#152 with Trung Phan - Sam Talks About the Hubspot Deal & Ideas With Trung Phan

u yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days on on a goal travel have a looking back alright we're live we're on okay we're on man listeners so sean is head a little work emergency not like a not like a real emergency he just couldn't join the podcast today so we have t what men so t is a writer for the hustle he wrote for trends now he basically writes to the daily email by himself to close to two million people a day he is big on twitter what's your handle trunk t fan so he's around a lot of you guys hopefully know him but he's been wanting to come in the podcast sean wasn't here so i wanna be grilling sam for everyone and i just wanna clarify we we do have some of the hit on the daily email i mean it did some heavy lifting in q four twenty twenty but we got some hit now jacob cohen i gotta give a shout out to the young one hey and he does great stuff but yeah i'm here for the listeners to to ask sam when he was selling hotdog dogs missouri if you ever thought he'd be selling the media company me to a south firm we have this group on this app called apex and it's like a private group where a bunch of my first million listeners are on this group and they anonymously say stuff all of them make fun of me for talking about hot dogs too much so i don't think i could talk about that anymore because i say i talk about it too much so i don't know if you can go the hot dog route but you know what we should do one day of bra we should have t and his team come on and i actually talk about how they write the daily email i feel like a lot of people ask me that all the time but it's way less sexy because it's basically t just locks himself in room and and does it one time i talked to t at like eleven am his time and he was like outside with his kid at the playground i was like chong don't you gotta write the email he goes dog done i did it already he said he just took the day off i was like alright well have to do that sometime but yeah the our deal was announced i think last wednesday the company the hustle has been sold to hubspot that includes this podcast and we're gonna do a ton of cool stuff i actually think we're having ke on the guy who was like the champion of the deal hubspot he's gonna be on this podcast tomorrow to talk about from his perspective why they did it but today we could talk a little bit about our company's perspective and some things like that just so everyone knows and so t knows because we got bought by a public company we're definitely not allowed to talk about certain things or to like i'm gonna try my hardest not to make a joke like oh you gotta go out by the stock right because that's illegal and i'm still learning all this as i go i'm not as i go i mean i've a lot already but it's definitely new to me i have to make sure i don't do anything unethical or illegal on this podcast so t hopefully you'll be able to but that's wondering that ticker is u so that is that gonna have to get leaked out no you're not i don't think you're saying anything wrong you're just just take a fast ticker i mean this will matt's get up but i was telling a sam that of all the the hub companies that purchased the hustle i'm glad it was hubspot you guys purchased too well you guys can do the math and the other hub companies what do you think brand you no i need be talking about this there's a big one based in montreal we'll just leave it at that well so what do wanna talk about do you what should we talk about with this deal well marty he told when he told listeners my i mean no one's her familiar than that thread tom download on them right now you're feeling yeah so we a while back so we've always had people wanting to buy us a lot of media companies and mostly all media or all bd companies in private equity firms and i was never gonna sell to a private equity firm like no not a chance wasn't it gonna be part of that media companies i thought it was cool so i went to like the offices of like a lot of these cool new york publishers in brooklyn or some of the older ones that own lots of brands in manhattan went to a lot of these companies and they were lovely nice people but it was just not a culture fit it was like i remember i was like in this boardroom where it felt like a boardroom like you imagine like boardroom in like we just picture like an old white dude with a tie overlooking central park and me telling him when i was twenty six or twenty seven about like this email where it's kinda funny because we could say the effort word and we just do crazy stuff in yada yada yada we one i wrote an article about doing a bunch of lsd like and i'm like this guy just not get it like i'm just a line item to him and and i didn't wanna be part of that i also felt that a lot of the media companies out there they were dying and they thought that buying us or buying a bunch of businesses like us would somehow save them and i did not wanna be part of that so we never like trunk name one media company that's doing great like publishing media company who you'd wanna own stock in are there any no i mean i think you've talked about this before but like i mean what the ones that raised major venture like four or five years ago like devices is but he's the boxes is they're just like those business models aren't gonna be able to last of twenty twenty and beyond if they're all tons of ventured tons of growth expectations that they're never gonna be able to meet so to answer your question no and then like is there any public company that is a like a traditional acquire of us that you'd wanna own stock in have you ever spoken to the times new york times yeah not in this capacity you're right so that's one i would wanna own new york times stock but there's not many no there is i mean the other one it's a an private company and it's at this point i come to nonprofit is whatever steve jobs is widow is doing the powell jobs i've talked to them but not in this regard do you believe that those companies can like three four five six seven x they're oh one valuations impossible i mean what's vice where was at his peak as a five billion dollar company it's insane yeah so when we met with these companies or just like thought about these companies selling to them it destroyed me also think that a lot of media companies particularly in new york scene and i like i make fun in new york i love a lot of these people a lot of them are my friends but you know just like in silicon valley there's negative stereotypes the new york media scene has these negative stereotypes that in my head it's the same people revolving doors at company building the same shit and most of it is horrible they all say oh let's go to video let's do this let's do that now they're all saying let's go to newsletters it's like dogg that was six years too late but they're all saying the same stuff and i didn't wanna be part of that and so in my head i always thought you know who should bias us we work i thought we work should bias us like when they before we found out that they weren't that great and then i thought linkedin should bias us and then i started thinking can oh what about like a salesforce or like companies like this and then last fall hubspot reach out to me and i was like oh my god this is finally happening one of you companies that i that i always thought should buy us is showing interest and so that was quite interesting and then they kinda explain their plan and it made a ton of sense and i was like alright this is great we gotta keep talking what don't you explain just like briefly before kieran gives a full download i mean top level what is the value prop for them yeah so basically the hustle our vision from day one here's been our vision from day one we said that we wanted to build up this really large email list and we're gonna do it for like these this entrepreneurial business minded person we're gonna make profits early on which we did with advertising we we had about an eight figure advertising business and then as we grow we're gonna use those profits to launch more stuff that we could sell directly to them and our first thing was trends which was a massive hit i think it's a massive hit but and then eventually it was like alright that's working let's launch another let's launch another and then it was like alright we're making all this profit let's invest in some of these school companies that are trans members or household readers are making that was kind of the long term goal and hubspot came to us and they go yeah we wanna do this thing and they basically described what i described they're like we have these products but a lot of media companies who have these great audiences is they haven't made like the really high margin stuff and we could partner with them and kind of have a one plus one equals three type of thing and so that's what they said to us and i well we are already gonna do this maybe it is a good idea to partner so we can just get to it right away the idea with hubspot is like they have like ninety thousand customers or something like that and a lot of their customers i think are not a lot but some portion of their customers are small to medium sized businesses well the hustle has like a million and a half almost two million of those people and then we have tens of thousands of trans members and the they're all that person and so they're like well if you could get us like two or three thousand new customers we're talking like you just gave us like a three percent bump in our customer base that's awesome and so like we don't need to sell that much stuff eventually i mean the way that we're gonna look at this is just brand awareness can we like get the brand well known but this allows us to buy the best or hire the best writers the best creators i mean the life at trunk is gonna have starting i guess today whenever we that starts is gonna be probably better than everyone who works with the new york times i mean i like some of those twitter following wings but i to your point i get it i'll actually you want to add something that i affords you something that ross simmons wrote from foundation i know you know ross he's a trans member he did a quantitative pac check on what you just said about the the audience over her the the hubspot getting with the hustle so he looked at the the most frequently used words in the bios of the hubspot followers marketers digital marketing seo and then he looked at the most followed the most used terms in the bios of hustle followers c founder product growth strategy data completely different subset right but also somebody of the house going after there i mean there's literally numbers put behind this that they found a very ying yang kind of acquisition here yeah it was great and then here's what's something funny as we were talking the founders were like stalking us a little like i could see da was like front of me on facebook and follow me brian was doing the same thing they were just wanted to check in and make sure we are legit and i know da i don't know him well but we run the same circle i've never met brian up until recently and i saw brian joined trends and he must have bought it which is his company credit card and he was trying to fire the radar and i saw that shit and i immediately you put it away on i went to the group and i said hey everyone brian hall from hubspot just joined the group and he got like three hundred replies in like an hour those chilean hilarious i told all my friends like hey comment on this for me leah there was reasons like and people were saying like oh hubspot rocks i use hubspot yada that's so you're here and i was hoping that in his head he would feel like oh this is perfect well i mean clearly something didn't work yeah that's what i was hoping for but anyway so that's kinda how it came to be that just let's add this is i mean i don't think you noted this but it was completely unsolicited that the the cold approach you got over the fall yeah yeah it was just a cold email you must saw lecture yeah and i was not intending to sell at all i was never gonna sell this there was a few reasons that the when i decided to sell i had just recovered from a really bad illness i was in a weird state and i was like you know like if there's like a horrible emergency like it would be nice to have this like a win under my belt and i was just like really sick and i just recovered from lyme disease wherein and i spent a ton of time in the hospital and i was you know what let's just guarantee a win and keep building it and i think that could be fun and that's kinda like where i was when they called but it was just a cold email have you in the last week like mentally changed at all or i mean you've been telling me yes it's not really just more the same but like to be honest dude anything anything changed you weren't a great shirt on friday it's black today man like something's going on are you asking like if i bought something no just in general man like you can't tell me that nothing mentally has not changed i don't know how most people are in the situation but my like i don't know how to put this in a non douche way but like i had a fair bit of money before this i had enough money that my that i was on like the high one of the hierarchy of needs where i was like i didn't need to worry about stuff the thing that i've changed is that changes just the fact that like i proved to myself that i could start something and end it and that is the thing that has changed the money doesn't really matter because i already live nice life i already owned a nice home i have cars and i've got and i don't really buy fancy stuff so there's i mean i'm not wearing to watch that our gym guy spend all your money on fitness i spent all my money in fitness and that's not that much money you know i've i built out a gym for five grand i'm gonna buy a rowing machine that's two thousand dollars that's like what i'll buy because i normally would try to give them to give to me for free but now i'll buy it but no i think the biggest relief is that i started something and it ended and also the second biggest relief is that i don't have to worry about the stuff that i used staff to worry about so during this process we're gonna hire a ceo and don't say his name by the way because trunk because we have a denounced who we never actually said who the guy's name was and i wanna call him out he was awesome i loved him and we were almost did it and then when this thing happened i had to film him in and like hey man i think we're gonna do this thing so anyway the reason i was gonna hire a ceo is i hate doing stuff like managing payroll negotiating with people about raises checking in with people to make sure that like just traditional managing stuff i hate it i hated it so much to the point where there were some days where i'm like i'm not going to work i don't wanna do this i called and sick once in a because i'm like i've got eight meetings i can't do it like it was lyme disease one of the times you called in sick for six weeks was that a fake one that was a real one my face in or or looking like gosh no i hated that you know someone tweeted something you tweeted something trunk today where you like talked about mba and someone said founders found managers manage and that's the truth and when i was managing stuff i was horrible at it and i hated it it felt like it sucked the life out of me and so i'm so thankful that i don't have to do the type of managing of like worrying about like looking at balance sheets and things like that and making decisions i can i'm so bad at it and i hate it well i actually now that you mentioned at tweet i think was pretty funny to talk about because the content tweet with basically like look at the big thing and companies whatever like facebook apple amazon microsoft google they're all run by nba now i didn't realize a sat that microsoft was an nba until i googled it and it made the tweet way more fire so no managers managed founders found and like if your larry page is sturdy brand and you worth like eighty billion or whatever they were you just wanna go off somewhere and do pay right like they don't give a shit no like that's not where i was you know what i wanted to do i wanted to be locked in a room i wanna know one to talk to me and i wanted to make right it's create stuff yeah that what i was creating like they're doing pay and like trying to do crazy like moon shots stuff right i wanted to make stuff so like when we launched trends it was me and i'm not like bragging here but i'm just telling a story it was me who made literally designed the page ran the paid marketing to it to get a little bit of traffic stuff called the customers to figure out what did you like about that what did you not like about and i did that for about fifty thousand dollars with the customers and then we decided to launch it and i kinda helped people figure out the vision and i gave it to other people like trunk and stuff who were way better than me at it and then they made it awesome and i just wanted to only do that all the time your a starter guy you're you like starting stuff yes i cannot run stuff i love starting i mean i can run stuff but i i like starting how comparable would you say like you want the port no role where you just get to be on twitter ten hours a day he's he's creating all day that's always he's doing he's he's screening your gap but his creating is different than my creating his creating is like performance art i don't wanna do that that's for sure and you want you wanna keep making cool products like oh whatever you work the community keyword for the community yeah i don't care if my names on it it's just fun to tinker and that's just what i wanted to do more of so yeah the deal happened it was cool a lot of fear a lot of excitement it's just a lot of big feelings right hubspot by the way is like a twenty billion dollar company like it sometimes you have to check these things to realize it how big the software companies are yeah and it was it was badass i've spent a little time with the ceo he the ceo came to our meeting today that was cool right he's just like a normal guy i guess he's just really successful mit dues i lived in boston for five years i live in cambridge i mit harvard it's then i'll tell you about libya in cambridge what's what's interesting about the area you'll never hear actually no you live in francisco those two places francisco and cambridge in the states where you like you'll walk around the street and just hear like over hearing stuff would be like the craziest kind of random talk here like somebody will be carrying some random disease or launching some kind of program in the middle east which will save the region like use the type of conversations go on when just walking around i mean you know that yeah and so brady you had a question and he wants to know what's gonna change going forward is the pod gonna be shit now no so over the last three months what i've been working on this deal i unfortunately have kinda left bra you and sean hanging a little bit i haven't been people were criticizing the podcast so were like man you guys aren't like focused enough and you're not preparing enough well i'm sorry it's because there was ninety hour work weeks for this deal so no i think actually the podcast is gonna be even better because we're gonna hire some people to help eva make it even better we're gonna get more distribution because we're gonna spread it across our channels a little bit more than before we're gonna spread it on hubspot channels we're gonna have some more money and budget to make it great and then maybe we'll do it more often i'm not sure yet but we're also gonna be releasing a ton more podcast maybe trunks is gonna have his own podcast maybe some other writer who we find is gonna have their own podcast and so we're gonna actually have more in terms of changing on the consumer's point of view for the hustle or for the pod nothing i don't think anything is gonna be changed except we're gonna do more of it and maybe you'll see a hubspot logo and on some stuff it's gonna be more than same that's how when you asked me like i got congratulations i'm sure got like a multiple of a thousand but they're was like hey man how's this changed for you i'm like honestly then nothing really just i still gotta work on those five emails a week and honestly at the end of day nothing really changes for the content side like we're gonna hire more people so right now like we didn't what i mean like the job still the same right yeah like some great writers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and like we could never afford that now we can and hopefully we can go or you know or send of those applications in well i don't wanna give any applicant a false sense that they're gonna get hundreds of thousands of dollars i just mean like we're working at a tech company now it's a lot different than a thirty person media company and that's interesting another thing is i think a lot of these media companies because they're reliant on advertising i think they're so screwed and they're not screwed like they're necessarily gonna die but they're screwed in that it's a horrible place to work yeah it's highly high pressure and you gotta deliver like you said these numbers but you mind you've been i mean you've been a very even killed person about it because you run an advertising based business but you also have a subscription based business so i think i mean when you kind of op pine on it like you know what i'm gonna kinda take sound this because you you've seen both sides it i've seen you on twitter like are both sides right like you're very balanced about it look it's not bad it helped us get us to where we had to go but if we wanted to be it would be really hard to become i'm not saying advertising is bad to have i'm saying it's great if it's part of your mix but like if we had one time we had bon as an advertiser and there was a shooting that we covered and bon was like hey like we can't be running next to this like nazi who just killed this there were some like a shooting in new york where a guy shot like what's a jewish church synagogue synagogue there was something like that and some brand i don't remember if it's bon no but they were like you know we don't wanna advertise so i was like fuck we just lost thirty grand that day absolutely it well you said can sell we the back end real good now it's a software then alright so we just got done talk in the deal about the deal we're actually gonna talk about it more tomorrow or i guess in two days whenever these go live with kirin from hubspot so we're gonna talk about that a little bit more in detail but i just wanna give you a little bit preview on what happened with the deal now let's get back into it with the old stuff and we're gonna have trunk tell us some interesting ideas that he's looking at t as the writer of the hustle or writer at the hustle let's do it so when we throw some ideas out there alright i didn't prepare anything did you i did well it's because i've been writing so much the last couple weeks i got some ideas here so i actually want to ask you a very specific one when you hear the word financial engineering what do you think bernie made off okay so you think financial engineering it it's a negative connotation when i think financial engineering i think of a thief okay i think that characterization is pretty much out there a lot of financial engineering happened in o eight with the mortgage backed securities goldman was involved in a deal where they put mortgage backed security bond together and they basically bet against it this is actually one of the most famous financial engineering which is a lot of fucker involved probably have to bleed that out but when greek tried to join the eu you have to hit certain debt numbers and goldman basically said listen we can do some kind of financial instrument for you which will make it look like you have a lot less debt than you do goldman made like seven hundred million dollars on this deal and they basically lied to get the greek government and the greek and greece into the eu and that means led to the the european financial crisis right so to your point financial engineering very negative okay but where are you going with this there's a very positive story just wrote about it and it involves a professor at the school of our cofounder now of the company we work for hubspot mit his name's is andrew lowe andrew lowe created a new financing mechanism for the biotech industry which has now led to a company that's worth over eight billion dollars and essentially what he did was he put financial engineering to the biotech industry because you know for example what do you know about the drug creation process it's expensive it's expensive and it's hard and it fails a lot exactly it's a lottery right so you'll spend two hundred million dollars for a chance a five percent chance at getting a blockbuster drug would might be worth twenty billion dollars so andrew lo about a decade ago a this professor lost six people very close including his mother to cancer over the span of four years and this like made him to reassess his life and like look at his field and be like what can i use my expertise with he's like well he's like a godfather in an industry but a whole generation of quan were taught by him and he's like i'm gonna look at biotech to figure go what issue is and you probably familiar this term do you know the term of you know the value of death and funding because some industries are un refundable right like a solar reached the value of death like a decade ago it's just very difficult to fund these like long shot things with long off payoffs he goes i'm gonna find a way to make biotech funding more viable so he went and said what if we got a hundred and fifty startups to get two hundred million dollars each and that's a thirty billion dollar fund and he ran the numbers and said if on this fund there is a ninety percent chance that you'll be able to get five blockbuster drugs out of it so the key being this though each startup has to go after a different disease be completely un correlated and he ran in numbers and he's like this now can make financial sense for an investor so explain this again what do you do you bundle you you pull risk together so instead of you fund a hundred and fifty startups ups attacking hundred fifty diseases but isn't that what a biotech vc firm would do anyway no he the the things this you have to specifically go after different diseases but wouldn't a fun a wouldn't any smart fund already do this no but this is things like the the the industry just hasn't been doing it like this is what he discovered and how's it going one one his students took his model and he went out raised money from k raised money from sequoia it's a public company now is worth almost nine billion dollars he had twenty drugs in the pipeline and four of them are in phase three so they literally applied his model and they're curing rare diseases and rare cancers is that him lo andrew lo andrew lo so he's like the fund manager no he the the company are of fun it's just a biotech firm that treats his model like this they to have a centralized research centralized operations each new drug that they create they spin spin it off as subsidiary so where's the opportunity here basically he created this funding model where you can attract money from conservative investors that wouldn't put it into biotech which is otherwise way to risky because he's saying it's actually der risked by doing with this model so to your point you would think that it has been done but it hasn't and he created kind of this situation and when was a champion for it and now he can go old guard money potentially pension insurance money into this type of system before it just the bent venture vc kind of biotech risky money but now he's gonna pour all this other money into it and with this proven model the companies called bridge bio pharma bridge bio pharma yeah check them out so to answer your question seems to be a little bit a min inertia of confusion here you're like aren't of they already doing this i think that the my rebuttal that is the amount of money needed it isn't going into it because it's still too risky let's say a biotech fund is like a hundred mil andrew lo like no we need tens of billions of dollars and he's out here champion this model it's like you gotta think bigger you can't just diversify across ten startups looking at ten different diseases he's like i want a hundred fifty startups looking at hundred fifty diseases and looking at my model i can get the probability of three blockbuster drugs which is probably worth fifty to sixty billion over a lifetime is like ninety plus percent so he's d risking for a conservative investor if you're an insurance company you can actually look at this now and be like you know what this is viable whereas before you would not so we had we had jason cal on here a few days ago he might be worth a hundred twenty hundred million dollars i'm not sure i mean he's he's up there because he's invested in robinhood calm uber all these great things and he says that that's his strategy with angel investing is like a little bit of a shotgun approach i don't think he said this explicitly but if you look at his track record it appears as though he's like i meet with tons of people and i invest in a ton of stuff it has worked for him i mean it seems like a pretty common model for high risk investing it's just quantity over quality because it's too hard to tell the quality early on yeah absolutely i i think the thing i really wanna emphasize here is the the low to no correlation i think that is really what because if you're looking at like for example the biggest kill in the the united states heart disease if you're just trying to attack heart disease in different parts of it they probably have the same underlying causes so that model wouldn't work right you have to be very specifically you're searching for diseases and maybe single gene mutations that are completely un correlated listen i'm probably completely chopping up andrew lo paper here but i thought it was super interesting because financial engineering get such a bad reputation as when i asked you what your first instinct is to that word alright what else you got idea guy so the other thing we wrote and i think you saw this you retweeted but i know you retrieve lot of my stuff without reading it which i do appreciate marcus bullock the ceo and founder former inmate turned a ceo of what they call yeah that's a crazy business let's talk about that yeah so do you remember you read the story yeah yeah yeah yeah so basically there's like a a a sa story along with it i i say that just i don't mean that disrespectful but like there was like there's like a sad story i think if i remember correctly he screwed up got locked up and at fifteen i imagine like he did what he did and so he just spent some time in jail and they make a collect call went to the point of him almost like bankrupt brought his mother right his mom had to move from an apartment into studio just to be able to afford to communicate with them yeah and what did you get locked up for arm car jacking got it and this happened six year about six seven years after the nineteen eighty nine central part rape case member the the genre was raped by five well the jog was raped by five minority use was what they were charged with but it turned out to be not true at all but in the aftermath of that the start of that case every state united states baby said we're gonna start trying use as adults so we got fully fucked bankrupt rep is not bankrupt his mom but depleted her funds she i completely changed her lifestyle just talk in the phone with them once a week however along was how much of it cost to make a collect call like twelve dollars a minute eighteen dollars for fifteen minutes eighteen for fifteen yeah insane yeah and that was in the nineties right yeah so a lot of money a lot of money and it's because the telephone system for prison system in america run by basically two private equity backed telecom companies okay and what is what did he create he created something that he just looked around he's like whatever using their phone for social media prisoners obviously don't have access to twitter and facebook but what if i could create something that would be similar from the family side and you can kinda still communicate with them so very simple you open app on your phone it's called flick shop f l i k s h o and you basically do whatever you do with twitter or facebook yeah click on an image and you send it but instead of sending an image between phones you are sending it to a flip shop and they're gonna write a postcard for you with image in the text and what what's amazing about the story is the hustle involved for him to get into like over twenty seven hundred prison systems in america he was like meeting these warnings and administrators like in person trying to convince them that they should allow flex shop and for the administrators of these prisons it actually makes a lot of sense they want to reduce rec and inmates that go out and commit crimes again but one way to do that is keep them immensely healthy right let them communicate with their family let them with this job opportunities a lot of corporations use flex shop to send job opportunities and ideas and the other thing that's a benefit to the prisons is flip shop is a no one vendor quantity so you're not gonna begin ketamine laced into these postcard what and how big the business now oh i don't i haven't gone through the full numbers i know he's sent i think he sent maybe hundreds of thousands of millions of postcards already and i'm look just looking at the landscape i know that there are kind of these like on demand i think flutter photoshop or something i don't know if that's right shop i think interesting industry can let me tell you a story real quick so about two years ago one of our investors and now a mentor and great friend of mine nate his name's chris red chris like help start re back and then he was the first investor in wish he's been around he's he's very successful a real low key though but about fifteen years ago someone asked him to go volunteer at a prison to talk to them about technology and he was like well i don't wanna do this what am i doing and then he gets there and he does the presentation and he's like i'm gonna dedicate my life to this he starts this thing called the the last mile and i went and volunteered at it and basically i went there he took me out to san quentin up and this guy he's met i think he's met with like the clinton and the trump's he's met with ed like on both sides of the aisle they all support this program and it's this in program and it teaches inmates wordpress basically rick relatively simple things but it allows them to get jobs so some of them have gotten jobs at slack he teaches them like front end stuff i think a lot of wordpress a lot of just basic web building stuff so they can get gigs and i went out to this prison and i'm a big crime guy like i love like crime i love like prison tv shows and like cops and all that stuff and so like i knew what san quentin was because you know that's like oh you're going to san quentin and that was like the you know that's a big deal and i was just walking around the yard and we go up there we show up we walk around these yards and and imagine just exactly what san quentin is it's like all dirt it's kinda overlook water and there's these huge dudes shirtless lift and weights mean looking dudes and me and chris walk in there and they part they like get out of the way it's like the red sea for chris and they all go hey chris man how are you and he goes like what's up darren like what's up like he was god there because everyone knows if you get into his program they have a zero percent or they had a a zero rec rate meaning everyone over the last ten years who went through their program not one of them went back to prison do you know how many go through i think thousands thousands i think you could look it up and so it was crazy i was just walking around with these guys i mean these are many of them were just dude right be honest were you scared like you must have been extremely uncomfortable i was scared at first and then you start talking to him and it's like i start talking to this guy i'm like hey what did you do he's like i beat up a guy twenty years ago he goes i caught a guy cheat with my wife and i beat him up really bad and he almost died he was like i was just so angry and i just lost my temper and i flipped and in my head i'm like yeah i mean you deserve to be here but that was twenty years ago you're doing better so he was just a guy to me he was wearing them you know his his inmate clothing but besides that he was just a nice smart dude and we were just talking about stuff and for the most part it felt like normal guys who did bad stuff like years ago and i don't wanna generalize i mean obviously there's a lot of bad people there who deserve to be there but it was crazy and so what he's working on now is they what he discovered was the same thing it's really hard to communicate and very expensive to communicate and it's hard to track people and he said that like i forget who it was exactly but lot these private equity companies have like these prepaid cell phones or something like that that they were gouging these these families like crazy to use them and so his new startup i don't know if it's launched yet but when you think about it makes sense but it's crazy on the surface he wants to give an iphone to all the prisoners now i don't know if this means like low security high security don't know which exactly but he wants to give an iphone to all of them they won't be able to use the internet but it's a way to track them to send them education stuff so they can learn how to prepare for work a lot of really cool up it's very fascinating he's called the last mile and the hustle we actually did a great story on it super interesting space and he says that this business he goes it's gonna be massive he goes we're gonna be as big as t mobile he's looking at like a business man right he's not looking at this i'm in both parts he's also looking at it's both i mean he runs at nonprofit that he raised money for and it just doesn't make any money it's a you know they just pay they cover their ass but he's like i wanna make a business for this he and he's like i wanna come at it at the right direction so it's like good for customers it doesn't completely screw but if i make it for profit that allows me to get expand faster and reach more people and it's a crazy unique situation this whole private prisons and that whole space it is quite fascinating it's really corrupt but it's very interesting well i your friend at the ci institute you remember over a year mister roman yeah so this friend this sent us a bunch of stats about the prison industry mean two point two million incarcerated and what marcus said was essentially when you were to prison your whole family goes in prison right so two point two million times what call it the average values four or five people maybe extend his ten you're talking twenty thirty million people directly affected by the prison industrial complex right that's ten percent of the us population us expenditure government and state and federal spent eighty one billion on the prison system so huge industry that needs a ton of change and banning you get the social good out of it the lord is huge yeah super interesting space we actually do more research on this space and come back if you wanna learn about this google probably the hustle what would they google to hustle the last mile zach road about it right well zach the last mile so google the hustle the last mile the last mile is three words the last mile and then for trunk story google the hustle and then what was it called flick shop f l i k s h o p i mean we could probably throw this in a nose but yeah this and marcus is crazy is insane yes you the one part of the story there i just wanna pad before we jumping in something else is i asked him i'm like in your you know your late teens sixteen seventeen eighteen and you're in prison like who are your mentors but how do you even come in entrepreneur he literally said yeah he got ahold of jay z's album his first album and j z was rap about these non traditional paths to entrepreneurship and he at the line that he said it was from the song you don't know he goes you can make forty off a brick but one ryan can beat that so he's like why be in the street hustling if there's other paths that you could possibly use right and i mean i'm sure jay's and influenced a lot more and inspired a lot more people and let's go to one more idea but let to wrap it up what did that guy give from the article did he get a bunch of customers or anything well i'll tell you that one was he wrote me and he said a a state government reached out to him and they wanted to put him the foot shop in the institution so i mean like honestly that was amazing man to get that message from him he's like and i'm like and he wrote me he's like you know this amazing i dude like what did i be like this is your journey man i didn't spend any years in prison i just got gotta be like yeah i helped you a ton man you had some equity or what alright man alright well let's do one more alright well this one will be an easy one for you i'm sure got million ideas on it tell me what you think about twitter subscription business tell me about exactly what's going on so basically twitter bought this company called is it review it's spelled like a really cute way so i don't use a newsletter business i don't know if you saw then yesterday twitter said that they gonna put description offerings potentially in this upcoming year so you can pay for the following things it looks like potentially i don't wanna front run a fake story here you could pay for tweet deck which i don't use but i've hear a really good things about you can pay for a pro features which is like more customization on your profile and something about undoing sends which doesn't really make a lot of sense to me because i just delete tweets it like yeah but if you have a twitter thread and you wanna delete number three zero five okay that one i might actually pay for and then the other one was tipping you can tip accounts you like for extra content i think that one's a no brainer and they also bought a newsletter business yeah review then not a newsletter business but a software that makes newsletter yeah and i then facebook say they're gonna do paid newsletters as well yeah facebook has a team doing paid newsletters so i mean you're the guru here tell us what you think i'm happy we sold that's a lot of competition i think twitter will work before facebook work because facebook's and the shit right now you know a lot of the people who make paid content i think are on twitter and trust twitter far more than facebook i think that's amazing i think i should go buy twitter stock i think it's awesome i think that's a great great great idea i think it's gonna be a massive massive success yeah people are gonna rely on twitter more which is probably not good if you're a trader but i think it's gonna make a lot of people millionaires if there was some stock guru like and he was like hey i'm gonna tweet out like whatever i'm buying each day yeah p for the tip me for the exclusive content yeah i mean that's gonna be the biggest thing there is so obviously that's gonna be awesome if elon has a thing where he just elon would never do is because he doesn't want that money but if he just is just say like i'm gonna tell you my inside thoughts once a week or something yeah it's gonna be the best i think it's such a great idea actually now that you mentioned that train thought the amount of sketchy insider stuff i could go on now is actually pretty insane people that you know can move the market can you just be like alright now you get the pay tipping to see me move the market beforehand whatever i mean i'm just finding out there i think it's great so we have trends it's trends dot c you have to go to trends dot c in order to buy it there some special stuff on facebook where we can get people to purchase it in the content if you're on your phone and you see trends dot c sometimes you can buy it right there in the app and that's great but trying to get new users we post on facebook and twitter the user has to click off try to be sold on it buy it sign up and each week they're sent information in their email and we know that removing a little bit of friction can increase the amount of users you get by two or three times so you could have a one percent conversion rate and if you change just a few things you can have a three or four percent conversion rate and if twitter can make this so my credit card is on file with them and i'm just doing this like oh i want this pop up done got it it's gonna go through the roof and i could tell you that the people who buy with apple pay convert at a much higher rate of course people aren't always using apple pay on the computer so we don't get that all the time but i do know that having payments like that is gonna be a huge win is gonna make it really easy also i didn't know this and this isn't like me joking do you know that there's like nudity on twitter i just no i did not know that yeah you can get new to the twitter probably idea either so the other day someone told i'm like wait yeah that would be the other help company we're talking about yeah it is there's new to the twitter i no idea i don't know if it's software or hardcore i don't know what the deal is but obviously we've seen only fans take off dude i didn't even think about that twitter literally might have just doubled its market cap based on this potential it's super interesting i think that's a really smart smart play i don't think it's gonna work as well for facebook it's wise i think they're running joke i probably don't last thought is it took him this long and figure it out yeah the thing about twitter is like they don't innovate i think if i was working at twitter or if i had power there i would fire jack or see right away or i would say you know you're demoted to this thing and we're gonna put a new ceo in place because they don't ever innovate or do anything new so i think it's badass ass what do you think no dude i'm a hundred percent on board a little bit fair to them i mean they did have vine you just have a history of crushing things periscope got fine so i'm on board man i like that take alright so today's episode a little not entirely all over the place a little new trunk yeah was your first we're we're wrapping up this is your first time on the podcast say your hit twitter handle again when need all the hate mail but hopefully way more fan mail to go to you so what's your twitter handle alright that's at chrome t fan that's t r u n g t p h a n hopefully the people love it and you can keep coming back but it's up to them yeah no that's fine man alright thank you alright talk you guys yeah