also these other shows. So Love is Blind is this like sensation show on Netflix, which is basically like you get a bunch of single people together.
They're in these rooms. They can't see each other. So you kind of speed date, you date other people, but you never get to see them.
So you're only supposed to follow over their personality. And then after you choose who you like the best on their personality, then you get to see them and you get to see what happens. Okay. So and don't you like get married at the end? Yeah. Well, of course, to like any great story, I need stakes.
And so they raise the stakes by saying, you don't just get to pick. Oh, I like Sam the best. I mean, I want to see him now.
It's like, in order to see him, you must get engaged blind and get married four weeks later. So they like, you know, that's how they make it a TV show.
SPEAKER_03
Some people walk on the altar. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
You have to decide at the altar. Well, a lot of people, when they see the other person, they're like, oh, hey, it's so good
SPEAKER_00
to see you. Like they're just like, oh man, like I imagined something different. And now I'm stuck with you.
And now I look like an asshole because I fell in love with your personality and I fell out of love with your face. But they can't say that.
SPEAKER_03
So they have to find some other excuse. One guy on the show was like, they're trying to get an idea of how they looked when they go. And the guy was like, I only weigh 150 pounds.
Yes.
SPEAKER_02
Could I give you a piggyback ride?
SPEAKER_01
No, no, he goes, he goes, it was so smooth the way he did it.
SPEAKER_00
And by smooth I mean, terribly good. I love to go to music festivals. She's like, me too.
He goes, at music festivals, you know, I usually put my girlfriend up on my shoulders.
SPEAKER_01
Do you think I'd be able to do that? Did she catch it? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
She was like, no, that's my worst nightmare is a guy like struggling to lift my body weight.
SPEAKER_01
So she was just like, what the hell? But what size rowboat do we need?
SPEAKER_00
On this season, there's one guy, they fell in love and then they meet and he's just, he's not bad looking or whatever. But he's does really intense eye contact. Like the guy doesn't blink.
SPEAKER_01
And she's like, you're going to never know this from behind the wall. And so she's like, how can you not looking away? He's like, what? What do you mean? I am blinking. And she's like, no, please look away.
It's like so uncomfortable to watch.
SPEAKER_00
So anyways, great show. I think somebody should take this show on the road. Literally, I think somebody should do a, I think the show, but if not the show, then somebody should spin this off, do a love is blind tour where you go city to city and people pay to be a part of the experiment.
So people pay to actually like do the show themselves. I also think you should do a podcast version of love is blind because podcasts is audio only. So it's already no visual.
So you could have two people talking and you could sort of edit and cut this together and make a pod version of love is blind. So I think people could take this concept of this dating show or it could be other dating shows too, but make a, make a tour out of it, make a show out of it where it's going from city to city and people get to participate almost like American Ninja Warrior. So people get to participate and other people get to watch the show going down.
And I think that these things would generate a lot of money ticket wise because Netflix has done the hard work of educating the market. And so once you get that education in the market, now somebody should go to them and get the license. Like we talked about this with kids cartoons.
SPEAKER_03
Or they can just call it like a love with poor eyesight. What? Fuzzy love.
SPEAKER_03
I forgot my glasses love.
SPEAKER_01
So like people did this with the cartoons.
SPEAKER_03
That was a, that was a three out of 10.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. It's okay. I gave you a laugh to try to like, you know, smooth it over.
But like kids cartoons like Blippi or Coco Melon, there's these companies that go and they license the rights to create the Coco Melon live tour or the Blippi live tour. And I've gone to these and I did a segment on the pod about these. These things make millions of dollars a year.
Yeah. Well, the every parent loves it. It's like, you can't really, there's not many places you could take a tiny kid that's like kid friendly, but this is perfect because they already love these cartoons on YouTube.
And so I'm willing to pay 50 bucks a ticket times four. So I pay 200 bucks, then I buy the merch, then I buy the stacks because of course my kids want stacks. And you know, we go there and we've dropped $400, $500 by the end of it or you know, something like that.
And so these, these shows can make a lot of money. And so I think somebody could do this with other television shows, including the dating shows.
SPEAKER_03
That's not a bad idea at all. Well, that's, that's a great idea.
SPEAKER_00
Skill, skill, skill, pitch. And something worse. You should have seen an average person try to explain that idea.
You, you would have laughed about the room. Okay.
SPEAKER_03
Here's my second. Love is blind on tour. Ah, even that sounds all right.
SPEAKER_00
So my second bad dating idea. Okay. So you've heard about this like dating app, Raya, you know, about this app.
SPEAKER_03
It's basically a dating app originally for famous people, but now it's like dating apps for people with like verified on Instagram or something.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. I don't even really understand it. I think somebody needs to come over the top on Raya and make the even more elite dating app.
So I'm calling it daddy. Here's what daddy is. So daddy, daddy or Zaddy, you know, we're debating it internally.
So daddy is an app where for a guy to be on daddy, actually, let me first start with the girl side. Okay. For a woman to be on daddy, she's got a basically audition or apply and we're only accepting the top 1% of eligible women. So this is beautiful, but not just beautiful, smart, but not just smart.
You got to be living in a town, a big city so that, you know, you're available to be to be, to be, you know, reach to be dated. So beautiful, smart, top 1%, maybe even top 0.1% of applicants get in more, more elite than Harvard.
And then on the guy side, you got to pay $25,000 a year to be on the app. So that's the app idea. 5,000 men, if you can get 5,000 men who have the money to drop 25 G's on their dating app, they get access to this elite pool of women who want access to this rich group of men.
And it is what it is. That's our slogan. It is what it is.
SPEAKER_01
Is it right? No, but it is what it is. Okay.
SPEAKER_00
And so it is what it is, it's rich guys with beautiful, smart women, and the business model is if we can get 5,000 guys to pay us this amount, that's $100 million a year business. Did that sound like something you might be interested in?
SPEAKER_03
So when I was studying like for Hampton, to launch Hampton, I was like curious about communities and there's a bunch of, a lot of people were like, could you charge like a hundred grand a year? And the reason being is there's a bunch of communities out there where the whole thing of making it elite and community is just, can you pay the money? And I was thinking about that and I'm like, first, like the audacity and second, if you
SPEAKER_02
can get, my first question is how dare you are? Who are you?
SPEAKER_03
But if you can get past that, how amazing is that where your whole business is just, if you could pay it, you're probably good. So we'll just, we'll be, we'll happen to be that middleman and check it out. And so there's this app called the league.
Do you know what the league is? It's a dating app. It started when we were in San Francisco by this woman named Amanda Bradford, who I'm friends with here in Austin. She sold it recently to, what's the big, the big company, IAC, who owns like Match and Bumble and, or not Bumble, Tinder.
And what Amanda was getting started, she was, or the league kind of took off. And so I don't, you probably don't know this. And it was like Ivy League was the premise, right? It was like only Ivy League.
And then she, one day she was like, how hard can I push this? And so right now the league costs, I believe it's either 499 or 999 dollars. So it's either 499 dollars or 999. It's one of those two.
And the reason being is that's the highest price per month that you can charge on Apple's, on the Apple store.
SPEAKER_00
It's 399 per month. Sorry. Yeah. 399 dollars per month.
SPEAKER_03
So yeah, it's the highest that you could possibly charge. And she goes, screw it. That's what it's going to cost to get premium features.
And people like at ours, I think her team was like, this is crazy. We can't do this. No one will do this.
And they crushed it. And IAC came to her and they're like, we want to buy you because how on earth are you able to charge this? And I imagine in her head, she was like, well, it was actually pretty easy. I just added an extra nine at the end of nine.
SPEAKER_00
You're right. It was the highest here is called investor. Owner, 299, owner, 399 investor, 999 dollars and 99 cents.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. Yeah. It's like, there's like an episode in South Park where they come up with this like new MBA and they're like, look, I don't make up the rules. I just think them up and write them down.
SPEAKER_00
You can't argue with me.
SPEAKER_03
I didn't make up the rules. And it's like, well, how'd you increase pricing so much? Well, I just clicked that button nine and we made it instead of 999. We made it 900 or instead of 99.
99. It was 999. So anyway, it's killed it.
And so I actually think that there are a lot of interesting opportunities in the market where you can just charge way more and it feels very weird. That's the business model.
SPEAKER_00
And actually, now that I think about it, $25,000 a year, that was complete small boy stuff. And I apologize to the entire audience. This needs to be a hundred grand a year.
This has to be a hundred grand a year. And guess what? We only need a thousand members now. We only need a thousand guys who are willing to drop a hundred grand in order to get access to the most.
And in fact, you know what we're going to do? We're going to take a portion of that money and we're going to pay some women to be on this app. We're going to say, look, you are so great. You were casted onto this and you are going to be paid to be a part of this network because we want to blur the lines between prostitution and legal dating.
SPEAKER_02
It is what it is, as we say. God bless you. Maybe this will work.
But yeah, good luck.
SPEAKER_00
I think there needs to be more apps that do this that go over the top with it. I agree. Basically, find the theoretical max of what the market will bear or what people actually want to do.
What does the actual behavior people want and what are they willing to do? And it's usually more than you think or more than sounds reasonable. What if you just took an unreasonable approach to the same thing? What would you do differently? Is it a question you can ask about really any business? There's these guys that created this thing called the Unreasonable Institute back in the day. Is that real? Yeah, it was a great idea.
It was called the Unreasonable Institute. I just love the name because I love the entire premise, which was what good has come from just taking a reasonable approach to something. If you're trying to make any big shit happen, you're trying to do anything, change the way anything works, create a new system or improve something or innovate, in a way, by definition, you're going to do something slightly unreasonable.
SPEAKER_03
Is this called the Unreasonable Group?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it was called the Unreasonable Institute. Then they had the Unreasonable Tour where they got a cruise ship and went into international waters. And then they did a bunch of these.
Now it's probably called... This is like 10 plus years ago. That's so funny.
SPEAKER_03
Well, there's this thing called Unreasonable Group. The Unreasonable Collective is an international community of sophisticated investors. We pull capital as a community and co-infest in world class.
But then there's the Unreasonable Institute, which is a fast-track program to give altruistic entrepreneurs skills and funding to affect a large scale change. Yeah, I think that's the one. The first one sounds maybe a little.
.. Yeah, the first one maybe sounds cooler though. That's cool.
I like that name. Speaking of Unreasonable, you want to wrap this up by talking one thing, Elon Musk. Okay. Did you see what he did? So you see the Twitter thing?
SPEAKER_00
Well, which Twitter thing? I feel like every day there's Elon Musk's Twitter thing.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, that's where he blurred out the W. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay.
This is news.
SPEAKER_00
No, no, I saw this. I saw this. I saw this.
SPEAKER_03
Explain this. This is dumb. There's this thing in the UFC called.
.. If you win... So basically the UFC and all about fighting, it has weight divisions. And every once in a while, someone like Conor McGregor or someone else comes along and they achieve greatness and they earn what's called the champ champ status, meaning they have a champ, they're the champion in one weight division.
And then while having that belt, they also gain a few pounds and go up and win another belt. It's unheard of. In my opinion, Elon is the champ champ.
He has amazing products. He's one of the best entrepreneurs out there. He's the champion.
He's also the most tringious. He's the champ champ right now. He does whatever the fuck he wants.
That's what champ champs do. And recently, like last night, he tweeted out that there was a dispute with the landlord saying you can't like alter the sign or something like that. So he took like a piece of white sheet or paper or something and he blurred out the W.
So now Twitter, the sign, it's a huge sign when you live in San Francisco, I lived a block away from it. It says, Titter. And it's the most cringe thing I've ever seen.
Why on earth would he do that? I love a good troll, but that's not like funny. He just makes like people like, look, I like trolling. I love punching up.
But this is like this punching yourself in the face. I like making people uncomfortable. This is the bad type of uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00
Go to his Twitter right now. Do you see what his name is on Twitter right now? Because you thought that was the cringiest thing he's done in the last 48 hours. Well, he's one up himself.
SPEAKER_03
Oh my God. What an idiot. Oh God.
What is his Twitter name right now? His name right now is Harry Balls. He spells balls B-O-L-Z, but it's Harry Balls. That is his name on Twitter right now.
SPEAKER_00
Oh, Elon, you're so irreverent.
SPEAKER_02
Dude. Oh, these billionaires have a sense of humor.
SPEAKER_01
They're just like us.
SPEAKER_00
I would love to see what Elon thinks the like other people's reaction is. He must type these in and just sit back and just smirk, just have a smug look on his face. Just imagine, oh man, the internet's going to love this.
I'm super rich, but I don't take myself too seriously. Look at this.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. Next week it's going to be like Elon Baller 69. It's just like, this is the lamest thing ever, man.
I don't know how. I mean, I guess like, look, with extreme personalities comes extreme success, but they don't tell you there's another end of that belly curve and that's extreme cringe. And we're experiencing that a little bit right now.
I know a lot of billionaires, not a lot. I know a couple billionaires and I know a lot of wildly successful people and they do every once in a while. Like you're like, oh, hey man, you don't know how to hold the conversation appropriately.
Let me help you out here. This is kind of what's happening with him. It just so happens that it's in front of 125 million followers.
SPEAKER_00
He has like the cringe version of Tourette's. Like dude, just stop.
SPEAKER_01
He can't stop just blurting out these cringy things.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it's ridiculous. I actually think that he's kind of ruining his legacy for sure here. Maybe five years ago he was the man and he still is the man, frankly.
Like his accomplishments are amazing, but he's a little less of the man at this point.
SPEAKER_00
There was a funny back and forth. Somebody tweeted out a graph of all the billion dollar or a chart of all the billion dollar companies and what industries they're in. Yeah, I saw that.
And Paul Graham retweeted, he says, oh, you know what's interesting here is like we're clearly like over indexed on like software and like, you know, real world things like hardware or manufacturing. And there's only like a few companies in that bucket. But don't let that hold you back.
SPEAKER_00
You should still do it. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. And Elon replied and was like, yeah, like a complete waste.
You know, it says something like it was like a big waste of resources or brain power or talent that that was the case.
SPEAKER_03
And then the response was the biggest own. And I've seen in a week, it was it was a really good reply.
SPEAKER_00
Paul Graham goes, yeah, can you think of anybody right now who's really talented and it could be doing those things, but is wasting their time on a software project? And it's so good because obviously, talk about Elon. And yeah, he's like a perfect self-own really by Elon. Yeah, it was pretty good.
SPEAKER_03
Too good. It was good. That was good.
I'm a big fan of him, of Paul Graham. I'm still an Elon guy. I think I might get myself a Tesla, but I don't like this.
It makes it hard to want to wear like a Tesla t-shirt. That's for sure. Not that he cares, but it makes it challenging to like root for him publicly when he makes these stupid comments.
SPEAKER_00
People in our comments hate when I make fun of Elon or or dis Elon or Chimoth or these guys because they're like fans of them, which is totally fair. You can be fans of whoever you want. But I just want for the record, I'm out on Elon early because guess what? More and more, you're going to be out on this guy over time.
And I just want to plant the flag. I'm out on him early because his cringe will eventually wash away all these people or he's going to get canceled for something. I'm telling you, it's going to happen and I would like the record to show that I was out early.
SPEAKER_03
Dude, these these people in our comments are crazy to me because why can't someone do a lot of really good stuff and also some bad stuff? Like why can't like someone kick ass at a ton of different things and make a huge amount of mistakes? Totally. Because whenever we talk about this, we say, yeah, he's the best at a bunch of different things.
SPEAKER_00
He's the greatest entrepreneur. He's of, I don't know, the last 30 years, 50 years. That is true.
But also true. He's pretty cringe and corny and disingenuous about some things. Right. Also true.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. It's like I can love Michael Jackson's music and also not love what he did. You know, like both like both can exist.
I can like Chick-fil-A chicken and also not stand by what they what they stand for. You know, both can be true and I can't stand that with the with the commenters on our on our stuff. But we're going to get a reaction on this.
I'm eager to see what it is. But anyway, that's an action packed product. All right, everyone, that's the end of my first million.
However, I've got good news. You see, if you liked this episode, we actually have another podcast. The hustle is another podcast.
It's called the hustle daily show. It's a daily podcast that has everything you need to know about business and tech in only a few minutes. It's awesome.
Our best writers like Zach Crockett are behind it. It's incredibly fascinating. I listen to it daily.
So check it out. It's the hustle daily show.