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Nov. 7, 2018 - Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes
56:30
Get Off My Lawn Podcast #95 | You need three things to get rich

You need a hipster, a hacker, and a hustler to get rich. You don’t need a “hound.” You don’t need some busybody on social media spreading irrelevant information. You don’t need a publicist. You don’t need some “badass” feminists who are going to get you sued for making a rude comment. All a start-up needs to get rich is a fanboy, a geek, and a sales guy.

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You need three things to get rich.
A hipster, a hacker, and a hustler.
I stole this from some Japanese dude, but it is very true.
And you can have some Venn diagram overlap with that.
I'm going to try to tell you how to make money in this thing, even though I haven't really been an entrepreneur since my ad agency was shut down.
And that was like five, six years ago.
So it's like a married man giving you sex tips.
They're all a little out of date.
Like Ronnie Mund.
You ever listen to Howard Stern?
Ronnie Mund has all his sex tips.
Oh, yeah.
I got to say, just as a little side note, I really don't like the way they all pile up on Ronnie Mund when you listen to Howard Stern.
Like, they're a lot less manly than him.
And he does this thing.
It's called like cannonball run or something, bubblegum run.
Jackass dudes do it too.
Sometimes it's in Europe.
And you race from Zurich to Barcelona or something.
Totally illegal and super fun.
And they're just giving him all this shit about it, saying, it's so dangerous.
And what are you, a little kid?
Racing cars is not for little kids, okay?
And nor is breaking the law.
They're having fun, being bad, being rebellious, being masculine, all those things that used to be normal American life.
You know, when I was a kid, men were almost too sexy.
Let me explain.
Let me explain.
Men's sexuality, masculinity, and women's, of course, too, but sexuality was so positive, I guess, and over the top and free, free love, right?
This bled into the 80s.
And women would wear short shorts and you'd cat call them and you'd call her a fox and stuff and women loved it.
But one thing no one talks about is how sexual men were.
Like you would wear shorts so short, your pockets would be sticking out of the bottoms of them.
And I remember as a kid, like an 11-year-old and a 12-year-old, we would sort of subsume this culture.
And if I look at pictures of me and my friends when we were, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13, we look like weird homosexual porn stars.
Like you'd wear cut off muscle tees that only went to your ribs to show off your gorgeous pecs or six-pack, whatever they're called.
Then you'd have the tiniest shorts with basically your balls hanging out and then your pockets there.
You'd have tube socks with like Chuck Taylors or something.
And then your hair would look like ferra faucets.
Like men would work hard on their hair.
Oh, and you also had a coral choker.
I don't know what, that must have come from someone on vacation, but that became the thing in 1983.
You'd have a coral choker on your neck, which I always bugged me.
I always thought that looked gay.
Like in the New York hardcore scene, Krishna Corps dudes would always wear these tight chokers around their neck.
It looks like an SNM thing.
Don't have something around your neck unless you're a whore.
But yeah, we would dress up like that.
And that's not a good thing.
Don't get me wrong.
But the good thing was, you know, with normal adult men, you could be a sexy dude.
And women were like, God, he's hot.
Look at his package.
We've kind of desealized our culture.
You see this in movies too, you know, where the leading man used to be James Bond and stuff, and you'd have all these women.
And then you'd have movies like The Terminator.
That's kind of a bad example because he's a robot.
But these sort of sexless heroes who the woman lusted, but he would just like go upstairs and be alone.
And he was alone.
I'm a lone wolf.
I'm a loner, Dotty.
And he wasn't banging chicks.
That's feminism.
Feminism has ruined everything.
But yeah.
So you're getting sex tips from someone who has been out of the game for a while.
But I remember, you know, I've started quite a few businesses.
It wasn't just Vice.
I started Rooster, God, a bunch of bars, restaurants, some I can't even remember the name of.
Spar?
I started a business with Nas the rapper and some other people.
And it was just, I could tell these nerds were busting their ass, so I invested in it and it paid out great.
But it was a thing where you go into a store and you use their Wi-Fi.
It's commonplace now, but this was back in 2010.
And you get on their Wi-Fi and then they follow you all over the store and they see how long you're in the hat section and shit like that.
And so the retailer accrues all this data and realizes that no one is buying anything but purses.
So we got to take it easy with the shoes.
We're wasting too much money on shoes.
Perfectly legal.
The subway does it now too.
And I don't think people really got at first that they were being tracked and all their movements were being tracked.
But now when you go on the subway and you can use the NYC subway Wi-Fi, you are totally prepared for what that they're following all your posts and everything you do and what you look at.
I think people have become a lot less guarded about their privacy, which I don't think is a good thing.
But anyway, so I made a bunch of money.
Oh, and the rooster thing, few people know this, but I had an ad agency.
We built it up from scratch.
It was really just a production company.
And those things are kind of easy to grow because you obviously don't start with 15 cameras and cameramen and light and sound.
You rent it as you make more money.
That's kind of what we did with Vice.
If we sold X amount of ads, we'd print X amount of copies back when we were starting out.
So we never really went into debt.
And so we'd get maybe one silly production job.
You know, when you start out with production, you're doing stuff like some Ukrainian billionaire wants to make a birthday video for his 30th birthday.
Or it's some, you know, you're getting subcontracted out by some bigger ad firm who doesn't feel like doing the whole commercial.
I'm actually boring myself as I talk about this.
I loved the guys I worked with.
I have a painting of them on my wall.
But I did not enjoy advertising.
Jesus Lord.
Like there was sometimes we'd get free reign.
Like I did all these Vans off-the-wall commercials, Like how to drink in a bar, you should check out, how to fly, how to fight.
And those were all fun because I knew Vans for a while now, and they trusted me.
And they said, just go bananas, these are funny.
How to piss in public already went viral for them.
That was $7 million.
So that was super fun.
And I'm really proud of those.
Even though I think Vans has since sold and everyone that I work with there is gone.
And I think they've scrubbed them from the internet.
But you can still find them.
You can't scrub the internet.
They're just not as high-res.
But outside of that, however, it was coming up with a great idea.
And then the client going, I don't know, that might be offensive.
And then all the other ingredients.
And that would ruin the joke.
So if it was something like a tequila company and you're going down there and filming the cacti and how they make it, they can't really mess that up.
And our cameraman, Rob, was really good.
And it would look beautiful.
But comedy is so fragile.
One little stutter, the joke is gone.
Well, that's the problem with Colorado.
Like, unless you're a stutterer and that's your shtick.
No.
So as these clients get involved, the joke just gets worse and worse.
And here's another annoying thing.
We'd be in a budget, so we couldn't really hire the best actors.
And sometimes you'd get these fucking Europeans.
Like someone from Hungary shows up and they're there to do a cell phone ad.
And you're like, okay, so just read the line here.
Okay, hey, one time are your guys going to be calling him.
And I go, what?
You have an accent?
No, not really.
Yeah, dude, you can't be advertising an American cell phone company with an accent.
It totally changes the whole context.
Now it's about long distance.
Why did you come to this audition?
One time we did an ad for Realtor.com.
And it's about, you know, you get reactions so fast that you have to run to the new location because it's so awesome.
I don't even really remember the premise.
But the guy who showed up, he's in the shower.
And then they go, your apartment's ready.
Oh, what?
Already?
And so he runs out of the shower and he's wearing a towel and he runs down the street and up the block and we see him running all over town in his towel.
The guy who showed up, he was pretty good in the audition.
He shows up, it doesn't have a Hungarian accent, I don't think.
This didn't matter because there was no lines.
He had no fucking belly button at all.
I guess it was infected and they had to seal it shut.
And I go, dude, you're in a shirtless commercial and you have a very abnormal torso.
You couldn't have mentioned that?
You couldn't have thrown that in the mix.
Hi, I'm deformed.
I'll be representing your product.
That's not going to be distracting.
So we've got to shoot around it and make sure we never quite get him dead on with his belly button if he's not like jiggling half a block away.
But that commercial, I believe, went through maybe 100,000 edits.
It's a very simple concept.
But you sit with the editor and then everyone wants to feel involved.
So then the production company that got you the gig and subcontracted it to you, they want to sit in the editing room.
Don't worry, this show's going to get better.
They want to sit in on the editing room.
And they all have their two cents.
So I'm counting each one of those suggestions as a version.
So we'll go, what if he was running backwards?
Comedy's fragile.
One joke can't take anything.
Sarah Silverman, back when she was on our side, she used to say that.
She'd say, my only goal when I sit down to write a joke is to be funny.
If I worry about anything else, like is this offensive?
Am I targeting the wrong group?
It's gone.
It's garbage.
And in advertising, you get that even before you talk to the client.
There's one thing you do in advertising where you go, all right, I wrote the bit.
It's maybe dramatic or comedy, whatever, but I wrote the concept.
Then they got to get to a Snickers bar or whatever.
And then someone will go, how are we doing with diversity?
And then you have to go backwards into the joke and start making people black or Asian or something.
But sometimes it's changing the whole thing.
Like if it's a girl and she's on a date and then she gets hit on by someone and she likes him more, the new guy, well, if you make him black, now it's like, black people going to steal your woman.
So then you make the woman black, but then if it's an Asian guy, it doesn't look as plausible and blah, blah, blah.
It's already ruined and we're not even at casting yet.
So I don't miss that.
But we ramped it up, ramped it up, and we sold it to this company called Havas.
And it was kind of under the guise of, let's be a secret satellite.
So if you have a Coca-Cola contract and you want to do a Pepsi commercial, usually these big corporations demand exclusivity because they don't want their client to be competing with, they don't want to competing with their client.
So we'll just secretly do a Pepsi ad and slide you the money.
We were even planning a secret door, but they bought us for many millions and we did not generate many millions.
But that's the way advertising is.
And to fail in advertising is like to fail in movies.
They saw Jackass was made for $5 million.
It made $200 million.
So that's a hit.
They saw Paranormal Activity or Blair Witch.
They're all $5 million and became $200 million.
So if you have a movie that costs $60 million and it makes $70 million, it's a flop.
The studio hates you.
And that's kind of what was happening with us.
We were just generating a reasonable profit as opposed to a super big explosion.
I mean, Havas is one of the biggest companies in the world.
They're French.
So they were waiting, biding their time.
And they were like, we got to get rid of these guys.
They're not the cash cow we thought they'd be.
And so when I said transphobia is perfectly natural, I had all these mentally ill trannies coming after me and going over to social media and threatening everyone, except Havas, they said, oh, we have to fire you.
It's over.
And then shut everything down.
So I've been through this before.
But anyway, that was a long-winded way of saying I've started a lot of companies.
And the hipster hacker hustler formula is really effective.
And to think you can do it all is just naive.
You know, I see shark tank people come out and it's one dude.
And he like designed the package and he does the sales, and he stirs the magic peanut butter, and he's been talking to vendors all day.
No, dude, you have to do what you're good at, you need to be specialized.
And sales is a major part of any business.
You have to go out, you have to play golf with them, they have to like you because it's one thing for you to be my paper supplier as like the show The Office, but I got to see you every week.
And sometimes we're going to be going away together.
Like, say there's a convention and you guys are my supplier or something.
So, when you do that and I don't like you, then no one wants to hang out with you.
I think that's why Japanese businessmen get so shithammered with their clients.
They're establishing a closer relationship, a friendship.
I think that's why, what's her name, over at The New York Times.
See, this always happens with executive editor of the New York Times.
I've hung out with her about 10 times, and her brain just left my mind.
Anyway, executive editor, they say she was Jill Abramson.
They say she was fired because she was a woman demanding too much money.
I don't think so.
I think it was she wasn't having beers with Pinch, and she wasn't friendly with him.
And he was like, I don't want this bitch around.
I want buddies.
So, yeah, so sales is important because you're establishing that you can be good buddies and you're fun to work with.
And so, an important part of any business is this hustler guy, this sales guy.
And that guy, it's good if he's fat because he has to take people out for dinner all the time and do a lot of drinking.
A lot of them, in New York, a lot of the ad agency guys are just brutal alcoholics because they're out whining and dining at clients at lunch and then at dinner.
Like, that's the Don Draper culture.
And I don't have the energy for that.
And I don't have a sales personality.
My dad was talking about this.
He's the same way.
If I believe in something, I want you to buy it.
I want you to invest in it.
I want you to become part of it.
If I don't believe in it, I don't want to have anything to do with it at all.
And so when I'm offering something, it's like my baby.
And then if someone says, no, well, you just insulted my kid, fuck you.
So when I'm like, do you want to buy this new yellow hockey tape?
You can buy it in bulk.
It lasts forever.
No, doesn't, I like my other hockey tape.
Well, fuck you.
This hockey tape's way better, shithead.
And that's not any kind of way to do business.
So I'm way too sensitive about my product.
And the beauty of being like doing the creative stuff, like coming up with the project, what the commercial is or whatever it's going to be, the book, you can argue with the people on your team and go, well, tell them to go fuck themselves.
No, it has to be this way.
This is how it's funniest or whatever.
And then they are a buffer and they go, please calm down.
Go have a drink.
You're getting on my nerves.
And the client never hears the bitchy creative director.
So the sales guy, I would say, is the most important part of any business.
And he should get more equity.
He should get more money.
He should get a commission, too, on top of his salary.
You're nothing without him, folks.
Sowey.
No, the creative is an important one.
No.
Look at magazines.
They're all about the same quality.
And the writers, you can switch them out like nothing.
Without ads, there's no magazine.
There's plenty of shitty magazines.
Remember that one?
What was it called?
Urban or something?
And it was just, I think it was these British guys that had a fetish for black chicks and hip-hop.
And it was just like pictures of black models and then two shitty interviews with a rapper.
And it went on, it's probably still around.
I don't remember.
But that was like 20 years of a successful magazine that had no content to speak of of any value.
So the sales guy is the guy, and it's a rare talent.
And I don't know why those guys get a bad rap.
I think it was used car salesmen in the 70s and 80s, but they're known as slick willies.
And I think it's an amazing talent to get, it's sort of like being a boxer.
Like I box, but if I'm sparring and I get punched in the face, I want a two-hour timeout and I want to talk to the guy.
Why'd you hit me?
I want that to be a national holiday.
Like I just can't poo-poo it.
And that's why I'll never be a boxer.
I never could have been a boxer because I can't just, there's a thing they do where they get punched and they go, oh, shit, that was my fault.
I left my right open.
I got to remember what's the matter with me.
Always keep your right up.
Very vulnerable there on that cheek.
You got a glass jaw.
Come on.
Wake up, dummy.
Like they get mad at themselves.
And the actual, the fact that someone punched them is irrelevant.
For them, it's a chess move and I left myself open.
And salesmen are the same way.
They can just take all these hits and just keep on smiling.
Oh, we'll get it.
We'll do it.
We'll make no money.
That's impressive.
And that's another biggie.
You're not making a penny for the first two years.
I think a lot of millennials don't get that.
And if you don't get that, don't be an entrepreneur.
If it's not in you, don't do it.
Like if you, if the idea of working through the weekend makes you barf and you just, you need, you're like, it's Friday, it's five o'clock, that's my, I'm punching out.
If you're that type of person, and I have no disrespect to that type of person, go bananas, then don't get involved.
An entrepreneur is someone who is constantly at work, always thinking about work, always wondering how it could be improved.
They are happy to get up at three in the morning because an alarm went off at the store.
It's their baby.
It's their other child.
Sometimes they make kind of bad husbands because they're built to always be looking for a better deal and to be able to just quit something instantly.
Like if you have a supplier and you've been with him for four years and someone offers to undercut the supplier by 10%, you got to go buy people I've been working with for four years.
You know, within range, you'll cut some favors.
Like I'll say to buddies at work or someone I work with that I have a good relationship with, all right, you're offering me eight bucks.
This guy's offering me 10 bucks.
I can maybe take a hit.
But if someone's offering me 14 bucks and you're offering me eight, I got to go to the 14 bucks, dude.
I'd be a cuck if I stayed with you.
What would you do is another way to phrase it.
That's a good way to talk to your boss, by the way, if you're getting scooped by a company with more salary.
Just say, I'll take a little bit less than this offer, but not a lot.
And then they understand.
You can stick around and be friends after.
But the entrepreneur is someone who just totally accepts that they're going to be eating out of the garbage for two years, has no problem with it whatsoever.
And I would argue, isn't that driven by money?
I don't think money is that much of an incentive.
Once you make $100,000 a year, your life is pretty much the same as someone who makes a million a year.
You go for some nice dinners.
I guess people who make a millionaire fly a lot better.
But if you're not flying a lot, it's just a nicer chair.
I mean, I go first class on the train.
It's the same as coach.
I think the chair leather is like 1% higher quality.
I don't understand why it's 100 bucks more.
But anyway, I remember I had this black intern.
I've told this story 9 billion times.
But for all interns, it was an initiation.
And so the first week always sucks.
Second week's a little better.
Third week's much better.
And then if you've been there for a year, and well, first of all, I don't think you should intern for a year.
But if you have been there for a year, you know, you get really, you can write a cover story if you're good enough.
But this was an entitled girl, black chick, middle class, thought she was special.
And she came in and I would give her jobs, like, take out the garbage.
Now, there's a method to this madness.
The reason you were doing that initiation is to show them that you had to take out the garbage when you started the company.
No, you don't magically start with a maid.
You have to clean the bathroom floors when you get your first business, when you do a startup.
You have to organize all the taxes.
The state tax is in the red shoebox.
The municipal tax is in the orange shoebox.
You've got to write all that out with sharpies and make sure there's no dishes in the sink and all that stuff.
That's all you.
So with the interns, I'm saying, you want to go on my journey?
It starts with taking out the garbage.
And she would get so pissy.
And so I'd never gave her much better jobs than that, at least for the first week.
And then she quits, of course.
By the way, I think interns are overrated.
I think it's just free university.
As from the intern's perspective, they're getting tons.
It's an awesome thing to do.
And I think it's way better than college to be an intern.
But from the employer's perspective, I'd rather just do it myself, thanks.
Like in that instance, rather than have someone pissy and grumpy sitting a few desks down, I'll just take the garbage out myself, get a breath of fresh air while I go out there and throw it in the dumpster.
But anyway, so this was the intern desk.
So after she quit, I was going through the desk for some reason, and inside, there's nothing else inside.
There was one crumpled up post-it note, and I unfurled it, and it said, why do they keep giving me these stupid, shitty jobs?
Hasn't 400 years of history taught them I'm worth something more?
Now, that's problematic for a number of reasons.
One, you've let race and slavery become an anvil that's chained to your leg, and everything is seen through the prism of oppression.
And that's not what we were doing.
That was not the point of the exercise.
In fact, I find initiations have a lot of camaraderie in them.
Like hazing comes from a place of love because it's like, let's be in this club together.
Let's go through it.
But secondly, that's not an entrepreneur.
An entrepreneur doesn't, an entrepreneur is all about the big picture.
Sometimes to a fault.
Sometimes they lack, you know, loyalty and intimacy or something.
But yeah, an entrepreneur is like, yep, let's take out all the garbage.
You know, cameramen in New York, they get tortured.
Guys who shoot movies and stuff, the ADs, the intern helper guys, the cameramen, like if they're shooting a Tom Cruise movie or something, those guys will work for free for years.
This is kind of different.
You're not an entrepreneur if you're a camera guy, right?
Although sometimes you are.
Yeah, sometimes you're a hired gun.
You buy your own camera for $150,000 and you shoot movies with it.
Yeah, that can work.
But anyway, what they do with those guys is they'll say, I want a Frappuccino latte, but I want it from this one cafe on 32nd Street, even though we're in Brooklyn.
So it's an hour trip there and back.
And if it's cold, by the time it comes back, they just throw it on the ground and go, you're fucked up.
This is freezing.
So they have to bring warmers on this pilgrimage.
And it's got nothing to do with the coffee.
It has to do with, can you hack it?
Because being a cameraman is very technical and stuff, but it's also brutally physical.
It's freezing cold for a lot of these shoots.
And you're drenched at night.
You got to work in the rain.
It's $300 an hour for everyone to be there.
Or I should say, sorry, $3,000 an hour for all the staff and everything.
So they don't want to shut it down because it's a little misty out.
And, you know, if you're over, if you're behind schedule, some of your days are 16-hour days.
There's plenty of 24-hour days.
There's plenty of times where you only have this venue for this long and the lights weren't working at the beginning.
So next thing you know, the sun's coming up.
You've been there all night.
That happens too.
But a 12-hour shift is normal.
Anyway, what they're saying with this initiation is, can you handle this brutal workload?
And that's why they make them do that stupid stuff.
So I was bringing her up to talk about the entrepreneur mentality.
But within the entrepreneur mentality, I think the hipster, the hacker, and the hustler all have to have that, I will work all night.
I don't care.
That's why it's good.
That's why I get so mad at these illegal aliens doing teenager jobs like mowing lawns and cleaning pools because that's when you develop your economic libido.
That's when you figure out who you are.
That's how you learn what money is.
That's how you learn.
Oh, you really got to nag people when they owe you money.
I mean, everyone has vendors.
Biggest companies in the world have bills they're waiting to get paid.
And you got to call them early in the morning.
And you learn that from nagging the people whose pool you cleaned when you were 14.
So the other big mentality that these three people have to have, besides the, I don't care if it's day or night, I'll work all week.
I'll do anything.
I'm going to miss weddings, whatever.
The other one you have to have is no is not an option.
Now, the best example I always give for this is back in Vice days, this guy told us that he could put the magazines in the, he shipped records all over Canada.
And he said, I'll just put some of your, I think it was Voice of Montreal back then.
I'll put your Voice of Montreal's in there and you can be a national company.
Now you're Voice of Canada, not Voice of Montreal.
Cool, man.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's good for me because it's a little prize in there.
So we sell all of these ads to all these national companies.
We were just in Montreal before, but now instead of talking to Warner Brothers Montreal, who don't really have a budget, it's Warner Brothers Canada.
Hmm, now we're cooking with gas.
Now we're getting some real ads.
About three days before, he goes, yeah, I can't do it.
Pardon es moi?
I didn't realize this, but it adds a lot to the shipping because it's magazines, they're heavy.
Oh, thanks, bro.
Now, the crumpled-up post-it note intern woman goes, oh, well, that's the end of that.
But the entrepreneur brain goes, no, is not an option.
These have to get there.
And we came up with this concept where we called all these record stores across the country and said, we'll give you a free ad if you deliver these magazines in your town.
And then we went to the Greyhound bus station and had all these different, like Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto, all sort of written up.
And you would, they meet it at the Greyhound bus station.
So that was an example where we hit a wall, a total catastrophe.
There was no way out.
And then we got out of it and never went back.
You know, we went bankrupt in the early 2000s, beyond bankrupt, maybe a million dollars in debt.
And we just kept slugging away, moved into a warehouse in Williamsburg and just kept telling people that we owed money to, that we're sorry, and we'll try to cut you some money and rebuilt it again from scratch because that was the no is not an option mentality.
All right.
So we have the sales guy.
We have the entrepreneur mentality.
Here's another example, by the way, of the entrepreneur mentality.
I remember way, way back, we were trying to get absolute vodka.
And when you're trying to get a client that big, what you often do is finish the campaign.
So this was when they would do like absolute spicy and they'd have an absolute bottle, you know, engulfed in flames or absolute, you know, Mozart.
And it would be a piano key absolute bottle.
And so he had like absolute rock and roll or absolute punk or something.
And it was a bottle covered in like the studs you'd put on your leather jacket.
But that takes a long time and you want it to be meticulous.
You don't want to see blobs of glue and stuff.
And the graphic design guy I was working with at the time goes, I'm not doing that.
And I said, why not?
And he goes, well, they're not going to pay for it.
So it's unethical.
That was the word he used, unethical.
Dude, that's business.
You will court someone for years and never get them.
I'm told that McDonald's has entire campaigns, do, do, do, do, do, that just get flushed down the toilet.
They're so, they pay so well that ad agencies will just finish the campaign and then present it to them as a giant campaign and they'll go, no, thanks.
And that's, I don't know, what, a million dollars down the drain?
That's how it works.
Sorry.
Not everything is a perfect equaminical.
You did this.
Here's your money back.
Oh, you worked for an hour.
There's your $15 minimum wage.
And if you have that mentality, fine.
But don't think you're ever going to get rich.
I'm sorry.
And there's nothing wrong with not being rich.
50K a year is the average American salary.
If you're not in New York City, that's a pretty good living.
You know, your kid has a motorbike when he's 17 with that kind of money.
Your kid's in sports.
You're still going on vacation.
You can rent an SUV.
I mean, you can rent a Winnebago or whatever.
Any his.
So we got the sales guy, got the mentality.
Then there's the hipster and the hacker.
And the hacker is an IT guy who makes sure everything works.
I know that sounds boring.
That's just email, isn't it?
No, there's a million different things that involves from the truck rentals when you're shooting something to bugs in the system to backup.
You know, when I first started media, we didn't have backups.
So something would go and you would lose 16 hours of work.
It was one of the worst experiences of my life.
I remember just seeing that happen.
Oh, it was even worse than that.
The files were on my desktop, and they'd be like 50 megabytes.
And then I would go, you know, control-I'd info to see how big they are.
50 megabytes.
Then I'd close it.
I'm not opening the thing.
I'm just doing the info on it.
Then it's 48 megabytes.
And I'm like, what the fuck?
This thing is, it has flesh eating disease.
It's eating itself.
So I have to open it, open the file, cut wherever I can, paste it somewhere else, and then it crashes again.
I'm getting stressed out just remembering it.
I remember standing up, taking my shirt off, like feeling really hot, panicky, and then lying down on the floor, just trying to breathe.
But the good news about something like that is you go, everyone's going to experience a shitty moment like that in a startup.
A lot of people are going to quit when something terrible like that happens and say, fuck it, I hate these computers.
Fuck this shit.
I'm out of here.
Now you're in a smaller group.
It's just like sports.
You know, you get through this level, this championship, and the next thing you know, there's only that many people who can run a four-minute mile.
And now you're special.
So the hacker doesn't sound very exciting, and it's probably not.
It's not to me.
I did it sometimes when we couldn't afford to hire IT guys and stuff like that.
But making sure everything works and is up to date is massive.
It's huge.
And it's a very rare talent.
I don't think it's something that is learned.
I mean, of course, you go to school for all that stuff, but the kind of people who can really get into tech and all the details of all the equipment in your office and how it works and how to back it up.
And they get on magazines and stuff and chat rooms on new technology and those sort of gearheads, engineers, they're a different breed, like the sales guy.
So I'm sorry I don't have much to say About them.
But suffice to say, when I say these groups, you absolutely need to have them.
You're nothing without your sales guy.
You're nothing without your hacker.
So this leaves the hipster.
This is someone who, now he was using it to talk about ad sales.
If you're running a cake company, you don't need a hipster per se, but you do need a woman or a person or a chef who loves cakes and cake culture and knows the top cake guys.
Now, I've always been into sort of subcultures, you know, alternative culture.
And when I was, you know, I remember when I was 12, I would sit with my tape player in front of the radio and press record every time there was a new song.
And then if I didn't like it, I would stop, rewind it back to the previous thing, and then wait for the next song.
So it's like making a mixtape live.
And then eventually, it would be both sides full of songs that I really liked with nothing I don't like.
I was making mixed tapes.
And later on, you know, through magazines, I would trade tapes back and forth with people in Europe, punk tapes.
Hardcore was sort of like American punk, and it was a stripped-down, raw, less floral, less colorful music.
It was like fast, cheap, and easy version.
It's like a hot rod version of a fancy car.
So hardcore was very regional, and you had your little scene.
And people go, oh, you must have heard it.
You must be down like you were into hardcore where you think of the Cro-Mags and Agnostic Front and all those New York bands.
And I go, they weren't really part of my world.
It was my little scene.
You know, we all had our little scenes.
That was kind of a cooler thing.
Punk Rock had this sort of rock star thing where Johnny Rotten was the Rolling Stones and all that.
But we didn't have, like, we didn't care who celebrities were.
We didn't have Rolling Stones.
There was just our hardcore scene, Neanderthal Sponge, Dead Trout, Grave Concern, The Trapped, Anal Chinook, Zen Slap, Porcelain Forehead.
That's who I cared about.
Anyway, you'd trade tapes with someone else in their little scene.
I'm going off on a tangent here, but my point is, genetically, I was always the pop culture guy who's really into the culture.
And lots of people who made it big in pop culture were nerds, like fanboys.
Morrissey wrote for NME.
Iggy Pop was just a fan who assembled the Stooges out of his favorite bands.
Chuck D used to do flyers.
Ludacris was a DJ.
They were all fans.
Benicio del Toro used to collect autographs.
They were all fans, and that's why they have the energy.
So like the sales guy, he's not into content, but when he's pitching something, he wants to be pitching something that has some substance to it, some background.
And then inevitably when another company meets, it's like two gangs meeting or two bands.
And the sales guy will put the two creative guys together and they'll go, oh yeah, I heard about that.
Yeah, he's doing a thing now with these other guys.
It's going to be coming out and it's going to be all, you know, it's going to be covering entire buildings with giant curtains.
Oh, yeah, I've heard of him.
Yeah, that's going to be cool when he does it in Central Park, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now they have something to sell.
Perfect machine.
And everyone has their job.
And everyone is in trouble if that particular thing fails.
If the company doesn't pay for the project, the sales guy fucked up.
He didn't get the correct paperwork.
That's his job.
He's in big trouble.
If the thing doesn't work, the hacker's fucked.
What are you doing, you idiot?
You're going to get fired.
We're going to fire you, our friend.
And if the hipster has some cultural project, it's a joke that's already been stolen, already done somewhere else or something like that.
Well, now he's on the chopping block.
But we can't be all responsible for everything.
That's not how shit gets done.
Now, I brought this up in a previous episode, and a woman, I got to say, man.
Women over 40, upper middle class, childless or divorced, are usually white, are the bane of my existence.
I want to start a KKK totally devoted to them where we burn giant wood vaginas on their lawn.
They are the worst.
They're such busy bodies.
Just getting into other people's lives.
And I see it in the workforce.
I'm sorry.
I'm getting real sexist here.
But I think 95% of women would be happier at home.
And when they have jobs, they go, I'm totally fulfilled by my career, blah, blah, blah.
Their jobs seem to be silly, busybody jobs.
Like, why are they always doing social media?
What's your job for the company?
I post shit on Facebook about what they did.
Oh, so what a mom would do about her family, but this is for someone else.
So you've been liberated from the kitchen, and now you're in a cubicle keeping some other man's appointments.
They're rarely oncologists.
They're usually doing a thing that you can't really quantify the value of.
Remember, I think it was last year where they said women don't go to work day?
Ooh, the economy just shut down that day, didn't it?
Oh, no, we don't have a Facebook post up.
And I think not only do these women meddle and get people fired, they also are prosecutors and judges, and they throw men in cages for bullshit charges because their feminist agenda leaks in there.
I've talked to men, I would never name names, who told me, yeah, we have kind of a secret dictum at the office now, no more women.
It's just too expensive.
These women have brought this upon themselves by freaking out over everything and saying that was basically sexual harassment.
No, it's me joking around with you.
I sexually harassed all the men I work with.
We talk about how gorgeous his ass is because it's funny.
Last time I was at work, I was sitting around with about five other guys and we were talking about what we are out of 10 and being totally clinical about it and discussing why it's a 6.4 and how it could be bumped up to a 7.
If you did that to a woman, she'd be mortified.
They were sitting there rating me.
Sorry, not worth it.
But here's another thing they do.
So they're the head of social media, and They get out there, and then there's something like my trans thing, right?
And then this woman who's been monitoring the Twitter account of McDonald's, because that's her job, she finally sees like McDonald's is racist.
This guy who works at McDonald's said Florida's a cracker state.
So she's like, there's a huge controversy.
Of course, I'm kidding.
The racial epithet cracker would never be an issue.
But it would be the N-word or the homosexual word.
But anyway, so they're doing this job, and then they get this alert.
Oh, finally a controversy.
And they realize, oh, this is an opportunity for me to show my boss that my job is valuable.
So she storms into the CEO's office and goes, we have a major emergency.
One of our companies has a transphobe.
I found it on Facebook and Twitter, and we're getting a bad rep. Now, the CEO is busy doing real stuff, generating millions.
And he's like, what?
Oh, okay.
We'll get rid of the problem.
Make it go away.
Fire them or I don't know.
Put them in jail.
Whatever you have to do.
Okay, I'm on it.
Here we go.
So it was fake.
So she's just hindered, lost a bunch of money, lost a bunch of people, a bunch of money.
And so sorry, the reason I'm talking about this is because this woman emailed me and she goes, you're forgetting one thing.
A hipster, a hacker hustler, and a hound.
Yeah, that's where people, she meant women, but people like me, that's where we come in.
The hounds.
We're out there sniffing out what's going on.
No, that's the hipster.
He's sniffing stuff out.
We're hounding people.
We're getting them to know.
No, that's the sales guy.
And she sent me this article.
She goes, I've summed it up in an article.
This is just a rough draft.
And the article, I didn't even read it.
And it was maybe 450 words.
Like, that's how half-assed.
You're trying to prove to me that you belong in the workforce.
You come up with a dumb theory, and then you're too lazy to even write it out.
You would be much happier at home.
So much of this fucking feminism is just based on feels.
Like this election.
I am so proud of women and people of color finally in the house.
Can you tell me why?
Why is that necessarily a good thing?
How about qualified people?
Why do you care what race and what gender they are?
So what you're saying is you base your politics on genitalia and skin color.
In other words, you're sexist and racist.
No, no, no, no.
They're talking about this one, what's her name, Irshad Ranad Mani or something?
She's in, she beat out Keith Ellison in where was it, Milwaukee or something?
I was like, why is there so many, like if there was a Muslim against a Muslim?
And then I realized, oh, it's Dearborn, Michigan.
Yeah, Rashida Tlaib.
And she beat out Keith Ellison.
Keith Ellison is a guy, black Muslim guy who beat the living shit out of his wife, and it didn't go anywhere.
No one seemed to care.
And he was also pictured holding a anarchist, the anarchist handbook thing.
I was going to say anarchist cookbook.
Just dumpster dived tofu.
But Rashida Tlleib, Tlaib, she's a Somalian refugee.
She married her brother to give him citizenship and then married another guy that she actually liked.
So she was in a polypolygamous relationship.
So she committed immigration fraud and marriage fraud and then said, oh, no, I divorced him.
But then we found out, no, you were on vacation with him.
You're back with him.
If you were divorced, you remarried him.
No problem, though.
What's important is that it's a Muslim and she has a hijab and she's a woman of color.
That's what matters.
Oh, really?
What's your favorite policy of hers?
I just read an article in Slate where they go, I'm still buzzing with excitement.
Finally someone who looks like me in the house.
Finally someone who will feel the way I do.
Oh, okay.
So Muslims' political stances are based on whether they're Muslim or not.
I think Sonia Sotomayor said this when she's on the Supreme Court.
She said, as a Latina woman, I bring something different to judgment.
And if people think that your Latin-ness or your femininity doesn't affect your decisions, they're wrong.
Oh, okay.
So you're not an impartial judge.
That's nice.
So now black people should vote for black people.
Women should vote for women.
And Muslims should vote for Muslims.
And each of those groups will act accordingly.
And the black politicians will be biased, I guess, to black communities or make sure they get more.
I think sometimes when there's these affirmative action type things, the person feels compelled to be affirmative action-y.
Like if I was hired because I'm Scottish at some company and they're like, we got our Scottish guy, I'd feel like, oh, we should probably get some shortbread in here.
And I guess Robbie Burns Day should be a holiday at the company.
We should all not come in on Robbie Burns Day because you hired me to do Scottish shit.
I guess I got to Scottish it up here.
I guess I'll bring some bagpipes and a kilt to work on Thursday.
Like the woman who hired the woman who fired Roseanne.
I think she was a recent affirmative action hire black woman.
And she was just like, oh, I heard a rude joke.
Boom.
Show's canceled.
We're switching it to the Connors.
Boom.
Like no trial, no time for an apology, just boom.
Because I guess she figures that's what I was hired to do.
Or I think the woman who runs Vanity Fair is an affirmative action hire.
And Vanity Fair, I talked about this the other day, it's for girls.
I don't like it, but it's for girls to fantasize about what it would be like to be married to George Clooney, and they'd go on holiday in the Swiss Alps and they'd fly private jets everywhere.
It's like it's rich porn.
And my wife was telling me now it's all just stories like this show is too patriotic and we need more women of color and person of color.
It's just a fucking social justice blog, which is not what the original design was.
I don't like either of those, by the way.
But she ruined the brand.
Same with Penthouse.
Penthouse U.S. is an affirmative action hire.
It's a lesbian.
And she just puts her dyke friends in it.
There's nothing remotely sexy about Penthouse U.S. Penthouse Australia, on the other hand, is guest edited by yours truly, the next issue.
I'll be going there for a tour if I'm not banned.
So my point is with the hound advice is we need the opposite of that.
Of course, there are incredible women in the workforce.
Barbara Corcoran is amazing.
She revolutionized New York real estate.
She got in there at the worst time ever and it basically invented the whole idea of flipping.
And she did an incredible job right when New York City was booming after we had Dinkins and Koch and it was a crime hellhole.
When Julianni came in and started cleaning up, she rode that tidal wave like a surfing beast monster riding a whale and made a fucking fortune.
But I will say, even Barbara Corcoran, she realized she waited too late to have kids, and she ended up spending, I believe, $350,000 on On Vitro.
And she's an old mom.
And as an old dad, I can tell you, it's frustrating because my son wants me to chase him around the house and I'm old and fat and beat.
And I'm in good shape.
I box.
And Maggie Thatcher.
And don't make me sit here and list.
I'm talking about general patterns here.
And the general pattern is a lot of women just forego being housewives and having kids because they are brainwashed into thinking they got to be a badass.
How many times have you heard that word?
Especially about the new, all these new women in the house.
Yeah, here's some of your badass seats that got switched and now they're badass.
Fuck off.
You're not a badass, okay?
You have to be scared of a badass.
I guess I am kind of scared of them in the sense that I'm scared of a crazy ex-girlfriend who's going to run through a plate glass window and cut her hands up and start screaming.
It's not a Tony Soprano fear.
It's a stalker fear.
So, here is the moral of the story.
And I'm kind of, I shouldn't have lumped both of these together, but I believe about 95% of women would be much happier at home.
You got kids everywhere.
If you make more than the average American salary and you can afford a nanny and the way people are hiring illegals all the time, I think most people can.
If you can get a nanny in the mix, there's a lot of sitting on your ass.
There's a lot of brunch.
There's a lot of mimosas.
There's a lot of going to the gym and really taking your time to really do a slow workout or something fake like yoga, which is just stretching.
You're not working out.
I know it hurts sometimes.
Yeah, so does stretching.
There's a lot of killing time.
And then by the time you're done, your brunches and your gossiping and your silly walk that doesn't, you don't even break a sweat on, but you got your little fucking nikes and your little, what is that, quilted vest and your hat and your mitts on.
God damn it, you look so ridiculous and just nattering away.
And then it's three o'clock time to pick up the kids.
Or if you're upper middle class, the au pair will do that.
You can go out for more drinks.
I think a lot of women in affluent suburbs become severe alcoholics just out of boredom because the nanny and the au pair are doing all the mothering.
I'm not saying being a house off is boring.
Pay attention there.
I said when they farm out all the different tasks, it gets boring.
Don't farm out the tasks.
Love your babies.
Get involved in the community.
Charles Murray has a great article where he says, even women without kids should be stay-at-home women because they enrich the community.
They talk about the local stop sign.
They're worried about the schools.
They're worried about the fact that on Main Street, there's three stores that have been vacant for a while.
That's hurting our property value.
You know, they're taking care of the cave.
We go out and get the big game.
And I've seen whores of whores who would have been much happier as housewives, but they chose to be in the workforce and they're fucking miserable.
And then they turn 40 and have a panic attack when they realize they waited too long to have kids and they deeply regret it.
Ladies, from 30 to 35, the hourglass is being inverted and you're running out of sand.
By 35, there's no sand in the hourglass.
Yeah, but my mom had a kid at 42.
Yeah, so did mine.
So did my wife.
It's very, very rare.
Talk to Barbara Corcoran.
So if you are super driven and you're destined to be a brain surgeon or an oncologist, or you just, you love doing sound for movies and working those horrible shifts, and you're one of those few women who can lift those big heavy sandbags.
I can't tell you how many film sets we've had female PAs have to quit because they twisted an ankle.
Because they're always like, no, no, I got it.
I got it.
I got it.
Being a PA is a brutally hard physical exercise.
And women don't have the same upper body strength.
I'm sorry.
But say you are one of those driven women, all the power to you, obviously.
I'm not advocating for Sharia law.
I'm not going to start rounding up women in the paddy wagon and chaining them to a kitchen stove.
But just allow for the possibility that you're not meant to be in the workforce.
The workforce isn't that fun anyway.
Like it's a pretty grumpy place.
I don't joke around that much at work.
In fact, half of my job is yelling at my producer, Ryan.
And then in D.C., half of my job is getting yelled at by Ricky.
And Ricky, my producer over there, by the way, is a woman in the workforce who does an excellent job.
So obviously, I'm not applying this to everyone.
She's very driven, but she's been doing this for a long time, and she has a unique skill.
Like Kennedy from Fox Business News.
She's almost cursed in a way because she has this great gift where she can just riff and write great monologues.
And she doesn't see her kids as much as she should, not as she should, but as she would if she was a stay-at-home mom.
But you'd be stupid not to take the whatever she makes, half a million dollars from Fox.
It's just sitting there on the table.
I have this talent.
I better use it.
So that's the first, that's the second part of this whole thing.
But the main part is hipster, hacker, hustler.
So say you have a great idea and you feel really driven and you want to do something stupid like run a t-shirt company, which is the worst idea you could possibly have because you're competing with China.
But say you have an idea and you feel really inspired.
Then step one is to find the hacker and the hustler.
And the hacker and the hustler.
I'm saying that as the hipster guy.
If you're a hustler, you're not done.
You can't start on step one without those other two guys.
And no, you don't need a hound.
Sorry, hounds.
We don't need you.
And I would say, out of the hacker and the hustler, the sales guy's first.
So I have a great idea.
I'm ready to rock.
I don't care if it's a fucking restaurant.
You're nothing without the face, the sales dude, the guy talking to everyone, the guy shaking hands, pleasing everyone, taking everyone out for dinner, greasing the wheel.
The president, basically, of the company.
All right.
I think you got it.
And you keep plugging away for that.
You do two years.
You don't do anything stupid.
You don't get sued into oblivion.
Or you don't become obsolete.
Like, Tower Records is a great documentary I highly recommend.
Oh, shit.
That's a very other important detail.
I'm glad I remembered.
Another important thing as you become a bigger company is always hire from the bottom up.
Like some of the best executives I've worked with were interns.
The head of Warner Brothers in Canada used to mow lawns in front of Warner Brothers.
And that's why Tower Records was so successful.
You got to understand, everyone thinks that they were killed by MP3s.
They've survived tons.
They survived disco when no one wanted to buy their rock records.
They've switched over from vinyl to CD.
They've been through these switches before.
The reason Tower Records died is they stopped hiring from the ground up.
And they would just say, well, you went to business school.
You're the CEO of record stuff.
You don't mean you have a PhD in record stuff.
You come over here.
It lost the culture.
You lost the connection with the staff at the bottom, the blue collars, and the company.
The fabric of it starts to tear apart.
So yeah, that's another important detail is that everyone at the top brass has to have started at the bottom so you can relate to the bottom.
And I think that's a big problem with American corporate culture today is these insane executive salaries.
And these guys have never been on a factory floor in their life.
And the guys on the factory floor end up resenting them, hating them, especially because they do evil shit like send all the jobs off to Mexico.
I know I did say earlier that entrepreneurs have to always take the better deal, but can we at least try to stay within our borders?
But one last thing I will say about the hustler.
He's kind of your first job because you've got to get the money flowing in.
The computers can break and be broken for a couple days, I guess, but the money can't not be coming in.
So in order of importance to keep something going, I would say it goes.
I'd say the hipster, the creative type, is the last.
Despite the fact that our culture, especially in New York, is creative.
Everyone needs to be creative.
Red Bull trying to hack creativity.
Yeah, we need creative.
Kids should go to creative shit.
Why?
If it's not in your genes, if it's not in your DNA, don't bother.
Don't force it is my point.
So I would say the importance are hustler, then hackers, less important, and then hipster.
There's always people interested in pop culture.
I like you more than a friend.
And this, this, this CRTV tonight, I've got seven people from the walk away movement who left liberalism.
I know we lost the house to a bunch of chicks because women voted for women.
And ladies, by the way, thank you for voting.
I'm looking forward to more Justin Trudeau's with these women who only vote with their hearts and could care less about policy.
Way to vote.
That's so ridiculous.
Not one of them could name one of the policies of these women and women of color and POC.
They just like the way it looks.
Yeah, because you're broads.
You like things to look pretty.
Okay, it looks nice.
Now, what's going on with charter schools?
What's going on with the border?
What's going on with health care?
What's going on with birthright citizenship abuse?
How are we doing with jobs?
You're going to raise taxes on all these corporations that are generating all this revenue for people?
You're going to kill some jobs for us?
Just like Justin Trudeau, a gorgeous hunk who was voted by women strictly because he's a cutie, and he's ruined the country, perhaps irrevocably.
At least we got balls in the Senate.
Yeah, so I have seven of these walkaway people who left liberalism and didn't necessarily flock to the right.
I mean, they might be fiscally conservative and stuff, but a lot of them are sort of libertarian.
They changed the name to classic liberal, but all they know is the hysterical left of right now is something they want nothing to do with.
All right, I like you more than a friend.
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