He Bought a Local Newspaper… Now He Makes $600K/YR
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So that article tells a story of multiple 80-something-year-old guys who own publications that are making, that are fine businesses. Maybe they make six figures a year in profit, but they can't find anyone to take it over. So they're literally just shutting it down. I feel like I can rule the world and be what I want to.

Should we start with this? This tweet? It's Media Gazer, which I guess some media publication, commentary on media companies. It says,

In nearly a dozen U.S. states, this is a growing problem. Okay? And so that article tells a story of multiple 80-something-year-old guys who own publications that are making—that are fine businesses. Maybe they make six figures a year in profit, but they can't find anyone to take it over, so they're literally just shutting it down. And here we have a tweet from Matthew Prince. I think his name is Matthew, is worth, I think—

something like four or five billion dollars. He's the CEO of Cloudflare. Do you want to kind of read what he says? Yeah. So he says, actually, this is a recipe for a really rewarding life.

If you're a recent college grad and not sure what to do, find a small town you could love with a local newspaper whose owners are ready to retire. Raise the capital to buy it. Run it with the community's interest at heart. You'll not get too rich, but you'll do well. More importantly, you'll be a hero to the community and have influence even early in your career. You'll meet the love of your life at some point at some event you otherwise wouldn't get invited to. You'll have kids who will proudly call you their parent.

So I think that's an amazing insight. But the true insight. So someone chirps at him and they say something like, go ahead, what do they say? I can't read it all. So literally the guy's name who's replying is some guy. So I'm not even disparaging this guy. Some guy tweets at him and says...

This is the sort of unwittingly funny stuff that wealthy people say that 130 IQ guys should be content with an imaginary small town life lived in anonymity near. I don't even know what this word is being 180 degrees from their own choices, which deliver untold wealth and influence. I don't even, what is this guy saying? I didn't even understand the suite. He's basically saying like,

This is something that wealthy dudes say that's so funny because it's so wrong that a guy would be happy doing this. Is that what you're saying? And here's why I like Twitter. So Matt Prince, he's not high profile. He's not like an average, like the average person has no idea who this is, but he's worth $5 billion. And it's so interesting to get his insight. So this is the tweet that I really care about. And I just, the rest was for context. Read this next one. All right. So he says, he just replies to some guy. He goes,

That's so good. What's more important is meaning.

I feel lucky to have achieved financial wealth while chasing meaning. That is super rare and I feel incredibly fortunate to have gotten both. But if you're early in your career and decide I'd rather optimize for meaning than financial wealth, I think this is a better path than most would consider. Example, volunteer for the Peace Corps.

It will actually make you a good leaving and you'll have incredible influence and meaning within your community. And if you later decide to go for untold financial wealth, always remember Rupert Murdoch's empire began with the Adelaide advertiser, which he bought when he was 21. How fantastic is that? This is really great. Although, you know, not to be a reply guy, but like Cloudflare is not the Peace Corps or owning a small town newspaper in a community. So like, is he saying that Cloudflare was his meaning thing or he did something before that? Do you know? That's his meaningful thing. But the point is-

For one, he has another one. So he's like, some guy goes, how is one supposed to make a good living from a small town newspaper? Do you have a new model for profitability? Blah, blah, blah. I want to hear a breakdown. And he said, Matthew Prince says, the local paper we bought cash flowed around 600,000 when we bought it. We wanted to run it as a nonprofit. So we plowed it all back into expanding coverage. But it is not the case that these are bad businesses. They're just not big businesses. Sorry.

So the takeaway is multiple things. One, newspapers are dying. Local newspapers, we're talking towns that have 5,000 people, 10,000 people, 30,000 people. They are not dying. And if you read the replies, you'll see people who are saying, I own a local newspaper that does $500,000 in EBITDA. There are replies here. And Matthew, Matt just said one of those replies where he explains the numbers. But two...

It's just so fascinating to hear this guy's perspective who has so much. And I actually agree with him. And I also think that there is a big opportunity to buy a bunch of these, but you can just start with one. And I don't think local newspapers...

are going to go away anytime soon, to be honest. I think that they have a very stable subscriber base. And what Matt says in there, he says something like hospitals and other local businesses, they are dying to advertise in local newspapers. And that business, while small, is doing great and it's a monopoly.

All right, this episode is brought to you by HubSpot. They're doing a big conference. This is their big one they do called Inbound. They have a ton of great speakers that are coming to San Francisco, September 3rd to September 5th. And it's got a pretty incredible lineup. They have comedians like Amy Poehler. They have Dario from Anthropic, Dwarkesh, Sean Evans from Hot Ones. And if you're somebody who's in marketing or sales or AI and you just want to know what's going on, what's coming next, it's a great event to go to.

And guess what? I'm going to be there. You can go to inbound.com slash register to get your ticket to Inbound 2025. Again, September 3rd through 5th in San Francisco. Hope to see you there. Okay, I love this one. 10 out of 10, fine. Good job. I gave a talk at Berkeley that was about starter businesses or called white belt businesses a few months ago. Wait, let's reflect on that. That's pretty cool.

What? Given a talk at Berkeley? I don't know. That sounds cool to me. Like I never got to be go to fancy colleges. It was hilarious. So I'm like, I'm going to give this talk. And I think I've told this story before, but my entire life shifted because I was in a random class at Duke. I planned to be a doctor. I had taken the MCATs, all of it. And then I took this one class by this amazing woman, Lisa Keister. And she had, she was, she herself had graduated 10 years earlier and gotten, gotten wealthy, lived an interesting life and came back to teach and

And she decided like, what class did the kids actually need? And the class was called getting rich. It's kind of like this podcast, my first millions, like sort of a pretty crude title. Her class was called getting rich. And actually it was two things. It was personal finance. So you'd learn about like mortgages and savings and how that all worked, compounding shit like that. And then secondly, she would invite speakers in just so that we would get exposed to other ideas of what a life could be besides doctor, lawyer, consultant, banker, which was like

you know, at a school like Duke, that's where 90% of the students are devoting their energy. And a guy came in and he gave a talk and it literally changed my life. It's not even something he said. I just kind of was like, this guy seems like he's having fun. He's doesn't seem like he's that much smarter than me. Like, you know, maybe smarter now, but he's, you know, he's saying at the beginning, he didn't know shit about shit. And that's where I am today. And like, why don't I just do what, what this guy's doing? And the last thing he had said was like, he's like, look,

If you go try to do something entrepreneurial or interesting and it doesn't work out, this is America. That may be like the story is a currency for you. And look, I hire kids like you. And guess what? You all have the same top three-fourths of the resume. You go to school. You got a three-point-something GPA. You have some stupid extracurricular activities. You got an internship at some big corporation where you didn't really make an impact. The only thing that differentiates any of you guys is the other section at the bottom of your resume. Like, have you done anything? Have you gone on any interesting quests?

And so he's like, go on an interesting quest. You have nothing to lose right now. You don't have kids. You don't have a mortgage. Just go try some shit. And if you fail, if it works, fantastic. If it fails, don't worry. It creates a great story that guys like me like to hear. So that like really shifted my life. And so I get, I get invited to go give this talk at Berkeley and I'm like, I'm going to do this, man. I'm going to change someone's life.

I'll be, I'll be a life changer today. And I prepped my ass off. Like I really tried. I like, I like thought about it. I spent two days really, really like full, like just 10 hours a day, just working on this one talk two days. Doesn't sound like a lot, but like,

I show up to these podcasts pretty cold. Like I can wing it with the best of them. So for me to really put 20 hours into one talk I'm going to give to 50 kids, that didn't, you know, that was unusual for me. You sound like the Kenny Powers of giving a talk, man. You're like, get ready, kids. I'm going to make you piss tears. Exactly. Hold on to your butts. I'm about to rock your world. So I go in and guess what?

These kids really just don't give a fuck. Within two minutes of the talk. And again, I'm trying to fire on all cylinders. It's interactive. I'm cracking jokes. I got a story. I'm doing, I have a big promise at the beginning. And I look around and I just remembered vividly in that moment. I was like, oh, I remember being 19. You're not even out of school yet. Like the whole, the real world is a, it's a distant land far away at this point.

And you're just trying to, you're like, okay, I have to be here until five and then I'm going to go eat. And then I have that paper to write. Three years out of your target demo too. Like they're Indian, they go to Berkeley and you're like thinking like, all right, perfect. This is my demo. And then you're like, shit, they're still 19. I need to wait until they're 21 until they have heard of me. Exactly. So honestly, it was a kind of a giant waste of time. I don't think I shifted anyone's life. I think I changed exactly zero lives, but I really tried. And one of the principles in there was like,

When you get out of Berkeley, instead of getting a job, like consider doing a company. But for most of you, you don't have the next Facebook. You don't have the next big idea. And maybe you're not even talented enough to handle that. It's kind of like if if, you know, Jessica Alba walked through that door and she's like you. It's like, did you couldn't handle Jessica Alba right now? Anyways, don't worry about it. That's not your problem. Like you need to go, you know.

Put your hand under Mindy's shirt in the back behind the bleachers over there. Like that's the level you're at right now. And so I basically was like, you need a starter business, a white belt business. And I was giving them ideas for what simple starter businesses are. But was this your analogy? Did you just? No, I just did that one just now. I thought you might like it. Yeah. Well, see, the funny thing is I have you and I'm like, Sam's going to love this. He's going to love hate this.

And then I'm like, Ari's just going to hate this. And sure enough, as I'm saying it, that's what I got. I got Sam laughing but face-balming.

And Ari just looking off into the distance wondering, how did I end up here? Why do I have this job? Oh my God. No, that's a fantastic analogy. Because it's very true. Everyone dreams of like the Jessica Alba doing that. And you're like, wait, what do I do? What do I do with my hands? You know what I mean? It's perfect. Exactly. You are not prepared for Jessica Alba yet. And that's okay. You just need some reps. And so what's the point of this? What are you going to show me?

Oh, I guess the tie to that was, I think owning a local newspaper is a fantastic version of a starter business to run. Was that not obvious? So crystal clear to me, the connection. Show me this story about Steve Ballmer. And then also I want to see the Gary Vee one.

Okay. Two great choices. Excellent choices off the menu. All right. This is from, I believe, Steve Ballmer goes on the Acquired podcast. It was really good. It was so good. I agree. I didn't watch it, but I agree. And the clips have been good. And so he's telling the story and they go, do you guys know the story of Kilo at Microsoft? He was one of the most pivotal things at Microsoft. And then the hosts go, why? I knew he was important, but please tell the story.

And Steve goes, he was pivotal in a way that you won't even know. So he goes, first of all, he's a brilliant guy, great guy. He's at Yahoo. And he went to grad school with the head of Microsoft Research, Harry. And so the setup here is that Satya Nadella, who's now the CEO of Microsoft, was running Bing at the time. Bing is trying to compete with Google. And Harry runs the research program there. And Harry comes and he goes,

look, this guy, Key is a genius. We have to hire Key. I don't know if Key wants to work for us. We got to learn from this guy. We got to hire this guy. So he's like Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer and Harry all fly down to California to meet with this guy, Key Liu. And they talked to Key and they're like, dude, you're right. This guy's brilliant. And we're learning about him. And then at one point, Key walks away, leaves the room, goes to the restroom or something. And he goes, Satya throws out this idea. He goes, we should hire Key and I should work for him.

He goes, so Harry, who's all in because he worked with them. Harry works for Satya. And Satya is like, we should not only hire this guy. I should work for him. I should report to him. Like gives up power, basically. So they call him and they're like, Key, listen, you know, he was thinking about taking a job somewhere else, but he ends up joining. And he goes, and the host goes, so what did Key do at Microsoft? He goes, what I just told you.

He told me about Satya. He goes, I love Satya. And we were giving him more and more responsibilities anyways. But when I saw that this guy would do the right thing for the company, he would give up power to bring in a more talented person and agree to work for him. He didn't have ego that got in the way. I knew that Satya was the guy. And now Satya has become the CEO of Microsoft and led Microsoft on this incredible run. That's so good. That's a great story. It's up a thousand percent.

And for a company as big as Microsoft to go up a thousand percent and now as a $3 trillion company,

uh all you know under satya's kind of regime i thought that was just a badass story right and later on in the podcast steve ballmer talks about philanthropy and he i don't know how rich he is but i think 100 billion or plus and he was like uh the acquired guys were like your wealth is growing i think 20 a year you know 20 billion dollars whatever he goes yeah i'm trying to give it all away and he goes you're forgetting about something and and the hosts go what he goes

you know, Microsoft pays a dividend. So just my dividends are making me $1 billion a year. And he's like, he goes, I'm trying to give it all away and I can't find enough people who can accept the money. Well, Steve, we would love to help you with this problem. We're a helpful bunch over here. Yeah. He was talking about how, um,

He's like, I forget the capital appreciation of this or the stock appreciation. Lately, it's been, what, 15% a year? I forget. It's something, like, magnificent where he's earning tens of billions of dollars from that. And, yeah, he corrected the guys when they said how wealthy he is. He goes, you're forgetting about our dividend, which pays me $1 billion. You know he's just been sitting on that, by the way. You know he's like, these motherfuckers out here don't know. Yeah.

They don't know how I'm balling. It was a really great podcast. It was like three hours long and it was fantastic. And he gets made fun of or Balmer gets made fun of a bunch for that one video where he just looks goofy. But he he he's a great salesman and he's way more technical than people realize. Balmer is a genius. That's cool. I mean, you got it. You got to be special. I mean, that's

There's luck is involved, but I think it's, it's so easy to write people off. And he's a great example of, uh, enthusiasm as a skill. I've talked about this in a bunch of other podcasts, but enthusiasm is a actual skill. And that video that people make fun of them, the developers, developers, developers, developers. To me, that's like watching, uh, you know, Vince Carter dunk or something like that. Right. It's like, uh, this is a guy who probably brought a shit ton of energy and enthusiasm and belief and, um, uh,

To the team in an unwavering way and at an unusual level. And yeah, that was obviously funny to laugh at. I get it. I thought it was funny as shit too, but yeah,

Enthusiasm is a skill and I love it because people don't even think of it as a skill, but we all know it when we see it. Like if you ever worked with somebody who's really enthusiastic and is a believer in what you're doing and brings good energy every day and doesn't get like, doesn't get worn down and doesn't get buckled by adversity. You love that person. That person's clearly valuable to the team. You would hate if that person left your team.

Yet, nobody talks about enthusiasm as a skill or something you could practice or develop or at least even celebrate that you have. It's something that seems like something sort of for dumb people.

This episode is brought to you by HubSpot Media. They have a cool new podcast that's for AI called The Next Wave. It's by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lanz. And they're basically talking about all the new tools that are coming out, how the landscape is changing, what's going on with AI tech. So if you want to be up to date on AI tech, it's a cool podcast you could check out. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. What's this Gary Vee one? This is very funny. All right. Love Gary Vee. Gary, I love you.

This is also hilarious. So they're playing a game called Bullish and Bearish, where the host is going to tell him a company name and he has to decide, is he a bull or a bear on it? Watch this. Meta. Bullish. Reddit. Bullish. Alphabet. Bullish.

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

Bitch, I'm bullish, okay?

Before that word gets out of your mouth, I'm bullish. What am I going to do? I'm bullish. How funny is this? I love Gary. It sucks because she picked like,

Honestly, I can't hate. I'm also pretty bullish on all the tech companies, all the best companies in the world. I'm pretty bullish on them too. Amazon and ChatGPT. So funny. Dude, people forget. I think VaynerMedia, I track it because I like Gary, and I think that it's easy to dismiss him as a guru. But VaynerMedia is doing something like $300 million a year right now.

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

Do you remember how I told you I had this document where I track companies and I like I I I track people where I will make a timeline of their life and like at different ages they do different things I track it with a variety of companies as well and VaynerMedia I was curious about their trajectory and he was growing the company like at a really good clip like it was doubling for a couple years and it was still growing at like 50% for a couple years and

And so I just wanted to check in and add to my document. And over the last three or four years, he's grown it to something like 250 million a year in revenue. And if you Google VaynerMedia revenue, he actually is fairly public about it lately of where it's at. But it's in the 200, 300 range.

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

I mean, it's got to be more of that. Manage people's social media stuff. It's got to be more of that. I think that's the bulk of it. They do social media advertising and campaigns. So like if you're Samsung and you want to run ads on Facebook and you want to make really good ads, I believe. Let's ignore VaynerMedia. I'm bored. What is the most interesting thing that's come out of your tracking people manually year by year?

borderline creepy stalker thing that you're doing? What's interesting to me is a few things. One, the ability to grow, it gets harder and harder. But the people who are really big animals, they just figure out how to do it. And that's really fascinating to me. But occasionally, even companies that are growing quickly, they'll have two or three years of no or little growth. And the reason why I like to do this research is it helps me understand...

I think that it's the same way when you talk to your rich friends and you talk about money with them, you start to normalize money. And that's why I do this stuff where like, it sounds like it's like a, almost like an emotional regulation because entrepreneurship is this long, longer than you want more up and down thing than you want. And seeing that the people, the things you admire today, uh,

either a took a long time or had, you know, multiple flat years. It makes you not feel like shit when you're in one of those, you know, periods that is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because I think I showed you the revenue chart or no, the,

So I've shown you charts before of Business Insider, which is a company I also used to do this for. And they've grown like crazy. But there was like three years where every single month they actually didn't grow. And I was like, this chart looks great because we've zoomed out to 15 years. But zoom in on those three years and imagine feeling that way for nearly a thousand days. That doesn't feel good. That doesn't feel good at all. The whole life of the company right now is three years. Imagine this whole time just flat, you know. Or I'll give you another example.

Replit. You know, we've had Amjad on the podcast and that was one of our biggest ones. They just announced the other day that they hit $100 million in revenue. That's huge, right?

Well, what he kind of said in a small comment, like in a reply, is that I believe last year or the year before, they're at $10 million in revenue. So they went from $10 million to $100 million in record time, like one year or two years, something like that. But what he told us on the podcast is that he started the company eight years ago, which means from years zero to eight, he got to $10 million in revenue, which is not impressive. That's neat. That's not impressive.

And what's that's just insane to me that he kept at it for eight years. And then, and tell me if I'm getting my numbers wrong, but he kept at it for that long. And then success was like in two years. Yes. And no, I think you're, you're, you're right. But it's not like it was just failing that whole time. Cause if you look at the user growth of developers, and I think I tweeted this out with it, I'll find it. But like,

Basically, they were growing exponentially in number of users who were developers. So that was also happening at that same time. And so it's not as like, oh, man, it's just suddenly it starts to work. I mean, look at this. This is Paul Graham tweeting about Replit before they even turned on monetization. This is back in 2020. What year does that go to? Yeah.

This is 2015 to 2020, like midway through 2020, like our end of 2020. It's basically 2021. And so they had 5 million developers, programmers using their thing. And he, Paul, Paul talks about, he says, this graph is impressive, not just for the perfect exponential shape, but the numbers 5 million users is a lot. When those users are programmers, imagine how many users their users will have of their apps, right?

And I think the crazy thing about Replit is that basically they pivoted the entire company when they were at a billion dollar valuation. I invested in Replit, I think at an 800 million-ish valuation, 800 or 900 million valuation. I invested in the fund and I invested personally because I was like such a big believer in this.

And they had pretty much no revenue at the time, but it was this type of growth. And I love the product. I loved Amchad. I was like, this guy's a savage. And they have a, they built an incredible product that I think will have a network effect over time. And then they pivoted the entire business to say, it's not about like young programmer. Cause I thought, oh, they're getting young programmers to start coding on Replit. And maybe those people will never leave. They'll code their whole career on Replit. And then when AI happened, they,

They pivoted basically the entire company to now it's not even for programmers. It's for people who don't code typically to make things, right? It's for non-engineers to suddenly be able to be engineers, to be able to create software for software creators. And now that's ramped to a hundred million at 10x, the 10x the revenue in one year.

So now I look like a genius investing in this thing, but I really didn't even invest in this because they pivoted. They like basically shifted the entire user. Who is the user and what is the use case, you know, afterwards? Yeah, I mean, this is just insane. I use Replit probably three or four times a week. It's really fun. I just asked ChatGPT to make this. This is Sam stocking all these businesses. Yeah.

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

And you were like, when I'm 30, I want to have $20 million in the bank. That was your number. And you were like, look at this. I'll be ahead of Jeff Bezos and Jack Dorsey and these guys. I was like, yo, this guy's a sicko, but I like it. It was the, I should call, like, if I teach a class, it's going to be called, like, how to become an economic animal. Unfortunately, like, there's way levels. There's many levels to this. And I'm

There's many people who are way above me, and I didn't understand how exponential growth works. But hey, I think I got in the arena of what I was aiming for. All right. So we got to talk about the new mayor. Not because this is a politics podcast. I don't know. Actually, I didn't even know this guy existed until three days ago, to be honest with you. But you're moving to New York, and you seem to know about this guy. And I am following him only from a...

Business and marketing perspective. I have a business and marketing take on this guy, but can you first set the context for people like me who are not following who this New York City – he's the mayor, right? That's what he just became? No, he's going to be the Democrat who's running for mayor. So it was – the Democrats were – I don't even know the right terms. Not a nation.

Um, and he won. Um, so basically, uh, it was him and Cuomo. Because New York is very democratic. He's most likely to win. Is that why people are freaking out? Cause normally if he's just a candidate, you know, more likely than not, the issue is the issue has a bunch of issues. Basically every politician is corrupt. So mayor Cuomo or the Cuomo is running for mayor. He was previously the governor. He got in trouble for like asking his coworkers have sex with them. Uh,

And he was the guy running against this guy. The current mayor, Mayor Adams, he has accepted bribes. He is going to be running as an independent versus this guy. And so we're kind of like stuck with like rock, paper, scissors. Yeah, it's like, you know, South Park. It's like a douche or a turd sandwich. Who are you going to vote for? That's kind of like what we're working with here.

The gist of this guy is that he's incredibly charismatic. He's 32 years old. He believes in a lot of crazy things. That's my opinion, crazy, but basically a lot of socialist things. So, for example, he wants to freeze rent, meaning you can't raise rent on on rent.

on I think something like 2 million different apartments, different rent-stabilized apartments. He also wants to create government-owned grocery stores and a handful of things like that that are very controversial to people who don't like socialism, but amongst young people who are very angry about a lot of things that they should be angry about, like housing costing a lot of money versus the wage growth. But he's super charismatic, and so he won over young people's votes.

And so, okay, great, great summary. Now, again, I don't care about the politics of this and I don't live in New York, but I'm fascinated by this guy. Like I literally had never heard of this guy. And then I watched this video. I saw this tweet. He killed it. So this tweet right here has 3.7 million views. So that's just the Twitter part of this. Forget Instagram, TikTok, anywhere else that I'm sure he's posting this type of content. But first of all,

The branding. So like that was the first thing that stood out to me, like literally the branding of this guy, like the font, et cetera. So what is this video? It starts like he's a TikTok content creator. And he goes, it says, New York is suffering from a crisis.

And it's called halalflation. And then he talks about how halal from like the like food trucks, you know, chicken and rice halal from like a halal food truck now cost $10, but it used to cost eight. And he's basically goes and he's interviewing them. He's like, you know, how much do you sell for? $10, $10, $10, whatever. We'll play the video. Clark is suffering from a crisis and it's called halalflation. Today, we're going to get to the bottom of this.

How much does a plate of halal cost right now from this truck? $10. $10. Chicken of a rice, lamb of a rice, $10. $10? Yeah. When you're a street vendor, you have to pay for the food, the plates. How much do you have to pay for your permit? Before it was $22,000. $17,000. How much does a license cost if you get it from the city? I think $400. Who are you paying? The permit owner. You're not paying the city? No, no, no.

You pay the permit owner $22,000 just so you can sell this food? Yes. And who is this? Random guy. Have you ever applied for a permit? Yeah, I applied and no come anything. It's long wait. I'm number 3,800 something. After two years, you're number 3,800? Yes.

These are the four bills that are sitting in the city council right now, which would give these vendors their own permits and make your halal more affordable. But Eric Adams hasn't said a single word about them. If you owned the permit, then how much would you charge for the plate? $7. $8. $8. Would you rather pay $10 for a plate of halal or $8? $8. $8. I think $8 is the way to go. If I was the mayor, I'd be working with city council from day one to make halal $8 again. So, how would you pay?

Tastes like 10 bucks, but it should be eight. So I was blown away because I have never really seen a politician doing this type of like, I want to call it like,

kind of natural influencer content. I don't know. What do you even call this? But this is not what politicians typically did. He's making like a Vice documentary, but in two minutes. It's very good. He's doing UGC content. Okay, I think that's the way I would put it. So the same thing happened in business, especially e-commerce. So

Sam, I don't know if you remember, like in the earlier days of e-com, right? Like let's say 2012, 2014, you know, you mostly did just static images. Okay. There was not really a lot of video on, let's say Facebook or Google at the time. So you would do static images for your ads. But those images you would pay a professional designer to make and they would make it look slick. And then that's what people would click. And then when video came out, people tried to do the same thing. They would basically film images.

professional looking videos. You'd hire a videographer, you'd have somebody holding the camera and then you would, you'd have a good background, good lighting, and you would say your thing. But it turns out that

commercials didn't really work as well on the internet as me picking up my phone and just making something that looks very raw. Like I'm doing my, you know, it'd be a girl doing her makeup while talking about a different product. Right. And it just feels like it's a get ready with me video. Or it's a, you know, a mom who's in a rush. Who's just being like, y'all, I got to tell you, this is a lifesaver. Like my husband, uh,

My husband can't believe how much happy I am since I got this thing. And then they ruffle in their bag and grab something out. And it's ads that don't look like ads. And they call this UGC, user-generated content. And that's the new style that works best in ads. For the last, I would say, five years, that's dominated most of e-commerce advertising.

This is the first time I've seen a politician do this. So like, if you compare, I don't know, like Kamala and how perfectly manicured everything was like her image or, you know, pantsuit, her like professional photography, her like fake phone call with somebody. But then you see that the phone wasn't even on and she's just chuckling to nobody. Like it was all super, super fake and polished. And this guy's doing like man on the street interviews, like,

Holding the microphone, you can literally hear like, you know, it kind of rubbing against his jacket sometimes accidentally. Like it's like it's wabi-sabi, dude. It's the perfection in the imperfection to go full circle there. This kind of blew me away. I don't know if I'm just like overly nerding out about this, but from from the topic like halal chicken and rice is 10 bucks. It should only be eight to the style of the video. I immediately was like, I get why this guy won.

And on Saturday, the election was taking place yesterday. He was he spent the whole day walking around New York and like doing like these very raw looking videos talking to people. And I think that this is just proof, which we already have had this proof that charisma matters more than ideas and reality. And this is not like a.

takeaway that like this is a very obvious takeaway but this is just another example because his charisma is off the charts and he has just been like killing it when his ideas in my opinion are just absolutely insane but because of the style of marketing it's done wonderful young people react to this stuff and by the way this is what we need like Governor Cuomo the guy who was running for him

He's an old guy. He's in his 60s, maybe 70s. And he would never in a million years grab his cell phone and just start talking to it. But that's what I need. I think my friend or our friend Austin Reif tweeted something out. And he said the next politicians and the next presidents are going to be podcasters and sub stackers. And that sounds like a ridiculous statement. People who write newsletters and people who have podcasts, that sounds ridiculous. It's not ridiculous. And I totally buy into it.

I, yeah, definitely. There's going to be a podcaster president. Why? Because they're going to have a built a following before they run. So they're going to build the audience before they go run to, they're going to be trained with 10,000 hours of storytelling, communication of, um, you know, how to make a point.

So, you know, I think that's going to be one archetype. The other one is going to be short form video creators. I think Roberto, our friend said this thing. He goes, whether this guy's agenda is good or bad for New York is irrelevant. He told the best story. This is why Steve Jobs said that the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world. A lie told as a good story can never, can never beat the truth trapped in a bad story. Or I think it's can always be the truth trapped in a bad story. And then I had, because I tweeted this thing. So when I saw this, I saw the second video. I don't know if you've seen this one, but.

Can you hear this? Dude, you know what's funny is I don't have to hear what he's saying and I could sense the charisma. Well, okay, so he's speaking Hindi in this video and I think he does actually speak Hindi, but it made me realize...

oh dude, 11 labs is gonna make like a billion dollars next election cycle because every politician is gonna translate everything they're saying into all languages using AI instantaneously. Like, you know, why would you not? You're just gonna pick up free views. Like we did this. We started doing this with our MFM episodes. Ben was like, hey, I think I can get more views if we dub our episodes into another language. So now if you're on YouTube and you click the settings wheel and you click like audio track, you could select Spanish,

or Hindi on some of the episodes, and it's going to be all the episodes soon, because we went to 11 Labs. We're like, hey, dudes, will you guys help us translate this? And immediately, we now get tens of thousands of views a month that we weren't getting before in Spanish and in Hindi. There's probably people in Mexico right now that think we just speak Spanish, that we're their favorite Spanish podcast. And if they meet us, they'll be sorely disappointed. Yeah.

That's a really good insight. I didn't, I have not seen this video of him. Is he, is this video dubbed? Is this a fake video? This I think is real. He kind of looks like he might speak in there or maybe it's not. I can't tell exactly, but.

I guess that's the point. I wouldn't know. AI tools have gotten so good that I would never know. And I actually tweeted this out. I said, I could a thousand percent create an AI politician that could win over, you know, a city election. Now, of course you can't actually run if you're not a human being, but whatever. And I said, here's how I would do it. You know, I would make a likable sort of guy next door character like this guy. I would create a hundred X more video content than my opponent because I

Andrew Cuomo is not going to be able to keep up with my AI engine. I don't know if you've seen people who do this. They basically, they create an AI workflow that's an agent that scrapes, like, it comes up, there's one agent that's just brainstorming topics. It's like looking at Reddit, it's looking at TikTok trends, et cetera, and it's brainstorming topics. Then they have a scripter agent that writes a one-minute TikTok script.

Then they have a video generation agent that creates a video that has your AI avatar speaking it like HeyGen or 11 Labs. Who's doing this? There's people that are doing this. They run what they call faceless channels. They run channels on Instagram and TikTok that get millions of views. Like with B-roll and narration? But it doesn't have to be B-roll anymore because now they use an AI avatar. So they just put a person there. And they're like, cool, I don't want to be an influencer. I don't want to wake up and get ready and have a nice house and all this. But I'll just make an AI character that does this.

And you can just create an AI character that does exactly this. And then, but the cool thing is they automated the entire workflow from coming up with the idea, scripting it, recording it, and then actually like scheduling it, posting it, analyzing the data and feeding that back into the engine. Who, what's an example? And it's almost like, dude, if you guys applied your talents to something useful, this would, you'd be incredible. I, but, but it's amazing that you can even do this.

I'm reading a book called A Promised Land. It's Obama's autobiography. He wrote it, but it's old. It's 10 years old, but I was at the airport and it looked cool. I'm at the point in the book where he was like, I was getting my ass beat in the election because I was too long winded. And my campaign manager criticized one of my debates. And he's like, dude, you're answering the question correctly.

And he's like, yeah, they asked me a question. I'm giving them an answer. And like, it's kind of nuanced and it's long. A thorough answer. Yeah, I'm giving like a good answer. And he goes, yeah, that's bullshit. That's not how you win a debate. And that's not how you win votes. You don't give an answer. You're not answering the question. The question is irrelevant. All people want to know is can they trust you with their vote? And like, are you a brand that they want to get behind? Stop answering the question and tell a story that lets them know that they can get behind you. And he was like, he goes, yeah.

That rubs me the wrong way, but that's the game and I will play that game. And there's like a distinct difference in like, you know, we know him now. Obama is regarded as a fairly charismatic, good storyteller. He was like, that was the change. Yeah, exactly. Do you know Lulu? No.

She's really cool. She's a very interesting person to follow on Twitter and whatnot. So Lulu, I think she was the head of comms at like Palantir or something like that. I don't know. Or Anduril, I think it was. But she does a good job. What she posts regularly is basically comms advice, communication advice, PR slash how executives should communicate. And I think Anduril was always an interesting one because like,

Instead of trying to conform as this like boring government contractor, you know, they let their freak flag fly. So she tweeted this out. She goes, it sounds so basic, but he is too likable to lose. Friendly demeanor, smiles with his eyes, seems earnest. Being liked outweighs policies, experience, and nonsensical plans. Quote, I just have a good feeling about that person can override almost anything. And then Harley, the CEO of Shopify said, vibes.

It's like, oh man, we're sort of vibe voting now. And it's like, actually, we're kind of always, we've always been doing that, man. We've always been doing that. You know, JFK was one of the most, um, JFK had like a 70% approval rating when he was murdered. Um, and he was well loved. He was our princess Diana or whatever for that generation. Like he, he was well loved and he was well loved because he was incredibly likable. That's like a,

His policies were fine, but it was because he looked great. He had a beautiful wife who was poised. He had a lovely family with really white teeth. That is why he won, because he was very likable and good looking. So you guys know this, but I have a company called Hampton. Joinhampton.com. It's a vetted community for founders and CEOs. Well, we have this member named Levon, and Levon saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem within Hampton, which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a PDF.

It's tedious, it's annoying, and it's a waste of time. And so Levan, like any great entrepreneur, he built a solution. And that solution is called Moku. Moku uses AI to automatically transfer data from any document into a PDF. And so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract, you just put a file into Moku and it autofills the output PDF in seconds.

And a little backstory for all the tech nerds out there. Slavon built the entire web app without using a line of code. He used something called Bubble.io. They've added AI tools that can generate an entire app from one prompt. It's pretty amazing. And it means you can build tools like MOLKU very fast without knowing how to code. And so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you, check out MOLKU.ai. M-O-L-K-U.ai. All right, back to the pod. ♪

So likable might not even be the word because you might look at Trump and be like, wow, is he, would you say he's likable? Well, he's funny. He's funny. He's charismatic. So did I ever tell you about the time where, so I had this friend who's like a billionaire, successful tech guy. And he sends me a Google doc one day called the president. And I'm like, okay, what's this? And I open it up and I have no idea what to expect. I think he might be running for president. I don't know what this is.

And it was basically a pitch for a television show. And he laid out a case and he basically said, if you look at the last, I forgot what it was, like, let me just make up some numbers. If you look at the last 10 elections, you would look for a pattern. You'd say, is it always Democrats? Is it always Republicans? Does it always switch between Democrat and Republican? Is it based on the economy? Is it based on the person's height? Like if you tried to look for a correlation, where would you find it? And he goes, the highest correlation you could find is that the more charismatic candidate wins.

And he goes, ever since the advent of radio and television, when our primary way of getting messages out scaled up like crazy, the more charismatic candidate wins, whether this was Clinton or Reagan. It wasn't Reagan like an actor or something like this. Yeah, he was good looking. He dressed great. He was going through history. And basically 2020 was kind of the only exception where Biden won. And I would say Biden was the less charismatic candidate than Trump. It seems to be like the outlier.

But the guy's case was basically he's like, I think in his case, he didn't he didn't want Trump to win. And he's like, problem is Trump is incredibly charismatic. He is able to capture people's attention. He says things that are very memorable. He says things that excite certain people and inflame certain people. But it's all attention that he gets free earned media. So he had this idea to create a television show. And he's like, this sounds a little bit silly.

But he's like, I think for the Democratic Party, which is the party he was a part of, he's like, I think we need to start nominating more charismatic candidates. And if you look at the last few, they have not been the most charismatic. He's like, we're sort of it's a captured party and we lack putting forward charismatic candidates since Obama. Obama was the one of the most charismatic candidates.

And he said, here's what I think we should do. Just like, you know, American Idol or The Voice or whatever, The Apprentice even, there's been proven shows where you can have like, let's say, an eight to 12 week period where you start with 10 people and then they get eliminated. And in the end, you have a winner. He's like, what if we did this for presidential candidates? So you would take 12 candidates, not random people off the street, but people that genuinely are thinking that they want to run. And so you'd get Pete Buttigieg and others in this batch.

And he's like, week by week, you know, let's say they go to a small town in Pittsburgh and they're going to actually meet with the car manufacturers there or whatever, like, you know, some like presidential type of shit that they do. And they have to present a plan. And then it's actually like, and the judges for that week will be the car manufacturer people. And then they'll sort of pick which candidate they felt best understood them and was able to address their needs.

And week by week, you sort of eliminate candidates. He's like, by the end of this 12-week thing, we'll have captured so much attention and hopefully found a candidate that's won the hearts of people. People will know their backstory. They'll know what they're all about. They'll have seen them in a more human light. And we will have filtered out the less charismatic candidates for the more charismatic candidates. He's like, I'm not saying charisma is the end-all, be-all. Ideally, at the beginning, you try to screen people that you think are worthy candidates to lead. But amongst that worthy pool,

give a boost to the most charismatic candidate i thought this was fascinating and i really wanted him to do it and he had he was friends with mark burnett the guy who created um survivor and uh a bunch maybe bachelor or whatever like a bunch of other major major reality shows and he's like i'm gonna talk to mark i think we're gonna do this and i hit him up uh recently and i was like whatever happened to that idea and he's like i just decided i didn't want i didn't want

than the avalanche of problems in my life for creating this. And I decided it wasn't worth, I have a great life and it really wasn't worth the, you know,

what it was going to do. And Biden won in 2020. And so he felt like maybe I was wrong. Maybe there's not as much of a need for this. But isn't that interesting, dude? Yeah, that's pretty fascinating. I wish you would have done that. I feel like that would work too. Like it sounds like it's an idea that I think is easy to make fun of. It's also an idea that I think would be effective at the stated mission. It's easy to make fun of because we don't want it to be true, but it is true. Like, um,

You know who's a really good example of this is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yep. He was such a charismatic, interesting person. He was good to look at. Like, even the people who become our leaders who aren't really good looking, they're still sort of interesting to look at. Like, Donald Trump is intriguing to look at. He looks like...

remarkable in a weird way. You know what I'm saying? Arnold Schwarzenegger is a perfect example of this. Can I show you one last thing? Which one? That I think is funny. So I found this and I don't, I think I've talked to this guy, Brian, and he was cool. So I don't want to shit on him, but I'm more so shitting on people who... This line of thinking, maybe. This line of thinking. And... Let's explain what it is. Brian Faraldi says...

He says, I asked, quote, what company is worth less than 10 billion today that you could be worth 500 billion plus in a few decades? I have received 710 answers. Here's the top 20 picks that have 50x potential. And this tweet has 18,000 likes. You know, it was probably, I don't know how many views, but like. What year was this? Over a million. This is in 2021, July of 2021. When times were good, when everybody's making a ton of money in the stock market.

And he lists 20 companies. And these are ones that this guy who I think he has a whole YouTube channel towards picking stocks. And I don't know if these were his picks necessarily or if they were his audience's picks. And this guy has 600,000 followers.

His bio says, I teach investors how to analyze businesses, stock fundamentals and valuation teacher, DM Buffett for premium courses, free ebook in my description. Okay, that's this guy. So this was in 2021. And I just was curious, like how it was he right? Like what's his deal? I'm almost positive that not only did none, none of them 50X, I am pretty sure that most of them

are down from down even from this tweet. Of the 20 that he hand selected, somebody says, this has to go down in history as the best case of stupidity of the crowds. Here's where we're at three years later. So three years later, only one company is up and it's up 6%.

The average company is down 70% on this list with several of them, minus 95%, minus 95%, minus 98%, minus 90%, minus 97, minus 86, minus 99. And of course, Ozan, which was an e-commerce platform in Russia, which is delisted.

And I think Open Door is now, and so this tweet that you're looking at, that was even six months ago. I'm almost positive that Open Door is delisted and Virgin is down even more. I think Lemonade is delisted or out of business. Context Logic, I think, is out of business, which is Wish.

All right, we should post an update here. And now we're at five years later. Here's how the stupidity of the crowd has done. And my point in bringing this up isn't the actual results. The results are not good. That's the summary. The results are actually really bad. But it's just crazy how hard it is to pick winners. It's very challenging. This guy has 600,000 followers. I assume that he does this all the time for his job.

And you still can't nail it. It's just so challenging. Is it though? Okay, I'm gonna tell you what I did. Back in 20, I graduated in 2010 and I started my stock portfolio, I think right around like senior year of college. And I bought, I believe six stocks. And my dad was telling me just buy the index. But I'm like, dad, I got this, right? I had the Dunning-Kruger effect. I thought I knew a lot more than I knew.

And I think I bought five or six stocks. How much money? I mean, I didn't have any, but I had $25,000. I had probably $60,000 total. That's a lot of money. Well, I guess what I'm saying is,

Even though the results were great, it didn't, you know, on a very small base that doesn't do a whole lot for you. I bought Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Tesla. What years? It was basically 2010, 2011. Oh, my God. So I did the thing you're not supposed to do. I picked. I didn't pick with any sort of brilliance. I was like, these are like obviously great.

just seemed like the good companies of the world to me at the time. And, you know, I did make a mistake because I sold Tesla earlier. Like I sold it probably 2014 or something like that. So that would, and that would have been a much bigger return. So, you know, I think I still, I still am in the case study of like,

it's really freaking hard to do. Even if you buy right, you'll sell wrong and shit like that. Like I bought Bitcoin early and sold some early and then bought it back again and sold it again, bought it back again. You know, I'm not saying I'm smart. I do dumb things. But I guess what I'm saying is sometimes it's actually kind of obvious. I think one of the reasons that what this guy did was so hard was he was looking for a 50X. And he's like, what company small today that's going to be massive tomorrow? Which of course, if he knew, that'd be fantastic. But there is a simple way of looking at things. Like right now, for example,

I put my money into what my own little AI index. And I didn't spend much time on this and I'm going to go back and do a little more research. But basically it's very obvious. I think at this moment in time in the world that AI is going to be a very big deal.

that the biggest winners over the next five to 10 years are going to be ones that are benefiting from AI in some way, whether they're Nvidia, they're selling chips, whether they're companies like Google or Facebook that are able to use AI in order to make all their services better and slash tens of thousands of employees that they don't need shit like that. Right. Like, I think it's pretty obvious that AI is a big deal. And I think if you put in the time to just think about like, instead of buying the generic S&P 500, like,

Like what's the equivalent of the AI 50 or the AI 20? And it's like 20 companies that I believe are well positioned. It's hard for them to lose given the AI tailwind. And again, it's a little bit naive because you might say, well, Nvidia today, they have 90% gross margins and that they're going to get competed away and blah, blah, blah. I'm not saying it's like easy. I'm just saying, I think an index of AI, of AI focused companies, that doesn't mean companies that are like, you know, all,

chip makers or whatever companies that are going to disproportionately benefit from AI and are going to adopt AI and get the benefits of it. I just feel like that's an obvious thing today. Yeah, that's the version of me in 2010 being like, I don't know, me and all my friends use the internet like crazy. I think I should just like own the big internet companies. That seems like a good idea. The issue is not can you pick winners? Because I think that like,

When we saw Facebook was valued at, when it was hit a low, I think a year and a half ago, everyone who has ever bought any Facebook ads was like, yeah, this is undervalued. This is a great company. The issue is the amount of times that you have lost using that same logic. And so if you were to take a lump sum of money and you would buy and sell occasionally or rather often,

versus just letting it sit and ignoring. Like if you average... I'm actually going to go back and just back test this for me specifically. And I'll publish my result. I'll bring it to the next episode because I'm curious. And I would say, I think there's a more likely chance that buying and selling and picking has underperformed. I would assume that to be true. I think there's a chance it's not been for me, but I really want to go get the exact answer.

because it'll include, I think I should include crypto because I think that was kind of like buying and selling, picking. And I want to see the returns of if I had just invested the same amount of money in the same times in just the index versus my picking. I just want to see for myself what I've done and give it honest, be able to look reality in the face of like, you know, how's this working for me? So let me tell you this. Let me tell you this crazy stat that Ankur told me. So

So Jerry Buss, the guy who owned the Lakers, they recently just sold the Lakers for $10 billion. So he bought the Lakers for $67 million in 1979, and he sold it for 150 times his money at $10 billion in 2025. And yet, had he taken that $60 million and instead just invested it in the S&P 500, he would have been able to have had $13 billion in

So he would have had more money. That's stupid. It's not stupid. But listen, the top comment was,

Think of all, it sounded correct. I mean, it's just math. It's acting like he didn't take money every year in gains from the business. He could have lost money every year. The Lakers spit off cash flow every year. Do they? Most winning teams do not make a profit. That's not true. They could show paper losses. I know team owners. I talked to them about this. I was like, is this true? Do you guys actually lose money on this thing? And they're like, no, most years we're making money.

And occasionally if we're way over the luxury tax, we get a huge penalty. Then, yes, we could lose money in that one year. But no, we're not idiots. We're not burning hundreds of – like people say like, oh, they lost $200 million this year. He's like, I'm not losing $200 million every year.

The top comment was like, yeah, but are you adding into the P&L all the women that he was able to get because of him owning the Lakers? Forgetting the joy of owning the Lakers, which is already, congratulations, you own the S&P 500 versus you own the Lakers. Forgetting that. The Lakers are a business that has been generating cash. And so all he's taking into account is just the exit price and none of the 30 years of cash flow. Yeah.

I don't really look at the facts whenever I'm making a statement. But I think it did make for a good headline. And it is kind of stunning what, I don't know, 11% compounding over 40 years actually does. It's pretty crazy. I like doing this. All right, that's it. That's a pop. I feel like I can rule the world. I know it could be what I want to. Like no days off on the road. Let's travel, never looking back.

All right. So when my employees join Hampton, we have them do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff. But the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing I made called Copy That. Copy That is a thing that I made that teaches people how to write better. And the reason this is important is because at work or even just in life...

We communicate mostly via text right now, whether we're emailing, slacking, blogging, texting, whatever. Most of the ways that we're communicating is by the written word. And so I made this thing called Copy That that's guaranteed to make you write better. You can check it out. CopyThat.com. I post every single person who leaves a review, whether it's good or bad, I post it on the website and you're going to see a trend, which is that this is a very, very, very simple exercise, something that's so simple that they laugh at.

They think, how is this going to actually impact us and make us write better? But I promise you, it does. You got to try it at CopyThat.com. I guarantee it's going to change the way you write. Again, CopyThat.com.