Neville Medhora  0:00  
What's up? We're here with buddy Sam Parr, founder of the hustle and now at HubSpot. Yes. technically a HubSpot employee after you got acquired Yeah. Oh man, look at you little employee. Okay, well, I guess you're like a really high paid employee though, right?

Sam Parr  0:15  
Yeah, I guess so. I think so. Yes. My first I think it's my first job.

Speaker 1  0:19  
Nice. Okay, so we have a whole like intro on the other video. We did this around to it sandbar. So real quick. Wait, when did we do that one. We did that one a little bit while ago before that before we sold for acquisition. Yeah, you were on the TV show American pickers. You did a bunch of different things you did Southern Sam's wieners as big as a baby's arm. Yeah. food stand. Hot Dog hot dog stand roommate matching app called bunk was acquired by partment list. I think they're about to go. I think they're about to go public. damp. Do you get anything out of that? Yeah. Nice. And then you started hustle con and the hustle which is a newsletter with the round What? How many readers? we could we could say close to 2 million to me. And then this year got acquired by the hustle February. Yeah. HubSpot. HubSpot. There we go. Yeah. And I was an investor. So thanks for the free money. Yeah. Wait, all the work. I just finished your house. You totally did furnish this house. It's kind of we got the wallpaper guy coming in everything. Yeah, we've we did good. Cool. So if you want to talk weed. Last time, we talked extensively about newsletters and stuff. If you want to find out about how Sam started a newsletter, you can go on the other video, and we'll link that above or something like that? How many?

Sam Parr  1:31  
How many people watch that? 5000?

Neville Medhora  1:34  
I have no idea because we put on different platforms. So yeah, good amount. Anyways, let's get started. So you recently sold a company after you sold your company? What would change his life better life different?

Sam Parr  1:45  
It's way better. Life is way better? What do you think? I mean, I think it's better.

Neville Medhora  1:52  
Well, we are neighbors. So we look forward or down.

Sam Parr  1:55  
So I bought my house and I furnished it and I had a I like the thing about selling the company is like I imagined in most cases, like you probably are financially doing okay, before you sell. Right? 

Neville Medhora  2:08  
Yeah. 

Sam Parr  2:09  
So that necessarily hasn't been the biggest change, which a lot of people think it is. But there's a weight off my shoulders. That's a huge change. Yes. I'm incredibly happy. Yes. I feel like there was a it feels nice to have a start middle and an end. 

Neville Medhora  2:26  
Do people take you more seriously? Is there like a different because now everyone knows that it was acquired by a public company? I think they know the price. 

Sam Parr  2:35  
I don't know, do they? Yeah, I think so. I think they know or I think people take them, do they? I don't know. I haven't really thought about that. Actually. 

Neville Medhora  2:45  
I mean, you sold a company to a public company that that sounds like pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah, like a check mark on the scoreboard.

Sam Parr  2:52  
Yeah. Oh, well, yeah. But it makes me more proud. I'm I have more internal proud pride than I do external. Like, I don't really care too much about the external stuff. But yeah, I feel like that's the weight off my shoulders is I pulled something off that I that very, very few. I mean, how many companies are sold a year? 5000? I don't know. I don't even know like single digit. 1000s. I would imagine maybe 10,000. But not that many. 

Yeah, it feels cool. 

What do you do with the money? Well, the first thing you did?

I bought a fancy car. And that was the only major purchase and then I bought a rowing machine. And that was $2,000 and a I think that's the only thing I bought me Sarah, my wife and my mom and dad. I me and Sarah we're gonna fly economy, but we're gonna fly my parents first class, and we're gonna go to Europe. They've never really been outside the country too much. So that's gonna be that's gonna be a thing. So a car and a trip. 

Neville Medhora  3:47  
Nice. 

Sam Parr  3:48  
Nothing, right. I mean, nothing substantial. I could have bought the car already.

Neville Medhora  3:51  
Not right now. Well, I remember you told me. I had some friends that told me a similar thing. We were talking about it. And they said don't do anything for six months.

Sam Parr  3:59  
And I've not done anything major. I bought the car. And that's it. 

Neville Medhora  4:02  
Yeah

Sam Parr  4:02  
It was $105,000 car, which is expensive. But we're not talking like Ferrari.

Neville Medhora  4:07  
You did buy a station wagon. So you look like a Persian house mom right now.

Sam Parr  4:11  
I guess. 

Neville Medhora  4:13  
Alright, let's talk about let's let's change gears, Twitter. Like it feels like during the pandemic, Twitter got kind of awesome. I was always on Twitter by just like share links to articles and stuff. And then during the pandemic, I was like, Well, I guess this is how you hang out now. Did you feel it? Also? Were you active on Twitter? Like before the pandemic a lot or didn't happen? 

Sam Parr  4:31  
I started doing it because my friend named Jason Lumpkin. You know, Jason, he's got Sastre. He got popular and Cora and then he got popular on Twitter. And I did a meet up with him and he told me it was awesome and so I started doing it before the about I'd maybe one year before the pandemic, maybe two years before I forget exactly. And I started going hard on it. And I got so much value from it. My friend, our friend jack, he probably makes two or 3 million bucks a year selling his course all from Twitter. When we started seeing like That and I was like, Oh, I'm gonna try this Twitter thing. And I cracked the code. And I got fairly popular fairly quickly. And then I got super bored with it. And I think it's a circle jerk now. 

Neville Medhora  5:08  
But you're on it all the time still. 

Sam Parr  5:10  
Yeah, I am. But I'm not doing the tactics that I did to get popular. Like, I can tell you the tactics to get popular on Twitter

Neville Medhora  5:17  
 Please do. 

Sam Parr  5:17  
Its long threads. So you basically go to Wikipedia, you go to Reddit, and you find things so like, when content goes popular, there's like, it all starts with emotion, right? What emotion Are you going to have the person have? So like, you don't want sadness, but you do want like, shock and awe or you do want laughter? What are the other emotions like you want like a handful of emotions that since the beginning of human time, humans have related to it, and it stuck with them. And so you just figure out what those emotions are. And then you do long form, so like 10 to 30 tweet threads, like a thread, and you tell a story. And it's just like copywriting where the The goal of the first sentence is to get you to read the second one to get to read the third to the fourth. And if you get someone down to like thread 10, or thread 20, the likelihood they're going to hit share is incredibly high. 

Neville Medhora  6:03  
Joe Sugarman slippery slope

Sam Parr  6:05  
Yes, yeah, it's just traditional copywriting technique. 

Neville Medhora  6:07  
That's what I heard because I think one of your employees, people who works on the hustle Trung, I talked to him for an hour, I was like, can you review my Twitter? So I'm like,

Sam Parr  6:16  
Well, I like things. So I like, I don't want to go as far to say, but it might be true, but maybe it's not true. I don't wanna like, overstate it. But I would say I taught a lot of people at my company how to do it. And many of them learned how to do it and are now way better than I am. 

Neville Medhora  6:29  
They surpassed you. 

Sam Parr  6:30  
They surpassed me, which I'm cool with. That makes me proud to Trung is better than me.

Neville Medhora  6:34  
You're richer. So that's, that's cool. 

Sam Parr  6:36  
Yeah, that's wrong is better than me. Shawn is like a god on Twitter like 150,000. And like, again, I don't want to like, it could be like, a lot of people discovered this at the same time, or it could be that they saw me doing it. I don't know. But a lot of people are not doing a lot of the stuff that I noticed work that I was testing. It definitely will continue to work and still works. I just find it to be annoying at this point, because I already figured it out. Do you know what I mean? Like once you figure out how to do something like, I'm not excited. 

Neville Medhora  7:02  
But Twitter, you know, it was weird. Like when I started posting a little bit on Twitter, I got more like in person meetings and zoom meetings, because it was during that pandemic time. Then I ever had like being on Facebook, Instagram, all that kind of stuff.

Sam Parr  7:15  
But yeah, I mean, I like become friends with people like Jack Butcher. I met him on Twitter. He's a good friend. He's like, I consider him like a family friend. 

Neville Medhora  7:21  
Like I met on Twitter also. 

Sam Parr  7:22  
Yeah, I met him on Twitter. Um, I mean, you and I met on email. It's just like the different version. But yeah, it's I think it's actually better than email. Ryan deiss. I'm become friends with close with. I met him on Twitter. Who else I mean, I've been through I met most people on Twitter. I've hired you know, Steph Smith, who works for me. Yep. Twitter. Yes, the best.

Neville Medhora  7:42  
Yeah, damn. It's like basically a mini blog. I never thought like just a tiny little blog would be that powerful.

Sam Parr  7:48  
Yeah, but the best part about Twitter is that, like, I get people who DM me. And this sounds like a little disrespectful. But it's true is like you can tell who's like legit and who's not by like, what's in their bio, how many followers they have. They have the blue checkmark. I mean, it's superficial. But when you get like a lot of messages, it's so fast and easy to filter who's like a heavy hitter versus who isn't?

Neville Medhora  8:10  
Yeah, I love doing that. And I love it. I love it. When I see someone who's really awesome. Joined. They have like 900 followers. You're like kind of one of the first Yeah, a month later, they have like 18,000 you're like, Oh, big deal.

Sam Parr  8:20  
Listen to this on July 18, or something like that. I'm going up to New York and I'm going to I rent it. I'm doing a race car class, like a racing class. And I did it because I tweeted out I want to do a racing class. What are the best ones? And I got so many people dming me 100 people dming me. And there's a professional NASCAR driver named Parker. I don't even know his last name Parker K, I forget. He him or a group just bought a huge, famous racetrack in New York. And he goes, I just I'm a I'm a NASCAR driver and he's got like hundreds of 1000s of followers. I'll host you I love your work. And it's sick. So now I'm like gonna go race cars and have this adventure all because of Twitter.

Neville Medhora  9:01  
The best about like, with your size? I don't have any followers. You have 100 fucking maybe 80,000 something like that. Yeah. I heard the magic number from patologia one of our friends he said 40,000 he's like something happen. People keep sending me free shit. You get a lot of free shit.

Sam Parr  9:14  
I get a crazy amount of free stuff. 

I get a lot of candy. 

Well, because I tweet that like I'd like candy. So like, m&m sent me like m&ms with my face on it. Coca Cola I tweeted that I love Diet Coke. They sent me the like new these beta flavors like these the test flavors that they're trying out. Cody sent me literally 50 butter fingers. A few weeks ago someone sent me literally 300 Twinkies. So I get all types of like cakes. And I it's pretty awesome. 

Neville Medhora  9:43  
You got to make them fat people.

Sam Parr  9:45  
Yeah, I can't. I tweeted out I'm looking for the world's greatest t shirt. And someone I get sent like dozens of different shirts. That's kind of awesome. Yeah, sorry. It's sick. Or like I'll tweet out like I'm looking for a new mattress. What's the best one and like five months Companies like, hey, we'll send you one.

Neville Medhora  10:02  
Well, they also probably want to mention the hustle, right? Yeah.

Sam Parr  10:04  
But I always explicitly tell them. Look, if you want to, like, send me something like you can, but I'm not going to talk about you. And unless I actually want to, can you tell the Miami story?

Yeah, yeah.

So in Miami, we went the other day. And a guy was like, hey, do you want to come to the Floyd Mayweather fight? Like I'm working on it? And I have, like, the best seats, you can have them? And I go great. Sounds good. I would love if you any good. Yeah, it's, uh, you know, you're friends of a friend. I know who you are. I would love to host you. I said, Great. And then like, the day before the fight, he was like, Alright, I can give you the info on the tickets. But like, you know, are you going to mention us in TheHustle or on Twitter? I go, No, I'm not going to. And he goes, and I in fact, I said, in fact, I don't want the tickets. Just because you've been brought it up. I'm out. And in. Yeah, we didn't go and I plan on going but yeah, if people like, say something like that, I automatically say I don't want want it. Keep it. 

Dude lesson learned to send friend Sam free stuff. And don't ask for anything.

Neville Medhora  11:02  
And I mentioned it a lot of times, like I'll mention a lot of times, but if you ask me to it's an automatic No.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's kind of gross. You're expecting something. So let's talk about different social media platforms. Obviously, social media back in the day when it first started, when probably you were in college, high school, something like that. It was kind of a joke. It was like something like a 16 year old girl does. And it was kind of like made fun of right. It's like, Oh, she's just posting wish she had for breakfast. That was the thing. Now it seems like it's just like a woven part of our life. Just like the internet. You don't log on. It's just there. It's always there. And so give me your thoughts on the different social media platforms, pros and cons. I'm gonna list one out, you say some of the pros and cons. Facebook.

Sam Parr  11:40  
Okay. For years, I have always made a joke that I don't buy any individual stocks except for Facebook. I think it's a great company. We spent I've spent 10s of millions of dollars on their ad platform. It the pros is that for years, it was the most effective, but maybe still is the most effective ad platform. Another pro is I think Facebook marketplace. I just sold something this morning for $50 on Facebook marketplace, a old beanbag. I think Facebook marketplace is amazing. I think that's way better than Craigslist is the only company that's ever beat Craigslist, that something none of the other companies really have ever like, right? Beat it. So Facebook marketplace amazing. And Facebook groups, I think is the world's best forum software. Huge pro. 

Con is my my opinion has shifted. I think that they're like I think that it's like a really like bad habit I would not I'm gonna try and get off of it a little bit more. I wouldn't want my kids to use it. I think that they're they innovate quite slowly other than buying interesting stuff. And I think that in 10 years, I don't think that Facebook as it is now will really be that cool or popular. But do you think Oculus will will I think it will be a VR company instead? 

Neville Medhora  12:54  
Virtual? I think we're going to live in that at some point. 

Sam Parr  12:56  
Yeah, but I don't think that like I if I was starting my business today, I would be very hesitant to become a customer of Facebook, because I don't think that it's going to be much of a thing in five or 10 years. As it is now the company will exist, I believe. 

Neville Medhora  13:10  
All right. What about LinkedIn pros and cons. 

Sam Parr  13:16  
The only Pro is that it's where a lot of people are. 

And the cons are just about everything. I think it sucks to us. So I've got like five or six or maybe more 10 or something like that many 1000s of like, requests. I can't just like click Select all. 

Neville Medhora  13:31  
Yeah 

Sam Parr  13:32  
so I don't actually accept any of them. They're there, the way that they have their login, where they make you go through horrible capture stuff to login. I mean, I just think it succeeds in spite of itself. And I imagine it will be replaced in a relatively short amount of time a decade or so. I think it's horrible. 

Neville Medhora  13:49  
Hmm. But do you hire on it? 

Sam Parr  13:53  
No. Twitter, I have more on Twitter than LinkedIn. 

Neville Medhora  13:56  
Interesting. Okay, so that brings me 

Sam Parr  13:57  
but I'm in the media world. Right? 

Neville Medhora  13:59  
Yeah.

Sam Parr  14:00  
So like, I need to see what people like can talk about. And I need to see the written word. If I'm hiring a dev, a lot of devs don't even have LinkedIn. I don't care about that at all. If I'm hiring an operations person or something that is not writing, there's not development, but it's like $100,000 plus professional white collar job, then yeah, I do use it. But like, Yeah, I don't I use it very little to the point of like, I would have to go and remember my password.

Neville Medhora  14:26  
Well, so for my usage of LinkedIn is nothing because just annoys me with all the message. It's like the automated like happy work anniversary. Yeah, I just like, what about 400 of these in my inbox. And then the other thing I've noticed, though, is interesting. Like inside of our course, we rewrite all these people's cold emails and stuff. People use LinkedIn a lot for that.

Sam Parr  14:44  
And our sales people did 

Neville Medhora  14:45  
It works 

It works. Yeah, it works. 

Sam Parr  14:47  
So also a feature where you can pay money to get into someone's inbox. And I think that's effective.

Neville Medhora  14:53  
You do also do like the premium thing, which I don't really know what it gets you but it just gives you a little bit more access and clout and

Sam Parr  14:58  
what this is like maybe I'm not trying Under humblebrag, but I am right now I've got like, maybe 50,000 followers on it. And so like, I've got like a ton of messages. And I just so I don't know, like from a non like public facing person what it's like, from a public facing.

Neville Medhora  15:13  
Yeah. Or I always tell people because like a lot of people don't have many friends on there as we do. So it's just like, if you have, you know, 50 friends a senior work anniversary email, you're like, Oh, that's kind of nice.

Sam Parr  15:22  
Let Sarah myget my wife gets recruited weekly on LinkedIn. Interesting.

Neville Medhora  15:28  
Yeah. Well, I mean, LinkedIn is pretty cool in that way. What about Twitter, I guess we already kind of talked about,

Sam Parr  15:34  
that's cool. I think as an ad, the ad platform, we've never had success on it. So I think that if I was a shareholder, a big if I was a meaningful shareholder of Twitter, I would want to fire or demote Jack Dorsey and get like, an ad driven person there. Because their ad stuff is horrible. It's quite bad. 

Neville Medhora  15:57  
Where do you think Twitter's going? 

Sam Parr  16:00  
I think that they honestly don't need to do much more than what they're doing. Or no, actually, I changed that. I think it's, I think that what they're going to do is they're going to launch they acquired an email newsletter company called review, I think, I think they're going to integrate, and they're going to clone substack. And I think that will be a total win. I think if they launch a subscription service, that will also be a total win. I think that they can also and so that subscription service will replace substack and only fans, and I think they can crush it because you know, they allow porn on Twitter, or nudity. 

Neville Medhora  16:29  
I mean, I don't know. But like, I've heard these things. Yeah, exist. Yeah. 

Sam Parr  16:34  
So I think that could replace only fans. I think that's sick. I think that Twitter should lean in to the news department a little bit more. I think when there's like a local event, or like a noise outside or a fire one of the first things you do is lean into Twitter and and type in like Austin fire. So I think they can lean into news a little bit more. Facebook has done a good job of that. But the substack competitor and email newsletter competitor, I think will be badass and freakin awesome.

Neville Medhora  17:03  
So this brings me to the next one. What about clubhouse?

Sam Parr  17:07  
Oh, Twitter should is is cloning clubhouse already did It's so good. And it's so good clubhouse is dead? Yeah, I'm not bullish on it at all.

Neville Medhora  17:16  
I haven't heard anyone really talk about it after the pendant. 

Sam Parr  17:18  
You know, they they're bragging about like, basically, like, they do have a niche amongst like hip hop and black communities. And that's cool. Obviously, I'm not like entirely part of that community. So I don't know everything I know, from a very like, academic point of view of like, that's who's using it. But no, I think they're gonna go out of business. 

Neville Medhora  17:37  
Yeah, I haven't joined the clubhouse in a while have you? 

Sam Parr  17:39  
No, I haven't logged on. And I only logged on just to like, as a as like an industry person to figure out what's going on? Like, is the app gonna die? But I think it's gonna go.

Neville Medhora  17:50  
I think I was bullish on them, because I thought they could have been the greatest podcast generation studio on the entire planet. And they still haven't done it.

Sam Parr  17:58  
It's the I don't think it will work. Unfortunately, I would like it to, but it won't. Like if they

Neville Medhora  18:02  
if they just took like so there are cool live calls that happened, you know, Biology will get on with Navall or something like that. If they just splice all the good parts and made it a podcast you can listen to later. That'd be amazing. But they haven't done it. It's just people just rip it off of YouTube and do that themselves and get the views over there.

Sam Parr  18:16  
Yeah, I don't think it's gonna work out. Well, YouTube, I think is just the greatest thing on earth. 

Neville Medhora  18:20  
Well, let's talk about YouTube. That was the next one. YouTube pros and cons. 

Sam Parr  18:24  
Cons. It's still I think undervalued and under underused. I think mostly young people use it. YouTube TV, I think is the greatest thing ever. YouTube on Apple TV, I still think it's way underused, but I think it's the greatest thing ever. I use it every day. I use it every day as well. I don't use TV, other than YouTube TV. And normally YouTube, once they get streaming sports, which they already do a little bit. YouTube TV has anything. Yeah, but not all. It's still like a little localized, but they do. I think it's gonna be I think it'll be it'll be as big as, like the normal Google I think it's great to AD platform is pretty sick. It's hard to make video ads, but the ROI there's very, very, very good. We spent a lot of money there for trends.

Neville Medhora  19:05  
I mean, honestly, we bought houses roughly around the same time. It's just like if I want to, like replace an electrical outlet. I want to do myself YouTube. Yeah, I've learned everything on it. 

Sam Parr  19:13  
I think it's sick. I am incredibly bullish on Google just for owning YouTube.

Neville Medhora  19:17  
I heard I think Austin alread from lamda school recently tweeted something he talked about, like. 

Sam Parr  19:21  
Yeah, I saw that.  

Neville Medhora  19:22  
 Just thought that's cool. Like, it's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it is a good encapsulation. And it says basically, he went to a private school. And they said, he said, Who are your biggest competitors? And he was thinking they're gonna say like MIT or Harvard. Yeah. And it's like YouTube and Instagram.

Sam Parr  19:35  
Yeah, maybe. I mean, that sounds very

Neville Medhora  19:38  
Whatever gonna be a shit talker on Twitter, too. 

Sam Parr  19:40  
So that's how I like Austin. I mean, I'm just saying that sounds like a incredibly conveniently good story. And but I do agree with it, regardless if it's true or not,

Neville Medhora  19:48  
but it is like I mean, I think about like what I learned in class in school, it's just like, you have this teacher that's repeated the same thing seven times that day, versus a guy who spent two weeks doing experiments and editing as a professional film crew. Which one is going to be better? It's going to be YouTube every time.

Sam Parr  20:02  
And in terms of owned audiences, I definitely think emails so number one, but I think YouTube's number two. I agree.

Neville Medhora  20:07  
Also, when we look at the stats for a YouTube channel, which has roughly 60,000 members, whatever, like when you look at the on page time, 

Sam Parr  20:15  
like hours

Neville Medhora  20:16  
it's it's like it's not even a close thing compared to any other social platform. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Twitter's great. Facebook's great. But then YouTube is ultra ultra great.

Yeah. I it's also the hardest one to grow. 

Sam Parr  20:27  
I think podcasts are harder to grow than YouTube. 

Neville Medhora  20:29  
You think so?

Sam Parr  20:29  
Yeah. And I think email is almost easier than all of them.

Neville Medhora  20:33  
Well, let's go into that. Actually, I have a whole separate thing on podcasts. We'll talk about that in a second. Let's go over to more Instagram. Pros cons.

Sam Parr  20:42  
I don't like the culture of Instagram. I think it's to Instagrams like the Miami of the world. Like it's like for bathroom sex and credit card debt. I think it's I don't like Instagram. I think it has a bad culture. tic tocs culture is amazing. Like, have you ever hung out with like an 18 or 20 year old or like a 14 or 16 year old? Yeah. Like they're so nice and friendly and warm. And they don't make fun of each other. I was like, that's not a joke. But it's like, oh, we are kids. Like you would you would make fun of someone when we were like, younger, like, don't be gay. And like, I remember I talked to like a 12 year old like Sarah's cousin. I was like, I was like, by the way, like, do kids cuz I saw like, a lot of the popular Tic talkers are like Indrajith. You know, you don't know what if their boy or girl whatever. And I'm like, by the way, these guys are popular, and everyone's really nice in the comments. You guys ever make fun of anyone for being gay? And they go like, why would we ever make fun of someone for being gay? You know, it'd be like, we 

Neville Medhora  21:38  
That's an old joke from our generation. Thats gonna die. 

Sam Parr  21:40  
Would we make fun of someone for being tall? And I was like, Yeah, I was like, I'm just I'm just wondering how you guys interact. And there and and i think that that is being that's happening in tik tok of like this, like, incredibly warm, very little bullying compared to before. And I think Instagram has a lot of that. So I think Tik Toc sick, although I'm nervous to use it, because it's a Chinese company. Yeah,

Neville Medhora  22:02  
I have it on my phone. It's too addicting. Like, you just waste a lot of time. It's amazing. Alright, let's talk about living in different places. You have like, lived in all the popular places now. So San Francisco. You live in Austin right now. You're going to New York.

Sam Parr  22:16  
I've lived in New York, too, though. 

Neville Medhora  22:18  
You've been to Miami? I know. You don't have 

Sam Parr  22:20  
I've spent time there. I've got family there. 

Neville Medhora  22:22  
What do you what's a good what do you think of San Francisco? 

Sam Parr  22:25  
Okay. So San Francisco, I think is the way that I explain it is there is like 10,000 things to hate about it. Right? There's like the homeless problem. The weather is like, okay, like, it's it's the problem. It's never like too hot. And it's never cold, which is kind of boring. Like, if I'm not I don't consider myself to be liberal, but it's like, not that great. And I think I don't think you can hear that in this mic. So there's a lot of bad stuff about it. But there's two amazing things which is like high caliber people and the geography is like the best of any city in the in the country. I think I so I think it's amazing. And I hope that it like crumbles and rebuild itself. And I would love to go back. 

 I moved to Austin from San Francisco. The pros, I think are everyone is so friendly here. It's significantly more fun and easier to live in than San Francisco or New York. I even though people complain that the prices are going up compared to those cities, it's still way, way more affordable. And there is some diversity of political stuff. The problem is for me is that it's incredibly white, it's like still like pretty homogenous in terms of ethnicity and race, which is only one type of diversity, but that is lacking. And as someone who has a black wife, it kind of makes her uncomfortable. And I missed the hustle and bustle of a major city. So overall, I think it's good, but I still miss it. I still miss like a New York,

Neville Medhora  23:55  
I feel like you go to San Francisco, New York to get rich, and then you move here to live good.

Sam Parr  23:59  
The easy, the living here is way easier. Okay? It's just like you're happier. But it's kind of like running a marathon where like I trained for it. Or like any sporting event, you train for it, and it like kind of stinks, but you're happy to be doing it. And then you're right in the middle of the race. And you're like, this fucking sucks. I'm never doing this again. I'm out here, you finish it and you're like, never again. And then like three weeks later, you're like, I need to feel that pain again. And that's how I feel about living in New York is I currently don't have that pain. I have a very easy, comfortable, cushy life here. But I missed the grind. And so I'll be happy to move. I'm moving there. Wednesday, a week from tomorrow for three months.

Neville Medhora  24:35  
Yeah. So I've been I've been one of those unemployed fools forever. And so I've always like never had to be in a specific place. And I always thought and way back in the day I would leave for just the summers and go places. And I always thought that the best place to live is to places and the reason is when you stay in any place you just get used to it right? You start everything's the same you stop appreciating it. Like I used to live like on Sixth Street and after a while. You're just like It's so crazy when people first come there. But after a while, you're just like, Oh, this is my backyard. Like you just you just think it's normal. That's

Sam Parr  25:06  
Yeah, place you got I think I definitely. And I think it's good to have different perspectives. So when I'm in New York, I'm like, around a bunch of finance oriented people. And everyone's like, doing this and that. And then I'm in Austin, and I'm still around entrepreneurial types of folks. But they're doing different stuff. And I think it's good to have different perspectives. And so I really enjoyed that. So I think two places living that's already doing one. Yeah, so we bought this place, I can say the numbers. So we bought, how much should I paid 960,000? For my house, my monthly payment is all my so the the mortgage rent insurance or sorry, mortgage insurance, utilities, and what else you have when your payment, whatever, like the fixed costs, mostly fixed costs? I think it's $4800 a month. And then how much should I think I spent $60,000 to furnish it. And then I'm now renting it out for around at $8500 a month when I'm gone. So I'm making a profit. And I'm going to use that profit to put towards my New York rent. I'm renting a place there for $6000 a month. So I'm actually getting like, what, 25 or $3,000 a month in New York, and I'm looking to buy a place there. And I want to do the exact same thing and live for free.

Neville Medhora  26:11  
It's easy right now to do all this stuff. Like in such an awesome bull market. He just like rent it for whatever you want. 

Sam Parr  26:16  
I think I'll be able to rent that for more. I just didn't, I found a friend who rented it for three months for the whole time as opposed. And everyone's like, dude, that's so much money. And I agree it is a lot of money. But my reasoning is, if you want to stay in a three bedroom home for a month, is that that's how much it costs us. $300 a night. Like that's like pretty normal. 

Neville Medhora  26:36  
And it's like, we live in a place that's like, it feels like a nice quiet neighborhood. And literally three blocks away. It's like crazy stuff.

Sam Parr  26:43  
Yeah. And if you want to go somewhere, like if you want to go stay in a hotel somewhere that would cost 150 to $200 a night, here at my place are getting a three bedroom home with the gym, and a neighborhood like $300 a night is not a lot of money. I mean, that's like normal, that's what you'd expect. So like if you can book it out for three months, like it becomes quite profitable. 

Neville Medhora  27:00  
Also your renter pays for the gym, but I get to use the gym. That's that should be in the clause, by the way.

Dude, let's talk about newsletters for a second. We went in, like I said in Sam's other video, we did a lot of newsletter stuff. But right now it seemed like six months ago or a year ago, like everyone, their brother and their mom started a freaking newsletter. You see this like huge wave, especially on Twitter. Everyone's starting to newsletter. As someone who started one of the world's largest newsletter, is this wise, like, like, are these people? Are these people all going to crap out of their newsletter?

Sam Parr  27:29  
All of them? No, most Yes. I don't think people realize how hard it is. 

Neville Medhora  27:34  
What's hard about it? 

Sam Parr  27:36  
Dude, writing stuff is way harder than a podcast or a video. I mean, with video you have to edit so long as you don't have to be the editor. You're okay. But podcasts I think are like super newsletters are super challenging. Because writing like, your average newsletter probably has 1000 or 2000 words or you're sending articles that are longer that takes so much work is to find stuff to write about to you just it's really, really hard. And there, but the thing is, is that they're super easy to start. Yeah, like they're so easy to start, it's not hard to start that YouTube is harder to start. podcasts are harder to start. But newsletters are so hard to keep on going. It's just challenging to write shit all the time. And it's challenging to write good shit that people want to read on a consistent basis. And the bad thing about newsletters is in order to make them good, you have to be consistent. So I think it's, I think, yeah, most of all quit.

Neville Medhora  28:29  
Yeah, I mean, I've anecdotally seen most of the people that started substack they no longer promote their substack they just kind of like post on Twitter.

Sam Parr  28:36  
It's way easier. Yeah, dude, it sucks. Like our good friend, who I love invested in sub second clubhouse, and he is invested in everything. But those are just the two that we're talking about. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure those are both gonna go out of business. Or not out of business. 

Neville Medhora  28:52  
Twitter might kill both of them. 

Sam Parr  28:53  
I don't think they're gonna go out of business, but I don't think they're gonna be venture sized returns.

Neville Medhora  28:57  
Yeah, agreed. Let's talk about podcasting. So you started some little shitbox podcast with Shaan. And now it's like number three in business or I don't know. It's like really high up. Can you tell us that story? Like Where'd that come from?

Sam Parr  29:10  
Shitbox shit. Like that word. It's called my first million is the name is bad. But in a way, it's become good because it's so bad. So Shaan came to me. It'll be two years in September, I think. He came to me and he goes, I want to launch a podcast for the hustle. And I've known Shaan has been a close friend of mine since 2014. Maybe I've been close with him for a while now. 

Neville Medhora  29:32  
He got furlough days. 

Sam Parr  29:33  
Yeah, for a long time. We've been buddies. And he came. He goes, I got this idea for a podcast. Here's episode one. He already had a pilot and I listened to it. And I go in we're in. and we negotiated the deal. And we start promoting it. And it was just him interviewing people on how they got their first million users. Their first million revenue, profit, whatever 

Neville Medhora  29:51  
Was it like a how I built this knockout. 

Sam Parr  29:53  
Yeah, yeah. And it was great. And he was good at it. And then he was like, dude, finding guests are hard. There's one guest is canceled. Do you want to just Come to the studio. And let's just brainstorm. Because we did that all the time we would do this thing called Judo or something where we would meet every two weeks. And we would talk about different ideas that we're seeing. And we would have an expert come in, and we would deconstruction, and it was awesome. People loved it. And he goes, just come and just do that with me. And we did do it. And we've been consistent to the point where now we've been putting out like, for a week for like, two years, and or we're not done for a week, the whole time. We've done like, one a week and then two, and then and then we just have we're consistent. And I think Shaan has gotten like crazy talented at this podcast. He's really good at it.

Neville Medhora  30:34  
He didn't start he started out as good now he's great. I thought you were way better. In the beginning. I was like Sam's carrying the show. And now the last couple times, I'm like, I think it might have flipped a little bit. Well, not carring you but it's just like, He's really good.

Sam Parr  30:45  
He's really good. I, the thing is, is that I'm working on growing it. And so we have we made a deal like a handful of months ago. I'm like, hey, let me focus on growing this. And I'm gonna like kind of be behind the scenes, like, I'll know what to do to grow it. But I need you to do a lot of the research ahead of time. And so that's so he gets a lot of credit. And also, I do think he is actually legitimately more talented at it. I mean, He's good.

Neville Medhora  31:07  
He's good, because I've known him for a while to through you. And like he wasn't that good before he definitely worked grew at it. It's kind of cool. 

Sam Parr  31:14  
he's hes the thing about Shawn is he loves it. So like, he's a he wants to be a teacher. So if you ask him what his life goal is, he's like, I want to teach a billion people like he loves it. I don't love it. It To me, it's just a means to an end.

Neville Medhora  31:27  
Did y'all have a plan back then to do anything? or grow? Was there a number or was just like fun? It was kinda like, yeah, let's walk around.

Sam Parr  31:33  
Yeah, we both wanted to be number one. 

Neville Medhora  31:35  
From the beginning. 

Sam Parr  31:36  
Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah, like, Yeah, I was like, but we didn't, I didn't see I didn't know how that was gonna happen. And we're still not number one like, but you know, we're becoming one of the most popular and in order to be number one, like if we got like, once we crossed about a million downloads a month will be bordering on like one of the more listened to podcasts. 

Neville Medhora  31:58  
How does the podcast make money, Does it?

Sam Parr  32:00  
Before it was ads Now, none of our shit makes my main Trends makes money. So so. So the hustle owns the podcast. And it made someone like Microsoft would buy an ad on the email and some of the ads would go on to the podcast and show them and get a cut of that money. Now that hub spots the only owner they are only advertiser and they they we run HubSpot ads. So I guess technically doesn't make money. But as a subsidiary, it makes money because in a way, HubSpot is buying ads on the podcast, but they own it. 

Neville Medhora  32:31  
So they basically fund the whole thing now.

Sam Parr  32:32  
They fund the whole thing. But trends makes money. So it trends funds our whole operation. I mean trends will make you know, we could like hypothetically, I don't know what I can say since we're like a public company. But like there, there's probably a world where trends makes 20 to $30 million a year in a very short amount of time. That's pretty awesome. And subscription revenue. Yeah. 

Neville Medhora  32:51  
What would you suggest for growing a podcast? What What have you noticed? 

Sam Parr  32:54  
It's so hard? I think there's really only two or three ways that you can do it. The number one way is by being a guest on other people's podcast. The number two way is by buying ads on other people's podcasts being a guest, you're basically just it's a free ad and more in depth. If you can't do that, then you got to buy ads on that podcast. So we're buying ads. So have you heard of, we study billionaires? No. It's like a really popular business podcasts. We're buying ads on that and it works. And then the third one is just using our daily email. But really, those two are the only two growth methods I've ever seen work. Well, there's a fourth one, which is like be Joe Rogan or like be color daddy and just be like, exceptional and outlandish and like different. But that's like, really, I can't that's not really good advice. 

Neville Medhora  33:39  
Yeah. Well, we have a buddy, Noah Kagan and he has a podcast first. And then he started a YouTube channel. And it seemed a lot easier to grow the podcast, but what he said was interesting is like, it's good for someone with an audience already. It's hard to build a podcast audience 

Sam Parr  33:53  
Dude, it's so hard. 

Neville Medhora  33:54  
YouTube naturally kind of spreads your message. Whereas a podcast it's like only your audience listens. And no one really finds it.

Sam Parr  33:59  
Yeah. And like, technically, like a lot of YouTubers are podcasters like Logan Paul has the Logan Paul podcast on YouTube. But having that daily cadence where you're in someone's ear for 45 minutes, it's pretty nutty. Like, I get recognized on the street by my voice throughout, like there's happens on a weekly basis. Someone will say, Alright, are you Sam? I go, Yeah, what's going on? And he goes, man, I'd like I have you in my voice for four hours a week. And they'll say like, and they'll make a comment, like, Yeah, because you know, Sam, you don't like X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, I don't He's like, yeah, you said it in this time. And I talk so much I don't remember that. But it's crazy that these people like get to know you. Like, through that podcast. 

Neville Medhora  34:40  
Are they surprised how ugly you are? 

Sam Parr  34:42  
I think they oftentimes they they're like I didn't realize that you were gonna be this tall or this big. I thought 

Neville Medhora  34:47  
You were pretty big. 

Sam Parr  34:48  
But they say I thought that you were just gonna be like a little dork. 

Neville Medhora  34:51  
You do look like a French boy on HGH. 

Sam Parr  34:53  
Well, I am testosterone but they, they they they tell me they go I always switched you and Shaan because you have like a high pitch nerd voice but you look like a bro and he's got a low pitched bro voice but he looks like a nerd and I'm like, oh, 

Neville Medhora  35:09  
Shaan's big to like the same size. 

Sam Parr  35:11  
He's Yeah, but he's not athletic looking. 

Neville Medhora  35:13  
He's getting there. It's getting better he is. 

Sam Parr  35:15  
And he's tall too. He's six two as well. And he's thick.

Neville Medhora  35:17  
Yeah, he's pretty big. Would y'all say like by volume? Y'all are probably the largest podcasts out there. 

Sam Parr  35:23  
That was a good one. Right? 

Neville Medhora  35:25  
All right. Yeah, by weight, y'all definitely are definitely the highest. Let's, let's talk about some rich people shit. So you've met a lot of rich people talk to them, blah, blah, blah, interacted. Give me some insights. What some rich people stuff that you don't know about.

Sam Parr  35:36  
Okay, there's a bunch of stuff. So I've had this event called Hustle Con. So I've like been, it's been crazy. Like I always tell these people to come an hour early. Like, I don't tell them it's an hour early, but it is. And so I can just hang out with them backstage. So I get to like, it's like my hack to like, get to know these people. So I've had like the founders of WeWork, Casper. I mean, just like 300 different startups that are probably many of them are huge. And I got to know them. And it was pretty shocking. So like, a few shocking things. Like a lot of people were, in one regard quite normal. Like they still had like doubts. Like, I remember one guy, I think it was Sam Yagan, the guy started OkCupid and was a CEO match.com. I told my papers flight, and he, the flight that he booked was like $300 from Chicago round trip. So I guess he flew Economy, and he like made sure to follow up to make sure that that flight got reimbursed. So like, in some regard, like that's, like, pretty normal. And another regard like, I noticed that, like, all of them have this attitude of why not me? Why can't I do this? Do you know what I mean? Like, I remember the Miguel the guy started, WeWork was explaining the vision and how it got started. And I was like, yeah, that that all makes sense. But like, I would never, like most people would never have done that. And he was like, Well, why? Why shouldn't I have done it? It sounded like a good idea. And I was like, you're you're right. You're totally right. It's just that that emotional thing of like, why, you know, while but maybe someone else should do this, like a lot of these guys don't have that. What else? I don't, I think that there is a threshold to where money doesn't make a difference. And it's probably lower than what most people think. I do think that a lot of these folks there. I talk to them a lot about their monthly expenses. And it goes up like crazy. But their happiness doesn't go up like crazy, unfortunately. What's that number? I don't know that number is like, like, the difference between a billion, someone who has a net worth of like 1 million liquid and like a billion liquid, or billion total net worth, in terms of happiness is probably quite minimal. You have more shit, but you have also more shit to worry about. And I think that that's true. What else?

Neville Medhora  37:51  
Warren Buffett always talked about he whenever he's talking to like a college or something, he's just like, if you think about it, we're not that different. Like, we use the same phone, we have probably the same size TV. And he's like, the only difference is whenever I fly, it's in my own little jet. Which is really the only difference. There's not too much more,

Sam Parr  38:07  
Which is definitely cool. But I've flown private because I've had friends that had jets and it's sick. But like you just I just saved like a few hours. I mean, that's not like it's not and I don't travel that much wasn't like the biggest difference. What else? Like, I think there was that study that said like the $80,000 a year like you're not happier. That's bullshit. Yeah, I think that's bullshit. I do think it's like $250,000 what is you? 

Neville Medhora  38:32  
I think it really is. I think it's when you make more than your friends. Well, I

Sam Parr  38:36  
And I would actually say that that's like a downside, which is like you and I hang out with a lot of like, interesting in terms of successful like, financially successful people, and I find it to be exhausting. And I have to go and realize that like this, that's not normal. And it's I like 

Neville Medhora  38:39  
Why is exhausting? Well, because the definition of like happiness is like the gap between expectations and reality. And if your expectation if you only hang around, like, ballers or something like that, and you're like, Well, I'm not a baller, unless I have this much money. And because these five of my friends have this much money, then you're going to be unhappy. But then you go hang out there people who don't have that, and you're like, wow, I'm killing it. Like, I'm like, why do I need anything else? And I think that that, like, it could be really dangerous to hang out with. Just Just to be caught in a stupid bubble. Because like, the financial stuff isn't nearly as important as unfortunately, I thought it was gonna be. But that said, there's like, the stupid thing is like, you're it. That's silly advice to give because you can't experience it unless you've actually done it. Yeah, like it sounds so trite, right, like someone who's like maybe wealthy explaining how it doesn't matter. So it is kind of bullshit to be in that perspective.

True. I've also seen I mean, we've also seen like a lot of people go from not wealthy to very wealthy and I will say, I don't think there's a difference in happiness level. I think that people are just kind of like for the most part. They're just kind of like what they are They they're just like that level. But richer.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai