#90 - How a Newsletter Generates $2m With Only 5,000 Subscribers

how's the suburbs it's good actually i i've said good now twice and it's because my brother taught me this thing i've been doing in my head you know who jo will is the guy who's like on yeah you have the navy seal yeah and i actually don't listen to him or whatever my brother law's i obsessed with him and he buys his book and like listen to his podcast or whatever and i just like overheard it and this guy he said this guy stick is that he's he's like hardcore about everything and his thing is like disciplined equals freedom he's he's like a david go guy yeah he's just like you know torture yourself and that's what makes you strong and that's what sets you free and that's how you get what you wanna do like you get get what get what you want and so you know anytime something goes wrong like it'll be like you know your business failed and hope just be like good start a new one or like you know right right faster to start the winner or he'll be like you know yeah yeah yeah it's always like i'm gonna make this into something good flat tire good time to walk and it's just like that's this like voice at my head bow it's cheesy as hell but it's actually quite effective to just immediately correct any thought to the like to the positive to the empowering and like got fired good i'm free okay i get it i'm i'm down with that have you read david go book no i i actually don't like these guys i can i read david go guy is cool i mean he's like cringe sometimes but he's cool grew up in a an abusive household and overcame a lot and you know he's he's definitely a good dude and an an inspiration yeah he overdo it obviously but these guys are good there's i now i i i i've already done so much sort of motivation porn that now i need something else it's like i don't wanna hear that you like you know an orphan who had you know no food and dude crawled your way to success it's like i want somebody who was doing alright and to have they're doing great or like you know then i've been doing great they're doing pretty good it's like let let me tell you more motivation let me tell you a book i think a bank is doing that for me but how is it actually what live in the suburbs yeah yeah it's fantastic it's amazing i swim every day that's like like that alone that one thing i say that and my no one gives a shit because it doesn't sound that interesting or new or novel for me i would i went from not going in the pool and swimming every day to doing it and it's like a combination of meditation a massage and a workout and it's amazing in a shower it's great it's everything i want great because maybe i'll do i'll join you okay you want you wanna hear my are you back in s f i'm in my house in san francisco it's looks messy because i've i've moved everything so okay you should come over then come over for the next podcast will hang out here we'll swim and then we'll do the podcast live okay i'm down i'm in san francisco now but i've packed everything up i leave august first i'm gonna go to what's the place park city for a week because like i said i wanted to hang out in utah and then i'm gonna go to saint louis for two weeks and then i'm gonna go to new york i saw bo saying this i'm stay in the hampton for a couple weeks and then i'm gonna rent a place in brooklyn for a little while and then maybe i'll go to asheville north carolina okay and then maybe back here i don't know alright i like it let's talk about this book real quick that i'm i started reading so okay and it relates to what you're talking about a little bit so i'm i love history i'm history buff and i started reading leadership in turbulent times it's by this wonderful woman named doris something she wrote the book by a abraham lincoln what's it called the but yeah alliance of enemies or some shit like that something like that and it's it's great it's i haven't read that one but everyone talks about that one being great anyway it's good because when i get alright i'm like i'm like i want to hear about all this motivational stuff but this stuff actually is motivational imagine being abraham lincoln and like born without electricity and like now i'm gonna go and i'm gonna like free the slaves or right lewis and clark and like i'm gonna like go you tweeted about this today i did because when you think about it i'm like i can't decide between living at the suburbs of that and i'm like fucking lewis and clark like yeah i'm like door isn't loading god door dash and then you're like like we think like walked across like the fuck shit and then map the whole thing and like had no electricity it's like should i raise funding or not or how much should i pay myself like all this bullshit it's like dude these guys like we're we're the first white americans and they like discovered this whole area for three years and i'm like oh okay this is easy this is an easy conversation i'm not gonna discuss what time i should record the podcast okay but this book what's the book about is it about every or is it about so it's called leadership in turbulent times this woman is a historian she's she's she's a wonderful writer and it looks at fdr who had polio and had the lead america through world war two or the beginnings of world war two abraham lincoln who came from nothing and then a mans anticipated the slaves teddy roosevelt whose mother and wife died in the same house on the same day and his child was born so in one day in the same home his wife died his mother died and his daughter was born oh my god same day and so he kinda led the spanish american war i believe it was and then who else is it about linda johnson who had to take over after jfk was assassinated and so and talks about what the modern person can learn from leadership in turbulent times alright i like it and you're done with it or you're in the middle in the middle of it but i just find it as fascinating that i think does it rank you know one to ten because like a book could be interesting but then there's like the life changing books that you're like no you have to read that and then this one is like it sounds like this one is like oh it's a cool read it's not a full so far but i would say i wouldn't say it's the book but what is life changing is learning about like men like abraham lincoln and teddy roosevelt right these guys were like true like i'm very patriotic and i love america and i love reading about the people who help shape america because what makes america special to me is this optimistic mentality and this we can bond we can get together and we can over overcome this problem and these guys just do that to the max i it okay i don't think i'm gonna read it but i like the it and tell you yeah i like that you like it and i'm not i'm not in that world yet by the way you bought the happy body when i mentioned it last time have you continued doing that workout or diet as well yeah it's not a diet necessarily i just i i mean already it there is a like strict fruit plan but that's what i'm saying it's not that strict like it just says you just eat under certain calories and eat healthy yeah sure then i i do that i mean i i lose like i i i'm i'm i'm fifteen percent body fat probably i'm are are you because you know they have that table that's like for this height you should be this much this weight this much body fat pounds over five times over okay gotcha nice i started away one ninety eight or no i'm i'm i i wait one ninety eight i'm supposed to wait one ninety i started doing it like five days ago and i like it it it's so weird it's not like a normal exercise program it's like like literally my wife laughed at me she's like oh she was like i was doing it and she really wanted me to just like hold the baby and like do my shift and then she was like mocking me talking to the baby she's like oh sorry daddy's doing a really strenuous workout look at them because it's like it looks like you're doing absolutely nothing you're lifting weight no i mean it's like you literally start with like ten pound weights and yeah but my back can't like can you do the can you try lift put your can you put your hands all way above and squat down no not the squat part oh but that's limited by like hamstrings and hips more than like like my back is fine it's my hips and hamstrings that suck anyways this does not fitness podcast it's like hey you wanna hear about fitness from sean who doesn't it's not fit this is the podcast for you but it's a cool and you should check it out and it's very unorthodox that's what i kinda like about it i hate doing anything that seems mainstream so this works for me gets me excited it i've been doing it and it may it makes my back feel better okay so we gotta decide something first on in the last podcast at the very end we were like okay interesting question if if you had to make a million bucks in the next two months and you could only start with i think like ten grand of like you you only a ten grand of budget how would you do it and we had said we're gonna come back on monday with a bunch of good at we're we thought about it on the spot and we wasn't great and we said alright we'll come back monday and we'll we'll we'll think and so as july fourth this weekend so i don't know did you did you think about are we ready to talk about it or are we're gonna punt it one episode and think about it i'm not ready to talk about it but yeah i thought about it a lot i guess i thought about it as well and i oh is our next episode the hundredth hundredth episode okay that would be a good special one the thing is is it's gonna be so much work but i think i'm down oh to actually go pull it off yeah i think i could do it though yeah i think you could and should do it okay so we're gonna punt it one one episode let's say so that we can come to the table with good answers because everything we talk about on here is off the cuff basically during the week we have this little google spreadsheet that we you know i'm out about and i see something while i'm talking to somebody or meeting somebody and they say something interesting i'll just toss it on that sheet but don't do a ton of research and i don't know what you're gonna talk about you don't know what i'm gonna talk about when we show up so it's very off the cuff but for this one i wanna have thought about it and i wanna have research so that i you have good when i when i normally i laugh at people when they say don't wanna tell you my idea and i i'm like dude shut up your idea like i've already thought of it or someone has thought of it like this not a big deal but in this case it it actually is true so when we talk about it we we'll have well i kinda have to be subliminal a little oh i'm i'm just gonna say what i'm gonna do with i'm gonna do it if if somebody could beat me to it for you good on you but most people are just gonna enjoy that journey alright i have a bunch of other topics that are interesting that we can talk about i wanna tell you about some research that i've done that shocked me okay so let me pull it up because i didn't list it all in here okay so car racks you know car racks no what is that okay so when you buy a car most of the time you have to do two things if you wanna carry luggage on top of your car first you have to install the rack okay gotcha then you have to install the thing that you want to carry stuff so you could wanna basket and you could carry stuff in the basket you could install luggage you could install bike rack you could so there's two components of this now these racks cost five hundred to a thousand dollars for a rack and then another five hundred to three thousand dollars for the luggage and so i started researching this and i thought it was crazy and i found this crazy article that burke a berkeley it's called berkeley lab i guess it's funded by brooklyn university so listen to this in two thousand and fifteen roof racks were responsible for about one percent of lightweight vehicle fuel consumption nationwide that comes out to be about a hundred million gallons of gasoline so what happens when you put just the rack not the cargo just the the small rack is your gas efficiency your fuel efficiency goes down five to twenty five percent so if you have a car that gets twenty five miles a gallon it goes down what two two point five miles a gallon and a lot of times people leave the racks on when they drive around right and i thought that was i thought that was crazy so let me tell you one more step which is the study calculated that the additional fuel consumption caused by roof rack is about six times larger than the anticipated fuel savings from a fuel from fuel cell vehicles and forty percent of the anticipated fuel savings from electric bat battery vehicles in two thousand and forty that's crazy to me and so when i read that i was like i wanna buy the most fuel efficient car rack there is and it and i there weren't a lot of things out there and let me tell you about the the company that i bought a car rack from their publicly traded they mostly only sell car racks and they do about what's her name it's called t t h u l e it's a publicly traded company in what's s switzerland they do about seven hundred million dollars in revenue with about a hundred and fifty million dollars in profit pretty big business all and only on car racks is that crazy that's really crazy so the market cap on here says twenty five billion now is is that us dollar that's french frank or that's was frank divided by ten about i think it's point one one two point five billion dollar market cap company for car roof racks car roof f mostly car and the study that i read they go yeah americans are buying room racks like crazy like it's growing at a really high rate i believe it and i didn't believe that and then i started like looking around i'm like oh my god every freaking car has one so when i go amazon the racks look like they're like seventy to two hundred bucks so which ones are you talking about well i don't know what you're looking at but because it's quite confusing because when you buy a rack you have to buy the part that just attaches to the car and then you gotta buy the rack that attaches to the fittings and then you gotta buy the cargo part that goes to the rack right it's incredibly expensive i mean so right now so you just bought these i bought it used on craigslist i used everything for six hundred dollars and what about when you buy it used okay you bought it on craigslist if you were gonna go to a marketplace to buy this used which marketplace would you go to went to craigslist but if you weren't if it wasn't craigslist where would you go is there like a okay so you go to the kind of broad one so there's no like is there like a vertical marketplace for basically outdoors the equipment like you know campers and surfboard boards and you know tents well campers yeah campers have their own thing a lot of what we talk about is un bundling these big marketplaces into vertically focused marketplaces and so i'm sure that i'm sure there's already one for this but i haven't heard of i'm not at outdoors time maybe i didn't i definitely didn't see it but there wasn't a product that i wanted to ship i wanted to go pick it up i drove like half an hour away and i picked it up because they're huge i mean this thing like it's like as big as a car roof right right right so you wanted it to be local okay got but isn't that amazing that hey i can't believe how i would not talk to and this is the same thing it's a hidden plain site i see these on carbs all the time i never even one thought to myself because i'm not buying it right like who makes these how much do they cost how much that company worth right but like boom billion dollar company hidden an plain sight freaking roof racks of course and you know i'm curious how many you know d competitors they have already there was a few chinese knock offs on amazon but i didn't wanna buy it because t is like so i bought a volvo car like a nice new volvo car and they're not like luxury but they're like quality right right t is like probably the volvo of car racks where it's it's not like the most expensive but it's like in impossible pay quality people spend for quality on outdoor stuff like whether it's like rei gear or you know like that's just like a common thing i see it's not just that people spend on their hobby it's like specifically outdoor stuff they'll pay more for the rugged sturdy reliable thing and i i understand why it makes makes total sense okay i have another niche thing unless you wanted to say anymore about google i just thought that that was crazy because a i couldn't find one that was marketing it as like the most fuel efficient rack and i was amazed to how big these businesses were i thought like it was like something started in like portland that was like had thirty employees right alright so i saw this tweet by this guy chris back and i don't i never met this guy he seems legit his bio is that he has three exits to indeed zillow and no natalia so i i don't know who this guy is exactly he's a founder of slash operator he follows me so i think he might listen the podcast so his handles he tweeted something that pissed me off the other i know who this guy his his handle is chris j back back with b a k k e each two of the thing that was really interesting i wanted to shout it out so he goes he was like you know one of my favorite small business ideas is to pick a hobby that you spend too much money on create a newsletter for that hobby and then market it to other enthusiasts via reddit at twitter facebook so for example the ferrari market letter has five thousand email subscribers and does two million in revenue with a team of two and i was like what like that was crazy to me i hadn't heard of this and you're knee deep in the news newsletter little world you know about this one specifically i know whole thing won't surprise you but did you know about this one no but i think what he's saying is a bit over visitation well i went to the ferrari market letter dot com it yeah i mean i guess i get it yeah he said breakdown of someone who's knowledgeable about their business they make six hundred to nine hundred a thousand from five to six thousand people who will pay about a hundred to two hundred bucks for online or print access and then they make another million dollars a year an annual member member classified revenue and then the remainder is from advertising so the classified revenue that's like sort of their little marketplace for enthusiasts to to transact and then about a million bucks is for people who want the sort of the online and print access to the content so i thought that was that was pretty interesting i i i never heard of this before and i thought that it was pretty significant for some you know really niche ent hobby yeah and you could do this for a variety of i mean hell you could just pick porsche or mercedes that both have fan following yeah i i i buy it it i'm not even remotely surprised about this if you go to the website it says they're celebrating their forty fifth year so it must be two guys that are like in their sixties or something or older and they just love ferraris so yeah i i buy it way simpler than you think yeah and i i bet you know the content is so niche that you know you just get this like disproportionate engagement from people who are you know the the more niche the more passion generally speaking so so i think that's the and then when it's ferrari is your niche within then the money comes with it and i'm a i'm a huge fan of cars and vintage cars and things like that there's a few people in this space there's hem motor news so if you go to hem dot com it's a company that's been around for since nineteen fifty four if you told me this business made fifty million dollars i would not be surprised it's a classified site for vintage cars additionally just if i don't wanna wanna watch once to watch a business get built in big real time you have to follow this so one of my favorite youtubers is a car blogger cars and bids dot com i'm following him building this i think this is gonna be quite large yeah i like he's hiring for it it's gonna be pretty big so watch that cool you're trying what else what else you got oh okay so i saw a chart and this is like e commerce compared to retail it's only like twenty five percent set it's only twenty five or twenty percent all retail yeah yeah and it's crazy when you think about that by the way that used to be like six or seven percent like only a handful years ago and i remember and this was like amazon was here like it was and i remember seeing that and being like that's crazy that it's only six or seven percent penetration so now i guess you're saying it's like twenty percent twenty five percent ish yeah i don't know how you measure that but ish i think that e commerce like when i think of commerce when i of like what you and our friends do i'm like i respect it but for me that that's not for me i don't wanna do that that's boring but then i'm like when you see that grow your growth you're like that is pretty neat so what do you think what that would look like at fifty or sixty percent i mean what do you think that's not being sold online so a few things that are interesting to me is homes are not really being bought online i i've thought about this since two thousand twelve when i worked at an apartment company i was like someone's gonna rent apartments online without seeing them once the three mapping is a thing which matter matter ports doing that diamond rings i bought an incredibly expensive diamond ring on blue nile dot com so diamonds are being sold cars are being sold what else is what's not being sold now that will i think businesses are gonna be bought and sold online obviously today online businesses are but you know brick and mortar sort of offline businesses like you know my uncle bought a liquor store you know and i was like how did you do it and he's like well you know in the newspaper you see an ad and they there are things like loop out there that you can buy and sell you know businesses but they're not as common and it's not as well developed as you know an online business marketplace would be what else i think more so than new shit being sold online that's not online is just more more percentage right so it's like okay of of the amount of groceries i i used to order online like all my groceries was a thing but now it's for a household like mine we do it fifty percent of the time now we used to do it five percent of the time right we we only used to do it when we're in a pinch and now we'll do it you know generally unless we really need to go grab something specific from somewhere and so i think it's just gonna be the market share of of each individual like item is gonna be more and more bottom line right so clothes and glasses like these have been for sale online but out of twenty people maybe one was buying their glasses from war parker in nineteen we're still going to costco or wherever and picking out frames lens crafter or some shit and that number is gonna go from one to five to eight to twelve to twenty you know eventually and so so i think that that's that's more where the change is gonna happen is just what percent of people buy x item online today they're all like kind of single digits out of twenty and it'll be double digits out of twenty when it's over yeah i'm i'm still just kinda thinking about everything i think that there have you read about blue nile i've i've read about blue nile and also there's another one the name slips my mind but there's another diamond company like that online but tell me about what you know about it i don't know how much besides today okay so blue nile was founded by this ex mckinsey guy it seems like a really interesting guy way under the radar blue nile is it's now owned by bain capital it does it went public it did north of five hundred million dollars in sales this guy also helped start moose jaw i believe he also started or helped found by as a advisor chewy dot com so a lot of interesting companies they were acquired by bain they did hundreds of millions of dollars in sales incredibly fascinating and you can buy diamond ring on there up to probably a million dollars and they refund you within two weeks if you don't like it and so i actually bought my engagement ring for sarah on there and i timed it so when i proposed she still had ten days to return it if you didn't like it i timed it so that she could open up the package and get her ring from there so why did you pick this versus something else just it cheaper is it better what what's better it's interesting because when you go and buy a diamond ring like everybody was like i got a guy right and like yeah when you go to like when you got a guy that means that like the selection probably isn't huge and you don't actually know like what's what you don't know what's good you don't know if you're being sold to and so because of the because they're online you have far more transparency about what quality is this is this company blue now reputable you have a more of a guarantee you have a larger selection things like that right and what do you think about this like alt rings where you know people are like some people are anti diamonds because they're like hey diamonds are not always ethically sourced blah blah blah blah we should do you know alternative rings that you know stand for something by using alternative materials we've seen this with alt milk we've send it with all beers are we gonna see this with alt rings what do you think maybe the difference between those things is that like you would only buy a special diamond if it were as convenient or as cheap or as good as another one like people who say they care about like it this ethically sourced i don't actually think that that many people would let their wallets it's like if something costs five thousand dollars more i don't think they would actually do that mh so i don't think that it's like that cool of a thing and i think that everyone says don't buy a big fancy diamond for your girlfriend or your if you know say were whatever and it's usually bullshit you're like whatever whatever makes her happy i'll do yeah also they were every single day which gets a lot of value so i think it's a little different than buying like a jacket or like a shirt or whatever i was gonna buy one like a cheap like re i had a budget and then i talked to ram remit my friend ram remit from i will teach of rich was dude this is the whole point of having money is to make your loved ones happy whatever they want to get it and so my budget ended up six okay well what was it tens of thousands of dollars yet ten thousand they say it's supposed to be what three months salary something like three years salary three years of salary i i three three months of salary okay i'm wanna stick with months i'm not i'm not trying to do you three years alright what do you got okay couple other random things okay so i saw this article about this idea of productivity tracking by your employer okay so everybody's still remote and you know one of the reasons people didn't wanna allow work from home was this question like our people are really gonna be working or they're just gonna open up their laptop and then go watch the simpsons and so some companies have started installing on their like employee laptops you know productivity trackers which are really like spy wear for yeah yeah you know it's your boss over your shoulder at all times and so there's a bunch of these that are out there they all say that they're growing like crazy so there's one called transparent business which is they said they grew five hundred percent so far through covid there's one called pro score i haven't looked into how big these businesses are or how they're doing but they're sort of like i never heard of them because i think it's not like this is very anti silicon valley where like i think if a tech if a tech company tried to do this i think there would be like mass backlash and they basically you know they track your you know when were you online when we offline when re idle when were you're typing when we mouse moving what websites did you visit like all these types of things and so i'm curious what is your opinion of this so i want your opinion in two ways one is as a boss who's gonna have a widely wrote team would you ever consider doing this that's question one question two is what do you think of these as like business spaces or ideas to to build in okay so i don't know how i feel let me tell you this we talked about i just pulled it up all you're talking about we talked about joe lam remember joe lam right joe monte guy in austin who buys companies and then outsource the name of his company thing into trilogy software and village capital he's multi billionaire likely he owns does different billy of the week which is his yeah thing yeah that's his everyone that's what he's known for and anyway he buys companies and he outsource a lot of the the simple programming work to india for fifteen dollars an hour and he developed software that tracks key strokes and takes a picture of the person's screen every ten minutes right that's what this does as well it does screenshots to every x minutes so what do i think of this i don't know i don't know i will tell you that as a boss like that is one of my fear is that we're not like achieving we're not getting done what we wanna get done what do you think about this like do you do i don't even know if you wanna talk about this do you feel more productive as remote or not well like for example i'm recording this on my non amazon laptop because i i assume that amazon knows everything that's going on on my laptop i just sort of assume that you know that the employer can access anything that i i do on my laptop so i use my personal laptop for personal stuff i used my work one for work stuff i would not implement this at all because i think it backfire fires so first is like the context so there's there's this game of leverage right with for most companies in america the employer has all the leverage when i talk to my cousins and aunts and they live in texas or you know north carolina or wherever they're constantly worried that they're gonna lose their job get laid off get you know in trouble with by their boss and and like you know it's like i have this many vacation days i have to give this much notice beforehand i have to clock in at this time if clock out at this time and to them the sort of silicon valley way of working where like literally we have an unlimited vacation policy which is controversial but like in theory means you could do do whatever the hell you want i can work whatever hours i want from wherever i want if i wanna change jobs they're like okay you know we just wanna retain us talent so yeah sure if you wanna switch you know how can i help you know if i say i wanna go leave and start a start up i will have their backing because the in tech companies the leverage is with the employee especially with engineers but other employees as well so the leverage here is way off which is why companies here will do your laundry and you know feed your food and have theirs this perks war because the companies want to retain talent and it's so easy for talent to just at the snap of finger go work for your competitor and earn more money and have a better job title you know you can hop around so easily here so i think in silicon valley this shit won't fly outside well hold on do you think that that leverage still exists remotely because it would with this environment i think it doesn't i think people don't wanna get fired i think we have just switched to we are an employer comes i i i don't think it's binary but i think on the spectrum it's definitely the pendulum is swinging back the other way because now the depends now the changes is oh you're the silicon valley sort of like diva engineer who's not happy with their five hundred k a year salary well guess what like i can hire your replacement in canada tomorrow because you're working remotely anyways what what do i care i'm just gonna hire the best talent now my talent pool is the whole world so that's gonna take power away from the sort of deep culture of silicon valley like today literally in slack i had a conversation with somebody who goes yeah you know after after this next stock grant i'm only gonna be making seven hundred k a year so so it's fucked i'm out i was like what they they really said that only here can they go can you say i'm only making seven hundred k year god got it's so fucked i'm out because you it's it's all relatively think that they're like broken it's under their brokers that they were making more before with their stock grants and now the company is not giving out a big fat stock grant anymore because like the company is more mature it's just need me to do that anymore did anyone say anything to that person i did i was like i was like yeah you know so sorry for your sorry for your loss but i said like you know only in silicon valley can you say my comp would just be seven hundred k it's fucked i'm out and so you know he it was just like a a joke i guess i don't know it was crazy they realized how du should they sounded yeah i mean he was saying it in private wasn't trying to like you know flex or anything but he you know yeah it was i i i think he realizes it because it's insane if if you if you say it out loud it sounds insane but anyways i guess my point is i don't think in a situation where the talent has leverage you can get away with stuff like this i also don't think this is actually the best way to help you be productive i think a better way would be to go to some like okay our system where you say look you're accountable for this key result and you gotta hit it i don't care what hours you work i don't care where where you work from i don't care what if you use google docs or if you use microsoft word i don't care about any of your how you just have to deliver outcomes and you're responsible for those outcomes and if you're consistently hitting outcomes cool you you you get more freedom more trust and if you're consistently not hitting your outcomes you're out here and i'm gonna get somebody in who is so i think that's how you make sure that people work when the remote is you set the outcomes and then you measure are they hitting them consistently or not i don't think screenshot in the screen is the way to do it let me ask you two questions the first is do you think that people in silicon valley are just p these p these yes but i think it's not what you mean so when i say that i mean they don't have courage courage to take risks to do what they believe in to do what they want to do what they say they believe in i i often find discrepancies a lot of discrepancies but you're talking about for like spoiled is kinda what you're talking about life okay so tell me what you mean you obviously that well it's like i meet these nerds who like don't know anything but they're like autistic and smart and i'm like i fucking love those people like one of my best friends is like this autistic kid who is like a genius and he's like my soul mate like i love him because he's like just like he's like well it's just like logically it makes sense to do that i'm like fuck you speak to me right and then there's other people who are like we need to have a discussion about this we all need to vote you know like if if we don't get a diversity coach in like we're quitting if right this is this is always but it's like dude you gotta understand that like you are this is a j o baby you gotta like you know you have you don't really have that many rights other than the agreement that you guys you're you and your employer have had like you don't get to vote shit you know what i mean and that kind of and that frustrate me and it makes people soft yeah i definitely think that people are soft but and and myself included because i don't go through hard times and so if you don't go through hard times you're gonna get soft over time and the hard times are like super relative it's right like the guy was like i'm only making it's seven k year i'm out of here like that's hard times to him or you know if hard times for people would be like you know they they took away the kombucha and the in the company fridge like this sucks like life got worse quality of life got worse and so i do think that silicon valley or i'll say tech companies in general have it so good we have it so good that it's easy to become spoiled it's easy to lose sight of like what real work looks like you know or how hard work can be and i shouldn't say real work looks like i should say how hard work can be because there's people out there who literally work in a sand mine and they just shovel sand all day and like that's part that could be you if the genetic lottery worked out slightly differently if you were born so was you know somewhere else or with one different gene you know like so so i think that i would agree with you that silicon valley has gone very soft i also think it makes very hard to lead a company because if you like i don't know i don't know if you experienced this at the hustle but like i'm guessing some of the things you mentioned or some of the things you've heard like oh we need a diversity coach or like hey we need to like this month you know we need to all a third bathroom that is gender neutral or whatever the thing of the day is right whatever the new expectation of how the work environment should be i need to be fully remote i need unlimited vacation i need you know career track progression whatever it is expectations rise it does make it hard and i think that the way that i'm gonna solve this in the future is when i started my company i was twenty three which my i didn't know like what i stood for or i did know but my opinion has evolved and my opinion will continue to evolve but now i a little bit more confidently know what i stand for which is treat people fairly don't take a out of bullshit like just get done do what you're saying gotta to do just shut the fuck up like don't complain to me about meaningless stuff like talk to me about like how we can actually make a difference like what i think are important things and anyway i think that i will make that clear early on what we stand for right and then you'll attract hopefully the people who resonate with that and they want to work in that environment and you will deter people who do not want that environment and then they you wouldn't be happy and they wouldn't be happy so i think that's part of it but i think you're more old school than what's allowed now so how are you gonna adjust well i don't think i am i don't know if i am mad i just don't know if people are saying it like but for example well i'm gonna the way i'm justice is i just have to face the pain i'm good gonna i'm doing it now i just have to deal with the repercussions of people not agreeing with me i'm like i'm sorry but tough this is just how it is so i gotta deal with the fallout but like what i stand for i guess is like treat people fairly be respectful focus on making a lot of money and building a huge business whereas before it was like we're gonna change the way acts is like no dude i just wanna build a huge company and i don't care like how we do it as long as it's like ethical and legal i wanna build a big business right and i think like so i'm just like una a bash i'm not like a nervous to say no nobody disagrees with that so the the controversial part will be where you're like this is a j o b baby and like we got and like yeah it's gonna be hard and shuts fuck up you're not gonna always agree blah blah blah right that's the part where like nobody nobody disagrees with let's be legal let's be ethical let's build a big business let's make a lot of money nobody would shake to head know at that it's what trade offs are required to do that sometimes well like what what let me clarify what i say shut the fuck up what i'm i didn't actually mean that i mean i listen to everyone i'm like alright let's talk what do wanna do now but there's a difference between i can vouch for that yeah there's a difference between listening and saying i agree with you let's do it yeah listen for so obey i right and so always listen i rarely obey exactly and so i'll have people i'm like we can have a discussion i'm gonna explain my opinion and i welcome you to explain your opinion that it doesn't mean we're gonna agree though but we can like hash it out and try to change each other's minds but at the end of the day if i'm the decision maker we're doing it my way and sometimes someone else is a decision maker it's like i think you're fucking crazy but i i will follow your right you're the decision maker on that it's your call you took all the inputs and i've said that i trust your judgment after you take inputs and as long as you keep taking inputs and you're operating with with clear intent i'm i'm cool even if we you know amazon has value that i like which called disagree and commit and i think that that should be like at every team i work on now i'm gonna be like by the way this is one of the values is that we can disagree what we could still need to be able to commit to going and doing the thing even if you disagree and that doesn't mean always disagree and never listen no it just means disagree and commit sometimes okay i like that the the other thing that i think is important there is like i think some people in their job they think that the company's job is to or say they act entitled in a way that makes me feel like they think the company's job is to make a happy workplace that all the employees are happy as the number one priority and the thing is every person who runs a company would want that of course but it is not the number one priority sometimes it's not even the number two priority but it usually you know it's somewhere in the top three depending on what the fate what the season of the business is and so for you it's like hey you know the normal priority is to grow this into a really big business number two is to let's say i don't know whatever may be and number three might be to get really great people and give them a great environment work so that they're happy and they're able to feel like they're making progress personally in as in in the project right and it's like but it's let's be clear it's number three it's not number one now that i've worked at a larger tech company it's very clear to me that many people feel like the number one priority should be to have a great workplace where employees are happy at sometimes at the cost of the other priorities like they complain about stuff yeah they complain about stuff but it's more like it's not the the complaint is very valid it's the underlying an of the complaint where it's like oh you're very upset that this hasn't been resolved because you think this should be resolved as the top priority this should be like resolving this should be the top priority and whatever trade offs are necessary we we make so that employees are happy and the workplace is happy and it's like well sometimes we're gonna do things that makes the workplace less happy or makes employees less happy temporarily because it's in service of this you know company objective that we yeah and i don't use the word happy with our team i i i i i i like to use the word fulfilled which is like i definitely like my logic is or what i tell people and what i believe is i wanna work on cool stuff that wins and succeeds and i don't wanna do it with cool and interesting people right that doesn't mean because i'm not happy all the time i i hate what i have to do every once in a while but i also hate like working out sometimes but it's like i like looking good naked so it's like that's the challenge and you that's that's this trade offs you make right which is like you wanna make seven hundred thousand dollars a year and provide for your family that's great we're gonna do that that doesn't mean you're gonna enjoy every second of it right and so to me it's not happy it's a little bit more about fulfillment now and in other industries that trade is very well known and and understood by all parties in consulting in investment banking this trade is understood we know what's going on alright i'm gonna be highly paid cool i'm gonna have to work my ass off okay you're gonna kinda treat me like a you know a replaceable part and i have to i have to sort of hustle to to stay cream with the crop yeah like i don't expect anything more than that whereas i think in tech companies there's so much abundance that that has changed but i don't know i should stop speaking out because we're gonna both gonna get canceled like real quick you know in fact dave port i think had a pretty interesting thing happened where somebody came out and was like he's the sketch you guys did a couple years ago was like racist well he didn't i think he also said the end word yeah i don't know i didn't actually watch i don't know what it was but there was it and like admittedly it was not like not in good taste and so he comes out and he's he does this video where he's like you know to all the haters who are trying to go through five year old footage and find stuff that we did wrong and try to cancel us it's not gonna work baby they were trying to cancel me for twenty years it's not gonna work that was a joke it back then that was that was kosher that now that wouldn't be kosher but we didn't do it now we did it back then and for you to and he was basically like you're a loser for trying to go dig this up like you can't i'm i'm the teflon don you can't cancel me and then like two days later he comes back and he says like i'm sorry you know i said that i was trying to address the haters and i was una to the haters but i realized to my own employees that was very call and to you know my black employees who felt uncomfortable and felt like i didn't own up and apologized to it i'm sorry and i thought that was a pretty interesting one where he sort of broke character in a way and again had to service i don't think he broke character i think that what he meant was he goes i agree it was a dumb joke and i i i yeah that it was really stupid of me but also fuck the kids people i i guess maybe maybe stayed in it but i you know i i was surprised to see that and i think that that's the that's the way that's the way things are going and i i think overall for the better think it's holding more people accountable to not do fucked up stuff but sometimes i do feel like it goes too far and people have to sort of censor watch themselves apologize for twenty year old things quite a bit and and i'm not sure that that's right either yeah it is a confusing time i think that your intent matters a lot though we're talking about this canceled shit so we might as well just wrap it up with this right on friday okay so there's a background which is a lot of tech people which whatever a lot of tech people particularly silicon valley san francisco tech people are really mad at media companies including new york times for being like anti business anti tech and it's been brewing they're also angry because this one in vc named biology is that a name yep tweeted in december about how corona was gonna be a huge thing and people at v laughed at him kinda laughed at him and said like these rich vcs are now wearing masks and not meeting with chinese people and are scared of this weird virus are they crazy turns out corona was real so there's this an well on thursday the ceo of away travel away the lu suitcase company did a instagram thing where she explained how she thinks that tech media people are bias and love to create outrage in order to get more clicks and a journalist named taylor at the new york times said the tweeted out something like the delusional ceo of a away is tweeting about how bad the journalists are she sounds and she's being crazy something she said something like that a very prominent venture capitalist tweet about the exact same thing right back to her but replaced the name away travel ceo with taylor the journalism from new york times right he he kind of mocked her basically saying she had said like talking about something that she doesn't she doesn't even know she doesn't even know about right when when the way he was talking about journalism she's like look at her rambling and and being hearing about something that she's she really doesn't know the first thing about and then he said the same thing about her where because she talks about tech all the time and he was basically saying she doesn't know it so she comes out she's signed go ahead she's just like you know what is this why do i keep getting attacked she first she quotes only half of it so she doesn't show that he was mocking what she said he was repeating the same words that she said about someone else he was saying about her she just took it out of context and made it look like he was just saying about her out of the blue which wasn't true but she's like look at this i'm getting attacked for no reason this guy won't stop and then she tweets ben h which is like his former boss at injuries h and she's like can you please help here and she kinda like played the like victim in that that moment and she i think she felt like the victim of like being bullied essentially then it escalated into this like weird thing on club house which i listened to it i was there i wasn't there so what happened so there's a stupid app it's not stupid but it's kind of a circle jerk called club house where roughly fifteen hundred people are invited and most of them are like elite elitist people type people i guess you could throw me in that category even though i don't wanna be i mean maybe some people think i am i'm i was there and taylor and this biology guy a little bit got into it she said something like i feel safe here and he goes oh you don't feel safe when a brown guy comes in you're racist and because of biology is sometime ridiculous around indiana or something i don't know what he is but he's not a white guy or didn't doesn't look like a white guy so now that made it even worse so it was wild i think going back and forth people pick sides half the people are like this guy is a jerk and an asshole and i'm sorry you had to deal with this taylor and then the other half of twitter replies are due dude she's gets what's coming to her and she's trying to play the victim and she's the one who's been on the attack the whole time and now she's trying to play the victim my opinion is both are true both are true yeah i i totally agree both are true and then he went further i know you saw this part where he put out a thousand dollar bounty bitcoin bounty and he said i'll give a thousand dollars to the best meme of the situation and i'll give a thousand dollars to the best legal breakdown of was it because because people recorded without consent the club house conversation post leaked it online she then referenced it and wrote about it and ask people to write about it and so he was like thousand dollars for the legal breakdown of can you it was this wire tapping can you actually record these private conversations out and and use them for your your journalist purposes or not and then she was like oh my god it's ridiculous and the whole situation is kind of ridiculous so where do you fall on this so and then i'll add one more thing i got into the mix a little bit of it when vice wrote article and there because the whole premise of this is biology says people including the new york times media companies purposely like outrage because it drives revenues and it drives clicks true and as one premise of the argument about of him against her and advice guy wrote about this saying the idea that clicks drives revenue is a fallacy and i was and i got i'm like i'm like that's that's not true guys like i'm not saying that like who's wrong who's right except for that person who said that you are wrong clicks clicks do drive revenue as matter person i'm not gonna say who's wrong you're right except for you that's yeah i mean that's just like that's just factual incorrect right i mean that's just like you you just you're so wrong i mean your your advice you guys made four hundred million dollars unless you off advertising revenue and you have someone on on your team who sole job at is to see which gets the most clicks and tell you to do more of that mean you're just wrong and also outrage drives more subscriber revenue as well so no matter what your business model is so just let's not say that because you're you're you're you're full shit but who's side of my own so i think that they're both hassle and i think that they're actually in the same group of people which is like highly educated very elite coastal people who like to smell their own farts and don't give a fuck about middle america and like are totally in their own bubble i think they're both fucking wrong and they're both right i think that the new york times and people like that definitely is our very anti business and very anti capitalism even though that they're they are in fact a tech company they are owned partially by a billionaire named carlos slim like they are what they claim to hate so i think they're hypo critical and bullshit i also think that biology it like he's also like just egg her on like she's definitely not racist i don't think this woman's a racist right and to color that is like stupid so i think that's done as well right yeah he's definitely i don't know what gas means but i think he's doing it and he's definitely bullying her and he's getting the internet to bully her yeah and you know he he can feel justified and doing it but he's definitely bullying her and he just you know that that's that are they say in bi about they go you're not wrong you're just an asshole and that's what feel about about i was like you you're you're definitely not wrong but you are an asshole yeah and the other thing that he he kind of argued for which was that he's like look these are this is called he keeps going corporate journalism because he's like they make money based off of people reading their articles they're trying to for profit for profit company they're trying to pretend they're this unbiased you know citizen journalism you know they're they're trying to present to this voice for the citizens and justice and they're not their corporate journalism that's true but he sort of says it in a way where like there's no place for that like he's like no what we need is independent what he calls personal media companies or something like that pm c's and we need personal media companies that will do that will you know report you know the that will report things that are less biased less attacking less whatever well in reality it's gonna be the same and anybody who's is the same thing that whether your personal or company you're gonna be trying to get attention you're gonna be trying to monetize it and then you're gonna do what what does both those thing yeah and what pisses me off i think is that people to say like it is corporate journalism on this and that and i'm like yeah it is i don't think that's wrong though because at the end of the day they forget that company is just made up of people organized of certain thoughts so whether they're corporate or they're on their own like it's the same person and you're gonna try and do the same stuff right and that stuff people ask this is new this is not new this we used to call this hurst media they randolph hears they say it was one of the one of the first guys to do it in reality again he's not he wasn't the first guy do it either he's called yellow journalism which was outraged rupert murdoch used to own well the way that he started in australia was is what he did was bold headlines that would say outrageous stuff and it started with the news voicing saying read all about it world war two highest death toll ever whatever right like guys this is not like something new this is hate when people back like this is like this new thing it's not new at all this is human nature it's like saying like racism is new or something it's like this will always exist and has always existed it's just a matter of how we're gonna deal with it right yeah i totally agree i think that's a hundred percent accurate i do find the whole thing entertaining i i love it too this is out this is the point guys look sean it's working again we're talking about yeah i love it i had five topics that were like you know interesting little business ideas but frankly this is more interesting to me and probably more interesting to some of the listeners even if you hate listen even if you're like i hate listening about this like there's a part of us that crave big gossip and that's why my it works and here's my my issue with this is guys why are we afraid to admit this like why are we like you you like someone called you clickbait someone called her clickbait or like she loved outraged and in my i'm like that's not bad like i don't understand that's not that doesn't have to be anything if i have an e commerce store i'm also buy bait and if i have you know a sports team i wanna be fan bait and like yeah the goal is to get people to use your product and to engage with you and to become your customers right and i'm like they each seek outrage i'm like yeah i seek outrage all the time that's why i watch like fucking the challenge on mtv or like watch youtube like watch fights on youtube or like that's why i love boxing and u seats it's like i love like people fighting it like whenever i see like a car wreck on the side of the road i slowed down and stare like can we please just like act like this is human nature and this it doesn't have to be bad there's a place for it all yeah and and either side acting like they're above at all they're both lying which is what's i always say they're just they're two groups of the same people who just like to smell their own farts like these guys are all they're they're all the the elite of the elite and like i've listened to that club house there was a bunch of injuries in horror venture capitalists or owners or wives of the owners like running running the show it's like okay like you're i get what you're saying but like you're you're also out of touch right right okay this is good sorry we didn't do more business of we got we got carried away but what you're gonna do to how about that suburban doorbell that is like a perfect sign off that is a perfect doorbell alright i gotta go sam i'll talk to you in a couple days