INTERVIEW | Make Money by Playing the Long Game in Business and Investing with Rufus Griscom

Summary

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Travis Makes Money Podcast – “Make Money by Playing the Long Game in Business and Investing”

Host: Travis Chappell
Guest: Rufus Griscom
Date: June 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the real stories behind entrepreneurship, business failures, major wins, and investing for the long term. Rufus Griscom—a serial entrepreneur, investor, and host of the Next Big Idea podcast—shares lessons from starting and selling digital media companies, learning from failures, and building generational wealth through unconventional strategies. Rufus and Travis explore the realities versus myths of startup success, why playing the “long game” matters, and how the purpose of money isn’t just making more, but enabling a life you truly want.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Early Entrepreneurial Spirit & First Lessons

• Rufus’s First Big Payday: Started as a ski instructor but made more as a pizza delivery driver, learning the thrill of making money for services ([01:53]).
• Early Business Failure: Launched a T-shirt company with obscure quotes—sold only 89 shirts, lost $1,500 but learned “I cannot assume that my taste is shared by the universe.” ([03:54])
  • Quote: “It only cost me $1,500, Travis, to learn that I cannot assume that my taste is shared by the universe.” — Rufus ([04:32])
• Entrepreneurial Roots: Neither parent was entrepreneurial, but Rufus had "issues with authority" and a drive to build something of his own ([02:57]).

2. Building & Failing: The Nerve.com Story

• Birth of nerve.com: Founded in 1996 in NYC, “literate smut” online magazine merging quality writing with sex and culture ([05:54]).
• Audience but No Business Model: Millions of viewers but struggled to monetize—innovative content & parties got attention, not profits ([07:19], [10:25]).
  • Quote: “People have this assumption when they see you on TV that, oh, you must be rich and powerful. And the answer was, well, I’m not rich and I’m only powerful insofar as you believe that I am.” — Rufus ([11:14])
• Pivot to Dating Tech (Spring Street Networks): Success didn’t translate into a high-value exit—sold both Nerve and Spring Street for less than their debt ([12:44]).
  • Missed a big opportunity: “Barry Diller had slammed his fist on the desk and... said, ‘Why haven’t we bought Spring Street Networks?’” ([12:44])
• Birth of Babel (Parenting Site): Spun out of Nerve. “All of my friends who invested in Nerve eventually were paid out when we sold Babel.” ([12:44])

3. The Reality of Startup Success & Survivorship Bias

• Luck vs. Skill: Media focuses on outliers like Zuckerberg, but most founders fail before they succeed ([14:14]).
  • Quote: “If your strategy involves an immense amount of luck, then it’s not a real strategy.” — Travis ([14:51])
  • Persistence matters: “If you learn from your failures and have the persistence to keep going...you’re probably going to do something that works.” — Rufus ([15:02])
• Baseball Analogy for Entrepreneurship: “If you never step up to the plate, you’re never going to hit a home run...In business, you could be putting a million points on the scoreboard.” — Travis ([15:02])

4. The Long Game: Investing For Compounding Returns

• Post-Exit Moves: After selling Babel to Disney, Rufus and family put most of the proceeds into a handful of tech stocks and leveraged real estate—against conventional advice ([16:46]).
• Learning By Doing: Early experience turned $1,000 into $100,000 in AOL stock in the 1990s; wove those lessons into bigger future bets ([18:46]).
• Tech Stock Thesis: Believes NASDAQ 100 outperforms S&P 500 due to network effects and Moore’s Law ([18:46], [22:07])
  • Quote: “The difference between an 11% and 20% annual return... In 10 years or 20 years, you’re talking about 6x, 10x more money.” — Rufus ([18:46])
• Contrarian View vs. Peers: Scott Galloway (NYU professor, podcaster) prefers S&P 500 for safety; Rufus disagrees due to ongoing tech sector advantages ([23:11]).
• Real Estate Play: Invested only in prime locations for both lifestyle and appreciating assets—believes 0.1% markets “appreciate faster than the rest.” ([23:53])
  • Leverage as a key benefit, but real estate generally not outperforming stocks unless leveraged ([25:47])

5. Next Big Idea Club: Building For Meaning, Not Just Profit

• Origins & Structure: Used lessons from Babel to create a network/platform for high-impact authors like Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, Daniel Pink ([26:00])
  • Quote: “The brands of individuals are increasingly powerful. The brands of institutions are eroding in value.” — Rufus ([26:00])
• Reality Check: “I joke that we’re running an unintentional nonprofit. It aspires to be for profit. Thus far it’s nonprofit.” ([27:57])
• Why Pursue It?: Financial independence lets you pursue what matters. “The greatest luxury is to be able to do the work you most care about.” ([28:51])
  • Hasn’t paid himself for over a year to get company to profitability ([29:47])
• Podcast Privileges: Hosted and learned from Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Brene Brown, Michael Lewis, “a lot of my intellectual heroes” ([29:47])

6. Meaning of Money & Redefining Retirement

• Money’s True Purpose: Not just to pay bills or buy luxury—enables you to focus on meaningful work, help others, and fulfill passions ([28:51])
  • Quote: “What’s the purpose of money? What do we want it for?...The greatest luxury is to be able to do the work you most care about, spend your day doing the stuff that matters to you.” — Rufus ([28:51])
• Redefining Retirement: “Retirement as a goal is not a good goal. The goal is to...only work on things that you care about and only when you want to work on them.” — Travis ([31:11])
• Financial Independence Escape Velocity: “The inflection point where the money that you’ve made can grow at a pace that makes it possible to pursue the things you love.” — Rufus ([31:44])
  • Quote: “I have never before talked just about money and how to make money so directly as this. But I do think what you’re doing here is a service...” ([31:44])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You cannot assume that your taste is shared by the universe... There’s a subset of things that Rufus is really passionate about that the world also, like, has an interest in. And that’s as it should be. The rest are hobbies.” — Rufus Griscom ([05:04])
• “If you start businesses with people who you love...Your persistence, it’s much easier to be persistent because you love the mix.” — Rufus ([15:54])
• “We were overconfident. We didn’t time things quite right...There’s selection bias in the stories we hear about entrepreneurs.” — Rufus ([12:44])
• “Financial independence escape velocity is my term for the inflection point where the money that you’ve made can grow at a pace that makes it possible to pursue the things you love.” — Rufus ([31:44])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:53] – Rufus’s first “exciting” paycheck & first entrepreneurial lesson
• [03:54] – Early failed T-shirt business and humble wisdom
• [05:54] – Founding nerve.com: vision, challenges, and “literate smut”
• [12:44] – Harsh realities: failed exits, luck, media selection bias
• [14:51] – The role of luck vs. persistence in business success
• [16:46] – Post-exit investing strategy: tech stocks and real estate
• [18:46] – The case for aggressive long-term tech stock investing
• [23:53] – Real estate in NYC/Long Island: wealth concentration, leverage
• [26:00] – The Next Big Idea Club: mission, structure, challenges
• [28:51] – Money’s highest purpose: meaningful work and contribution
• [29:47] – Podcasting as learning, networking privilege
• [31:44] – “Financial independence escape velocity”: New money paradigm

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Where to Follow & Learn More

• Next Big Idea Podcast — listen wherever you get podcasts
• Rufus Griscom on LinkedIn
• Substack: "The Occasional Rufus" (coming soon)
• Next Big Idea Club — website and membership offers curated books, newsletters, community

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Closing Thoughts

This episode reveals the gritty, often unglamorous path to financial independence and meaning-filled work. Rufus Griscom strips away media myths, emphasizing that persistent, value-driven entrepreneurship, paired with smart long-term investing, can lead to both wealth and personal fulfillment—even if the journey includes plenty of setbacks. The ultimate lesson: Play the long game, invest in what you believe, surround yourself with great people, and use money to buy freedom for your life’s best work.

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“Money only solves your money problems, but it’s easier to solve the rest of your problems when you got some money in the bank.” — Travis ([32:44])

Transcript

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[Travis]

You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis what's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's our mission to help you make more money. Today on the show, I have a new friend, Rufus Griscom. Rufus has started and sold a series of digital media companies. First nerve.com back in the late 90s, then spring string or Spring Street Network dating technology platform in the 2000s. And then Babel, a website for parents that he sold to Disney back in 2011. He's currently building company number four, the next Big Idea Club. It's also the host of the Next Big Idea podcast which is downloaded over half a million times per month. Which if you're in podcasting, you know how difficult it is to get to those types of numbers. And then, and also since then he's been doing far more investing than anything else after he sold Babel to Disney back in the day. So he's got a thing or two to say about how to make a little bit more money in life. Rufus, what's up man? Welcome to the show.

[Rufus Griscom]

Thanks man. Great to be here.

[Travis]

So let's go back in time, man. Tell me the, tell me the first time you ever made a dollar that got you really excited. Not like the first dollar you ever made unless this was happens to coincide. Like the first time you just like couldn't believe that you got paid to do something.

[Rufus Griscom]

Well, you know, I think I, I think I had the standard American lemonade stand experience everybody had. It was pretty, pretty invigorating. It's been cool to watch my kids, you know, their eyes light up as they count the money. That of course is a totally inaccur great representation of the capitalistic system because they, we provided them with the lemonade. But the, the first time I, I was actually a ski instructor in Aspen, Colorado. Took took some Time a year off from college. And I, I, I, I was very surprised that people were paying me at, at times. But, but I, but actually that same year, I made my real money delivering pizza. I made a lot more money delivering pizza than I did teaching people how to ski. So, you know, it's, it's. But, but yeah, there's, there's nothing like that feeling that, oh, my gosh, I can't believe I'm getting paid for this.

[Travis]

Yeah, right. Like, somebody's actually, like, I get to ski and somebody's going to pay me money to be here. That's wild. When, when did you feel like you were, like, sort of had, like, an internal calling to entrepreneurship or, like, was, was your, did your parents encourage you to do that? Where did that, where did that come from?

[Rufus Griscom]

Yeah, I always wanted to build companies, and I honestly don't know where it came from. Like, my father was a corporate attorney. My mother was a psychoanalyst. Neither of them were entrepreneurs. But I always had the bug. I think it might be that I have issues with authority, and I was willing to crawl. Army crawl through the mud in order to work for myself. I think I felt that relatively early on.

[Travis]

Yeah. I always lovingly define the entrepreneurial spirit as someone who has a desire to solve problems, make money, and has an inability to listen to authority. That's my working definition.

[Rufus Griscom]

There's. Yeah, there's, there's some of that. Yeah.

[Travis]

So you. What was the, what was the first, the first business that you started? Even if it wasn't one of, like, the successful ones that we talked about? Were there some sprinkled along the way that didn't pan out or didn't go the way you wanted them to?

[Rufus Griscom]

Yeah, the, the first business that I started was actually a T shirt company that was called wordware. And I had kind of obscure quotes on T shirts with sort of line drawings that I had done. And I probably sold a total of, like, you know, 89 T shirts. I lost probably $1,500 in that enterprise. But it was a. The T shirt said things like tact, colon. The ability to describe people as they see themselves, which is Abraham Lincoln or. He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing. Cicero. Now you can see why this didn't work. But it was, it was a very. It only cost me $1,500, Travis, to learn that. I cannot assume that my taste is shared by the universe. It's a relatively inexpensive lesson. And.

[Travis]

Yeah, because. I was going to say because it Works in both directions. Right. Sometimes you might have an idea that you think is going to be great that other people don't like. Other times you might have an idea that you and your mind are going, like, no way I'd ever pay for this. But there's 10 million people who would

[Rufus Griscom]

pay for that totally. And actually, like, I think that it's not. It's not that. I mean, happily I've been able to discover in my career that there are things that I'm really passionate about and love that a lot of other people love, but it's just not everything that I love. Right. I think everybody has to learn that. Right. It's sort of like, you know, I want to write poetry and paint and make wood furniture. The world does not want to pay me money, necessarily, for all of those activities. There's a subset of things that Rufus is really passionate about that the world also, like, has an interest in. And that's as it should be. You know, the rest are hobbies.

[Travis]

So. So tell me about. Tell me about the first. The first company, nerve.com, which was the first company ended up selling. Where did this idea. Tell me about the timing and the journey.

[Rufus Griscom]

So Nerve was. So in 1996, I moved to New York City in my 20s and was working for a book editor, a book publishing house. And I learned very quickly that my fondness for serious nonfiction and dark, tortured fiction was not aligned with what was working in the book publishing business. And I had to either develop an affection for humorous cookbooks or find a different. Different profession. I decided to start a. An online zine. Like the Internet was just taking off. So I had to convince my. My then girlfriend to start an online zine with me about sex, sex and culture. It's called nerve.com and the tagline was literate smut. The suggestion being that most smut was not literate. And we kind of thought, like, we could publish really great, beautiful writing, and if it was about sex, probably people would be interested. And we also had photos of naked people, much to my mother's dismay. And so that very rapidly grew to millions of viewers in 97, 98. Back when. Back then, there were only. There were far fewer people online, but there was no business model. Right. So we built a substantial audience. We threw extraordinary parties. Investors invested in the business partly to attend our parties.

[Travis]

Oh, really?

[Rufus Griscom]

We eventually did, yeah. But it was. We had published work by Norman Mailer and Joycelyn Elders, the Surgeon General, and we attracted a lot of very interesting writers and photographers. And it was eventually we did a

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[Rufus Griscom]

sold millions of copies of books. So it was, it was translated into five languages and still in the end it did not make money. You know, I mean, we worked really hard on a lot of different business models. Although we did spin out of that an online dating technology company. So we launched Nerd Personals. We spun out an online dating technology company. And I joked that I managed to be an Internet entrepreneur in, you know, between 97 and 2011 while remaining pretty impoverished. I was doing fine, right? I was having a blast.

[Travis]

Yeah. But not to like the same degree of success, not to the same degree of success that people on the outside looking in would have thought that you were enjoying.

[Rufus Griscom]

That's right, because I was on, you know, we were on television. You know, we were profiled on 60 Minutes and on CNN and on, you know, and in magazines. It was like nerve.com was very hot in the late 90s. And we did a lot of interesting things. And people have this assumption when they see you on TV that, oh, you must be rich and powerful. And the answer was, well, I'm not rich and I'm only powerful insofar as you believe that I am. Because that's sort of the beautiful illusion of media, of media coverage. But we learned a lot and you know, and made some mistakes. Like really, you know, we had opportunities to. I was on paper worth many, many millions that never was realized because, you know, we were raising money at valuations that suggested maybe I was worth 5 or $10 million or whatever when I was in my late 20s, early 30s. But that never materialized. In 2000, we had the dot com implosion 90% of the. At least 90% of the dot com companies that my friends were running went out of business. So it was miraculous that we survived it. We did some innovative things. But it wasn't until we spun out of Nerve, a parenting website, a website and community for parents called Babel, that we built something that really started scaling and we sold that to the Walt Disney Company in 2011.

[Travis]

So that was all part of the same exit then. So nerve.com did not have its own individual exit. Exit. This was a spinoff pivot of nerve.com that eventually got.

[Rufus Griscom]

We sold Nerve, but we sold Nerve. But we sold Nerve for less than its debt. We sold Spring Street Networks, which was the dating technology company, also for less than its debt. I kicked myself because there was a moment when Barry Diller had slammed his fist on the desk and purportedly said, why haven't we bought Spring Street Networks? Because our online dating technology company was exploding. Barry Diller was running match.com as part of IAC. So we had opportunities, but we were overconfident. We didn't time things quite right. And then we eventually birthed Babel, maybe an appropriate word choice parenting website out of nerve.com. so all of my friends who invested in Nerve eventually were paid out when we sold Babel, friends and early investors. So that was. And that was something that was not good for me. I mean, it would have been better for me if we'd started Babel as a separate company. You know, we had a lot of ownership on the cap table, but I think it ended up being the right thing and it felt good. But I think it is important to hear these things because I think there's selection bias in the stories we hear about entrepreneurs, right? We hear all these stories about people who's like the Mark Zuckerberg case of there's a lot of luck involved in. You know, I think it's more common to not have your first startup work and to have it work. And the selection bias of the. Of the media exposure gives people a false impression.

[Travis]

That's right. Yeah. That makes it seem like that this is. That this is an actual strategy that can work because like it's. The whole thing is you still have to take the action, right? You still got to do the steps like Mark Zuckerberg, like Facebook. In the hands of somebody besides Mark Zuckerberg, it might not have turned into what it turned into because he was. Clearly worked it really well. He had a long term vision. He did all the things that were necessary in order to be successful. However, if your, if your strategy involves an immense amount of luck, Then it's not a real strategy. You know what I'm saying?

[Rufus Griscom]

That's right. Yeah. I mean, you have to. If you have the persistence to keep to. If you learn from your failures and have the persistence to keep going and have enough swings at bat, you're probably going to do something that works.

[Travis]

Yeah. You know, and the nice thing is that. Sorry, sorry. The nice thing about, especially in business in general, entrepreneurship is that, like, I love the analogy of stepping back up to the plate because it speaks to every single piece of it. It's like if you never step up to the plate, you're never going to hit a home run. But also, the first time you step up to the plate, you're probably not that good at swinging the bat. So you're probably going to strike out. And then if you keep doing it, you might hit a single or you might get a double. You might, you know, you might. Then at some point you might hit a home run, you might hit a grand slam. The only part where the analogy breaks down is that in baseball, you can only score four runs at once on a grand slam. In business, you could be putting a million points on the scoreboard if you hit, if you crank one out of the park. You know what I mean? Like, you just got to keep stepping up to bat because one of these times you hit well and that's it. Like that, that, that actually takes care of you basically for the rest of your life. You're smart with the money.

[Rufus Griscom]

That's. That, that's true. And, and part of my philosophy has been that if you start businesses with people who you love or, you know, people who, who are very compelling, you'll probably come to love over time, doing things you care about, your persistence, it's much easier to be persistent because you love the mix. You love, you love what you're doing, you love the people you're doing it with. And so if you go 10 years and it doesn't pan out, so be it. And you, you just, you know, but I, I think that's much harder to do if it's not. If you don't have the alignment with both people and, and with the mission.

[Travis]

So tell me about the next big idea club, at what point along the journey to that? Because I know you do a bunch of tech investing and things like that as well. Post exit. Did this come immediately after or was there a gap? What did you do in between?

[Rufus Griscom]

Yeah, so, so, so I will say, if you don't mind if I go back one step that, that with Babel with Babel, we did decide the parenting site that we were going to build something at scale, you know, that we wanted to reach parents at scale. And so because at that point I had a little child and the novelty of, of, of poverty in New York City was, was wearing out, so, so we were intentional about deciding we're going to try to, we're going to build a business that has value at scale, reach many millions, tens of millions of people. We sold that business to Disney, spent two years inside of Disney. And then just pertinent to your show and the theme of the show, I then did something, we then did something a little bit reckless, which was we took all the outcome, which was a large amount of money in the world at large. But in, in New York City, maybe more like a medium sized amount of money, right? So we took all that and we put it in, we put it in a combination of tech stocks, just a, just a handful, like a half dozen tech stocks that we believed in, and highly leveraged real estate, you know, maxed out the leverage, which was a really sort of what most people at the time were, you know, told me was just totally insane. And since then, the money we made has made much more money. You know, we made much more money in the stock market than we ever made from, from selling the company to Disney. And, and so that was there, there were lessons in that, in that process.

[Travis]

Couple, couple quick questions for you. First off, why invest in a half dozen, by definition, higher risk tech businesses versus just taking a big chunk and putting in the s and P500. And then what type of real estate were you investing in?

[Rufus Griscom]

So, so first of all, I, I had been investing in the stock market since I was just out of college with very, you know, like I saved a thousand dollars and I put it in AOL in 19, I want to say 1992. And it doubled and doubled and doubled and doubled. And I kept thinking, maybe I should sell it. And I kept reinvesting, looking again at the investment thesis and concluding. No, I actually think the investment thesis is strong. The 1000 grew to 100,000. And then after the Time Warner acquisition of AOL, it collapsed down to 20,000. I sold it. So I made 20X in those 10 years. But what mattered was not the $20,000. What mattered is what I learned about investing. So by the time I made millions of dollars off of a company, I had a good 15 years of experience investing in the market with smaller amounts of money. And I had come to believe that something I continue to believe, which Is that if you look at the drivers, the NASDAQ 100 has been returning close to 20% annually for the last 15 years. The S and P has been returning more like 11%. The difference between 11% and 20% in one year sounds like a small difference. In 10 years it's a massive difference, right? In 10 years or 20 years, you're talking about 6x10x more money you have in something like 15 years. Later we could do the math. The distinction between an 11% annual return and a 20% annual return. So my thesis, because I sort of been watching what had been happening from my own small investments for the prior 15 years, is that network effects and Moore's law, Moore's law being the compounding every 18 months the amount of compute you can get doubles for the same amount of money. Basically combination of technological progress and a network of study and play come together

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[Rufus Griscom]

Facts that benefit large Internet companies. We're creating a new kind of ability for the leading US tech companies to grow at north of 20% year over year, which was previously impossible. And that trend has continued ever since. And so I continue to invest with the same strategy today. We've averaged maybe 21, 22% annually for over 30 years.

[Travis]

Wow.

[Rufus Griscom]

And people always say to me, oh well, why can. Oh well, that's great. That's lucky. That's so fortunate that you've gotten the 21%, 22% annual return in the last 30 years. But you can't assume that's going to continue. And I think those people are correct. We can't assume anything will continue. I can't assume that I will continue. We never know. But however, if you look at the core dynamics at play. If you look at what's caused companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, et cetera to grow at these paces, all those things continue to be true. And so I believe that you can that in my opinion this is a contrarian opinion. I talked with Scott Galloway my podcast and he says invest in the S and P. I think he's completely wrong. I think you should invest in the NASDAQ 100 again. Difference between 11% annual and 20% annual, which 20 years later you're talking 5 to 10x more money.

[Travis]

What did Scott have to say about that?

[Rufus Griscom]

You know, he got. One thing that I think I found in my own business adventures to be important is to understand people's personal experiences, history and biases. In the case of Scott Galloway, he got Destroyed financially in 2000 by the DOT com and so he's really risk averse when it comes to public markets and tech stocks. He's got post traumatic stress disorder. I totally appreciate that, but I just think he's wrong about the numbers and he persists with the view that just put it in the S and P.

[Travis]

And what type of real estate were you putting money into? Or do you still put money into real estate?

[Rufus Griscom]

Put it into a second apartment in New York and a house in Long Island. And part of the thesis there is that the, I mean, part of that was just sort of a lifestyle thing, right? It's nice to have a country house, you got kids and you want to take them. It's good for city kids to actually experience grass and stuff, throw a ball. But the other part of it is that my thesis is that if you look at the. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it's unfortunate the rich are getting richer. The concentration of wealth is continuing in this country and in the near to medium term there's no indication of what would change that that phenomenon. Right. I think it's a lot of it's about these incredible compounding returns that the wealthy benefit from more than everybody else. And part of it is just technology and the wild success of a lot of entrepreneurs you're talking to. But because of that real estate in 1% that the wealthiest 1% of Americans in the places they want to be is appreciating faster than the rest of the real estate. And the real estate in the 0.1% markets appreciates faster than the 1%. So in other words, we see this in fine arts, right? It's like your van goes and your $25 million piece of art is going to appreciate faster than a random piece of art. And I think the same tends to be true. So that was a thesis 15 years ago that actually investing in real estate, I generally believe that real estate does not return, does not generate as good returns as those of the stock market. However, you can get more leverage. With real estate, you can put down 20%. And so with the leverage, you can potentially do better in these top markets, I think.

[Travis]

Yeah, leverage and tax benefits of having real estate make it a serious contender, I think. Okay, so the next big idea. Tell me about that.

[Rufus Griscom]

So the Next big idea. So, so what we took what we learned from Babel and which was what we ended up doing with Babel again, it was a website for parents. We ended up, you know, we, we had very little money and we ended up basically becoming a platform for the top several hundred mom bloggers in the country. And we, we learned that we could basically help these mom bloggers learn best practices from each other, build much greater audience, and we could sell advertising on behalf of all of them. So we grew to about 10 million unique users when we sold and 20 million a year or two later. And so the broad thesis was we live in a world in which one person, media companies are ascendant and the brands of individuals are increasingly powerful. The brands of institutions are eroding in value. And so the future of the media company is sort of a distributed, you know, network of individual brands. And so that's what we did with Babel. And that was my aspiration with the Next Big Idea Club. I wanted to do that with authors of kind of TED talk type authors at the intersection of science and how to be better at your life.

[Travis]

Yeah.

[Rufus Griscom]

Partly because that's just of interest to me personally. And we tried different strategies for five years that did not really work, honestly, because the whole social media game was changing. We launched effectively a digital book club. With our four curators are Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, Daniel Pink. We launched this podcast, the Next Big Idea Podcast. And so we have a book subscription product, we have a daily email, a new book every day, and we curate and select the most sort of game changing nonfiction. And to be honest with you, Travis, it has thus far, I, I, I joke that we're running an unintentional nonprofit. It aspires to be for profit. Thus far it's nonprofit.

[Travis]

Yeah.

[Rufus Griscom]

But I, I, I actually think that we're getting closer to figuring it out. So it's been the Next Big Idea Club in its current incarnation, we've been doing for running for about five years.

[Travis]

Okay.

[Rufus Griscom]

And I think I think we're starting to see the pathway for. For it to really scale.

[Travis]

But to your point, man, the beautiful thing about being smart with your money, learning about investments and managing your wealth, you get to pursue things that are just personally meaningful to you. Like you said, this is something that you would do regardless of if you are sharing it with others. So what a. I mean, pretty great case scenario to be able to work on something that actually means something to you, that matters to you, that you would do regardless, and then have the prospect of it turning into profit is already something that I'm fascinated with anyway. And you got the podcast, too, the Next Big Idea podcast. Have you found running the podcast, it's

[Rufus Griscom]

just such a great privilege. And I would actually say as an extension building on what you just said, that what's the purpose of money? What do we want it for? I mean, obviously it's nice to, like, you know, be able to have children without going crazy. That's what, to me, that's one good purpose of money. It's great to be able to travel. You know, that's nice. But really, to me, the real reason, the real value of money, and it's really nice to be able to help other people, but I think the greatest luxury is to be able to do the work you most care about, you know, spend your day doing the stuff that people that matters to you. So. So honestly, like, the luxury of right now, I'm over sharing here. I'm not paying myself in my current role. I haven't paid myself in, you know, more than a year because we're getting the company to profitability and it's just the right thing to do.

[Travis]

Yeah.

[Rufus Griscom]

And. And I feel very fortunate that I'm able to do that, you know, and it's because I believe in what we're doing, and it's a great joy. And the podcast, as you say, is, you know, in the last year, we've been had the pleasure of interviewing everybody from Bill Gates to Reid Hoffman to, you know, Michael Lewis, Brene Brown, all kinds of just incredibly inspiring people. A lot of my intellectual heroes, all kinds of scientists. And so it's just. I consider it to be. I think I've never learned more than I have in the last, you know, five, six, six years of running this podcast.

[Travis]

Thank you. Yeah, that's something I touch on all the time. When people ask me if they should start a podcast, my answer is always yes, but it's never for the sake of g. An audience or becoming the next big influencer or whatever. It's always because the people that you meet and the rate at which you can learn is so much greater than anything else ever done. Because you get the ability to sit down, have conversations with really interesting people and ask them all the questions that somebody else would. Might have to pay a hundred grand to have like a coaching session, or you wouldn't even be able to get to have a coaching session. They wouldn't even give you the access on their calendar. Even if you could theoretically pay them enough money to do it, they still wouldn't do it. Yet for some reason, you got a podcast. So it's. I call it the Trojan Horse. It's the thing that gets you past the gatekeeper and into the city walls so that you can do something with it. You know what I mean?

[Rufus Griscom]

Yep. Yep.

[Travis]

And that whole idea, too, on about what you're saying about just what is money for, except for doing what you want to do? That's like something we talk about a lot on the show, is just rephrasing retirement. It's like retirement as a goal is not a good goal. The goal is not to stop working. The goal is to continue working just only on things that you care about and only when you want to work on them. You know what I mean? So if you can figure out a path to be able to do what you're doing, man, I just appreciate the example that you're setting in the world. Where can people go to get more from you, from the Next Big Idea and all that stuff?

[Rufus Griscom]

Well, you can go to Next Big Idea wherever you listen to podcasts and to listen to the show. I'm rufus Griscom at LinkedIn. I'm about to actually start posting on a substack that's called the occasional Rufus on substack. And one last thing I'd say building, double clicking on your last comment, is that I think financial independence. Escape velocity is my term for the inflection point where the money that you've made can grow at a pace that makes it possible to pursue the things you love. And I think it's a goal worth. I have never before talked just about money and how to make money so directly as this. But I do think what you're doing here is a service because I think it's important to take a certain amount of your energy and try to figure out how to achieve that goal so you can do the things you're most passionate about.

[Travis]

Financial independence. Escape velocity is a term that I will start using more often here on the show. Rufus, I appreciate you bringing that to my awareness. I'll definitely be referring to that in the future. The Next Big Idea Podcast Go check out some of the stuff they're putting out there Next Big Idea Club as well. Rufus, I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show. And you're a busy guy. Don't take that for granted. Everybody else tuning in. Remember, money only solves your money problems, but it's easier to solve the rest of your problems when you got some money in the bank. So let's solve that one first here on the Travis Makes Money podcast. Thanks for tuning in, guys. We'll catch you next time. Peace.

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