Danny Jones Podcast - #20 - Making Millions & Drinking White Claw | Clayton Johnson
Aired: 2019-09-11
Duration: 01:16:33


=== White Claw: The New Beer Standard (08:26) ===

[00:00:05]  What were you telling me about the white claw just a second ago?
[00:00:08]  I love the analogy.
[00:00:10]  Dude, the white claw is genius, first of all.
[00:00:13]  I love it.
[00:00:15]  Actually, I mean, not particularly.
[00:00:16]  I don't really love the taste necessarily, but white claw in general is amazing because this is now, it's like what jewel is to cigarettes, white claw is to beer, right?
[00:00:28]  Definitely.
[00:00:29]  Because, you know, I actually like beer, but objectively, the first time you ever tasted a beer when you were really young, you drank it.
[00:00:37]  I mean, we like it now because it has alcohol in it and you get acquired taste inside.
[00:00:40]  But, like, the first time you have it, it tastes like fucking gross.
[00:00:42]  It's gross, right?
[00:00:43]  It's fucking gross.
[00:00:44]  Same thing with a cigarette, dude.
[00:00:45]  People like cigarettes.
[00:00:47]  A cigarette can be very enjoyable.
[00:00:49]  Oh, yeah.
[00:00:50]  After you smoke it for a while.
[00:00:52]  All sorts of different times.
[00:00:53]  Yeah.
[00:00:53]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:00:54]  Well, I mean, but the first.
[00:00:55]  Me and you shared a new part on the side of the road one day.
[00:00:57]  Exactly.
[00:00:57]  Yeah.
[00:00:58]  But the first cigarette you ever have is probably not the best tasting thing you've ever had.
[00:01:03]  So now that everyone's becoming health conscious and stuff, the whole idea with 100 calories.
[00:01:11]  Dude, it's a vodka soda with some flavor in it.
[00:01:15]  Yeah.
[00:01:15]  5%.
[00:01:16]  It's fucking crazy how it's blowing up.
[00:01:17]  Dude, it is crazy, man.
[00:01:19]  If I were a beer company, I'd start producing this immediately.
[00:01:23]  Everybody has.
[00:01:23]  Natty Light even has.
[00:01:24]  Yeah, they got White Claw ASMR.
[00:01:26]  Well, nope.
[00:01:28]  They didn't even pay for this.
[00:01:31]  This is free.
[00:01:32]  I was talking earlier.
[00:01:34]  I was like, we need White Claw to advertise on our show.
[00:01:37]  And we're like, White Claw is the last company that needs any advertising.
[00:01:40]  They would probably pay us not to promote them.
[00:01:44]  Dude, there's a bunch of companies jumping on it.
[00:01:46]  Like, Truly's in the game.
[00:01:48]  But not even just like.
[00:01:49]  I heard that shit sucks, though, compared to White Claw.
[00:01:51]  I don't know, man.
[00:01:52]  You got to have, like, if I was White Claw, I'd just start Truly.
[00:01:55]  So I'd have two brands so that everybody can argue with it.
[00:01:58]  I'm winning.
[00:01:59]  Is that what you'd really do?
[00:02:01]  Yeah, for sure.
[00:02:02]  That's genius.
[00:02:03]  Yeah.
[00:02:03]  You got to win both sides, but then you got to, like, start little fights.
[00:02:07]  Yeah, start the beef.
[00:02:08]  Yeah, start the beef.
[00:02:09]  And the beef, like, it just makes everything grow, dude.
[00:02:12]  It's like, there's, like, YouTube people, man.
[00:02:15]  If you start beef, it's not like you're going to destroy the other.
[00:02:17]  It just makes them both grow, dude.
[00:02:19]  Yeah, same in the music industry.
[00:02:20]  Like rap beef, rappers beefing.
[00:02:22]  Yeah, dude.
[00:02:23]  If I were White Call, I'd buy both brands and I'd run commercials trashing the other brand.
[00:02:27]  Trashing them both?
[00:02:28]  Yeah, that's genius.
[00:02:30]  And maybe promote one a little more hardcore on the East Coast and one on the West Coast or something.
[00:02:34]  Start a little state by state battle or something.
[00:02:37]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:37]  That's next level.
[00:02:38]  That is next level.
[00:02:39]  You need marketing help.
[00:02:40]  That's next level marketing.
[00:02:42]  All right, so we've got to do an intro for this for you, Clayton.
[00:02:46]  Clayton Johnson, ladies and gentlemen, is a digital marketing entrepreneur genius from Medellin, Colombia.
[00:02:53]  I'm not from Medellin, if you can tell.
[00:02:56]  Give me the factual background of Clayton Johnson and who you are.
[00:02:59]  Okay.
[00:03:01]  For what's relevant, I'm Clayton Johnson.
[00:03:03]  I am the CMO of a company called The Hoth, H O T H.
[00:03:07]  And it's an SEO company based here in St. Pete, Florida.
[00:03:12]  It's been growing pretty quickly.
[00:03:14]  Last three years, we got on the INC 5000 list, three years in a row.
[00:03:18]  So it's pretty cool, and that's pretty much what I do.
[00:03:21]  So I love marketing, all things marketing.
[00:03:24]  Grew up in Indiana, lived in Chicago for five years, moved to Medellin, Colombia for three years, and then now in St. Pete.
[00:03:31]  Damn.
[00:03:31]  Hanging out with you.
[00:03:32]  What is the INC 5000?
[00:03:34]  INC 5000 is the top growing companies in the U.S., it's the fastest growing companies.
[00:03:38]  That's crazy.
[00:03:39]  So the Hoth, your marketing company, is one of the fastest growing companies.
[00:03:42]  Yeah, we hit it three times in a row.
[00:03:43]  Not just marketing companies, but just any company.
[00:03:45]  Any company in the U.S., or anybody that applied.
[00:03:48]  So.
[00:03:49]  Okay.
[00:03:50]  That's pretty badass, dude.
[00:03:51]  But yeah, that's what a marketing company should be, right?
[00:03:53]  They should be one of the fastest growing companies.
[00:03:55]  If you're good at marketing, marketing helps create sales and grow businesses.
[00:03:58]  So you better be on that list.
[00:03:59]  And so we've been smashing.
[00:04:01]  And it's in downtown St. Pete.
[00:04:02]  Downtown St. Pete, yeah.
[00:04:04]  I'm very familiar with that.
[00:04:04]  Worldwide, baby.
[00:04:05]  Actually, worldwide, baby.
[00:04:09]  Well, main office is in St. Pete.
[00:04:10]  It used to be a virtual company.
[00:04:11]  So we used to not have an office.
[00:04:13]  And actually, to be honest, the vast majority of people that work at the Hoth are not in the office.
[00:04:19]  We literally have hundreds or maybe even thousands of people that are working freelance for us.
[00:04:27]  And they live all over the world.
[00:04:30]  Yeah, it's crazy.
[00:04:31]  So it's kind of like Uber for.
[00:04:35]  Journalism kind of or Uber for for search engine marketing or how do you what do you call that when people are are developing content that also helps boost your search results is that that's pretty much One of the main products that you guys have yeah,
[00:04:51]  well, I mean if we're talking about the freelancers like we have 500 people on one team and they're content creators So essentially for SEO in order to it's all about ranking on search engines right you if you people are typing in questions about your products and services that you're selling every day right and so in order to show up there You got to have some kind of content like that actually ranks.
[00:05:12]  So, we help people create that content, and that could be in the form of like blog posts, for instance.
[00:05:17]  That if you have a question like, How much does it cost to remodel my home?
[00:05:22]  Right?
[00:05:22]  That would be like a piece of content you want on your website.
[00:05:25]  Somebody's got to write that.
[00:05:26]  And so, we help a lot of businesses write that type of content.
[00:05:29]  And we have enough, you know, customers and orders and all that kind of stuff to provide 500 people with work.
[00:05:38]  So, that's what the majority of those people are doing.
[00:05:40]  They're literally everywhere.
[00:05:42]  Um, in the U.S., or they can even be outside, you know, worldwide, yeah, and literally just working from their homes or whatever.
[00:05:48]  But they're trained by us, writing like really good content for our clients.
[00:05:52]  That's crazy.
[00:05:53]  And you're so young, your company is so massive to build something like that that's just digital and all on the internet and all based on people all over the world, freelancers.
[00:06:02]  It's like a very modern type of business, yeah, man.
[00:06:07]  100%.
[00:06:08]  I mean, this is like a whole new economy that we're kind of like uh entering into with people being able to work from wherever they want, whenever they want.
[00:06:15]  I mean, think about, yeah, like you said, like Uber.
[00:06:18]  Uber, like, allows pretty much anybody that has a car to have a job right now, and you can turn it off, turn it on and off whenever you want.
[00:06:24]  Is that why the company grows so fast?
[00:06:26]  Is that what's allowed you guys to hit that Inc. 5000 list every year because the model is built like that?
[00:06:33]  So you can scale up super fast?
[00:06:35]  Kind of, to some extent.
[00:06:36]  Yeah.
[00:06:36]  I mean, just because you hire freelancers doesn't mean your company is going to grow.
[00:06:38]  You have to sell the products first, right?
[00:06:40]  You have to sell the services.
[00:06:41]  So that is the big thing.
[00:06:43]  But there is a great thing about, you know, the freelance model.
[00:06:49]  In terms of keeping controlling costs, right?
[00:06:51]  As you scale up, controlling like human labor is like your number one cost in a business.
[00:06:56]  And in this case, if you were to hire people that work in the office, you have to have enough work for one person to work 40 hours every single week all the time.
[00:07:05]  And then also on top of that, there's we pay benefits and have like all this different stuff.
[00:07:10]  Not everybody wants that as a job.
[00:07:12]  Some people want to work one hour a day, some people want to work five hours a day, some people want to work 10 hours a day, right?
[00:07:18]  Some people want to work in a week.
[00:07:20]  And then take another week off.
[00:07:21]  Some people want to, they just have the freedom, right?
[00:07:24]  And the way our system works is, you know, kind of like Uber.
[00:07:28]  There's a list of tasks, and after you're approved and trained to work for us, you just log in, you click, I want a new article, you write the article, and then you send it in.
[00:07:37]  That's it.
[00:07:37]  You can stop working, you can do more, whatever you want to do.
[00:07:41]  It's a lot like Fiverr or one of those gig based companies where, depending on whatever your creative skill is, whether it be writing, video editing, photography, graphic design, you can basically go in.
[00:07:52]  Find a bank of jobs that need to be done and pick what you want to do and then get paid for it.
[00:07:56]  Ours is a little different because we actually train everyone that comes in and it's very specific for what they do.
[00:08:02]  All the writers are trained on exactly how to write it in an SEO optimized way, how to write for web, how to do interlinking.
[00:08:09]  They have to be good.
[00:08:11]  They have to hit a certain level before they can actually be approved to do those jobs.
[00:08:15]  Yeah, actually, we only hire the top 1% of writers.
[00:08:17]  Literally, for every 100 people apply, we only hire 1% or 1%.
[00:08:21]  That's crazy.
[00:08:22]  But in terms of the model, yes.
[00:08:25]  The whole economy of being able to, the gig economy, it's blowing up.
[00:08:29]  It's changing the way people work now.

=== From Construction to Content Creation (03:01) ===

[00:08:32]  And I think that's actually one of the reasons that we are successful.
[00:08:35]  We sell the services really well because we're a marketing company, but that allows us to scale and keep our costs right in line where they need to be.
[00:08:44]  What did you say you went to college for?
[00:08:46]  And you went to college in Chicago?
[00:08:47]  No, I went to college at Indiana University.
[00:08:48]  Oh, in Indiana.
[00:08:49]  And at the time, they called my degree telecommunications, which sounds.
[00:08:53]  I've never heard of that.
[00:08:55]  It's because it won the award for the worst name of a degree to get ever.
[00:08:59]  Telecommunications.
[00:09:01]  So you got a degree for telemarketing?
[00:09:02]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:09:03]  That's what it sounds like.
[00:09:04]  Yeah.
[00:09:05]  Good thing, like, I own my own company now, so I don't have to put that on a resume, you know?
[00:09:09]  Because people would be like, what?
[00:09:12]  No, but I was going to, like, work on movies and stuff, dude.
[00:09:14]  Like, I made, like, a documentary.
[00:09:15]  I did, like, media studies.
[00:09:16]  That's so wild.
[00:09:18]  Things like that.
[00:09:18]  So, dude, it's kind of the thing about now, today, is whatever you study, it's, like, irrelevant because all the information you could ever want to learn is online.
[00:09:27]  Like, you can pick any career path.
[00:09:28]  It's crazy.
[00:09:29]  Yeah.
[00:09:30]  How did you get a degree in telecommunications, wanting to make films and documentaries and movies?
[00:09:37]  And how did you transition into.
[00:09:39]  Working or starting this company, a marketing company.
[00:09:43]  Well, I worked on a couple films in Indiana.
[00:09:45]  I actually worked on one.
[00:09:47]  You know, Kevin Sorbo?
[00:09:48]  No.
[00:09:50]  Kevin Sorbo used to do that one.
[00:09:51]  He had the sword.
[00:09:53]  I'll look it up.
[00:09:54]  Kevin Sorbo?
[00:09:55]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:55]  Look it up.
[00:09:56]  You'll know who the guy is.
[00:09:57]  And you'll be like, oh, that dude.
[00:09:59]  Shit, what was the name of the show?
[00:10:03]  Hercules.
[00:10:04]  Do you remember Hercules?
[00:10:05]  Oh, yeah, If you see a picture, you'll be like, yes, that guy.
[00:10:09]  Yes, I know who he is.
[00:10:10]  So he was the main actor on this film.
[00:10:12]  Dude, he is old.
[00:10:13]  Well, he is now, probably.
[00:10:16]  This is, dude, I graduated in 2008.
[00:10:18]  So this is from college?
[00:10:19]  Yeah.
[00:10:20]  So this is like 11 years ago because I'm old now.
[00:10:22]  Okay.
[00:10:23]  Time goes fast.
[00:10:25]  But anyway, so yeah, I wanted to work on movies.
[00:10:28]  So I worked on a movie that was being filmed in Indiana and he was the main actor.
[00:10:31]  And I was like, this is fucking cool, dude.
[00:10:33]  Fucking Hercules.
[00:10:34]  And I went up to that dude.
[00:10:35]  This is funny.
[00:10:37]  I went up to him and I was like really scared because it was my first movie I've ever worked on.
[00:10:40]  I was a PA.
[00:10:41]  So, you know, I got there first.
[00:10:42]  I was the last one to leave, just running all the time.
[00:10:44]  I was like, just trying to.
[00:10:45]  Do you remember the name of the movie?
[00:10:47]  No, I don't remember.
[00:10:47]  I could find it though.
[00:10:48]  But I was like so scared because I was like, man, this is maybe going to be my future.
[00:10:53]  And I went up to him, I was like, Mr. Sorbo, hey, I'm Clayton.
[00:10:57]  This is the first movie I ever worked on.
[00:10:59]  Do you got any advice for me?
[00:11:00]  He goes, don't fuck it up.
[00:11:02]  Hell yeah.
[00:11:03]  That's awesome.
[00:11:04]  Was that fucking Hercules?
[00:11:07]  But yeah, I worked on that movie and it was fucking horrible and I hated it.
[00:11:12]  What were you doing every day, Lee?
[00:11:14]  Running coffee around?
[00:11:15]  Yeah, I was like running.
[00:11:16]  I went to get the director his prescription and he didn't have a prescription.
[00:11:20]  Yeah.
[00:11:20]  So, like, I had to get the pharmacist to call his doctor, and I sat there and waited while they did it.
[00:11:24]  He's like, I can't get a hold of the doctor.
[00:11:25]  So, I was like, I can't come back without this fucking prescription.
[00:11:28]  It's my first movie.
[00:11:29]  You know what I mean?
[00:11:29]  Stuff like that.
[00:11:30]  And then they treated me like total shit.
[00:11:31]  And I was like, fuck the movie industry.

=== Advice from Mr. Sorbo on Movies (12:01) ===

[00:11:33]  I'm going to start a marketing company and make millions of dollars that way.
[00:11:36]  Dude, that's a great idea.
[00:11:37]  I was a PA on Dolphin Tail, that Warner Brothers movie that was in here.
[00:11:40]  And it was a lot just like, it was like working on a construction site.
[00:11:43]  My first job was construction.
[00:11:44]  It was just like working on a construction site.
[00:11:48]  And a lot of those guys, a lot of those guys that like work in those different departments, like, there's electrical, there's camera, there's sound, there's all those different.
[00:11:54]  They're all just like carnies with dental plans.
[00:11:56]  That's what they call themselves.
[00:11:57]  I don't know, man, but those guys work hard as fuck.
[00:12:00]  Yeah, they do.
[00:12:00]  And, like, if there was some little kid that was, like, bright eyed, butcher tails, I'd beat him down, too.
[00:12:04]  So, you know what I mean?
[00:12:06]  I can understand it now that I'm a little bit older, but at the time, it was just so demoralizing.
[00:12:11]  Like, I just got treated like I didn't like it.
[00:12:14]  Yeah.
[00:12:16]  But that's the way it is.
[00:12:18]  So then, how did you get into starting the Hoth?
[00:12:20]  So, yeah, my homies in Chicago, actually, one of my friends that I graduated with, we reconnected when I moved to Chicago.
[00:12:28]  And he was like, Studying marketing, doing affiliate marketing, started the company.
[00:12:34]  Affiliate marketing.
[00:12:34]  Yeah, affiliate marketing.
[00:12:36]  And started the company.
[00:12:39]  And then he was like, dude, you got to come on here.
[00:12:41]  And so I joined like super early on and then just started smashing ever since, you know?
[00:12:47]  Started smashing.
[00:12:48]  Yeah, smashing that like button.
[00:12:49]  Yeah.
[00:12:49]  Well, the good thing is like, dude, like I didn't know anything about SEO.
[00:12:52]  They don't teach SEO in college.
[00:12:53]  I thought SEO was dead.
[00:12:55]  Yeah, you think SEO is dead?
[00:12:56]  It's not, dude.
[00:12:56]  Is Google dead?
[00:12:58]  Hell no.
[00:12:58]  Hell no.
[00:12:58]  It's like one of the biggest companies in the world, dude.
[00:13:00]  It's growing every day.
[00:13:01]  So, as long as there's organic search results, you know, SEO will not be dead.
[00:13:07]  So, you know, the cool thing is, like, I didn't study any of that, right?
[00:13:10]  And so you can literally learn anything online.
[00:13:13]  And that's kind of how I learn SEO.
[00:13:15]  There's so many resources, courses, and all kinds of different stuff.
[00:13:18]  I do that all the time.
[00:13:19]  Still do it, you know?
[00:13:20]  Yeah, no, yeah, for sure.
[00:13:22]  Anything you want to learn is online.
[00:13:23]  Every time I've ever learned, like doing this kind of shit or making videos, everything I've learned was from like a YouTube video or an article that I searched.
[00:13:31]  It's a great thing because, you know, when I was.
[00:13:36]  I grew up in Indiana and I was not poor, you know, but I got like a ton of financial aid.
[00:13:40]  Like most of my college was paid for by financial aid just because, you know, whatever.
[00:13:47]  And, you know, I saw people that were like, dude, I can't go to college or something, you know.
[00:13:52]  And at some point in the past, that would have been like a really bad thing.
[00:13:54]  Like going to college was kind of like a ticket, like a golden ticket.
[00:13:57]  Now it doesn't fucking matter at all, dude.
[00:13:59]  And in fact, it's like almost there's a very good case for going to college is a fucking horrible idea.
[00:14:06]  You know what I mean?
[00:14:07]  Right.
[00:14:08]  Dude, four years.
[00:14:09]  Dude, if.
[00:14:11]  There's this dude I follow, Alex Becker.
[00:14:12]  He's super smart.
[00:14:14]  But he made a big case for it.
[00:14:15]  He's like, look, if I had a course and I told you it was four years, you had to take my course for four years, and every year it costs $60,000, and there's no guarantee that you get anything out of it at the end, dude, that would be a fucking scam, bro.
[00:14:32]  He would be in jail.
[00:14:34]  But that's exactly what college is like right now.
[00:14:36]  But student loans are the one thing you can't escape for some reason.
[00:14:40]  Yeah, I didn't know that, but that sucks.
[00:14:42]  Bernie said he's going to wipe them out.
[00:14:43]  Yeah, except Bernie comes in, he's going to wipe them out.
[00:14:46]  Okay.
[00:14:47]  We'll see.
[00:14:47]  Shut up, Bernie.
[00:14:49]  Dude, I think that there's going to be a huge revolution.
[00:14:52]  You know, like, this is kind of a theme tonight that we're talking about is like this new economy of how people are working and stuff.
[00:14:58]  It's kind of crazy, is because, like, if someone came to me and they're a dope programmer and they didn't go to college versus a programmer that went to college, I don't give a fuck.
[00:15:05]  You know, I care about if they can do the job and they can do the job right and they can do the job well.
[00:15:11]  And if somebody is so motivated that they went and learned it on their own, There's a good chance that, you know, that's going to be even better.
[00:15:19]  You know what I mean?
[00:15:19]  Yeah, for sure.
[00:15:20]  Well, I mean, like for me, like I didn't go to college for marketing and I can out market like many people that come in to, you know, the office.
[00:15:30]  You know, dude, we have masterminds where people pay $50,000 and they come in.
[00:15:34]  I do like a day with them.
[00:15:35]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:15:36]  And these are very smart, savvy marketers.
[00:15:38]  So, you know what I'm saying?
[00:15:40]  I didn't learn any of that stuff from college or anything.
[00:15:42]  Like I learned, you learn that in the trenches in books and courses and just, Getting after it.
[00:15:47]  Yeah.
[00:15:48]  And you ran the company out of Medellin, Colombia for a while?
[00:15:52]  Well, like I said, it was like a virtual company because you can start a company without an office.
[00:15:55]  That was in the beginning.
[00:15:55]  Yeah.
[00:15:55]  Yeah.
[00:15:56]  You can start a company without an office now.
[00:15:58]  It's great.
[00:15:58]  Of course.
[00:15:59]  And it can be a legit virtual company.
[00:16:02]  There's a company right now called Zapier.
[00:16:04]  You ever heard of it?
[00:16:05]  No.
[00:16:05]  Zapier, like, if you ever want to be like, hey, fill this form and then I want it to send it to an email or I want it to go into a Google Doc or something like that, Zapier connects all the APIs online.
[00:16:18]  Okay.
[00:16:18]  Anyway, it's a big company that a lot of people use.
[00:16:20]  Okay.
[00:16:21]  All right.
[00:16:21]  They have 200 employees and they are 100% virtual, dude.
[00:16:25]  It's like a lead generation type thing?
[00:16:27]  No, no, no.
[00:16:27]  It just connects all types of apps.
[00:16:29]  You want to connect Salesforce to Woofo.
[00:16:31]  You want to connect.
[00:16:32]  Like any kind of app that you would normally need a programmer to connect.
[00:16:36]  Right.
[00:16:36]  You need this lead to go over here.
[00:16:38]  Okay.
[00:16:38]  That's what it does.
[00:16:39]  Wow.
[00:16:40]  So, but anyway, the whole point is that it's a virtual company.
[00:16:42]  It's a big one, it controls a lot of parts of the internet.
[00:16:46]  200 employees, 100% virtual, dude.
[00:16:49]  You can totally do a virtual company.
[00:16:50]  And that's kind of the way we operated for a long period of time.
[00:16:53]  200 employees is kind of a lot of employees.
[00:16:55]  It's a lot.
[00:16:55]  Fuck yeah, that's a lot of employees.
[00:16:57]  Are you kidding?
[00:16:59]  So, you can totally run a virtual company.
[00:17:01]  So, when I moved to Medellin in 2014, we were a virtual company.
[00:17:07]  But we only had a handful of people.
[00:17:09]  I mean, we clearly had like a ton of people that were like freelancers, but it was always like that.
[00:17:14]  I'm talking about like core team.
[00:17:16]  And then in 2014, we actually weren't as big as we are now.
[00:17:20]  I mean, I went through like a big personal transformation in right before I moved to right before and during when I moved to Medellin.
[00:17:26]  Why?
[00:17:29]  This is like where everybody that's like stuck, you know, right before you have this big breakthrough.
[00:17:37]  It's always like something internal, dude.
[00:17:40]  It's always something about you.
[00:17:42]  You think it's like your situation that's holding you back or something, but it's like it's totally internal.
[00:17:47]  And that's what happened to me, man.
[00:17:48]  So I was in Chicago, and I was, Chicago is like one of the best places on earth during the summer, and then the winter is coming.
[00:17:58]  And then so one summer or one winter, it was my fifth year there.
[00:18:06]  I was on my 18th month of winter.
[00:18:07]  Dude, because it's so fucking long.
[00:18:11]  It's horrible.
[00:18:11]  Goddamn.
[00:18:12]  Anyway, so the company was like just kind of stalled.
[00:18:16]  And I didn't know marketing at the time.
[00:18:18]  I was not that good.
[00:18:19]  I used to run ops, I used to run operations for it.
[00:18:22]  And dude, I was on the 18th month of winter and it wasn't growing and I wasn't growing.
[00:18:28]  And I was like getting kind of frustrated.
[00:18:30]  And I was just, every night I would just drink.
[00:18:33]  I would go and I would grab, I put on like my coat and scarf and everything.
[00:18:40]  Waddle down to this little corner liquor store, get a ball of gin, come back, make gin sodas because I was trying to save little calories, you know, because I was still self conscious.
[00:18:46]  You drink by yourself or you go to bars?
[00:18:48]  Yeah, I drink by myself.
[00:18:49]  Dude, and I would sit there and I would watch how I met your mother, just get fucked up every night, dude.
[00:18:54]  And then I'd wake up in the morning and I would like try to work, I'd work as much as I could until I couldn't anymore, and I would start drinking again.
[00:18:59]  So I was like a functional alcoholic, you know.
[00:19:03]  And, you know, like.
[00:19:04]  Were you drinking it all at work or no?
[00:19:06]  No, no.
[00:19:07]  Work was my table, dude.
[00:19:08]  It was a virtual company.
[00:19:09]  I would work at home.
[00:19:10]  Oh, shit.
[00:19:10]  You were working in your apartment?
[00:19:12]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:13]  Yeah, the whole company was virtual.
[00:19:14]  Okay, I thought maybe you guys had like a universal space you guys worked in, maybe.
[00:19:19]  No, no, no.
[00:19:20]  In Chicago.
[00:19:21]  No.
[00:19:21]  No, there wasn't an office.
[00:19:22]  It was a virtual company, AKA, no office.
[00:19:24]  What I meant was maybe you guys still had like a.
[00:19:26]  Now it's different.
[00:19:27]  Okay.
[00:19:27]  Now it's different.
[00:19:28]  But yeah, we literally had no office.
[00:19:29]  So I would just watch How I Met Your Mother, which, you know, you can watch that brainless, you know?
[00:19:36]  I've never seen that.
[00:19:37]  So anyway, the wintertime was hard on me, man.
[00:19:39]  It was really.
[00:19:40]  It was hard, like emotionally.
[00:19:41]  And there was one day I woke up and I was working and I just like.
[00:19:44]  Couldn't work anymore.
[00:19:45]  I like literally just went up from the desk.
[00:19:47]  Like, and I sat on the couch and I felt like this pressure on my chest.
[00:19:51]  Like, I laid down and I just felt like someone's press on my chest.
[00:19:53]  And I was like, it's kind of hard to breathe.
[00:19:55]  And that moment, I was like, what the fuck are you doing, dude?
[00:19:59]  And so I had this like immediate thing that's like, dude, you have to change.
[00:20:02]  And I was like, what am I going to do?
[00:20:04]  I was like, first of all, fuck Chicago winner, never doing this shit again.
[00:20:06]  I'm moving somewhere else.
[00:20:08]  And then I was like, where should I go?
[00:20:11]  Let's go to Medellin, Colombia.
[00:20:12]  I'm going to sell everything that I have and let's fucking go.
[00:20:16]  So that's exactly what I did.
[00:20:18]  You know, I planned for it.
[00:20:19]  My lease got up, sold everything.
[00:20:21]  Why Colombia?
[00:20:22]  Well, the cool thing is, you know, someone actually invited me there like the year before.
[00:20:27]  So I went for like one month before.
[00:20:29]  Okay.
[00:20:29]  And then I met some cool friends, and I was like, I can just go back there, you know?
[00:20:34]  So, just that one little trip, it's like dipping your toe in the water.
[00:20:36]  There's enough to make you have the confidence to be able to go.
[00:20:40]  So, that's what I did, man.
[00:20:42]  And I moved to Columbia.
[00:20:44]  And when I got there, you know, I just started changing everything, right?
[00:20:48]  And I think that I was looking for something.
[00:20:51]  I didn't know what it was, but I was looking for something.
[00:20:53]  And the cool thing is that sometimes when you go looking for something, you find it, right?
[00:20:59]  And.
[00:20:59]  That's what kind of it was for me.
[00:21:01]  Not that Medellin in particular has like something magical, which I do think it is magical, but the idea that you know, this like thing happened to me like this that moment I remember where it's just like it was a breaking point of like struggle.
[00:21:15]  It was just like I couldn't grow, didn't know I was doing middle of Chicago winter, and that was a breaking point.
[00:21:19]  I was like, I have to go find something.
[00:21:20]  I went looking and just did that big break.
[00:21:23]  And as soon as that happened, like everything changed.
[00:21:25]  I started looking for how to like get up in the morning, how to start a morning routine.
[00:21:31]  How to like set goals, and then I was also in a really good, like new environment with no fucking snow.
[00:21:36]  Yeah, way better.
[00:21:37]  Hell yeah.
[00:21:38]  And all that shit started happening, and I started, you know, just mapping it all out.
[00:21:42]  And then, you know, you could just, you just, you can just see like in every way from like if you look at our like revenue growth, you could just see like boom October 2014, yeah, like that.
[00:21:55]  Really?
[00:21:56]  Yeah, yeah, for sure, man.
[00:21:57]  We were, we were stalled out for like a whole year.
[00:21:59]  We were doing the same revenue every month.
[00:22:02]  Now, there was a time where you sold the company, right?
[00:22:05]  Or where some people came in and purchased the company, but you stayed with the company during the transition or whatever.
[00:22:12]  Did that happen before or after you moved to?
[00:22:14]  That was before.
[00:22:15]  That was before.
[00:22:16]  So like we sold it in 2013, like early 2013, something like that.
[00:22:20]  Okay.
[00:22:21]  Sold it to another company.
[00:22:23]  And then the other founders left and I stayed on and we got a little bump in revenue and then we flatlined.
[00:22:28]  And then that whole, like at the end of that first year of just flatlining, that's when that kind of happened.
[00:22:33]  I think that right before you moved there was maybe the first time I met Mark.
[00:22:37]  Oh, yeah.
[00:22:38]  During the Hostamania times.
[00:22:40]  Dude, I love Mark.
[00:22:42]  He's a crazy dude.
[00:22:43]  Mark is one of the owners of the company that bought the Hoth.
[00:22:46]  Yeah.
[00:22:47]  And I met him during the Hostamania when this company idea he had where he wanted Hulk Hogan to be like a competitor for GoDaddy.
[00:22:56]  And it was like a Hulk Hogan-based, what do you call it, hosting company.
[00:23:00]  It's a Hostamania.
[00:23:01]  Hostamania.
[00:23:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:02]  I got looped into that project for like 20 minutes too.
[00:23:06]  So Hulk hit me up and he's like, hey, I need you to shoot a commercial for these internet guys.
[00:23:09]  They want to do a hosting company all about me.
[00:23:12]  We're going to take down the host gator, brother.
[00:23:14]  Yeah, dude.
[00:23:15]  That's how I met Mark doing that wrecking ball.
[00:23:17]  We did it.
[00:23:17]  We put him on the wrecking ball, and Hulk Hogan smashed through it.
[00:23:20]  That was famous, dude.
[00:23:21]  That will live on internet history forever.
[00:23:23]  That will.
[00:23:24]  Hulk Hogan wrecking ball.
[00:23:25]  Just search that on YouTube.
[00:23:26]  That was a genius.
[00:23:27]  And then I remember shortly after that, they invited me to Vegas, and then I remember him and David on the computer, like, check out this Hoth.
[00:23:34]  It's this new thing we got.

=== Taking Responsibility for Your Career (07:01) ===

[00:23:35]  Look at this.
[00:23:35]  Yeah.
[00:23:37]  Five grand a day.
[00:23:38]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:38]  So, like a little baby company at that.
[00:23:40]  I mean, not baby company.
[00:23:41]  I mean, we did, we were doing maybe like a million dollars in revenue or something a year.
[00:23:46]  A year.
[00:23:46]  A year.
[00:23:47]  Yeah.
[00:23:48]  So, it was a successful company.
[00:23:49]  What's it do now?
[00:23:50]  Can you talk about that or no?
[00:23:52]  Yeah.
[00:23:53]  I mean, our numbers are in the INC list.
[00:23:55]  Oh, really?
[00:23:56]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:57]  So probably do like a million and a half per month right now.
[00:24:02]  Per month?
[00:24:02]  Yeah.
[00:24:03]  Quite a bit of growth.
[00:24:04]  Yeah.
[00:24:06]  What was the difference between when you made that change?
[00:24:10]  Like, how much money were you making then?
[00:24:11]  And then when you changed and went to Columbia and you saw that big spike, like, what was the difference?
[00:24:17]  We were probably making, like, between $80,000 and $100,000 a month when I went to Columbia.
[00:24:23]  And then now we make, like, $1.5 million a month.
[00:24:25]  So there's, like, a 15x growth.
[00:24:29]  In the last like handful of years, whatever it was like, four years.
[00:24:33]  Yeah, that's awesome.
[00:24:34]  So, what specifically did you do in Colombia that made that change?
[00:24:40]  Lots of things, man.
[00:24:41]  I think like there's some like obvious shit that's not taught and actually made me mad about school.
[00:24:46]  Made me mad about like how like there's so many they didn't teach you none of it.
[00:24:50]  There's so many like really, really important things that if you want to do shit, you need to know these things, right?
[00:24:55]  So, a lot of it is like personal stuff, like how do you perceive the world?
[00:24:59]  Like, one of the things is, um, Take 100% responsibility for everything.
[00:25:05]  Like, a lot of people go through and they're like, oh, this situation happened to me.
[00:25:09]  I fucking can't do this because this is whatever.
[00:25:11]  It's like you have to eliminate that shit.
[00:25:12]  You have to eliminate any kind of complaining.
[00:25:14]  And you have to just take responsibility for everything.
[00:25:16]  Be like, dude, whatever.
[00:25:17]  This is my responsibility.
[00:25:18]  Like, it's not your situation.
[00:25:20]  It's you all the time.
[00:25:21]  Doesn't matter if it's right or wrong.
[00:25:23]  Like, that's just a mentality thing.
[00:25:24]  And that, it's hard because being like, oh, this person did this thing to me or this happened to me, like, that's an easy way out.
[00:25:31]  You know, that feels good because you're like saying, I don't have any of that responsibility.
[00:25:35]  You know, like, that's not my fault.
[00:25:37]  And when you go, like, shit, maybe it's my fault, or maybe I just have to take responsibility for it anyway, that's fucking hard to do.
[00:25:44]  But ultimately, that gives you confidence because you are the one that can actually fucking do something about it now.
[00:25:51]  It gives you that ability to be like, all right, I'm taking fucking responsibility for this and I'm going to do something about it.
[00:25:58]  I don't care if it was right or wrong or whatever, something happened to me because it's now my responsibility.
[00:26:02]  And that gives you the power.
[00:26:04]  Now you got the power to change shit.
[00:26:07]  Okay.
[00:26:07]  And dude, people can change.
[00:26:10]  You can change a lot of shit.
[00:26:11]  You can fucking change everything, dude.
[00:26:14]  And you did change everything.
[00:26:15]  Fuck yeah, I changed everything.
[00:26:16]  Are you kidding?
[00:26:18]  Dude, there's so many crazy shits that happened.
[00:26:21]  So many crazy things that happened in Colombia in terms of like mentality.
[00:26:25]  Yeah.
[00:26:26]  That made me believe that this is true.
[00:26:28]  And it's hard.
[00:26:28]  Like, if your shit is not going very well or you're stuck or whatever, it's like almost impossible to believe that what I'm saying is true until you start seeing it like little things.
[00:26:39]  If I could reel back everything to one thing that I kind of focus back on that helps, it's just this phrase of think about what you want, not what you don't want.
[00:26:52]  So, most of the time that if you feel like super bad or whatever, you're almost always thinking about what you don't want.
[00:26:58]  You're like, oh man.
[00:27:00]  You're running away from things instead of running towards things.
[00:27:02]  Well, you're focusing on the wrong thing.
[00:27:05]  You're like, oh man, I didn't get this raise, or I didn't get this money, or this fucking shit's hard, or whatever.
[00:27:09]  You're thinking about the shit that you don't want.
[00:27:10]  What you do want is you want.
[00:27:12]  To get the money, or you want to get the viewers, or you want to get whatever.
[00:27:16]  And so, if you only focus on that and you start thinking, like, okay, how could I get it?
[00:27:20]  Your mind starts getting really creative on different ways that you could try, you know.
[00:27:25]  And as soon as you start feeling bad again, you just check yourself and go, wait, what am I thinking about as I'm thinking about something I don't want or what I do want?
[00:27:33]  Let me give you an example.
[00:27:36]  Here's one of the crazy things that happened I started dating a girl who's now my wife.
[00:27:40]  Booyah.
[00:27:41]  Bam.
[00:27:42]  Yeah.
[00:27:43]  I started dating Wendy.
[00:27:44]  She's Colombian.
[00:27:45]  Clearly.
[00:27:46]  And what's crazy is that, like in the US, we get passports and we can go over the world.
[00:27:51]  So, if I'm like, yo, do you want to go to Costa Rica?
[00:27:54]  You want to go to Paris?
[00:27:54]  Whatever you want.
[00:27:55]  We can just go.
[00:27:56]  You don't even think about it.
[00:27:56]  Just go.
[00:27:57]  Not everybody in the world can do that.
[00:27:59]  Like, you need like visas and stuff if you have a different kind of passport.
[00:28:03]  So, for instance, Colombia, if you come to the US, you have to get a tourist visa, which means you literally have to fly to the capital.
[00:28:10]  You have to go to an in person interview to get the visa to even come to the US.
[00:28:13]  Okay.
[00:28:14]  Wow.
[00:28:14]  And they deny lots of people.
[00:28:16]  Yeah.
[00:28:16]  And, and, you know, so the people that they want to approve are people that, Are going to go back to Colombia, right?
[00:28:22]  Because it's a tourist visa.
[00:28:24]  Okay.
[00:28:24]  And so they, the typical person that they're going to deny is like a single girl.
[00:28:31]  Right.
[00:28:32]  Is getting married to come over here.
[00:28:33]  Well, no, they would typically deny somebody that's single and is a girl and doesn't have a lot of money because the likelihood that she's going to stay illegally in the U.S. is very low.
[00:28:43]  It's very high.
[00:28:44]  Right.
[00:28:44]  They don't want people to stay in the U.S. illegal.
[00:28:46]  Stay illegal.
[00:28:47]  Yeah.
[00:28:47]  They want people to come in and get the fuck back out.
[00:28:49]  Right.
[00:28:50]  They want to get back to Colombia.
[00:28:52]  They want you to go back to Colombia.
[00:28:53]  Right.
[00:28:53]  Right.
[00:28:53]  They don't want you to stay illegally in the U.S. because now.
[00:28:56]  But if you're a single girl, you're going to.
[00:28:57]  Chances are you're going to go there, you're going to get married, and then you're going to become a citizen, right?
[00:29:00]  It could happen like that.
[00:29:02]  But they just don't.
[00:29:03]  If on a tour's visa, they want people to leave the U.S., they want people to come in the U.S. and then leave.
[00:29:08]  Yeah.
[00:29:08]  And they want to make sure that you have a reason to go back.
[00:29:10]  And if you don't have a big reason to go back, they're probably going to deny you your visa.
[00:29:14]  So, anyway.
[00:29:16]  So my friends had girlfriends that they wanted to show the U.S. to, right?
[00:29:21]  A bunch of.
[00:29:21]  People from my friends from the US, bunch of expats, bunch of expats living in Colombia.
[00:29:25]  Um, and they want to take their Colombian girlfriends, and they would they would apply, pay like a couple hundred bucks or whatever, hundreds of dollars to apply for the visa.
[00:29:35]  And uh, they would uh fly them to Bogota, which is the capital.
[00:29:40]  They would go through the interview, and guess what?
[00:29:42]  Denied.
[00:29:43]  Like, I have one friend send his girl up there, boom, denied.
[00:29:47]  Another friend send his girl up there, boom, denied.
[00:29:49]  Another one, like, three in a row, dude.
[00:29:51]  And so I'm like, I want Wendy to come meet my family and stuff.
[00:29:54]  And I'm like, dude, we don't, the likelihood of this going to happen is very low.
[00:29:59]  You know, we just saw it.
[00:30:00]  Like, my friends, three people denied right in a row.
[00:30:04]  So I went back to that mentality like, we think about what you don't want or what you do want.
[00:30:08]  And so we started thinking about, like, okay, if we want to do it, how can we do it?
[00:30:11]  What are we going to do differently?
[00:30:12]  So we got a lawyer, we got a plan, we made her have like a reason to go to the US.
[00:30:18]  Yeah.
[00:30:18]  Like, we got her registered for a conference.
[00:30:22]  I called up the conferences at Northwestern University.
[00:30:24]  I was like, hey, It's an international student.
[00:30:26]  She was like, I mean, this is actually like a microbiology conference because that's what she studies.
[00:30:30]  Right.
[00:30:31]  Anyway, got them to send like a sealed letterhead invitation that showed it.

=== Party Systems and Colombian Hustlers (11:44) ===

[00:30:36]  Nice.
[00:30:37]  And so when I had a lawyer and I had a lawyer practice questions with Wendy for like what's going to, you know, how they're going to do the interview and stuff, so she really prepared.
[00:30:45]  So when she went to do the interview, she flew on the plane, sat next to a girl.
[00:30:50]  You know, she was doing the same thing.
[00:30:52]  She was going to go in and get a visa.
[00:30:54]  And Wendy waited in line with this girl and she went out and she came out crying.
[00:30:58]  She got her, the other girl got denied.
[00:31:00]  The other girl got denied.
[00:31:01]  She was on the plane with.
[00:31:02]  Yeah, but Wendy went in there and crushed it.
[00:31:06]  Aced it.
[00:31:07]  Came out with an approved.
[00:31:08]  Wow, dude.
[00:31:09]  I know, dude.
[00:31:10]  That's crazy.
[00:31:10]  They give you the answer right then and there.
[00:31:12]  Yeah, they do.
[00:31:13]  But that's just like, that's one of the crazy examples of doing this whole thing, this whole personal transformation that was like, dude, this shit's real.
[00:31:22]  Like, you can change anything by the way that you think.
[00:31:26]  So that's just one of the many things that happened that made me believe, like, the way I do now.
[00:31:31]  Yeah, it's a whole different changing your whole your whole perspective on things.
[00:31:35]  Yeah, so what was it's not it's not like the situation dude.
[00:31:38]  It's like you, you know, it's like internal.
[00:31:40]  It's yeah, you think Yeah, exactly.
[00:31:42]  Yeah, it's not where you are.
[00:31:43]  It's not, there's no, like you said, there's no excuse that you can make about your surrounding or your environment or anything else.
[00:31:50]  It's all in your head.
[00:31:51]  You can make excuses.
[00:31:52]  You can do whatever the fuck that you want.
[00:31:53]  Right, but the excuse is not to do shit.
[00:31:54]  But I mean, like, what do you want to do?
[00:31:56]  Like, you are your biggest limiting factor.
[00:31:58]  Right.
[00:31:58]  You know, so.
[00:32:00]  You would think, well, I guess no.
[00:32:02]  Chicago, I mean, is known for just booze and food.
[00:32:05]  Yeah.
[00:32:05]  I mean, what is Medellin known for?
[00:32:07]  I mean, it's known for fucking drugs and partying, right?
[00:32:10]  Yeah, kind of.
[00:32:11]  I mean, that's kind of the weird, ooh, damn, what's that sound?
[00:32:15]  We get that all the time.
[00:32:16]  Fuck it.
[00:32:18]  That's the weird thing is that people know Medellin for what they've seen in the movies.
[00:32:23]  You know, cocaine, right?
[00:32:24]  And to be honest, I didn't know anything about Medellin before I moved there.
[00:32:28]  Medellin was never on my list of places to go.
[00:32:30]  Really?
[00:32:31]  You know, I had Rome, Paris.
[00:32:33]  Yeah, Medellin wasn't one.
[00:32:34]  Yeah, like Colombia.
[00:32:36]  I was like, what the fuck is in Colombia?
[00:32:38]  That's crazy because when you told me that I'd never been there, when you first told me that you lived there, I was like, holy shit.
[00:32:44]  Because I've read books all about Colombia.
[00:32:45]  I've read like multiple books about it.
[00:32:47]  Yeah.
[00:32:48]  And.
[00:32:49]  Dude, Colombia, so, you know, it's known for what happened in the 70s, whatnot, 80s, Pablo Escobar, and whatnot.
[00:32:59]  But the crazy thing is, like, that shit died, like, a long time ago.
[00:33:01]  You know, that did, like, 15 plus years ago.
[00:33:05]  It's been gone, and they've been trying to, like, change the reputation ever since.
[00:33:08]  Not that drugs don't exist, but fuck, man, drugs exist everywhere.
[00:33:12]  Chicago's a murder capital of, you know, the U.S., or at least was for a period of time.
[00:33:17]  Right.
[00:33:18]  And so, dude, there's drugs and murders everywhere in any big urban city, you know.
[00:33:23]  But it's really beautiful though because I mean, for me, I have a personal connection to it for well, many things.
[00:33:29]  You got your wife there.
[00:33:31]  I found my wife there and I had a great time there.
[00:33:34]  And I met a lot of amazing people when I was there.
[00:33:37]  But Medellin is kind of crazy.
[00:33:39]  You have to experience it for yourself.
[00:33:41]  First thing is when you come into the city, it's in a valley.
[00:33:44]  So you come in from the airport, and when you first get into it and you can see the valley, there's like literally lights going up both sides.
[00:33:51]  It's the weirdest sight you've ever seen.
[00:33:54]  So it's like no matter where you are in Medellin from above or below.
[00:33:57]  You have a view.
[00:33:59]  So, like, because it's lights going up both sides of the mountains.
[00:34:02]  It's crazy.
[00:34:03]  You got to just check out a picture of it so you can see it.
[00:34:05]  Yeah.
[00:34:05]  And then you come into Medellin, and it's strange because, on one hand, it's like super developed in some downtown areas.
[00:34:13]  Like, do you remember seeing the picture of the building that I lived in?
[00:34:16]  Oh, yeah.
[00:34:17]  Super modern, super brand new building.
[00:34:19]  Yeah, crazy.
[00:34:21]  But then you can also drive down the street 10 minutes and see like what kind of poverty that I've never seen before in my life.
[00:34:28]  So, it has a little bit of both.
[00:34:31]  They're trying to really totally transform it.
[00:34:32]  And actually, they've done some really amazing things.
[00:34:35]  They have this thing called the Metro Cable, which essentially one of the hard things about poor communities is you can't get transportation to go get a job.
[00:34:45]  And especially in Medellin, with the geography, with going up the hills, to walk down a fucking mountain to go get a job is literally impossible.
[00:34:54]  So that would mean poor communities stay poor.
[00:34:57]  So what they did is they put these crazy Metro Cable things that you can get.
[00:35:00]  It's like little gondola things that ride on cables up above.
[00:35:04]  And they can go down and you can.
[00:35:06]  Like a ski lift.
[00:35:06]  Yeah, ski lift type like that.
[00:35:08]  And it connects to the metro, which is like, you know, the buses and the trains that go all around the city.
[00:35:15]  Wow.
[00:35:15]  So it allows poor, you know, poor communities to have access.
[00:35:20]  And so that's a big thing.
[00:35:22]  And then they're also like pushing for technology coming into the city and like doing kind of incubators and startups.
[00:35:28]  And there's a startup scene there.
[00:35:29]  Really?
[00:35:30]  Dude, there's a WeWork.
[00:35:31]  There's like young hustlers down there, like trying to start up big businesses, big.
[00:35:35]  Yeah.
[00:35:36]  Online marketing companies.
[00:35:37]  Yeah, for sure.
[00:35:37]  And there's like WeWork is down there.
[00:35:39]  Oh, really?
[00:35:40]  Yeah.
[00:35:40]  WeWork.
[00:35:41]  I mean, we work as an office.
[00:35:43]  There's a Y Combinator startup called Rappi.
[00:35:45]  Y Combinator is like a startup accelerator.
[00:35:48]  And there's a company called Rappi that went through Y Combinator and then blew up in Colombia.
[00:35:56]  Crazy thing, dude.
[00:35:57]  Rappi is a service.
[00:35:58]  It's kind of like Uber Eats, but Uber Eats is like doubles the price when you go get it because we're in America and people need paid money and cars are expensive.
[00:36:07]  Yeah.
[00:36:08]  Well, in Colombia, where the cost of living is way lower, there's a lot more available workers.
[00:36:14]  And they ride on like little motorcycles or like mopeds or whatever, like all day.
[00:36:19]  So they just zip around the city.
[00:36:21]  So the cost of labor is low.
[00:36:22]  The ability to go get.
[00:36:24]  Bring your mic a little closer.
[00:36:26]  Yeah, ability.
[00:36:27]  You can scoot it if you want.
[00:36:28]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:36:29]  So the ability to go get like stuff and pick it up is really fast.
[00:36:33]  Yeah.
[00:36:34]  And so to get something delivered there, it costs like a dollar or two, you know, like versus like 10.
[00:36:41]  That's wild.
[00:36:42]  And so Rappi is a company that literally said like they just developed an app.
[00:36:45]  And they got a bunch of people like riding scooters all around town.
[00:36:49]  And so Rappi blew up in Colombia.
[00:36:52]  And what's crazy is you know how Venezuela had, you know, like Venezuela economy like collapsed and a bunch of bad shit went on in Venezuela.
[00:37:00]  A bunch of those people migrated to Colombia looking for jobs right at the same time that Rappi was blowing up.
[00:37:06]  So all those people that were available.
[00:37:08]  Yes, they're all available and they start working for Rappi.
[00:37:10]  So Rappi, like to some extent, is saving the Venezuelan, you know, What do they call it?
[00:37:16]  The people that are moving out of Venezuela.
[00:37:17]  Really?
[00:37:18]  It was wild.
[00:37:19]  And everyone loves it.
[00:37:20]  Because now, literally, if you live in Colombia, you can get everything delivered to your house for like pennies.
[00:37:25]  You know what I mean?
[00:37:26]  It's so sick.
[00:37:26]  Yeah, it is super sick.
[00:37:28]  Wendy never left the house.
[00:37:30]  You just order everything.
[00:37:32]  You literally order it.
[00:37:33]  It's like having Amazon here.
[00:37:35]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:37:36]  It's like room service for anything you want, like at your house.
[00:37:41]  Is it true, like most of the people in Colombia are super Christian?
[00:37:45]  Because you were telling me that they really.
[00:37:48]  Put Christmas on like a whole nother level in Colombia.
[00:37:51]  Oh, sure.
[00:37:51]  Yeah.
[00:37:52]  Well, I don't know.
[00:37:52]  Like, the Christmas lights are just like on a whole nother level.
[00:37:55]  Like, the whole city's lit up.
[00:37:57]  Dude, it is wild.
[00:37:58]  Like, I don't know if I can accurately judge like percentages of religious people in Colombia.
[00:38:04]  I mean, there's a lot of Christians, a lot of Catholics, and stuff like that.
[00:38:08]  But in general, the Christmas spirit is on, dude.
[00:38:13]  It's on, dude.
[00:38:14]  Every single house.
[00:38:15]  The pictures are insane.
[00:38:16]  Every single house has crazy lights.
[00:38:18]  And I was like, dude.
[00:38:19]  Straight up, this is a business opportunity.
[00:38:21]  If you want to sell lights, like you would sell lights to literally everywhere.
[00:38:24]  If you just search Christmas lights in Colombia, dude, oh my God.
[00:38:28]  And the parks are even more insane.
[00:38:31]  You know what I mean?
[00:38:31]  The parks, they go all out, dude.
[00:38:34]  Lights everywhere.
[00:38:35]  It's like you're walking through a whole other fucking universe with all the lights they put up.
[00:38:39]  But that's part of the Colombian spirit they're like, they're very, they love celebrating.
[00:38:44]  You know what I mean?
[00:38:46]  Whether things are going good or bad, like, you know, people celebrate and they celebrate together.
[00:38:51]  Very like into the family, very into celebrating.
[00:38:54]  Like, it's kind of a cool thing.
[00:38:56]  I don't know.
[00:38:57]  Yeah.
[00:38:58]  It's a little weird, dude.
[00:38:59]  Think about little Indiana boy me, like, going out to the first time I went to Wendy's mom's house.
[00:39:05]  And, like, dude, there it isn't like you go hang out with like Wendy's friends in a house.
[00:39:08]  Like, they're, they live, most people live with their family until they get married.
[00:39:13]  Yeah.
[00:39:14]  In Columbia.
[00:39:15]  In Columbia.
[00:39:15]  Right.
[00:39:15]  And then they still continue to, like, hang out with their family, like, all the time, like every weekend, you know?
[00:39:20]  Yeah.
[00:39:20]  Multiple times a week.
[00:39:21]  Where, like, in the U.S., I mean, this is very general.
[00:39:24]  I'm just saying in general.
[00:39:25]  We love independence, dude.
[00:39:27]  Once we're out, you know, we're out.
[00:39:29]  But they, like, it's so, so family oriented.
[00:39:32]  So the first time.
[00:39:32]  Yeah, everybody down there parties with their family all the time.
[00:39:35]  Parties with your parents.
[00:39:36]  You go partying, you're going to partying with your parents and your brothers and sisters.
[00:39:39]  Yeah, you're partying with your parents, brothers, sisters, aunt, uncles, cousins, everybody.
[00:39:43]  Yeah, the whole family, dude.
[00:39:44]  And the first time I went there, I'm like, there's 40 people at Winnie's house.
[00:39:48]  You know, it's like every aunt, uncle, cousin, everything.
[00:39:51]  And then, dude, they're doing like salsa dancing.
[00:39:53]  There's a little white nerd.
[00:39:54]  Yeah, I'm a little white nerd.
[00:39:56]  I had no idea what's going on, man.
[00:39:59]  Oh, man.
[00:39:59]  But then, like, after you, because, like, the first time you hear that type of music, you're like, dude, what?
[00:40:05]  But then you get into it, and now I love it.
[00:40:07]  There's a special thing about it.
[00:40:09]  Oh, they don't give a fuck.
[00:40:10]  They just dance like there's no tomorrow, dude.
[00:40:12]  Dude.
[00:40:13]  And you think that, dude, like, you know, like in college, like, they'll teach you to like black out and like, they're like, yeah, we party harder than anybody else.
[00:40:20]  Dude, that shit is fucking nothing compared to Columbia's, dude.
[00:40:23]  They will literally party for days, dude.
[00:40:27]  All that cocaine.
[00:40:28]  Dude, I don't know.
[00:40:30]  Actually, I think they're good at pacing themselves, too.
[00:40:33]  And they also just straight love partying.
[00:40:35]  Like, literally, I'll go and I'll drink too much.
[00:40:39]  I'll drink like I was taught in college, like, get drunk.
[00:40:42]  And then, like, I'll go home and pass out.
[00:40:45]  And then.
[00:40:46]  I'm getting, you know, pictures the next day with call or face chat, you know, like Wendy's mom's like FaceTiming her or something.
[00:40:53]  And they're like, Where's Dale Party?
[00:40:55]  I'm like, What the fuck?
[00:40:56]  Dude, all night long, you're still going?
[00:40:58]  Damn.
[00:40:59]  Dude, it's wild.
[00:41:00]  And it's not just like, Oh, that happened one time.
[00:41:01]  It happens every time.
[00:41:03]  Every single time, dude.
[00:41:04]  It's wild.
[00:41:05]  I love it.
[00:41:06]  It's a beautiful thing, dude.
[00:41:07]  You got to go.
[00:41:08]  I want to go.
[00:41:09]  And you can't just like hang out with friends in Colombia.
[00:41:10]  You got to go hang out with Colombian families and feel it.
[00:41:13]  Yeah.
[00:41:14]  You got to get in there.
[00:41:15]  Stay at somebody's house with their family and let them cook for you and do all that.
[00:41:19]  Oh, yeah.
[00:41:20]  They're going to cook.
[00:41:20]  Dude, they have a sister.
[00:41:21]  Man, they got like a whole system of how to party.
[00:41:24]  They know the meals to make.
[00:41:25]  What about the food?
[00:41:26]  How is the food there?
[00:41:27]  Food's good.
[00:41:28]  There's a lot to say.
[00:41:30]  I mean, Chicago's got good food too.
[00:41:32]  It's not a gastronomic center of the world.
[00:41:33]  Like, if you go to Italy, man, Italian food is amazing, you know, or whatever.
[00:41:38]  Or Mexico, maybe like Mexico's gastronomic center.
[00:41:42]  Colombia is not like that.
[00:41:43]  Colombia is not like, oh man, yes.
[00:41:45]  It's a typical Latin American food, which is like meat, rice, and beans.
[00:41:49]  Yeah.
[00:41:50]  And not to say that's not good, you can have some fucking great meat, rice, and beans.
[00:41:55]  But, you know, There's not a ton of, it's not a gastronomic center.
[00:41:59]  With that said, there's still some very amazing Colombian dishes.
[00:42:05]  Nothing right home about.
[00:42:06]  No, there is some really good stuff.
[00:42:09]  But, you know, you can't compare it to like in Italy or something.
[00:42:14]  Right, right, right.
[00:42:14]  Of course.
[00:42:15]  And one of the things interesting about Medellin is like in the area.
[00:42:19]  Medellin?
[00:42:20]  Well, they call it Medellin.
[00:42:20]  Okay.

=== The Billion Dollar Freelance Theory (14:46) ===

[00:42:21]  So like in double L's in Spanish, it's used like ya.
[00:42:23]  Medellin.
[00:42:24]  It looks like Medellin.
[00:42:25]  So if you're U.S. and you're a white dude, can't pronounce anything.
[00:42:29]  It's Medellin.
[00:42:32]  If you pronounce it like Spanish, you know, with the double L's, it'd be like Medellin.
[00:42:36]  But colloquially, in there, they pronounce double L's like a hard J, like Medellin.
[00:42:42]  Medellin.
[00:42:42]  Yes.
[00:42:43]  Similarly, like they would say, like, como te llamas, you know.
[00:42:46]  Okay.
[00:42:47]  They say como te llamas?
[00:42:49]  Yeah.
[00:42:49]  Like the double L's a hard J.
[00:42:51]  Oh, wow.
[00:42:51]  So, anyway.
[00:42:52]  Instead of like a Y.
[00:42:53]  Yeah.
[00:42:54]  Yeah.
[00:42:56]  So, fuck, what was I saying?
[00:42:58]  Some.
[00:42:59]  Something stupid, probably.
[00:43:03]  So, what?
[00:43:05]  Oh, I was saying, I was saying in Medellin, um, the uh, it's like there's some parts that are like really up and coming, and there's some really, really nice restaurants, yeah, and like the area that I live.
[00:43:14]  So, you can get like all different types of food and go to like super nice restaurants for like uh, 50% of the price that would cost, like maybe somewhere else, like in a big city, right?
[00:43:24]  Right?
[00:43:24]  It's crazy.
[00:43:25]  So, what made you decide to come back to the U.S.?
[00:43:28]  Lots of things.
[00:43:28]  You know, over the course of growing the business, there was, well, growing a business at different stages needs different things.
[00:43:36]  And we came to a stage where it was growing so fast, we actually needed to have an office.
[00:43:40]  And so we started getting an office, and then we started adding a lot of people to the office.
[00:43:43]  And it got like an office where there's like 20 plus people working in it.
[00:43:47]  And I'm one of the dudes, like, supposed to be running it, you know.
[00:43:52]  And I came back and visited a couple of times, and I was like, the vibe, you know, like, I feel like I need to be part of the culture because culture is such an important part of growing a company.
[00:44:01]  Like, You fuck up the culture, dude, fucks everything.
[00:44:04]  Kind of like your mind.
[00:44:05]  Like, you know, it's not just like, just go do the work.
[00:44:07]  It's all, there's a lot about the mindset that you have.
[00:44:10]  So I need to make sure that that mindset is integrated into the company.
[00:44:13]  And I felt like a pull to come back and cultivate that.
[00:44:17]  You know what I mean?
[00:44:18]  And actually just be a part of it.
[00:44:19]  It's kind of weird if like one of the main dudes is, I don't know, somewhere living, right?
[00:44:23]  Right.
[00:44:23]  Because, so sort of you have like a visual idea of what it is.
[00:44:27]  It's this giant, you have the whole 15th floor of this giant office building in downtown St. Pete that overlooks the Tampa Bay.
[00:44:33]  Yeah, we do now.
[00:44:34]  Now, yeah, and and there's I don't know how many there's there's dozens and dozens of employees in there.
[00:44:40]  There's like 45 people working in the office.
[00:44:42]  Okay.
[00:44:42]  Okay, and it's just like this super dope like modern area with bean bags and like different rooms and hangout areas and a fridge full of LaCroix.
[00:44:51]  Yeah, yeah, typical stuff, right?
[00:44:53]  And just people just walking around, you know, doing fun shit.
[00:44:56]  Yeah, that's cool man and working and you you weren't there in the beginning and now you're there.
[00:45:02]  So now you're able to Walk around and talk to everybody every day, and you guys do cool stuff and have story time.
[00:45:10]  And another part was like, I couldn't really, like, I got married this year and I wasn't married.
[00:45:15]  And, you know, before that, clearly.
[00:45:17]  You and me both.
[00:45:19]  So, yeah, I remember we had some good moments together.
[00:45:23]  Yeah, we had some good moments.
[00:45:24]  You held my ring, my engagement ring, while we were in Costa Rica.
[00:45:27]  Or, no, where were we at?
[00:45:28]  We were in Costa Rica.
[00:45:29]  Mexico.
[00:45:29]  Mexico.
[00:45:30]  Yep.
[00:45:31]  Those good times.
[00:45:32]  Those good times, dude.
[00:45:33]  But, yeah.
[00:45:36]  We didn't used to have the office and I wasn't married.
[00:45:38]  So, like, if I was going to move here, like, I kind of had to marry Wendy, too.
[00:45:45]  I mean, so it all kind of happened at a really good time.
[00:45:48]  Wendy and I got married and she got her visa, and then I was able to actually, like, really move here.
[00:45:52]  So, that's dope, dude.
[00:45:54]  Yeah, it was beautiful.
[00:45:55]  It all worked out.
[00:45:57]  So, I'm a very lucky guy.
[00:45:59]  So, let's go back to talk a little bit more about, like, marketing and ads and shit like that.
[00:46:04]  Marketing is fucking bananas.
[00:46:06]  It's interesting how companies like yours that have all subcontractors, like gig-based workers, just get to pick the gigs they want to work on.
[00:46:19]  I feel like America or the world in general is going that direction.
[00:46:23]  I feel like it's going to be majority of that type of work in the future.
[00:46:28]  And nine-to-fives are going to kind of fade out, especially as the college institution starts to die off, which it's already doing.
[00:46:39]  People aren't just going to college to get jobs.
[00:46:42]  I feel like that's going to take over.
[00:46:44]  People are, it's all going to be kind of freelance work.
[00:46:47]  People just going online and getting gigs based on whatever they're good at.
[00:46:50]  I want to be good at this.
[00:46:51]  I'm going to watch a couple of videos, learn how to do it.
[00:46:53]  Then I'm going to go see if I can get paid to do it.
[00:46:56]  Yeah.
[00:46:56]  With someone like the Hoth or with like Fiverr or shit like that.
[00:47:00]  Yeah.
[00:47:00]  Well, I mean, you're talking about a lot of different things in that statement.
[00:47:03]  But in general, yeah, there's way more opportunities for everybody.
[00:47:07]  And like the idea of the freelance economy.
[00:47:09]  Like being able to work whenever you want or choose your work and not have to do the same job all the time.
[00:47:15]  That idea is exploding right now.
[00:47:18]  I mean, look at what Upwork is.
[00:47:20]  Look at, there's a company called Top Towel.
[00:47:22]  I love Upwork, dude.
[00:47:24]  I use it all the time.
[00:47:25]  A lot of businesses get started on Upwork.
[00:47:27]  I have a lot of friends that started their own business, like a lot of friends that were in Medellin or working virtual.
[00:47:34]  They started a company literally on Upwork, just going in because there's people posting jobs that say, Hey, I need somebody to do this.
[00:47:40]  And you can go and you can say, Hey, man, I can do that for you.
[00:47:43]  And you get the job, and then you literally just do it.
[00:47:47]  It's pretty simple.
[00:47:48]  But that means you can, the things that are important to you, which is a lot of things that are important to our people our age, is like, I want to work, not going to that office.
[00:47:59]  I do not want to commute.
[00:48:01]  I'm afraid to even have a car.
[00:48:02]  I want to work when I want.
[00:48:03]  Or maybe, let's say, you want to go to another country, like somewhere in South America, or maybe you want to go to Eastern Europe or you want to go to Thailand or something like that.
[00:48:12]  There's these big expat hubs that you can go to.
[00:48:15]  And a lot of people are like, yo, I can't afford to travel.
[00:48:19]  And the crazy thing is that it's cheaper to go there a lot of times than it is to stay wherever you're at.
[00:48:26]  It's wild.
[00:48:27]  Dude, that is pretty true.
[00:48:28]  And so, the things that people care about, they can meet those requirements by, you know, by doing this freelance economy type stuff.
[00:48:36]  You become a freelancer, go do whatever you want, don't work the typical nine to five, and then you get to travel the world.
[00:48:40]  You get to live, bring your MacBook with you wherever you are, exactly, man.
[00:48:43]  And it's crazy.
[00:48:44]  I thought there was like a handful of people doing this.
[00:48:46]  No, it's like a literally global movement, man.
[00:48:49]  I met like literally hundreds of people in Medellin alone.
[00:48:53]  There are thousands right now that are like expats from the U.S., from.
[00:48:58]  Canada from all over the world that have come to Medellin as like a nomadic center, but that's not even a big nomadic center, dude.
[00:49:05]  Like Southeast Asia, Thailand, that's a huge one, dude.
[00:49:09]  There's probably tens of thousands of expats there right now working from their laptops.
[00:49:16]  That's wild.
[00:49:17]  I would say working from laptops on the beach, but those people are fucking stupid.
[00:49:20]  They're very psycho.
[00:49:21]  Have you ever who would who would take your laptop?
[00:49:24]  You know how hot those laptops get, dude.
[00:49:26]  Plus, trying to read in the sun that's a terrible idea.
[00:49:29]  Never work from the beach.
[00:49:31]  All of your laptop.
[00:49:32]  That sounds like hell.
[00:49:33]  You should be drinking margaritas on the beach, not working.
[00:49:35]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:49:36]  You got to fucking learn to draw a line somewhere.
[00:49:38]  Yeah, you should be working in an air conditioned apartment and then, yeah, that's how I would do it.
[00:49:43]  But, yeah, man, outsourcing in general, like, that's huge now.
[00:49:47]  And actually, I've read some statistics on freelancing.
[00:49:52]  I'm not going to quote any because I would sound stupid because I don't know them off the top of my head.
[00:49:55]  Yeah.
[00:49:55]  But the freelancing economy, the idea that bigger companies, instead of hiring somebody now, like, onboarding them and paying benefits and all this kind of stuff, They're really a lot of companies are now into just hiring a person specific for this job.
[00:50:09]  They don't care where you are, whatever.
[00:50:11]  They'll pay you even more than they would pay like a normal person because to onboard a person is crazy high.
[00:50:17]  If they can hire a specialist that can just come in and nail a project, that's that is really growing.
[00:50:22]  That's why the freelance economy is growing so much right now.
[00:50:24]  Yeah.
[00:50:24]  And also like like basic media companies like like Forbes or or any kind of magazine, Vice, their majority of their people are remote and they're just writing articles for a flat rate.
[00:50:38]  That gets posted on a website.
[00:50:40]  I mean, Forbes is a great example of that.
[00:50:43]  Well, I mean, in industries where it typically costs a lot to produce something, I think writing is a big one.
[00:50:50]  I mean, think about how much it costs to onboard a writer, pay for their benefits, their salary, have them in an office.
[00:50:58]  Dude, our office costs $25,000 a month.
[00:51:03]  Right?
[00:51:04]  Rent?
[00:51:04]  Rent.
[00:51:05]  Every month.
[00:51:06]  Yeah.
[00:51:07]  That's not like including snacks, all that other stuff.
[00:51:10]  Everything.
[00:51:10]  It's not the power bill.
[00:51:12]  Yeah.
[00:51:13]  So, so man, think about like, what if that expense just doesn't happen?
[00:51:18]  Now, there's ways that you can cut costs, and like, people don't even want to come to the office.
[00:51:22]  They fucking hate traffic, dude.
[00:51:24]  Cut the whole office.
[00:51:24]  Fine.
[00:51:25]  No office.
[00:51:26]  All right.
[00:51:26]  You work virtual.
[00:51:27]  Hire a freelancer.
[00:51:28]  Dude, you cut out tons of expenses.
[00:51:29]  The product stays the same.
[00:51:31]  You know what I mean?
[00:51:32]  Actually, it might even get better because the writers are happier about whatever they're doing there at home.
[00:51:36]  Yeah, so what's the point there at home?
[00:51:37]  Exactly.
[00:51:38]  So for us, there's some positions where it makes sense to have an office.
[00:51:40]  We're not going to get rid of an office because we need it.
[00:51:42]  There's different times at a company when you need different things.
[00:51:45]  Right now, like a lot of people in the office are managers.
[00:51:48]  Like we have people that manage the 500 people, the 500 outsourced team.
[00:51:51]  Yeah.
[00:51:52]  And we want that person in the office for a lot of other reasons.
[00:51:54]  Right, right, right.
[00:51:55]  But the idea of companies hiring freelancers to just snipe.
[00:51:59]  Projects like that economy is exploding.
[00:52:02]  So, if somebody is thinking about, like, oh, I don't know, should I get a real job or should I be a freelancer?
[00:52:07]  If you're talented, dude, there's a huge economy.
[00:52:10]  There's a huge economy.
[00:52:11]  Oh, hell yeah.
[00:52:12]  If you want to go after it, dude, there's a huge economy.
[00:52:14]  A lot of people are afraid, though, to leave that nine to five.
[00:52:17]  You know what I mean?
[00:52:17]  Leave the security of that with all the benefits to just go full time freelance.
[00:52:21]  Yep.
[00:52:22]  It's a scary jump to make until you do it.
[00:52:25]  Well, until you have, you see, one billion other people doing it.
[00:52:28]  I mean, I actually.
[00:52:30]  I have this theory.
[00:52:31]  It's called the river theory.
[00:52:33]  It's for wussies like me.
[00:52:37]  I'm a very risk averse person, or used to be.
[00:52:41]  I'm a little less now, but I mean, I'm from the middle of Indiana.
[00:52:44]  I'm conservative, you know, I'm very risk averse.
[00:52:48]  I don't want to take risks.
[00:52:49]  I'm not necessarily an entrepreneur at heart, not from the beginning.
[00:52:53]  Right, right, right.
[00:52:54]  And I have this theory, the river theory, which means if you know you want to go in that direction, you know, but you're too scared to just go there, you can just get around people that are.
[00:53:05]  Going there and hop in the river with them, and like, you know, that it'll help you get there.
[00:53:12]  That's a way that.
[00:53:13]  That is a good way.
[00:53:14]  That's a good method.
[00:53:15]  Just get around people that are going where you want to go or are where you want to go.
[00:53:19]  And then it's crazy how things become possible.
[00:53:24]  Yeah.
[00:53:24]  Like, do you remember there's a big, you know, Roger Bannister, I think this is his name.
[00:53:30]  He's the guy that first ran the four minute mile.
[00:53:33]  Something like that.
[00:53:34]  Five minute mile.
[00:53:35]  I don't think I've heard of that.
[00:53:36]  Anyways, the first guy that broke like the five minute mile.
[00:53:38]  Dude, I sound so stupid because I don't know if it's a five minute or four minute mile.
[00:53:42]  Tomato, tomato.
[00:53:42]  Anyway, so yeah.
[00:53:44]  This guy, nobody could run that fast.
[00:53:47]  And then this guy broke it.
[00:53:48]  And then right after that, like 10 more people broke that record.
[00:53:51]  Okay?
[00:53:52]  So the whole idea being that, like, dude, it's.
[00:53:55]  Once you know it's possible, everybody can do it.
[00:53:57]  So if you could just go find those people, which there's communities everywhere to find out people that are like you that are doing what you want to do, dude, then it becomes possible in your mind.
[00:54:06]  And then, like, immediately, you can start doing that stuff.
[00:54:09]  Right, right.
[00:54:09]  You know, that's the way to hack it.
[00:54:12]  Do you guys work with any publishing companies or any big media companies or anything like that?
[00:54:17]  Kind of.
[00:54:19]  We have some things in the work right now with some crazy big, like, multi billion dollar companies because of, like, literally what we're talking about right now, which is publishing companies, they have a lot of costs, you know, and their costs are high and their profits are shrinking, like publishing companies, right?
[00:54:35]  So, if you're trying to run, like, a newspaper, your margins are shrinking.
[00:54:38]  So, people are trying to move that digital.
[00:54:41]  But digital is all about, you know, they're selling like CPM ads on the sides, you know, like banner ads.
[00:54:46]  And that's based on CPM, it's like cost per thousand impressions.
[00:54:51]  Right.
[00:54:52]  And so they just need more inventory, you know.
[00:54:54]  And so they need, and the way to get more inventory is to have more articles that rank in Google.
[00:54:59]  And so the cost of them having like people in office, like journalists writing articles, is like so high.
[00:55:06]  And plus the articles that they write are news.
[00:55:09]  So they go up and they go down.
[00:55:10]  Like they don't rank in Google for like a long time.
[00:55:12]  Right.
[00:55:13]  Because it's like this happened today.
[00:55:14]  Tomorrow, we don't care about that.
[00:55:15]  They have to write new shit all the time.
[00:55:17]  So we have an ability to create this like evergreen content, plus, we're an SEO company that ranks stuff.
[00:55:22]  Yeah.
[00:55:22]  And so we have some things that we've been working on, some different models that this could be pretty interesting for the publishing industry because we have literally a workhouse of 500 people and we can triple that very easily.
[00:55:39]  We're literally producing over 50 million words of content per year.
[00:55:46]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:55:46]  It's fucking insane.
[00:55:48]  Way over 50 million.
[00:55:49]  It just depends.
[00:55:50]  I'm just trying to give you the scale of what we can create.
[00:55:53]  And we create content.
[00:55:55]  That is evergreen, meaning that it'll rank forever.
[00:55:57]  It's already optimized for SEO.
[00:55:59]  You know what I mean?
[00:56:00]  And yeah, we can just do it at a very low cost, like a wholesale cost, because everything that we built is scalable, process size, and it's built by cost per article, outsourced workers.
[00:56:14]  Right.
[00:56:15]  That's interesting.
[00:56:16]  It's like they're trying to just feed the.
[00:56:19]  I mean, it's a whole argument of quality versus quantity.
[00:56:23]  And obviously, in Google, it's like quantity wins.
[00:56:28]  Well, it seems like that.
[00:56:29]  Is that true?
[00:56:30]  I mean, it's both.
[00:56:30]  You need both.
[00:56:31]  You need both quantity and quality.
[00:56:32]  How do you have both?
[00:56:34]  How do you find a balance between quantity and quality?
[00:56:36]  Because, I mean, there's people on YouTube who just sit there and talk to the camera about nothing for 10 minutes, and they do it every single day, and they just get an insane amount of fucking views.
[00:56:48]  I think there's different reasons.
[00:56:51]  I don't want to comment on it all because there's different reasons that certain things happen, right?
[00:56:56]  But for Google, What works is having a big fucking website, right?
[00:57:02]  Meaning, like, you ever see the same sites come up all the time?
[00:57:05]  You know, like Wikipedia comes up fucking every search, right?

=== Balancing Quantity and Quality Online (14:06) ===

[00:57:07]  Yeah.
[00:57:08]  Okay.
[00:57:09]  That's because Wikipedia is like an amazingly strong website and it has a billion pages on it, right?
[00:57:14]  So Google loves these big websites that are big brands, these big trustworthy brands.
[00:57:19]  And so you got to have a.
[00:57:23]  If you have a lot of quantity, yes, that's good for multiple reasons.
[00:57:26]  Number one is because it's going to make your website bigger so you're like a bigger brand in Google's eyes.
[00:57:30]  So you have more pages in Google's eyes.
[00:57:31]  And number two, You got more pages, that means you got more chances to rank.
[00:57:34]  You can write about everything, you know what I'm saying?
[00:57:36]  Right.
[00:57:37]  So you have more chances to rank because every single page is about some kind of different keyword that somebody's searching about, right?
[00:57:41]  Okay.
[00:57:42]  So that's quantity.
[00:57:42]  But then you also have to have quality because if people come to your website, the best thing is keep them coming back to your website.
[00:57:49]  And if they get to your website and you have shitty content and they're like, yeah, this website sucks, they're never going to come back to your website again.
[00:57:55]  So you have to have both.
[00:57:56]  The good thing is, like, we found a way to do both, right?
[00:57:59]  Right.
[00:57:59]  We only hire the top 1% of writers.
[00:58:01]  So we know we got quality.
[00:58:02]  We train them, all this kind of stuff.
[00:58:04]  And then.
[00:58:04]  We do it on a very scalable process.
[00:58:06]  So we have shitloads of scale.
[00:58:08]  We can produce literally thousands of articles a week.
[00:58:11]  Yeah.
[00:58:11]  So we got both.
[00:58:13]  And that's the way to do it.
[00:58:14]  Do both quantity and quality.
[00:58:16]  But you can't mix quantity and quality because then you'll go fucking broke.
[00:58:19]  Well, if you're one person, you can't mix them, right?
[00:58:21]  If you're one person, you either bang out a bunch of articles or you bang out a bunch of articles.
[00:58:25]  Yeah, but even if you're not one person.
[00:58:27]  We have a lot of people that are trained to do the same thing.
[00:58:29]  Yeah, but you mean if you want to have both at the same time, you have to hire the best.
[00:58:36]  Of the best, the best journalists, the best writers, the best video producers, or whatever.
[00:58:42]  You can't afford to hire the best of the best times a thousand.
[00:58:45]  I mean, you have to be able to compromise.
[00:58:49]  And that's why I can't comment on every single way that quantity and quality.
[00:58:55]  I'm talking about from an SEO perspective and publishers.
[00:58:57]  Okay.
[00:58:58]  And I mean, you know, like regular publishers.
[00:59:00]  Yeah.
[00:59:01]  There's definitely, you know, like let's say HBO or something, you know, they.
[00:59:06]  Like every show has got to be pretty fucking good quality.
[00:59:10]  You know what I mean?
[00:59:11]  They're going to spend a lot of money to produce one episode of one show.
[00:59:13]  How's their fucking SEO, HBO?
[00:59:16]  They don't need, I mean, they might need SEO, but I mean, like, that's not their gig, you know?
[00:59:21]  That's not how they make it.
[00:59:22]  make their money through SEO.
[00:59:24]  Because people know.
[00:59:25]  I mean, that's a very good example.
[00:59:27]  That's a very good example.
[00:59:28]  HBO is a very good example.
[00:59:29]  Yeah.
[00:59:30]  Because they only spend, I mean, look at Game of Thrones.
[00:59:32]  They spend how many millions of dollars per episode?
[00:59:34]  Over 5 million an episode.
[00:59:35]  Right.
[00:59:35]  And in that case, it makes way more sense to do quality, right?
[00:59:39]  I mean, but they still did quantity too because they did fuck 12 seasons of that shit.
[00:59:42]  Yeah, they did.
[00:59:43]  They spent so much fucking money, dude.
[00:59:46]  Every episode was a movie.
[00:59:47]  They're not making it back, though.
[00:59:48]  What's that?
[00:59:49]  Got to make it back.
[00:59:50]  Make that money back.
[00:59:51]  Yeah.
[00:59:51]  Yeah.
[00:59:52]  So, I don't know.
[00:59:54]  Netflix is so what's a stronger brand?
[00:59:56]  HBO or Wikipedia?
[01:00:00]  Dude, these are two totally different things.
[01:00:01]  It's a totally different market.
[01:00:03]  I would say that HBO is a stronger brand because Wikipedia is asking me for $5 every time I go to their website.
[01:00:08]  I know.
[01:00:08]  They're poor.
[01:00:09]  They're fucking broke.
[01:00:12]  Are people paying it?
[01:00:13]  I think so.
[01:00:14]  I don't know what actually happened with Wikipedia.
[01:00:16]  I didn't pay for it, but damn, this fucking kid's sucking down the white claws.
[01:00:19]  Dude, I had one.
[01:00:20]  I only had like two of them.
[01:00:21]  I know this guy's had like six.
[01:00:23]  I had two.
[01:00:25]  The problem is white claws is I need double strength.
[01:00:27]  Maybe we need an app that can deliver us white claws.
[01:00:29]  Fuck yeah, dude.
[01:00:30]  Rappi needs to exist in the U.S.
[01:00:32]  But the problem is we need to get a bunch of low.
[01:00:37]  We need to totally change the minimum wage to be able to make it financially viable.
[01:00:41]  You know what I mean?
[01:00:42]  It's too expensive.
[01:00:43]  We have to construct cities in a different way so all the buildings are close together.
[01:00:47]  And then everyone has to ride motorcycles and stuff.
[01:00:48]  So, see, there's just things that are different that make it economically feasible.
[01:00:54]  So what's the key to making a podcast?
[01:00:56]  Good, you gotta just do like a hundred of them a day, if I know dude, I don't run, but you gotta think about it like a website right, you gotta have more pages.
[01:01:03]  Now everything's different.
[01:01:04]  So YouTube is not the same.
[01:01:05]  So YouTube does not rank the same as Google.
[01:01:08]  Yeah, we were talking about this yesterday.
[01:01:10]  Yeah, because we were.
[01:01:11]  I was like the thing about YouTube is okay.
[01:01:16]  So I live in the Google world right, because Google is the largest search engine in the world.
[01:01:21]  Google is like one of the biggest companies in the world and dude, literally just ranking on Google can make you literally millions of dollars.
[01:01:31]  Yeah, just ranking, if you're in the right industry and stuff like that, you can make or break your business 100.
[01:01:40]  And the thing is like when people go to Google, every time they they're typing in something because they're looking for something, they're trying to solve a problem right, it's like there's an intent of that search.
[01:01:50]  Right, I need to figure out how to get this wine out of my carpet.
[01:01:53]  I'm looking for a fucking plumber.
[01:01:55]  You know they're looking for something very specific right, where YouTube is a little bit different, most, most of the traffic on YouTube to people's videos Is not by people searching.
[01:02:05]  Even though YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, most of the traffic is not via people searching.
[01:02:10]  Most of the traffic is people that see the shit on the right hand side that says suggested videos.
[01:02:16]  They're clicking on that.
[01:02:17]  That's where 80% of your traffic is coming from, is people clicking on suggested videos.
[01:02:25]  So while optimizing for searches in YouTube is important, people are looking for things, people search for things in YouTube.
[01:02:33]  The more important thing. for YouTube is to have like a clickbaity type title or a good, you know, and or a good thumbnail.
[01:02:43]  Right.
[01:02:44]  So I think that's why like, you know, viral type stuff works on YouTube so well.
[01:02:48]  It's because people just keep clicking on that shit.
[01:02:50]  You know, they're not searching for things.
[01:02:52]  I am though.
[01:02:53]  Whenever I want to find something, it's probably a 50-50.
[01:02:57]  I'm going to YouTube to find the answer.
[01:02:58]  No, don't get me wrong.
[01:03:00]  It's not that people do not search on YouTube.
[01:03:01]  There's a lot of people that do.
[01:03:02]  But I'm saying the majority of traffic that people get to their videos is through suggested videos.
[01:03:06]  Okay.
[01:03:07]  Yeah.
[01:03:07]  If you look on your channel, that makes sense.
[01:03:09]  If you look on your channel and you break down, like, what it is, I can show you right now.
[01:03:13]  I can look at it right now.
[01:03:14]  Yeah.
[01:03:15]  It's like 80% suggested videos, probably.
[01:03:17]  So you should optimize for SEO.
[01:03:19]  Like, you should optimize your titles and stuff if you're talking about something specific.
[01:03:22]  If you have a guest on that's really popular, you when the people type in their name, they're searching for it.
[01:03:27]  Yeah, definitely have that in your title.
[01:03:28]  But I would prefer to have a crazy title suggested videos 33%, browse features 31%.
[01:03:39]  Okay, what is browse features?
[01:03:41]  I don't know, I'm not a YouTube expert, okay?
[01:03:45]  But most of it, like, is not search, right?
[01:03:47]  Search was like 30%, the other 30%.
[01:03:51]  Search YouTube search 8%.
[01:03:55]  There you go.
[01:03:56]  Boom, boom, boom.
[01:03:58]  Okay, that's different external.
[01:04:00]  It's because people might search for concrete, people might search for a guest that you had on.
[01:04:04]  But what they're mostly going to do is they're going to be like watching that and they'll click over some other shit, you know?
[01:04:08]  Right, right.
[01:04:08]  That's where most of the traffic is going to be.
[01:04:10]  And so that's why you want those thumbnails to look so good.
[01:04:13]  So in this video, if we were optimizing for SEO, we'd be like Clayton Johnson, SEO, the Hoth, you know, anything that we would be talking about in this.
[01:04:21]  But I think it would work so much better if we had some kind of crazy title, you know?
[01:04:25]  Yeah, but would it?
[01:04:26]  Because if you look at some of the biggest.
[01:04:29]  Because I'm not popular.
[01:04:30]  If you look at some of the biggest things.
[01:04:32]  I mean, this is.
[01:04:33]  Like I said, you said you're not an expert, but an argument to that would be like, look at some of the biggest YouTube creators.
[01:04:40]  Like, for example, look at fucking PewDiePie.
[01:04:42]  You read his titles?
[01:04:43]  Like, sometimes he just types in some weird Greek font and just makes up some fucking bullshit.
[01:04:47]  That's why I'm saying that he doesn't need to optimize for SE.
[01:04:50]  So people, yeah, right.
[01:04:51]  So people are familiar with him and his character and his content.
[01:04:55]  Yep.
[01:04:56]  And they basically at that point, all you need to see is a thumbnail with his face, and you're just going to click on it.
[01:05:01]  Yep.
[01:05:02]  I mean, if you're doing entertainment content, yeah, that's way better.
[01:05:05]  Now, there's a big play.
[01:05:07]  Facts first.
[01:05:08]  Well, yeah, yeah.
[01:05:08]  That's entertainment content.
[01:05:09]  Yeah.
[01:05:10]  Now, there's another play that you could do.
[01:05:11]  So, like, let's say, for instance, you wanted to sell Bluetooth headphones, right?
[01:05:15]  You can make a video that's like best Bluetooth headphone reviews because people love reviews online.
[01:05:21]  Tech reviews.
[01:05:21]  And then, like, you would optimize your video for that, and people do search for that.
[01:05:25]  That's not only going to come up when people search for headphone reviews in YouTube.
[01:05:30]  That's also going to come up in Google, too.
[01:05:32]  You know how we ever been searching on Google and a bunch of videos up at the top?
[01:05:35]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:05:35]  That's why you got to optimize that for SEO.
[01:05:37]  So that's a different play because this is an entertainment show versus like trying to sell something or whatever.
[01:05:42]  Right.
[01:05:43]  Or like even a how to.
[01:05:45]  Right.
[01:05:45]  How to videos.
[01:05:48]  There's also a whole wave of people that just don't want to be entertained.
[01:05:51]  They want to fucking learn shit.
[01:05:52]  Yep, sure.
[01:05:53]  Like they listen to these long ass videos or listen to them on Spotify or iTunes or whatever because they want to like learn new things.
[01:05:58]  They're on car.
[01:05:59]  It's like listening to an audio book, kind of.
[01:06:01]  Yeah.
[01:06:02]  Because if you have somebody on there who.
[01:06:03]  Whatever is really like an expert in something, and you want to learn more about that.
[01:06:06]  It's yeah, so it's kind of like a whole, it's very new, it's a very new type of audience to YouTube.
[01:06:13]  Or I love it, it's like a knowledge explosion.
[01:06:15]  But what people really want, people really want, they want infotainment, dude.
[01:06:19]  Infotainment, what's infotainment?
[01:06:20]  Infotainment is information, but that's entertaining at the same time because, like, you know, how when you read books as a kid or in school, you're like, okay, this is information, and it's so painfully boring, yeah, dude.
[01:06:33]  Okay, information exists everywhere, what doesn't exist.
[01:06:36]  Is information in an entertaining way.
[01:06:38]  You know what I mean?
[01:06:39]  That's why, like, the best.
[01:06:42]  There's a bunch of people, like, online right now on YouTube that teach, like, how to program, but it's kind of almost like a V log while they're teaching you how to program.
[01:06:49]  You know what I mean?
[01:06:50]  They tell you, like, behind the scenes, like, hey guys, how's it going?
[01:06:54]  It's me, it's Oscar.
[01:06:55]  Today, I'm going to be programming my iPhone 12.
[01:06:58]  Yeah, and they'll do stuff like that.
[01:07:00]  Like, let me teach you how to program through this.
[01:07:03]  Smash that like button.
[01:07:04]  Well, yeah.
[01:07:05]  But they'll teach you how to, like, program through real world situations or show you, like, I know there's, like, a dude that was, Here, this is me doing an interview with Google or something like that.
[01:07:13]  And they'll like do the interview live so you can see it.
[01:07:16]  So it's like entertaining and informative at the same time.
[01:07:18]  Yeah.
[01:07:19]  Yeah.
[01:07:19]  So, if you're a content creator and you want to do how-to shit, make it entertaining.
[01:07:25]  Because that information already exists online.
[01:07:27]  It's just painfully boring.
[01:07:28]  That's true.
[01:07:29]  Yeah.
[01:07:29]  People just really want to be entertained, dude.
[01:07:31]  They do.
[01:07:32]  People are just bored all the time.
[01:07:35]  They spend all their time on the phone and on the internet.
[01:07:37]  God damn it.
[01:07:38]  You know how bored people are?
[01:07:40]  All right.
[01:07:40]  Think about this.
[01:07:41]  How many times do people just sit, they go through their entire day, and they get to the last few seconds of the day, and they're just going like this, and their phone laying in their bed, just going like this, like.
[01:07:52]  Please, God, give me like one more thing of entertainment before I fucking back.
[01:07:56]  I saw a great tweet.
[01:07:58]  I saw it.
[01:07:58]  I retweeted this.
[01:07:59]  I saw this on Twitter.
[01:08:00]  This guy posted, scrolling is the new smoking.
[01:08:04]  Dude, for sure.
[01:08:06]  For sure.
[01:08:06]  Man, people are just painfully bored.
[01:08:07]  That's true.
[01:08:09]  That's why if you can give them some like good infotainment, dude, that's where it's at.
[01:08:14]  And they can stop scrolling and watch your infotainment.
[01:08:17]  Well, if they're like, oh, why don't they stop on your video and give you like the ad revenue or sell them a product or something?
[01:08:22]  Yeah.
[01:08:23]  Or help them.
[01:08:24]  I mean, like, that's really at the core of it is like, You're trying to help people.
[01:08:27]  They're looking for stuff, you know?
[01:08:28]  They're looking for ways to improve their lives, like get better headphones or whatever.
[01:08:32]  Do infotainment.
[01:08:33]  Yeah, I just saw, you know, like kids' content is a huge thing on YouTube, right?
[01:08:39]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:08:40]  There's a bunch of moms sitting at home being like, how the fuck do I make this kid?
[01:08:44]  Raise this kid.
[01:08:45]  How do I raise this kid?
[01:08:46]  I give him an iPad.
[01:08:47]  I got pregnant again.
[01:08:50]  YouTube will teach me how to do this.
[01:08:52]  Yeah, I'll just figure out how to raise this kid.
[01:08:54]  I'm pregnant again.
[01:08:55]  Just buy another iPad.
[01:08:56]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:08:58]  They had to play with kids, YouTube.
[01:09:00]  No, no, no, no.
[01:09:01]  How do I make this kid go to sleep?
[01:09:04]  They have the entertainment, like the cartoon shit on YouTube, like YouTube Kids.
[01:09:09]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:09:11]  Or like little kids opening toys or people opening toys.
[01:09:15]  And kids will sit there and veg out on the iPads watching these YouTube videos for hours.
[01:09:19]  Yeah.
[01:09:19]  And people use that as babysitters for their children.
[01:09:22]  It's genius.
[01:09:23]  I don't know.
[01:09:24]  We're in a weird generation.
[01:09:25]  We're the first generation that grew up half without the internet and half with the internet.
[01:09:29]  You know what I mean?
[01:09:30]  So, like, this will never be again.
[01:09:32]  Like, when I tell my kids that, like, I didn't have internet or I didn't have a cell phone when I was, like, growing up, they'd be like, Dad, you're a fucking dinosaur.
[01:09:38]  Yeah, for real.
[01:09:39]  Yeah.
[01:09:40]  That is nuts.
[01:09:41]  But what I was trying to get to was just starting this week, YouTube is phasing out monetization on kids' content.
[01:09:51]  They gave them, like, four months saying, okay, we're going to, because there's such a huge part of YouTube relies on this.
[01:09:57]  They've made a huge announcement that in four months from now, they're going to stop this.
[01:10:02]  So now all these people like people have to stop have to find something else to do.
[01:10:05]  No, they don't it's crazy dude.
[01:10:06]  No, they don't.
[01:10:07]  What do you mean they don't because they can do advertorials Because they can put integrated like advertisements into their videos You know like product placement like that's the most common way that people refer to it is like that's true, but that's a huge loss of revenue just straight up Google ad revenue Yeah, but they have enough views that they can demand like huge amounts They still have the attention.
[01:10:27]  Yeah, they still got as long as you have the attention then you can still sell it.
[01:10:30]  You know what I mean?
[01:10:30]  Yeah, that's true.
[01:10:31]  I didn't think about that And then, if it's a really big deal, there's lots of ways around it.
[01:10:36]  They can start getting people to subscribe on an email and start siphoning them off to another platform where they're going to run ads on them.
[01:10:41]  So, there's lots of different ways around it.
[01:10:43]  Siphoning off their subscribers to sign up for an email list.
[01:10:46]  Yeah, be like, we're going to do exclusive content, but we're only going to be doing it on our website from now on.
[01:10:50]  So, subscribe to our email list and we'll let you know when it launches.
[01:10:52]  And then, when it launches, you have a list of like 2 million people.
[01:10:55]  And you email them every time you come out with a new video.
[01:10:57]  And now they're not going to YouTube anymore.
[01:10:59]  They're only going to your website.
[01:11:00]  And then you're running shitloads of ads all over your website and doing the fuck that you want with it.
[01:11:03]  So, there's lots of ways around whatever platform.
[01:11:07]  You know, I mean, the real thing is the attention.
[01:11:09]  Like, if you have the attention and you can capture that and you have the relationship with the audience, you can put them wherever you want.

=== Dave Chappelle: Comedy at Its Core (03:22) ===

[01:11:14]  Yeah, that's true.
[01:11:15]  Yeah.
[01:11:16]  What did I just read today?
[01:11:17]  Dave Chappelle's new dave Chappelle said that strippers are like the street version of Google.
[01:11:26]  Strippers are the street version of what?
[01:11:28]  I don't understand.
[01:11:29]  Yeah, you've got to break that down.
[01:11:31]  I don't know about that.
[01:11:32]  I think he meant like strippers basically know a lot about a lot of shit.
[01:11:36]  You can ask a stripper.
[01:11:38]  They got the scoop on everything.
[01:11:40]  They got the lowdown about a lot of shit.
[01:11:42]  You fucking get a lap dish from a stripper, you can ask her about this, that, and the third.
[01:11:45]  Where you want to go to eat, where you need to buy some some weed at.
[01:11:49]  Where you want to score some drugs?
[01:11:50]  Where you want to do anything?
[01:11:51]  What's the closest gas station?
[01:11:53]  Strippers know.
[01:11:54]  They know.
[01:11:55]  Is Wawa still open?
[01:11:56]  I don't know, dude.
[01:12:02]  Dave Chappelle is.
[01:12:03]  That new stand up is pretty good.
[01:12:05]  It is amazing.
[01:12:06]  Yeah, but they were just saying that how all these big news platforms like Vice and Vox were crushing him, saying, don't watch Dave Chappelle's news.
[01:12:15]  They were.
[01:12:16]  They said, I don't know, they said he'd like.
[01:12:18]  Don't watch it.
[01:12:19]  It's terrible.
[01:12:20]  No, because he's kind of like.
[01:12:22]  I guess, talks about the people and the LGBT and stuff like that.
[01:12:27]  Yeah, so these are people like Vice, who are super left wing.
[01:12:30]  Super left wing media companies are like saying, don't watch Dave Chappelle's new thing.
[01:12:34]  Even Rotten Tomatoes had a zero percent.
[01:12:38]  They're like, you don't need to watch this.
[01:12:40]  Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 0%, where it was just people that worked for Rotten Tomatoes that were hired to rate it.
[01:12:46]  They gave it a 0%.
[01:12:47]  Did you watch it?
[01:12:48]  I watched it.
[01:12:48]  I watched it.
[01:12:48]  I'm going to watch it.
[01:12:49]  Did you watch it?
[01:12:50]  Yeah, I watched it.
[01:12:50]  What'd you think?
[01:12:51]  I thought it was good.
[01:12:52]  Yeah.
[01:12:52]  Yeah, he does like, you know, he crosses the line between like offending people.
[01:12:56]  Fuck yeah, he does.
[01:12:57]  And it's comedy, but I thought it was good.
[01:13:00]  I mean, you know, anybody that goes up there and just talks it how they think it, I think is admirable.
[01:13:06]  Yeah, I think, you know, Dave Chappelle, like, it's hard because we live in this time right now where it's like a hypersensitive society.
[01:13:13]  Yeah, it's very sensitive people.
[01:13:15]  And Dave Chappelle is like one of the few people that somehow is able to talk about, You know, hard stuff like this.
[01:13:23]  And like, that's the beauty of comedy.
[01:13:25]  Like, the beauty of comedy is like the darkness of being human brought out into the light.
[01:13:32]  And like, the best comics have to talk about that type of stuff.
[01:13:37]  Oh, for sure.
[01:13:37]  Oh, yeah.
[01:13:37]  And like, the best thing is like, I mean, it's hard for me to say anything because I have had so much, you know, growing up.
[01:13:45]  Like, I'm a white dude in America.
[01:13:47]  You know, like, I have nothing to say.
[01:13:50]  White privilege, Clayton.
[01:13:51]  Right.
[01:13:51]  Some people would be like, you know, nothing.
[01:13:54]  You've never suffered about anything.
[01:13:57]  And so it's hard for me to say anything, but I mean, one of the beautiful things about comedy is like being vulnerable and like bringing out like bad shit and like talking about it and laughing about it.
[01:14:08]  Like that is comedy at its core.
[01:14:10]  And it's a beautiful thing for everyone if you can do that.
[01:14:13]  Like he even addresses this specifically in his stand up special.
[01:14:16]  He said he had a trans woman come into his gigs and he was going to make a bunch of trans jokes.
[01:14:23]  And he was like, She laughed harder than any fucking person that was there.
[01:14:28]  He specifically addressed that.
[01:14:29]  And I think that's one of the beautiful things about comedy.
[01:14:34]  Definitely.

=== Managing Change with a New Mindset (01:56) ===

[01:14:36]  If you can participate in that.
[01:14:38]  Or if you just want to think about what you don't want instead of what you want, you can fucking go have a terrible life.
[01:14:43]  Go have a terrible time.
[01:14:45]  Lock yourself in a room and fucking feel terrible all the time.
[01:14:49]  Whatever you want to do with your life, it's up to you.
[01:14:53]  Move to Columbia.
[01:14:55]  So, what's next for Clayton and the Haw?
[01:14:57]  What's on the horizon?
[01:14:59]  Oh, man, we got so many cool things happening, man.
[01:15:02]  And I mean, like, I, one of the coolest things that I've been working on is there's so many different parts about growing a company, and it requires so many different skills at every stage, right?
[01:15:15]  And, you know, just like I really focus on that kind of what's limiting me at that time was my inner person, you know?
[01:15:21]  And I had a big breakthrough then.
[01:15:23]  Well, I need another big breakthrough.
[01:15:25]  I mean, we come to a new point because you have to do, you have to have a totally new skill sets at different times.
[01:15:31]  And then at that time, I just needed to change myself.
[01:15:34]  Like, I need to change my schedule.
[01:15:36]  I need to change what I worked on during the day.
[01:15:37]  I need to change my mentality.
[01:15:39]  Now we're at a point where we have to manage.
[01:15:41]  Like, we have 45 people in the office.
[01:15:43]  So now I have to figure out how to organize this structure here and manage people.
[01:15:47]  And people want different things now.
[01:15:49]  So now instead of focusing on just making the company, like marketing it better, I got to focus on giving people like a career path, you know, and encouraging them and showing them these good mentality and then, you know, creating opportunities for them.
[01:16:04]  And then at the same time, serving our customers at a higher level.
[01:16:08]  So, expanding our products and services.
[01:16:09]  It's a really complicated thing.
[01:16:11]  It requires a whole new mindset.
[01:16:12]  So, that's kind of stuff that I'm working on.
[01:16:15]  Okay.
[01:16:16]  Yeah.
[01:16:16]  Cool, dude.
[01:16:17]  Yeah, man.
[01:16:18]  Self improvement.
[01:16:19]  Yeah, for sure.
[01:16:19]  I love it.
[01:16:20]  Cool, dude.
[01:16:21]  Well, that was a good podcast.
[01:16:22]  All right.
[01:16:22]  Thanks for having me.
[01:16:23]  Let's wrap it up.
[01:16:23]  Let's go have some more White Claws.
[01:16:25]  Yeah.
[01:16:26]  Thanks for sharing your knowledge and all your wisdom.
[01:16:29]  Yeah.
[01:16:29]  Thanks for having me.
[01:16:29]  It's been great.
[01:16:30]  Sweet.
[01:16:30]  Thanks, dude.
[01:16:31]  All right.
[01:16:32]  Peace, guys.
[01:16:32]  Thanks, bro.