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How to use your "useless” hobby to make money

Pick one hobby or local obsession and make it specific enough that you can own a tiny category. Today, write a one-sentence positioning statement in the form: “I help [specific people] experience [specific interest] in [distinctive way].” Then design one paid, high-energy experience around it—a tour

57m
My First Million

Key Takeaway

Pick one hobby or local obsession and make it specific enough that you can own a tiny category. Today, write a one-sentence positioning statement in the form: “I help [specific people] experience [specific interest] in [distinctive way].” Then design one paid, high-energy experience around it—a tour, class, consultation, or event—and document it as short-form content. Your enthusiasm and unusual point of view are assets, not distractions.

Episode Overview

The hosts explore how deeply personal, seemingly niche interests can become durable businesses when paired with distinctive positioning, contagious enthusiasm, and media. They discuss perfume tours, museum tours, food and mafia experiences, the Equine Network, and how creators can use real-world services as raw material for scalable content and brands.

Key Insights

Aim to Be the Only, Not Merely the Best

Rather than competing in a broad category, remove the generic elements until your offer becomes recognizably yours. Asia Grant is positioned not as another perfume seller, but as a personalized New York City perfume-tour guide—a market of one.

Enthusiasm Can Be a Business Moat

Customers respond to an operator whose genuine fascination makes an unfamiliar subject feel exciting. The hosts argue that passion for a niche—perfume, museums, sushi, roping, or horse ownership—can create trust and differentiation that are difficult to copy.

Find a Repeatable Content Format

Don’t wait for a random viral moment; test a repeatable “show mechanic” with a clear hook and payoff. For a perfume guide, the hosts suggest a short makeover-style video in which a stranger is matched with a signature scent.

Use the Experience to Produce the Media

In-person tours and workshops are constrained by time, but they can become powerful inputs for a larger online brand. The hosts recommend treating participants and real-world experiences as content that builds audience, authority, and more scalable revenue streams.

Niche Down Until the Economics Become Visible

The Equine Network illustrates how a small but intensely committed audience can support multiple businesses: media, roadside assistance, fly control, events, and streaming. A niche becomes valuable when its members have recurring, high-stakes needs and strong willingness to spend.

Frameworks or Models

Personal Monopoly

1. Identify the interest or capability you can speak about with unusual depth. 2. Claim a specific association in people’s minds through repeated content and offers. 3. Keep adding distinctive layers—expertise, format, community, and brand—until competitors cannot easily substitute for you.

Content Is the Business, Not the Tour

1. Run a real-world service, event, or experience. 2. Treat its participants, stories, and outcomes as material for compelling content. 3. Publish that content to build an audience and brand. 4. Use the expanded brand to create revenue beyond the time-limited service itself.

Sell the Horseback Riding, Not the Saddle

1. Identify the larger identity, lifestyle, or desired outcome surrounding your product. 2. Market that aspiration instead of leading with product features. 3. Position the product as the practical tool that helps customers participate in or achieve that outcome.

Notable Quotes

"It's a great example of you don't want to be the best, you want to be the only."

— Shaan Puri

"That mentality is how you become the best because you continue to refine and refine and whittle away the generic parts of what you do until it's really the thing that you do well."

— Shaan Puri

"I think that enthusiasm can be a moat in a business."

— Sam Parr

"The content is the business, not the tours. So the tours are just content."

— Shaan Puri

"When niching down doesn't work, niche down harder."

— Sam Parr

Action Items

  • 1
    Write your personal-monopoly statement

    List a hobby, your particular point of view, a location or audience, and a concrete format. Combine them into a clear category claim, such as “the local-history food walk for new residents” or “the scent stylist for founders.”

  • 2
    Pilot a paid micro-experience

    Invite 3-8 people to a paid tour, workshop, or guided session this month. Give it one memorable twist—such as an unusual theme, challenge, or selection method—that makes it more compelling than a standard version.

  • 3
    Test one repeatable short-form format

    Record 5 versions of one 30-60 second format with the same structure: a strong hook, a personalized process, and a visible payoff. Evaluate saves, comments, and inquiries rather than waiting for a single post to go viral.

  • 4
    Map the niche’s recurring problems

    Interview five enthusiasts in your niche and note what they repeatedly buy, worry about, or struggle to coordinate. Look beyond the initial experience for adjacent memberships, services, products, media, or events.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How to use your "useless” hobby to make money from My First Million. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

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. Whittle away the generic parts of what you do, 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, try 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 Garamp. 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 part of New York, this street of perfume stores. Basically, she sends out a type form in advance to everyone on the tour, and you 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 colognes to view per store. And she took us on a tour where we went to three different stores or whatever, and she showed us all this stuff.

And she's like, here's why I think you would like this thing. And she 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 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 thing was like, I'm going to show you five pieces of art that I would love to steal today.

And that small twist makes a world of difference. And I don't care about perfumes at all. But I went on this lady's tour, Asha Grants. It's contagious though, right? But it's contagious. I'm so into it. And 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? I'll take it back to the shelf, and I'll put it back. That's what I'll take. I think I'll love the scent more of the cheaper ones.

Where's the Abercrombie? 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 quirky it is. This woman turned this thing into, it's a full-time job. She makes a lot of money, I think, doing it because she does it for companies and shit. 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. Yeah, I got to mix it up.

This is good. So she's just doing this on the side for people? It's a full-time job. And I think that there's three types of customers. The first type is a private tour, which we did, which I think it's like $500. The second thing is 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 whittle away the generic parts of what you do until it's really the thing that you do well. And you do. 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 her friends and she was like, this is my friend, Jamal, I'm going to show you how I picked out his personal scent. And she went store to store to store. I don't think she has a huge following. What does she have? 15,000 followers?

Yeah, 15,000. And some of the videos do well, but they're not out of this world. I would say, I feel like you might be early to the Asia Grant train. Oh, 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 here.

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 that 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, but 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. 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. 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. Now, 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 Ben Affleck is there at this thing with you. And literally, I think Leonardo DiCaprio goes on these. He's got megastars 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 shit ton to run these things. It's not a great business business, but it is absolutely incredible content.

And so I think using the real-world business stuff as content is the smart idea. Hormozy's doing the same thing, by the way. If you see, he's got these in-person workshops, and he charges for people to come. And I'm sure that thing actually does pretty well, like probably 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, and 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. A failure. Yeah. 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 does 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. Nike famously did this with jogging. So 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 and 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've 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 $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 you have, it feels like you're in the same room together to 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 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, it's 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. Because I was like, 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 me. And this is horoscopes are better because the horoscope trend and like kind of the cold reading tarot card type of fortune teller type of shit, 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 backend 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. 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. You could write that off now. This is called being a professional. Take notes. Was I just Neo in the matrix? I just know where agent Smith was just now with that horoscopes, but better shit. Yeah. Classes and session fools.

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 the 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, Heberman, 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. Our friend, David Perel, friend of the pod, David Perel has a great phrase on this.

He calls it having a personal monopoly and a personal monopoly is when you are, you are known for something you're known. And so, you know, he was the writing guy online and he was, he taught writing courses. He always talked about writing and he has a podcast called how I write. 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, she's got that thing. Now all she has to do is just add layers and layers and layers of defensibility of, of more, 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, but 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 a hundred, $168 or something like that, almost two. dollars per tour. Oftentimes the tours were not even sanctioned. He would just get a group of eight people and just walk through. I think actually the whole time he was like, hey, I can just do this, right? And 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 100 people who were up and coming Broadway people or comedians or actors struggling creatives. And he would teach them how to do these tours. And that's what he did. And then he sold at some multiple of 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 the museum tour guide. And then, this sounds silly to use these phrases together, but he reinvented himself as the two-hour cocktail party guy.

Another thing that you think is really stupid and dumb, a two-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 copies. It'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 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. He just didn't hedge. He didn't sandbag himself. He just did what he wanted to do and like went for it. And 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? Or what was it? Mafia tours. I did it. I also did that one. Awesome. Yeah. So there's like a kind of genre of these things. 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 I, 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 tired 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, with the owner, like they even permission or he gets a reservation and he tells you like, you know, the table that we're sitting at, you know, Sammy, the bowl or wherever 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 really 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 Hampton. His name is Guy, Guy Allen. And he opened up this restaurant. We went to it in New York, a little omakase bar. It was in the like, dude, you look 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, hottest omakase ticket in New York right now. I was like, no way.

Where are we? And I walk in, the sushi is 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 in the, like, how could people, how could this have gotten hot? Like you were literally defying the laws of real estate here. The restaurant is called Sendoh Sushi. Yeah, Sendoh 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, he's a guy, just great enthusiasm for sushi. And he'd been traveling around talking about sushi on his Instagram. He had a book, like a sushi, coffee table 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, wait list, et cetera, et cetera. And what's, what's funny, by the way, when I met him, I was, 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? There's easier ways to meet Asian women. Like, not the only white guy in New York. But, 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, 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, so apparently they're doing like millions a year in DoorDash deliveries and pickups, which is like, I just never really seen that. So it's like this interesting, kind of like a ghost kitchen, like more than half the restaurant is just the back, back kitchen for delivery. But it's a, it's not like most ghost kitchens on DoorDash where you've never heard of the brand or it's like a, it's a random, like 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 Sano Sushi. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data.

So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Well, call us Dolly Parton, because that's the next subject. RIP. 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? I was like, I know the name, but I can't really tell you. Because you were like, no, no, you know Dollywood? And I was like, Dollywood?

What is 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 and did a little learning about Dolly Parton. I did not put enough respect on this woman's name. Can we do a Dolly Parton? Yes. Billion of the week? Sean, describe who Dolly Parton is or what she looks like to a non-white Midwesterner guy. Well, you know, this changes over time and age. But like, you know, she was this kind of almost larger than life character, big blonde hair, 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. And like basically like, you know, she created the brand, the iconic look, which was very distinct.

And like, 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, it 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 that you like distinctiveness matters a lot more than sort of the objective attractiveness of about somebody. Yeah. So what do you know about her?

For the 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 five 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.

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 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's she kind of passed away with a net worth over five hundred million dollars, 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 on any 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're like, I remember meeting her and I went and called my friends. I think I actually met an angel like, you know, like just like these 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, incredible things that she did. I was pretty inspired by some of this. 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 is I will always love you by Whitney Houston. Yeah, it's actually a great story around. Do you know the full story of this? No, no. Okay, so two crazy things about this one. She wrote, I will always love you and Jolene in the same night.

Oh, wow. Which is one of those like, there's these admit this happens many times. It's like these, these, you know, days where decades happen type of thing where people get this creative streak and they just go. And this is she's a she's a good example of one of these. The second thing is she did sing the song. So, so one of the things that happened was when she went out to go try to be a artist, she leaves the home, she's going to go try to make 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, try 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, alright, 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're 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, alright, I'll let you go. If you record this song, I want a piece of the action of this song. And so she and 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 breakdown normally is of the song creator versus the artist who sings it.

And Elvis was like, 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 bet on herself. 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, I'm like, it's like hearing the song for the first time. Like what Whitney did with it was next level.

But because she owned it, she got royalties on every time that song plays, which if anyone's been in the world, it 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, she took $10 million that she made of that in the 90s, reinvested it 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 gonna tell you something. What else? Yeah, tell me everything. Okay, so she's pretty famous for some of the philanthropy she did in Tennessee.

So her dad could not read or write. And she always saw how that kind 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? 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 gonna 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. And 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, give me 500 bucks if you graduate. And it worked.

Dude, have you ever, there's all these studies going on right now about the stimmy checks, stimulus checks, and turns out that just giving poor people money is probably better than a huge percentage of charities where they're like, in order to help young single moms who are poor, I'm gonna help you get a job, I'm gonna help you, you gotta go through this program, or I'll just give you two grand. They have found that because it lacks administrative costs and it's just, here's this money, and there's a larger percentage of time, it just gets the desired outcome.

And they asked her, they were like, 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 a hysterectomy when she was in her 30s, and so she couldn't have kids. But 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 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 gonna go help all these kids instead. And I just thought that was kind of amazing. You're this evolution of Sean from not knowing who she is to being her biggest fan, I find to be incredibly endearing. This is like watching puppies play. Are you having this reaction in you?

Because 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 then years later, they're like, dude, have you seen the show? I love the show. I'm like, I told you about the show. And I get infuriated. And I'm just like, I need to assert my claim to the thing. Are you feeling that? No, I can't take that. Because frankly, at this point, you probably know more about her than I do.

I grew up listening to her, and I lived in Nashville. And in Nashville, she was always like a mini mayor. She's always been the shit forever. But now you actually know the facts. You're like a tourist who knows how tall the tallest building is. So true, so true. So true, yeah, I'm doing the tourist thing where I got the pamphlet and the guide, and I can tell you more about it 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 a tribute, and I scrolled one tweet, and the Democratic Socialists had a tribute. And that never happens. Didn't happen when the Queen died, Michael Jackson. Nobody gets that side. 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 shit, and Eminem was saying it, and Taylor Swift was saying it, but they all didn't say it generically. They had a personal story of some way in which she did a really good thing for them somewhere along the road.

There was this great story that was like, she lost some Grammy, some musical award to Three 6 Mafia. And then they were like, Dolly, bummer on the lost, Three 6 Mafia is kind of, 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 that. I'm gonna go home and listen. Have you, 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 was married to the same guy forever, and seemed like a pretty good person all around, whereas Martha's a little bit more sharky. But she was well-respected by all these people, but she also, nine to five, if I'm going off memory, so I could be wrong here, but she was regarded as definitely like a woman's right advocate. The movie, you mean? Well, the song was written for the movie. Oh, so good story about the movie, too. Here's another fun fact, that earned another respect point in my book.

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 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 wanna do a good job, but like, you know, they just kinda 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 because she wanted to be so prepared to do a good job, and that's how she showed up, and it kinda blew everybody away on the set because they were like, wait, why does Dolly know every, she knows where the scene changes, and she knows where the cut is gonna 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, we all love an unavailable queen, and here she was. She was like, you know, nobody knows her phone number. If you wanna 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 you could find a photo of him. Yeah, that's crazy. 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's got a masculine scent too, huh?

Yeah, yeah. 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 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.

She's awesome, man. 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 that I could tell you. As it happens all the time, coincidentally, it's all gonna converge. We're gonna 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 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. Could be a bull. No balls, though. Yeah. Roping is when the steer goes into the area, and then two guys have to quickly rope it. Like, you know, you gotta tie it down. 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 a hillbilly, and they assume I know these things, but I don't actually know.

Right, it's cosplay. Yeah, it's cosplay. Dresses like a cowboy, but lives in a fancy New York City apartment. Yeah. I've been to the rodeo, but sort of like seeing a Mardi Gras parade. Like, I can't tell you anything that's actually going on. And so- Okay, roping, what you got? But it's a sport because it's done by working-class dudes. It's a little bit like golfing used to be. It was like, enthusiasts were into it, but it's not much of a sport in terms of professionalism and being a big thing on TV, although it is, it's still quite niche.

Well, in the early 2000s, there was this guy, these two guys named Andy and Tom, and they started a company. I believe it was called Active Interest Media. And they started buying these niche magazines. I think they bought one on sailing. They bought one on a couple other things. And eventually, they kind of came to this conclusion that there's this niche sport or people who care about horses, like they love horses, particularly like the cowboy shit, like roping. And they're like, this might be a thing.

And so they start this thing called the Equine Network. And they start launching magazines where they are appealing to horse owners, which is kind of like laughable, if you think about it. Not laughable to the people who are into it, but laughable if I'm like, you're gonna create a big business for people who own horses? Like, that doesn't sound that big or interesting. And they turn it into a magazine. Magazines start going down. They turn it into a website where they only are getting like 600,000 monthly uniques.

Like, it's pretty niche and small. But what they noticed was that there's this one company that was advertising on their website. And it was basically the AAA for horse trailers. So if you're driving, like my aunt and uncle, by the way, are professional cowboys. My cousin was a professional bull rider. My aunt and uncle own the bulls that they are paid to bring to different rodeos. And it's called bucking bulls, that's what they call it. They're like, how hard can your bull buck? You get paid on that.

But there's this whole subculture of people who are bringing horses on trailers. And when their trailer breaks down, they need a very particular type of like AA person. AA, triple A. Triple A. Yeah. AA. Big overlap though. Yeah. It's like a Canadian talking about alcohol anonymous. AA. Anyways, they realized that this business is like, this is kind of interesting. And they called a guy, they're like, how do you grow this thing? And they're like, I don't really. I just advertise with you. That's how I've gotten all my customers.

And they're like, bingo. They're like, when niching down doesn't work, niche down harder. Okay, go. So then. Yeah, and they did that. And they bought this business for like next to nothing and they've grown it. And they were like, bingo. We got the, we got this a great crazy idea where they had this like small website for horse owners, but they buy and start every business under the sun for this. And so they own the triple A for horses. They own a fly control business that has 4,500 people spending something like 300, sorry, 45,000 people spending like $300 a year.

And they like send you stuff to keep flies off your horse. They now own the largest roping event in the country and they own all these other businesses. And I just saw that they sold. They sold for $300 million, I think like six months ago. And now the guys who were previously, I believe the president and CEO of WWE are now helping run this business because they think that this is gonna be like the next big entertainment business, particularly roping. They're like 401ks for your horses, they do everything.

Well, they have Ride TV, which is a $200 a year streaming network where you can watch the best roping events. They have a barrel racing event. They have a jumping event. They created software. How do you know this? Where did this come from? That's what I do. She has King Mozart where the notes come from. Yeah, I just, I'm interested. I've always been interested in media and I saw this business and the founder and CEO, he said they do $85 million a year in revenue with high 20s profit margins.

They only have 200 employees. I saw they just got bought for $300 million. And I saw that the WWE guys, I forget their names, who they are. I saw that they are now on the boards and they're like are leading the business. And I'm like, what is going on? And then coincidentally, we have a guy in Hampton who's also named Sam. And he built software to help horse owners like aggregate stuff. And I had kind of heard of this business and he was like, dude, you gotta check out the horse world.

It's way bigger than anyone realizes. And he's like, these people who own horses, they will go broke, they will not pay their rent before they give up their horse and their horse's rent. Because horses cost like 30 Gs a year to maintain. And he's like, they are so passionate. I've never seen such a crazy thing. So anyway, that's how I got into the horse world. But pretty interesting, right? Dude, have you ever been on equine.com? Yeah, yeah. I could literally just buy a horse right now.

I don't think that's theirs, is it? I don't know, but there's a horse called Houdini's Bride and right now the bid is $1. He's in New York, he's a thoroughbred. But like, I don't know, take a look at Houdini's Bride. He doesn't look like a thoroughbred to me. Go to equinenetwork.com. It's pretty good. Hold on, I don't want to lose my cart as I check out here. Go to equinenetwork.com. Look at this website. It looks like they got the two businesses you talked about in terms of their product.

Fly Control and Roadside Assistance. EQN Sports Desk, your source for equine sports news. In case you needed one. Dude, TBPN for horses, let's go. You know what I think is actually gonna be a huge thing? Peptide for horses. Oh yeah, peptide for anything. Peptide for anything, peptide for babies. I haven't heard one peptide for X that I haven't liked. Peptide for dogs, I was like instantly like, hey, who's doing that, I need to invest in that. Peptide for men, peptides for women, peptides for horses, sure, why not?

Well, that's my story on the Equine Network. This is just like one of those Sam specials where I just want to show you something that I didn't think you knew about and hopefully awe you. Did I awe you? You awed me. You don't seem awed. It's sort of like a silent fart, it's like an inner awe. Like there's like a deep awe. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already, I use Mercury for all of my businesses.

I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards.

One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a FinTech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through. Choice Financial Group, and column NA, members FDIC. Can I give you a little quick hitter at the end here? Yeah. Did you hear about LeBron James' brilliant business move?

Which one? No. Great answer. LeBron did something very, very interesting that I hadn't really heard of any athlete doing. So, I don't know if you know, the Lakers owner got in a bunch of trouble and had to flip the team recently, and it was like this whole thing. Well, in that, people started looking into like, well, what is his firm, Guggenheim, like these advisors, investor bank type shit, what have they been helping with? And one of the things they found was this thing called the LeBron James.

Wait, hold on, you're missing something out. The guy who owns the Lakers is rich because he owns a financial firm called Guggenheim. Is that right? He has like Guggenheim, but then he owns insurance companies. And why he's in trouble is because the insurance companies have a float. You can invest the float. That's what Buffett and others have been doing for a long time. But there's a caveat, you can't invest the float in companies you also own. And he had reported like, yeah, like I got a little bit of, yeah, like whatever, 1%, or something like some small number, like a billion dollars of related party assets.

And then they looked into it, and it was more like $20 billion. It was like way above the threshold. And therefore- And this is a legal thing. It's a, therefore, yeah, like there was like a whistleblower, and it was like, so now he's in trouble, and his insurance company needs to sell related party assets that they had used the money for to get back in good standing. And so he had to sell the Lakers. He's selling like his stake in Chelsea or something like that. Whatever, whatever team he owns.

Which is interesting, he sold the team to a guy who got rich partially because of an insurance company because he wanted the float, Josh Kushner. Yeah, yeah, exactly, correct. And so he, anyway, so that's what's going on there. So they find this thing about LeBron. And so what's the LeBron story? Okay, so here's the short story. I wanted the name of it. It's called King James Funding. People find this LLC, King James Funding. What is that? And why did it get $300 million in this bond offering, and this like highly rated credit bond?

So here's what happened. LeBron, when he was, just many years ago, probably it was 2018. LeBron James, while he's in the Cavs, decides to create a bond offering against his Nike contract. So I don't know if you know, but LeBron has a lifetime contract with Nike. And so just like Jordan is still selling shoes, even after his career, LeBron has a deal with Nike to keep using LeBron's name and likeness to sell products. And LeBron realized, LeBron and his team, and then actually his money manager, who's the same money manager for, wealth manager for Beyonce and a few others, came up with a very smart idea, which was they'd used the old Bowie bond thing.

I don't know if you know David Bowie. David Bowie, the musician, created something called the Bowie bond back in the day and raised like $50 million, selling his like future music catalog. It was like this really innovative way to pull down funding. But it was a bond, so he wasn't selling it. He was getting money up front and he would pay, I don't know what, a 7% loan. And people thought that was a... Exactly. So what LeBron did was LeBron created a bond offering. And it's a 30 year bond or 31 year bond with like a sub 5% coupon, right?

So he basically owes 5% interest, but he got $300 million up front. Now the beauty of this is debt, when you get debt or a loan, it's taxed. So he gets 300 million of cash now, doesn't have to wait for this lifetime contract. He doesn't pay tax on the 300 million, so he gets 300 million outright that he can use to like invest or do other things. And it's secured by this Nike contract, but he still owns the upside of the Nike contract. It's not like he sold the asset.

He just took a loan against it. So he still will make more than that off the Nike contract. How is this different than factoring? Or like when you get a loan against your receivables? It's not, right? I think it's like technically a little bit different, right? So in a bond offering, like other people can participate. So like several firms participated in this bond offering. It was rated by a credit agency who kind of like looked at it and said, this is like, this is better than the U.S.

Treasury, you know, like this thing will pay out. And so, you know, he did that. And he, unlike factoring, you know, he didn't like take the whole contract and basically like say, yeah, give me X upfront. And you keep, like when you factor, let's say a million dollar contract, you might take 900,000, they get to keep 100,000. Okay. Because that's the VIG for giving the money upfront. He still gets his whole thing. He just has to pay this loan down over time. And there was still some risk.

Like if he did something inappropriate or whatever, like Nike could have, you know, taken the contract away. But that's okay. So that's crazy. That's interesting. Good for LeBron. Kind of amazing. And this is only on his off-court income. It's not on his like actual basketball contracts at all. And so this was like just his endorsement deals and all that stuff. It's pretty brilliant. You know, props to LeBron for a pretty badass business move. But what about Guggenheim? How did that come into play? Guggenheim has like an advisory practice.

So when they traced it, they were like, great. So these different, like, you know, what were the names of the companies that bought it, right? It was like, who bought it? It was like Midland National Life and North American Life and Health. Like they're like two Midwestern life insurance companies were buying it, but they were advised by an arm of Guggenheim. And so that's just how it got, it's not like LeBron is entangled in this. It's just, they just found it because a lot of people were looking into like- And it sounds like it's all very circular.

You know, he wasn't even on the Lakers then. And like, you know, maybe there was a relationship and maybe that's why he went. I don't know all that, but like definitely, definitely very interesting. Not quite Kawhi Leonard interesting, but definitely interesting. There's a funny meme going on right now in the Instagram space of like, I guess there's a, there must be a channel or something, but it's popular now for athletes to talk about how much money they made. But they're like, look, I made a hundred million dollars, but that's not as much as you think.

And they like break it down. They're like, and then now there's like a competition to where it's like, but I still slept on an air mattress or like, but I, you know, like, but I still like only wore one sock. Like, it's like, it's so like, or they're like, have you noticed this? Like, this is, we got to like, I don't know if this is actually a meme, but I'm kind of pretending that it needs to be. PR poison is basically saying a hundred million dollars isn't as much as people think.

So it's like, you first dig a huge hole and then to get out of the hole, you're like, but I only wore the one sock. It's like, you have to do the like really likable, like I'm just so grounded, you know, type of thing at the end to try to dig yourself out of this hole of a hundred million isn't as much as people think. Yeah, I just like, again, I'm trying to say we have to buy stock in this potential meme. It hasn't happened yet, but I'm noticing that like, I'm seeing all these athletes, like I only made this much money, enter huge sum of money.

But when you think about it, it actually, you got to do this tax, you got to pay your guy, you got to get your mom a house, you got to do this. So I really only netted with enter also big number. And therefore I had to do enter an extreme frugal thing that potentially may or may not is that frugal. Right, right, right. Yeah. Like LeBron famously, like he doesn't turn on roaming when they go play the Raptors in Canada. He's like, no, I'm good. Like if I got wifi, I got it.

If not, I'm not. And he's got like Spotify with ads still. It's like, dude, geez. There's another version to this. I think like you could watch the pendulum swing in culture. And so there was like a big swing for a long time, which was like flashiness. So like the cool thing to do was to ball out, whether it's the cars, the houses, the clothes, the chains, the grills, whatever it was. And now I think it's swinging back the other way where like you see the athletes bragging, like I didn't even touch my NBA contract.

I live off my shoe deal. My NBA contract goes into this and that's compounding. And I own 42 gas stations. And can I tell you about cap rates? And they're going like Saeed Balki on their ass and they're like on the other side of the spectrum. And I think it's gonna be cool to be fiscally responsible. It seems like that's the way that the culture has shifted. And that's now the brag. And before that's the flex. Before the flex was look at like the hydraulics on my car type shit.

Yeah, well, it's because all these guys, current and ex players have podcasts now. And like the best clips, the ones that go most viral are when they talk about money and therefore like sophisticated or savvy or just like slightly responsible moves and discussions are becoming the viral things. And therefore it's becoming more popular to actually be that. Well, I think LeBron gets a lot of credit in this. LeBron did a bunch of things that most guys don't do. So he turned down McDonald's and Coca-Cola early on.

And why one of the reasons why was they basically discovered this pizza chain called Blaze. And they were like, look, you could do this McDonald's deal and you'll get the cash, you'll get cash every year. But we could be owners of Blaze and we could be a part of like the franchise. And if we talk about that, we use our put our muscle behind that, that might end up being worth a lot more. Magic Johnson and Shaq had done these things with franchises. So people kind of started to understand like, oh, you don't wanna be the employee, you wanna be the employer.

You don't wanna be the one getting just this marketing payment. You wanna be the owner. And like, that's the goal. And so, and similarly, like his tastes are not, like he doesn't shout about drinking Hennessy. He's like an avid wine head and will talk about wines that he loves. And it's like, almost like in some ways it looks sometimes like a little overcompensation is like, you know, it's kind of like the funny memes where he's like reading the, he's like holding a book, but it's like upside down or he's on page two.

And so they're like, what's your favorite thing from the book? And he's like, oh man, so many, so many. How can I choose? And they're like, well, just name one. He's like, oh man, one is like, I don't want to tell you about the other. There's so many that come to mind, I just can't even tell you any of them. So it's like, he kind of gets made fun of that way. But like, in a way, look, this guy grew up super poor, single mother, never met his dad type of shit.

And like to have made it, it's like, yeah, I own assets. I have wine collections. I read, I do, you know, like all the sort of hobbies of the traditionally white and wealthy. And I think like those golf, like he's on a huge golf kick right now. Is he good? He's like, okay. Actually, his son is amazing. Really? So his son who gets a lot of shit, cause he's like, you know, can't live up to his dad's basketball career. Watch one video of Bronnie James swinging at a golf club and tell me he didn't choose the wrong sport.

Smooth as butter, unbelievable golf swing. And so, you know, like, I just think there's like an interesting thing to watch where the trendsetters are, it's cool now to do the stuff that was kind of lame white guy stuff before. And now that's the cool thing to do. Dude, that's awesome. I've never been like the biggest LeBron fan. I don't pay attention to basketball, but like, obviously he's famous. He's no Dolly Parton. Yeah, but like, he doesn't do anything bad. No, it's incredible. I mean, like you can like, again, this is not a basketball guy.

Like, I guess there's a stereotype that he flops and that he, I saw the video that I don't know if it's AI or not, where Dennis Rodman, he goes, Michael Jordan's the goat and then LeBron's the other goat. Go on to another team. Wow, I was not prepared for that. That's good. He's like, I don't know if it's AI or not, but it was like potentially AI Dennis Rodman being like, Michael Jordan stayed with the same team. He won all the time. This guy like gets upset and he leaves.

Like that's right. You're not the goat. But like, he seems like pretty controversial free. He's unassailable. I mean, basically look at the history of any child actor, any child star. It's impossible to be as clean as him. And he was a star from the time he was 12, 13, 14 on the cover of magazines at 15. You know, his high school was airing his games when he was a junior in high school on ESPN. They're playing high school basketball games at this kid. And for that to have worked out.

Yeah, perfectly. That's literally like one in 8 billion. Like there's not really any, you know, go look at Macaulay Culkin and go look at like, people who had far less fame and attention and expectations as LeBron to have not just not become a screw up, but to have actually exceeded the delusional expectations is unbelievable. Yeah, I like got teary-eyed the other day because there was like an inspirational video of him playing with his son. And I'm like, that's the coolest shit ever. Like those videos or when like someone plays their first MLB game and the dad's in the crowd, like crying, I'm like, that gets me every time.

Does he have other sons or just one? Yeah, he's got another son, Bryce, who's also a basketball player. He's in college. Did he make it? He's better. So I think he has a good chance to make it. But, and then he has a daughter as well. This episode is called the boys got range. Cause frankly, we were all over the place. And also frankly, I think all of it was amazing. And frankly, it all landed. Yeah. So shout out to Frank. Shout out to everyone. That was awesome.

That's it. That's the pod. All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.