We react to Bill Ackman's advice to young men

I got the best opener. May I meet you, Sam? Oh, my God. I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I can be what I want to. I'm all in it like a day's all. Did you see this? May I meet you thing?

I did see the context, but I saw the quote. Bill Ackman said, this is how you meet women. May I meet you? Is that right?

We're doing a deep dive, by the way. This is not a casual reference. This is my first topic. The great Bill Ackman.

We won't just call him Bill Ackman. He's going to be called the great Bill Ackman. Not only has he proven to be a prolific billionaire investor, he's also just the best at Twitter because he uses it all wrong. It's like, have you seen how Magic Johnson uses Twitter?

No. All right, so Magic Johnson, the great basketball player, does not know how to use Twitter. He just tweets the most obvious thing. So he'll be like, Lakers playing the Celtics tonight.

Whoever scores more points tonight is going to take it home. And he's like, what? Yeah, that's how all games work. Whoever scores more points wins, we're going to be like, they're losing now.

If this stays this way, they'll lose the game. But he's not joking. He's been doing this for like seven years. And so Bill Ackman, if you don't know, originally famous for being a controversial and prolific investor, right?

Yeah, he basically owns this company called Pershing Square Management. He's an activist investor. So what he would do is he would buy stakes in companies that he either really believed in or thought were undervalued, but he's also an activist in that if he sees sort of corporate wrongdoing or thinks a company has had some sort of malfeasance, then he will come out and talk about it while taking a big short position against it. And so he did that with Herbalife because he's like, this is an MLM and this is not right the way that they do their MLM.

And he got kind of burned on that one. But that's what he does. Okay, so he's a billionaire activist investor. Awesome.

Whatever. Great story. I want to have him on the podcast. His life story and his approach to investing is pretty legendary.

Yeah, he's got one of his stories, I think, where he was like successful in his Harvard dorm investing. Like, that's the thing, I think. He's also like hit bottom many times and like bounced back. Okay, spooky.

So he said, I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting. In other words, online culture has destroyed their ability to spontaneously meet strangers. I'm reading this, I say, yeah, true. I'm glad you're speaking on this.

Nodding head. Nodding head, nodding head. He says, as such, I thought I'd share a few words that I use in my youth. Go, go there.

That's what it sounds like. Go, go there. The head nod went from putting everything I was doing down. What is he about to do?

It's like when I saw the dude from Red Bull jump out of the space station and skydive. I was like, oh my God, he's talking about pick-up lines he used in his youth. Let's hear this. He goes, I would ask, may I meet you?

Then I got to tell him, may I meet you? I don't know how you say this, but may I meet you? Before engaging further in conversation, I almost never got to know. Oh my God.

That's evidently opened up the way for a further conversation. I got to meet a lot of really interesting people this way. He goes, I think it's the effectiveness of proper grammar and politeness. Oh my God.

You might try. And yes, this will also work for a women-seeking man as well as same-sex interaction. This is versatile. Just want to send some happily married guy about our next generation.

So this thing goes wild. May I meet you? You know what I told my wife when I saw her? I picked her up in real life.

I said, what's the difference between a chickpea and a lintel? I don't pay $500 to have a lintel on my face. I'm going to joke about peeing on my face. And it worked.

Thank God I didn't say may I meet you. Yeah, actually, I don't think we're allowed to make fun of this given what you did. To actually meet your wife. If a girl will reply to may I meet you, I think that's not the one I want to go out with.

Which I'm just joking, by the way, a little bit. I do think that you can walk up to a girl and be like, what's going on? I do think that a recording casual can crush it. But may I meet you?

Tinder with the may I meet you billboard. Love it. There's people who are just going around doing may I meet you. Just walk it up to hot girl segment.

May I meet you. So people are just going crazy with this man meet you thing. And it got me thinking, number one, Bill Hickman's the best. Number two, do you think that this actually would work?

And number three, it is wholly improvised. The top five MFM formal pick of lines in addition to that. So we're going to go there in a second. But first, what do you think of this?

Okay, may I meet you? Like, I have a joke that I say. No joke. When it comes to flirting, I think as long as the girl laughs, you can pretty much say anything.

And so, like, you can kind of get away with anything. So if you say it a certain way, yeah, it could work. But that's may I meet you is probably not the best. Right?

Do you think if you were 22 or 23 and you read this, you're a big Bill Hickman guy, you're on Twitter all the time, do you think you would have laughed and then secretly that Friday, gone out and done it? No, I would not have you declined. Would you have? I probably would have.

So desperate. Make sure to choose this. Try everything. I read the book, The Game, and then for, like, five years, my opening line to anybody I saw at a party was, hey, I need you guys to help me settle this argument I'm having with my friend.

How many options are there? Five or seven? That would be better. We had this whole elaborate story of my next girlfriend, and then it was like, if it was loud in the bar or the club or whatever, they were just like, what?

And then I was like, I'm telling you, give the background of a story first. No, I'm just peacocking. I'm just trying to track you. All right, Sam, so I'm going to take a second here.

I'm going to write some of our own pick-up lines, because why is Bill Hickman the only one who can give young men this sort of advice? I think we, too, should steer the next generation. So here we go. Do you want to take a second?

Let's write down a few. I can't. There's not a chance I can come up with great pick-up lines. First of all, I've been married for like 12 years.

I will give you three then. All right, ready? I just wrote one down. How about this?

This is actually a close cousin to me. I meet you. Court is done. You're into the conversation now.

She's going to say yes and start what we call in sales as the yes ladder. So I like that one. I think that one's pretty good. Another one.

Are you cold? I found that women are always cold. There's a cold species. And so I just think you have a good chance of them being like, yeah, I am cold.

You see me. You understand me. And then from there, you can maybe give the jacket from the previous girl that you talked to and give it to this girl. I can't believe you have children.

I can't believe that someone let you do that. I had a big advantage, which was my wife was looking for a guy like me. I win the lottery. I was like, what?

Your type is me? That's insane. Are you crazy? Is there something wrong with you?

For some reason, at my company, Hampton, we have 20 or 25 employees. 20 of them are women. We have just men are getting left behind. Scott Kelly says, I don't know.

Something about it. And so I overhear all these conversations that they have. They brag about their boyfriends being uglier than them. Do you know that women do this?

They brag about it? Like they want to date someone who's uglier than them. Is that the craziest thing you've ever heard of? That doesn't make sense.

So what is the because it implies something else? Or is there more to the store? Or that's the fact? Because they want to be the hot one in the relationship.

But have you? You've never seen this, Shonda? No, but explain so much. Yeah, same.

What's your third one? Okay, my third one is, hey, I'm Bill Ackman. I'm the billionaire founder of Pershing Square. Nice to meet you.

That one can work too. That one can work too. It needs some free work. This actually makes a ton of sense.

I'm pretty sure he would work $10 million when he was 27 years old. And so here Bill Ackman, he's like 6'9", by the way. He's like 6'3". Yeah, yeah.

So they were like, oh, you're a handsome 6'3 rich guy also. You may. You may see me again. So yeah, this is not like the best person to get advice from.

You might be honest with me though, because you know what show women love? Bridgerton. And they love the formality of Bridgerton. So maybe he's tapped into this like secret desire that they have to just like be incredibly formal or be treated like a princess.

Dude, I used to think that as a kid, but I looked like Napoleon Dynamite whenever I tried to be proper. Like it was as if I was like, it just never worked. Okay. Like when you have braces, you're an afro.

Like, hello, Miss Thing. Like it never worked. Okay. It never worked.

Frankly, nothing really worked. So who am I to say? But no, that never worked. All right.

So a lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start a business. Nonsense. If you listen to at least one episode of this podcast, you know that is completely not true. My last company, The Hustle, we grew it to something like 17 or 18 million dollars in revenue.

I started it with like $300. My current company, Hampton, does over 10 million in revenue. Started it with actually no money. Maybe $29 or something like that.

Nothing. And so you don't actually need investors to start a company. You don't need a fancy business plan. But what you do need is systems that actually work.

And so my old company, The Hustle, they put together five proven business models that you can start right now today with under $1,000. These are models that if you do it correctly, it can make money this week. You can get it right now. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description.

Now, back to the show. Let me tell you about something. I have two things I want to get your opinion on and just riff on. The first, let's do, let's do, all right, this one's short.

Let's do this guy. Okay, so have you heard this thing called the203media.com? Oh, I've seen this. So it starts with, so first of all, if you've ever been on TikTok, you see these videos where it's like a young guy interviewing other like good-looking people like at Washington Square Park and asking them like what they think of this deodorant or like you take a bite of this brand's chocolate and like what do you think?

It's like a review, but it's supposed to look organic, whatever. This guy named Josh, he started working with Oliver at Tab's Chocolate. You do Tab's Chocolate? Yeah.

Yeah, it is and was a popular product. So this guy, Oliver, who was like a 20-year-old entrepreneur, 22-year-old entrepreneur at the time, hired this other guy named Josh, who at the time, I think he was only 19, and he's like, hey, I'm going to pay you money to go to Washington Square Park, which is a marketer in New York City, and I want you to interview people about my chocolate and like get good clips that are testimonials for TikTok, whatever, and it worked. He killed it. So eventually, Josh is like, I should do this for other people.

So at the age of like 19 or 20, he drops out of Syracuse University and he starts doing this for other people, and he's now making $300,000 a month in revenue doing this. So he's got something like 46 employees, which are a lot of freelancers, and he goes to parks in New York City, LA, and Miami interviewing people. And he tells a story about how he started, and he's like, I just would DM founders on Twitter constantly. And I would show him these videos that I'm doing, and I would do free work just to get like some videos that make me look more legit.

And he starts filming these videos, and now he's killing it. He's building this business. And I'm not sure if this business is going to be his big thing. Who knows how huge it's going to be.

But anyone who's bold enough to go to the police parks and walk up to someone at the age of 20 and build a company doing $3 million a year in revenue, this kid's going to be it. Yeah, we talked about how door-to-door sales is like this weird breeding ground of incredible entrepreneurs. Also, you know, while Mormons are so successful, like, well, one of the things they have to do is admission, where you, for two years, you block out the world, you wake up every day, you go knock on doors, and you try to spread the gospel about something you believe in. And like, that also happens to be incredible training for entrepreneurship and sales.

And this is the same sort of thing. Not only is the agency kind of working, because, well, he took a format that works on social, which is a street interview, but no founder really wants to go do this. It's like, you know, extremely exhausting to go do, and you're basically putting yourself out there for rejection and humiliation along the way. And he just productized that.

It's like, let me productize this one ad format. And so that's kind of genius. When he does this, I don't know if you say, like, he basically walks like 30 to 50,000 steps a day when he's doing this. Or he puts his, like, you know, Apple Health tracker or whatever.

And it's like, yeah, I'm just walking around the entire day. I always walk, like, whatever, 10 miles a day doing these street interviews. It's pretty incredible hustle. So first of all, just being a college kid and doing this, I bet you, I don't know for what the numbers were, but I bet you just him, he was probably making $300,000 a year doing this.

And there's a skill here, but it's honestly mostly boldness, and it's mostly just, like, getting after it. Like, no one will do it, right? Someone's paying him money because they're like, I'm too embarrassed to go talk to a stranger in the park and film this. This is stupid.

But then he's operationalized. In fact, our friend, I originally heard about him because Ramone, he was, Ramone, was like, I'm in New York City because I paid this kid some, he said the money, some absurd amount of money to, like, do these things. And I was like, what? He goes, yes, man, I just gave this kid $10,000 and he's just walking up to strangers.

And I'm like, that's so interesting that that's how scared we are, which, me too, I don't want to do it. I saw this guy's Twitter feed and I just called him because I was like, wow, I just DMed him my number. I called him because I was like, man, I need you, sir. And it totally worked.

I think this is the pot, so I'm glad you can get to shout him out now. He's a real hustler, man. And I think this is such a cool, like, I have this phrase that sounds a little condescending. I don't mean it that way at all.

In fact, I think this is like one of the best things you could do, which is what I call like a light belt business, like a stronger business. So it's like basically, what's a great first business to start? Because your first business is probably going to be one of your worst businesses. You're going to be at your worst because you're just getting into the game.

You're not your best yet. And you maybe don't have the network, the capital, the skills, or the knowledge of what you, the big things you want to do in life. That's fine. Just get in the game.

And this is one of the best examples of a just-get-in-the-game business that he's doing this cool in New York. Guess what? There could be, after this podcast, if you're, I don't know, between the ages of like 18 and 25, and you're like, oh man, I just want to be successful so bad. I'm willing to work.

I'm a hard worker. And you listen, and there's nothing working for you yet. If you listen to this and you don't go do this, you're basically, I'm calling a bluff then, right? Because this is a business that's available to anybody.

You could be in Miami doing this. You could be in Los Angeles doing this. You could be in pretty much any city doing this. And now he's started into a real thing.

The funny thing is, it is a podcast. It's just so short, right? He does the same thing. He's like, oh, like, I talk to successful people.

I hold the mic, and then I ask you a question, and then they answer. It's an interview. It's a podcast. It can be considered a podcast.

You're right. What he did was he shrunk it into a more authentic format, catching, bumping into somebody on the street. But at this point, he's not bumping into Shaq. Dude, he has Tom Cruise on it.

Tom Cruise. Yeah, those guys see his content, they follow, he sets it up, where he can bump into them. But he's really young. I think that guy's, I don't know, like, he's got to be by law under the age of 47, but if you have that.

So I think it's kind of amazing. It's this one-minute compilation where he just cuts up a quick question and answer with a star on the street, and it's just what's great. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot, because using only 20% of your business data is like dating somebody who only texts you in emojis. First of all, that's annoying.

And second, you're missing a lot of the content. But that's how most businesses are operating today. They're only using 20% of their data. Unless you use HubSpot, that's when all your emails or call logs or chat messages, they turn into insights to help you create your business, because all that data makes all the difference.

Learn more at HubSpot.com. All right, I want to show you one more thing. So I sent you the article in the Wall Street Journal. So check this out.

So in 1981, Warner was a big cable company or entertainment company, and they decided to create a music channel where they were basically just going to be music videos, and it was going to be called MTV. And so they had a group of like four or five, basically like punk rock slash hippie guys, who they said, you're in charge, figure this out. And one of the guys, the guy's name was Tom Freston. And Tom Freston had this amazing article about him in the Wall Street Journal the other day.

And I want to get your take on this, but basically he tells the story of like founding MTV. And MTV, you and I were raised with it, but the people who are 18, 19, 21 years old now, MTV shows that was like, yeah, but eventually MTV, they became, they own Nickelodeon and they own Comedy Central. And so listen to like the things that this guy, Tom, he was in charge of programming. Listen to some of the shows that came because of him.

Blues Clues, Beavis and Butthead, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Spongebob, Daria, The Daily Show, Jackass, South Park, Crank Gankers, The Fairly OddParents, Chappelle Show, The Last Airbender, The Colbert Report, Renan's Dibby, The Real World, Dorothy's Floor, Rugrats. I'm going to have a nostalgia seizure over here. You're just saying those names. Names I haven't heard, thoughts I haven't had.

And so like this article goes really deep. There was one thing that really stuck out to me. So listen to this quote. So Tom tells a story and he has like all these hilarious bits.

So basically he was like, we were like the rejects. He goes, the receptionist sold cocaine and the office had one clothing rule. No frontal nudity. Like, he was, these guys were the real deal, man.

But he sent this amazing line. So he says, he goes, I had this idea. I said, let's find the type of pot smoking guys in high school who sat in the back of the class that could draw well. and have some character living inside their heads like this crazy guy named Steve who made up Spongebob let's get these guys who don't know anything about how to make a TV show or a series and school them and we're going to crank these things out dude it's all good that's great right and the reason I thought that was interesting is because first of all there's like four founders of MTV and like they are now like the mafia a little bit like one of them was Bob Pittman who is the CEO of iHeartMedia another guy runs the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame they're all like you know big shots but I thought it was interesting this line because in business I think you and I at times have fallen I think we're actually better I think a lot of our listeners do this where they come up with an idea and they kind of like iterate their way like to this idea versus taking a stance and saying like for example I think Barstool has done I don't particularly love Barstool's content but they think they've done an excellent job of like planting their flag and saying this is what we are and this is the bet we're making or Vice did a good job where they're like we're youth culture and we're going to give inexperienced guys cameras in Southern Africa and maybe they get something or Pixar saying we think that computers and animation can tell stories just as good if not better than real life actors but the idea of like putting your thing this is a bet we're taking this bet and even if it's a silly bet I'm saying we're going to give like potheads like jobs and like let them great content but when I look back at that I think that's actually like brilliant and very romantic and very cool to like take a stance yeah I feel like you did this with the hustle I've got to give you some props here when I think about who in my kind of group did this I would say there's really two groups of people one Alex II and Michael Acton Smith and they were doing Calm they had from the beginning this idea there's like a problem that they wanted to solve which was like meditation is this thing that's incredibly good for you and so few people do it and even when the initial results were like somewhat lukewarm and it was unclear what to do and investors didn't want to fund it they did not iterate and pivot like crazy around into like other ideas like oh today we're a messaging app and tomorrow we're going to do delivery of weed and you know whatever else they were like no we're going to do 50 different attempts to make meditation a thing because that's the thing we think is important and that's what we believe in and that's what we're going to do so they did like they launched this app called do nothing for two minutes it's like meditation in disguise it was an app where if you touched your phone in a two minute period it would start over and it was like calming music like waves crashing on a beach and just for two minutes just couldn't touch your phone couldn't use it for anything the next one they did was this app called Checky which is again they did this viral app about like how many times a day do you check your phone so right like we've heard this idea of screen time oh you know whatever I can go to the settings app and find this Checky would be like hey do you know you've checked your phone like you've unlocked the lock screen 398 times today like you are the little rat in the maze who's addicted to pellets you know like the cocaine pellets you're pushing the button over and over and see if you can get the prize out and so they did many different versions of this ultimately sleep stories was the thing that worked for them and helped them really accelerate but it was the same as meditation at night instead of just during the day and they get it they pulled it off and I just remember when it was so uncool and so lack of like lack of momentum lack of investment traction lack of sex appeal there was no other comparable in the market that was like we're just we're doing what they're doing but in our category which is what entrepreneurs use to validate themselves and they kept going so I thought that was a planchip flag I thought you did too where you were like I'm betting on email and we're going to be independent I was like dude Facebook videos right now going viral snapchat and like I tried to dangle every shiny and you were just like no we're going to be you kept calling it a pirate ship and I was like brother it's a newsletter and you're like no I'm building a pirate ship I said I'm building a pirate ship and every email subscriber I get is just a little bit more into my sales and I was like why is he reciting poetry and I also kind of liked it I was like damn I don't say cool stuff like that as a CEO I should probably have lines like that and then you have like a tattoo of a pirate ship on your thigh and I was like what's going on with this guy full fast fun baby that's the male version of live laugh love you're wearing shorts right now pop that sucker off well I have our pants all the time now because I don't want people to see it it's all the company still got the tattoo though so yeah I thought you did a great job the punch of flag in the ground let me tell you where I messed up I messed up I messed up not believing a couple things one I messed up okay so when people start something most things don't work right away even though whatever you see on our podcast and all these things they don't work right away the thing is can you deal with the pushback and stay the same and that's really hard to do that every day it was really hard for me to do that every day but the second thing is underestimating how big something can get I drastically underestimated how big we can get so I think the year we sold we did 12 million in revenue and I was like I think I can get this to 50, 60, 70 and I was like but looking back I was like this is foolish so morning group our competitors they only sold part of the business so they were able to keep running it they're at 90 million in revenue and I can give you other examples of people that are doing hundreds of millions of revenue and so same with Barstool if you say that to Barstool if you look at them in like 2014 you're like this company's going to make hundreds of millions a year in revenue you can say that's insane that can't happen same with Calm and I think the issue is you underestimate how big something can get because you don't realize that the TAM once you have a really cool product it can expand and I think that's really hard to see because the numbers don't say that but you just have to have faith right yeah everything takes longer than you think but it can be bigger than you think that's kind of the weird like rule of thumb for an entrepreneur do you think it's going to happen faster it's not sorry it's going to take way longer than you want and way longer than you think way longer than you expect but on the upside you've probably underestimated yourself even though you think you're being Mr.

Ambitious yeah exactly and I have this I want to hear about your mistake but let me tell you one quick thing so the very first okay so before I come to the Hustle before we were an email newsletter we were in events and whatever and we had Tim Westergen Tim Westergen is this guy who founded Pandora Pandora it doesn't get talked about enough nowadays but I'm pretty sure it's still a multi-billion dollar revenue business and at its heyday I think we're tens of billions of dollars and it was one of the early pioneers of the app on the iPhone and Tim Westergen has this amazing story where basically he told the story at my event and I wrote about it on the Hustle it was the very first article we ever published and it got like it went viral and the title of the article is here's how Pandora's founder convinced 50 early employees to work for two years without pay basically the company started the music genome and what he did was he raised $5 million and he convinced 50 to 100 musicians struggling musicians to come work for him and he basically had I think it was legitimately an Excel spreadsheet and he created 50 attributes for a song and they would sit all day listening to music and they would write the attributes in the spreadsheet and eventually after doing this for years they had this massive database but unfortunately it didn't find product market fit they just had this database but they're not like what do we do with it and so originally they had it in Best Buy we could listen to a CD in Best Buy and be like here's a panel of CDs that you could potentially buy that fit that CD that's on but it wasn't really working and so he ran out of money but he was like this thing is magical and he convinced his employees to continue working for him for I think like 18 months without pay and someone in the crowd goes what speech did you give on a weekly basis to convince these people to work for you and he goes yeah I got the exact quote he goes man it's hard I closed my eyes though I think I can figure it out and he goes we all know that we have created here it's very unique and it's solving a gigantic problem no one on earth is going to do what we've done and when you use this product we all know how magical it is it will find its home everyone on the planet loves music and there's millions of musicians who produce great music and they can't find each other when this thing finally finds its home it's going to change culture how many times in your life can you say that you've had a chance to do that that's what this is about fucking A right how good is that that's almost a separate skill which is you make everything bigger than it is Elon is the master of this so you know he doesn't just say hey we're going to build a company that launches satellites and there's no plan if we don't do something so he creates this incredible grand scale vision sense of urgency and purpose around what he does but you can do that with anything he did with he got like a co-worker pregnant and he was like he was like the biggest risk of civilization is underpopulation oh my god we need to be having more children and I was like this is the peflon dawn how is he how is he he just rebranded cheating like Aeolius to Mayo yeah he was like it was the most noble cheat I'd ever heard of I was like this is incredible why don't you tie this to the collapse of population and civilization itself it was amazing but you can do this for anything like have you ever read the biographies or listen to the podcast on Patagonia or Dyson sure haven't okay well do you know anything about Dyson I know that Dyson's still hot right now every it's like a cool thing for a successful CEO to be into it's like you know who my hero's not it's not Boston Jobs Dyson it's the cool thing to say Dyson basically I think they do three things vacuums hand dryers and restrooms and blow dryers so blowing and sucking basically that's not like inherently cool but why are they such a cool company it's because the CEO has such a good job of like making like in my opinion Dyson is the standard of excellence and so when I think of like if I'm an employee wanting to work at Dyson and I'm like vacuums it's like well no like it's excellence like we're gonna make the best and there is something very appealing about that so you don't have to be going to Mars I think to give one of these speeches and by the way anytime you have one of 15 employees your job is basically like 40% this like right like and so you have to get good at this and so I don't think you need this world changing product to say like this is cool I mean we're talking about Rugrats and fucking Spongebob and we look back at it and it's dope right like it's like how cool to be part of that changing culture yeah yeah I've really come to appreciate this that everybody who's successful in life has just taken a simple idea very seriously yeah that's your thing it kind of doesn't really matter what your thing is because your experience of it it's gonna consume your world one of the most beloved person is Nick Ray who hosts cocktail parties he took it very seriously he's like I'm gonna write a book about how to host a dinner party and it's like are you sure you need to it's not an email he's like no it's a book and it's a science and it's an art and I'm gonna master it and that's why he's you know that's why he's fallen in love with it that's why he's such a good job with it that's why he's really opened all these doors it became much bigger than somebody would expect something like that to become and so a lot of life it didn't really matter what simple idea I picked if I couldn't if I didn't learn how to take it seriously so me and Tyler the CEO of Beehive came up with a little challenge for you it's the newsletter challenge now if you know me you know that I'm a big fan of newsletters I got my own newsletter I also have a business that was a newsletter business that was amazing I wrote this newsletter about crypto we grew it to quarter million subscribers we ended up selling it after a year for millions of dollars and I want you to be able to do the same thing in your business so we're doing a challenge 10 grand is on the line plus me and Tyler will actually be in your corner as growth advisors you just need to go to beehive.com slash MFM and you either start a new newsletter or you move your current newsletter over there and five finalists will get picked me and Tyler sort of like Shark Tank and the winner gets 10 grand so go to beehive.com slash MFM that's beehive.com slash MFM to enter the challenge today so you're writing this book series check out the URL onehourbooks.co so Sean's writing a really cool series of books so onehourbooks.co go to his website and set up and your first one is on creativity you should really google MTV and comedy central and Nickelodeon in some of the early years because I started going on this rabbit hole and I started reading about the guy named Steve I forget his last name Steve who started Spongebob and so this guy basically was a teacher like a great school teacher in San Francisco then he became a marine biologist and then he quit doing that at the age of 28 or 29 and went to school for animation because he loved drawing comics in his free time and he eventually like kind of worked his way up to Nickelodeon and he worked on Rocko's Modern Life and then from there he got in and he was able to pitch Spongebob and Spongebob was like a silly show it was almost like a show that our parents didn't want us to watch a little bit because there was something weird about it but it wasn't appropriate but it was like silly but his passion for marine biology and everything led to creating this and I thought it was really beautiful and something that I don't know is going on with the world of creators on YouTube is this like fiction style content or in particular animation which I loved as a kid and so I would love to see some of that stuff because a lot of the stuff on YouTube now doesn't talk about that I mean I don't think that like that's not really a thing but do you think that there's room for that like do you think that like do you know anything in that space or does this interest you I know that our friend Dylan Dargan was trying to do something where he's doing comics and I actually thought it was pretty awesome we met the guy who was doing this do you remember The Amazing Digital Circus go to YouTube and look up The Amazing Digital Circus the pilot first episode of this currently has 398 million views on YouTube yes yeah okay of course you remember this yes so this guy Kevin and his brother they are based in Australia and they had like a passion for animation they didn't really know what to do with it but they just decided like look we're sitting in Australia we're guys who've never done this before the odds of getting a deal with Netflix or Hollywood is super low but maybe we could just make something and put it on YouTube and so they worked on this they basically were using gaming engines which is not what you use for normal TV shows for animation so they started using like Unreal Engine or whatever I don't know which one instead of making a video game out of it they animated this wild show with a little bit of dark humor and it's basically like anime but done for the West so they remixed the idea which is one of the core creative tools like it's find a new connection of old dots and so they connected the old dots of anime and like you know sort of Pixar animation and they created this show on YouTube and it gets hundreds of millions of views every episode on every single episode and when we were there I don't know if Jimmy missed it that well but I said hi to him and I started talking to him and he goes do you want to meet like the guy who inspires me or who I think is even better than me or like he like deferred to this guy yeah with the group we basically say like do you have three or four people you want to invite that are not in our network we're bringing a bunch of people from our network who's in your network that you think is awesome and this was one of the guys and so and he was he was an awesome dude and you know they're doing and I was like so wait so you spend all this money and time you make these crazy animated things you know it's kind of like the Spongebob guy right it's like just a guy with an idea and a sketch and then turns it into a show and they were making like tens of millions on just merch drops just fans buying the merch of their thing that was the business model it was literally selling t-shirts at this point and I was like what I think they got a deal with either Amazon Prime or Netflix and so now they're going to bring their show now like Hollywood wants them basically and so now they're going to bring their show to one of the big streaming platforms and they cut a very unique deal where they didn't have to take it off YouTube because they're like no no we're keeping it on YouTube YouTube it's our place so we're building a giant fandom and I mean you know a few videos get 400 million views like you literally have to have made Despacito to get 400 million views like Gangnam Style it's not like a number that a normal YouTube video can get and this is their own original content there's also something interesting here going on where I'm romanticizing 80s MTV and then you're romanticizing this guy now but like this guy Kevin Digital Circus like he's only a handful of years into his journey and when we were with him I thought that that was neat but it was just like oh that's cool now I'm looking back and I'm like that's very romantic that's very badass it's very interesting that you don't see that at the time you're doing it but I do think that I have to work on I think everyone does have to work on like reframing things because it would make it so much more fun to work on and you could like keep going for a lot longer because now I see this and I'm like oh this is amazing keep going keep doing this when I talk to him he was one of 20 interesting people yeah 100% it's so true what you just said I noticed a few people who do this now in fact we just had Ben Horwitz on and after we stopped recording he had told us a story on the podcast about this incredible like leader in Haiti this guy who started off Toussaint Overture yeah Toussaint Overture and he's like read this book about him or read multiple books about him there's a book called Black Spartacus he told a story about how this guy who I think was a slave became like the leader of a 500,000 person army and was like one of the few places where slavery ended as like out of a successful revolution and they like changed the norm and it was just incredible and so as a guy who's investing in world changing leaders I think he was just fascinated about how somebody pulled this off and so we were like how did you that's actually a really good take I didn't put that together that's actually that's a really good insight actually why he liked him yeah I'm not sure if he consciously did it or not but obviously there's an appeal to it so he after the pod was over we were like on the podcast what was your impression of Ben Horowitz what's he like what would you have said a top 10 so we've done 750 he's in the top 10 of like wisdom and but would you say like he's like outlandish personalities i don't know he's smart is he surprisingly good balance surprisingly well balanced good hang seem like a like a more normal dude than your average tech billionaire type of guy right he seems like a really good father he's probably 30 years old but he seems like someone who like to ask for advice and it wouldn't be extreme right so i was thinking about that this was just like a great hang with just great dude but more on the normal side of the spectrum than i would have expected just because i've gotten used to every time i meet these extreme outliers of performance they often come with these kind of sharp edges i think his partner mark has that his partner mark seems sharp like uh his literally his head has like 30 extra headroom like you know you just hold more brain in there like you're like oh i mean that's 16 lebron james like well okay i can see that we're different like yeah we're both you know both humans but like you're 69 and you can fly and i can't so like i get there's a difference that happens a lot of guys you're like oh you're literally just super smart you process information differently he even said it he was like people get confused because he knows mark duckerberg and peter seal all these guys because people get confused they think that those guys have like low eq like they don't understand people because they kind of stutter and stammer and they're a little awkward he's like no they actually have a pretty deep understanding of people you wouldn't be who they are if you didn't actually understand people but they're processing data at such a high rate that it's a little bit awkward when you hear them try to talk and reply because they're processing they're just literally processing so much information and i was like oh that's an amazing way of putting it anyways that's what i said on him at the end of the podcast we stopped recording and we asked him we're like how did you get into that tucson guy like that's crazy how'd you hear about this and he said something he goes i was thinking about um why slavery ended and i was like oh my god let me stop recording because that's you can't for saying something like that like this rich white billionaire wonders why slavery ended he's like that's bad pr for you but he had a really good answer and i wouldn't even say anything because you know slavery was not just a human rights issue it was actually also the economic model of the times so he's like you know slavery been around for a long time and in many different places it sprung up organically it's not like one system that was ported everywhere like different countries each came to the same i think he goes the aqueducts in Rome were built by slaves yeah it was the six it was the functioning economic model so it got me curious why did it ever end and and but he didn't mean like it's super super clear he was not saying it's a good thing he was literally thinking from first principles like isn't that interesting that this this thing that was working thousands of years and all of a sudden suddenly it stops you'd be kind of curious what stopped it and he's like haiti was the only place where it was like a bottoms-up successful revolution where they just decided to change the rules without well without like i think i don't know how he was saying it was like it was different than like the civil war for example um and so he was like that's what got me curious and i thought ah there it is there's your weird bone like you know you're funny like i found it i found your special sauce you asked a question that the rest of us would have never asked you leaned in and got curious about something that we would have all just accepted at face value and there are so many of these in life you realize this when you have kids and they're like um well how does this building build so there's people what where people come from like oh my god um people come from this like but why didn't this just happen and you realize how shallow your knowledge of the world actually is not just scientific by the way it's like like my son was like um why can boys show their nipples and not girls we're going to pool and i'm like i'm telling my daughter like you can wear your swimsuit and my son couldn't find his and i was like it's fine just he's like but why and i was like honestly i have no idea why that would be horrible if she did it and it's totally fine if you do it i have no clue you know i don't know yeah and so there's like there's all these things we just sort of accept we just take it because like too much mental energy to go try to answer every question and the great ones get curious about like obvious things they see things on the floor that the rest of us aren't looking at and they just pick it up and like that's where they become great i love this topic because um eddie murphy has a documentary on netflix it's so good it's a two hour it's two hours people forget we grew up listening to him or watching him people forget how impactful he was i mean he turned off this podcast on youtube just go to the search bar just type eddie murphy raw and just go back and just talk about that and so basically eddie murphy was famous starting at the age of 18 eddie murphy was on snl at the age of 18 and it's a whole documentary about his creative process but also it's really interesting eddie murphy was famous at the 18 in new york city when he was 25 or actually 22 i think he was the star of beverly hill's uh you know the police movie and he was the most famous kind of nerve and he hung out with all the craziest people and all those guys now you know prince uh rich james all these guys are dead because they're drug addicts and he was like i was sober the whole time because i don't drink i don't do drugs and so they talk about that and so anyway he talks about being funny and he's like i don't really think of myself as a comedian i'm an artist um and i express myself be a comedy but i could do anything he's done serious movies i've done everything and he's done actually it's very inspiring but he has one line that has stuck with me and he was like the thing about comedians i think what makes it special is that we're actually more sensitive to everything and so the best comedian you know if i buy a new car and the car gets uh and the car comes home the dealer is standing right in front of me and i can point out a scratch that no one noticed because i just notice it first and that becomes the comedy that becomes a bit or if i walk into a house and there's just one little tiny smell i'm gonna be the first person that says it because i'm the most sensitive and what the thing that you're describing with ben um i've always noticed like good comedians like shane deals does this whole read history and he'll retell this very funny bit about george washington like this one little thing that i read tons of history i would be like i would skip over that three is like very interesting to me that is the truth that is the right question and i think eddie murphy did the exact same thing when he said he goes we are just more sensitive to everyone and we can do and so our threshold of like something that grabs us is lower it's a great observation they notice what the rest of us ignore and if you think about great investors what do they do they just sort of notice that this company is not being understood properly it's mispriced it's misunderstood and um they go up against consensus in a way and why do they do that you first have to notice in this pile of stocks which one is the one that's mispriced and you know there's great stories about buffett and he'd read moody's manual front to back so he's reading just company it's like whatever two thousand pages or something like that it's like a bible and it's just company financials and company uh perspectives and you read the whole thing and all he's trying to do is just notice for something that makes him curious that's weird has this much earnings but prices like this i wonder why that's because this is believed is that true how does that work and what if this happens it's very hard so you see it in investing you see it in comedy comedy is the art of noticing i have this running doc on my uh on my phone called seinfeld premises it's basically like if you like what would be the premise of a seinfeld joke seinfeld is the master of observational humor and so when you turn this part of your brain on that starts to notice the like hilariousness of human life you start to notice things don't make any sense so for example seinfeld talks about this power of observation he's like uh he goes you know when somebody's on the phone somebody and the call drops and they call you back and they're like hey sorry i don't know what happened he goes of course you don't know what happened you don't even know how this is happening does anyone even know how a phone works as if we could know the reason the call drops like what a hilarious the ridiculous thing to say and then he builds up that premise which is like we all say this thing and what nonsense of course you don't know what happens you don't know how microwave works you don't know anything works and then you could build off that into a joke and so i started doing this and so i have this list of like just things that i've noticed over the past three years and i'm like i've never done sam comedy i always secretly like one two and like you've been talking about for years you just have a date but like i'll give you like one that's on this list that i just took a flight and right before the right before boarding they're like um you know uh platinum america global elites whatever right and they're like any uh military vets or whatever and like a soldier basically walked up and got to board the plane 30 seconds before us and i was like i looked around i'm like that's it that was the perk he got like this guy fought in the war he's gonna go through tsa like security he is security like this guy should be getting like a blowjob on the plane this is insane that all he got to do was board after global elite but before group one i was like what a shame like this is i always thought that way about metals when they give you a metal i'm like all that for a metal it's the same thing my son got after soccer this year a metal so it's just like his art of noticing the the sort of things that is just taking the face value and i think as an entrepreneur you want to be doing this as a technologist you want to be doing this right like a big part of technology like the big wave right now is ai and the funny thing about ai is all the big companies all the companies that were winning in ai and all the people who are leading those companies they were not the ogs of ai like ai's been around and talked about for 50 years and the study of um you know neural networks and all the underlying technology there were experts none of the experts are the ones who started these companies so like why is that and it's because they were so far they actually didn't notice that something changed it's like they were so lost in the sauce that they did not realize like this time it's different even like the core thing that changed at all was a transformer paper was written by google google which had been pouring billions into machine learning and uh you know neural networks and all this stuff who is that sam no sam was an outsider to this whole thing that paper at google was written by these like seven or eight guys that's good at the center of people called attention is all you need and attention is all you need was this breakthrough this realization that like wait a minute all you need is this and then suddenly the outputs changed this is written inside of google who spent billions of dollars on this and google wasn't the one to use it they just released the paper and then there was others out in the field like huh that's actually pretty interesting that's new that's novel so that means if that's true then we could try this and maybe we'll get a new result this time and suddenly the computer could figure out what's a cat what's a hot dog and all these things that were previously hard were now actually very doable and so then that's where you know this wave happened and now all eight of those people from google have since left and they're a part of the big like you know the big ai companies now um but like it's amazing that google itself which is looking for the treasure you know the metal detector started beeping and they just kept walking on the beach you know they just didn't stop and dig and so it takes because it takes a beginner's mind to be able to stop and dig right um so to answer your question of like who did notice uh i would say first it was deep mind so this guy dennis i don't know his last name he's that google company right so google ended up buying having to buy that company so deep mind was doing really interesting work google buys it for half a billion dollars or something like that i want to say many years ago then ewan notices he's like wow what deep mind can do is like what they've been talking about with ai for 40 years but nobody's freaking out about this and ewan's like i shall freak out about this so he starts realizing that google has all google has a monopoly on ai and he viewed ai as an existential threat and he viewed larry page which was his friend at the time as somebody who does not care about ai safety because he would talk to larry about ai safety and larry brush it off larry basically viewed it as this is this is the evolution of man we're going to go from homo sapiens to this like kind of this new species of like ai ai plus human whatever it'll be like a new thing that's what's gonna happen and ewan's like this is crazy and so he decided to help create open ai which is a counterweight to google which had a monopoly on ai talent and research so he's like we will get researchers and we will open source material because google would never do that and that will be like a good counterweight so he noticed kind of the difference there which is kind of crazy i don't know what we're gonna call this episode but this is one of the most interesting ones that we've ever had you had a really good thing in your five tweet tuesday uh email you said the context of this quote is that uh jerry seinfeld sold uh or turned down the most amount of money ever in tv history apparently he turned down 110 million dollars for one more season seinfeld the reporter asked him why why not do one more season and jerry says the most this is so good the most important word in art is proportion how much how many words how many minutes too much cake too much anything changes the whole feeling of it getting proportion right is what makes it art or makes it mediocre so good so good okay we should end there that's that's it that's just the best i feel like i can rule the world i know i can be what i want to hey let's take a quick break i want to tell you about a podcast that you can check out it is called the science of scaling by mark roberge he was the founding cero of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy's smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like klavio and vanta and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking to scale a company up if you're a cro or head of sales looking to level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcasts