#139 - The Rise of "Clout" Kitchens, Why Martin Shkreli is a Rockstar, and a $100m Acquisition

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like my day song On the road less travel never looking back You know what I've I've decided I wanted to do, I think?

So like I I've been like obsessing over the future like What's like How are people gonna live in the future and Um, I think I'm gonna try and purchase An apartment.

In a cool part of New York. That is currently not COVID. Awesome. Like that is not wonderful during Covid. So by the dip.

Yeah, and uh the reason why is I really think that I think that for a lot of people Th this whole like five I I don't think that After I did the nomadic thing for a while.

It was hard. That was hard, but I do think that like there's a world where people are gonna do like six months, six months. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I my ideal Uh, I started this a few years ago and then we just paused with the baby, but like I would do Um about about a month and a half uh in a different country altogether, just living somewhere. So

For example, we would live in San Francisco for eleven months, or you know, 10 and a half months. And then we went down to uh Buenos Aires and we lived in Argentina for for over a month. Um and we just like got an apartment. Just bought groceries. It wasn't like a vacation. It was a vacation, but it wasn't at the same time. Right. That felt awesome to me. Um I I hope I can pull that off with kids. I know just kids life just You know, I I feel it now where I'm just like, Yeah, it's just easier to stay home. Like, let's just not go and do the things. It's it's just a lot easier. But uh I think that's cool. And I think whether it's six months, six months, or nine months, three months.

I think that's a l that's a cool luxury to have. To be able to do something like that. I I think we're gonna do like a like an eight four nine three thing. Um,'cause I got family in New York and I think like it's still expensive. You can get an apartment in New York though for like one three. And that's

That's a lot of money. Why are you buying it? You should just if you're just gonna go there for three months, you should just Airbnb it. Oh, you want to rent it the rest of the year? Yes, this is what I want to do. It's hard to rent something for nine months out of the year, though. I'm doing research and I I I'm not sure if it if it isn't. So If so what I or I or I could buy a three unit building. So our friend

Ryan Beagleman. is Airbnb being he bought this really nice house in Williamsburg. Have you seen it? Like Ryan's like into architecture and he spent a lot of money on this great place. And he's now in Miami or Delaware. He's all over the place. And he um He's Airbnb his place for thirty grand a month, he's making off of it.

Gross. Not a payment though, right? Like Ah, I don't want to get into his business too much, but he bought it up front. He doesn't have a mortgage, so he only pays taxes. But Uh I do think that What I think what I'm gonna try and do is I wanna try and live

Break even. While while getting equity in these homes. I think I could pull that off right now. Yeah. I think you know the rules change uh pretty frequently though. Like so for example, when we bought our place in San Francisco, I was like, Oh, this is great. We'll do this, and then if I leave, we can just like Airbnb it and like San Francisco was like oh Airbnb can only be done under these specific conditions. You must live in the unit. You must not do more than ninety days out of the year. And it's like, dude, ninety days out of the year. So now let's say I was trying to

do the thing you're doing right eight and four or whatever. Uh I can't do the eight months. I can't Airbnb the eight months. That means I need a long term lease. How am I gonna find a long term lease for eight or nine months? That's that's d that's where it gets tricky if you're depending on Airbnb. But here's Where things are a little bit unfair, which is I've got a huge Twitter following. So do you. Uh I we have a podcast. We could say like Hey, who wants to retard place? I and I I I so I think that we could find someone to rent our place at a fair price.

Uh for ten months out of the year. I think it's possible. And I think that the reason why I'm I'm pretty sure. Sorry, go ahead. The reason I'm bringing this up on this podcast is I think

That this is gonna be a normal trend of youngish Apple it. uh yuppie white collar workers doing three three three, you know, whatever. I just think you're better off just renting and just investing your money elsewhere. Like why even buy the home? Who cares about the home? Who cares about trying to rent it out and dealing with the tenant and dealing with maintenance? Like fucking just rent one place for nine months and then rent another place for three months and then hop around to the next one for six months. Just rent and put all that other money into

Stock market or Bitcoin or whatever the hell else you want. That's that's what I think you should do. I think that could be a great a great solution. I would only do it. So if I'm gonna do it to make money, I would have to find the right deal. If I would do it not to make double if I would do it just because I want to and make me happy, then I don't really care if it's gonna make money or not. I'm also just I think in general it's best to split if uh I don't like to dual purpose making money with enjoyment because I tend to find some middle ground where I'm like, oh, I would like to live in this place. And it's only okay as an investment versus like, oh, this place is a dump. I could buy this and uh rent it out for hire and you know, maybe do some maintenance on it or whatever. That might be a great investment, no enjoyment. And so like Personally, I've I've found that my best investments are ones that I don't try to mix business with pleasure.

But I don't know. I mean there's no Just now. Right answer here. Um okay. Well, you wanna get into it? You wanna talk about uh Uh our boyfriend Martin Skrelli. Do you want to talk? Oh, I know. Let's talk about this. Let's talk about the penny hoarder. You know the penny hoarder?

You've talked to me about the penny hoarder before, but uh tell me what you want to talk about. I wanna okay, they got a card today for a hundred and five million dollars in cash. Uh okay, explain what the penny hoarder is. Okay. It's the pennyhoarder.com. Um, I know about it because I'm in digital media. Uh the founder Kyle came and spoke at HustleCon, so I got to know him a little bit there. He's a wonderful guy.

He started it as a finance blog where basically he was like a poor twenty year old and he was doing like Task Rabbit. and Uber driving and all types of odd jobs in order to make ends meet. While he was in college'cause he came from a low income household. And he Would blog about it.

And eventually his this is his origin story. I don't know if it's true. Uh he was like, Oh wow, Uber will pay me two grand for every person I refer to them. I'm gonna write a little bit more about this and put more affiliate links. And that's what he did. And I'm gonna explain the sophistication behind this, but it uh to dumb it down, it scaled in eight years to fifty million in sales.

Now That's cool and all. But let me show you like what's actually interesting about this. And no without this isn't a slight towards them. But I think it's kind of um I hate this I like this business model, but I personally wouldn't want to do it. But basically what it is is it's a blog.

That gets uh a bunch of really free like free traffic by writing about personal finance topics. But they make all their money through affiliate link. So basically it you're a it's a performance marketing company that has a block. And so the way it works is is if you Google Or they create they write a blog that says here's the ten best ways to save money online. And it's like a ten different coupon sites or Here's the uh

Signing up for Uber is more profitable than ever. Here's how much you can make in a year. And it's an article about that. And at the very bottom it says sign up now to get become an Uber driver and they get two grand. But what Kyle and the petty hunter team did is they made this incredibly sophisticated algorithm or a sophisticated website. So they rearrange the article. to make sure that the most amount of people are clicking the credit card offer or the Uber driver offer or the Coupot like the honey, you know, the honey coupot clipper.

It and it it's quite interesting and it works so well that this large publicly traded company called Fluent. Uh Made they they they poached one of The penny holders uh employees

And they just duplicated it. and run ran ads on Facebook and did this whole arbitrage machine and the penny owner sued this company and it was all public. It's pretty crazy. But anyway, that's just how the this business model works is they found a an offer and then they create do content marketing and they do performance marketing to drive Uh they get hopefully. Nickel Clicks from Facebook.

two thousand dollar sign ups and hopeful the math works out that they're able to make it profits. Right. Uh yeah, so ten started ten years ago. Looks like a you know email list of about a million people, traffic of like 10 to 17 million people a month, going to the website. And sold it for a hundred and two million and it was doing Fifty million a year in revenue. Um I think only fifty employees or sixty employees. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Uh no. So it says twenty eighteen they pledged to create a hundred sixty five positions this year in exchange for incentives. Okay. It didn't work out. In twenty nineteen they laid off everyone.

Oh okay. Something happened. I don't I don't know what happened but it didn't work. Anyway. Interesting company about how you can turn a blog into a fifty million dollar business and uh Maybe a lot of our listeners don't know who this company is because it's more like a middle America uh mom type of website. But uh Hey, kinda kinda cool.

Yeah, okay, that's cool. I don't have much to add, but uh I like knowing about that. That's that's interesting. All right. Uh let's do uh okay. Callback to an episode we did with Stu Iverson. So he came on as a pinch hitter for you. You were out with something, I don't know, your sick or something like that. And you were like, hey Um, this guy Stu, who's my friend, or he like works in my office or something like that. I I don't know who he was. He's like this guy's here today. And I was like, Okay, uh I'll talk to this guy on the podcast. And so He's great. He's great, by the way. And he came on and he had a fantastic episode of one of the ideas that he had talked about. Now, this is I don't know, six plus months ago.

Um he came on and he goes Alright, here's my idea. Clout. Kitchens. And I was like, oh, cloud kitchens. He goes, no, no, no, not cloud.

Clout. Clout as in like an influencer has clout. And I was like, oh, what do you mean? And he's like, Well, you know how like in the regular world you have, you know, Bobby Filet has his burger joint, Bobby's burgers or whatever, and you have Wolfgang Pac or whatever, these like kind of celebrity chefs or celebr are, you know, Margaretaville. Um, by and he's like, you know, these celebrities create their own restaurant chains. I think people are gonna do this as cloud kitchens on top of uh Uber Eats DoorDash, et cetera. So I thought it was a great idea. Uh I put it in my newsletter. I because I I I started ranking in my newsletter some of our best ideas, right? Because I went back through, I was like, dude, we spit out like hundreds of ideas over the course of the year.

What are like the twenty ones that I actually think are Good ones and let me put those into my email list and so If you just go to like chanper.com, there's an email newsletter and I put in there like here's one of my here's my favorite ideas from the pod. The first or second idea I put on that list was this cloud kitchen thing. I was like, I think this is a good idea because You have millions of people every day that are opening up DoorDash, opening up Uber Eats, and they're scrolling and they're trying to decide what to pick, what to order. And A lot of the restaurants on there are just like the mom and pop restaurant that's around your corner, but you probably don't know too much about and trust it.

So Man, and we we were joking about like It was like ASAP, Rocky Roads, Ice Cream, uh, you know, like I forgot what the other ones were like, you know, um, Tra Song's Pizza and like whatever. And so we were like, we think that these these celebrities or influencers should open up their own branded store and you just have like, you know, some restaurant underneath that is um that is actually fulfilling this or some cloud kitchen that, you know. hire a chef in a city to to make the stuff.

So this is what's happening. So yesterday, um Or two days ago, Mr. Beast. uh who is a really, really popular YouTuber. Um Came out and crew and said hey guys.

Uh Go to your apps, any your favorite delivery app and you can order from I think what is it called? Mr. Beast Burgers or what's it called? Yeah. I'm looking at it. Mr. Beast Mr Beast Burgers and Uh menu items include B style burger combo.

Uh chicken salad combo. Chicken sandwich combo, not special. Chris style, Chandler style. It's nothing special. It's just They have put their names in front of a cheeseburger. Right. And so um

So this guy, Mr. B, so he's got like almost fifty million YouTube subscribers. He's like the eighteenth most popular YouTube channel, period. So this guy's you know, super, uh, super popular. And um So he launched this thing. This his so his app for Mr. Beast Burgers goes to number one on the store ahead of Facebook, ahead of Instagram, ahead of he spikes to number one on the store yesterday. Uh the app crashes because tens of thousands of people are trying to order burgers in their cities at once. He deployed his restaurant in 200 locations. overnight because it's a cloud kitchen. So in all the cities where Um, they already had cloud kitchen infrastructure. He kind of organized it so in one day he could have 200 locations nationwide. Fucking brilliant, right? And um

And he's selling and he's and it's actually not just fulfilled by his Um his uh like kitchen it's not like he's got five people in a kitchen making all these dishes some of the dishes are actually coming from other restaurants um so like you know if you order a lasagna from him it's actually coming from this Italian restaurant branded as his thing. So this is actually I'm doing a full breakdown of this uh in my newsletter tomorrow. Um that's Because I wanted to know how does this actually work. And so there's this company called Virtual Dining Concepts. Have you ever heard of it? I'm on their website right now. They've got taigo's chicken bites. Mariah's cookies and Mariah Carey's cookies, Mario Lopez's tortoise, Pauly D, the Jersey Shore guy, they have Polly D's Italian subs, and now they have Mr. Purgers. Let me let me explain to people how I found this.

Because uh you and I, Sean, we're we're the same. The way that I found it is I went to Mr. Beast. iTunes. Scrolled all the way to the bottom and find out who developed the app. Is that what you did? Yep. And then I go I Googled that with quotation marks and I found their website and there's not a lot out there.

And uh so anyone anyone who cares, that's how I did my research. And then there's one guy on my mailing list who actually works at one of the big cloud kitchen companies. So I asked him, I said, hey, what are the numbers on these things? So he sent me a spreadsheet. So I'm gonna do a full breakdown there, but I can't I can't do off the top of my head. I haven't like compiled it all, but uh maybe we we come back on the pod and talk about it because I think this is fascinating. I think that there's gonna be more of this. I think it's gonna basically be You know, there was nothing. There's gonna be a huge spike of this. And then it's gonna get kind of played out and people consumers are not gonna know what to choose. There's gonna be big quality control issues like

Okay, are Mariah Carey's cookies any good or are they not good? Is Taiga's, you know, pizza any good or not? With a few winners. I'm just looking at this while we're talking. Virtual dining concepts dot com. Do you know who the founder is? Uh I don't know their name now.

Okay, the founder is the former CEO of Hard Rock Cafe, which That's irrelevant now, but that was a multi billion dollar chain success, yeah. And and and Planet Hollywood, again, multi billion dollar Mm. Same.

So Yeah. So it's him in the sun Yeah, exactly. So I think I don't know if he's like the one who's doing the work or, you know, the son's had this kind of like More forward thinking idea like okay, dad did this in the traditional brick and mortar world.

We're gonna do this. Which is this idea that is only now possible because delivery apps have taken over the world. And so a lot of people are now reaching out to these guys to try to get their own virtual concept spun up, whether it's YouTubers and Twitch streamers, Instagram stars, or you know, kind of like the the Mario Lopez, the sort of C list, D list celebrities who are like, all right, I'm looking for my next way to make this work. And this is no different than something that's been going on, but remember sort of like, remember I said that framework, which was like You know.

Old problem, new problem, old solution, new solution, this two by two grid. So this is that this is that thing, right? So This is actually taking a old solution. to a new problem. Or if you could look you could you could also look at the other way, but if if you look at like George Foreman grills, right? This was a old solution to how a

famous person who no longer has their income stream going can use their brand to sell a bunch of product. Uh branded product. And you know, George Foreman Grills was one example of that. But now you have a new space, a new opportunity, which is These delivery apps that are

You know you can just list in two hundred cities and you can have the delivery infrastructure done for you overnight. So I think this is pretty fascinating. I'm I'm curious to see how this works. And I'm investing in a couple of companies that are doing something very similar to what's what's going on here. I'm all Okay. Do you know uh I think it's a good idea. Uh do you know, um okay, so I'm just looking I'm just thinking as we're talking. I haven't done any research. Uh

Uh George Foreman Grill. Who makes that? Or Okay, there's another one. What's the what's Proactive? Proactive, who's owned by Proactive? Uh Simon and gun uh Corrective.

The acne stuff, you mean? Yeah. Oh, Gunther Ranker. Okay. Got their rank or What If you want to learn about this business, I highly suggest that you f you find Gunthy

Ranker. I think that's how you pronounce it. Have you heard of this company? No. Okay. So it was started by a guy who kinda looks like a sixty year old version of me. He's looks like he's like a tall blonde haired dude. He looks like a blonde.

Yeah. He's like a super white dude. It looks like he just has been eating corn his whole life. I mean what? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's got blush hair. Yeah. So Bill Gutty, I think is the one. Anyway. So it started out uh They did a bunch of stuff.

But Originally they bought the rights, this guy Bill I think he bought the rights to um Speak and Grow Rich, uh like a self-help book by Napoleon Hill.

And he created infomercials and direct response marketing campaigns on the internet to make it popular. Then he was like, Okay, this self help stuff is working. Let's keep going. So we partnered with a a variety of other products and he started selling them and then eventually he was like

Okay, let's try this like someone brought to him like proactive. And they're like, All right, let's try proactive. And he grew that to a billion dollars in sales. And then they partnered with Brooke Shields and they launched a shampoo line. And they partnered with Cindy Crawford and they developed a what's called Shear Cover. You probably don't know what that is. But it's just a thing. Uh this women's um

But you say my hair doesn't have shear? Yeah, you don't use this. Whatever this is, you don't use it. So anyway, he grew the the revenue. This is just a marketing company. He grew their revenue to eventually billions of dollars. And this is the same process that Beach Body did. You know Beach Body? Yep, yep, yep. Beach body owns P ninety S. These are all these all use what they call direct marketing, which is code for MLMs. Um direct marketing is not MLM. It's different. MLN is multi-level marketing. Direct marketing, like direct response marketing.

is when you write like copy and someone goes and they or uh they they purchase right these when these guys say we're a direct marketing company, they don't mean direct response. They mean uh we have basically salespeople in the field, like Beachbody does. And those salespeople are basically like they're commissioned, um, they're they're commissioned salespeople and they operate in a in a MLM structure. I'm pretty sure that Beachbody is one of them. I know that the Uh so for example Proactive was developed by those two dermatologists, Rodan and Fields, and then they spun out and now I've created Rodan and Fields, which is an MLM that sells the biggest competitor to Proactive and many other skincare products, and is a multi-billion dollar company. So these two women Who

probably didn't get you know their fair shake with with this guy Gunthy R Gunthy Raker. He they w they spun out and created Rodan and Fields, which is a monstrous company, I think based out in Utah. Well I think the Uh your Yeah, you're right. I think they're confusing the two though because Beach Body Oh yeah, you're right. Beach Body is an MLM. But they get a lot of their sales.

from direct response marketing. And also infomercials. Right. Um there's marketing they're just marketing machines and they just look for what's the best and most profitable thing they can sell. The reason I'm bringing this all up is Cloud kitches is now a new category of that. Yes. Uh and VDC is trying to be the Gunthy Ranker or trying to be the Rodan Fields where they're basically taking famous celebrity brand, we are your back end infrastructure. Now they're not doing the MLM model, but they're basically doing

uh they're basically listing on all these marketplaces like AdorDash, Ubread, Scrub Hub, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it's a pretty big opportunity. I've also seen something else that's pretty cool. I'm gonna talk about it more in depth soon. Uh it's a company I really want to invest in. Probably shouldn't talk about it before I have messed up, but fuck it. Let's do it. Um So all these delivery apps exist and they all need infrastructure. So there's two types of companies that right today, there's two two ways that people are participating. The restaurant itself says, Oh, put us on the delivery app. We will we will do delivery. And then the other one is um

You know, like a cloud kitchen or a virtual concept like these guys are doing, where they create a brand on top of this. There's a company that's doing something in the middle. They're creating a brand like a cloud kitchen. but they're fulfilling it using real restaurant staff that already exist. So they don't need they're basically creating these cloud brands for for for uh uh that are consumer facing. Like it might be uh pizza and pies, right? And pizza and pies is their is their brand name, but what they're actually doing is they're fulfilling by using actual pizza shop mom and pop pizza shops that don't know the first thing about technology. They don't know how to get list on these these um uh on these marketplaces and they don't want to deal with, you know, kind of the marketing of it. And so these guys rebrand these mom and pop. They put them up on the on the delivery apps, and they don't have to own any labor, any st any any uh um you know kitchen infrastructure, any equipment, any anything. Um they're just like a sort of a um

a marketing brand that basically creates the concept and when the and they upcharge and when they get the order, they go place the order at the mom and pop for fulfillment. And uh that's how these guys are doing it. It's very smart, very capital. And they just and they train the mom and pop how to make the or like Or they they probably like. All pizza. All pizza companies, you guys all probably have the the right stuff to make what we need you to make, but we have to do some quality control. They give'em a tablet that says, Hey, when an order comes for this, you're no longer, you know, Deborah's kitchen, which is your real brand, you are pizza and pies. Put it in that box and it comes to this order. Um here's just more orders that are coming to you. You want more orders, right? It's like a no-brainer proposition to a restaurant. Hey, here's your tablet. Every time this thing rings, you get you get paid.

You're wrong. I there is it is definitely not a no brainer. If I'm a restaurant I'm like Dude, F all like in addition to what you're doing. I've gotta make a brand here. Like I can't like

You know, like McDonald's. Think. They're not trying to create a digital brand and expand do all that. They want their shop to like not go out of business. I don't know if I agree with that. I think that like You're you're an immigrant you're an immigrant family and

And I think that like many of them Uh many like uh lower income hardworking or immigrant family that's like, look, I just gotta pay my bills, I gotta pay my bills. But I do think that after you've been doing it for like twenty or thirty years, you pro maybe do think like well the way that I make I I really get rich is like Like I'm not talking like

Millionaire Rich, but I am talking like I've got like the best restaurant in this neighborhood is by doing something that will be really, really good and high quality for forty years. Am I wrong? It's just a split. I think there's a pie chart, right? There's some percentage of the pie that's already doing it. There's some percentage of the pie that will do it themselves. And then the majority of the pie are people that are not going to do it. Uh they've run their business their way for 10 straight years. And um You know, the easy proposition, which is hey

I can add an extra five thousand dollars a month of sales. Um, if you just put this tablet here and whenever it it rings up one of your orders. Fill it. Um, that's a very easy proposition for a lot of people who are not gonna be part of this tech tech wave and and switch the way that they they do things to become like kind of delivery heavy. I'm not interested in in investing at the moment. But this would be a fun thing to look at is that number that

Company's deck. 'Cause I've just talked myself out of it, but I think I actually Think that that's a bad idea because I think a restaurant owner We'll start using it and they're like

Well shoot. I'm no longer really like a small business that I own, I'm just like a factory worker. And I think that

the churn for those folks might be quite high. It could be. It could be. But it's also very hard to s say no to consistent once money starts coming in your pocket every month, very hard to turn that off. Uh and so I think that that that might be a problem, you know, some people obviously will say, No, I'm willing to to cut off this revenue stream that's bringing me five, 10,000 a month. And um And other m I think most people will will not want to do that. They'll say, Okay, cool. I'm not gonna do extra work and I'm not gonna take a dip here. Yeah, well I and I've never talked to any of these people, so I'm just shooting from the hip. Yeah, let's go to the next one. Uh next topic, uh which one you want to do. Let's do this Martin Shrele one. That's kind of interesting. So did you read this article that came out yesterday or the day before?

The Bloomberg Lady? So explain to people who didn't read it uh what this story is and what you thought about it. So you'll have to fill in any gaps here, but basically Martin Screlli Everyone remembers this guy from two thousand and sixteen. He was called PharmaBro. He was kind of this prodigy businessman pharmaceutical guy. He created multi hundred million dollar companies.

in the pharmaceutical space. He got in trouble because he increased the price of a drug that you need if you get like a nut allergy. I forget what that drug's called. It's it's like the shot something, yeah. If you get a shot when you have an allergic real uh reaction and they raise the price from like a dollar to like a hundred dollars. And he's got a really punchable face. And I actually heard his reasoning and it and he was like, No, look, it's just for the insurance companies and I was like, Okay, so maybe it's not as bad as reality, but who knows? But he's very smug, very punchable. And

This one journalist that was covering the story, which I've got a story about that too, was covering the story. It was a this uh woman who's looked like she's thirty eight, I think it's that. She had a husband. And she started covering him. became friends with him, he's now in prison. Left the husband.

Quit journalism. Is with the was is with them. In love with this guy. Yeah. So so he goes to jail And she goes from married with a job to has to quit her job because she fell in love with the story, uh, with the the guy in the story. And secondly, um

You know, left her husband and is and also now Martin Shreley doesn't talk to her. So uh he doesn't like I didn't even finish it. So he won't talk to her anymore because um Because what? I don't it's not clear why. Um I think it's like she was like the story was coming kind of coming out that she's in love with them and all this stuff. And Um, he didn't want her to like Do the story or something like that. I didn't fully understand why he stopped talking to her, but she released the story To in the hopes of like

I hope he reads this, realizes how much I really truly love him. And I hope he returns my call because for prison, she can't call in. He can only call out. So she's just waiting for him to call. And for two months he hasn't called. Well here, let me tell you a Martin Sale story. And you'll you have one as well. I met Martin on lab. So Sean used to run this thing called Blab. It was like uh

Clubhouse before club I mean, you know, you log in and chat with people, it was pretty cool. And Martin would come on and and actually you go first. Did he like have like You had like the Martin Wave, right? Yeah, we basically were like a small startup and we had a bunch of Like marketers actually were using it, like a bunch of digital marketers were using it, and a couple of brands were using it, a couple, you know, friends.

And we were small, like the biggest It was a live stream platform. So imagine a Zoom call, but the Zoom call was public. It was like a public room that somebody could come, they could join in, they could be uh not on camera. They were they were in the chat. And so they could listen in on this conversation that we're having right now, and they could request a call in and be like, Oh, I actually have a Martin Schrely story. I want to call in. And it was like a radio show. So that's what Blab was. It was small. And then One day I noticed that oh shit, there's a stream that has four thousand people in it. That's 10 times bigger than our biggest stream before this.

Awesome. Who is this? I see this guy Martin Shkrely. I don't know who that is. I Google the name Martin Shkreley and I see Marn Shirley, the most hated man in America. And I was like, Oh shit, what do we get ourselves into? And that's when I learned about this. You know, what what he was doing. So anyways, continue on from there. And I was a blab user and I saw Martin on it and I called in

I became friendly with him. I was only Uh this was in the winter, I believe, right? This is winter time. Yeah. So winter must have been winter of uh two thousand and uh fifteen. Yeah, fifteen and um like it just turned sixteen. And I Became friends with him.

Friendly. And I email them back and forth and eventually we have this woman working for us named uh what was her name? I forget her name, uh Brina. Rina Curve No nice woman.

Um Like she was like a like a charming cute woman. And Breno went to interview him on the phone and he must have saw what she looked like and The kinda hit it off and he and Brida goes. Or no, Mark goes, I'll pay you ten thousand dollars to fly down to San Diego to see me.

And Britain was like, Should I do this? And I was like I mean if he won, yeah. And she like became friends with them and we wrote this story about him and to this day Trump. Because the hustle I talked to this guy.

Trong, my guy Trong, who writes a daily email. Talks on the phone with them and trunk Called me the other day and he goes Hey, uh I got Martin on the airline and it was like midnight on a Thursday. Uh like, are you you want us to cover this? I was like, Yeah, I mean, why not? Uh so anyway the hustle and and

And Martin, like I see how he's pulled us off. He is very charming. And uh It works. So I wrote this Twitter thread. I wrote this Twitter thread because um

I was like, I can see how this would happen. This guy. has this like kind of weird magnetic pull. He's like you said, he is super smug. He can be a total asshole. He's not like good looking. He's not like uh you know, physically impressive in any way. And But he has a little rock star vibe because he doesn't give a shit. He doesn't give a fuck.

He's like Dave Portnoy, but like not as cool. Like I don't necessarily think that he's a bad guy. But like I don't think he's like a great person. So when he came on the platform, he came on because we were kind of this live place where you could just host a room, people could come at you, they could come talk to you and you could talk back, you could boot them out. So he loved it because it was like having his own radio show. So he basically The first few days he was just fighting people. And people loved fight. So these streams were getting really, really popular. Um he had gotten kicked off Twitch and so he came to Blab, actually. And so he um And I remember reading uh Emmett, who I didn't know at the time, uh the CEO of Twitch

Came out was just like he banned him like the first day. He's like, this guy like has no place in our community, no place on our platform, the way he acts and the way he's he's acting. And I was like celebrating. I was like, this dude's driving traffic, man. This is awesome for a startup. We were desperate for any kind of traction. So I was like, okay, this is this is interesting. So he starts bringing on hundreds of thousands of people per month just through his channel, which like we had like Tony Robbins came on, the Jonas brothers came on, ESPN was using us. Nobody could drive numbers like this guy. And not just that he drove people to come check it out, like come check out the car crash, but he actually used us like 10 hours a day. Like in the morning he would log on, he would start the room. His like kind of fans and haters would come in. There was some like kind of back and forth.

Uh, in the afternoon he would sometimes do these like educational streams where he would stream himself like looking at stocks and talking through how he thinks about it. He recorded that and he put it on YouTube and I watched almost the whole thing. It was awesome. It's fascinating. He was smart. He would talk about like drug discovery. He's like, Yeah, people get mad at me for this. Big pharma doesn't even invest in these small drugs for small Like basically it's really hard to make a drug that has a cure.

So if you're gonna do it, you do it in the markets that are the biggest, basically the most popular diseases. So then there he goes, there's this opportunity where for rare infectious diseases or rare rare diseases, nobody's producing anything. He's like so what I started doing was going and buying up the RD for the IP for all these rare conditions. Um because I could accumulate all this stuff and I could build I could add them up and build a big company. And he's like, Yeah, and I increased the prices on some of them because, like he said, Um, I'm mostly just charging the insurance companies. If anybody can't afford it, they can get it for free. It's just if you can't afford if you do have insurance, I charge insurance more, which in turn makes the insurance company bill you a little bit more, but like it's really the insurance company paying. So that was his his defense. He goes, if we don't do this, No one's gonna fund any research for these rare diseases. So you have it either way. Either you don't pay for it. And then nobody read no, there's no RD and there's no cures.

Or we increase the price, which actually lets me invest in R and D. That was his like public justification. But that's not also for the record, that's not why he's in jail. He's in jail because he committed securities. Fraud. He like sí He had a co founder and or No, no, I got it, I got it. It's simple. He he had he had hedge funds before he was in pharma.

And so he had two hedge funds. And I think he had lied to the investors about how the returns were for the hedge fund. And then he used profits from the pharmaceutical companies to pay back his investors from the hedge fund. So But that's not why he's in Yes.

He that's how he went to jail originally. This now he's in jail because and this is kinda stupid. He threatened Hillary Clinton on Twitter. I think he like extended his time, maybe. I I don't think you can just go to jail for that. He violated he violated his uh whatever his his parole. And he but he also I read the report, he did some weird shit, man. He like called the daughter of the guy who was suing him. and he like threatened her. I don't know if he threatened her with violence, but he did he was kind of odd. Like he he definitely crossed the line. I don't know if that's definitely not Oh, he's a line crosser for sure. Yeah, that's not like jail crossing, but that's like

You are uh Like you're you're fucking weird and I don't want to be around you. But he uh but but when I do This was like he was famous before the Robin Hood people were around, but it's like the same group of people who worship Elon, who love Bitcoin, who love Robin Hood. Below Davy Day Trader.

Yeah, I don't know what this group of gut but like got young men who are kinda nerdy who don't have like a strong male father like who don't have a strong father figure. These types of Hot balls. And I would come onto that blab and beer there's women that would come on that were like cute women that were like the female version of these guys. And they loved him. He told me at groupies. He could have fooled around with all of them, but he was a rock star to these women and men.

Yeah, and he would do complete trollly shit. Uh, in fact, he was getting popular right around the same time Trump was, right around 2016. And I noticed that both of them were doing the same thing, which I just started calling troll marketing, which is basically he would do something like let's say, uh I remember once there was some monument or statue that was like for sale in Time Square. And he was like, he just goes and public announces like I will buy the statue for$10 million. But what he wanted to do was he wanted to own this little thing and then be able to erect like a trolley like kind of statue of himself in Times Square. And He didn't ever even have to go through with it, but he was like Say a thing, bang, headlines. And Trump was doing the same thing at the time. He's like, Mexicans are rapists. And it's like, you know, boom, headlines, right? And so the Martin Shirley found a way to get in the news like every fourth day. He would like.

Uh, he bought the Wu Tang album for two million dollars, the one copy of the album. And uh, you know, it's like boom, found a way to get news. He would um like he did a thing on our platform where he would go he would swipe through on like Tinder or whatever and come like get a date with somebody. He would go on the date, he'd come back to his apartment, but he'd leave the stream on so anybody could overhear it and listen to it. And he would just be playing chess with this woman or like, Yeah, I saw that, I remember that or whatever. Uh You know, he was just always pushing along the boundaries. And so I don't know, he was pure entertainment. It was for our platform, it was good and bad. A lot of people hated them. And so these hacker groups came out and they would DDoS us, which is the you know, distributed denial of service attack, which is basically like.

flooding our website with fake traffic to take down our servers. And we're just like a simple like startup and they were hitting us with like five gigabit like um DDoS attacks every single hour. Um, and they were take down not just us, they would take down like Our service providers like Cloudflare and shit like that. And they would call us being like, Yo, what's going on? We're seeing really weird traffic patterns to your site's taking down our infrastructure. And we're like, Yeah, sorry, like people hate Shrelli, so they've decided to just attack us. Um, it was a very, very crazy time. But anyways, long story short, I think this is a wild story, but I am not surprised. Because I So

A weird reason ended up Spending a lot of time observing this dude because he was on our platform and he was our biggest user. And Martin has not been in the news lately other than this thing. He I think he's gonna get out and A few months.

He's gonna get out in a a short amount of time. I have a feeling this is uh we're gonna hear a lot more from this guy. Yeah, he's he he's gonna do something. And and and this guy, even though he's creepy, I I don't I'm not anti Martin, but I like I don't wanna be friends with him. Um He is

Capable enough. That he's gonna mess some stuff up soon. That's my prediction. He's got the per he's got the the trifecta capable or he's like smart. Um like driven.

And like kinda like a troll in evil. So he's got like all the things yeah. He's like a sociopath. Uh I think that's pretty safe to say. All right, what do we want to go to now? Um

Oh, Brady, what do you like on this list? Um, let's do Uh Elon Musk potentially buying a hundred billion dollars worth of bitcoin. Okay, so Elon tweeted this out. He tweeted out a meme of

Uh I mean, how the fuck do you describe a meme? It's basically a meme where it's a guy and it says me trying to live a normal, productive life. And then it's like there's like uh you know, brothel whore with Bitcoin on her butt and it just says Bitcoin. He's like trying to avoid looking at it or or or dabbling in it. And then The guy we talked about last podcast, Michael Saylor, who's the CEO of MicroStrategy, who Um has bought. over a billion dollars of bitcoin off his company balance sheet goes.

If you want to do your shareholders a hundred billion dollar favor, convert the Tesla balance sheet from USD to Bitcoin. The other firms in the SP five hundred would follow your lead and in time it would grow to become a trillion dollar favor. And Elon responded, he goes, Is is are such large transactions even possible? And Michael Taylor goes, Yes, I've purchased one point three in Bitcoin in the past months and we'd be happy to share my playbook with you offline from one rocket scientist to another. First of all, what a cool thing to be able to observe.

Uh and then by the way, Elon changes his Twitter bio to say I'm this former CEO of Dod of Dogecoin, which obviously he's not, but like is kind of like uh an actual meme coin that was created to sort of like make fun of Bitcoin, that actually became quite valuable. Didn't uh All right, so what's Bitcoin at today? Twenty five? Uh I don't know. Let's see.

I'm trying to buy this desk. price tracker, just like a clock, but it's not a clock. It's just showing me the price of Bitcoin at all times. Yeah, that sounds like uh the a horrible way to live. Sounds miserable. Shoot me. Uh.

All right. Well what are we gonna say about I mean, I don't know. I don't give a shit to be honest. Like I think Elon's cool now. I just I'm I didn't I'm I'm I'm over it. His kind of loose cannon shit. I think it's cool for a little while and it's good in healthy doses. But uh

I uh I'm not an Elon hater, but I wouldn't say I'm uh uh I don't like just jump at what he says. Uh sometimes I find him annoying. Yeah, I I'm actually the same way. I think he's trying too hard. Uh now it was cool when he was like A legit visionary CEO who happened to have a sense of humor. Um

And now he's like one of those guys who go who goes and watches the Shreli stream. Uh like his personality is like trying really hard to be like cool and irreverent and like, oh, that's so cool that you did that. Uh you know, you you posted that meme. Oh, you you said Dogecoin, oh you know, you said F U to somebody on Twitter like Uh it just seems a little bit try hard to me now. It's kinda like uh it's like do you remember the nineties. If I saw'em I'd be like, you know. bowing down and like, you know, make a fool of myself trying to like be friends with the guy. So I can't really lie and say I wouldn't fucking up to him. But I I just Annoying. It's the stick is going a little too far. It was kind of like how Trump in the nineties, remember when Trump was on Home Alone and like

Trump meant like successful rich businessman. Now to uh half the country Trump means like lie or fraud. It's like Dude Elon.

Like Two years ago, you were like rocket scientist genius. Good guy saving the world. Now you're kind of like over to be like maybe troll first, uh like do kind of douche first and then like saving the world and doing all this amazing stuff second.

Yeah, you never go full troll. He went full troll and uh we'll we'll see what happens. Um I think that one thing that's cool there is just that with Bitcoin, it is one of those self-fulfilling prophecies. If they were to actually do this, it would add more money and more legitimacy and drive out the price, which would strengthen both the story and the price and the res like the the the returns. Which would drive more companies to do it. And Which would again drive up the price, drive up the returns, and bolster the story. And so That's the beauty of Bitcoin. It is the money, it is the bubble that never pops. The more people that believe in it, the more people that get behind it, uh, the more hype it builds, the more Real it becomes. And so uh Michael Saylor is absolutely right. If Tesla did this, if they did legitimize Bitcoin even more than it's already been legitimized.

It would only Like Uh It would only like if it's a self fulfilling prophecy, it would only increase the likelihood that the price would go up and the returns would be higher. So do you want to talk about um you already talked about this a little bit.

But you had a really cool Twitter thing going on where you like Talked about your newsletter. Did you have any good uh replies to that? Uh yeah, a bunch of people were like, Oh, this is cool. You know, just like yeah, I did it to try to get likes, right? Like it's a reason to put on a thread like this is to get likes. It drove three thousand new email subscribers and four thousand new Twitter followers, which is cool. Like one Twitter thread can do that. So that was cool. Um There wasn't a whole lot. I mean there's a couple of people who are like haters. Like one guy was like Um

You know, it's just funny, people are like, Oh, you worked on this after seven PM? Like uh like you know. Basically calling me a shitty dad. I was like, dude my my kid sleeps after seven, like that's a bedtime. So so yeah, I guess so. But okay, even if my kid wasn't asleep, weird takeaway for you to have out of this thread. That's what they said. Yeah, a bunch of people bought the vault of like the the archive. Uh so we sold I sold like five thousand dollars worth of it yesterday um from from that. So that's like you know, at a hundred dollars piece, fifty, fifty people I think bought it as of this morning. Um and I didn't put the link in there. So I actually just DM'd it to one guy who asked. And then a bunch of people asked him. And so he he sold basically 50 of these for me because I didn't I didn't want to promote selling it. I just wanted to put the information out there.

uh and drive people to like my free email list. Cause I I really want to write more. I really enjoy the podcast and I want to do written stuff more too. That's like uh where I'm having a lot of fun. So I don't know. It's not that not that interesting there. Th there's one inch more interesting thing that is um Uh I'm doing this other thing, which I find to be very entertaining. So I'm I'm doing all these like tiny life experiments. One of which is Um I'm creating

Something called Club LTV. Did I tell you about this? No. Okay, so I had this idea, I was like, okay I wanted to meet a bunch of other people who have like successful D to C stores. I'm I'm interested in the D to C ecom space. So I was like, Oh, okay, cool. I want to meet a bunch of people. And I have this philosophy much like you, which is that

You want to host the party, not attend it. Right. Like what you did with HustleCon was great. Like yes, it was more work, but the rewards are like. Yeah. Totally disproportionate to how much more how much more effort it is to just host the event. Uh, like all the speakers know you, they like you, they they're grateful to you because you brought a bunch of cool people together. Um, every attendee starts to know you and your brand. And so I've always had this philosophy, which is like if you want to get into something, you want to build your network. The easiest way to do it is just to host, host something, just do the schlep work of hosting. So I wanted to get into the DDC world. So I was like, all right, I'm gonna create like a meetup.

But of course. There's no conferences, no meetups going on right now. So I was like, okay, it's got to be digital. But digital events are so fucking lame that I was like, I don't wanna do like a boring ass like Zoom networking event. That's not like, you know. I I wouldn't even want to attend my own event. So I talked to Ben and I was like, Ben, how do we make this cool? And I was like, let's just go way over the top. So I created this thing called Club LTV, and it's literally like a nightclub. Uh, and it's only for people that are LTV being lifetime value, which is like a a metric every e commerce store owner cares about. Uh I hired like a DJ who's coming. Um Everybody has to bring a drink. Uh

In real life. This is a Zoom meetup, but it's gonna have every like fucking trick I can throw into a Zoom meetup to make the Zoom more fun. I'm making it fun. So I got backgrounds, I got a DJ, I got everyone's gotta bring a drink. Um, we're using this little tool that lets it like it it basically you like snap your fingers and breaks everybody out into groups of five. So they can kind of like kind of go hang out and have conversations on their own. Uh I got these like ballers like Clay uh Craig Clemens who was on our podcast, who's done like a billion dollars in e commerce revenue. He's like, Oh, this is dope. And I I come from a club background. I'll be there. And uh and so I got these like kind of cool people that are just gonna be at the club. And uh I don't know. I'm gonna try to I'm like if I'm gonna do a boring networking thing, I'm gonna make it not boring. And I don't know what the answer is. But I'm gonna use it.

Do you have a long term plan? Or I have a sponsor, right? Uh yeah, it's free to attend, but you have to be an e commerce store owner that's doing over a hundred thousand a month uh in your store. That's good. And how many people signed up? Uh we have like 50 people coming uh as of right now, but I'm gonna try to get this to be more. So if you if you're out there, if you want to be in the e-commerce, I don't know about that restriction about the 100k and up. I I I might drop that or I might just like split the group into two, which is like Uh you either have this tag if you're like legit

Or not? Like some kind of status symbol. I don't know what I'm gonna do with that, but if you want to come to Club LTV. Tweet at me and uh tell me about your e com store. Can I Uh well you're You'll have to like share the URL or something for that.

For people to sign up. Just go to my Twitter, just at Sean VP and DM me and say I want to into Club LTV. There's no website. What do you you and your family Use for personal finance.

Uh like just tracking spending, you mean, or what? Yeah tracking. Do what what's your personal finance setup? All right, my personal finance setup is uh mint. for uh just aggregating accounts and tracking and then Excel. Um, I do all my shit in Excel.

Why do you use Excel and Mint? So I use Mitt'cause I've used Mitt for a long time. I did I started that like I don't know in twenty Ten or something, I started using mint. So I just kinda have it. There's a whole bunch of other software out there that's like supposed to be better. But I don't trust any of them.

Like I don't want to link my accounts. I don't want to link all my bank accounts to randomized services. Mint, I kind of already did. It's kind of grandf I already took the risk. So you know, I get some benefits from it, but I actually just prefer to do it in Excel because for me. One of the valuable things is it's sort of like, you know, when you wanted to get better at copywriting, you like hand wrote stuff. Right, right. There's something in the practice of writing out my finances that makes me think about it and Like spend time with it rather than just like checking a dashboard real quick. Do you do that every month? Uh every probably like two months, yeah.

So I'm looking at like solutions for those. So I'm trying to figure out two things, like how to set up all my bank accounts. Or my wife and I and like because we I've got like eight bank accounts because like we each had four. Like Like the savings and checking that we had were like when we were in high school. Right. And then like your new account that you create once you like have a real job. Yeah. Yeah. And then your credit card, and then maybe like your early credit card or your new credit card. And then you combine that. It's like oh shit we've got ten accounts.

This is like so silly. What are we doing? So I've got to figure that out. I also have to figure out I'm like, well, I w person personally was just using personal capital before and I knew what I spent, so like it was no big deal. I didn't have to track it religiously, like I just I used to use this this thing where I wrote it down as well, but now there's two of us. I'm trying to figure all this out. There's a software I I found, it's an app and a web app called You Need a Budget. Have you heard of it? No. Okay. It's called You Need a Budget. And I've never seen a phen such a fanatical group of people around budgeting. And they they used what's called zero based budgeting.

And this app, it was created by one guy and a small team. I bet they do twelve to fifteen million a year in recurring revenue. And If you go to you need a budget, whatever the uh abbreviation of that, you, so why, need, and a. Y N A B.

There's a subreddit with a whole lot of people. And they like are fanatical about this. What is that zero budget thing? What does that mean? So I don't know entirely I mean, I I know just because I Googled what is zero based budgeting. And the way it works is every dollar that comes in is allocated and spent.

So it's it let's say you make ten grand a month. And you save five thousand dollars. So that's five thousand dollars that you spent on saving. And then so you have to spend Two thousand on rent, like Every dollar must be spent.

And you have to go in each month and make sure that you've accounted for each dollar. Like each dollar serves a purpose to get down to a zero. Gotcha. And I don't and and people like it because of exactly what you said, which is they like seeing where everything is going and they want to do a little bit of manual work in order to know exactly what's happening with your money.

Um Now And so what it does is it gives you a little bit better perspective on what you're gonna spend in the future, whereas Mitt does a little bit better job of probably telling you what you've spent in the past and it averages the trailing three months and says, Here's what you spend every month. And I'm trying to figure out the best thing to use, but it's incredibly complex. And like I'm not even like

Imagine if you're like ultra high net worth, then it's really hard, but I guess it's not that hard. You have so much money it doesn't really matter what your budget is. But for a young couple, a young family. with ten accounts or whatever, I'm like overwhelmed. And the zero base budgeting seems incredibly interesting. I've never heard uh and the reason why is I've never seen a group of people that are rallied around this. Although I guess I have a little bit with Dave Ramsey. Do you know about Dave Ramsey? Yeah, yeah. Uh

I don't I don't know how to describe him, but he's got a big podcast and he's a kind of finance kind of advisor, guru. He's a religious he's a he And I'm not gonna judge this, I'm just gonna say the facts. Well no, he's all about religion. So his his

Yeah, he he's a southern guy, so I know him because I'm from the south. His Finance. Tips are based off of the Bible. Uh and and so Southern Christian conservative folks love Dave Ramsey.

Um and so he's all about And it's and he's a very conservative, like, you know, he he anticipates that his average user is gonna make fifty thousand dollars for a really long time, is a teacher, needs to save for retirement, needs to get out of debt, yada yada, yada. He's not like uh Get rich type of guy. It's just like live a good life uh with the normal normal means. Anyway, you need a budget. So fascinating. I've never seen such a cult following around a freaking finance app. Yeah, that's cool. I like that. Um

I'm not a big budgeter. Like I basically My my thinking is this. I was like, all right, I can focus in one of two areas. I can focus on saving or I can focus on earning. So I try to focus on earning. Uh any hours that I have, I try to focus on earning, not saving. The second thing is Um

What gives me like stress versus not stress. And so I like I like to have the snapshot of where we're at. Every couple months, but I don't want to uh measure where we're spending. Because I think about the future. I'm like, all right.

I'm very confident. But that over the next ten years When it gets to the point where we have more than enough money that we like we have more money than we know what to do with. So if that's true, if I'm like if I believe that a hundred percent, which I do. then this is all wasted energy doing this. I'd rather literally be sleeping. I'd rather be like doing something else. And so I I just want like the de stressed way of living, which is like not measuring anything. In fact, I've told my wife like

Set a budget like Uh not a budget of what you can spend. Uh set a threshold of when you have to talk to me about it. Like. Don't ask me about anything that's under X dollars, right? And uh this was inspired by like Uh

My co-founder for Conn always tells a story at a previous company. Um This guy's wife kept calling him and he just picked up the phone and he goes, If it's under five thousand dollars, I don't want you to talk to me about it. And he hung up the phone and for I was like, damn, that was a baller move.$5,000? Like that's that's crazy. Um and so then I also heard that story and I was like, that's awesome. And so now I want to do the same. I just think that's just a baller way to live. It's like don't. The items under five thousand like expenditures under five thousand dollars do not concern me. Uh I think that's a cool way to live. That's how I wrote too. Uh I don't know what

I don't know what are uh like it's Probably four thousand, three thousand. It's like I don't care. I just don't want to talk about it, bro. Um Well, I just wanted to ask what you use for personal finance. I'm trying to figure out how to how to handle all this shit. Yeah, you you do a good job finding these little communities. Where did you find this? Was it from Reddit that you found this?

I tweeted out. Uh what People so I'm a personal finance Uh, I would say a little bit of a nerd. Like I like to see what's out there. I don't I and and and it's fun for me.

So I like uh so uh this Reddit the subreddit called Fat Fire. I'm like a huge fan of that. Uh I read The book that you and I talked about via text, uh, which is like a finance book for personal finance book kinda. Um, and so I just like him in the know of all of them.

And I asked my Twitter up following what they use. And I had one or two people say you need a budget. And then it got like crazy amounts of likes. And I was like, What is this? I went to the subreddit. And there was people who were like defending it like crazy.

Like like maybe stake their personality on this. And I'm like, that's crazy. This whole zero bit so so for a certain You with people? It seems life changing. Yeah, let me see how many downloads this has.

I mean the Android app alone has over a million downloads. That's pretty impressive for a call by the way. But look, it costs money. So you have to pay fifth, I think, or a hundred dollars. To use it. And I love that.

I love that that they're charging for it. I think that is such a smart move. How much does it cost? Three dollars a month or ten dollars a month or something? It costs money. So I think it's free to download, but then it's probably you pay to use it in some way. Yeah, and uh I almost I think I'm gonna sign up for it. The only reason I haven't Is it it's kinda like

Uh superhuman dot com or something else where it requires some work to learn and I just haven't had the time to learn and so Uh, but people love this thing. And I was trying to figure out Like How do they m build a cult following around us? Like what are they teaching? How much does it cost?

I bring you just said eighty three. Eighty three dollars a month. Uh how do you A year. How do you create a cult following around

These types of things and like what are they saying that's the opposite? Here's the commonality. I don't think it's the cult following around you need a budget. I think that what happens is If you take a bunch of people who all have a shared goal. Um Or like kind of a like a desire and you give them a forum to basically trade tips on how they're achieving it and like say when things are going really hard. So I see this all the time. Right. We had a baby. So Sonia's in all these like mommy forums and mommy kind of like groups. And it's the same thing, right? Like

These bombing groups have like such a strong like I mean the engagement's just off the charts and often they're around certain like For example, it could be uh natural birth versus getting an epidural or could be around sleep training or not sleep training. It doesn't matter which process it is, it's like that that community has like a cult following. And it's not that Like.

It's not all about the brand up top. It's about giving a bunch of people who are trying to do a hard thing a place to trade stories and tips and like commiserate. I think that's what the these guys are doing for kind of personal finance. Uh, I think that happens with mommy bloggers, uh, not mommy bloggers, just new moms who are trying to go through that together and trade. You know, why is my baby not sleeping or she's not eating enough or whatever, um, getting that that sort of community help there. I think that's where the magic is. How many um Brandon? Like we could have done that, right? We we could have said we're gonna really foster a community of people who are trying to make their first million bucks. People who are who literally they want to be a millionaire and they're going after it. And um Yeah, we're gonna build an awesome community around it.

Yeah. I didn't I I I don't know. Um, community building's not something I'm good at. So I didn't do that. I have a Facebook group, but like That's not a real great community. Um But it's such a clear stated goal and dream. Like it's baked into the name of our podcast that I think

We had the potential to build something as good as These guys. Oh, it's not over yet. Uh. I mean.

We can still do it. Uh I wanna I bet you I wonder how this guy got started. I bet you we had a personal finance blog and built an audience and then launched this. Right. Um cool.

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