#133 - Sam's Black Friday Email Results, Lean Media Businesses That Make Millions, and Celebrity Death Match for Tik-Tok

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my all in it like my day's off On a roadless travel never looking back We're here. What up, Sam, how you doing? Hi, you wanna talk about uh what transpired on Wednesday? On Wednesday. Oh yeah, after the uh

after our podcast recording with the about the Black Friday tactic that I was telling you about, then you're like, I'm gonna do it and then What happened? I did it and I got all the credit. So I first want to say I stole from Sean. Sean stall from

Brooklyn. Actually, technically, I stole from my friend Ben, who works with me, my partner Ben. Ben was like, stole it from Brooklyn and Brooklyn and stole it from Tubby. Tub stole it from Probably it all goes back to like Sugarman, you know, or something like that. So I wanna say I wanna give a ninety percent thank you to you for giving me the idea. I got all the credit, but you should get the credit. And then you could give like a ninety percent thank you to all your people. So it kinda like trickles down. Exactly. So I sent it out. And it worked.

So good. It uh I got a text from Andrew Wilkinson. I got a text from um co-workers and they're like, dude, you just sent this out to the whole list. That's hilarious. The people actually believe it because this year I saw so we did it I like I had saying last time we did it with our econ business. But I saw three or four different companies try this, including you guys. So you know, I think the jig is up. It's all still will probably work again next year, one more year, and I think it's like everybody's burnt on this tactic. I think you could keep doing a different iteration of it. So But the principle will still work. So I sent mine to like two hundred and fifty thousand people and we made

I'll just say seven figures. Yeah so here's a few things I learned. The first thing is that like we normally discount trends and we actually discount it way too much. We need to raise the prices. This needs to be way more expensive. But we did it at this one time and shockingly, not really anyone was angry that they didn't get a discount prior. So which I that was my biggest reason for not ever wanting to do a discount. I didn't want to be disrespectful to old people. They didn't care. But I got literally a thousand emails of people saying Either this email's awesome, you're a piece of shit, this is a scam. Why are you scamming people? And my reply was like Dude, jokes aren't scams. Like this is clear like a joke. And then the third one was like, Oh my gosh, Sam, this is not meant for me. Like people who are concerned. What type of replies did you get? Actually, Sean, should we give the background of this? Yeah, let's do it. So people who because we can't assume everyone follows the whole every episode. So on Wednesday, Sean has an econ business and he told me about this

sales tactic that he was gonna do where he was going to email his list this thing And where the subject says needs approval And the body of the text said Hey team. Are Black Friday sales ready to roll? The email's below. Can you please click through and make sure all the links work fine? Let me know.

Sean. And it was supposed to be an internal email. And it was like a mistake as if it was sent to the entire list. Sean told me about that and immediately we were like oh we gotta do that. So that's what we did. So how'd it go for you? For us, it was great. It was our biggest sales day and it was like two weeks before Black Friday. So you get to double dip Black Friday, basically.

And I did it a little bit differently. So so you did it like the exact Brooklyn and tactic, like needs approval, blah, blah, blah. We changed it up like the text at least, but the same result, same effect, because it's the same principle in play. And what we did was we followed up with, Oh my God, this discount isn't supposed to be live. We over engineered it. We didn't need to do this. We sent it to a handful of people that we knew are chatterboxes. They're always super active everywhere in the community. And so we sent it to just a few of them. They immediately ran and said, Oh my God, guys, did you see this?

And then we were like, Oh no, you found it. This is in the public like Facebook group or whatever, where there's a lot of people there. Or like, well, you know, we told our developer to fix it, but You know, hey, while it's live, fair game, go for it. This and we'll we'll hopefully have it fixed in a couple of hours. So that time urgency of like Did it before the bug gets fixed?

was like Insane. And so this worked really well. So that's what I was telling you. And you were like I was just telling you to brag and then you were like Oh, dude, we're gonna do that. That's great. That's a great idea. And then you posted some crazy stats on Twitter as it was going, which I think is great. It amplifies That's an amplifier, right? You're talking about what's going on. Which amplifies the interest in it.

And you showed a screenshot of like three hundred thousand people on a website in real time. That can't be right. That is fake. That was fake. Okay, thank you. That number but we did have about five thousand. I thought that three hundred thousand was a high so look. I was like Playing this kind of douchey. Like banging my chest. I thought I was doing it. so obnoxiously that most people could understand that it was a joke. So we had this whole thing planned out.

And we had already written out all the emails and then Sean told me his idea and I was like Oh, that's way better. So I called Steph. I go, Steph, we're gonna do this right now. Fuck it. Like we're doing this right now. And I just wrote up the email I sent it and like We went with the stick of I sent out the email saying

Check this. And then I moved on Twitter. Oh my god, I totally screwed up. My fat fingers have gotten me in trouble. I've sent this to everyone hurry up and buy or something like that. And then the follow up was Oh my god, I can't believe I just sent you that. My co workers are gonna kill me, unless, of course, you buy now. You know what? Two thousand twenty was a hard year.

We're doing it live. We're keeping it up. Right. So for the for the next five hundred people, you get this price. After that, it rises to this price and then it rises to this price. I think personally it's thirty percent. good marketing psychology and seventy percent was it was actually a sick discount. So there's probably a lot of people who if you had just said Hey, Black Friday sale. Ninety nine bucks for trends. I think you would have got probably half the response that you got. So I think that maybe this was fifty percent marketing and fifty percent amazing deal for good value. People who were on the fence and this was enough to push them over the edge to give it a shot.

So I'll split the credit there. It worked out well. I'm happy we did it. It uh All right, I look forward to my Christmas gift. Yeah, we do owe you, that's for sure. What else we got? Uh unless you had anything else on that one. No. But you wanted to do Drudge, right? Yeah, so you wanna take the lead. Yeah, I'll tee it up. So

I put this on there because you had told me about Drudge. I had heard the name. I didn't even know anything about Drudge Report. But there's very interesting I think this week and somebody basically dug into like What the hell happened to Drudge? And there's what is Drudge, on the Drudge Drudge Report is like kind of like a news aggregator. It's a bunch of links on a page.

that was predominantly for like kind of right wing Sometimes conspiracy, but definitely like right wing conservative news articles. And it became super, super popular. It was really early, kinda like when was it, nineties like? When it started. Started in the nineties and it became like the influential place. If you were in the middle of the page, if your link was like

forty links down, thirty links down, you could still get like a million page views just by being on Drudge. So it's like a a a link aggregator, but they did break some of the new stories. So they were the first to accuse Bill Clinton, I think, of sleeping with Monica Lewinsky. So they did get some even better. They broke the story that I think Newsweek. had squashed a story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. So not only was it like the president had an affair with the staffer in the White House, but Mainstream media

Squashed it. We are gonna like release the truth, release the crack in here. So They had a few big breakthrough moments like that early on, which happened to get big. And then this thing was basically talking about these like three or four at like three or four points that were like kind of like a Drudge take down. It was basically like if you look at Drudge, it's no longer right wing. To the point where some people think it's been bought by a lefty billionaire. Which goes into point two, which is that like

Matt Drudge doesn't work there anymore or he's sold it. And he's a pretty like kind of stealthy character, so nobody knows, no nothing's confirmed, but the this is a rumor and suspicion. Then the third one was like They're inflating their page views and they have some like nefarious ad practices. Where they're like, if you're on the page, they'll auto refresh the page like ridiculously fast.

Which drives up their page view count or drives up their ad impressions count. And they say it's for like Show you the new links, but like it's like ridiculously fast auto reload. Nobody would do that. And so there were some other things in the ad, like about ad ideas, a bunch of really nerdy stuff that it got into. So let's even let's give a little bit more background. I took this from the article you posted. So basically Who who wrote this?

Uh what was going on? It it looked like a good sight. T table. Table uh tabletmag.com I'd never heard of it.

So Drudge report. It's basically a one page website that with just links. That's all it is. And In two thousand and four. On election day, it got thirty six million of views.

uniques in one day. Previously it was updated once to twice a day with as many as forty to fifty links per day. And if you like Sean said, if you were like in the middle, if you were just a link there, you could get millions of views. And they guess that it was making some number between ten and thirty million a year in ad revenue and had been doing so since the nineties, and it only had three or four

Employees. one of'em being Matt Drudge, who would actually post the links in the day. He would like go surfing and post the links and then just chill all day. And he had a pretty like chill lifestyle, but there's one man media operation that kind of controlled the at least the conservative movement or at least some Portion of it. Yes, exactly. And there's a whole bunch of stuff in this article. This this article was like

It was like five conspiracies baked into one article. Like they could have split it out as like a five part series, as far as I'm concerned, because it was like there's this couple, the autos O T T O they they live in Mountain View, California. Who are they? Why do they live in Mountain View? Why are they associated with Drudge? If you call the Drudge help hotline. It goes directly to this woman's phone number. Now it's got changed after I called it the first time and In twenty nineteen, he randomly changed the ad agency that worked with this to this company owned by the autos.

The autos have no background in ads. So why would he do this like a twenty million dollar property or like you know, ad revenue, why would he switch it on a dime to somebody else? Didn't even tell the original agency why. There's all this like stuff like do they actually own Drudge? Is that why it's changed? Who are they linked to?

Yeah, this guy, he's the ex CTO to the CTO at Google. And it's like, what the hell? What's going on over here? So there was just a whole bunch of interesting things. I wanted to hear your reaction to this. Overall and I I I would say there is an idea paired with this or an opportunity paired with this, which is they reference that there's been a whole bunch of other sites that are trying to replace Drudge as like the real right wing news aggregator. We're what Drudge used to be before Drudge like went left. And I think that's kinda cool and interesting. I was watching I was looking at a couple of those. So yeah, let's talk about the opportunity and then my opinion after, or or like what my takeaway is. But in terms of opportunity, so these link aggregation websites are awesome. I mean, at the end of the day, the hustle is that.

And it's an eight figure business doing that. We have this thing in our daily email called Snippets, which we literally just take a headline and we put it in there and we say, you know, from Bloomberg. That's usually always the the most engaged thing to the point where I'm like, Man, screw it. Like should we only just do that? Right. Which is maybe that could work. And Certainly that would be a lot easier to run that operation. So I think news aggregators work. I think that um they can be a really good business if you keep them lean, like three, four, five people. But particularly, I've always said this, Sean, that the conservatives

Engage with news way more I don't know what the right word is, but pervertly. Perfect, yeah. It it's they have a more rapid fan base because usually the right wings the right wing folks feel like they're the minority and that they're being push down and so they like need a band, you know, any group that feels like they're the second, they feel like they got a band together and rise up, whatever. And so the conservatives always engage with news more. So I do think that there is something here. I have a friend that actually launched something like this who you know, Sean, it's our good friend who lives near you. And It worked really well. He ended up shutting it down because he didn't agree with that ideology and so he was like the best of it. This is good this will make money, but this is not I just can't do this. By the way, I'm not placing judgment. If you believe this shit, cool.

That's fine. Do it. I think there's a l a way to make money, but he personally was like, This goes actually goes against what I believe. I'm actually shutting it down. And um it worked out well for the short amount of time. A at least like the path was there that's like, Oh man, this could totally work. Yeah. And so I was looking at a couple of these alternatives because Trump tweeted out.

Something a while back like Our people have left Drudge. It's become a lefty thing. And our people now go to revolver. And so I was like what the hell's revolver. And so it's Revolver.news is one of these.

Citizen free press is another where like if you go to citizen f citizen free press, it's just a white page with black links on it. Citizenfreepress.com and it's like you know here's here's some of the links. Something shady in Syracuse. Dot dot dot. Forty two shot, eleven dead in Chicago. Steven Miller shoots and scores. CNN cancels Christmas.

There's just like a whole bunch of these like kind of sensationalist links, which is like no different than pretty much any news, honestly. Like they're all Slationalist clickbait, some are just more blatant about it than others. Some don't put up the facade of being noble journalism. Like you have Daily Mail who's like, Yeah, we're gonna post about Kim Kardashian's butt every time she wears a bikini. And then you have C N or somebody else who's gonna like

Still should be trying to drive as many clicks as possible, but they're gonna not be as blatant about it. Do you wanna know one of these sites that I used to read All the time. And I love it. And like I found out that Some of Sarah's girlfriends read it and we always make fun of it'cause it's so funny. Which one? It's called

Media takeout. Have you ever heard of media? I love media takeout. It's MTO News dot com. I think it is so funny. So media takeout's kinda like a world star hip hop uh TMZ ish type site, but what's its like what's its stick? So they talk about Ficana, which means uh when Rihanna was thick, when she was or I don't know if she is or not. I don't know anything about it. I I I know enough to know that like in our family thread.

They're like talking about thick on a And it says has the funniest headlines I've ever seen. Today is so freaking funny. And so we always talk about media takeout. It is so good. Yeah, I think some of these sites are great. There were some other ones that were like this that were What was the site that does the like this person's cheating on this person? Is this person having an affair with this person? That's like all it does.

Or they were doing r some really bad stuff that was like On this college campus, you know, this guy or girl is sleeping around. Like they were just like post that was like the article on the website. It was like really crazy. And it's like supposed to be really trashy. And do you know what I just realized while I'm on media takeout? This is hilarious. Media takeout. So it's MTO News.com, right? Yep. Okay, it's supposed to be trashy. Like that's why it's funny. It's like it's funny because it's trashy. So they were independent. I noticed a shift in their content. They've switched.

It's owned by this company called Maven. Do you know what Maven does? No, I just clicked the link at the bottom because I was curious about the saying who owns this. They own Sports Illustrated and a bunch of other like incredibly legitimate thing. And their CEO is Ross Levinson, who I've met before, who's the former CEO of the LA Times and the former CEO of a bunch of like legitimate things. It's crazy. This is crazy that this company owns media takeout. Right.

And by the way, isn't sports illustrated like bankrupt and for sale or something right now? That's why Maven bought it. I see. So by the way, the CEO of Media Takeout. In one sentence, what do you do? I provide gossip to the masses.

Just straight up. Just says it. I love it. Second one. Why did you create this? There was a opportunity in the media market to address African American and urban audience. I decided to fill it. Media Takeout is among the top five hundred most visited sites in the country.

It was that. Is that is it still the case? Yes, but everything's you know changing pretty frequently. That's pretty crazy. So it had sixteen million Readers a month. at one point and then It's a lot more now. He's just thirty million visitors a day. It's crazy. It's really big. You're in the wrong niche, bro. So here's my here's my opinion. By the way.

The person who I just look I'm look I'm on the team page. Do you know a woman named Sarah Stringfellow? She's a VB publisher at the company. She was the first employee at Twitch. Oh, really? Yeah. She but she was the first hire Justin TV, which wouldn't become Twitch. So these websites, these gossip websites, as long as they are so ridiculous that they're funny. What you have to do is you got to cross the barrier to where you are talking about it like you and I are to our friends or with Sarah and our family. So for example, World Star Hip Hop. Or world star. They crossed the chasm of the threshold by people screaming, World Star. And like what's part of that became part of culture. Same with um fashion Nova. So like Fashion Nova is like the shitty, you know, I mean there's like pretty fucking shitty clothes.

And Once it crossed the threshold of like, oh, it's just another fashion nova ad. Like once you start saying with that your friends, it became a thing. Same with media takeout. When me and my friends or my family would start talking about media takeout, it became a thing to me. So that I consume it all the time. I love media takeout. So like with these sites, you gotta figure out You can't just be behind the scenes entirely. You have to do something. You could have this, but you have to do something interesting or impactful to cross the threshold. Same with Drudge. What Drudge did was they actually did the Clinton thing. So they had one or two legitimate stories that they broke that made them not legitimate, but part of culture. And that's what you have to do with these. Yeah, I would agree. T M Z done an amazing job of that, I would say. The big risk with these things is that you can get gawkered, basically, where Docker was this.

And then Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan basically sued sued them to the point where they, you know, they they basically sued them out of business. And so in one day, basically the business shuddered overnight. Yeah, but the problem was that Gawker wouldn't acknowledge what they were, which is just trash. Right. And this media takeout they say they say we are trash and it is awesome trash. I think that wasn't the problem. I think Gawker literally just picked on the wrong guy.

Uh, they picked on Peter Teel. And Peter Thiel was just the wrong person to mess with. A deep pocketed billionaire with a vengeance streak is not Not the one to mess with, right? They messed with a thousand famous people and got no repercussions. It started that way because someone said, Take down the video and they go, No, we're journalists, fuck that. We're gonna have this sex tape on our video'cause on our website'cause we're journalists and there's no such thing as holding us back.

Whereas like media takeout would be like Like they don't have like you know, it's a different shtick. They don't have like a principle probably that they're trying to So if you wanted to do a business like this, how where would you where would you look? Where would you start? Uh first of all, you probably I'm I'm guessing you probably wouldn't want to do a business like this. Am I am I right on that or no? One hundred percent, but it would be fun. I would say that um I would probably start with Reddit.com public freak out. Do you know public freak out?

I haven't no, I haven't gone to it. So it's a subreddit where I notice a lot of people like Barstool and other folks get their posts from And it's just a it's got a million subscribers, maybe, and it's just has lots of videos of people freaking out. Right. There's this other website called Th there's two more. That I would do. There's this other one called Karma or no, what's it called? Justice Served. And I noticed that the engagement on that subreddit is like stupidly high. There's two more that are combined. They're called popping and the other one's called Belt Good Coming Out.

And it's all of like these like instant relief. For example, there's like a video of like a horse getting like a piece of hair pulled out of its stomach, and when you pull it out, then like those whole abscess like leaks out. People are obsessed with that. So I probably those three areas. Interesting. Okay. I if I was gonna do this. I don't think I'm the best person to do this, so my idea's probably bad, but I would I would definitely go for gossip. So I'd either go for h like a Hollywood gossip or like kind of a

The Instagrammer, TikToker, like not Hollywood gossip, like kind of social media famous, but not Hollywood famous. And I would go for their gossip. I would do it all through SMS. And I would just text out anytime anything happens, anytime this person cheated on that person, this person said something, this person commented on this person's photo, this person liked this person's photo that they're not supposed to. I would just be texting that out for all these like famous people that you that this young audience is into. So I would try to be

Kind of T M Z Or two rungs down the ladder of social media stars. That'd be one. And then the other would just be kinda world star st style, like ridiculous videos that aren't gonna be posted on YouTube because they're too extreme or they're too crazy.

And I would do that. Or the last one would be conspiracies. I think that you could you could build a site like this just on conspiracy and rumor. And again, I would try to do the whole thing through SMS. I think that would be the way I would build it. I think that your TikTok one is the best idea. But it could be tied with the conspiracy ones. So I'm a follower of a whole lot of the conspiracy ones. So I love True Crime. I love Unsolved Mysteries. These are all subreddits. Last night I just watched a fifty minute documentary to fall asleep about Robert Hansen, the serial killer in Alaska, who would Kidnap women and throw'em in the uh wild and then hunt them. Like I like

I'm obsessed with the Great thing to go to sleep to. Love it. Serial Killers, the conspiracy theories. I love conspiracy theories. I just bought a book on JFK's conspiracy or the conspiracy of him being murdered. So I agree with you. The engagement on some of these subreddits is crazy. Like people dedicate their lives to uncovering conspiracies as well as finding missing people. They invest so heavily into it. Cause you like eventually they feel like they know the person. So anyway, I agree with you. I think those would be some really good niches. I like it. Oh so let's wrap this up by saying We talked about opportunities, so opinion. So here's what I think about Drudge. Who cares about is politics? What I think happened

Is he just did the coolest thing ever, which is he got rich on the internet and he bounced. You think he stole it or he or he just Stop working on it. One of the two. But I think that he made probably a hundred and fifty million and he goes All right, I'm out. And he bailed. And I think that bailing like that is so cool. And you remember this other guy who did this? Do you remember Flappy Bird? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's his name? Dong Win. Who's the maker's name? Yeah, Dong Win, yeah, that's right. So Dong Win.

He uh created this game called Flappy Bird and it got downloaded fifty million times. In like a two month period, by the way. It was like a very short amount of time. Every every everybody already know we don't even need to explain Flappy Bird because You downloaded Flappy Bird. And it apparently was making around fifty K a day in revenue. And he famously tweeted after two or three of Something months. This is too addicting, I'm turning it off. And I actually don't know if he turned it off or not.

But I love the idea of someone creating something and saying, All right, I'm out and killing it. I love that tactic. I love that story. In the article they said Drudge had talked about One day I'm just gonna the page is gonna load is gonna be all black and it's gonna be over. That's how I'm gonna do it. And so he didn't do it that way. I don't think he bounced Because I think he would have done it in a flashier way just by like anything I've ever read about this guy. I think he would have either sold it publicly or he would have

done something like what you're talking about, which is like go extreme and like just shut the site off. I don't think he would let it slip into like irrelevance and like kinda lefty style stuff. I don't I just feel like that would be Not the cool way to like let it go. When I one time I when I first moved to San Francisco, I volunteered to help Andrew Warner and we went to the Launch Fest and he was interviewing people and I was like filming or something and he interviewed this guy. I was trying to find out who it is, who has a software company that now does about a hundred million in sales. And the guy told a story, he goes, I created this service in college. And it was a cloud hosting site.

And the more popular I get, the more money it costs me. And I was giving it to people for like free. And eventually I was like, Oh, I can't afford this anymore. So he emailed the customers and goes, I'm shutting this off in the next 48 hours unless I collect this much money. So if you want the service, you have to become a customer. And he like Made the money and then he's like Oh wow. All right, fine, I'll keep doing it and we're gonna charge money for it. Like he was like a more like a like a nerd who just anyway, have you heard any other

stories of people saying, I have this thing I'm bailing. Unless, of course, like I can make enough money to make this a thing, then fine. But until then, like I'm out. All right, so this ties in. Did you see the Dave Chappelle thing that happened recently? Did we talk about this already? Told Netflix to take his shit off? Don't definitely take your shit off. Did you see what he posted on Instagram?

No. Uh, you gotta watch this video. Maybe I'm just like too into this, but like I sent this to five people with just like wow. Wow, this is amazing. And then none of them like replied like yeah, that was amazing. So maybe I'm off, but I thought this was fucking awesome. So Chappelle Show which has a cult following goes on Netflix.

Bunch of people are like, Yes, Chappelle shows on Netflix, I get to watch all of it. And then like I don't know, a few weeks later, it goes down. Why did it go down? Dave Chaval asked for it to go down. Well why is that? So he posted on Instagram a video, a twenty minute IG TV video. That says this is why. And then he explains it's like him at a comedy club and he's explaining

why he did what he did. And he s and it he weaves together a story like You know, Dave Chappelle's kinda like, you know, a comedian, normal dude, like Loves to smoke weed or whatever. But to me, this was like every PR person, every comms person at every big company needs to watch this and be like, Oh, that's what perfection looks like for like communicating. A message and getting people on your side looks like Which he's like the best at that. He tells stories Yeah, he's the best at that. He tells a story, I'm gonna butcher it, but I'm gonna give you the short version of it. So he's like

I remember the first time I ever did a comedy. I was fourteen, fifteen years old. I was at this comedy club. And the guy who's introducing me goes Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is the first ever performance by this next comedian. Who knows? We may be seeing the birth of a star. Uh, I'd like to welcome on Save.

Stage. David Chapel. He's like he goes on stage, he does his set, and afterwards this other guy's like this older comedian who's like, you know, probably forty. goes up to him he's a fifteen year old kid and he's like, Hey, that joke you told about Good year condoms.

Al I really like that joke. I have an audition next week at this club across the street. Would you mind if I use that joke? And Dave's just like uh like you know, kinda weird, but like okay, it's fine. I guess if it helps you get the audition that that's cool. And so he says, Yeah, and then he's just like whatever and then Three months later, four months later, he's at a club and that guy's going before him.

And the guy does his joke and he's like Whoa whoa whoa dude that like This is four months. You said you needed it for the audition, like You can't just take my material. I was going on right after you. I was gonna say that joke. And the guy's like All right, let me buy this joke off you for fifty bucks.

And Dave's like again fifteen years old, he's like uh I don't know, like I don't have any money, but like that seems like not the right move for me. I I think I should keep my material and like build my name off of my content. And The guy's like, Well, you know, like I was just being nice. Like I could just take it. You know that, right?

I could just take it. He like kinda like towered over him as like an adult man and Dave's like all right, I guess it's fine. And then he like all right, let's jump forward three years now. And he tells a second story. And basically he weaves together these three like life stories. He's each one of them is like a funny, interesting story on its own. And he weaves it together to show like

Oh, he's basically over his career just kinda like constantly been taken advantage of by sort of the bigger players. Like at first it was this Forty year old man at the club and then like most recently it was like You know, the network execs who own Shell show. And he's like, I walked away because I didn't want to do the show on the terms that they were telling me to do it. And then they say I go cr I've gone crazy. I'm smoking crack. I'm in Africa. He's like, I never smoke crack.

He's like, I just didn't want to do the show and he's like and now I can't even do a news show because they sign you know, I had to sign a contract that said you can use my name and likeness Forever and in perpetuity in all parts of the universe. He's like he's like, What kind of contract language is that? That's like all parts of the universe was that even really necessary.

So I literally can't come out with another show with my name in it because these fuckers own it. He's like, so I called Netflix and I was like, hey, I don't have any legal power here, but like this shit makes me feel bad. 'Cause I'm not making a dollar off this and they're making a lot of money. off my name, off my content, and I can't even make a new show. Because of this. And Netflix took it down. He's like, That's why I fuck with Netflix. I saw that. I saw that. He goes, This is why I fuck with Netflix And so I just thought it was great. So everyone should go watch that thing. I think it was like a master it was interesting and it's like a master class and like

Tell your side of the story. I wonder if that's good for Netflix. It certainly makes me appreciate them. You know what it does though, more than anything, is every creator will be like All right, fine, Netflix. We'll work with you. You sound cool. Hulu. They're in competition really with all of the Production studios, right?'Cause they're doing original content. They're trying to sign talent, sign actors, producers, all that stuff.

So What weak competition really is like the traditional Hollywood world because They got away with the monopoly for so long. Th things were so screwed up that all you have to do is just not be completely an asshole. And you look like a knight in shining armor, and so I think that this is gonna be good for them with creators. I agree.

Especially comedians,'cause they're going heavy into comedy and like every comedian looks up to Dave Chappelle. I wanna talk about a write this writing tool. But before I do Since we're talking about Hollywood, I just looked up Th I like looking at houses for sale.

There's a house for sale in LA for eighty five million dollars and it's Ryan Seacress's house. How the fuck did Ryan Secrest get so rich that he has a house worth almost a hundred million dollars? And the hardest working man in Hollywood, dude. God. And then I looked up what he does. It's called like Ryan Seacrest Media. And they raised like three hundred million dollars, which is Outstanding cra crazy. And then they explained what they did and like they write television shows and they produce television shows. And the way like I just know so little about that industry. I'm like, what the fuck do you do? Yeah. I also don't really know. I know he has like his morning radio show type thing. He does everything. Now he hosts like it's like Ryan and Kelly instead of you know uh it was Michael. It was Regis and Kelly, then Michael. No, if you remember when American Idol started, there was two guys that were the hosts. Yeah, it was Ryan Seacrest and

Fucking other guy. And the other guy wanted like a little more money and they were like Nah, fuck you, we don't need you. So Ryan Seegers like stayed on and became like the household name and this guy who was like Holding the winning lottery ticket.

unfortunately like got it pulled out of his hand after uh after the first season. I just looked up Brian Secret Productions. I'm like, it's really hard for me to understand what you do, but he raised three hundred million dollars from PE companies. So like legit companies. And I'm like, what the heck? So one of these days we're gonna have to dive in because there's a whole bunch of these companies. So there's like Tyler Perry productions as well, but they're like around one person. There was Dick Clark productions. And I'm like, what does that mean? First of all, what does a production company do exactly?'Cause it sounds like a very manual thing to produce a show and I understand how that creates massive returns. Second, why is it after one person? So we we gotta dive deep on that actually. I think that's a that'd be interesting topic. Okay, I have a five minute Tangent. Two minute tangent, I should say.

Do you remember Celebrity Deathmatch? On MTV? Obviously. So I went down this rabbit hole last night about celebrity deathmatch because I was like, what happened to that? Was that as awesome as I remembered? I went back and watched one. I was like, yeah, this is awesome. And then I was like, how did they make this? Because it was like cremation or whatever.

I was like, How hard would this be to do? And so I watched The making of of a celebrity deathmatch. Amazing YouTube video to go watch. It's really hard, I think, right? Don't they literally hard, dude. So they make like a the the doll is basically like this wire. So imagine like kind of like a like a hanger material, like so just wires, and that's in the stick figure of like a body. They have an artist who draws like a three D version, a caricature of like whichever celebrities are in the match, like Bill Clinton, though like They'll find like what's the one unique identifying like physical trait of this person? Is it their big chin? Is it their hair?

And they like accentuate that like any caricature. They do a three D drawing and then then a guy makes it out of clay. Uh and they put it on rubber so it's not so heavy. And so that's like the mold. The whole thing is animated, right? So how do they animate this? So there's like this tiny little like desk sized

Green screen stage. And then literally there's a camera that's just set. And this is back like in the nineties. So like I can't even imagine how much easier this would be now. And actually I tweeted at the creator, he's on Twitter, he's at like three hundred followers or something. I was like Dude, how much easier would this be now? A hundred times easier to do? Like it's like

Good on you guys for doing this ridiculously over the top thing that like was completely unnecessary. And just pushing the boundaries. What'd he say? So he didn't reply yet, but I probably doesn't even use Twin more. He's like kind of like completely off the grid, but We'll see if he replies. I I tweeted at him at like three AM last night when I was looking at this. But they make fifteen different mouths for the characters. And so as they're animating them talking, It's like

Photo. Then switch off mouth, put next mouth, photo, next mouth, photo, next and they have fifteen mouths I can make. The like kind of syllable expressions of all words. And they just animate like if it's if he's like, you know, jumping off the top rope. That's like a you know, they move'em one inch, take the photo, move'em one inch, take it's like a hand animated thing. It's ridiculous. Like so crazy of a thing. Yeah, I remember that shit. That was uh

Very hard to do. I feel like that was a great concept that was Way before its time, both in terms of the technology to do it. Like I think now you could probably do this whole thing essentially with AI. I think you can animate the whole thing using the kind of modern graphic stuff. And then the second thing is Distribution. So that was a television show, but I bet you if you made a TikTok account that was like the poor man's version of Celebrity Deathmatch.

You probably get five million followers in like three weeks. And you could make, I don't know, probably a million dollars a year. Just sponsored off sponsored stuff of your TikTok channel that's gonna be because you're gonna be way better production than any TikTok account. And it's completely permissionless. So any

Kind of artsy craftsy film kid somewhere. Who doesn't want to like go through the gauntlet of Hollywood. The TikTok gates are open. Just go make Celebrity Deathmatch TikTok edition. Do it between TikTokers. They'll retweet it or react to it. And I bet you'll get to like millions of followers, you know, if you did it well. That's a great idea. I was gonna ask you to talk about writing tools that I have on here. Let's we have to get to that next week because we're already on this topic. You might as well this like a Hollywood episode, get to the Jake Paul Stuff.

Yeah, and unfortunately I don't know anything about Hollywood, so I'm just you know talking out my ass with a lot of this stuff. So You did you watch this boxing match that happened with Jake Paul over the weekend? Hell yeah. So for those who don't know, Jake Paul, this kind of like big Viner turned YouTuber. Like whatever kinda like. Teen influencer guy.

They made a career pivot where they stopped vlogging. Jake and his brother Logan. And they started hosting these celebrity Boxing tournaments where boxing matches where it was like Two YouTubers, KSI fought Logan Paul and Jake Paul fought KSI's little brother.

And you either know all about this or you know nothing about this. So I'm trying to figure out how much to explain, how much not to explain. I know all about it, by the way. So what's interesting is I think this is a a brilliant move. And B like an amazing business model to capitalize on the fame. So what they did was Jake Paul fought Nate Robinson, who's an ex-basketball player. These the slam dunk champion. He's like this five nine super athlete dunker. Who's out of the league now. So they agreed to fight on the undercard of the Mike Tyson, who's like fifty three years old. Mike Tyson for versus Roy Jones Junior.

So they were the co main event against these fifty year old Boxing. And I bet you Jake Paul drove, I don't know. thirty to forty percent of the buys compared to uh to Tyson, maybe thirty percent.

And I just think this is an amazing model. I would not be surprised if these guys are banking Ten million dollars, five million dollars every time they do one of these events. And they've done Like one or two a year now for the last couple of years. I think this is way better than doing, you know

Sugar bear hair ads, uh, you know, on your Instagram or whatever. It's a way better business model for these influencers. Now it takes a lot of like risk and Effort, but I think it elevates them to like a different Stratosphere of fame and fortune. So Abreu, while we're talking, can you s find out how many viewers that fight had. See if there's anything like that. So basically the background here I wasn't allowed to talk about this, but it I think I

I don't know if I talked to you about it or not, Sean, but in March or May or something like that. I actually The creators, the promoters of this event.

emailed me asking if we wanted a sponsor. I didn't want to sponsor, but I wanted to see the deck. Because I'm a huge boxing and fight fan and they sent me all the information. So I knew about Tyson fighting before he announced it and I was so amped.

And I didn't tell I don't think I talked to anyone about it actually. And the idea here is that Triller, what is Triller? Triller's an app. I think it has a hundred million users. It's like a music video app. T it's TikTok, but it's based at the US. So Triller's been around for a while. Triller and Musicly were competing. Musically got bought. by the Chinese company Bite Dance and it became TikTok and TikTok took over the world. But Triller is still fledgling.

They're trying to make it. They announced some big numbers. I don't personally believe it. But they are basically trying to be TikTok and they're In some ways, you know, the best outcome for them is TikTok gets banned because of Sort of like People have talked about the TikTok ban because of the Chinese backing and the data collection privacy issues.

And if so, Triller would be the big beneficiary'cause it it's TikTok in in the wings. And they paid, according to Breu, fifty million For the right to stream the fight. And uh They were trying to get a bunch of app downloads. I bet you it worked pretty well. It wasn't I don't think that's right because it wasn't even in it wasn't even on trailer. The event was called

Tyson on Triller.com But you could watch the thing without triller. There's no way they would pay fifty for it to be non exclusive. I I don't believe that. You can just go buy the pay per view without go downloading triller. What did what did he say? So he's saying the estimate the you know the estimate for of by a veteran promoter Lou Debilla w was that it would be a million plus

Pay per view buyers, which is like Almost Conor McGregor, Floyd Madeweather territory of like how much they can individually draw. Like the biggest pay per view of all time was the uh Manny Pacquiao Floyd Bay weather, which was like Close to it was between four and six, four million. Domestic pie, so

That's four million people buying something at Essentially seventy dollars apiece. So that's a lot of revenue. What is that? I don't know, six six hundred million revenue or something like that. And so

This would be a million. A million would be more than Pretty much every UFC pay per view card of the year except for Connor McGregor one. So two things happened. I agree with you. It's a better way to make money if you're a YouTuber. But then also there used to be this show in the nineties where retired athletes, like retired football players would do like a track and field Like a decapon or something. And

It's kinda cool. I watched old videos of it because like there's all amongst runners, which I'm I'm in the running community, there's always bets like Do you think that Usain Bolt could have ran a half mile in under two minutes? Or do you think Mayweather says he's fast. There's no way he could break five minutes in the mile, though. He always act like he would like, could he actually do it? And so Tyson was like After the fight, Tyson was like, Man, I think a lot of people like seeing us old guys fight. They know we're not the best, but I think uh more people watch watch uh will want to watch Randy Moss do something than the guy who currently plays the position. Right. And I was like I agree with you actually. I think that Well the numbers will back it up. Tys this event is gonna draw more than I could be wrong, but I I believe more than any boxing event of the year. Oh yeah, even more than Deontay Wilder and uh Fury, although I don't remember what year that was. If that was this year Oh, Bray, you looked it up, but maybe maybe I'm wrong on that. Did did Wilder Fury do

Let's say two paper two million paper to half a million. I already looked it up. Half a million, exactly. So so this is gonna beat that. Well, the only other boxing match that would be bigger than this is the other Logan Paul one. Right. Well that one see what was interesting is That one was a YouTube pay per view of like five dollars or ten dollars. This one was a full sixty dollar pay per view because it had Tyson on it. And so it was

This one even if this had a fraction of the people watching it. This was much, much bigger. I watched both of them. I paid for one of them. I bootlegged this one. Yeah, I bootleg I would never pay for this, but so easy to bootleg nowadays. Where do you what do you go to? Two ways. There's a website called Ripple. So Ripple.is. They have bootleg all sports. And then the other one is there's a a Discord channel. If you just Google MMA. Cracked streams Discord.

MA Craft Streams Discord, that's a Discord, and they always post the link in the main channel there in Discord about where you can find this thing. So I go to this website called craftstreams.com. And I looked up the traffic of it. Crack streams. It gets like fifty million monthly uniques. Ha ha.

Super spiky, I'm sure. It is Crazy. It is crazy, crazy, crazy. They always do these things where you click this ad and you got to register. I have no idea how that makes money. I would love to have one of these guys who's who owns one of these sites come on and just talk about it. Because

Yeah, I mean it's it's clearly just like shit ton of ads and then they know like hey you're You're doing the pirating thing. So you're gonna put up with like the maximum Possible number of ads. And uh you know, they s they they really do screw your computer up, but it's it's all good.

Worth it. So here I posted the one that I go to. I look'em up on similar web. According to Similar Web, they're at thirty million uniques, twenty six million uniques last month, with an average visit duration of two hours. Right. It's nuts. It's nuts. It's nuts. It's us. I wanna I definitely want to know who and all sixty two percent of the traffic is direct and thirty three from search. So it's just like the best audience ever. I wanna know how uh it's illegal, right? So that's the problem is is you're running an illegal business. So it's like

If you wanna do pirated content, you're gonna get a lot of traffic if you're gonna give away pirated stuff for free. If you uh like the it's really funny, I was on the you the Twitter channel of Chad Hurley, the creator of YouTube. And there was this chart that came out that showed the growth during Covid of all these different platforms like YouTube and Twitch and TikTok.

And then OnlyFans? OnlyFans is like spiked up way above everybody else and he just retweeted it and just just wrote, Titty's It's not like an amazing uh an amazing retweet by the the founder of YouTube. Yeah, if you do porn, you do illegal content, you do gambling, like you will get the traffic, no doubt.

You know, your business might be in murky waters, but but good luck. I just looked up this guy, Chad Hurley. His latest tweet was If I was employed, I could easily be fired for what's in my Twitter drafts. Right. I'm looking at this graph. How big do you think OnlyFans is now? Well, I I kinda know, so I can't really say'cause I would be giving it away. According to this, their revenue is significantly greater than Twitch. Do you believe that to be true? Uh I can't say I have it for on both sides. So so

That would be I can get in trouble if I said anything. Okay, so this is all from the tweet. Only fans lets creators charge for access to content in four years only fans grew to a million creators, two billion paid to creators, and a hundred creators making at least a million dollars. What? That's crazy. So this is like a multi billion dollar company already. It is definitely a multi billion dollar company.

What? That is crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Alright. That's nuts. I can't believe that, but I mean, I can believe it, but good on them. Does the guy who started still work there or did he hand the reins away to someone else? I think they're still there. Wow. Wow, wow, wow.

That's amazing. What a crazy company. Uh all right, the Hollywood episode is over. What are we talking about? Take paw. Talked about Drudge.

We talked about celebrity death match and OnlyFans, all right. All right. Talk to you later. All right, man. Peace. See ya.

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