Ha ha. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like a Days on the Road Less Traveled never looking back.
You know what I've decided I wanted to do I think so. Like I've been like obsessing over the future like what's like, how are people going to live in the future? And 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 that wonderful during covid? So buy the dip. Yeah, and the reason why is I really think that I think that for a lot of people
This whole like Phi. I don't think that after I did the Demonic thing for a while. It was hard that was hard. But I do think that like there's a world where people going to do like six months six months. Do you agree with that?
Yeah, my ideal. I started this a few years ago. And then we just paused with the baby but like I would do about a month and a half in a different country altogether just living somewhere. So for example, we would live in San Francisco for 11 months and 10 and a half months and then we went
Down to Buenos Aires and we lived in Argentina for for over a month 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. I hope I can pull that off with kids. I know just gets life. Just you know, 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 just a lot easier, but I think that's cool. And I think whether it's six months six months or nine months three months.
That's a that's a cool luxury to have to be able to do something like that.
I think we're going to do like I got eight four nine three thing because 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 1 3 and that's that's a lot of money
buying you should just if you're just gonna go there for three months. You should just Airbnb it all you want to rent it the rest of the year.
Yes. This is what I wanted to
rent something for nine months out of the year,
though.
I doing research and I am not sure if it isn't so if so what I or II or I could buy a three-unit building so our friend Ryan beagle men is are being 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 he's are being his place for 30 grand a month. He's making off of it.
not what's up prophecy meant though, right like
I don't want to get the real business too much but he body up front. You're going to have a mortgage so he only pays taxes, but I do think that what I think what I'm going to try and do is I want to 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 a pretty frequently. They're like, so for example, when we bought our place in San Francisco, I was like, oh this is great will 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 90 days out of the year as I do 90 days out of the year. So now let's say I was trying to do the things you're doing right eight. And for whatever I can't do the eight months. I can't Airbnb they months that means I need a long-term lease. How am I going to find a long-term lease for eight or nine months? That's that's that's where it gets tricky if you're depending on Air B&B,
but here's where things are a little bit unfair which is I've got a huge Twitter following. So do you I could we have a podcast we could say like, hey, what's up?
Dark place and I thought I think that we could find someone to rent our place at a fair price for 10 months out of the year. I think it's possible and I think that the reason why are you better off?
Sorry good
reason. I'm bringing this up on this podcast is I think that this is going to be a normal trend of youngish applet Yuppie white-collar workers doing 333, you know, whatever.
I just think you're better off just renting and just invest
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 do it with maintenance like fuck it 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 the 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 great solution. I would only do it. So if I'm going to do it to make money, I would have to find the right deal if I would do it not to make dumb if I would do it just because I want you to make me happy then I don't really care if it's going to make
money or not. I'm also just
I think in general it's best to split if I don't like to dual purpose making money with enjoyment because I tend to find some Middle Ground. I'm like, oh I would like to live in this place and it's only okay. It's only okay as an investment versus like this place is a dump I could buy this and rent it out for higher and maybe do some maintenance on it or whatever that might be a great investment no enjoyment. And so like personally, 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 there's no right answer here.
Okay. Well you want to get into it. You want to talk about our boy Friend Martin shkreli. Do you want to talk? Oh, I know. Let's talk about this. Let's talk about the penny border. You know, the penny hoarder
you've talked to me about the penny of order before but tell me what you want to talk
about. I want to okay, they got acquired today 405 million dollars in cash.
Okay, it's fine with the penny hoarder
is okay. It's the penny holder.com. I know about it because I'm in digital media the founder Kyle came and spoke at how silicon so I got to know him a little bit. There's a wonderful guy. He started it as a finance blog where basically he was like a poor 20 year old and he was doing like taskrabbit and Uber driving and all types of jobs in order to make ends meet while he was in college because it 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. He was like, oh wow Uber will pay me 2 Grand for every person I've ever heard of them. I'm going to write a little bit more about this and put more affiliate links. And that's what he did and I'm going to explain the sophistication behind this but it's a dumb it down its scale than eight years to 50 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
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 a bunch of really free like free traffic by running about personal finance topics, but they make all their money through affiliate link. So basically you're a it's a performance marketing company that has a Blog and so the way it works is is if you Google
Or they created they write a blog that says here's the 10 best ways to save money online and it's like 10 different coupon sites or here's the signing up for Uber is more profitable than ever. Here's how much can you can make any year and it's an article about that at the very bottom. It says sign up now to get become an Uber driver and they get two grand but what Kyle on the penny what our team did is they made this incredibly?
Sophisticated algorithm or a sophisticated web site. 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 Q pot like the honey, you know the honey coupon Clipper and it's quite interesting and it works so well that this large publicly traded company called fluent made may be poached one of the pending orders employees and they just duplicated it.
And run ran ads on Facebook and did this whole Arbitrage machine and the pending order sued this company and it was all public. It's pretty crazy. But anyway, that's another this business model works is they found a an offer and then they create new content marketing and they do Performance Marketing to drive they get hopefully nickel clicks from Facebook to thousand dollar sign ups and hopefully the math works out that they're able to make it profits,
right? Yeah. So 10 to start a 10 years ago looks like, you know email list of about a million people traffic have like 10 to 17 million people.
Mom's gone to the website and sold it for a hundred and two million and it was doing 50 million a year in revenue.
And I think I'll wait 50 employees or 60
employees. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Not and I says 2018 they pledged to create a hundred sixty five positions this year in exchange. I didn't work out.
Okay laid out. Maybe it didn't work out in 2019. They laid off everyone. Okay, something happened. I don't know what happened, but it didn't work. Anyway interesting company about how you can turn a Blog into a fifty billion dollars.
Is this and maybe a lot of our listeners don't know who this company is because it's more like a Middle America mom type of website. But hey kind of a kind of cool.
Yeah. Okay, that's cool. I don't have much to add but I like knowing about that. That's that's interesting. All right, let's do okay call back 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. You're sick or something like that.
And you were like, hey this guy still who's my friend or like Works in my office or something like that? I don't know who he was. He's like this guy's here today and I was like, okay, I'll talk to this guy 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 to him. Now. This is I don't know six plus months ago. He came on and he goes, here's my idea klout kitchens and I was like, oh Cloud kitchens. He has no not Cloud clout Cloud as in it.
Like an influencer has clout and I was like, oh, what do you mean? He's like, well, you know how like in the regular world you have? You know, Bobby Flay has his Burger Joint Bobby's Burgers, whatever and you have Wolfgang Puck or whatever these I kind of celebrity chefs or select are, you know, Margaritaville by and he's like, you know, these celebrities create their own restaurant chains. I think people are going to do this as a cloud Kitchens on top of ubereats door - accelerator, so
he knows all that I thought was a
great idea. I put it in my newsletter.
Because I started ranking in my newsletter some of our best ideas right because I went back there 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 you just go to like Sean three.com is email newsletter and I put in there like here's one of my here's my favorite ideas from the pond the first or second idea. I put on that list was this cop kitchen thing. I was like, I think this is a good idea because you have millions of people every day that are opening up door - opening up ubereats.
and they're scrolling and they're trying to decide what to pick what to order and a lot of the restaurants on there just like the mom and pop restaurant that's around your corner, but you probably don't know too much about I am trust it so man, and we were joking about like it was like ASAP Rocky Roads ice cream, you know, like I forget what the other ones where I was like, you know, Trey Songz pizza and like whatever and we're like we think that these these celebrities room flows to shit open up their own branded store and you just have like
No some restaurant underneath that is that is actually fulfilling this or some Cloud kitchen that you know, hire a chef in a city that to make the stuff. So this is what's happening. So yesterday are two days ago. Mr. Beast who is a really really popular YouTuber came out and cry and said, hey guys go to your apps and your favorite delivery app and you can order from I think what is called? Mr. Beast burgers or barrier?
What's it called? Yeah. I'm looking at it. Mr. Bates. Mr.
Mr. Beast burgers and menu items include be style burger combo 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 so this guy mr. B so he's got like almost 50 million YouTube subscribers. He's like the 18th most popular YouTube channel period those guys, you know, super super popular and so he launched this
This hit so his app for mr. Beef burgers goes to number one on the store. I had a Facebook ad of Instagram had spikes to number one on the store yesterday the app crashes because tens of thousands of people are trying to order burgers and their cities at once. He deployed his restaurant in 200 locations overnight because it's a cloud kitchen. So in all the cities where they already had Cloud kitchen infrastructure, he kind of organize its own one day. He could have 200 locations nationwide fucking brilliant, right?
And and he's selling and he's and it's actually not just fulfilled by his his like kitchens not like he's got five people in the kitchen making all these dishes. Some of the dishes are actually coming from other restaurants. 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 in my newsletter tomorrow. That's because I wanted to know how does this actually work? And so there's this company called virtual
In Concepts, if you were
home on their website right now, they've got Tigers chicken bites Mariah's cookies and
Ryan carries cookies Mario Lopez's Tortas Pauly D. The Jersey Shore guy. They have paulides Italian subs, and now the house trees Burgers.
Let me let me explain to people how I found this because you and I found were the same 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 we did and then I Googled that
With quotation marks and I found their website and there's not a lot out there. And so anyone anyone who cares, that's how I did my
research and then there's one guy on my mailing list to actually works at one of the big con kitchen company. So I asked him I said hey, what are the numbers on these things? So he sent me a spreadsheet. So I'm going to do a full breakdown there, but I can't sorry do off top my head. I haven't like compiled it all but maybe we come back on the pot and talk about it because I think this is fascinating. I think that there's going to be more of this. I think it's going to basically be you know, there was nothing there's going to be a huge Spike of
And then it's going to become played out and people consumers are not going to know what to choose is going to be big quality control issues like okay are Mariah Carey's cookies any good or are they not good is Tyga's, you know pizza and soda.
I'm just I metal with a few winners. I'm just looking at this while we're talking virtual dining Concepts.com. Do you know who the founder
is? 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 multibillion-dollar.
Incest and Planet Hollywood again multibillion-dollar chain. So wow. So, it's Timmy 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 sun's had this kind of like well forward-thinking idea like, okay Dad did this in the traditional brick and mortar World we're going to 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.
Spot up whether it's YouTubers and twitch streamers Instagram stars, or you know, kind of like the Mario Lopez the sort of c-list d-list celebrities who are like, alright, I'm looking for my next way to make this work. This is no different than something that's been going on. But I remember sort of like remember I said that framework which was like, you know old problem new problem old solution new solution this 2x2 grid. So this is that this is that thing right? So this is actually taking a old solution to a new problem.
Mm, or if you can look at you, can you could also look at the other way, but 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 branded product and 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 could just list in 200 cities and you can have the delivery infrastructure done.
For you overnight. I think this is pretty fascinating. 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 going on here.
I'm all okay. Do you know I think it's a good idea. Do you know? Okay, so I'm just looking to I'm just thinking I was for talking I haven't done any research George Foreman Grill who makes that oratory is relative. Okay, there's another one. What's what's proactive proactive who's owned by proactive?
Simon and go
Proactively acne stuff you
mean? Yeah. Oh, dr. Rancor. Okay, Gunther Rancor. Okay. So what if you want to learn about this business I highly suggest that you find you find gun T Rancor. I think that's how you pronounce it. Have you heard of this company? No, okay. So it was started by guy who kind of looks like a six-year-old version of me is looks like he's like a tall blonde hair dude. He looks like a human
belong picture. Let's see.
He's like a super white.
Dude, who looks like he just has been eating corn as whole life. Let me see you.
Yeah, he's built gotta share.
Yeah so build got the I think is the one anyway, so it started out they did a bunch of stuff. But originally they bought the rights this guy Bill. I think he bought the rights to Think and Grow Rich 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 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 know 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 Sheer Cover. You probably don't know what that is, but it's just a thing.
This Woman's
very safe a pair of shears.
Yeah, you don't use this whatever this is you don't use it. So anyway, he grew that their revenue. It is social marketing company. If you're the revenue to eventually billions of dollars and this is the same process that Beachbody. Did you know Beachbody? Yep, Beachbody owns
P90X are all these all use what they call Direct marketing which is code for mlms. So
no direct marketing MLM.
Flight level marketing direct marketing like direct response marketing is when you write like copy and someone goes and they or they purchase right place
when these guys say we're a direct marketing company. They don't mean direct response. They mean we have basically sales people in the field like beach body does and those salespeople are basically like their commissioned their commission sales people and they operate in an MLM structure. I'm pretty sure that these bodies one of them. I know that the like so for example proactive was
Up 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 the you know, they're Fair shake with with this guy going through rate got the raker. He they they spun out and created Rodan and Fields, which is a monstrous company. I think based out in Utah.
Well, I think that your yeah, you're right. I think you're confusing the to do because it
Body. Oh, yeah, you're right. Beachbody is an MLM, but they get a lot of their sales from direct response marketing and also infomercials, right? There's marketing a business marketing machines and they just look for what's the best most profitable thing that could sell the reason I'm bringing this all up is
Con pitches is now a new category of
that. Yes, and VDC is trying to be that going T Rancor or trying to be the Rodan and 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 they're racing listing on all these marketplaces like a door - Cooper needs Grub Hub, etc, etc. And I think it's a pretty big opportunity. I've also seen something else. That's pretty cool. I'm going to talk about it more in depth soon. It's a company. I really want to invest in.
Probably shouldn't talk about it before I missed him, but fuck it. Let's do it.
So all these delivery apps exist and they all need infrastructure. So there's two types of companies there today. There's two two ways of people are participating. The restaurant itself says o put us on the delivery app, we will we will do delivery and then the other one is, 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 eat there.
Really creating these Cloud brands for that are consumer facing like it might be a pizza and pies, right and pizza and pies is there is their brand name, but what they're actually doing is they're fulfilling by using actual pizza shop mom-and-pop pizza shops. I don't know the first thing about technology. They don't know how to get a list on these these 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-pops they put them up on the on the delivery.
The EPs and they don't have to own any labor any stand any kitchen infrastructure and Equipment anything. They're just like it's sort of a marketing brand that basically creates the concept when they up charge and when they get the order they go place the order at the mom-and-pop for fulfillment and that's how these guys are doing. It is very smart very
Capital ages and they train them out and pop how to make the like are they probably like well all 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
the give him a tablet that says hey when an order comes to this, you're no longer, you know Debra's kitchen, which is your real brand you are pizza and pies put it in that box and it comes to this order. 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 earlier tablet. Every time this challenge you get
paid you're wrong. I there it is. Definitely not a no-brainer if I'm a restaurant.
I'm like dude F off like like hydration to what you're doing. I've got to make a brand here. Like I can't like, you know, like McDonald house.
That's not how most mom and pop restaurants think they're not trying to create a digital brand and expand and 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 an immigrant you're an immigrant family and and I think that like many of them many like lower-income hard-working or immigrant families is like look, I just got to pay my bills. I gotta pay my bills.
But I do think that after you've been doing it for like 20 or 30 years. You probably maybe do things like well the bay that I make I really get rich as I like I'm not talking like billionaire 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 in high quality for 40 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 percent is applied that will do it themselves. And then the majority of the piyo people that are not going to do it. They've run their businesses their way for 10 straight years.
Years and you know the easy proposition which is hey I can add an extra $5,000 a month of sales. If you just put this tablet here and whenever it rings up one of your orders fill it that's a very easy proposition for a lot of people who are not going to be part of this Tech wave and and switch the way that they do things to become like kind of delivery heavy.
I'm not interested in investing at the moment, but this would be a fun thing to look at. Is that know that
companies deck that I've just talked myself out of it that I think I actually think that that's a bad idea because
I think a restaurant owner will start using it and they're like, we'll shoot I'm no longer really like small business that I own. I'm just like a factory worker.
And I think that the churned for those folks might be quite High
it could be it could be but it's also very hard to say no to a consistent once money starts coming in your pocket every month very hard to turn that off. And so I think that that might be a problem, you know, some people obviously will say no I'm willing to cut off this Revenue stream that's bringing me five ten thousand a month and and other I think most people will not want to do that. They'll say okay, so I'm not going to do extra work and I'm not going to take a dip here.
Yeah.
And I've never talked to any of these people. So I'm just shoot from the hip. Yeah, let's go to the next one
next topic which one you want to do it. Let's do this Martin shkreli one'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 what this story is and what you thought about
it, so you'll have to fill in any gaps here. But basically Martin shkreli everyone remembers this guy from 2016. He was called Pharma Pro. He was kind of this Prodigy businessman.
And pharmaceutical guy he created multi-hundred million dollar companies and 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 is called. It's it's like the shot para something. Yeah, if you get a shot when you have an allergic reaction reaction and they raised the price of my Dollard like $100 and he's got a really punchable face and actually heard his reasoning and he's like no looking just for the insurance companies that I was like, okay, so maybe it's not as bad as reality, but who knows but he's very smart.
Very punchable and there's one journalist that was covering the story which I've got a story about that too was covering the story is that this woman who looks like she's 38. I think it said 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 it was with him
and 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.
Of with the story with their the guy in the story and secondly, you know left her husband and his peers and also now Martin shkreli doesn't talk to her. So he doesn't
like to go out and I didn't even finish
it so he won't talk to her anymore because because what I don't know it's not clear why I think it's like she was like the story was coming kind of coming out that she's in love with him and all this stuff and 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 calls 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 Martin shkreli story and you'll you have one as well. I met Martin on blab. So sorry Sean used to run this thing called blab. It was like
The clubhouse before Club, I mean, you know you log in and chat with people is pretty cool. And Martin would come on and actually you go first. He like have like you had like the Martin wave, right?
Yeah. We basically were like a small start-up and we had a bunch of like marketers. Actually. We're using hit like a bunch of digital marketers were using in a couple of brands are using a cup of you know friends and we were small like the biggest it was it was a life-changing platform. So imagine a zoom call, but the zoom called was public. It was like a public room that somebody could come they can join in they could be
Not on camera. They were there in the chat and so they can listen in on this this conversation that we're having right now and they could request a call in and be like, oh, I actually have a Martin shkreli story. I want to call in and was like a radio show. That's what blab was it was small and then one day I noticed that oh shit. There's a stream that has 4,000 people in it. That's ten times bigger than our biggest stream before this. Awesome. Who is this? I see this guy Martin shkreli. I don't know who that is. I Googled the name Martin shkreli and I see Martin shkreli the most hated man in America and I was like shit what?
We get ourselves into and that's when I learned about this, you know 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 this was in the winter, I believe right? This is winter time. Yeah, so winter one must have been winter of 2015
16. Yeah
and like it just turned 16 and I became friends with him friendly and I email them back and forth and eventually we had
This woman work in person. And what was her name? I forget her name Brina Brina Kerr nice woman like seems like a like a Charming cute woman and Brianna went to interview him on the phone and he must have saw what she looked like and they kind of hit it off and he Breda goes I don't know Martin goes I'll pay you $10,000 to fly down to San Diego to see me and bring it was like should I do this? And I was like, I mean if you want yeah and she like became president of every wrote this story about him.
To this day Trung because the hustle as talk to this guy Truong my guy trunk who writes a daily email talks on the phone with them and trunk called me their day and he goes hey, I got mine from the airline. It was like midnight on a Thursday. Like are you want us to cover? This was like, yeah, I mean, why not? So anyway the hustle and Martin like I see how he's pulled us off. He's very charming and it works
well.
I wrote this Twitter thing about this trinitarian because I was like I can see how this would happen. This guy has this like kind of weird magnetic pole. He's like I said, he is super smug. He can be a total asshole. He's not like good-looking. He's not like, you know physically impressive in any way and
but he hasn't Little Rock Star by because he doesn't give a shit. He doesn't 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 him out. So he loved it cause 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. He had gotten kicked off twitch and so he came to blab actually and so he
And I remember reading Emmett who I didn't know at the time. The CEO of twitch came out was just like a band. I'm like the first day he's like this guy like has no place in our community in a place on our platform the way he acts and the way he's acting and I was like celebrating. I was like, this dude's driving traffic man. This is awesome for a start-up. We were desperate for any kind of traction. So I was like, okay this is this is interesting. So he starts Bring It On hundreds of thousands of people per month just threw his channel which like we had like Tony Robbins.
Robin's 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. I 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. He's like kind of fans and haters would come in. There was some like kind of back and forth in the afternoon. He would sometimes do these like educational streams where he would stream himself like looking at stocks and talking through Hideaway 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 guy says Marcia, he would talk about like drug Discovery. He's like, yeah people get mad at me for this because like the reality is 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 are rare diseases. Nobody's producing anything is X. So what I started doing was going and buying up the Rd for the IP for all these
These rare conditions 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 increase the prices on some of them because like he said, 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 say that was his defense he goes if we don't do this no one's going to fund any research for these rare diseases. So you have it either way either.
You don't pay for it and then nobody really knows no R&D and there's no cures or we increase the price which actually lets me invest on Andy that was his like public justification,
but that's not it also for the record. That's why he's in jail. He's in jail because he committed Securities fraud he like he had a co-founder and or something. I guess
it's simple he had he had hedge funds before he was in Pharma. And so you have to 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 you know what? He wasn't stealing money from
people. I don't like yes. He that's how he went to jail originally this now he's in jail because in this is kind of stupid. He threatened Hillary Clinton on Twitter.
I think he liked extended his time. Maybe I don't think you could just go
to jail for that violated a violated his whatever is parole anybody. Also I read the report. He did some weird shit man. He like called the daughter of the guy.
I was doing him any like threatened her. I don't know if he threatened him with violence, but he didn't he was kind of odd. Like he cry. He definitely crossed the line. I don't know if that's definitely
not. Oh, he's gone Koster for sure.
Yeah, that's not like jail Crossing but that's like you are like you're you're fucking weird and I don't want to be around you Vici. But what 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 Ilan who love big coin who love Robin Hood beloved David a traitor. Yeah. I don't know.
What does group of get Butts like young men who are kind of nerdy who don't have like a strong male father who don't have a strong Father Figure these types of oddballs and I would come on to that blab and there's women that would come on that were like two women that were like the female version of these guys and they loved him and he totally had groupies. He could have fooled around with all of them. He was a rock star to these women and men.
Yeah, he would do complete trollee shit. In fact, he was getting popular right around the same time Trump was right around 2016, and I know
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 I remember once there was some Monument or statue that was like for sale in Times Square and he was like, he just goes in public announces. I will buy the statue for ten million dollars, but what he wanted to do was he wanted to own this little thing and then be able to erect like a troll he 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.
It's and Trump was doing the same thing at the time. He's like Mexicans are rapists and it's like yeah, boom headlines, right? And so Martin shkreli found a way to get in the news like every fourth day. He would like he bought the Wu-Tang album for two million dollars the one copy of the album and you know, it's like boom found a way to get news. He would like he did a thing on our platform where he would go and he would swipe through on like Tinder or whatever and come like get a date with someone else. He would go on the day. He'd come back to his apartment, but he'd leave the stream on so
anybody.
Oh my
God over here it and listen to it. He would just be playing chess with this woman or like
yeah, I saw that. I remember that I know whatever,
you know, he was just always pushing the boundaries. So I don't he was pure entertainment. It was for our platform. It was good and bad a lot of people hated him. And so these hacker groups came out and they would DDOS us which is 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 DDOS attacks every single hour and they were take down not just us they would take down like our service providers I cloudflare and shit like that and they would call us being like we do what's going on. We're seeing really weird traffic patterns to your site's taking down our infrastructure and we're like, yes, sorry, like people hate shkreli. So they've decided to just attack us. It was a very very crazy time. But anyways, long story short, I think there's a wild story but I am not surprised because I
Weird reason ended up spending a lot of time observing this dude because he was on a platform and it's our biggest user
and Martin has not been in the news lately other than this thing. He I think he's going to get out and a few months. He's had to get out in a short amount of time. I have a feeling this is we're going to hear a lot more from this guy.
Yeah,
he's going to do something and this guy even though he's creepy. I don't I'm not anti Martin, but I like I don't want to be friends with him.
He is capable enough that he's going to messing stuff up soon. That's my prediction is a cannibal. He's got the he's got the the try fact that capable or he's like smart like driven and like kind of like a troll and evil, so he's got like all the things necessary to see a
path. I think that's pretty safe to say.
All right. What do we want to go through now?
I bring you what do you like on this list?
Let's do
Elon Musk potentially buying a hundred billion dollars worth of bitcoin.
Okay, so you'll on tweeted this out. He tweeted out a meme of I mean how to fuck you describe a name. It's basically I mean where it's a guy and it says me trying to live a normal productive life and then it's like this like, 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 dabbling in it. And then the guy we talked about last podcast Michael sailor. Who's the CEO of microstrategy who has bought over a billion dollars.
A Bitcoin office 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 the S&P 500 would follow your lead and in time it would grow to become a trillion dollar favor and Alondra quantity goes is are such large transactions even possible and Michael Taylor goes. Yes, I've purchased 1.3 and Bitcoin in the past months and we'd be happy to share my playbook with you offline from one rocket scientist to another
parcel. What a cool thing to be able
able to observe
the by the way Ilan changes is Twitter bio to say on this former CEO of dot of Dogecoin, which of these not but like is kind of like an actual meme coin that was created to sort of like make fun of Bitcoin that actually became quite valuable
didn't it's all right. So what's Bitcoin at today?
25? 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 the horrible way to live. Shoot me. 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 and all I just I'm getting I'm I'm over his kind of loose cannon shit. I think it's cool for a little while and it's good and healthy doses but I am not an Elon hater, but I wouldn't say
I'm a I don't like just jump at what he says sometimes I find them annoying.
Yeah, I'm actually the same way. I think he's trying too hard now. It was cool when he was like a legit Visionary CEO who happen to have a sense of humor and now he's like one of those guys who go who goes and watches the shkreli stream like he's at first I was like trying really hard to be like cooling around Grant like, oh, that's so cool that you did that. You know you
Posted that Meme. Oh, you said Dogecoin, you know, you said f you to somebody on Twitter like it just seems a little bit try hard to me
now. It's kind of like it's like it remember the 90s.
I can like if I saw him 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 drink enough to Green it just I do think the stick is going a little too far. It was kind of like how Trump in the 90s remember when Trump was on home.
Alone and like Trump meant like successful Rich businessman now to half the country Trump means like liar fraud. It's like 30 lat like two years ago. You were like rocket scientist genius good guy saving the world. Now, you're kind of like trying to go over to be like maybe troll first kind of douche first and I'm like saving the world and doing all this amazing stuff second. Yeah.
You never go full troll. He went full Troll and we'll see what happens.
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 up the price which would strengthen both the story and the price and the like the returns which would drive more companies to do it and which would again drive up the price drop with the reference 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 the more hype it builds the more real it.
Becomes and so Michael sailor is absolutely right if Tesla did this if they did legitimize Bitcoin even more than it's already been legitimised. It would only like it would only like a self-fulfilling prophecy would only increase the likelihood that the price would go up in the returns will
be higher.
So do you want to talk about you already talked about this a little bit, but you had a really cool Twitter thing going on where you like talk about your newsletter. Did you have any good replies to that?
Yeah, bunch of people were like, oh, this is cool. You know, it's like yeah, I did it to try to get likes right like that's a reason to put on a thread like this to get like it drove 3,000 new email subscribers and 4000 new Twitter followers, which is cool. Like one Twitter thread can do that. So that was cool.
There wasn't a whole lot. I mean there's a couple people who are like haters like one guy was like, you know, it's as funny people are like, oh you worked on this after 7 p.m. Like like, you know, basically calling me a shitty dad is like my by kids sleeps after seven. Like that's a bedtime. So so yeah, I guess so but okay even if I can't wasn't asleep weird takeaway for you to have out of this thread, so they
said yeah a bunch of people bought the
Vault of like the archive as we saw.
So like $5,000 worth of it yesterday from from that. So that's like, you know at $100 piece 50/50 people I think bought it as of this morning and I didn't put the link in there. So I actually just deemed it to one guy who asked and then a bunch of people asked him and so 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 and drive people to like my free email list because I really want to write more I really enjoyed the podcast and I want to do written stuff more to that's like we're I'm having
A lot of fun so I don't know it's not that not that interesting there. There's one inch more interesting thing. That is
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 I'm creating something called Club LTV. Did I tell you about this? You know, okay. So I have this idea. I was like, okay. I wanted to meet a bunch of other people who have like successful DC stores. I'm interested in the data see calm space. So I was like, 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 attendant.
What you did with hustle Khan 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 like all the speakers know you they like you they they're grateful to you because you brought a bunch of cool people together 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 a host host something to do the schlep work of Hosting. So I
I wanted to get into the DTC world. So I was like, all right. I'm going to create like a meet-up, but of course, there's no conferences no meetups going on right now. I was like, okay, it's got to be digital but digital events are so fucking lame that I was like, I don't want to do like a boring ass like Zoom networking event. That's not like, you know, I wouldn't even want to attend my own event. So I talked to Ben and I was like Ben how 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. It's only for people that
LTV being lifetime value which is like a metric every see Commerce store owner cares about I hired like a DJ who's coming. Everybody has to bring a drink. My guess is in real life. This is a zoom meet up, but it's going to have every like fucking trick. I could throw into a zoom meet up to make the zoom more fun. I'm making it fun. So I got backgrounds. I got a DJ I got everyone's got a bring a drink. We're using this little tool that lets it.
As you like snap your fingers and breaks everybody out in the groups of five. So they can kind of like kind of go hang out and have conversations on their own. I got these like Ballers like Clank Craig Clemens who was on our podcast was done like a billion dollars in e-commerce Revenue. He's like, oh this is dope and I come from a club background. I will be there and it's I got these like kind of cool people that are just gonna be at the club and I don't know I'm gonna try to I'm like if I'm gonna do a boring networking thing. I'm going to make it not boring and I don't know what the answer is, but I'm
going to have to have a long-term plan.
Before I have response, right?
Yeah, it's free to attend. But you have to be a eCommerce store owner that's doing over a hundred thousand a month in your
store.
That's good. And how many people signed up
we have like 50 people coming on as of right now, but I'm going to 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 hunter can up. I think I might drop that or I might just like split the group into two which is like 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 tell me about your eCommerce
store tonight.
Well, you'll you'll have to psych share the URL or something for that her people to sign
out to go to my Twitter just at Shawn VP and dma and say I want into Club LTV.
There's no up to you. What do you and your family used for personal
finance like just tracking spending in mean or
what? Yeah tracking do what your personal finance set up.
My Personal Finance setup is meant for just aggregating accounts and tracking and then
Well, I do all my shit in Excel.
Why do you use Excel in mint
so I use Mig because I've used it for a long time. I did the started that like out of town 2010 or something. I started using mint. So I just kind of have it. There's a whole bunch of other software's 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 randomize Services mint. I kind of already did its kind of Grandpa. I already took the risk, so, you know, I get some benefits from it, but I actually just prefer to do it in a
Sell because for me one of the valuable things is sort of like, you know, when you want to get better copywriting you hand-wrote stuff,
right? Right, like
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?
Every probably like two months.
Yeah. So I'm looking at like solutions for this. So I'm trying to figure out two things like how to set up all my bank accounts for my wife and I and like because we I
I've got like a 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 this real
jobs real thing sounds cool. Yeah.
Yeah and then your credit card and then maybe like their early credit card or your new credit card. I did you come by that psycho shit. We've got 10 accounts. This is like so silly. What are we doing? I've got to figure that out. I also have to figure out I'm like, well, I was a person personally was just using personal Capital before and I knew what
I spent so like it was no big deal. I don'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 gonna figure all this out. There's a software 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 fan such a fanatical group of people around budgeting and they used what's called zero-based budgeting and this app. It was created by one guy at a small team. I bet they do 12 to 15 million a year in recurring Revenue.
And if you go to you need a budget whatever the abbreviation of that you so why need and YNAB there's a subreddit with a whole lot of people and they like are fanatical about this and it may be
what is that zero budget thing? What does that mean?
So I don't know entire. I mean II 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 10 grand a month and you say five thousand dollars. So that's $5,000 that you spent.
Saving and then so you have to spend 2000 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 zero doctor and I don't end and people like it because of the 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 now, and so what it does is it gives you a little bit better perspective.
Active on what you're going to spend in the future whereas MIT does a little bit better job of probably telling you what you spent in the past and it averages the traveling 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 and it's really hard but I guess not that hard. If so much money does really matter what your budget is, but for a young couple young family with 10 accounts, whatever. I'm like overwhelmed and the zero-based budgeting seems incredibly interesting. I've never heard of and the reason
Why I've never seen a group of people that are rallied around this although I guess I have a little bit of Dave Ramsey, you know about Dave Ramsey.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how to describe it got a big podcast and he's like, yeah Finance kind of
advisor glow you the religion. He he and I'm not going to judge this I'm just going to say the facts. Well, no, he's all about religion. So his arrest his yeah. He's a southern guy so I know I'm gonna miss out his Finance tips are based off of the Bible.
And and so Southern Christian conservative folks love Dave Ramsey and so he's all about it. And he's a very conservative like, you know, he anticipates that is average user is going to make $50,000 for a really long time is a teacher needs to save for retirement. He's to get out of debt yada yada yada. He's not like a get rich topic. I it's just like live a good life with a normal normal me. Anyway, you need a budget so fascinating. I've never seen such a cult following around a
finance app
Yeah, that's cool. I like that. I'm not a big budgeter. Like I basically my thinking is this I was like, all right, I can focus on one or two areas. I could focus on saving or I can focus on earning. So I try to focus on earning any hours that I have. I try to focus on earning that's not saving the second thing is 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 measure Where We Are
Name because I think about the future. I'm like, all right, I'm very confident that over the next ten years. When you get 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 just want like the distressed way of living which is like not measuring anything. In fact, it's all my wife like set a budget like not a bug
of what you can spend 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 this was inspired by like my co-founder for condo is tells a story on a previous company. This guy's wife kept calling him and he just picked up the phone and he goes if it's under $5,000, I don't want you to talk to me about it and he hung up the phone and for coming down those a baller move $5,000 like that's that's crazy. And so then I also heard that sort of like
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 5,000 like expenditures under $5,000 do not concern me. I think that's a cool way to
live. That's how I roll two. I don't know what I don't know what or like it's probably 4,000 3,000. It's like I don't care. I just want to talk about first. Well, I just want to ask what you use for personal finance. I'm trying to figure out how to handle all this shit.
It's 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 what people so I'm a personal finance. I would say a little bit of a nerd like I like to see what's out there. I don't and and it's fun for me. So I like this Reddit the subreddit called fat fire. I'm like a huge fan of that. I read the book that you and I talked about via text which is like a finance book for personal finance book kind of 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 lights 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 they stake their personality on this and I'm like that's crazy this whole 0 bit. So for a certain group of people, it seems life-changing.
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 place but look it costs money. So you have to pay $50 I think or $100 to use it and I love that. I love that they're charging for it. I think that was such a smart move. How much does it cost three dollars a month or $10 a month or something? It costs money.
So think it's free to download but then it's probably pay to use it in some way.
Yeah, and I almost I think I'm going to sign up.
Work. The only reason I haven't is it's kind of like superhuman.com or something else where it requires some work to learn and I just haven't had the time to learn and so but people love this thing and I was trying to figure out like how do they build a cult following around this? Like, what are they teaching? How much does it cost? I bring you to set 83 83 dollars a month. 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 of what other people are saying in order to make this solarize there'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 or like kind of 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. We're right. We had a baby. So Sonia's and all these like Mommy forums and Mommy kind of like groups.
It's the same thing right? Like he's mommy groups have like such a strong like the engagement just off the charts and often they're around certain like for example, it could be a natural birth versus getting an epidural or could be around sleep training or not suggesting. 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 these guys are doing for kind of personal finance. I think that it happens with Mommy bloggers Irish. I 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 getting that that sort of community help there. I think that's where the magic
is.
How many people
we could have said we're going to really Foster Community people who are trying to make their first million bucks people who are literally they want to be a millionaire and they're going after it. And you know, we're going to build an awesome Community around it. I didn't I don't know Community buildings 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, but it's such a clear stated goal and dream like it's baked into the name of our podcast.
I think we had the potential to build something as good as these guys.
It's not over yet. I mean we can still do it. I want I bet you.
I wonder how this guy got started. I bet you had a personal finance blog and built an audience and then launch this right
cool.
