Okay, so this was supposed to be private, but we decided to do it in public. As any good influencer would do, we said, "Hey, why do this if we're not going to have the camera on?"
So, I guess the setup here is me and Sam are on camera, but you'll also see Ari and Cassie doppelgangers. And Cassie's the new girl on the team. And she came on and we were supposed to do kind of like a strategy meeting of like, oh, what are we — you're here to help with the podcast? What are we trying to do again? What's the strategy? And we said, why don't we actually just record it and we'll just do it live and see what comes out of this session. So that's what I'm here to do. Sam, is that what you are expecting here?
Yes. And we all filled out something in advance. You are the only one who did not submit yours already.
Well, okay. Yeah, that's right. I did, but I'm like the collator. Okay. So, what I like to do in these situations, and I think anybody should steal this. I stole this from Amazon when we got acquired there. I learned this method, which is you send a little bit of pre-work in advance and it makes the meeting so much more interesting and so much more valuable because some people are fantastic at thinking on the spot and coming up with insightful, accurate, true, honest things on the spot in front of a large group of people, but that's like 1% of people. Most people don't think very well that way. And so if you actually want to get to the right answer, a really good thing to do is to send out some questions or have people write in advance what they're thinking and then one person's like the gatherer. You gather all the materials together and they use that to have a good discussion. And so I asked you guys 10 or so questions and there were questions like what's working really well with the podcast right now? What's not working? What's your biggest pet peeve? What's something we're just stupid for not doing right now? Right? Like just very simple questions. And so I gathered all that and we're not going to use all of it, but I wanted to share some of the most interesting findings. Can we just start with the most interesting findings? The first one is Sam, you had a bit on almost like the virtue of selfishness. You were basically like I want to do the selfish thing with the podcast because there's one way to look at this which is it's all about what should we be doing to be more successful? How do we make this external thing work? And you were just like you said, I want to do the selfish thing and have fun and learn and improve myself. I think others will enjoy that a lot more than us trying to appeal to them in an inauthentic way. And it reminded me of the Rick Rubin quote of the best way to serve your audience is to ignore them completely.
I actually think I was like nervous to even put that on there because I'm like, "Oh, we're going to do a podcast on this and I'm just going to go tell the audience to themselves." I just think that so originally you started this podcast then I came on and for the first three years I don't think you and I ever looked at the data. And I couldn't even tell you a bunch of the numbers. Frankly I still don't really look at the numbers but every once in a while I get drawn and sucked into this thing where I look at the YouTube numbers because those are the most public and I start thinking in headlines and I start thinking in what can get the highest clickthrough rates. And then occasionally I suggest we do some of those episodes and we do do some of those episodes and I notice the night before I get the Sunday scaries on a Tuesday night because we record on Wednesdays. I notice that I dislike those the most. And then I notice there are so many times like when you will tell me a story or we will have a guest like Graham Weaver who I think Graham Weaver is popular so it's maybe not the best example or Sarah Moore who you did a podcast with where we do these podcasts and I leave with more energy than I came in on. And almost always that happens when it's not data driven and it's simply what am I curious about or if I read a book and I'm like I'm so excited to tell Sean about this or Sean goes and does something and he goes and visits Austin and I just want to hear his opinion of who he met and what was cool about it. I am more excited and energized at the end of those than I am at the things where I've done based off of a headline that I think will be popular.
Right. That's so true. And I think we should actually set the stage. Well, I forgot to do this. Set the stage on where we're at. So, for those who don't know, started this podcast 6 years ago. We're 822 episodes in. I think we've done something like 115 million downloads of the podcast. And the entire podcast is based off of a stick, which is four words. It's an empire built on four words. Dude, have you seen this? And that's it. And then it's basically Sam saying that to me and I'm like, no, what is it? And he tells me something that kind of gets me excited, blows my mind. And then I try to do the same for them. And it's a giving contest where me and you sit here and we try to do that. That's how I see it. Six years into having a podcast, we are basically a media company. We have never had a social media person. I didn't even know that we had like social media.
You don't know how many times somebody from HubSpot has asked me like, "Hey, does anybody have the Twitter login?" Hey, can you — like Cassie yesterday was asking, she's like, "Hey, there's like a LinkedIn page. Do you know who made that?" I was like, "I have no idea. I didn't even know it existed." We've got like an Instagram account that for years nobody had the password to. We had to like request like a reset. Yeah, we're pretty comically like cartoonishly bad at some of these things.
Hey, so when I was prepping for this meeting, I put all of our MFM numbers, our competitors, our goals into a Claude prompt, and it gave me a 60-day action plan for growing our channels. I want to give it away to you as well. So, if you head to the show notes below, drop your email, we'll send you the prompt that you can use to grow your platforms as well.
Sean, what do you want to do? Are there any new initiatives that you want to do this year in the next 12 months? Is there anything you want to do? You don't want to do?
I think most of the things are things I don't want to do. Meaning I could come up with a list of like 30 possible things, but I think the real question is like what are the one or two things that might actually change things for the better? The one I wrote right now is I think our core product is actually pretty good. I think I would like listening to this podcast and that's a good test. I don't know if I would listen to the podcast by default because I might not even know it exists or know what's in it, you know, what would hook me in to doing it in the first place. And ironically, like some of the things that would hook me in might be like a bigger name guest that I'm curious to hear what this person has to say about this or oh, there's an interview with this person. I haven't seen what that person is saying or the topic they say is going to be interesting. But that isn't exactly what the main podcast is or it doesn't give me like a feel for what the next episode might be totally different than what that one was. For example, it seems like the main way that podcasts work today is you have the loyal listeners and then you have the samplers. And the samplers are basically clips that you put in places where people already are that give somebody a bite-size taste of what the real podcast is like. So, for example, I love this podcast, Basement Yard. I've never even listened to a full episode of it, but I've watched probably 200 clips. And if you tell me, what do you think about that podcast? Oh my god, I love those guys. That podcast is amazing. Never even listen to it, right? But I've listened to so many clips that I feel like I know those guys. I feel like I know the show. And every one of the clips gives me the same feeling most importantly, right? Like it's not like one is a really deep intellectual thing and the other one's funny. No, every clip is hilarious. I think those guys are hilarious. They seem super likable. Those guys are awesome and that show is funny. If I ever wanted a funny show, like that's where I would go. And so I don't think we're doing a good job of giving out the samples of what's in MFM to give people that frame break or give people that inspiration or give people that story or the banter, whatever, in a good enough way where people already are. So on I think a lot of our communities on X, for example, and they can do amazing things like I was on Christmas.
What do you want? You want 10 or 20 clips a day, which is fine. That sounds like a combative.
I don't think that's probably too high. Let's take a normal episode in an hour.
The challenge would be how do you take three to four moments from that podcast that are like MFM in a shot version and give that to people and architect those clips in a way that you, me and you would want to share because oh yeah, that was a great bit that we talked about. It's edited tightly enough where people would understand what it is right away and they would be hooked and they would get the payoff. And if we do that and we share it where people already are consistently, I think that's the number one thing that we don't do a good job of. That seems to be the smart thing that every other podcaster does. Like I was on Chris Williamson's podcast. We did an episode. I thought the episode was fine, like good. You know, if you looked at his YouTube channel, it wasn't like a 10x outlier. It was probably on the lower side of his normal episodes. But for 3 weeks, his team has just been clipping from that episode. Little stories, little nuggets from that episode. He put one up on X and Elon replied to some story I told on there. That same thing could have happened maybe 20 times from MFM and it doesn't happen and you just don't — it's like the dog's not barking. We don't know what we're missing because it's not obvious. It's invisible to us.
Okay, that sounds great. That's a great idea.
Awesome clips posted on social media where people already are. Instagram. Yep.
Is this the My First Million first? The viral one I'm going off.
Wow. He's pretty quick to act there. The dad instincts kicked in.
How do we go viral? What if Sam's apartment catches fire during the episode and saves.
I think we should make this more meeting-like. What do you think, Sean? You're saying it's boring as an episode or what are you saying?
You're so different in strategy meetings.
You're being podcast, Sean.
I wasn't aware of that, but you're probably right. What's the main difference?
You're more — you're not harsher, but you're just more like blunt and do more.
Wait, hang on. Hang on. This is.
You're more of a dick. Leave this in, too. This is great.
Okay. Yeah, just make it more how we talk when we're talking and.
All right. Can you give an impression of how I am off podcast when we're doing strategy, whenever we're talking about what we should do or not do?
All right. What's not working?
Why are we doing this? This is stupid.
Someone can do something that doesn't suck.
Yeah, we're doing three things. Like, why aren't we doing that?
Sean chastised someone on the team and he gave his answer. He goes, "That's a stupid answer. Give a better answer."
Okay, but his last point is good. Basically, we do need more clips. We need him to be on X and we need to be on Instagram. You know what? One of the things that we grew most from was when we made this bounty where we just said we're going to give five grand to the person who clips the most that we like and we got 20 million impressions in one month, the first month, which interestingly there's all these things called clipper armies now. That was like one of the first examples of doing that and we didn't even know what we were doing and it was incredibly successful.
We stumbled ass backwards into that where we were just like hey what if we — honestly by the way the reason we did that we didn't trust ourselves to be doing a good job of this. It's like I don't think our own team is going to do a good job of this. How about the crowd? Anybody who does this will give you a prize. And two very interesting things happened. First it was awesome. We got so much spread from it. The second, the guy who had the most viral clips ended up creating a company doing short form content, sold it to Morning Brew and like, you know, had the sort of successful business come out of the whole thing. And then, by the way, in hilarious news, we then immediately stopped doing what was working, forgot about it, and haven't talked about it since then until today.
So, my opinion is we should a on our internal team, we should post way more on all platforms, and b we should do another one of those things, and we could either do the exact same thing or we could just pay a CPM. So, for example, if you have a video that gets 100,000 views, you get — I don't know what the going rates are, but I think it's cheap. I think it's like a dollar per thousand views. Something like that. But basically, it's like, all right, you got 100,000 views, you get a grand or I can't do the math, but you guys understand what I'm saying.
So, Ari told me that I should be more blunt and direct as I am in not this podcast format. So, I'll do that. Cassie, welcome to the team. You have lots of good ideas about the community and this and that. Here's what we want to do. In the next 90 days, I need you to raise a Clipper army. Get this going. And we should, you know, you have 24 hours to basically set a target. That makes sense. Like, you pick your goal. But what we fundamentally are trying to do is copy a working playbook that, you know, has worked for everyone from Andrew Tate to, you know, whoever else, you know, on the clipping side. And we want to use money to incentivize these like 16 to 22 year old kids who are just awesome at editing and making clips to post clips about our stuff on social. Not on our own brand account necessarily. We'll take the best and we'll put it there, but we want to set a very aggressive stretch goal and aggressively raise this army of clippers and we'll do that for 90 days and then we'll check in at the end of the 90 days and decide whether we continue or not. You could be basically stupidly aggressive for 90 days so we get a clear answer versus tiptoeing into it and then we won't really know in 90 days because oh we're just getting started. We haven't really found out yet. Like go all out. Spend more money than you think you need. Be a little bit looser with the controls about it and go for more scale. And let's see what happens.
Okay. So in my opinion, big rock one, Clipper army.
Um, okay. Let me give you a couple. One thing that I don't know 100% Sean if I want to do it, but we should consider it. We've been talking about events for forever. I think I would be open to like a two or three venue tour. I would want it to make — I would have to figure out if family can come or not and if we can make that happen. But I would be open. But the shtick that we have needs to be easy because, and I don't mean easy like in a lazy way, but easy where we could kick ass at it because performing in front of 2,000 people like we have before. It's kind of hard to make it entertaining. And I've been to a lot of live podcast tapings with a lot of people, almost all of them suck. And so we would have to like really hone in on a format. So I would say I would be open to an event. But let me give you a few more ideas.
Wait, hang on. Before we do that, let's stick to events. Like what would Sean — what would you do if it was worth driving an hour for? What would you do?
I think okay here's my interest in an event. I don't want to do an event for money. I don't want to do an event for the ego hit. I got that. You know for the record.
You would like to get paid for it.
Sure. Sure. Making money is fine, but that wouldn't be the motivation to do it. Same thing with like it's awesome to walk into like a theater or an arena or whatever the thing is and be like wow all these people are here for us. This is awesome. And like there's a line of people trying to take selfies and like showing my wife like look it's real like this is a thing and like yeah like you know my kids do is this am I cool to you yet? And they're like no can we go? So that wouldn't be the main motivation. My only motivation with an event is I want to know who the top 1% of MFM listeners are. And this is an extremely selfish request which is over time actually not through me but through my business partner Ben Levy. People go to Ben and they're just like dude I love MFM. So he'll be like, "Oh, you know this the founder of that really cool thing we eat, that place we go, that product we use. Yeah, he loves MFM." And then I get to meet him and text. I'm like, "It's insane that we don't know who the most interesting listeners are. That's who I want to do the event with and for." And just purely out of selfishness because I want to meet them. And also, it'd be cool, I think, if they met each other. And I think that would just be the fun version of doing an event that I'm most interested in. So if we can figure out what I call the MFM 1% event, that's what I want to do.
Okay, got it. So 1% means like a hundred and that most interesting. So that means curated.
That means okay, so you're thinking like hundreds or dozens, 150 curated people and let's make it an awesome retreat, hangout, whatever. Let's invite some friends of the pod who are guests like let's get Andrew and Steph Smith. Let's get other people that they would also want to meet. But again, like if you curate it, to me, that's a room I want to be in because I know I would have a fun time. I could in one day meet a bunch of awesome people who are like-minded, who are fans of the show. That would be the no stress versus get on stage like travel somewhere already bad. Get on stage, have to perform like some live show for what, you know, I'm sure what do I want out of that? I don't really want anything out of that. Here's another version that I find interesting. So I like always brainstorming like what's the opposite? So what's the opposite of the live tour the big show?
And my brain went to Tiny Desk. So you know like the NPR Tiny Desk series that they created on YouTube.
Like the vibe is immaculate. It's cool because it's kind of small and intimate rather than mega mega.
And you get to see the artist cook. And so I actually would be curious like if we did our version of Tiny Desk. So you've seen like Hormozi does a lot of these where he's doing his like workshops and somebody stands up and says, "I have this problem. I'm this guy, you know, here's my business. Here's what I do." Blah, blah, blah. And he's supposed to give him the right answer as the kind of guru on the stage. And it's good, but it's very like a bit sterile, right? Like the vibe of it is like we're in a cold conference room and you know, we're here for some tactics, whereas Tiny Desk has like a different aura to it, a different vibe to it. So if we had a cool venue that was like almost like compact and we had 20 people who are you know entrepreneurs, whatever people who listen to the podcast who are entrepreneurial and then we just kind of spitball with them. Like I think both me and you are pretty good at doing this with people like I've done this at a couple of events where I got paid to go do this talk and I just on the drive there I just threw out my deck and I was like you know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to stand up and be like, "Who's got a business? You're here to get better and improve your business." Like, you want some value out of this? Tell me what you're doing. Tell me your biggest problem. Let me try to help you right here on the spot. And I did that with like 20 people. And I felt like a magician because you get to do a magic trick of like they're stuck and you get them unstuck. Which talk are you referring to? The Mercury one?
Because I watched that. That was good. Okay.
So me and you doing that together, I think would be pretty fire.
Yeah, I agree. That could be cool. We could have like a cool set. We do one in New York, we do one in San Francisco, we do one in wherever else and we take our family, we hang and you know it's like a curated event, but that becomes the trick is the live event is an experience, but really it's the content you create off that meaning like what Hormozi is doing is pretty smart, right? Like he chops that up into a thousand question and answer clips where somebody has a problem and then he helps them solve it and then they're like, "Wow, thank you so much — oh my god, yeah, you're right." That becomes like good clip content. And so I think for us, we could do that. And I think it would be pretty easy for us to do. Much easier than like going on stage and like performing comedy or essentially like live entertainment.
I'm more interested in that than like hanging out with really successful people. Like I for some reason I don't love like hanging out with like ballers in these type of settings because a I don't feel like googling everyone in advance and seeing if they're on the Epstein list, but also it just feels like a pissing match. And I just like being with like the nobodies. But yeah, I'm interested in that.
Okay, Bernie Sanders of business over here. I'm like, who's the guy Mitt Romney who was like, I don't like poor people. Whatever.
Okay, so maybe we do different events. You do the everybody event in venue A and I'll be with all the cool, successful people in venue B. It would be great. It's something for everyone. Something I want to do less of. A few things I want to do less of. Do you like doing solo episodes? I hate doing solo episodes. I hate recording to and like looking at a bare screen. Do you? I don't mind it. Sometimes I like to teach if I have something, but well, there's two types of solo. One is solo just talking to the camera. The other is like when there's a guest in New York and it makes sense for you to hang out with them in person and do the in-person pod and I'm not there or vice versa.
I'm not like those either. I find those to be way less fun because I'm like, "Oh, okay. This feels a little bit like work, but when we do them together, it feels more fun."
It feels way more fun because it feels like it's sort of like whenever you're around brothers and they egg each other on mentality. I don't love solo interviews or occasionally if it's someone who I know that you don't like or you don't care about their topic but it's super interesting to me. I'm like all right I would like the solo time just to go really deep on this one thing. But in general, I prefer duo versus solo for both interviews and talking about stuff.
Me too. The only caveat would be there is something cool about in person. You pick up so much more than just doing a remote podcast where they pop on, they pop off at the end of the hour and there's not a lot in between. So I think hanging out in person is pretty cool. But I think the production value I do like — I prefer to watch podcasts that are like that when people are together versus when they're doing a Zoom. And then lastly, like sometime, you know, I like — you were pretty sacred about like what times you're going to record. Whereas I'm like, you know, Ari, if you ask me like, "Hey, this person wants to record on the moon at 2 a.m." I'm like, "Yeah, that's cool." Like, right? Like, have I ever said no? I'm basically like, "Yeah, sure. What does it matter to me if it's 9:00 a.m. or 9:00 p.m.?" Like, I don't really care. Whereas, I think Sam for you, you're like, "That throws my whole day off. I have a more structured day." Yeah, I think that's the only other times where we do solo is where you can't make it.
What do you guys feel about newsletter? I know Sean, you both Sean and Sam have experience in this realm, but curious what your thoughts are on a branded newsletter, too.
There has to be some type of way. Yes. Interesting. There has to be some type of way where it doesn't become a liability and it only becomes an asset or at least is a liability a small amount of times because the problem with a — because neither of us have time to write it. The problem with saying yes to that is that you're going to say something dumb, you're going to say something it doesn't fit our taste or it's just going to be factually incorrect. And if one of those three things happens and it hurts our reputation, to me I go never do it again. And so as long as we could derisk it, which it will never be 100%, but as long as there's some type of trust there, it is interesting, but that's a huge thing to solve for, right?
Yeah. Well, what to you guys would be interesting, too. Like, what would you read or what newsletters do you currently read that you're like, "Hey, this is something we'd want to pull from or at least get inspired by."
Just takeaways from our episodes. Like, I want that.
Yeah. Exactly. Just like I don't want to listen to every single — like there's so many episodes that we have done where I'm like I need a reminder of that we have 850 just pull out like cool learnings.
Yeah. I think basically if it's here's what we just did here's who's coming up and of the just did you know here's like the three or four most interesting stories just in plain speak like oh you know he shared the numbers of how fast they grew. It turns out year one was
This year two was this. Year three was this. No gatekeeping, like just here's the best stuff. If you don't have time, like just great. Here's this, here's a quick summary, but like that would make me want to go listen or watch an episode. And then if I knew, oh, Thursday, they have this person coming on. That's cool. And then if there was like a little just kind of bullet point section where we can be like, oh yeah, like check this out. Sam went viral for this. We're doing this thing. Check out this product we bought. Like, you know, whatever. I'm cool with like a little bit of extra so it's not purely an AI summary of like the episode. I think that would be great and I would be happy to like do the work on this and not write it myself but like Diego who's my head of content was my lead writer for Milk Road. So like you know I basically trained him how to write my style. He did it for two years for Milk Road and was excellent. You know he's really really good at this. That's a lift that like I think I could have Diego take on that would be worth it if we could drive enough people to it. I think right now there's this conflict which is we tell people hey go to HubSpot to go get this like offer. So then that's where they would go. So this would need to become the main place we're directing people to. And I think, by the way, like way more people would subscribe because they would know like, oh, I'm just going to be getting value from this all the time. That's a great idea that again, don't know if we want to do. Have you guys seen or Sam, do you remember when they were doing those like river community meetup type things?
