Digital Social Hour - Navigating Legal Challenges as a YouTuber and Real Estate Investor with Spencer Cornelia #7

Episode Date: April 22, 2023

Hey there listeners! This week, I had the pleasure of welcoming Spencer Cornelia on the Digital Social Hour podcast. Spencer is a real estate investor, YouTuber, and all-around entrepreneur who has accumulated considerable wealth in his young career. Spencer shares his love for his city, Vegas, and how he moved from the Bay Area to enjoy a lower-cost lifestyle. His investment strategy of house-hacking, where he has four properties with 18 tenants that he manages, has been influential in his success. Spencer offers an affordable rental option for those struggling to find affordable rent, where it costs approximately $700-$800 to move into one of his shared houses. Clever thinking, right?We discuss in this episode the future of the US real estate market and how Spencer sees it mostly as a renters' nation. He talks about the challenges people face while looking for affordable housing, and how this is impacting the overall economy. Spencer also shares his insight into the world of NFTs and his opinion about them – while he finds the potential for a good project to invest in, there aren't always good projects out there, and NFTs can be risky ventures. We also delve into fascinating legal issues and how Spencer dealt with them after posting videos on his YouTube channel. The speaker doesn't worry about getting sued as he's careful with his words, but legal issues have come up before, and he has learned a lot about law and defamation throughout the process. For new creators looking to join the ever-expanding world of YouTube, specifically the financial space, Spencer has some tips and tricks to help them succeed. He talks about his experience with agencies and sponsorships and gives insight into ways creators can make money off their YouTube channels.To hear more about Spencer and his thoughts on real estate, NFTs, legal battles, and building a successful YouTube channel, listen to this episode of Digital Social Hour on your favorite podcast platform now! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/digitalsocialhour/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to the digital social hour. I am here with my co-host Charlie Cavalier and our guest today Spencer Cornelia. How are we doing guys? Let's get it started baby.. This is going to be fun. Super excited to be here. Where should we start? I don't even know. I mean, how are you liking it in Vegas? This is the best city in America. Wow. That's a bold statement. It is. And I'm willing to back up my claim. What are you going to back it up with?

Well, it used to be way more affordable. Now, not so much. You used to be able to buy real estate. I moved here from Oakland, California, where buying a house or buying any property is just not a thing. And then I came here and I could buy a condo for $120,000. So the cost of living, certainly great. And then you also have like a vacation within your city. A bunch of people come visit. Everyone comes and visits Vegas once a year.

100%. All the conferences are here. Yeah, everything. Everybody always gets me to come here, but I can never be convinced to move here. So if you're trying to get me to move here,'s your go-to argument cost of living everyone comes and stays plus i think the layout of the city is the best i've ever seen like in terms of the strip and then henderson well just the ease of getting around it's 20 minutes to everything right and there's no traffic no traffic it's a great city. It's got no state income taxes.

Wow. You might've just convinced hundreds of people to move here. No state income taxes is a game changer. And then obviously coming from Northern California, where you're giving almost everything away, what was the biggest difference for you other than culture-wise going from NorCal to here? Certainly the idea of buying a property. So I was interested in real estate before. When I moved here, then I officially became interested because I was like, oh, wow, I can actually buy something. Let's dive into the properties. So how many properties do you have right now? I have four. All in Vegas? All in Vegas. Correct. So you purchased the first one to live in? Correct. Yeah, I was a condo in Las Vegas Country Club, which is right next to the Las Vegas Strip. So I bought it for $120,000 in September 2016.

I sold that two and a half years later to go into a seven bed house. And I do what's called house hacking, which is basically rent by the room. You get a house with as many bedrooms as possible, rent by the room. And so I have four now. One of them's an Airbnb, but the other three, I have 18 tenants that I manage. So how do you manage that many people living in one place together? Because that sounds kind of crazy. You set up a culture. Okay. And so what I offer is really lucrative. A lot of people across the country right now, I think, are struggling to find affordable rent. Certainly here in Vegas, as we've seen rents rise, rents historically have risen essentially every year. And I think it's getting worse. I think the idea of buying a house is

becoming more challenging. And so more and more people are looking to rent. And then because renting on your own in a studio or having one friend split a two bed is becoming even more unaffordable, people are looking for the affordable option, which is what I offer, essentially $700, $800 to move into a house. Wow. Everyone's got a different opinion on the housing situation right now. Some people, you know, whatever direction it's going in, but without a doubt, it's getting harder and harder to find places to live.

How has that affected what you do on a consistent basis? Not at all. I have no competition. Now, I love when people read news headlines about real estate markets crashing. It's been crashing for seven years. It still hasn't done it yet. So everyone who sits on the sidelines seems to have been wrong. Yeah, it could crash in three months. It could crash in six months. It could crash in a year. I have no idea. But I buy for tax reasons. I buy for house hacking reasons. And so I'm not too affected by what happens. there's a huge dip in the prices. That just means a discount.

Love it. Let's get into the tax reasons, because I know a lot of people are interested in saving money on taxes. So what's your strategy with that in real estate? You need to be a real estate professional. So one thing that a lot of new beginners can start with is getting their real estate license. And then hopefully you want to become a real estate professional. You're not a W-2 worker. This does not apply to people who are like W-2 workers and then trying to buy a property on the side. But if you want to go in full, full time into real estate and become a real estate investor, then yeah, you can essentially buy properties and then fast depreciate the building instead of 27 and a half years, which is what is allowed. You could do in

five years if you're a real estate professional and you do what's called a cost segregation study. And so that's what I do. That's what I've done. Every year I buy a new property, I can get in 10% down or less because owner occupied to get back two and a half percent because I'm a real estate agent. And so I represent myself on the buy side. So I'm getting back a 25 to 50% return on day one, just be from the agent fees. So then I rent by the room, live for free. And then I cost seg, add solar. Solar is a huge tax credit. So between those, it's 100% return. Easy. So that's why, I don't know, if there's a real estate dip, okay, I'll just buy another one. So it sounds like almost every decision you're making is based around the tax reasons or

implications for doing so. Very little has to do with whether or not you think the property is going to go up in value or anything to do like that. I'm very confident in 10 years, my properties that are worth 2.2 million today are going to probably be worth double, whatever. That's just icing on the cake. But yeah, I'm not buying for appreciation, but I fully believe in this market. I think Las Vegas will become very similar to LA in the sense that the idea of owning is there's like an owning class and a non-owning class. And the non-owning class will represent a majority of people. And therefore, those who own can rent and get exorbitant amounts of rent. Do I think it's fair or fun? No, but everyone's playing the same game.

Might as well win. So you agree with Grant Cardone's philosophy that we're becoming a renter's nation? We already are. We already are? I think we already are. However, the percentage of home ownership actually hasn't changed much in the last 15 years. I just made a video on this.

And so you could argue that home ownership is actually very similar to the past 20 years. I do think it'll continue to get worse, though. The housing supply is not matching the demand and won't for a long time, especially if we're about to see a huge pullback from builders, then the supply is only going to get worse. Why have we stopped building as much? Because I don't understand the market, obviously, as well as you do. But it seems like ever since the recession, 9, 10, 11, we've never really picked back up construction rates to provide enough housing for everybody. I'm certainly not an expert on the builder community.

However, my understanding is that it took such a hit during those years that it never fully caught up. And then now it's just really hard to catch up for the demand. The demand is just insane. For affordable housing is really the kicker here. And the building costs have gone up so much that if you look at the ability to build an affordable home,

that's the real problem. There's plenty of houses in the $500,000 range. But when you talk about affordable home, a starter family can buy a three, two, $300,000. That's done. It's never happening again. Where did you find the three properties, the other three properties you bought? Was it word of mouth? Was it online? Just your own research? The first one, it's a seven bed, five bath over by the airport. That was actually a friend had that house. I did what's called a lease purchase agreement, which is a form of seller financing. That property was through him. And then the other three were MLS because I don't have any competition for what I do. So I just,

whenever I'm ready to buy, I look on the MLS and then I buy whatever the best option is available. Wow. So you're only putting 10% down of the house. So on that 120K house, you put down $12,000. So for that one, I did 20% down because I've been able to save up for the previous couple of years. I had been able to save up enough money for 20%, But 120,000 was only 24 grand at the time. My last three properties have been 5% down, 15% down and 10% down. The 15% was an investment property, a non owner occupied. So what you can do is every year you can buy what's called an owner occupied property. And it allows you to do sub 20% down the investment property, the 15% was a unique loan. However, if you you have the ability to move every

year and put down five or ten percent which is what i do and i get back two and a half percent as an agent so in the example where i put down five percent i got back to and i got an immediate 50 return on day one of owning the house wow that's on card yeah and it's there's no other place like imagine buying amazon stock if theoretically this was not insider trading but you could buy it and it immediately goes up 50% the next day and it maintains and, you know, theoretically would maintain that value. That's just how it is. It's amazing. Yeah. And I love when people just talk about you can't own homes and real estate market's going to crash. Like, yes, please. I hope these people get huge followings. I hope there's less competition because this is like a cheat code.

So for those who are trying to understand basically like the simplistic form of what you do, how do I start with whatever money I have for a down payment? Let's say my credit is an average credit score in the United States. What is their next step or at least their first step short of getting a real estate license like you did? Certainly to understand what you're doing. Like you are buying a property. If you're putting down three and a half percent, you're leveraging what, 33x your money. So be very careful. I don't want people to just jump in and think it's like some magical system with no setbacks. I mean, the goal would be the person wants to become a full time real estate investor and could see themselves being an investor for the next 50 years. The best option is three and a half percent down

FHA loan. The more bedrooms, the better, which is what I prefer. I go after six and seven bed houses. That's my that's my recipe, my system. What percentage of your time is on YouTube and the real estate business? Probably half and half. My real estate takes up a lot of time because I still self-manage. Right.

And so I'm also doing anything with the properties I'm dealing with. YouTube is kind of easy at this point. Got it. And for the YouTube, let's talk about that because you built a channel with 72 million views and 400,000 subscribers. Yeah, 485. Yeah. So how long did that take and what was sort of some things you remember along the way that really helped you grow that? Started January 2015 as a side hobby. Didn't make my first dollar for five years until February

2020. So it took quite a while. I realized that the biggest, the most important element of YouTube is making videos for an audience as opposed to making the videos you wanna make. I think that's a separation that's really important. A lot of beginning YouTubers haven't figured that out where they're like, I wanna make videos about my life because I'm so interesting

or what I eat is really interesting, but you don't realize that no one really cares. Right, yeah, like the vlogs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you really have to understand the niches really cares. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you really have to understand the niches and the trends and how to pivot with the trends. That's very important. And you go in hard on people on YouTube. Like it is fairly enjoyable to watch. Is there any sort of hesitancy when you, before you put out a video, maybe I shouldn't say this, maybe I shouldn't go at this person so ridiculously or hard. Absolutely. Yeah,

absolutely. That's something that is on your mind. I also want to be very fair to the subjects of the videos. I never want to say something that isn't validated or if I have a source, it isn't like, hey, is this true? Like, can I see some proof

that if I'm going to call this guy a scumbag publicly, can I see some proof that it's accurate? Right. Yeah, I've noticed you've called certain people out and then the next video

you'll have them on to get their story. Absolutely. That's a great video. I love that part of YouTube, which is like, yo, I don't believe this guy, but if you're willing to come on and actually confront my claims, and I think that is how we should act in a society.

It's like, if I don't believe you, I'll say it. I don't believe you for X, Y, and Z reasons, but I also want to give you a chance to speak, and I think that's missing in a lot of conversation. I might not agree with you. Maybe you lie to my face, and it's all BS, but I at least give you the opportunity. If I call you out publicly, at least give you the opportunity to say your side of the story and then let the audience decide. Right. Yeah. I love that. Let's talk about sort of the darker side of that when

people don't want to come on and they want to take it to the courthouse. Sure. I saw you were dealing with a lawsuit the past two years. What has that process been like? I was served June of 2021. So we're now at a year and a half. Worst experience of my life. Crazy. Yeah, lawsuits are pretty wild here in America. It is a system that very much favors the wealthy,

very much favors large corporations, and has no protections for the small man. I consider myself a small man. And I'm insanely fortunate to be able to afford my legal fees. And April 17, 2020, I lost my job, furloughed from COVID. I was making $45,000 a year at the time. Fast forward to June of 2021. So not even a year and a half later, I was sued. And in the following 20 months or however long, I've been out of pocket $240,000. Wow.

And for a guy who made, last year I made $170,000 from AdSense. AdSense is the money that you make from the ads that play on your YouTube videos. So theoretically, if I did no other monetization, I spent $270,000 last year making content and made $170,000 from AdSense. Wow. So to give you an idea of how damaging this has been, it's been a massive setback. It's cost me a significant amount of money.

And it's kind of the unfortunate side of this world of, I don't like the word exposing, but kind of bringing to light some business practices that I find unethical. Exposing is a good word to use because you do provide an unbiased opinion. You give people a chance to speak up for themselves. Why do you think people ever don't want to do that? To me, it seems indicative of them not wanting to actually be called out again and proven incorrect. For sure. You're speaking about the subjects of the videos. Yeah. Because they have something to hide. I mean, I would love to interview everyone. However, I think a lot of people, when they get caught and a lot of it is a lot of what I go after

is not necessarily like, it's nothing's personal. It's not like I found you cheating on your girlfriend. It's nothing about that. It it's like here's marketing pieces that I don't agree with or here's proof that you might not have the expertise that you claim to have if you can't prove me wrong you probably don't want to bring more attention to it right yeah that's I'm sorry to hear about that lawsuit I truly believe though in business that once you get to a certain level they're almost unavoidable. Seems that way, especially here in America because of how prevalent it is. Exactly. Cause I talked to so many eight, nine, you know, seven figure entrepreneurs and they're all dealing with it. And I remember my first one, I was a wreck.

Couldn't even leave my house. It's emotionally damaging to an effect that you can't. And it's, guys struggle to talk about this, you know, it's like emotionally damaging, but it's incredibly stressful. I just got my legal bill literally on the way here for. You know, it's like emotionally damaging, but it's incredibly stressful. I just got my legal bill literally on the way here for last month. And it's like, oh, yeah, I spent. So I made last month I made I'll probably make about four thousand in AdSense because my views are down and AdSense is really bad in January. So my legal bill is twelve grand and I made four grand. Oh, geez. Fine.

My last year was the highest I paid in legal fees. Probably you, too. Yeah. And so this has to be probably your first encounter with having somebody practically try to sue you into submission. And what would you say to everyone out there who's making content similar to what you're doing and doesn't have the ability to pay those legal fees? Media insurance was my biggest mistake. Media insurance and raising money. When I first was sued, I figured 50,000 seems insane. I'll pay. That's going to be the cost.

I can afford that. 50,000 will be the total cost, right? Because what's a lawsuit? You just, okay, you share some data or share some screenshots of whatever. And then your lawyer submits it. I don't know the process. I was so ignorant. Here I am 20 months later.

I thought it'd be three months and 50 grand. Here I am 20 months later. It'll be a quarter million dollars. It's so insane. But yeah, media insurance would have protected me that was the biggest mistake unfortunately i couldn't really afford it at the time because i i was under the impression it was a big maybe like a ten thousand dollar payment up front i don't know the i never spoke to anyone about that but that was my impression and so that and then my biggest my next biggest mistake was not raising money

raising awareness for it which is, universally works for YouTubers. When YouTubers come out and say like, this guy's trying to silence me, he's suing me, universally has always been a successful fundraise. Yeah, I saw Tozzi did that for the BitBoy one. 24 hours or 48 hours, 200 grand. Crazy. Get the masses on your side.

I mean, you're the one with the voice, you're the one with the audience, use it to your benefit. Yeah, that was a mistake I made. I mean, here I am, I'm right at the end, so I don't wanna raise money to then, it wouldn't be put to any use. It would just go back into my pocket. So I'm not right. Not raising money at the moment. Let's dive into some hot takes. So we're both in the NFT space. Love it. I've seen you make three or four videos about how good you haven't seen the other ones then. Oh, man. How a lot of them are scams. Well, they are

factually. I want to get your perspective on the NFT space as a whole. Sure. I think it's 1% amazing. I think NFTs are going to change investing forever. I actually had a video lined up where the title of the video would be Why NFTs Will Change Investing Forever. Very positive spin on the NFT world. However, I think we just went through a period of a lot of...

It was a get-rich-quick scheme, essentially, where a lot of it was a get rich quick scheme essentially where a lot of people were and i say take advantage but i don't mean that in like a judgmental way but you had a lot of people that saw a way to make money and then the people who who bought the nfts saw a way to make money too it just happened that the creator made money again they were both trying to make money one won the game it's almost like a poker game one won the hand one one didn't i think anything with the artwork is was pretty much useless and again that's not me trying to say don't buy nfts like if you're into that space do your thing i was the guy in 2021 when i was like this is clearly a mania if you're buying some artwork and you're gonna buy it for a thousand

dollars thinking you're gonna make money you're out of your mind it's gonna drop 99 now it turns out i was right because i could see the writing on the wall. However, to fully answer your question, I think there are good projects and bad projects. And I was trying to be the guy saying, here's clearly the bad projects. If you know what you're doing and can buy the good projects, do your thing. Don't listen to me. But if you're one of these people that's new to investing and you're entering this NFT space, you're going to lose it all. And it's like anything. It's like the tube craze, right? And the last person holding the baton at the end of the race

is probably the last one that's going to get, you know, the worst end of the stick. And I couldn't agree more, right? The people that are actually going to follow through on promises are the ones who are going to make it. But it's not unlike kind of the stories

we were talking about before the show, where people have these programs where you buy to learn how to become successful when they themselves have never done. And I think we saw it in the NFT craze a lot where people are operating businesses that have never done anything before. Right. And I think any NFT that had utility, and I tried to present that in the videos as kind of to show that I'm not this like hater, the NFT hater. I'm like a

neutral guy just trying to say like, hey, there are NFTs with utility. Please try to stick to those if you're into this world. And plus, there's plenty of people who figured out how to flip NFT. So I don't want to deter anyone from going and making their money or to participate in this community that seems to have a lot of value. I know VeeFriends, some people think that's crazy valuable and great by all that. But there were so many projects. I mean, Logan Paul was one. I mean, there's so many examples. There's too many.

Stuff went wrong. And my interpretation was that there's a lot of labels of scammers and all this. I don't think there were really that many scammers in the NFT space. I think everyone was trying to make money. And some people just said, oh, I can make artwork. I could hire a developer to make these 10,000 NFTs. And then the project went awry. And I think that was just part of the risk of this asset class.

It was always inherent. And I was just trying to raise the red flags. And that was my interpretation of it. You were on it early. I got to give you that. Yeah. You were calling it out during the bull run. Yes. Which not a lot of people were. Got a lot of negative comments. Oh, yeah. I saw those. I saw those for sure. It's hard to go against popular opinion, especially when people feel like it's easy money to make and it's all speculative. They don't have to do any work. You buy an asset for one, you sell it for two. And so safe to say you're not an art collector. Correct. Not in any way.

Okay. Is there anything that you are collecting besides houses, of course? No, no, I, I realized in, in 2022, so kind of one of the, you know, January one comes around, you can kind of focus what I want to focus on this year. YouTube and real estate is all that matters. I shouldn't spend a minute on anything else. So no, nothing, nothing else other than that. What's your plan to grow YouTube? And then we'll get into the real estate plan as well afterwards. The YouTube main YouTube channel, I'm trying to pivot into more documentary style. And so I don't know what that looks like. I've noticed a lot of channels have gone into like the faceless big documentary styles, which I think I can stick to my niche. I haven't figured out exactly how to build a team around that. But

unfortunate nature of the lawsuit is I've been strapped it's almost like having both your hands behind your back like i haven't been able to invest in my channel like i had hoped because it's investing in my law and my legal bills so kind of like the jake trend approach i would love to do videos similar to that although my audience seems to very much dislike him so he's getting some some hate he got got a lot of hate. But yes, that style where you can stick to my genre, but also make it more I think it's more scalable, that model. I think that's where kind of a lot of the trend is going. Yeah, I could see that. And what about the real estate side? How do you plan on scaling from four properties to 10 to 25? I unfortunately can't do anything this year until my lawsuit settled. Hopefully it gets dismissed,

which would allow me to recoup my fees. That would be a single day where I essentially recoup a quarter million dollars, which would be significant. At that moment, I want to get into seller financing deals. I think we're about to have two to three years where seller financing becomes incredibly lucrative. I think it's a gold rush that is opening it up today and will be available for the next two to three years. So once I get capital and I'm past this major headache, then I'm going all in on finding seller finance deals. Can you explain what seller financing is? Have either of you bought a property before? Or are you familiar with it? So you go to a lender, the lender says you need this qualification and put down 10%, 20%. So that is a traditional lender.

That is someone who uses a bank. So a seller finance is essentially getting finance from the seller. So let's say a perfect example is your shirt. I love your outfit. I really want to buy this shirt. You're like, dude, I want $20 for it. I'm like, well, look, I don't have $20 on me, but what I will do is I have a dollar. I'll give you a dollar today and I'll give you $1 for the next 19 months or let's say 25 months because you get your $20 plus a little bit of interest. I own the shirt today. I get to wear it to the parties for only a dollar out of pocket. And we don't have to deal with a lender at all. So seller finance is essentially going straight to the seller and paying him a down payment, whatever the terms, it's infinite possibilities because it's just up to you and him.

There is no credit check. There's no down payment specifics. There's no interest rate. You could do 0% interest rate. You could do minor down payment. To give you an example of how this works, I bought a fourplex here in town in 2018. I went straight to the seller. The seller owned the property free and clear, no mortgage.

And so therefore, he was able to finance me. So on a $260,000 property, it was worth about $305,000 the day I bought it. And I did $20,000 down. There's not a single loan program that would allow for an investment property loan of that magnitude. So for $20,000, I got access to a property that cash flowed. It was worth 305. So I bought it for $20,000. I immediately tripled my worth or my equity in the property essentially. And then he financed me. So at $1,500 a month for 30 years.

Wow. That's incredible. Never had to deal with a credit check, never had to deal with a bank, never had to deal with qualifications, 30 days, none of that. Yeah, that's amazing. So people with no credit history can explore that often. Yeah, that's how you do it. It's amazing. My friend here doesn't have a credit card to his name. Nope. I refuse to do it. I'm a big Dave Ramsey advocate. Oh, huge mistake. I know. That's what I've been telling him. I know. And I've been getting on that for so long and I catch so much stuff for it. You know, I own my home. So luckily I can always take out, you know, loans against that sort of stuff. And I have enough equity in various assets where I can do things like that.

I've never needed a credit score. I've always come from very cash-heavy businesses where cash flow was really just the name of the game. And so I have Sean now getting me to make sure that I get on top of that, so I'm guessing it's going to happen very soon. Good, good. I'm glad to hear that. And luckily you can buy that. And you said no mortgage on your property?

Nope. Yeah, so perfect example. If he wanted to move, now's not a great time to sell. It's tough to find buyers. And general, are you willing to share a general idea of what the house is worth? But 1.2. 1.2. So let's say he can't sell it for 1.2.

The best buyer wants, I could do 1 million. He's like, dude, I want 1.2. I'll come to him and say, look, I'll give you 1.3. Deal. Cash? Not cash. But I give you $5,000 a month for the next X amount of years so that you recoup your 1.3.

I take over the property. I rent by room and I make my cashflow. No down payment. So anyway, this is an example of seller finance where he might get what he wants and I get what I want, win-win situation. And no banks. No banks allowed.

And if I never pay, you know what happens? He gets to keep all the money I've already sent him. He gets the property back. Now he can try and sell it. Wow. So he becomes the bank, essentially. So you don't have as much risk. There's always risk, right?

What happens if I take over the property and I light it on fire? He lost his property. Or he starts squatting or, you know, anything. Or if I don't make the payment. Now here is very landlord friendly. But anyway, there are risks involved. Not in New York. Yeah, New York and LA would probably be a little tricky to do this.

Yeah, I had a friend with a property in New York. And the guy lived there for two years without paying rent. And then just got away with it. So, have you had any nightmare tenants yet? Oh, where do we start? Yeah, I was on the No Jumper podcast with Adam 22. We were sharing something about. Oh, yeah.

He asked me a similar question. If you had any problems. Like, you know, I've dealt with everything. but i've never dealt with someone lighting my house on fire yeah a couple months later dealt with that manifest that into oh man yeah i've dealt with a lot of problems the whole house got caught no thankfully no no no he lit lit something on fire kind of went mental lit something on fire by the front doorway caused a lot of damage a real real headache did insurance cover it they did thankfully i fronted the costs and thankfully insurance came back and funded it yeah i had a i

had a jackhammer in the house had plumbing issues underneath that property it was uh it was a tough day i'll still i'll never forget when i called pure plumbing and they came out and they said oh yeah no this is the problem it'll be here's your bill it was thirty thousand dollars at the time i just lost all my money flipping houses i was finally kind of back on my feet back to no debt but i had no cash and then i get hit with a thirty thousand dollar i was this is a seven bed property so it's me and six others i was living in the house with everyone making youtube videos and had a jackhammer i have a video if you want to see it was like how i bought the best house hack in america or something is the title of the video but anyway i have video footage of like them jackhammering in my kitchen, destroying my floors, multiple

bathrooms destroyed, all to go underneath the house. Out front, I just laid concrete, $15,000 worth. Troubled that up. Outside of my house. Had to dig it up. Outside of my front house was six feet deep in my driveway with dirt mounds all in the front of my house. I'm just like, what is life?

Oh, man. What is life? I had a quick question about YouTube. You said you haven't posted some videos. What stopped you from posting those? Was it you feeling like you changed your mind on the subject or just, you know, maybe I shouldn't do this? I haven't made a video and not posted it. Is there anything specific that you're referring to? No, I thought maybe I heard you wrong earlier. So every video you've ever made has gone out. Yeah, correct. Wow. That's backing it up. I've had a couple of videos that I've taken down

when someone reached out and said, hey, I think you're wrong or cease and desist. And I just didn't want to deal with it. At some point, there's just not enough money from AdSense that realistically, if someone threatens a lawsuit and there's, I wouldn't say merit, but you're like, oh, they're rich enough where if they wanted to just bankrupt me,

then you just take the video down. Hey, no problem. It's not a big deal. So there's been like two or three examples of that, but no, I never really make a video and then, and then have any worry. I'm very, very particular because I write a script for my videos and then therefore I'm not just riffing and go, Oh shoot. I didn't really mean to say that. Like I'm thoroughly researching the video and making sure every word is strategically. Do you have a lawyer review the script? No, no, never.

I'd go bankrupt. And they'd ruin the script. I mean, lawyers make everything look more. Yeah, they'll eventually just say, don't release the video. Yeah, that's true. No, there's nothing. Thankfully throughout this process,

I've at least learned a lot about law, a lot about defamation. Maybe even there's a business here where I can like consult where I'm not a lawyer, but I'll at least give you an idea. I wouldn't do that, but maybe there's a way to like do that consult. I'm not a lawyer, but I'll at least give you an idea. I wouldn't do that, but maybe there's a way to do that for YouTubers.

But anyway, you kind of learn what can and can't be said, what could be interpreted as defamation, what your sources are, all that stuff. But no, I don't have any worry at all. The key isn't about getting sued. I could theoretically sue you today if I wanted to. For anything. I could make any claim.

I could show proof that I was here. I say, he hit me. I hit my own side. He hit me and caused me a black eye, all this stuff. The question is, are you liable? And I've never worried about being liable. That's good. What percentage of the revenue on your YouTube

is from AdSense compared to sponsors and brand deals? Last year, I made around 100,000 from sponsors and a couple other various methods and then 180,000 from AdSense. So whatever that comes out to, maybe 60, 70% from AdSense. But right now, so far in 2023, I'm at about a 4,000 a month pace from AdSense. January, I made eight from sponsors, so 2x. So that would be 67% from sponsors.

And I think AdSense can be pretty rough this year. Yeah. Brands are going to stop advertising, I think, during the recession. I think so, too. For the sponsor side, how are you finding these sponsors? Because I know a lot of content creators and podcast owners that are looking for sponsors. I have an agency, Creators Agency. They go out and they have relationships with a lot of brands that want to promote within the kind of the financial. I'm not in the financial space, but I'm the periphery of it. And so they have brands that

their relationships with and then they bring them to me and then they take a small cut. Got it. So you'd recommend upcoming creators to join some sort of agency? Absolutely, now if you're small enough and you can justify the time spent trying to develop relationships with brands, I mean, go do your thing, but for 15%, and generally 10 to 20%, 15 or 20% is usually what you'll see

for what they'll cut, or their cut of the deal. I think it's totally worth it, just, hey, they've got a relationship, they'll fight for you, they'll try to get, because they're incentivized their cut of the deal. I think it's totally worth it. Just, hey, they've got a relationship. They'll fight for you. They'll try to get, because they're incentivized to get more as well. Perfect. All right.

That was a great episode. Any closing comments? Yeah. I love YouTube and real estate and I would highly recommend no one getting into the space so that I have no competition. Awesome. Where can people find you also?

Spencer Cornelia on YouTube. There we have it, guys. That's it. See you next time.