It's a great example of you don't want to be the best, you want to be the only. That mentality is how you become the best because you whittle away the generic parts of what you do until it's really the thing that you do well, and you will be the best one because nobody else is the same as you, and you're sort of in a market of one.
All right, Sean, I have something interesting to show you. And this is going to be a little bit of an advice line, but not for me, but for the person I'm talking about. So, the other day, as you know, my new thing in my household is I try to go on dates once a week, every Thursday. You know, trying to become less roommates, more of a married couple. And so, this lady reached out to me because she listens to the pod. And I had coincidentally also seen her Instagram. And she did something really cool that I wanted to tell you about. So, go to scentsocialclub.com.
So, her name's Asia Grant. She started this business. She was like a consultant, but she was obsessed with perfume. And she created this idea that I think is actually really cool that I call a perfume tour, I guess. But basically, there's this like part of New York, this like street of like perfume stores. Basically, she sends out a Typeform in advance to everyone on the tour, and you like tell her about your personality and things that you're into. You show up at a perfume store. She gives you a sheet where we list out three stores and three perfumes or clones to view per store. And she took us on a tour where we went to three different stores or whatever. And she showed us like all this stuff. And she's like, 'Here's why I think you would like this thing.' And she like pointed it out and you can or cannot buy it. You don't have to. But look at her Instagram because this lady was amazing. But the reason I'm bringing this up is because I think that enthusiasm can be a moat in a business. So our friend Nick Gray, both you and I, one of our favorite people on earth, he has this story where he started this business called Museum Hack, which grew to $3 million in revenue over the course of like three or four years. And basically what he did was at the Met and a bunch of other museums in New York City, the museums are free and oftentimes you can get a free tour, but he was like, these tours are kind of lame. I'm going to give more exciting tours and instead of free I'm going to charge $200. And he would give this tour where his whole shtick was like, I forget all of the things, but one of his main things was like, I'm going to show you five pieces of art that I would love to steal today.
And like that small twist like makes a world of difference. And I don't care about perfumes at all. But I went on this lady's tour, Asia Grant's.
It's contagious though, right?
But it's contagious. I'm so into it. And like she showed me one perfume or whatever and I was like, 'That's dope. I'll take it.' She's like, 'That's $1,200.' I'm like, 'Where's the cheaper one? Show me the back of the shelf and I'll put it back. It's where I'll take it.' I think I'll love the scent more of the cheaper ones. Uh, where's like the Abercrombie? Uh, but anyway, I wanted to show you this because A, I think enthusiasm is a moat. And B, for people who have a passion, it doesn't matter how like quirky it is. This woman turned this thing into a full-time job. She makes a lot of money, I think, doing it because she does it for like companies and [__].
Well, first, congratulations on the date night. That's actually pretty big in our culture. I appreciate what you've done there. And very creative date night.
This was good. So, she's just doing this on the side for people. Is that her thing?
It's a full-time job. And I think that there's three types of customers. The first type is like a private tour, which we did, which I think it's like $500. The second thing is like she does group tours.
Her bio is Asia Grant. I have a perfume for you. The best New York City perfume tour. It's a great example of you don't want to be the best, you want to be the only, which is always a hard thing, right? Because somebody's always doing something. But that mentality is how you become the best because you continue to refine and refine and refine and whittle away the generic parts of what you do until it's really the thing that you do well, and really whether you're the only one, you will be the best one because nobody else is the same as you, and you're sort of in a market of one. And she's a great example of this. I mean, to be able to do this full-time in New York City, that's no joke. I mean, that takes courage, right? You wouldn't go into it thinking, 'I'm sure this will work.' No, not at all. And I'm curious, how did she build up brick by brick? Do you know?
Well, originally what she did was I think she got like her friends and she was like, this is my friend like Jamal, I'm going to like show you his, I'm going to show you how I picked out his personal scent. And they like, and she like went store to store to store. And she's, I don't think she has a huge following. What does she have? 15,000 followers.
Yeah, 15,000. And you know, some of the videos do well, but they're not like out of this world. I would say I feel like you might be early to the Asia Grant train.
That's why I'm talking about it.
If she gets one format, she's one format away from being like 10 levels higher than where she is today and doing this. And this is great what she's doing right now. But when I say a format, I think people have this idea that like, oh yeah, I'll go viral. I think go viral is the wrong idea. It's sort of this like false hope, like lottery ticket type of mentality. But when you say I'm one format away, you have all of the upside of the go viral lottery ticket, but you're actually using a more grounded approach, which is look, if I can just figure out one core like show mechanic, right? This my Instagram reel is a one minute show and this show if I just get the right hook and then the right payoff, I can do that over and over again for a while. I'm one format away from this becoming 10 times bigger than I am today. And I think she's kind of like this. Maybe the format is something like, I don't know what she does exactly because I'm looking at her Instagram for the first time here, but I think if she stopped a guy on the street and like found his scent and he just looked like a normal guy and it looks like she's stopping him on the street and he's a little hesitant, but it's this sort of makeover type of thing that's shrunk into this 30-second Instagram reel. I feel like she's one format away.
That's, I completely agree. That's great advice. I also wanted to ask you, how would you grow her business? So, let's just say I don't know how big she is. I'm just going to guess. Let's say she does $250,000 a year in revenue and $200,000 a year in profit. You know, she makes a good living for herself. I think that most every business can get to 5 or 10 million in revenue in some capacity given enough time. How would you get her there?
Well, I think you, well, here's kind of a couple ideas. So, I would say one, you're one format away. The second is the content is the business, not the tours. So the tours are just content, whereas I think what most people do is they say, 'I'm going to make content to try to get people to book the tour because that's where I get the transactional money.' And so that's the real business. And I actually think if you want to go bigger, you have to flip that on its head. You have to say the tour is just actors. I'm essentially having humans that I'm going to be using to create awesome content and the real business is going to be building this brand online. So, that's the kind of the flip that I think you have to do if you want to scale this bigger because the in-person tours can only scale so much. A guy who's doing this well is that guy, Jack's dining room. We've talked about him before on here, mostly because I don't really use Instagram and I bumped into this guy in New York and now he's like the one example I keep going to because I think it's pretty remarkable what he's done. He goes to places, he tries the best food in different cities and he just records Instagram content. And one thing he has is this thing called the reserve, which is like you pay some absurd amount of money. I don't even know what it is. It's like it's tens of thousands. It might be $100,000. I don't know what it is. It's some crazy amount of money you pay to go on a once-in-a-lifetime food experience. You get on a private jet, on the jet there's a Michelin star sushi chef. You land and there's caviar being poured down your eye and then you get champagne and then you, you know, Ben Affleck is there at this thing with you and like literally like I think Leonardo DiCaprio goes on these, like he's got like mega stars that are fans of his that pay to go do these reserve things. But the thing is even if he sells out all of these, it's like a million or two million bucks a year of revenue and then it costs a [__] ton to run these things. It's not a great business, but it is absolutely incredible content. And so I think using the real world business stuff as content is the smart idea. Hormozi is doing the same thing. By the way, if you see he's got these like in-person workshops and I'm, yeah, he charges five grand for people to come and I'm sure that thing actually, you know, does pretty well, like probably 10, 10 million a year. But really what he's done is he's using that as a farm system to produce clips and content and the content grows his brand. He's going to make way more off his brand being famous than he is off those workshops in the end.
So that's the second piece of advice. The third piece of advice I would say is, hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So, hundreds of episodes the team at HubSpot went through. They pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable ideas that we have brainstormed and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show. You remember that great blog post by the CEO of Slack called 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here.' I think she should read that post. I think every founder should read that post. He wrote this to his team the day Slack launched. And Slack became ultimately, I think, a $25 billion company. But this was day one.
And for those who don't know, it was a video game company for one or two or three years, and it sucked. He was going to give his money back to Jason Horowitz. And they're like, 'Dude, I don't care about this money. Figure it out. Just do something.' And he did something. He's like, 'Well, you know, while we were building this game, we did have this internal chat tool that was pretty cool. Like, what if we turn that into the product that became Slack?' So, what did he say in this blog post? He basically says, 'Look, let's imagine you're Acme Saddle Inc., and you sell saddles, and today you could try to sell saddles to horseback riders. There's not that many of them.' And he said, 'Instead of selling saddles, we need to sell the joy of horseback riding.' And he talked about how certain brands do this. You know, Nike famously did this with jogging. So, you know, Nike didn't sell shoes to people who were already track athletes only. They basically, you know, as jogging became a national trend, they piggybacked on this idea that like people are going to have athletic shoes whether they're athletes or not, that the everyday mom and dad is going to own these things, the kids are going to own these things, and you don't have to be an actual track athlete. The way that the company started, Lululemon did the same thing. Lululemon, if you walk in their stores, you can literally take a yoga class. That's kind of weird, right? Why would a clothing store offer yoga classes? It's not a big money maker, but it was because they needed to promote the lifestyle of being a little yoga girl that you got your cute water bottle and your cute pants and you're going to go to this thing and you have friends there and namaste and you know, downward dog baby, here we go. And so they promoted the lifestyle of yoga, not just selling these $70 pants. And so he said, 'We're going to have to do the same thing.' That we know that when you use this tool, your calendar chills out. You don't have as many meetings. Your email inbox stops being overflowed. That you feel like a sense of camaraderie with your team, even if they're remote, that it feels like you're in the same room together hanging out. That's what we need to sell is the feeling of great team communication, of a team working well together is what we're going to sell. And Slack is going to be a tool to help you get there. It's just your saddle. It's a mentality around marketing that I think would work real well here. And so why I say this is because look, I'm not a, you weren't a perfume guy until you went on this thing. I'm not a cologne or perfume guy, but you are now. She sold you horseback riding, not a saddle. Because if she tried to say, 'Hey, here's a cologne.' You probably wouldn't have bought it. You weren't really interested. But then when you realize that like actually smelling good is part of showing up well, is part of your personality that you can have one that's, you know, tailored to you and that's very different than something that...
It was even better. She goes, 'You're a masculine guy. Very Midwestern masculine values, stoicism, leadership, timelessness. Therefore, this one would be perfect.' You smell it.
I wrote this down. I wrote horoscope but better. When you started talking because I was like, she, you can just cold read anyone and be like, you're a masculine guy, but you do have a soft side for the people that matter in your life. You're like, I do. That's so true. It's like I can say that to any guy. And they're like, yes, thank you for telling. And this is horoscopes but better because the horoscope trend and like kind of the cold reading tarot card type of fortune teller type of [__] obviously works. Obviously there's like a market for people who love to be told something like about themselves and that they're part of something, learn more about their favorite subject themselves. But in this case, she's selling a very good back-end product on the other end of it, which is like here's water with two drops of oil and 99% profit margins, which is way better than what the horoscope person sells, which is the horoscope reading. The reading is free. And you buy the water at the end at this insane markup. Wow, this is horoscopes but better. Um, first of all, for those content creators out there who want to learn how to turn a date night into just a banger content session, you're welcome.
Spence, you could write that off now.
Yeah, this is called being a professional. Take notes. Uh, dude, was I just Neo in the Matrix just seeing code? I just know where Agent Smith was just now with that horoscope but better [__]. Yeah. Yeah. Class is in session, fools. Um, I completely agree with everything you said. I think it's awesome. We have to get Asia Grant, if you're listening, you got to have like implement some of this stuff and give us an update. I like finding these like creators who are early in the journey and figuratively buying stock in them. We did that with, you know, Huberman, Brian Johnson, now Asia Grant. And so I think it'd be fun to get an update on her. But I wholeheartedly agree with your advice.
By the way, our friend David Perell, friend of the pod, David Perell, has a great phrase on this. He calls it having a personal monopoly. And a personal monopoly is when you are known for something. You're known. And so, you know, he was the writing guy online. And he taught writing courses. He always talked about writing. And he has a podcast called How I Write. And he really wanted to build a personal monopoly. I feel like Asia Grant is building a good example of building a personal monopoly. She is going to be the New York City scent girl or the New York City perfume person, right? Like she's got that thing now. All she has to do is just add layers and layers and layers of defensibility, of more and more stacking on top of that until there is really only one. Nobody else could ever come into that category.
And I think people are surprised by how big things can get. Our friend Nick Gray did this with Museum Tours. It was called Museum Hack. How big did that get?
He told me that they did $2.9 million in revenue the year they sold. And the way the business worked was he started doing a bunch of tours. He was probably the only tour guide for a year. People spent $168 or something like that, almost $200 per tour. Oftentimes the tours were not even sanctioned. Like he would just like get a group of eight people and just like walk through. And I think actually the whole time he was like, hey, I can just do this, right? They're like, well, it's open to the public, so yeah, you can do it. And so he did that and then eventually he hired, he had roughly a hundred people who were like up-and-coming Broadway people or comedians or actors, struggling, you know, creatives, and he would teach them how to do these tours and that's what he did. And then he sold, he sold as a multiple of, you know, either revenue or profit. So in addition to making the money every year, it was actually a sellable asset, which people don't really think that something like that can...
And he became like the museum tour guide. And then, you know, this sounds silly to like use these phrases together, but he reinvented himself as the 2-hour cocktail party guy, right? Another thing that you think is really stupid and dumb. A 2-hour cocktail party. That's ridiculous. A, who would write a book on that? And B, do people really want to learn how to do it? He wrote the best book on it. And he sold, I think he sold hundreds of thousands of...
That's another enthusiasm is the moat. Because what's Nick's edge is that he just is more enthusiastic about two-hour cocktail parties than anyone else, you know, on Earth. That's what he naturally felt that way. And he really, it's less of getting yourself to do something as it is giving yourself permission and trusting that that's a thing that you can lean into it and you don't have to like withhold some part of yourself or kind of sandbag yourself and kind of hedge. And he just didn't hedge. He didn't sandbag himself, just did what he wanted to do and like went for it. And you know, obviously amazing things have come out of that as well. Can we talk a little bit about these kind of like real world experiential tours? So, there was the guy in New York City who was doing a million dollars on Airbnb doing the police tours, right? What was it? The...
I also did that one. Awesome.
Yeah. So, there's like a kind of genre of these things. Um, you know, when we went to New York last month or whatever, actually, David took us on a walking food tour, which was awesome. He basically just took us through New York, but like I'm not big into sightseeing, but if you can't tell, I'm pretty into food. And so I was like, 'Okay, you want to show me some stuff, but we're going to eat at every stop at a cool place that has a little story and is known for having the best fro-yo and then the best burger and then the best this and then the best that.' And that's what we did. And it was amazing. And I think that as a thing, food tours, why isn't that a bigger deal? Like that is the way I want to explore most cities. Is that already a thing?
When I travel? So my wife worked at Airbnb and I think she, I don't know if she worked on but somehow was involved with Airbnb experiences and so she would always hype it up and we would, we all whenever we travel we do food tours. That's like how we get around and like learn about the city. It's really awesome. But there was this guy in New York City. If you Google like New York mafia tour Airbnb you'll see his listing on Airbnb experiences. He was a retired police officer and he gives like a three-hour tour where he would take you to different restaurants and different places where famous mafia incidents happened. And you end at a restaurant where he's in cahoots with the owner, like they give him permission or he gets a reservation and he tells you like, you know, the table that we're sitting at, you know, Sammy the Bull or whatever their names are like sat here and they brokered this deal and so we are kind of like them right now. Let's eat some spaghetti. And it's awesome. And this guy, he's an ex-cop. He actually sold his Airbnb experiences listing to another person who now has like five or six or seven ex-cops giving these tours. And so it's a very miniature version of like, all right, I retired as a cop. I still like want something to do. Like this sounds like a good thing. Let me just step in and do this. And so I actually think that like people can very, it's not easy, but it's fairly simple. They can turn very passionate local experiences into thriving businesses. If I had to guess, you can make many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing experiences based off of history and food just like this.
Another guy who did this was in the sushi space actually. So there's a guy, I think he's in the Hamptons. His name is Guy Allen. And he opened up this restaurant. We went to it in New York. It's a little omakase. It looked like it was like you have to go down this back alley staircase. I was like, there's no way. And then everyone's like, this is the hottest ticket in New York right now. I was like, no way. Where are we? And I walk in, the sushi's great. And I was like, dude, how did you, how do you get people to find this place? It's literally on an unmarked staircase and an unmarked door. Like how could people, how could this have gotten hot? Like you're literally defying the laws of real estate here. The restaurant is called Sendo Sushi.
Yeah. Sendo Sushi. And he was like, 'Oh, well, you know, I basically spent a decade building up my Instagram because I just love sushi. I just, this guy had just great enthusiasm for sushi and had been traveling around talking about sushi on his Instagram. He had a book, like a sushi book I think that he had released. All that stuff led up to this point where as soon as he opens the restaurant, bang, you know, like line, waitlist, etc., etc.' And what's funny, by the way, when I met him, he like told me what he was doing and I was like, 'This is a horrible idea.' And then I like researched him because he's like a white young guy and he's like, 'I'm opening up a sushi restaurant.' I'm like, 'Are you sure?'
Why? Like, dude, there's easier ways to meet Asian women. Like, yeah, not the only way, white guy in New York. But, you know, one thing that was really fascinating actually on the business side because there's only like eight chairs in the restaurant. So, I was like, 'Dude, even I get why there's a line. There's only eight chairs. Like, you know, what are you going to do?' And he's like, 'Well, delivery is huge.' And so apparently they're doing like millions a year in DoorDash deliveries and pickups, which is like I just never really seen that. Yeah. So it's like this interesting kind of like a ghost kitchen. Like more than half the restaurant is just a back kitchen for delivery, but it's not like most ghost kitchens on DoorDash where you've never heard of the brand or it's like a random fictitious name. This is like a really high-end, well-known brand that has this huge delivery operation. I thought that was pretty interesting.
Yeah, they kill it and it's awesome. We're giving shout outs to everyone. Order from Sendo Sushi.
Well, call us Dolly Parton because that's the next subject.
We famously had a Dolly Parton moment many years ago where you were like, 'Yeah, Dolly Parton, you know Dolly Parton.' And I was like, 'Honestly, not really.' You were like, 'What?' And I was like, I know the name but I can't really tell you because you were like, no, no, no, you know Dollywood. And I was like, Dollywood, what is it? Dollywood? And you made fun of me for years that I don't know Dolly Parton. And honestly justified because now Dolly Parton unfortunately just passed away and I went still learning about Dolly Parton. I did not put enough respect on this woman's name. Can we do a Dolly Parton week? Sean, describe who Dolly Parton is or what she looks like to a non-white Midwestern guy.
Well, you know, this changes over time, age, but like, you know, she was this kind of almost larger-than-life character. Big blonde hair. You almost like kind of all American, but then every knob was just dialed up. The makeup was dialed up, the hair was dialed up, the body was dialed up, everything was dialed up, the style was dialed up. That's kind of like became part of the shtick. And she's actually talked about like the dumb blonde packaging. Like she kind of created the brand and then she was like, I don't mind when people call me a dumb blonde because I know I'm not dumb and I'm not a blonde either. Like basically like, you know, she created the brand, the iconic look which was very distinct. And like, you know, I've always like joked about this with myself. I grew out long hair once during COVID and I was like, well, people are like, why are you doing this? And I was like, well, you can't be good-looking, you got to be interesting-looking. And it's just like a general philosophy which is like actually like in terms of branding that actually is not untrue, that distinctiveness matters a lot more than sort of the objective attractiveness of somebody. Yeah.
So what do you know about her?
For the other ignorant people like me who didn't know, here's the story. So, fourth of 12 kids, born in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Immediately has like, you know, a sort of gift, but also an interest in singing. Writes her first song at 5 years old. At 10, she's performing on stage. And, you know, fast forward the tape and she's a very successful singer. And if that was the whole story, it wouldn't be a very interesting story. But the singing part is pretty impressive, right? She does over 100 million records sold, 10 Grammys, but then she just was a prolific businesswoman. So she owns this thing called Dollywood, which is this essentially like a Disney World in Tennessee, like an amusement park that brings in millions of visitors a year, and is actually a big contributor to her fortune. And the reason why she can qualify as Billy of the Week, she kind of passed away with a net worth over $500 million, which very few artists ever get to. And then on top of that is this larger-than-life personality. Every quote you hear about her, any person who ran into her just like on any age, any background, any race, any political orientation, they all loved her and they all literally like there's quotes now that she passed away. They were like, I remember meeting her and I went and called my friend. I was like, I think I actually met an angel. Like, you know, just think these quotes that you don't really hear from most people and also a very prolific philanthropist. Did a lot of great things in the world where her music is, you know, maybe three or four on the list of great things that she did in her lifetime. And I just wanted to kind of walk through some of these incredible things that she did. I was pretty inspired by some of this stuff.
And by the way, just on accomplishments, some of her most famous songs, she didn't sing. So I believe she wrote 'I Will Always Love You' by Whitney Houston.
Yeah. There's actually a great story around. Do you know the full story of this?
Okay. So, two crazy things about this. One, she wrote 'I Will Always Love You' and 'Jolene' in the same night.
Which is one of those like, there's these days where decades happen type of thing where people get this creative streak and they just go. And this is, she's a good example of one of these. The second thing is she did sing the song. So one of the things that happened was when she went out to go try to be an artist. She leaves the home, she's going to go try to make it and like there's like this hero's journey of anyone who goes and tries to make it. We had our version of that moving to San Francisco trying to make it as a founder, as a tech entrepreneur.
And she went to Nashville.
She went to Nashville trying to make it as a country artist. And she was actually singing backup for this other guy. And she had a deal with him where he's like, 'Okay, I'll take you to my gigs. I'll pay you, but you'll be a backup singer and like kind of side performer basically at my shows and you got to give me five years.' And she's like, 'Okay, like I don't really have any other way to make it, but like all right.' So she agrees to this. She's now seven years into this thing. And it's pretty miserable. Like she doesn't want to be this guy's sidekick. And he doesn't treat her that well. They kind of are not even on speaking terms at this point. She's still performing at his shows. And she kind of like, I'm going to quit. And she using the emotion of that wrote 'I Will Always Love You.' She performs it for the guy and she's like, 'I want to go out on my own.' And he's like, 'On your own?' And she's like, 'I have the song.' She plays it. He breaks down crying and he's basically like, 'All right, I'll let you go if you record this song and I want a piece of the action of this song.' And so she, you know, one of the things that she did a great job of in her career, one of the reasons she built such a big empire was she understood the value of her music in a way that most artists do not. And that song, 'I Will Always Love You,' it was such a banger early on that like everyone who heard it knew this is going to be a winner. Elvis wanted to buy it. So Elvis was like, 'I'll sing the song.' And she's like, 'Amazing.' He's like, 'And I'll own over 50% of it.' And she's like, 'I don't want to do that. Like how about you sing the song and we'll do the normal like kind of, you know, whatever the rights breakdown normally is of the song creator versus the artist who sings it.' And Elvis was like, 'No, no, no, I need to own most of it. I'm Elvis. I'm going to blow this thing up.' And she turns him down. She turns down Elvis to make a better...
That's like a Sylvester Stallone move.
So she bets on herself. She sings the song. The song does well. One day she's in her car and she hears Whitney Houston singing it and she breaks down. She's like, it's like hearing the song for the first time. Like what Whitney did with it was next level. So, but because she owned it, she got royalties on every time that song plays, which if anyone's been in the world, plays all the time. And so, like in the '90s, she made like tens of millions in royalties just off of Whitney Houston's version of 'I Will Always Love You.'
Well, and the album that that song was on, it was for The Bodyguard, the movie The Bodyguard. At the time I think it was the number one bestselling soundtrack of all time and that song and that movie was one of the reasons Whitney Houston became an American superstar but catapulted to global superstar.
And then like the legend that she is, took $10 million that she made off that in the '90s, reinvested in like an all-black community to build housing. She was like, it just seemed like the right thing to do and she just kept doing what seemed like the right thing to do over and over and over again. And nobody's perfect but man she did a lot of amazing things. I'm going to tell you something else. Yeah. Tell me everything.
Okay, so she's pretty famous for some of the philanthropy she did in Tennessee. So she, her dad could not read or write and she always saw how that kind of...
of held her back and like you know 12 kids, dad can't read or write. He worked really hard, didn't make a lot of money. And so she was like, 'All right, like they were like, Dolly, you know, you could set up a foundation, you could set up a fundraiser you could perform at.' She's like, 'How about I just get books in the home?' And they're like, 'Yeah, but Dolly, you're an artist. You could go do this and you could tap into your network and you could raise money and have a gala.' She's like, 'How about I put books in the home?' And so she just decided to send books to people's homes for free for years. And she sent like 300 million plus books to people's homes over her lifetime.
What's that called? Imag the Imaginary Library. 325 million books since 1995 as a tribute to her father who couldn't read or write.
Okay, so that was one of them. Here's another thing she did. She went to her county and she got all the seventh and eighth graders in the county and they had a huge problem with graduation. I think like 35% of the kids were not graduating. And so she went and she said, 'I got an idea.' Same thing again, like kind of ruthless simplicity in her approach to solving these things. And so she just went and she said, 'All right, I'm going to pair all of you up and here's the deal. You're going to sign a contract with me.' And the contract says if both of you, everybody gets a buddy and if you and your buddy both graduate when you graduate you get $500. Now this is back in the 80s so it's like more like kind of $1,500 or $2,000 basically worth of money which is a lot to a kid. She was like if you both graduate you both get the money but if you don't both graduate you don't get the money.
The dropout rate dropped from 35% of kids not graduating to like 6%. It was like this incredibly effective program that was basically Dolly Parton being like, 'Listen up, kid. Like, give me 500 bucks if you graduate.'
Dude, have you ever like there's all these studies going on right now about the STEMI checks, stimulus checks, and turns out that just giving poor people money is probably better than like a huge percentage of charities where they're like, you know, in order to like help young single moms who are poor, I'm going to help you get a job. I'm going to help you like you got to go through this program and then we're going to get like or I'll just give you two grand. And like they have found that like because it lacks administrative costs and it's just here's just money and like there's a larger percentage of time it just gets the desired outcome.
And they asked her, they were like, you know, why are you doing this for these kids? And she basically, she herself didn't have kids. And the reason why she had endometriosis and basically had like a hysterectomy when she was in her 30s and so she couldn't have kids, but like listen to this attitude. She goes, 'I didn't have children because I believe God didn't mean for me to have kids. So everybody's kids could be mine and I could do things like the Imaginary Library because if I hadn't had the freedom to do the work, I wouldn't have been able to do all the things that I've done.' And like what an attitude for somebody who took kind of like a lemon from life and was like okay I can't have kids and put a different meaning on it. It's like so everybody's kids can be mine and I'm going to go help all these kids instead and you know I just thought that was like kind of amazing.
Your this this evolution of Shawn from not going to from not knowing who she is to being her biggest fan I find to be incredibly endearing. You are I this is like uh this is like watching puppies play.
Are you having this reaction in you? Cuz I have this all the time. If I tell somebody about a show being great and they're kind of like, 'Yeah, yeah.' And they don't watch the show and the years later they're like, 'Dude, have you seen the show? I love this show.' And I'm like, 'I told I told you about the show.' And I get infuriated and I'm just like I need to like assert my like my claim to the like thing. Do are you feeling that? Cuz I
No, I can't take that because frankly at this point you probably know more about her than like I grew up listening to her and I lived in Nashville and in Nashville she was always like like a mini mayor like she was like she's always been like the [__] forever but now you actually know the facts. You're like a tourist who like knows how tall the tallest building is.
I'm doing the tourist thing where I like got the pamphlet and the guide and I can tell you more than the local. You know why I paid attention to it? Because I saw when it happened. I was like, 'Okay, Dolly Parton passed away.' And I remember just thinking like, 'Oh, Sam probably cares about this.' And I scrolled on and then I saw Trump had like a tribute and I scrolled one tweet and the democratic socialists had a tribute and that never happens. It didn't happen when you know the queen died, Michael Jackson, you know, it doesn't nobody gets that side. And I was like, 'Wow, who gets these kind of warring tribes to both actually be like, yeah, she was the shit.' And rappers came out and were saying she's the [__] and Taylor, you know, Eminem was saying it and Taylor Swift saying, but they all didn't say like just generically. They had a personal story of some way in which she did a really good thing for them somewhere along the road. Like there was this great story that was like she lost some Grammy, some musical award to 36 Mafia.
And then they were like Dolly like you know bummer on the loss to you know 36 Mafia is kind of you know and she's like they're bringing it home to Tennessee. I'm happy for I don't know their music but I'm really happy for them you know I'm going to go home and listen. I was like
Have you um if you look at what Martha Stewart has done that's a really kind of that's somewhat of an interesting comparison although I would say Dolly was probably a better person. She um was married to the same guy forever and like would seemed like a pretty good person all around whereas Martha's a little bit more sharky but she was like well respected by all these people but she also um 9 to 5 if I'm going off memory so I could be wrong here but she was regarded as like a definitely like a woman's right advocate.
Well the song was written for the movie.
Oh so so good story about the movie too. Here's another fun fact that earned another respect point in my books. So she goes into acting and I think a lot of people take confidence from one area and it becomes false bravado when they move into another area. You'll see this a lot with like I'm a businessman now. Let me give you my views on Gaza, right? Like you know it's like well maybe you're not the best person to do that. You just have the ability to talk about it. That doesn't mean you necessarily have like earned your stripes in this one area. So she goes into the movie business and like I would say most celebrities when they go into the movie business they show up for the cameo and they want to do a good job but like you know they kind of show up and hey I'm me you know so that should be enough right? She not only learned her lines she learned every line of every character in the movie. She had the whole movie downloaded in her brain cuz she wanted to be so prepared to do a good job and just that's how she showed up and it kind of blew everybody away on the set cuz they were like wait why does Dolly know every she knows where this like the scene changes and she knows where the cut is going to be like how is this possible we just got here it's day one.
Let me give you a couple others. Nobody knew her phone number so she was um we all love an unavailable queen and here she was she was like you Nobody knows her phone number. If you want to get in touch with her, you fax her manager, your phone number, and then you'll get a call from a phone number, and she'll talk to you. And so, she wanted to be kind of independent in that way.
Did you read about her husband?
Well, all I know is that she was married for like 60 plus years, and this guy was like never in the limelight.
I don't think I could find a photo of him.
He basically was I think he was a truck driver. Maybe Ari can correct me, but he was a blue collar guy. And there was like a joke, which I don't know if it was true, that he like never saw any of her performances, but she like loved him and like said he was the man, but he was like this very much like a what is it called? The strong silent type.
He was He's got a masculine scent, too. Huh.
Yeah. Yeah. He I don't know if he would go on a perfume tour, but if he would, he would get the flavor rain, which was also the same one I bought. And so yeah, he was kind of cool. He was like like mysterious.
We'll leave you with a great Dolly Parton quote. I tried every diet in the book. This is about dieting. I tried every diet in the book. I tried some that weren't in the book. I tried eating the book. It tasted a lot better than most of the diets.
All right. Well, Dolly, you'll be missed. Sorry I didn't learn about you till you passed away, but I am a big fan. Now,
I have one more story um that I could tell you. Um as it happens all the time, coincidentally, it's all going to converge. We're going to um combine enthusiasm into southern stuff. Have you heard of roping?
Roping? Is that something you do in your date night now as well or what was going on?
Well, we're not there yet. But roping is it's similar to it's could be part of a rodeo, but it's basically where not a bull, but a steer. It's a they're actually different. I think a steer is a castrated bull in case you're wondering.
Dude, what a low-key great insult to start using.
You're a steer. You're not even a bull,
If you know what I mean. Yeah.
Yeah.
Roping is when the steer goes into the area and then two guys have to like quickly like rope it like you know you tight
Like a lasso catch it. But what do you do? You just snag it. Then what pulls you?
A lot of people think that I'm like a hillbilly and they assume I know these things but like I don't actually know. Right. Cosplay.
Sam dresses like a cowboy but lives in a like fancy New York City apartment and it's like
NY I've been to the rodeo but like sort of like seeing like a Marty Gr parade. Like I can't tell you anything that's actually going on.
