Austin Rief: Building Morning Brew, The Ultimate Guide to Building Newsletter Businesses, Side Hustle Ideas, & More

alright so we have austin here austin reef founder of morning brew i i i i know how big you guys are i don't know what the public numbers are so i'll let you kinda say like how how big is the company now yeah seventy seventy five million of revenue this year double digit profit margin two hundred fifty people or so and it's kind of crazy kind of a crazy store you guys started this you guys were at college right you're you're at is in michigan where where you guys with the school yeah so so at university in michigan i applied the duke didn't get in though unfortunately sorry what we and so went to michigan yeah i went do a small private condolences oh sorry i now michigan worked out well was a little cold little bit colder than duke but i i mean my my goal was to go to the biggest school i could get into other than you know ivy or duke i got in michigan and had no idea what i want to do and everyone went to finance michigan so i was oh i gotta i gotta follow the herd i was a a sheep following the herd straight into the world of corporate finance or investment banking and then stumbled upon this guy alex lieberman who was like i when you call a newsletter it was a pdf attached to an email he actually took a he made a word document he went pdf and put it to an email and that was the first newsletter so he was he was already doing it was it called morning brew no it was called market corner it was way more markets based way more finance oriented with he in college as well or he had graduated yeah so he was two years older than i was and that's a big part of our success to be honest if i was his age we probably would went out and raise venture capital so you know twenty twenty fifteen you have buzzfeed raising money vice raising money and the only reason we didn't follow that path was because i was in college and no one's gonna fund a a sophomore in college and so alex went to work at morgan stanley for fourteen months i spent this summer investment banking and was like holy shit this is miserable get me out of here and so i like alright well i got this morning bro thing i might as well do it for a couple years and what's the worst thing that happens i come back here and that was the that was the start going full time what did your nice jewish parents think about you not becoming a banker instead working on a a newsletter so my parents were actually okay with it except i told them after my junior year i said i have one more year college what if i i just don't go back what if i don't finish and the idea of them spending a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on three years of college and not finishing my senior year drove them nuts so the deal we made is if i if i graduated and they were cool with me doing morning brew for a year or two after and then fast forward you guys so it was funny right when we were sell in the process of selling you announced that you had sold like months or two months in it before us and you guys sold a portion of the business i think the majority of the business for at something like a seventy million dollar valuation in that ballpark right yeah right around there i think we were actually we were doing m and at the same time we we've been talking to some similar partners i i think we were and the reason why like sean and i wanted to have you on because we wanna talk about newsletters which every all three of us have a newsletter business but you and i have an interesting background we're like on paper we kind of hated each other like the whole time kind i hated you dude i hated you so i didn't entirely hate you i just it was hated you it was like i it was like just sports a post sports scenes where i was like i have a lot of for this person i don't know anything about their character but i'm gonna make up the story in my head to like motivate me and the reason why i wanted to do that was because we so i launched we technically launched the hustle in april april twenty thousand sixteen were you before us or after us we were twenty fifteen when we launched the first newsletter but it wasn't it was a a very small thing that so we were going like back and forth it was like the skin was like the thing and then it was you and i morning brew and the hustle and you guys were this like a new york kind of buttoned up crew i was like a little bit of a crazier person it was tech san francisco but it was like everyone kept comparing us and i remember like wanting to like crush you guys and then after we both sold alex called me and you and i became buddies and i was like oh no i actually love these guys and now at this point you i are great friends and i have a ton of respect but yeah like i wanted to crush you i didn't i didn't really hate you what what did you feel yeah look i i think it's always good for a business to had an enemy but i think in the early days our ending was the sci very quickly though we were like you know like that they're not our enemy we realized i think we both realized pretty quickly that you can't raise twenty five million dollars for a newsletter and have a good exit and so i think it was you and us and so i turned you into the enemy and i was so immature at the time right i it was my first thing out of college i knew nothing so i was like here's this guy he's so abrasive he's so aggressive like what the fuck like i was so i i wasn't principal i didn't have real values at the time and so i just saw you who are super valued right you you have strong principles very strong principles which some people love tons of people i'm sure don't like and i was like this guy just so abrasive and i learned to love that about you but the time it just it rubbed me the wrong way and i was like we're gonna make this guy your enemy and we're gonna crush this guy and i used to get mad because everything that i was bad at you were good at and everything that i was good at i thought you guys were bad at and i'm like shit they're just stealing all my idea ideas guys for my ads and i'm running they're stealing all my content ideas and then i would see how you guys operate and i was like no we gotta have all these salespeople people just like the like i remember i was i i was at your office and i and you were talking about morning brew and you were like i thought you would just hate them and be like they suck because i feel like that's how we used to just talk about most people at most arms so was just like oh my god they suck and especially one that's doing what you're doing then it's like oh i already want you to suck so i'm gonna say that and instead you were like god why does this email look better than ours and you would just like show it to the whole team but you're like look at this why does this look so much better than our email look at what they do at the top like god there's so like you're just like they're so much better at that you know like the the formatting or the cleanliness or like the the brand that they are doing at the i remember at the top of the email and i was like wow he just respects the the actual like craft so much that he can't even hate him fully he's like they're doing good at these three things sam i'll give you a story never told you which is you know there was a time where i thought our copy was much better than yours our editorial and then there was a time where i thought you guys passed us right and alex in particular was man mckay about this he would print out morning brew in the hustle every single morning got just go line by line we'd sit down line by line and we'd be like that line's better no our lines better know that and we go line by line and general some of some of the early morning for employees they really hated share because when you wrote a story that we wrote and when yours was better and alex not yours with better buying people are pissed they're were like a revolt in the morning grew office one morning because people were like no ours is better and i think ultimately it wasn't better or worse right it was just tailored towards different people but i mean yeah we printed out your newsletter every day in read through it it i don't know six months nine months like we were just so focused like i've never been as hyper focused as i was in twenty eighteen on us writing the best newsletter growing the best newsletter and selling it like i woke up every day right gross sell right gross sell like we wrote it in the wall and at eleven am every single day we had the great wall of opens and we track our open rate and write it down the wall and we had that for probably two years running every day what was our open rate and your strategy was to our our our strategies were they diver and they were different so we were gonna launch we were gonna stay in the space and vertical and launch subscription services and all this other stuff you guys launched multiple different newsletters which met from my eyes you grew your revenue quicker i personally hate that business because i don't like advertising that much but you grew your revenue way faster than us well i think you did like we if we were one year behind you i think we were tracking one year by so the year we sold i think we could have done eighteen or twenty million dollars in revenue which is around you were i think the same year so we like tracking perfectly which is really interesting but you went this horizontal route where you launched multiple multiple newsletters which route do you like looking back look i mean it's tough to say we took the route the wrong route but i also think it's what we had to do right we didn't have the choice you had because our content was more general business right you wrote with an edge with the tone you were targeting entrepreneurs or maybe like account executives who wants to become entrepreneurs and so you had way more opportunity to launch a trends or to launch a hustle con for us we thought you know a general morning brew subscription wasn't gonna work a general mori brew event wasn't gonna work the the tone wasn't specific enough the the target customer wasn't specific enough but we fell in love with this b business which i know both of you gotten a little bit of a twitter shit when you when you spoke about the b or then you know industry dive but we i felt love of that business i'm like wow if you can get in front of retail professionals and hr professionals and we have them in our newsletter and it was a craziest business where we launch a newsletter and any break before we even hired the writers because we pre sell you know an advertiser like let's call like a b b saas company into one of these newsletters and so i know there's better or worse i think you're our opportunity was easier to get to a hundred million of revenue yours was bet easier to get let's it's call like a a billion dollar company right because you could have subscription multi revenue stream much easier it just was gonna take another you know eight to ten years that's great i'm happy i'm learning that now after i sold it i'm happy i got to see it because i just got to copy both of your playbook and do that do it for the milk road like all three of us were able to win at the same playbook mine was the easiest path of all because i could just text you guys be like hey think about doing your thing but for crypto what do you think it was like yeah i think it's gonna work let's do it did did the playbook work perfectly sean you think it has so far right we basically less than a year we built the number one like the biggest daily crypto email it's profitable it's you know seven figures it's i don't know was like it worked as well as one could expect bootstrap it you know in our spare time like that's like as good as i could have expected that to go dude that's why these businesses are awesome because people don't realize that's why i always hate when people say if you wanna start it over again what would you do i'm like do the same thing like it works it consistently works i know austin you're way more like pessimistic you got you're like i'm pretty paranoid you're way more paranoid and i know you say like oh it can't work again and i'm like well no man i think it i forgot like a can and you have like a framework around you have like a lot of opinions around email newsletters give us that and put a context in milk crowd like when i told you i gonna do that or you saw was gonna do that what'd you think and did that fit your framework for what you thought might work or was that a maybe an outlier what what what was it yeah so it it perfectly fits the framework so i'm pessimistic on relaunch the next morning brew a general business four million person email but basically i split up newsletters into three categories and one are the editorial newsletters right you have you your subs you're you're packing mccormick full newsletter maybe two thousand words maybe ten thousand if you're some of these writers that's like category one right category two is what we did aggregation right and sam and i kinda went more general general business went for scale and then after that you kind of have like the let's call it morning b x right where you you have still have that aggregation of summaries but you're more niche right and maybe the tam is smaller but you think because of your tone and because of the way you cover it you can have a larger percent of that tam reading your product which sean i think what you're doing and the third is more of like your classic hey i'm gonna give you five links your five bullet friday or things like that i think the biggest opportunity is sean what you did which is more b x you find a growing industry and you ride that tail wave and you just own that and build a brand something really distinct in one of these you know niches if if x is finance or x is something that's be more b to b or or like you know a professional you know something that's a job title then x works better than if x is you know fly fishing or or or you know basketball or something like that yeah so i think you're gonna go consumer route right target consumers it's gotta be high dollar it's gotta be you know the newsletter for ferrari owners or the the newsletter for rolex owners right it's something where people spend you know hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on this b2b is great as well that's the other place i would go and so you were kinda like i call maybe pros summary right that was the best of both worlds you get hit on both worlds you got the consumer oriented readers and also the people work in the crypto industry did you agree with our i know that i and we actually did or i'll say it myself i did sound like a douche bag when i was talking about industry drive i didn't need to like phrase it that the way that i did but when we were talking about industry drive you know they're a six hundred million dollar company that mostly is a newsletter business and our criticism towards the b industry was like the content pretty wack do you agree with that that assessment like do still think there's a lot of import opportunity to build really big b2b media companies yeah i just think you another the way sean did right which is go the complete opposite route right so they're they're pretty dry they have a standardized process they go in every single vertical look i think they're business model simple but it's not easy i don't think what they did was easy at all but it's very simple the playbook is very well defined there's no crazy tech they're not you know building some ai machine learning thing it's they create great content they resonate they sell ads into it but the way to compete i think is to treat b2b to like consumer right to treat them like people like you know the milk grow does why is it not you're saying it's simple but not easy why it that what do you mean it's not easy i mean i i think to scale across all those verticals right to your point add businesses are pretty tough right and so you take on a lot of costs and you can't you can't mess up right because if you you go wrong in verticals you have bunch of writers and salespeople and and the thing about media businesses even when they're profitable the difference between twenty percent profit margins and losing twenty percent is way is is way like it it's easier to to flip that because of all your fixed costs it's not saas don't have locked in you know you're a b saas company you've locked in a hundred or a hundred ten percent of your revenue the next year because of renewal every day with ads it's another grind you gotta go sell more ads and so it it's not easy you know the ad business is an absolute grind we found this guy i'm gonna give a shout out here his name's i don't know i think he's they you pronounce it volta and he's from the netherlands and he i think he's at school right now i don't know what happened but i did a video i thought okay maybe maybe we'll start doing youtube content i did this video when luna collapsed and i did this video like i lost a bunch of money luna i did this video i thought it was gonna be like i remember i was like viral whatever we came out late we came out like three weeks after the news so that was kinda stupid so it didn't didn't go super viral but one good thing came of it which was this kid this kid on twitter was like hey your thumbnail sucks for for your youtube thing like it should be like this or like this or like this you did this thread and i was like yeah you're great i don't know if i'm wanna gonna do any anymore youtube videos but like you wanna just come in our slack because i just want i like what you just did that was like helpful and it was quick and like you know he's like sure yeah i love them be amazing i love the moo and so he joins our slack first of we're like what do are we doing with this guy like what the fuck is this guy like i'm imagine actually like a two person meeting and i just invite this third guy from the netherlands to a meeting you'd be like like it's sky gonna talk with why is he here ed for two months no one knew why he was there but then something amazing happened we were like we need to sell ads like for the next month or whatever and it was like nobody wanted to do it it was just like do we have to like it's gonna be a pain in the ads sucks it just sucks to sell ads so i wish should hire sales guys it's like even hiring a sales guys kind of a shitty task okay let's procrastinate a little bit and along the way this guy had been wanting or this guy had been always just messaging us ideas like because he's like i don't know he's like into slack so he's like trying to be productive so he would just nonstop message ideas of things we could do and it got point where ben was just sort of like dude guys like you know incessant like you won't stop messaging and it's like it's at first it's a good but like nobody can handle this volume of ideas like this is crazy and then he's like i i he's like you gotta do something about this and i was like okay i'll i'll i don't know i'll talk to him or i'll kick him out of slack and i was like hey what if we just point the machine gun like outwards instead of like right now the machine gets shooting us with ideas what if we just made him like sell the ads and he just bothered the hell out of everybody else and so that's what we did and this guy is the single handedly crushing mil road ad sales through the crypto bear market like we are fully sold out for months on end which is one guy just one kid who's not even twenty years old just absolutely pill the market and advertisers will privately dm maybe be like y i shared this guy's name with our sales team because i was like this is how you sell like this guy is relentless and i was like wow that was that was just like an incredible i don't know like incredible thing he is so impressive dude let's talk about that real quick ad sales ad sales suck austin they suck what i learned getting into the hustle i i did you sell i sold our first ads i think i got us i sold like the first maybe hundred thousand dollars worth of ads and then in order to scale we had a hire a sales team and they would show me like the conversations that they are gonna have i'm like there's this conversation will never work like you're using all this jargon and you're wearing like these like buttoned up plaid shirts and like these brown leather shoes like you guys look like weeds like this is never gonna work and it worked perfectly nobody wants to go skateboarding with you right now yeah you're not ready guys want you i was like dude it was like a oh you're like you look like your name's todd or kyle like this is not gonna work and it's like my name is tom fucking worse yeah yeah it it works you're you're you're not cut out your person is not cut out for that the the media buying world did you do it you're well no so yeah and the early days we bought it right but we we we sold all direct response ads right it was casper mattress it was a way luggage it was saying so hey by by your placement here you're gonna get three hundred clicks and three percent of convert you're gonna make a thousand dollars will charge eight hundred as we've grown though i think there's another difference between us we were in new york city and open up this whole world that i had no idea about which was the world of of media buying and these big ad agencies and they have huge budgets right we're not talking about a hundred grand from casper we're talking about five million dollars from the biggest brands in the entire world and it really is a black box that people who aren't in and i think it's one of those things where it's a black box intentionally so people can't get in right finance is the same thing every year there's new term within the ad industry or finance just to keep people on on the side crazy it's crazy and it's like not based in logic or fact it's based on relationships and like it's so weird it's like i have to realize that this person this lady i'm trying to get to buy ads she just has to spend this twenty million dollars this quarter and she just wants to find somewhere to place it where she won't get fired that was such a weird feeling yeah i mean the idea of like media budgets right hey they if they if they don't use it they lose it and so you're incentivized to spend money it's it's it's interesting and it's something that we learned again by hiring people in new york which i think was a big difference between us and you you had a a lower cost more like inside sales team a really efficient one right you took that route we didn't take that route went these big brand dollars and and i think both routes work it depends what you're what you're looking to sell we just took that route and say hey we're gonna we're gonna dive right in this black box and we're gonna learn all about it we're gonna get a million now i mean one of our first advertisers discover gave us a million bucks i was in college i'm a senior in college living in my f house right like beer cans everywhere and i get an email from the cmo of discover like here's an rfp i'm like what the fuck is in forever like what are you talking no clue i open it up and it's like hey give us media plans for like half a million a million bucks right for a million dollars she could own the company seven times over the company was worth a hundred grand and here's this woman asking for a million dollar rfp and you we just we learned it but it it really is relationship what how did you how did you justify that like how do you like if if if if am says we're gonna spend five million dollars this year be real do you actually think that's gonna help them like sell more shit yes so i i i do right we do a lot of brand lift studies and things like that right it's different right it's not we're not no one's trying to you know like lexus for example we're car company and lexus doesn't how many brand lived studies did you do we used to do that and i'd be like like the fuck is a brand lived study like that i are you kidding to me tough what the hell is a brand live study i don't know what the hell this is or we would do all this other stuff like an rfp like we had been doing for like six months i was like hey guys alec like at this point i'm a little bit too afraid to ask but what the hell at rfp i don't know what this stuff means didn't know what any of this stuff it's so challenging if you don't work in the industry and then they like they talk about agencies and i'm like wait what the hell it is an agency why don't we just go straight to the brand like the stuff from from a small business owners perspective all of this stuff is crazy and efficient and stupid now that i've been at a big company hubspot i understand i'm like okay i i get like these guys are having to like give out a billion dollars of marketing like now i i i understand a lot more but when you're just a ten person company you're like do you guys realize this market study shit doesn't work like this brand study that's bullshit right laura like you're gonna give me twenty thousand dollars to write this article it took me like twenty minutes to do it like so it doesn't make sense when you're small yeah but you know people are people are buying the audience they're buying the their relationship with with you they're not buying you know purchase or things like that and so you know i i think at scale when you get the four million subscribers if you can change the perception of half a million or a million people and have make them because of a marketing campaign have a you know ten percent of people have a higher perception of of credit card x is programs like that is really valuable when your visa or your mask or your american express and you spend a billion dollars like that's so much money how do you deploy a billion dollars of marketing spend you go through agencies and then that's how it all happens sean and i are really good i think at starting stuff we we've got pretty good vision where we can spin things up and get them to like a million in revenue pretty quickly the thing that i was always en of you because my it's a it's a fairly big short i think i have is you're just so good at i don't know exactly how to explain it you've got this like almost private equity like ability to like look at numbers and be like oh the margin here is shitty and i'm like i've never used that word margin in my life but you'll like talk about like the margin here and like if you just change that by like ten percent probably by doing this your outcome is gonna be like this this and this like you just have this really good operational ability you're also really good at saying like well if just improve this this and this and only focus on that then in six months i think your outcome will be this you're really good at that and you're really good at that at a very young age how did you figure out how to do that how did you learn how to do that and and have that insight and have that ability and also have that faith and like well if you just do this and this the outcome might be this this and this in eight months yeah i mean so i got an undergraduate business degree and i always used to shit on undergraduate business secrets i'm like what a complete waste of time like those four years were so dumb but as i look back it really did give me a pretty good overview of what it takes to to run a business not actually the day to day of running a business but like what is accounting i took like seven accounting classes or i don't know maybe five those were actually really valuable to be able to really dive deep into a p and l to real and my summer spent an investment banking to to understand what's the financial model what drives the model those things that within the context of finance like yeah yeah know they're okay when the context of running a business was super helpful to understand what levers you need to pull but the other of the flip side is i looked to use three years ago and i went forward we knew each other or maybe even two years ago and i was like both of you was like i hate these guys because they're so good at going zero to one they're so good at coming up with ideas like i'm the opposite right i i'm not an ideas guy i can't come with ideas but i do think it is the ideas there we're and sex here to do what we do you know listen there's no doubt about that just definitely like dude one what would you remind you know we all we need to like partner because zero to one is cool but that like one to a hundred million of years is is pretty fucking cool too yeah how about you guys take things you get them off around you take him to three employees and a million dollars of revenue and i'll take him from one to a hundred and we can just pair up and just every came about his margin and he he thought i said margarine he brought some butter dude like wait like i didn't understand lot we know for all we know the the the hustle was either a billion dollar company or worthless sam has no idea yeah well i like i remember when we were negotiating to sell and like there's was just all these things that people were giving me advice on and i'm like man i just didn't even think about that like it's just and i actually know a lot of people that are really successful like we're talking billion dollar successful and they know so little about operations and there's a lot of people like that like who are just they're good at hiring like richard branson i think he famously said he's like dude i didn't know what a p and l was until we hit like hundreds of millions of revenue i know how to read it and i think same thing which is super cool so awesome you what i like that you said on the operations side like sam saying is like you when you were talking earlier you were like you know write gross sell what you we wrote that on the wall we woke up every day and said write gross sell we had the greatest been so good at that those are the things that like we i used to do this so such like similar like we literally we had the wall but not with no road actually but this is like kinda of my earlier startups ups and monkey friend i remember sam you probably remember this when people used to come in like we would always have like all this shit on the walls and like these sayings and these posters like this ind thing the ind nation and and i i always felt like whenever i would meet founders one of the highest predictor of success was do they even know what the main thing is and it sounds like a stupid question but for a lot of founders they didn't really understand what the main thing was for their business they didn't know their business version of r sell okay and even if they understood like that that's good of generic okay what you gonna do with that they didn't understand to translate that into the great wall of opens is a number we're gonna write down every day we're gonna look at it and if it's bad we're gonna do something about it and if it's good we're gonna like double down on that and that's what daily work is is around this one number and so it was like i remember we had these founders in in in the office and they would be like i'd be like alright what's the you know how many you do customers you guys get today like what's revenue and they have to like oh yeah let me check and they would like at first they didn't have a dashboard they're like going into the database like bro you haven't app built a easy way to know this number and then they then finally they built that and then they always had to check and i was like how do you not know why am i asking this question like it's three pm one of y'all two should have asked this question by three pm like every day this is crazy and they just didn't do it and i was like these guys are gonna fail because they don't have to keep the main thing the main thing is that something that you see or like did consciously like where where'd you get that because that wasn't obvious to be right out of college but sounds like you got it right right away i can find this client in full have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets serve doing databases hubspot grow better yeah that i mean for us i i mean it's almost an insult right we were we people like why aren't didn't you do this why aren't you do why aren't you go into video we were too dumb to do that like we end we're like video how the hell do you make a video we can barely get our newsletter out i mean there were days where we we finish the newsletter like two am we'd be coding the thing ourselves and so i think it was partially you know a little bit of foresight also partially a forcing function you know we just looked at we're like if we do these things we will get here and we looked at the math and we're like everyone's telling us we're crazy but if we grow subs fifty thousand dollars every or fifty thousand subscribers every single month and our costs don't change we're gonna go from fifty thousand monthly revenue to seventy five to a hundred to one twenty five and by end of this year we're gonna be at a million subs doing a million dollars of revenue a month and i tell that to investors and people they'd be like doesn't make any sense i'm like i don't know what to tell you like i'm just looking at the excel and people could i mean we spoke to investors and they were like what do you mean your business only has a hundred thousand dollars of cost i'm like it's people it's growth marketing and it's an the that's it it's always we spend money on what was that last line i don't even know what that last line is email it's like provider email service provider where you sell through oh esp p okay i think i was like p i what the hell sp okay yeah but if it it's if it's one of those things where we're like it was just when you boil it down and numbers and run it in an excel model it's like so simple and people these investors are like well like you're not accounting for this and that i'm like it's all bullshit like none of that means anything think i'm just trying to make money like i just fine they also did some scrappy stuff i remember like didn't you get your first i don't a few thousand emails just by like standing in a classroom but i i think we may have we may have broken to come the law to get our first like thousand people out you'd have a piece of paper and be like hey just right to now we we we wouldn't let him walk out so we go in the beginning of a lecture these e econ one zero one lecture like a thousand people and i hate in public i still do but i hated public speaking and i was like look if i'm going to this lecture hall and i'm a talking from a thousand people i better get every damn email and so what i would do is i'd speak in front of these people and then i walk around you know i the teacher let you speak or you would just stand there yeah i speak no no the teacher will let us speak because there's there's this thing called michigan times so you actually had ten minutes in between each class so if the class started at ten and actually started at ten ten and so at ten o zero five i get up there i'd pitch you on pitch them one morning brew and then i'd basically print out excel document and i walk around i was just stand in front of people and just stare them in the eyes until they gave me their email and i sit the back of the class and type every email in and i'd be like shit alex that an a or a c or an e he'd like who cares put them all in and we've had like every like six perm of every single email and that's how we got to like ten or fifteen thousand in michigan and then we're like do you have a friend of penn state i have a friend of penn state let's do this at penn thing let's do it at miami let's do it at nyu and next thing you know like fifty thousand people across the the country college students reading morning brew are your parents wealthy did you grow up wealthy i'd say middle class upper middle class but what's interesting so i up in the suburbs at baltimore and like i didn't know i thought i knew wealth and then i moved to i would in michigan i and i met people from la in new york and i moved to new york and i saw people from new york and i never saw that kind of wealth and to me that was inspiring that was exciting because i can't for again there's like i'm very well off fight everything i needed but you know i know people i met people a school who are flying private plans i know what a private plane wants you got rich pretty young right like when do you guys sell your you're you you're pretty young right now i think you guys sold it what twenty six or something yeah ending twenty five well the reason hold on real quick the reason i asked was because like you've got this like this immigrant hustle and before i knew you i stereotype you is this like oh everything's been given to this rich kid like and and and hearing this story i'm like oh no these guys were like just as gritty as i was for sure sometimes more yeah i mean alex has his own story about you know his family and and his dad passed away and so he was i mean i learned so much from alex about hunger like alex again he broke things down the same way i did alex would be like hey you know i'd be like alex we need a hundred advertisers this year i be like i don't know how we're gonna do it we have zero he goes i know exactly how do it i'm a go linkedin and i'm not gonna sleep until message a thousand companies and we'll get a ten percent reply rate i'd be like you're gonna message a thousand companies he's like well isn't that what you need to do to get to a hundred hundred advertisers i like yeah but that sounds crazy he goes well let's start working and we just like you sit there drink beer and we work and just you know crank out pulled dms the head of i mean i must know the head of growth at every new york city direct to consumer company because alex incessantly emailed them and we would like we would laugh at the response like we would get excited once someone respond to be like hey alex this is your ninth email like you gotta stop following up like number eight was good but nine you you passed it so yeah i we both had that hustle what did it feel like bet the back what sean was saying you're twenty five and you i don't know how much were you made but let's just say eight figures what's that feel like when you're twenty five fucking dope yeah i mean so it was it was very cool it's great so so it's so it's interesting right i i got the wire to what the the sum of money i was it was during covid so i get this the like listen this job to position on one hand i just made a boat load of money more money than you know i thought i'd ever make right on the other hand i'm living in my childhood bedroom sitting next to my parents as the wire hits my account and i was like what are you gonna do now i was like i don't know if my mom's cookie like meatloaf mom make me breakfast yeah it was those anti anticlimactic thing ever it was unbelievably psycho should just move into the master bedroom yeah like i don't know remember dad this shit's mine no but i i think look i i i think getting a quick win early and lower or a win early in life is so important right just having that swag that confidence that brand allows me to do so much that i wouldn't have been able to do otherwise what but get into any room i can get in touch with anyone right what are the opportunities do you think you can i mean again like get into any room right so meetings investing what what are some what are some cool rooms you got into i mean again like it's the same things that i think you guys are you you guys also have a wins right i don't think anything is is that well i don't like to leave my house and then sam's only interested in like people that are like this guy's the best axe throw in you know the country and he's like super pumped about it i'm like i don't think you needed to like you know pull your your you know rich guy card to get in touch with him but i feel like you i don't know like like have you met leo d cap i feel like he might have just bumped to leo d cap somewhere that i feel like that's more your in new york well so so i i bumped into justin bieber in the bahamas which was pretty cool but no i mean like the weekend we had with with a what's his name mister beast and and austin was cool spent a weekend with kid rock on his rant yeah tell me that was pretty sick what was that like i mean he is a a unique unique character i again this is all forward to him so i mean i in fact checked this but i'll assume he's telling the truth he told me he's the only person to play at both president obama and president trump's all inauguration he played it both and he knows both super well he's close to both and he has this this he lives in this huge ranch outside of nashville right i went there it was my friend his name shane he works in tech he's good friends of kid rock kid rock obviously music guy and shane put together ten people in tech kid rock ten people on music we go to his ranch and i mean you get there and it's like out of a movie right you walk in and kid rocks bats is to me he's got a cigar stepping out of his mouth he's got a shotgun and he's just shooting clay pigeons and the whole weekend was out of a movie right his studio unbelievable we pulled all lighter together just telling stories about eminem and m i mean he's a is really really cool he's a a lot of people don't realize this but kid rock got famous right before cds went down and he's one of the best selling artists of all time and i i it would surprise me if he's probably worth two or three hundred million dollars because he was famous when cds were eighteen and twenty one dollars and so like cool it's wild so now though i think he's a new source of wealth so he owns again this is what i i've been told he owns the most popular borrower in all of nashville and whereas most of the other ones like luke bryant has one and a bunch of other country singers they just licensed their name to the bar right and they make a couple percent i think kin rocks like a fifty fifty owner probably makes two million bucks a month no i've heard more really like it's approaching i've heard and again i know this true i've heard it's big big money you know high high tens of millions you know just crazy dude the one of the best things about our companies and like the culture that us three have kinda built with our friends because we kinda like got into this media game a little bit early and i don't know about you austin but when the hustle was starting there wasn't that many people who we could look at and be like well let's just do what they do but different they're like i remember i told this one media guy who i'll tell you afterwards he's the founder of a multi billion dollar media company like here's what i'm doing it goes bro this will never make more than two million dollars a year in revenue and this other person who i who i'm not now good friends with was like dude what do you talking about this i'm like it didn't matter just a small screen who cares like it if you're an email or on a website it didn't matter the math shows x y and z and so we had a hire like twenty four year olds who like were promising but like and then we had to learn about it as we grew and be but because of that both morning brew the hustle and the in the crew that now i mean sean's great at this as well we've we've done a really cool job of like finding smart inexperienced people who now have gone on to do a lot of really cool stuff and that makes me really really proud to like see like this crew that we've all built and so there's like the hustle crew the morning brew crew and then sean was like the hustle thing now he's got his own thing have you noticed that like we all have this little like army of people who have like been through like this like self created like training camp it it's kinda neat right yeah a hundred i mean it's it's we in the early days we could not get people to work with us who didn't wanna be entrepreneurs and the pitch was simply like hey we're starting a business you'll be in on the ground floor right you'll see what it's like and that's that's all you get like you know we didn't have for the first year and a half i'm i was so cheap for the first year and a half of morning brew you didn't get a company computer you had to bring your own computer to work dude that was famous because i'm facebook i would put hey i'm buying i'm buying laptops does anyone have a max for sale for five hundred dollars no dude we were not dropping any money on company you viewed we didn't have health care in the early as you got nothing you got i mean and we we we couldn't afford it because i was so against taking venture capital i was like we're gonna make every penny count one more story fridays at three o'clock we'd all go pencils down work with stop because we had a referral program we sent out stickers and t shirt to that whole thing that you know i'm sure we've all seen but yeah a packet we had no we know packing and so we'd sit down we'd like wheel in that we were c into our office and we can conveyor you know we we do like assembly line the first person would would like open the envelope the next person would stick the sticker in there the next person would lick them the next person would put the the the label on for like three or four hours from like three pm till seven pm of fridays that's all we do we just pack envelopes of shit well you're one of your early guys tyler dan has gone on to start high which is a really cool company he he's in like a really good entrepreneur he's pivoting or iterating really quickly and then i've got a couple people i've done that and then like it it's it's just cool to see like these people who are young and not dumb but like just young and like inexperienced go on to like build cool shit and then like your ex people are now at other newsletter companies and then sean has hired a couple of my ex people or and probably it seems like a couple of your ex people and it's like this inc thing which at first i would be jealous i'm like whoa what the hell why are they working with this person but now i'm i'm like oh this is awesome man like we've created this like tiny little industry of of newsletter nerds and it's actually quite cool yeah i love yeah i think it's really cool and i think there's me so much more value create i think what tyler's doing at bee behind is amazing i think what i've been so impressed with him is like the the maturation from the morning b is of you know it's like six of us and he's a little bit of everything the way he's able to scale himself and scale that team is amazing and so it's really and trunks is the same way like what trunks done is incredible and there's i mean there's a ton of example since it's really cool to see do regret selling no that's that's you answered that quickly even though like not element limit it so you sold part of the business what do you think the the entire business is gonna sell for in the future hundreds of millions i think many multiples of what we sold the first half for but we structured the deal in a way that i thought was great right i mean the ability to have life changing money if anyone has the option like i always think it's good to take half through chips off the table and maybe i'm biased because i did that and and it's worked but i thought that was really important but i still have enough upside where i'm excited right it's it's not like a a tiny earn out that people sign where it's like ten percent the deal it can you know it can be really really meaningful and that drives me that keeps me excited it's it keeps me on the hunt i love the company i love the people we work with i love the executive team but i would i i i mean during covid or during i i i went have slept the night and i just i sleep very well at night knowing that like i have my my nest and so what you do with money drew and cool with it or you touch it right away what that money hits the bank or at your parent's house what it what happened to that money over the next i don't know how long it's spent like a year or two yeah so i haven't i say in terms of ever like yeah like make a slurry purchase there was nothing out there that was that excited about buying so i buying a car on which expensive i didn't to buy like a a mercedes i bought an acura right nothing crazy i died my or i i tried yeah a car yeah pre owned acura my dad it wasn't f owned and brand new twenty twenty two sports mode sports edition ate tech ata tech air conditioning as air conditioning what why or you really do have that immigrant mentality but i think we need to get you like a twenty three and meat test i i feel like there's something going on here you got too much immigrant energy i love it no but i mean i i i increased my rent four to five times i live in a great apartment i went on an amazing vacation last summer you know i i actually love i know you guys know ram ramirez state here or seth i'm not up pronounce last name but like that idea of like your rich life and spending on because i mean lifestyle free is real totally that is real and so like look i spend money on the things that i find interesting and that i like and i love traveling and staying at really nice hotels and spending a ton of money on business class flights and things like that i like living a nice apartment but like i live in new york city what am i do dropping another fifty can of car that sits in a parking lot three hundred and sixty one days a year it's a complete waste of money it's just stupid and and know i morgan hell actually tweeted this and i read this too in wilson smith's book he has a great quote he was talking about fame and becoming famous and the quote was something like becoming famous is awesome being famous is cool and losing any famous horrible and i feel the same exact way about money right i feel the same way and so i have no desire to like spend money on things i don't actually care about i don't wanna i don't wanna lose my money because i can you know change the a to a you know an am or whatever on a mercedes so i spend money though i i on things i actually care about so i can make sure i maintain my wealth what are you invest in or do you just are you conservative or are you aggressive like what's the pie chart of like of the hundred percent where did where did the money go yeah so i probably took like eighty five ninety percent of it and put it into very very boring stuff right s and p five hundred or or vanguard like target date funds like twenty sixty five or something like that right because this yourself or you hired like a wealth person i hired a team and it's a good thing i did if not i would went off the rails right and then i put you know five maybe seven percent in crypto right and i put another five percent venture investing right but the vast vast majority is in really boring real estate s p five hundred and like bonds right but like really boring shit nice let's talk about some non newsletter stuff so you got a bunch of ideas when we were hanging out at at camp m m you were telling about like this thing you're doing and this thing you're doing i was like this guy guy's like way more dynamic and interested in a whole bunch of different things what are some ideas that you think would be cool to share yeah so i'll throw out a bunch of ideas i have but one general framework i think people should think about is when you're in shitty economic times like we're going into now i think the the framework you should use as you should look to save companies money or earn individual's side income right before companies money didn't matter right capital was abundant so companies they were all about just grow grow grow right how can you help me grow it's a one eighty now you know people were trading their money for others people's other people's time right now they're trading time for money and so you know if you can help companies preserve money you can i think build really really great side hustle so a few ideas right i think it's like what's old is new and then there's a bunch of agencies i think it'd be really interested to start right now one is outsource talent i knew nothing about the outsourced talent game i recently became a c owner in a business it's a really interesting business called oceans they found talent in sri lanka right really cool talents in sri lanka where they've us graduates come to tech startups work there really interesting and i think there are ways right they have a unique advantage going this sri lanka which we don't really have to talk about but i think there are companies who were hiring a full time copywriter writer let's call it or a full time you know marketer and they probably need them for twenty five thirty hours a week twenty twenty one screw it right we'll need them at some point i think now companies are really questioning f right do you need a full time higher and so you can create these niche marketplaces and i'm getting investment opportunities for them all the time and they're just not venture scale but you bootstrap a marketplace let's call it like a content marketing agency or content marketing marketplace for b b companies right these stocks are down ninety ninety five percent they're trying to drop f but they still want content right we all know how valuable own the audience and content is and building that marketplace helping them find people i think simple services like that are gonna come back into v and be very very profitable what's that company where the founder got trouble for not converting the the stock converting the convertible notes but it was a marketplace for developers and it like bootstrap its way hotel practically it don't top tell so top tell they got in trouble because they only raised like eight hundred thousand or a million dollars but they didn't convert the the the the the the note or ever so was controversial but they basically have bootstrap it to this point to like north of a hundred million in net revenue and so these marketplaces are like can be they could be pretty freaking powerful and seem they seem hard to get off the ground but they don't seem that hard if you already working in the in in the industry and it's a super niche a niche topic because people ask me all the time ago go hey i wanna hire writers who should i hire and i'm like i don't know man it's hard i don't know who you should i hire yeah yeah i mean the one the one i i'm now a kona and that's gone from zero to seven figures to arr in like eight months right you've a very specific target customer that's an unique talent gross or is that just margins are no no well now both right both are seven figures arr are that's crazy yeah and then what's the name marshall from marshall h he did shepherd what's the you url the thing right it's same same business and i i it seems like he's scaled that to high seven figures in like less than a year it seems from the outside yeah yeah i think they're are a bit different right ours is i think there's is more like strictly ea the one we have is more you you know you you've people in finance people in operations what's interesting about sri lanka is they have big four accounting firms right so you can poach people not just from local businesses but from people been trained by ernst young and and deloitte and so it's an interesting an interesting demographic to go into yeah i love that one i think that's a great one what are what are some other like you know help business save money help you the other one you said is help individuals earn side money what's a what's an example of that yeah so here here's one i think interesting right so you built morning brew for crypto right i know a lot of people spoken about this but i don't think anyone's really built the brand yet i think morning brew or the hustle for ai is gonna be huge but how's that feel by the way a thing you you're just like calling sean the morning brew blank it's okay it's okay we did kick your ass in crypto i mean it's okay it's that that happened don't you we can just let it go though we could tell we could take a collective breath i just let it go if you if that would help no no i mean again you guys did a really great job i thought that was awesome and i think someone's do the same thing in ai right into the bootstrap version of this is to do what you did right the ai newsletter right down the fairway have a unique tone integrate yourself into the audience the way i think take it to the next level is the last three months thousands of entrepreneurs have all started tinkering one little ai side projects right and they all have fifty a hundred k of arr and i've been reach out to all these founders like you know different little tools right are not real big businesses they're all side hustle right i went home for thanksgiving i asked all my french from home my family hayley have you guys been playing around with the chat gp have you been playing around and they're like what in the hell are you talking about right and so clearly it's the same customer for all of these different things so i think this is opportunity for the ai for morgan brew to start a little tiny capital or a little holding company where you can start to invest them buy these businesses right give a and off ramps these founders who built these fifty or hundred or a hundred fifty k arr businesses and start cross promoting them bundling marketing them you write reviews for your little ai tool and then you promote it and instead of having ad advertising which again sam has spoken about how it's difficult you're promoting all your products you have this portfolio of ten twenty thirty little ai tools and maybe each one is half a million or a million of arr but altogether you you can get you get pretty big pretty quickly that one seems harder to be i i feel like like i like the idea but i'm like okay realistically if i did that i feel like i would i like ideas where the idea is so good my execution can be like a seven out of ten and i still win because but this is his thing man this is his thing he he execute some of these things really well yeah i don't think it'd be that hard i i'm telling you i've been talking to a bunch of these like these founders these a little ai side projects and i've been i'm like what are you doing with it like i the i think it's hard is not because you can't roll them up we can't buy them i think it's hard because all it's like the lin effect right so when something's been around for three months and it's at fifty k mr r and it seems great like you don't know if that thing's gonna be around three months from now because the next model will come out or the next chat like for example you know your stable diffusion comes out then and then you know chat gp comes out well people were you know i've invested a couple of these that you know the ai writing tools they're getting better and they're pouring millions into marketing to get ticket customers for their you know ai ai writing tool but everybody's building on the same foundations the same models and then they're trying to say how they're gonna be differentiated and the reality is they could differentiated on i don't know customer acquisition and so i think that like it is you know i i think about when i buy something like you know the tiny capital model works because he buys stuff that's like kind of been like around and forgotten and ignored for like a long period of time like he buys like at a dr you know it's like it's been around for years and i could buy it and i can it's gonna be around for years and i can improve it over that time versus buying the things that are really new and quick i think you have a a challenge with the durability of those businesses because what happens as you know the ai just keeps improving but you know either these things become obsolete or it starts to consolidate into like one app that can do four of these things and so you don't need one for posting on social media had one for writing emails it's like it's the same chrome extension that's just gonna do both and so i think there's a good chance you can kinda get like you know you know just sort of blown away by by by the rate of change that's going on in the industry so that's nothing i would be worried about with that similar to i remember telling andrew will gets said about t and i was like this is super smart like these fba stores are super cheap and there's you know like each one of them is small but you could go and just like scoop up all these and look at this they're buying them on like crazy low multiple he goes yeah it's like picking pennies up in front of a steam roller and is his first reaction and i was like yeah i could see what you we would like if the platform changes he goes if anything happens he's like you these aren't real durable brands i haven't been around for a while maybe it's that amazon changes the algorithm maybe it's that there's you know more competition maybe it's set the multiples to go up there's there's four or five different ways where you just get steam rolled and and that's actually what how it played out pretty much in the in the amazon ag space was for a while the git was good and then those companies went all in on it and then they kind of got steam rolled that you know they're they're getting steam rolled as we speak yeah i think you bring up a great point about ai alright right and that's why well i think the technology is great i have been very skeptical in investing in these companies that just really build on top of you know open ai because it's it's like what you have a nice wrapper right it's nice marketing it's great but what you have long term what do you actually get all do that what are you gonna who them through that nobody's doing with their own ai everybody's everybody's is building off open ai or stable diffusion and that's why i'm skeptical investing in right i i think there's so many popping up right it's next crypto wave right there's gonna be a huge huge bubble and you know and they're raising not a crypto prices but i'm seeing hey two guys left some you know andrew and back company or raising five one twenty five like what do you have they're like we have a deck but since we created the deck we've already changed our mind it was this and now it's this it's like guys come you can't be can't be serious we've seen this play out and they're while you say that they're like we just got another offer for thirty five the price is gone you you know like i always i i always felt this way about you and as i've got to know i i feel this way even more the way that you know someone's an interesting founder is when you talk to them and you're like a little fearful of them where you're like i don't wanna have to go against this person because they're gonna be very very challenging to kill and you totally have that vibe you've got this like weird mixture of neuro where you're like no i have to go like i have to win we're gonna lose like everything's over if i don't win this thing but then you also have this like really good work ethic i remember i asked you the other day i'm like hey at what point at morning bro did you quit grinding and you're like what never i'm still grinding and i think that's just a really that's really fascinating were you are you weirdly good at like some random thing did you like channel that obsession towards some other thing things like growing up game we like we tennis or some bullshit yeah i mean i i was obsessed with video games right sports video games but nothing nothing specific right i wasn't like travis call like number two we tennis in the world no it was that and now i'm like it's that for cooking right i'm i thought about like when i go to culinary school and take night classes because now obsessed with cooking cocaine i love to wow did not see that coming do you gotta come over for a meal yeah it comes in i know you don't leave san francisco but when you do yeah do you have to come to york so what what do you what's you said something about ram remit in like your rich life what do you think your rich life how how do you now twenty eight what do what's your rich life gonna be yeah thirty five and forty like what are you working towards yeah i i i think for me it's all about time right like to me wealth is all about having time and spending that time how you want to right right now i wanna spend that time billing this company because i constantly see more growth and more opportunity and not just like two x but ten x but ultimately what i wouldn't be able to thirty five is spend my time how i wanna spend it on any given day right and and that means a lot of travel i love traveling like i i i wanna go at some point in then not to distant in the future hopefully on a six month trip three months to europe three months to southeast asia i never got to do that a lot of my friends in college when they graduated they went to thailand and and wherever else i drove from michigan to new york and started working the next day and so for it's a lot of traveling you know nothing created spend time family doing fun stuff right like being able just to say hey like say i'm gonna you know drop five hundred bucks and go you know do something you know a thousand dollars go do some fun activity right adventurous activities but bill comes back to just waking up and say hey here's what i wanna spend my day and then doing that thing are you able to do that now i can right but i i choose to spend that time on morning brew like i am economically focused on growing morning brew i think there's a ton of opportunity but as soon as i don't think that like i'll change i was hey young today i wanna do something else do you like having two hundred plus employees it sounds like fucking hell particularly new york manhattan like woke employees that like in the new york media scene like everyone's talking about union patronizing like when i think about that i'm like this sounds miserable blink if blake if it's miserable because i know you can't say anything yeah what way to say no no i i mean look i and there's a couple things one we have a lot of remote employees so we do have a really good of employees across the country which i think does help right i think having employees everywhere gives different perspectives right our engineering team lives you know in the midwest then and we have people all across the country which i think is cool but to be honest as as a ceo a two hundred and fifty person company i'm not interacting with that many people on daily basis but what i love is like the one the reason i say is gonna be built this team of people who reporting to me who are just a plus all stars like absolute rock stars and that's what makes me so happy is when i can just come to work and say hey you know chief content officer hey you know person x like what do you do it like tell me more about it how can i help you but also i'm like a vacuum right i'll hired someone new at chief content officer a a coo i'll be like i'm gonna learn as much as humanly possible and my goal is to catch up to you in knowledge as fast as possible so if you're thirty eight you're forty you know you're you're ten years lower than me i wanna just vacuum up those ten years of knowledge you gain working in these four or five places in the next like two months and i'm gonna gonna pest you and sit with you and just learn as much as humanly possible so i can you know be better than you and know more than you and it's like this competitive nature that's exactly what i'm saying about being like someone did that you're you're be you'd be really hard to compete with you were hard to compete with that's a really fascinating mindset it's very intriguing i i saw sean sm that's always a good sign you're were like yeah i wouldn't wanna compete with like oh you did for like five years right i did yeah and like i mean it was fun i i think that i think maybe i'm the same way where someone's like i don't know i wanna compete against soup but but like you know i think it's it's it's it's you're you're intriguing you're interesting i think you have got a really good mindset i think you got that good inner game yeah and i i i think i think i i can't remember impressed before but i think the thing that really i i've changed my thinking about you so much is i used to think you were like rude and now yeah we've been working together like a few signed projects and what i've learned is that your style is not for everyone but you are what i would call like ad abrasive right and we wrote a call i don't know if if i'm supposed to tell a story but we're on a call i won't say names we're on a call and this guy gives us like a three minute pitch and i just need a look on santa's face i go oh no this guy's spiel is not good and the guy goes sam what do you think and sam no smile straight face goes i don't know why i'm even on this call what are you talking about i just start dying but but trying to be rude i'm not trying to be rude exactly exactly and it's not for everyone right that style is not for everyone but i can see how you so quickly grow things with the right people because that type of radical can that like hey i'm gonna tell you what i think and we're not gonna have an ego and we're gonna work together to solve problems is so much better than sitting in the corporate media and being like oh yeah no that was that was great and then sending an email later you should look this guy straight the eyes and you're like i don't know why i'm here yeah i mean and the person who we're speaking with i think they're great and i was just like you're you're great this is stupid though you you know be different and be better than you are right now and and achieve your potential i think you're i think you're great that's typically with the way that i work with people and i don't like hearing when people say that i'm rude that kinda hurts my feelings because i'm like gosh shit i don't wanna be like i don't wanna be known as a jerk i'm i i'm a pretty kind guy i thought so i hate hearing that but it is the truth alright s you were with sam what what's you to deal down her own yeah i think sam intimidating to work with you know i think that i've seen a bunch of people are on the podcast that are intimidated but it's a good thing it's a standard like the people who have really high standards for how they want things to go they're intimidating the work like for me we come on here something's messed up the camera the audio whatever i'm hey don't worry it's gonna be a great show i'm to put that person at ids these so i'm like they probably feel like shit i know they didn't want this to happen you know like and a lot of these things are i know like that's not you intentionally messing something up that's like something is going wrong somebody's late so something out of your control is happening whereas sam gets frustrated i could see that person start to sweat and i don't think that's rude i just think that's like i think you're focused and i think you you know you're just like you're like a blunt object it's like what are you're gonna say like this hammer is not very soft no it's a fucking hammer we that that's why we like it that's why it has that's why it's the best spot in the tool because it's this like really like heavy blunt object and that's what you need and like for the podcast the podcast would not be successful without sam like the that's just he brings that to the pod and so i love that now with that comes well i you know sometimes is not gonna be you know not everyone's gonna get treated with soft gloves and that's okay like you know if you know the guy's intent is good then you you don't really worry about it so i don't know that's that's my i don't know my my feedback that's good yeah no that that's all what brad and then sean let me i i i know i'm here for you guys to to ask me questions but i wanna ask you a question which is you know like you obviously are great storyteller you're very good on camera how much of that you think is is natural like you born with it let me bit use oh going keep going to going let me let me answer it first start keep on hammer the enter fifth i was gonna say i was how how much are you think you're born with it how much are you have you studied like how are you and what are you doing to get better at because i've listened the podcast for three years and you just increasingly upped your game and gotten better and i mean it it's pretty it's pretty incredible let me give my perspective and then he should answer but so from the time i knew sean he was always pretty good he would we would we would do these like the the podcast stemmed because me him and c and a few other guys would meet weekly or monthly and like dude kinda of what we're doing now and sean was always good at at like oh i i would explain something and you'd be like well so what you're really saying is this so here's how you should look at it and he would like story in such a way where i'm like oh wow you've got this like inspirational like thing about you that's really good and then so we always had that i think that was like i think he was born with that and then we started the pod and he was a little rough where i actually think early on i was better than him at like capturing attention and then he started learning about copywriting i think i was like you should learn about this copywriting thing and then he got really good at copywriting and then he got really good at storytelling like on a more refined basis and basically what happened was because he was born with this i think this innate ability as well as he wanted to learn about it and then he actually studied it his trajectory and his growth was quicker than mine and i think he actually surpassed it in terms of like storytelling and ability to capture attention and if you won't listen to like the first couple of episodes you could clearly see like because of his tone of voice and everything like alright this person's intriguing but then it was like he studied it over a year and you could see that there was a huge change and i think it was in part of him studying copywriting and i do think he like actually went and studied like hassan hassan hassan and like all these other comedian he like figured out we both like comedian but i think he studies it and we'll like tweet or messaged each other but like hey let's look out the like told this joke it was really interesting and so he actually studied that and truly learned it so i think was a combination of being born and studying over like two years is that is that accurate i think some you said they were accurate sure my and nobody knows right like is it's a possible question answer but like i'll give it my best shot my here's my honest opinion my honest opinion is i i don't actually think i'm that good at it in at absolute terms i just think it's relative to tech business and like partners or general when i've seen you with like professionals and they like comedian and i saw that they were like coming to you for advice i've seen it yeah that okay that happens but i think the i don't know i i grew at houston and houston's just got like a very high swag factor and like there were like you played basketball in the locker room there were dudes that like should have been on stage at the apollo or something like that like just the natural charisma of people who were just and and you know that i grew up with were was just really really high so i think that actually has a lot to do with it would you hang out with people who naturally have a lot of swag charisma and tell funny jokes your stories are able to to just quickly jump in and have quick wit that's just becomes your normal so i think part of it was that some environment stuff my sister for example is way funnier way better storyteller than me and growing up it was always sean's the smart nice one he's quiet he's shy she's the funny one charismatic if something happened to me they'd be like they should tell the story about like shu like let chant tell the story everyone will love it so at every family party it was her doing and and you know so imagine that like the person you admire your your older sibling is really great at this thing and you just constantly see your family and friends are like everybody loves that about them so to me it became like an important thing in my life i was like not in a negative not like a jealous but i was like it was a thing i value i was like oh that's a really cool skill i value that i had no idea how to do it and when i was younger i was just super super quiet so i didn't talk that much in my friends group i was just the i was the laugh track i wasn't the the guy making the jokes i was the crowd noise and but i started to i got a couple lucky breaks my cousin was in town and was like hey you know there's a movie audition going on like you wanna come with me and i just like yeah i guess so i don't know and and so i went with him and i ended up getting cast in the movie and that like showed be that exposed me to a different thing and the the guy the movie who was my brother was cal penn who who was the guy from harold to kumar and stuff like that so i got to hang out with him for like weeks at a time so now i'm around somebody else who's very charismatic very good storyteller but he's like a professional actor right so he was somebody admire that i was hanging out with for weeks he's the only guy i talked to on sec because i was intimidated by everybody else and he was super nice to me and so we just hung out every day for like you know six weeks that's a kind of a boot camp in like just being around somebody who's got that charisma okay then fast forward i moved to san francisco and i'm like okay i wanna be like you know i don't know in my mind i was like a ceo should be the leader the leader should be inspiring charismatic clear i'm none of those things so how am i gonna do all that and so i like tried to do things i took you know i went to the s f improv i took classes there all the time right i was like i don't know it's fun i might meet some people but also i think this i think improv is just like a crazy skill set i have like to be able to on your feet be able to think of something and you know make a crowd laugh that that to me is a actual superpower and it's the superpower i wanted to have same thing with comedian like i like that content but i don't just watch it and let just like drool come out of my mouth that oh wow these people are funny i'm like i wanna be funny i love how funny they are and like what do they do when they tell stories to you know that makes it work and i'll go rewatch it and i'll sort of break it down sometimes i'll i'll try it myself like for example when i did that luna video i did it in the style of like there's john oliver or hu mina like skit and mine is like you know ten times worse and i text it to us and he was like cool change these ninety five things and i was like dude that's a lot to change i just gonna ship it like you know i don't have time to do all that but like now that you've told me this i now know what i should have done but it's just those reps like it's talent helps but then there's reps and people don't really see the reps and i would say like that combination of the three things i mentioned like being around people who are who are better at than you and you admire them that plants a little seed inside you right like austin you were talking about that with money like when you met people with more money it was expiring and you're like oh wow my world opened up i now have like people i can sort of like you know i could try to embody a blueprint that that that maybe they have to to something i want that's how it was with storytelling and sort of like i don't know charisma or something like that for me and so that you know bigger around people to admire putting yourself in unusual situations that are like kind of intensive like improv or acting in movies stuff like that most people in business don't have that experience so they shouldn't be as good at it right like if you've never gone through these intense experiences and then you know how would you have developed those skills why are you asking that austin are you trying to like get better at talking or what yeah i only get better public speaking so twenty twenty three bill i guess i'm going to new york and improv dude i i i you're brian i think some people are born better but i think everyone can get at least good but i do think sean has this like something that will make him great and it it it is it's very well let me just put it this way austin have you ever watched back a video of you speaking publicly in order to take notes on yourself of how you did super uncomfortable feeling but an obvious thing to do if you wanted to get better yeah right like just had that moment where i was like oh i'm saying i wanna get better at this i've never done any of the obvious things you would do right i never like went and watch myself and said what the hell am i doing with my hands and why am i fidget so much and i man i keep saying at the start of these sentences i should just say the sentence but like i had to go review the game film okay then the second thing was like i had to take it seriously like did i just walk up there unprepared and not warm or do i warm up or do i prepare okay that that that added to the game and then the third one is like who's the best at this and i went to a tony robbins event i was this guy's is like the best public speaker i've ever seen and even if i don't listen to any of his content if i just literally listened to the rhythm of his words and the gestures and then the the hooks and how he's getting everyone's attention that's a master class right there like okay i'll take that and so that's how i started stacking up some of these things that i don't consider myself a good public speaker because i don't do a lot of speeches or anything like that anymore but it's definitely something at at a time i'd tried to build up and it culminated in an epic wedding speech i gotta say the best speech i ever gave was at my wedding un off the dome and just like it was i don't know the perfect the perfect speech i just retired from the game right there at your own wedding i'm my own wedding yeah is there is there anything else you wanna talk about us and this pretty cool you should come on more by the way we should talk about newsletter shit because you're like the only person or us three are some of the very few people that like i actually wanna ask newsletter advice from and like yeah i'm trying to get out of the the the newsletter guy branding but just keep on bringing me out to be the newsletter guy guide dude but it's not it is so fun it's it's a love hate relationship it's really they're really fun to do but also they're painful and whatever yeah no i i think that's it i think we we cover most of it what do you think you're gonna be doing like ten years now you're gonna you think you're gonna be running businesses or you're gonna be just investing or sure or business once or what so to me it's it's barbell right i either wanna you know have some passive income and you know work twenty twenty five hours a week more casual or i wanna go all in but if i go all in it's gotta be huge right the potential has to be multiple billions i don't think i'm gonna wanna run a business where it's like it's nice and it's like a double right if i win it's a double i i don't want doubles right either wanna a home run or i wanna you know sit in a dug out and just you know be be part of the the peanut gallery i don't wanna play in that middle game i'm gonna look in the future and i'm gonna tell you it's probably not gonna be used sitting in the dug out that is not gonna be this is i think maybe you will for a couple years but it if i have to make a bet and i would put my money on my mouth this it's not gonna be that one that's not what you're gonna do we'll see well thanks for coming on dude this is awesome yeah thanks for having me see again soon