All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 16, 2018 - Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes
44:52
Get Off My Lawn Podcast #25 | You Wanna Get Rich?

Outside of making a ton of cash in media, I’ve also done well in advertising, real estate, and the stock market. I still work, however, because I like it and ironically, that’s how you get rich. You work hard. The other details are less obvious and include: be humble (you can be replaced), get it in writing, know your worth. This episode examines all of these helpful tips and why they work.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
You want to get rich?
There's many ways to do this, and the beauty of America is that if you hustle for ten years at the same thing, you'll be a millionaire.
Now, there are a few caveats, but not that many.
And people say to me, well, what if I'm sweeping out a bodega?
A million bucks?
Yeah, a million bucks.
Now, if your head is to the grindstone, that's 80% of it.
Just pure labor.
And not a lot of countries are like that.
Canada isn't like that.
You know, in Montreal, if you're English, you live under apartheid, basically, and you're not going to get a job if your French isn't without an accent.
So you have to come up with some sort of hustle, some sort of trick.
I dealt pot for a while.
That was my trick.
But in America, it's free market central, really.
I mean, who is a freer market than America?
I think Hong Kong, it's easier to incorporate, to start a corporation.
That's a metric John Stossel uses.
How long does it take you to make a corporation?
Like to register it.
But it's hard to beat America.
I mean, you hustle, say you want a blog about BMX guys and you go to the right BMX competitions.
10 years?
Yeah, million bucks.
No, but sweeping a bodega.
Yes, dude.
Stop with that.
How?
Well, what happens is you are sweeping the bodega and the boss, there's a huge need for labor these days.
You'll notice, like, I went to a fancy restaurant recently for my wife's birthday, and the guy's like, hello, I am Giovanni at this Italian restaurant.
And I'm like, no, you're not.
You're Mexican.
All waiters have accents.
We can't get teenagers together.
No.
Teenagers don't want to work.
There's no real young labor force, especially in the service industry.
So it's all people with accents, accents, accents, everywhere you go.
Accents.
So if an owner of a bodega sees you sweeping the place, he goes, hey, this guy really hustles.
The bodega guy wants to have chains.
That's the only way you make money.
I had a restaurant in New York.
It went under because it wasn't a chain.
You need three restaurants to make money.
So you're buying in bulk.
One manager handles, you know, all three.
One guy's doing the payroll.
That's the only way you can do it.
And you have to be able to starve long enough with the one that you can have two more.
So every guy who owns a bodego or restaurant is hoping he can do a chain.
The only way you can do a chain, the only way you can have more than one, is if you can trust someone with the company store.
So the guy's sweeping, he's putting away restocking the shelves after a while.
And this guy goes, can you run the sandwich counter while I go out?
Yeah, okay.
Now you're running the sandwich counter.
The next thing you know, the owner trusts you to open and close the bodega.
Bodega, by the way, is a dépanaire if you're in Quebec, corner shop if you're in Britain.
And eventually, you are the manager of that place.
Now you keep hustling, you keep hustling, you're making minimum wage, you feel like you're being taken advantage of.
And eventually he goes, look, man, I'm opening another one in Queens.
Why don't you co-run it with me?
I'm sorry, dude.
I have no money.
I get paid by you.
Yeah, nice one, Ebenezer.
How about I pay you?
You earn sweat equity, so I'll give you like 20%, and then you just pay it off through working there and me trusting you.
That works out great.
We're up to like four or five years now.
Now you own 20% of a bodega.
Now at seven years in, you're going to have maybe four chains.
Meanwhile, you're a hard worker, so you're also looking out for young bucks you can trust.
Now we've got like 10 bodegas.
You have a 50% share out of four of them.
You're a millionaire.
Way to go, dude.
Now, there are some exceptions to the rule.
Like for some reason, I don't know, you screwed the owner's daughter in high school and he hates your guts.
He's never going to promote you.
He hates you.
Or maybe there's a one in a million chance he's racist and you're black.
Let's not dwell on that.
That's very rare.
But in that case, you have to know, okay, people are getting hired above me.
I got to go.
Like at Fox News, I kept seeing every pretty girl and every gay conservative rocket past me, and I thought, all right, I'm a white male.
I'm controversial.
I'm never going to move up the ladder here.
There's a low ceiling.
It's funny they talk about the glass ceiling.
There's a glass ceiling for white males, that's for sure.
Scott Adams talks about that, how he's hit it twice in two separate careers.
But if you can just be slightly, not too aware, but just normally aware of your worth, so no one's being hired over your head, and just keep plugging away, nose to the grindstone, 10 years, million bucks, I promise.
What about electrician?
That's a shitty job.
No, not really.
Not if you're a union.
And eventually, you can start selling your license out.
You can start hiring other people.
You start your own contractorship.
You need a sense of entrepreneurial ship, right?
I mean, a lot of people don't make money because they don't want to make money.
They're called women.
And I totally understand that.
But, you know, what was it?
Ralph Wiggums told his, Ralph Wiggums' dad, that's the chief of police, told Ralph that if he likes Lisa, he has to keep trying no matter what.
And he gave her that Valentine's card.
I choo, choo, choose you.
Lisa will never, ever get with Ralph in a million years.
So give it up.
I saw, I talked about this on another podcast, but they had that midget who wanted to be Britney Spears, the next Britney Spears.
No, a Midget will never be a mainstream pop star, at least not for the next 30 years.
So drop that dream.
But otherwise, if you're passionate about something and you bust your ass in America, you will get rich.
That's why this country is great, because it rewards hard work with almost no limits.
Sanitation, cancer research, trees, whatever those guys are called, the tree doctors who cut down a branch.
Just keep hustling.
And that's the other thing I think a lot of people don't get is you have to hustle like crazy, like 60-hour weeks.
And I have nothing but respect for people who don't have the entrepreneurial gland.
For people who want to punch the clock at 5 p.m. on a Friday and go home, I totally get that.
I don't have that.
I always feel like I'm at work.
Oh, that could be, since I was doing a fanzine in the 80s, I'd go, oh, that could be good for my zine.
Oh, you're an interesting person.
You'd be good to interview.
We should do this together.
Networking and stuff.
Let's build this.
I want to get involved in that.
I know I sound like I'm flattering myself.
But that's in many ways a curse because you can never truly relax.
Even on vacation, you're on your deck chair sort of fidgety.
So it's just something that's innate.
It's genetic.
You're either an entrepreneur or you're not.
I don't think it can be learned.
I feel the same way about creativity.
You're either born creative or you're not.
Sorry this episode's so serious, by the way.
No laughs this time.
I'm talking about you making money.
Clean your room, as Jordan Peterson says.
That's how you get started.
Get in shape.
Stop watching TV.
Quit your addictions.
That's what the beauty of Catholicism is it has Lent every year.
So I'm going to go 40 days without booze.
I'm also going to try to stop this stupid phone addiction I have.
And that sort of cleanses you, gets you refocused.
Now, one thing I wanted to mention when I was talking about your worth, one thing I've learned about millennials, they have a lot of mistakes.
But one thing I've learned about them is they think of themselves as too valuable.
I remember I had this black intern, a young girl, and I would say, take out the garbage and other crappy jobs, mop the floors, reorganize all these books.
Because that's what we had to do as entrepreneurs.
We had to take out the garbage.
We had to do the taxes ourselves.
We had to buy groceries.
When I started Vice, we would eat at the office.
The office was our home.
They're doing all this stuff, you know, putting these bottles in the recycling.
It's not fun.
And so when you have an intern, which, by the way, I don't like interns.
It's just free school.
And inevitably, you're explaining to them a job that it would be much faster to do yourself.
And they screwed up and they're half-assed and their heart's not in it.
Nah.
Anyway, after about four days, and you need two years of suffering to make money, but four days, she said, I quit.
I'm out of here.
What?
What's going on?
No, I've had it.
All right, bye.
Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
And then I found a crumpled up note in a desk.
I've told the story a hundred times.
And it said, why do they keep giving me these jobs that are clearly below me?
Hasn't 400 years of evolution taught them more?
And she didn't say that.
She wrote it on a note, crumpled it up, and left it inside the intern desk.
And I thought, lady, we have barely begun your initiation.
This was not a hazing.
This was a tiny taste of what the real world is like, and you can't handle it.
Remember those millennials?
I forget the exact company it was, but they had a dress code.
And for some reason, this company thought it would be good to have, I don't know, 50 interns.
What?
You must have a lot of things that need to get alphabetized because 50 interns is way more work than it needs.
And they went on strike.
They said, we're not wearing a dress code.
We're on strike.
Okay, you're fired.
And they were mortified.
How can I be fired?
You overvalued yourself.
Everyone is replaceable.
That's another lesson.
I could number all these.
But you think of yourself as incredibly valuable.
You could be fired tomorrow.
I always have a plan B and a plan C. CRTV could fire me tomorrow, no problem.
And I know a lot of people, like I know a producer of a news talk show, and he was there for years and years and years.
He had no idea what he was going to do if he got fired.
He got fired.
He's been unemployed for about a year now.
And that's a weird job being a producer, because you're really just saying these guests would be good, and you're not really contributing to what stories are, sort of, but the team sort of figures it out.
And there's only so many producer jobs.
There's a million jobs for editors if you can work premiere.
But being the boss of a show, there's not that many shows on air.
She'd have a plan B, if you're in a band, what are you doing touring?
You're in your 30s, dude.
You better learn how to be an engineer or start a record label or do something.
God, Tom Hazelmeyer is doing prints.
He used to do, he ran his label amphetamine reptile, and then he would do the prints for the band's appearances.
Cheaper than paying someone.
And now that's what he does for a living.
He had a plan B, a plan C, a plan D. So you have to be prepared to be fired tomorrow.
And that brings me to my next biggie, which is how much is it going to cost?
Get it in writing.
Millennials have this thing where they'll come in somewhere, bust their ass in giant quotation marks, and then after two months go, I think I've earned about like $3,000.
And you go, no, no, you don't go up into the suburbs with a big bucket of gold paint and start painting a house and then just leave the owners of the house with a bill.
They didn't ask you to paint the house.
You didn't work it out in advance.
And I do that with everyone, contractors, guys who want to shovel the driveway.
How much?
And it could be ballpark.
It doesn't have to be the exact amount.
Sorry for swallowing snot on air.
I'm sick.
And like with lawyers, it's tricky too because they love just giving you a massive bill.
And I say to them, please tell me every time we hit $1,000, if they're a cheap lawyer, every time we hit $500, I just need to be aware.
I don't want to get bill shock.
Same with mechanics.
Just give me a ballpark.
What are we looking at here?
$3,000.
$3,000 for a roof rack and a minor repair?
Then you can shop around, blah, blah, blah.
You work it out.
So I don't want to hear your complaints when you get fired out of the blue and you say, well, he owes me money and you have no contract with the guy.
If you have a contract, You can go sue.
And I'm not litigious, but I don't see a problem with that.
You've been robbed.
You have it in writing.
Now, this brings me to my next point.
Getting a big contract is a pain in the ass.
Lawyers are expensive.
So I do what I call a crayon contract.
And it says, We're doing this, we own this percentage of the company.
And then you just have worst-case scenarios.
What if I fuck your wife is one of them I like to put in.
I said that to G Vaucher, the artist behind the punk band crass.
And she goes, that's horrible.
Why not?
What if I fuck your husband?
Well, gee, I haven't started a lot of companies with women, and I don't think I ever will, by the way.
I didn't say that.
But sorry, it's not meant to be taken that literally.
But it's a worst case scenario.
So this thing's in there, like when I started Rooster the Ad Agency, we had a clause like, what if, after we divided up 25% each, I don't come to work at all for a year?
That's not going to happen, but that's a worst case scenario.
Okay, we renegotiate in six months and evaluate each other's performance and democratically see who's been screwing up.
What if I fuck your wife?
Well, we buy you out at this evaluation and then we take the rest of the percentages.
Because the best case is easy.
What if everyone wants to give us millions of dollars?
Yeah, that's great.
We'll jump up and down in the streets.
And this is just written on an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper, typed out.
You all sign it, and I recommend a little bit of blood is involved.
Little cut of the knife Varunski to the pinky.
You can even bite, you know what?
The easiest way to cut yourself is, sometimes you get these guys that are nauseous when they cut themselves.
Bite your inner lip and then suck the blood out.
That's blood.
And then put that next to your name.
Now, if it ever goes to court, the judge can say, well, you do seem to have been quite committed.
In fact, I'm looking at here.
It's brown, but it appears to be blood.
You literally signed this quote-unquote crayon contract with blood.
I'm inclined to think you were well aware of the circumstances.
And most of the stuff with these major fights are based on major misunderstandings.
Sorry, someone called my name and it confused me.
I'm that fragile with my train of thought.
Sorry, slight interruption there.
Got edited out.
That was someone.
I'm building a wall in my cupboard to keep the iPads and the iPhones locked into the closet.
And being in a nice house means that the quotes you get are pretty intense.
This carpenter gets $125 an hour.
Wants $300 to build a door.
I could only get him down to $275.
But the prices are agreed upon.
Nothing weird after.
And a lot of these sort of millennials, say they have a startup or something and they start getting money.
That's when they decide what the percentages should be.
All right, we've got a million bucks now.
I feel like I'm worth like 70%.
I mean, I did most of the work.
What?
I did most of the work.
I get 70%.
You don't have a crayon contract.
You don't need to go to a lawyer and get a thousand pages drawn up, especially when you're starting out, especially if you're just cleaning pools or mowing lawns.
But when you start getting, you know, making income, that's the first thing you do.
That's another big piece of advice.
Anytime you start cooking with gas and getting rolling, worry about the back end.
You don't want to be Wesley Snipes when you finally get rich and they discovered you've never paid tax.
You need to allocate a substantial portion of your back office to a back office, to a controller, spelled competroller.
I recommend they're Jewish.
That's been my experience.
They tend to do better at that.
I've had very good experiences with Jewish accountants and Jewish controllers and Jewish lawyers, but maybe that's because I live in New York.
But it's crucial that your back end is solid.
You don't want to get an investment and you have no, they can't do due diligence because you didn't record anything.
So you've got to meet with the accountants, meet with the lawyers, meet with the pencil pushers every month and make sure all your books are in order.
So due diligence is just a snap of the finger.
How do you know, Gavin?
Who are you?
Didn't you just have one company?
No.
I did very well with my first endeavor.
Invested in real estate and stock market, but I also started an ad agency after that that was very lucrative.
I've also invested in quite a few little startups.
The ad agency was closed down, but it was only about six months after we had sold it.
So we had golden handcuffs there.
That's a little-known part of the story.
I couldn't have given less of a shit when they shut us down.
We had already cashed out.
But that's an rooster.
The ad agency is an interesting thing.
We had what they call a hipster, a hacker, and a hustler, which is an integral combination.
We had a strong back end, and the hustler is the sales guy.
Without a sales guy, you're nothing.
If you can't have someone out there...
I've gone from sweeping a bodega to running an ad agency.
So I'm essentially giving you two pieces of advice at the same time.
I'm talking about how as an employee to get rich, and then as someone starting a company from scratch, how to get rich.
But I think they're intertwangled.
That's a word I made up.
Because with the bodega story, he ended up becoming an entrepreneur.
He ran two of them basically by himself.
Mr. Dinkins owns them all, the majority share, but Luis, he runs two of them totally by himself.
I don't think Mr. Dinkins has even been to the two that Luis owns.
And yes, these are invisible people I just made up.
So the hipster, the hacker, and the hustler.
So the hipster is the me guy, the culture guy, or the content guy.
And I'm the kind of guy who was making mixtapes in my bedroom when I was 12.
So I've always been incredibly passionate about pop culture or the goings-on.
And when people bring up a story or bring up a name, I know about it.
I'm familiar with that guy.
Oh, yeah, I know what those Guys are doing.
Those guys have been doing this for a while.
They make grapple grummits.
And it's two guys out of Cleveland.
Like, you know, you're aware of the culture of what you're doing.
This could be biochemistry.
This could be oncology.
This could be plumbers.
But the hipster guy is into the scene.
He wants to go to the conventions.
He's interested in the making of them.
And all these guys are sort of mixed.
Like the guy, the hipster doesn't have to be 100% hipster.
The hacker doesn't have to be 100% hacker.
There should be a marketing guy within that, you know?
So the hustler is the sales guy.
He's bringing in the money.
He's also often the guy finding the accountants and everyone.
And then there's the hacker.
The hacker is the technician of the group.
He makes sure the machines run.
He makes sure you guys have a good operating system.
He's there when your email fails.
Everything from your email fails to, he knows how to work the camera.
So sometimes you need a team of hackers.
But the hipster hacker hustler means you need someone bringing in the money, someone who understands how the machine works, and then the gasoline, you want someone who fills the machine, who actually provides the content.
Without one of those, you're screwed.
Now, there's ways around it.
You could have someone who's a hacker, part hipster, and a hustler, part hipster, and you come up with, you make the three rolls like that.
Someone wears more than one hat, and that often happens when two guys start a company.
But that has to be the goal at some point.
You know, speaking of working your nose to the grindstone, I'm reminded of this guy, Kennedy.
I edited his book, and he has a self-help book that's like a layman's Jordan B. Peterson.
And they both, by the way, said, clean your room.
Yeah, that's sort of the big thing, the beginning of all this, too.
Another way you get rich is you want to get rich, and many don't.
And I always say that to people, like, I want to be a billionaire, and I want to be a hundred millionaire.
Okay, then get into finance.
Like, you can't say, I want to be incredibly rich and then be a musician or a stand-up comedian.
You clearly chose the wrong thing.
That's the beauty of America.
I remember I used to work with this guy, and he would say, I want to fuck models.
And I said, well, where there's a will, there's a way.
If you're into that, then become a photographer and do portraits all the time.
They love being photographed or be a stylist or a hairdresser or something.
There's a million ways to be surrounded with models.
Work at Vogue as an intern and eventually start doing the lighting for their sets.
I don't know.
You can be around models.
I don't want to fuck models that bad.
I would never do any of that stuff.
But Kennedy is a, he's a cameraman.
I actually don't know his name.
I think the byline on the book is Kennedy.
It's called How to Make a Million Bucks or something, because he was something like 350 grand in debt, and then he had 650 grand, and he goes, I want to call the book How to Make 650 Grand.
I go, well, you kind of made a million, and that's a way better sending title.
But cameramen in New York are brutal to the youngsters starting out.
They'll say, I want a Frappuccino, but from 58th and Broadway.
And it better be hot when you get it.
So you have to figure out a way to keep this thing warm as you get, you know, you're gone for an hour getting that drink.
And then they get it and they just go, poof, it's cold.
Spit it on the ground, throw it out.
And they keep torturing these guys again and again.
But there's a method to the madness.
This is why it's so sad that hazing is being abolished.
Or, you know, with cooks, with chefs, they used to torture the young chefs.
I used to date this girl, Susan Winemaker, and she was a young chef.
And she told me that she'd get locked in the freezer if she disobeyed the chef.
That's the way these people work.
And I'm sorry, I'm still getting over that carpenter's fee of $125.
Holy crap, what's a surgeon make?
I could make it myself, but it would suck.
And if we ever want to sell this house, you'd be walking in the closet and you'd see this rickety door with huge gouges out of the wall.
I can make anything, but it looks like a Viking did it.
Anyway, sorry.
So this cameraman, they abuse him, and the method to the madness is when it gets hard, when the kitchen gets hot, you know, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, it's like the military.
I already will have put you through the worst case scenario.
I'm putting you through the ringer now, so when we're in the juice, as they say in the restaurant industry, you'll be able to handle it.
You know, rush hour at a fancy restaurant, or any restaurant, sorry, rush hour at any restaurant is grueling.
And every time you're slow, every time you screw up, every time you make a bad meal or drop a meal or it's undercooked, you're costing everyone money.
The owners are screwed.
It's a big deal.
So that's the beauty of the initiation.
And they do that to the cameramen because shooting a movie sucks.
The money's great.
If you're shooting a Tom Cruise action thing and you're the head DP, you're going to make, I don't know what you make, $1.5 million?
But you're working 14-hour days.
Sometimes it's raining, so we got to go inside.
We got to do all-nighters all the time.
It is grueling.
The movie business, all those PAs, they'll work 13, 14, 20 hour days for two months and then take two months off and go to Bahamas or whatever.
It's a very strange work schedule.
I don't think I could handle it.
I'm not built for that.
That's like what the Chinese do.
They bust their ass and then take two months off for Chinese New Year.
That's not my cup of tea.
I like a good nine hours a day.
45 hours a week.
That's ideal.
Especially when you have kids.
You want to see your kids.
Oh, by the way, speaking of getting fired, I knew this other dude, Kelly, and he would do these mountain bike tours, right?
And the understanding was Kelly was going to take over the company when the boss got old.
And then he would be running these.
These mountain bike tours would go all over the world.
So the bikes would be in, like, Tibet.
The bikes would be in Amsterdam.
You'd fly there and then go on this cool mountain bike tour.
So it was mostly Vancouver, North America, but there was tons of package options for way across Europe.
But he was making great money.
The boss loved him.
Everything was going great.
Then the boss's daughter gets married, and his son-in-law needs a job.
And he goes, sorry, dude.
My son-in-law needs a job.
This provides for my daughter's family, my grandchildren.
You're out.
There's nothing written down.
He had no equity.
He had nothing, no guarantees.
Fired, gone.
Years of his life down the drain.
Now, you always have to be ready for that.
That's what I meant by everyone is replaceable.
You always have to know the rug could get pulled out from under you.
And you also should be prepared to get fucked over.
Everyone gets fucked over.
Everyone.
You usually don't make any money from it.
It can be from your brother, from your best friend.
Just know that's looming.
Working with someone is a marriage.
And marriages often end in divorce because she cheated on you.
She was sleeping with your best friend.
God, I know a couple like that.
Whatever happened with those two?
Oh, his wife cheated on him.
Oh my God, that's unthinkable.
With who?
His best friend.
I cannot imagine.
You mean for the past two years, my best friend, the guy that I drink beers with and slap on the back and have inside jokes with, has been putting his penis inside and out of my wife?
I mean, how do you not go insane?
How do you not become the punisher after that and just wake up at 8 p.m., do a bunch of pull-ups, assemble your silencer on your backpack, and then disappear into the night to snipe drug dealers from roofs?
Here's another thing now.
Hypotheticals.
I talk about this a lot on my show where liberals, like they canceled the father-daughter dance because of, hypothetically, there could be a trans son who doesn't have a penis who, I mean, sorry, has a penis, but thinks he's a daughter.
See, I'm screwing it up.
I can't even remember how it works, but it's father-daughter dance.
What if one of the daughters has a penis?
Can she come?
She in quotes.
Can Z come?
And the school would have said, well, no, that's a son.
And so they go, we're canceling the dance.
It's exclusionary.
Now, this trans daughter hasn't come up.
This hasn't been a thing, but it could become a thing.
So they cancel a real father-daughter dance based on a hypothetical.
And that's very dangerous.
I think too many people spend their time mourning hypotheticals before they've even happened.
You know, I had these gay neighbors upstate before I sold my place and they had a little dog.
And dogs don't like fireworks.
So we're lighting off all these fireworks and their dog runs away.
The dog's gone for a while.
He's really scared.
That's what they do.
But I've seen this happen a hundred times and the dogs always come back.
But my friend Roswell, he's sitting on a rock and he's bawling his eyes out, his little gay eyes.
And I come over and I go, what I always say to people in this scenario, I go, dude, you're mourning something, M-O-U-R, that hasn't happened yet.
Why don't you, don't cry about your dog being gone if your dog isn't gone?
Don't give up.
Now, the tricky thing about that is, as an entrepreneur, it's a total waste of time to be wondering what to do when you win, when you sell your company for tens of millions.
It's easy to win.
It's losing you have to be prepared for.
So I know I just said don't dwell on the hypotheticals, and that's the worst thing about the left these days, is that we're all crying about this trans kid that hasn't done anything yet, hasn't run away.
But you have to weigh that with real hypotheticals.
That's probably the trickiest art of making money, is not being a negative nelly and panicking all the time, but also being just negative enough to know that this shit could hit the fan.
You know, there's sort of this, with making money, I think there's this sort of chest surge, this sort of energy force coming out of your chest where it just has to happen.
And the non-entrepreneurs, mostly women, God bless their cotton socks, they just have this like, well, I tried.
Hey, did you get a hold of that guy who was going to fix the window?
I sent him an email.
He didn't get back to me.
When was that?
Oh, like three days ago.
What?
Three days ago?
No, no, no, no.
It should have been done by now.
The entrepreneur would call him.
He doesn't call him back.
Call him, doesn't call him back.
Eventually he goes, you know what?
Fuck this.
I'm going to just do it myself or get someone else.
Or, you know, say you've got a rubber ducky race going on in the canal.
All right, and we have the truck bringing them.
Yeah, at what time?
At eight o'clock, they're going to be there.
Okay, have you worked with this guy before?
No, a new guy, really cheap.
All right, I need a plan B in case he doesn't show up.
Do we know anyone else who has trucks?
And that's why, that's the good thing about the hipster and the hustler.
They're out there fraternizing, meeting people, knowing guys with trucks.
You know, one of the best things about being an old man is I got a guy for everything.
You got a print that's 10 feet by 5 feet.
I got a guy that can put that together, who can mount that.
You're buying a property.
I got a guy.
I got a good real estate lawyer.
I got a good criminal lawyer.
I got a guy who can do lighting.
I got a company who can do catering.
Oh, I got a good band for your wedding.
I know a guy.
He can do it cheap.
Just charge me cost.
You know, it helps when there's a blackout and stuff.
I know a guy with gasoline.
Don't worry, we can get gas.
Yeah, I know a guy with a generator.
And that should be your way in business.
I mean, nothing's harder than starting a business that you haven't had anything to do with.
That's why there's a great documentary I highly recommend if you're interested in Doe called All Things Must Pass about Tower Records.
And you realize that they were successful because everyone in the top brass used to stock shells.
So not only do they have an intricate understanding of how the company works, but they have this empathy with the bottom rungs of the company.
And that translates when you're out there meeting them.
And they're going, sorry, man, I just was so tired and the traffic was bad.
You know that you're supposed to have the records here before traffic or after traffic.
You know you timed those routes.
I did that route 100 times.
I never got here after 7 a.m.
It's a nightmare after 7 a.m.
They go, oh, I can't do that.
Lie on him.
Jesus.
He knows what he's doing.
So, there's another, there's a good book.
You can just read the Wikipedia page if you're lazy called Six Thinking Hats.
And that thing I was talking about, where I said, don't worry about hypotheticals, but also worry about hypotheticals.
How do I distinguish between that?
Well, there's all the different hats you wear as a moneymaker.
There's a black hat thinker who says this sucks, everything's going to fail.
There's a white hat thinker who goes, We can do it.
I feel good about this.
That guy, by the way, that guy is very important, especially starting out.
Leonard Cohen was once asked, they said, you're a Canadian poet.
What kind of pitch is that?
Did you go to the bank and say, I'd like a loan, I'm a Canadian poet?
It's like the world's worst pitch.
And Leonard Cohen says, I was incredibly arrogant and incredibly naive.
And that's how he pulled it off.
I mean, that's the white hat thinking in a nutshell.
Green hat thinking, how we're going to make money.
Blue hat thinking, maybe that's the money part.
Green hat is organic.
I forget them all.
Yellow hat thinking is intrepidation, fear.
But you need all these different hats to pull it off.
And a tragedy with a lot of businesses and a lot of people in general is they wear the black hat too much.
That's the easiest hat to wear.
Even my son today, we were walking to school and I was talking about the movie Taken with Liam Neeson.
I've got a certain set of skills.
You leave my fucking daughter alone.
And I was talking to my middle son about how funny it would be if Johnny, my youngest son, was portraying Liam Neeson in a remake.
And he go, I got a certain set of skills.
And he said, that's not how he talks.
That's not how he would say that.
And I go, how would he say that?
And he goes, I don't know, but that's not how you say it.
And I go, see, black hat thinking is the easiest thinking.
Green hat thinking, the creative hat, that's the hardest thinking.
You need all of them.
They're all crucial.
All right, we're running out of time here.
Here's an important one.
Yeah, let's do it.
I've had this, when I started getting involved in business, I'd have this shitty attitude where I'd go, ah, no, that's not going to work.
Hey, let's do a fanzine about rocks and we'll sell it to geologists.
No, I don't know.
You know what?
Geologists probably don't buy a fanzine.
I was too much of a black hat thinker.
And that's dumb.
I think a much better attitude, and this is why it's important to have a back office with a good lawyer, and I know a guy who knows a guy.
Yes, we will do that rock magazine.
Let's do it.
If you said to me, Gavin, I want you to be a singer for you too, I would say yes, I'd love to sing for you too.
Now, I've got a bunch of caveats, like I don't want to go on tour for more than two weeks at a time.
I don't want to be away from my kids.
The money better be insane.
I don't like loud music.
I'm not a fan of U2 either.
But you just assume the money's going to be right, and you say yes, and then right before you sign on the dotted line of the crayon contract and bleed all over the paper, you go, hey, controller, did these guys meet our criteria?
Is it a reasonable price?
No.
Okay, buy.
You wait until the deal is totally presented before you say no.
You got to stay positive.
Just got to stay positive.
Another thing about the negative thing I was talking about was, so you're negative.
What if this fails?
What if this fails?
You're not vocal about it.
You don't want to bring down the group.
And by the way, these millennials, you know what drives me nuts about them?
They need so much love.
Like, that's, I think, their number one currency is love.
They need you to go, you guys, that was a great job.
Women are guilty of this too.
You guys, we did a great job today.
I'm really happy with everyone.
Can I just give you a check?
Isn't the fact that you're getting paid to do this proof that we're happy with your work?
Why do I need, I'm not your dad?
Why do I need a group hug?
Everyone really nailed it today, man.
You really did a great, and it was great working with you especially.
You're an inspiration.
I hate that shit.
Nose to the grindstone.
Time to go home.
We'll get beers later.
Well, when do you get beers, Gav?
You get, don't call me Gav, by the way.
You get beers when you look in your balance at the bank machine and the check is cleared and the money is in your account.
You're not done until that is what's happened.
I don't care what you've been promised.
So many people start celebrating early.
They start spending the money in their heads.
They start literally spending the money.
No, it's all hypothetical until you see the check has cleared.
Oh, and that reminds me of another thing.
A young person problem.
They think they deserve something.
That's a huge one.
I'm glad I remembered that before I ended the podcast.
You don't deserve anything.
If it's written down, it says, I'll pay you $100 to eat a spider.
You eat the spider, he's gone.
All right, you deserve $100.
You have a contract.
Go to a judge and make sure they pay.
Otherwise, though, there's this sort of like, I'm not working for free.
That's the only way you make money as an entrepreneur is to say goodbye to two years entirely.
Two years, you're going to be broke.
I'm really sorry about these snorts.
They're annoying me too.
I remember back when we started Vice, there was this Absolute campaign.
And we said to the graphics guy, let's make a bunch of Absolute bottles, like a punk one covered in studs, and see if they say yes.
And if they do, we'll get a contract.
What if they don't?
Then we're screwed.
I'm not doing that.
What do you mean?
I'm not working for free.
And then he said something that really struck me.
This is, by the way, I'm talking about 1993, 1994.
He said, that's unethical.
Unethical?
To whom?
What are you talking about?
They don't use the ad if they don't want it.
It's called pitching.
Is it unethical to hit on a bunch of different girls in the bar?
Hey, excuse me, I bought you a drink.
I should at least get to touch your tits.
That's ethical.
You've been getting free drinks all night from different guys.
Yeah, that's courtship.
And you get into advertising and you realize how many hundreds of, I courted Red Bull for a year.
A year I went snowboarding and went to talks about hacking creativity, hung out with, well, the dude that we were hanging out with wasn't a bad guy, but I did So much Adderall and makers at their luncheons and stuff trying to get in their pants.
And at the end, no, we don't think comedy can be competitive.
It doesn't fit the Red Bull image.
Okay, bye.
Flushed down the drain.
Written book proposals, done pilots.
The pilots are a bad example because we got paid, but a huge part of business is throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
And these young people go, no, I'm not wasting my shit.
Another one.
If someone's not doing drugs, don't fire them.
Personnel finding people is such a chore.
And it's much easier just to fix a bad employee.
You know, one way to do it is to give him like 10 strikes.
And then he can see on a board, an eraser board, I'm getting close to that number 10.
And they get better.
They improve.
And then you think, thank God I didn't fire this guy.
He's paying my rent now.
But there are times to fire people, people who bitch about having to work late.
That's a good thing about interns, I should say, is you see who has the gumption to stick around.
But yeah, people who are doing Coke a lot, they're bad news.
And when you fire people, that's another thing.
Don't spend a lot of time.
Just go, this isn't working out.
I'll give you two weeks' salary.
You can be here, not be here.
You can use our stuff.
This whole idea that they have now where security has to escort you out the building to make sure you don't hack into the mainframe, they have access to the files at home.
You're not doing anyone any good like that.
Be a decent person and give the guy two weeks.
But don't draw it out with this.
It's like dumping it.
Actually, no, it's not like dumping a chick.
Dumping a chick is something you should do if it takes five hours.
I think I've got everything.
Create a crayon contract.
Ideas.
Don't mean anything.
Socialize.
Don't take no for an answer was what I meant by that.
Don't do that thing where you just say I emailed him.
Oh, here's another one.
Start with what they need.
We want you to paint a red truck.
Okay, we'll bring you a bunch of different trucks, a bunch of different paints.
We'll show you different.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
How long does it have to be?
Like, I used to work with these twins.
They did the Lego jewelry for Kanye.
I forget their names.
The D D twins or something.
And they would just go to meetings and they go, what's the budget?
When's it due?
What are the parameters?
Goodbye.
People tend to keep selling things or doing extra work or they have these big grandiose ideas.
I did an interview with a guy.
I transcribed it.
It's 7,000 words.
Well, what does the article have to be?
500?
Just pout out 500 words, dude.
That's the thing I like about in French.
They say, le livre rouge.
So you start with a book, le livre, and then you add the rouge inside the book.
Whereas they say the red book in English, and you have this massive spand of red, and you have to fit it in.
Anywhere.
I could bore you with all these all day.
But here's the short version of today's podcast.
How to make money.
First, want money.
Are you sure that you're that hungry for it?
You know, if you want to meet Chinese people, move to China.
You don't want to move to China?
Okay, you don't really want to meet Chinese people.
So do you really want money?
Yes.
Okay, start by cleaning up your room.
Try to get away from your goddamn phone and your stupid video games.
Quit your vices, or at least curb them.
Stop jerking off, by the way, too.
You can only ejaculate within a yard of a woman with her consent.
You can beat off all you want, but she has to be there.
It has to establish a relationship.
Masturbating to women on it, you're watching two other people have sex and you're watching like a voyeur and touching yourself by your computer.
What's more pathetic than that?
You need your male vitality, as Alex Jones would say.
Be prepared for failure and abuse.
You have to be prepared to suck it up, take a beating, to work for free for two years, to show your boss that you're determined.
But he's taking advantage of me.
Sometimes Fox News took advantage of me, but for the most part, the guy just wants his business to run.
And if you're good at helping his business run, then you're an asset to the team and you're going to start having your own equity.
So put your nose to the grindstone.
Recognize that don't let people take advantage of you, but don't think you're special.
Understand that you can be replaced.
Take some hits.
Take some hazing.
Take some abuse.
Get run over.
And slowly you'll start seeing the money come in.
You know, there's a lot of stuff that you do that doesn't generate income on your to-do list.
The stuff that makes money should be at the top of the list, what makes me the most money.
And then just hammer away at it.
And you know what?
The rest will work itself out eventually.
My dad used to say, I don't negotiate a salary.
I just show up.
And if they've underpaid me, I'll get poached.
I'll just keep hustling.
It's that way with love, too.
If you guys aren't meant to be, I don't know, you can go to all the counseling you want.
You're just not, it's not going to happen.
But if you guys are meant to be, then you can dump her, make a mistake.
You guys can go away for five, six years.
You're going to end up together.
The gods have willed it so.
And I feel that way about making money.
If you are determined and you hustle and you don't fuck up, you don't get addicted to cocaine or heroin or alcohol, then you will start making money.
So I want you to get rich.
It's totally possible.
We're in a free country.
All you have to do is have some humility and bust your ass.
Thank you.
▲
Export Selection