Julian Dorey Podcast - #79 - How I Got FIRED By Google | Mac Frederick

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

Mac Frederick is an Ex-Google Employee and Entrepreneur. After Google fired him, he went on to become the Founder & CEO of both Momentum Digital and Phone Repair Philly. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; Airbnb Arbitrage; Puerto Rico & Hurricane Maria 25:27 - Promoting healthiness to fight C*v*d; NY Times Report on C*v*d & Fat tissue 35:01 - what Mac did working for Google; The story behind what led up to Google firing Mac; Don’t s–-t where you eat 1:04:21 - The final straw that got Mac fired from Google; Mac talks YouTube monetization; Example-driven marketing 1:33:39 - Why TikTok is overtaking Instagram; Millennial vs Gen Z aesthetic differences; The TikTok algorithm; How Facebook sucks you into buying more ads with them 2:01:02 - Mac almost left it all behind; Coffee at 12:30AM; Mac’s lowpoint post-Google; Ramen Noodles & Comfort 2:22:21 - Retirement and death; Mac recounts Joe Paterno’s demise after the Sandusky Scandal; Knowing yourself; Julian does a mediocre Gary Vee impression; Shiny Ball Syndrome 2:41:59 - Mac explains his battle to develop better empathy; That time Mac’s employees were stealing; Momentum and the Pandemic ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q  ~ PRIVADO VPN FOR $4.99/Month: https://privadovpn.com/trendifier/#a_aid=Julian   Get $100 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover: https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier  Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey  ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io  Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Right off the bat, I just didn't fit the mold of Google.

What's the mold of Google? Someone that's there to climb the ranks, follow the rules, be super googly. Oh, is that a thing? That's a thing. Googly. What's cooking, everybody? If you are on YouTube right now, please hit that subscribe button, hit that like button on the video,

and as always, if you have a second, would love to see you guys drop a comment down in the video comment section and I know I said this last week but I want to say this again to everyone who's been leaving comments on these YouTube videos in recent weeks thank you so much it is absolutely enormous for the YouTube algorithm and so the results that we have seen from that and the growth we've seen particularly on the YouTube page is directly so the results that we have seen from that and the growth we've seen, particularly on the YouTube page, is directly attributable to all that help from all of you. So thank you for doing that. Would love to see that ball keep rolling.

And yeah, it's a beautiful thing. So thank you. If you are listening on Apple or Spotify right now and you have not already hit the follow button on either of those platforms, please be sure to do that. Thank you for checking out the show over there. And I look forward to seeing you guys again for future episodes now i am joined in the bunker

today by mr mac frederick and really the title of this one says it all mac was at google he got fired it's a funny story he went through the whole thing and along the way he happened to learn a lot and so he used his expertise to then leverage that into his own career opening up his own companies and has done an amazing job on those things and so he came in here we drank some whiskey he told a lot of great stories and it was a great time really enjoyed having him in here i want to thank the homie ty martin for hooking this up by the way so shout out to ty and seeing as this is the final episode before Christmas, I want to wish all you guys out there a Merry Christmas. I hope you have a great

day and weekend with your families and have a full, healthy, happy holiday season. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Tread-o-fire. Let's go! This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where's the news? You're giving opinions and calling them facts! You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions.

So you just bought a place in Puerto Rico rico i'm in the process of closing really what made you do that yeah boy uh always wanted to do it man i had it on my uh phone's wallpaper for like three years just dreaming about it acting like it was so hard to do and just finally i was like can we curse on here right oh you can say whatever the fuck you want i was like fuck to do and just finally I was like can we curse on here right oh you can say whatever you want I was like it dude you just gotta go with it sometimes I think I always wanted to have somebody do it with me though oh really and so are you married nah nah nah yourself not my other partner my business partner gotcha so he went in on it with me yeah we just found that and we were just down over the weekend,

checked out like six, seven places. And the last one we hit, we were like, boom, this is it. Damn. Now, where in Puerto Rico? I assume on the coast? Yeah, we're like less than a half mile from the beach in San Juan. Condado. Oh, nice. That's the capital, right?

Yeah, yeah. San Juan's the capital. So there's like new San Juan and old San Juan. So we're in like the new san juan like touristy area but uh bro it's like two blocks from this this uh little street uh thank you sir cheers by the way cheers thanks for coming in bro yeah thanks for having me it's um what do we got here some doers little doers I'm a doers guy they gotta sponsor me you know we'll figure it out that would be the move that would be awesome that would be the Wawa too where

you at baby let's go but anyway that would be the move you were saying I feel like I almost want to push her over here and just you know you're good you're centered you're cool cool you're perfect but you were saying you were like two blocks from something this place called la placita so it's you know just 40 50 bars all in one area so a lot of locals go there but also a lot of tourists so it's just mix and mingle in there and people get after it so a lot of young people you kind of need to know spanish or at least a little bit to be dangerous. What does dangerous mean? Perigroso, si. It's in Santorce, which is, if you're in Condado, if you're looking at a map of San Juan,

old San Juan's basically like an island within an island. But Condado is, what, 15 minutes from the airport, and Santi is you know right behind it you go past the highway so the price drops off drops off significantly once you go past the highway so we're like fuck it like that's the move because we're only one block further so decent neighborhood yeah it's a good neighborhood right yeah La Placita um but yeah 160 000 putting 20 down just that's it let's go how big's the place it's a one it's like one bed yeah all right so it's like it's very simple but that's not too bad yeah so just gonna airbnb that you know just throw it up on airbnb i've done a lot of airbnbs in the past and just have a company manage it down there so we need some realtors some airbnb management companies the whole nine yards.

And I'm just going to live there every February. So just be out. You do like a month there and then rent it 11 months a year? Yeah. You're going to have that paid back in like two seconds. Holy shit. Yeah. That's really good.

So it should profit. Like I worked out all the math. It should profit $1,000 a month even with the management company. Are a lot of people, like that's an interesting question that I've never asked before and I probably should have asked this is someone that would know but are a lot of people investing in real estate now who previously did or would have just invested in getting their own places to rent out but they are literally doing it just in volume to do it through airbnb yeah damn there's a lot of people that do airbnb arbitrage too so arbitrage yeah there's this

guy sean on youtube sean i forget what his channel and all that is uh if you look up airbnb arbitrage sean or something on youtube um shit i should remember what his channel's name because my business partner's name is sean who's also from philly so we're like what the um yeah yeah yeah yeah check it right there he is he made 600 000 in a day with holy like bro crushes god see this is the thing man like you can find all this stuff on the internet you just gotta like think about it that's why when i ask a question a question like that to you it's like i've been sitting in a studio all day i could have googled that maybe if i had like two seconds of free time at some point today which i probably did i could have googled that question but the thing is i could get to this guy you don't know what you don't know so

sometimes you don't know what you need to be searching or googling you know that's true but yeah we would put in search terms like uh how to automate an airbnb or how to find an airbnb management company or wait, there's Airbnb management companies alone. Yeah. Tons of them. Yeah. Yeah. My friend runs a cleaning company that turned into an Airbnb management company. So her and I, she didn't own a place. Uh, she's this, uh, Chinese lady living in Philly. She's a friend of mine. She's real cool. And we were trying to buy a place to Airbnb it, but like Philly's, it's a weird market to Airbnb there if you want to buy. So if you wanted Airbnb arbitrage. Yeah. Can you explain that to people? That's when you don't own the property. So you

rent a place and either it's allowed for sublets or Airbnb, or you have to convince the owner, like the landlord, Hey, I want to Airbnb this and like make up a story if you have to convince the owner like the landlord hey I want to Airbnb this and like make up a story if you have to and then you make the difference in the rent versus what you can rent it out for verse you know Airbnb holy shit so yeah if you do that and you don't the owner who you're renting it from doesn't make you disclose that who you're going to sublet it to. Hypothetically, you could just look for a bunch of places where the owners aren't asking that and then just do it through Airbnb. And they might not be okay with it, but they have no idea. There's so many places that don't allow Airbnb, but they don't know unless they're searching on Airbnb or if one of your neighbors complains like, hey, a lot of people are coming out of here or

whatever. And so yeah, people do it all the time. So let's say a one bed in old city goes for, let's say 1200, like an older one bedroom. And you have a bunch of people coming in for, you know, the Liberty Bell and you know, like the historic district and all that, they're going to pay $200 a night. So you're in 1200 plus another 200 for utilities, maybe another hundred for supplies. And if you manage it yourself, managing means you manage the app, like the inquiries, the customers, you know, customer service, filtering people out.

You can have auto bookings turned on or off, or you can filter people out manually, which is what I like to do. I Airbnb a room in a place that I own, but I also own another place that I rent traditionally wow so I rent out an entire house and then uh sub out two of the rooms and then I Airbnb the third room but back to the math so 1200 plus another 200 for utilities You got $100 for supplies like toilet paper, whatever. So right there you're talking $1,500. Let's go

at $200 a night for I don't know, let's say 20 nights. So two-thirds of the nights you have rented. So 67% rented. So do the math on that. You're talking $4,000. What about like cleaning fees? Because a bunch of people are coming in and out.

You charge a cleaning fee on top of it, which is typically 10% to 20%. So if you do it at 20%, now you're charging $240,000. But then you pay a management company if you don't want to do it yourself. Their fee is typically 20%. So now you're back to even. God damn. so now you're back to even god damn so now you're four grand for the rental income 200 times 20 minus 1500 for your all in expenses three percent goes to airbnb for their fee like the math still plays out if you're willing to put in the time it's like anything you know if you're willing

to put in the time i keep forgetting that they charge so low too which is crazy yeah they charge more to the buyer they charge like seven percent to the buyer i guess because it's like a convenience thing yeah you know they're they're basically creating the network so the buyer's the person that has the demand they need the sellers to be on there it's like yeah hotel you know your fees and everything like really adds up at the end there too like hotels are going to get blasted if they haven't already what do you mean just i mean how much they've been hurt since covid you know i thought he meant something else by blasted but yeah yeah i mean airbnb and vrbo just kind of crushing the game you know it's a convenience thing but at the same time you know there there's conveniences to hotels too at certain points like sean and i were

just down in in san juan Like Sean's my business partner. And so we're looking at places down there. And we book an Airbnb for 200 a night plus like cleaning and fees, whatever. So we're paying 240 a night or something. And we're right on the water. So ocean front view. Beautiful, yeah.

You know, top floor. But we had one room and one bed. It's like hotels typically just have two beds in one room so there would be more of a convenience for two guys or like you know people that aren't together yeah it's now we could also do that with your airbnb we could also put two exactly exactly and we also like take this stuff for granted now because the internet of things has made everything so easy and customizable but like you think about the fact that something like airbnb quite literally was not around and it obviously didn't have any competition it wasn't created it

was told that it couldn't even exist by a lot of doubters like a decade ago maybe a little 11 12 years something like that and now like back then you had to go into expedia you book that room that has two beds or three beds or whatever it is. And then the rest of it's like, well, maybe you can go on and find some sublet, like, on a weird Google search or fucking Craigslist or something. And now it's like, I want two beds, a couch, two kitchens, one industrial, whatever. You plug it all in and Airbnb is like, yeah, we got a place over on 6th Street. It's fucking insane. Dude, that's, you could say that with anything so I had this uh I run a digital marketing agency so

I help businesses grow online right and uh this guy reaches out to me like finds me on google because we we rank well that's what I do for other companies I hope them help them rank on the top of google because I used to work at google which I'm sure we'll get into we're gonna get to that and uh so he's got a tourism like he basically has like a glorified travel booking company so think like 30 years ago you go to the yellow books and you you look for like you know travel booking companies or whatever you even call them you call them up hey i'm trying to go to disney with my family whatever and he he's trying to do that now i'm like wait he's like a travel agent now yeah come on yeah and like i hope he doesn't listen to this episode but like your website's garbage you you know unless you're targeting like the 55 up market

which maybe you are even now though man yeah they're all on iphones yeah like even my grandparents are all in their 80s i'm not going to say they're like experts with it, but they know their way around a little bit. They can figure a few things out. Maybe we'll end up in a world where, so this supersedes everything that's going on now in the sense that like, okay, convenience is what we're building algorithms for. We're building startups and apps and everything for its convenience you know that is the definition of uber you know it's convenience and just like anything else out there but maybe there's people that are anti that that prefer more of that handheld customer experience maybe there'll be a gap like a divide in customer satisfaction and user experience

i think it depends on what we're talking about this is i'm really glad you brought this up yeah because it's hard for me to put into words i've been trying with some people but it's it's important that we at least put it out on i guess like on the podcast and and discuss what's going on with web 3 and everything because not that you just said that it just reminds me of that because you look at web 1.0 it's just the internet yeah you connect you go to www.whateverthefuck.com yeah you get what you want web 2.0 brings in social media which basically brings all these hub spots for us no pun intended with the company where where shout out to hubspot sponsor us exactly please pay me thank you anyway but you'd go to these places where everyone else would

convene so that then you could see what else they would bring all the things happening online that are of note that might be of interest to you that you could then access through there meaning you're not going directly to the source so the source better figure out how to get noise on the social media apps. Yeah. The thing that's confusing about Web3, and this will make sense why I'm thinking of it on what you said, but the thing that's confusing to me about that is we're talking about the whole blockchain and moving things quote-unquote decentralized and basically taking back web freedom because now these platforms that formed have too much of it, right?

That's true. Which I'll agree with but it feels like That type of world when you're going back to like the individual computer concept You are now going back to what you were just saying where oh we want it the old way the handheld way meaning I have to go type in it won't be like this but www.whateverwebsite.io, and that's where we're accessing stuff on Web 3.0. So it's like we're trying to move forward with speed and the security of blockchain,

but we're also, I don't know if they mean to say it like this, but it seems like a lot of Web 3.0 has to figure out how we don't move backwards into that world. You know what I mean? Right. Maybe there's a way, and i was just thinking about it so people essentially like to feel special so i think that's the one thing about these convenience apps and maybe even web 3.0 that doesn't exist in a sense of there's a lot of anonymity to web 3 yes uh instead of like specialized personalized experiences so the thing that a lot of old school and new school people will like like my one friend doesn't want to do

uber at all he'll always have a private driver because he knows his name the guy knows what he likes he'll have drinks waiting takes care of him pay a little extra that still still get the convenience out of it but it could be like that with you know it's like i always stay at this place because the guy at the front desk likes me or knows me and treats me well so i think maybe there'll be some some congruence there in a sense of like maybe there's like an ultimate concierge app that's like blockchain based but also has like personalized experiences who knows and i don't know how that looks but like even the first example of like the people who are going to want white glove service on certain things outside of like ultra elite rich people for specific

things that you and i can never even concept i'm just thinking of like the average well-off person who might be older or might not even be who is going to stick to that trend you're talking about and it's like if they're looking for a trip five years from now is that really going to be something that they want the white glove service on or are they going to be like no I can like they've been figuring this shit out now for another five years themselves online you know know what I mean? Like, they learn more and more. So now it's like, well, I'm used, I don't care how old you are, I'm used to doing this. So why do I need to, I mean, that example was extreme, the guy that is literally doing it over the phone. But why do I need to, like, go to this agency or something to help me with this?

Yeah. I don't know why when you said, like, booking this trip five years in advance, I was just thinking back to, like like when i was getting on a plane and everybody's like huddled in on the plane like already cozy in their seat just like waiting to get on the plane like got there hours in advance to the airport i'm like rushing in last minute i booked the flight like earlier that day i'm just like man people really save up to go on this one trip, maybe two trips a year that they're just all planned out for. And what if shit goes wrong? But, yeah, I mean, I don't know what's going to happen with the concierge and convenience apps and if there's a way to really bridge that. I had that memory stuck in my head from when I got on a plane in Puerto Rico.

What is it like down there? Because I'm curious. i've never been and it's like this whole thing where they are protectoret or protectorate however you say it but they're not a state and the native language is spanish like you were saying earlier and i mean like are a lot of americans living there now too because they have free access do you have to take a passport in there like how does it work hurricane maria changed everything down there so that was like four years ago yeah that was that was about four years ago we were just hanging out we made some friends down there we're hanging out with these two girls and i was like yo so i gotta ask because i've never really talked to anybody on the island about hurricane maria and how bad it was i've just saw pictures and saw videos but

never heard really a personal story about it and she was like i'm from a wealthier neighborhood she's in like outside of bayamon or like some sort of like i don't know like a suburban type of neighborhood like more in one quote yeah yeah like when suburban type of neighborhood. Like more inland? Yeah, yeah. Like when you get out into like the more of the mainland, farmlands, rainforest, all that, then it's, you don't have too much money. But she was saying she was without power and water for seven months. Holy shit. No electricity, no no water no gas

seven months seven months bro i was like what are you fucking kidding me i'm like did you have a smartphone like how did you charge your phone like what do you do like that's this thing i couldn't live without and then i'm like oh well i couldn't live without. And then I'm like, oh, well, I couldn't live without water, either food or like, what the fuck were y'all doing? So what did she say? So she would charge her phone. There are only like very few spots on the island that even had any sort of energy, electricity, whatever.

But how do you get there? You have cars, right? They run on gas. Yeah. The gas line was 12 hours long. Holy shit, man. And she would charge her phone from her car, but that had to run on gas. But she'd have to wait 12 hours or more in line to get gas. And they would sell out of gas a lot.

And I was like, what did you eat? So the grocery store lines, they didn't have power there either and all they would have is like bread and like canned tuna and no running water so they go down to like a creek or like any open water like wells bro they went back 200 years it literally overnight overnight and then it just came like they fixed it obviously but did they build like a new brit a new grid when they did it they're yeah they're still building it but yeah it took them a year so most people were without power and water for a year and so what the wealthier people did like the wealthier younger people just dipped to the u.s flew out and can they because they're free to go back and forth

obviously right that's not that's not immigration you can just do that i guess yeah i think yeah it makes sense like they're u.s citizens yeah it's so bizarre like how that whole thing works yeah right because it's and it's down there with a bunch of other countries that have nothing to do with us too but then they also still maintain their own culture it's very cool it's just like unique but god damn bro could you imagine in america like shout out to the puerto rican people for lasting through that first of all but could you imagine if that happened here i mean people are dying left and right yeah we we could never handle that we are not we are not equipped to do that no people are dying left and right. That'd be an apocalypse. Yeah, we could never handle that. We could not handle that. We are not equipped to do that. No.

People are going to be dying outside the grocery store because they didn't get their Rice Krispie treat. I mean, it's like, holy shit, man. That's what I worry about. When our society is just very soft in certain ways, we've all been used to comfort and things like that, and then, God forbid, something like something like that struck i mean it doesn't even have to be a natural disaster for it to happen you know because like i understand puerto rico is a small country so obviously hurricane hits them it affects the whole country like here

hurricane sandy crushes people but like you know in an emergency people can go inland somewhere so i get it but like what about the whole our networks all run on the on the cloud now and they could be hacked and it's been proven in other countries that this shit could be hacked if the power grids are taken out everything's fucked we're done you can't hack you can't get onto the cloud you can't do anything yeah that shit is so scary man have you ever read the book sandworm by any chance never heard of it it's phenomenal it's written by this guy andy greenberg i've talked about it one or one or two times on the podcast but sandworm yeah he wrote all about the benjamins the what

no no no but he i think it was pretty much all focused, I read it a while ago, but it was pretty much all focused on like the internal Russian like hacking teams. So there's like Team Fancy Bear, they're like codenamed that, but they're a part of the GRU in Russia, the 7, it's either 77445 or 745, I of them but anyway these guys would prove that they could hack the power grid in ukraine and they took it down in like kiev and a couple other places across like 250 000 people the click of a button for like four or five hours or something one time just to prove that they could do it and now like you're looking at a potential future of cyber warfare yeah i mean that's just russia imagine what all these other countries can do even north korea which shockingly has like a pretty good cyber team over there which is kind of creepy but like imagine if they just were able to get in once and imagine if they just said we're going to shut down the entire the entire

eastern seaboard and the next like 300 miles inland people are dropping like flies here i don't think the next world war if there is one hopefully there isn't but if there is one it's going to be very tech based in a sense of knocking out power grids and power supply water supply like whatever a country needs to survive in a sense of like new age technology it's not going to be like missiles and bombs and all that stuff um and who knows maybe it's airborne illnesses yeah i mean it's not that's the farthest thing from being out of the realm of possibility. And now at least there's a renewed interest in people actually looking into how this whole corona thing got out. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of obvious from the beginning.

It should have been obvious to a lot of people, but now at least they're looking at it. And it's like, could there have been some dirty bomb stuff with that? You never know. I mean, think about it's invisible. You get one person on a plane who's able to bring something right you can't kill this virus either you can't just fucking morphs into something else it's like anything else dude are they treating treating it like you know how hurricanes they'll name it like an a and then a b and then a c are they doing the same thing

with corona there's like the alpha and there's a Delta and that Omicron do we miss the the D through O's were there other variants that I believe and I have to check this it could have just been a meme so if it was I'm sorry but I believe they skipped over the G or something because it's named after Xi Jinping so they were naming each of these things and they were supposed to be like a G that might literally be a meme but it's kind of funny so there are other are other variants between d and o oh they're gonna keep going yeah yeah so we're the holy at o we're probably past o by now i mean don't come back around just like hurricanes come back oh my god just works its way through the letters every year it's just i don't know it's impossible to have conversations with

certain people about this because you either get people who are just like, oh, the entire thing doesn't exist. It's a hoax. Or you get people who are like, we're all going to die. We need to stay inside forever. And it's like neither of those make any sense. But you should also be treating this not just with the vaccine and everything. Treat it with like, all right, people, let's get healthy. Let's do some things that can take away our risk to it I mean even even the New York Times eat

healthier workout yeah smoking cigarettes exactly the New York Times put out a story a couple days ago maybe it was last I don't know and all the days mesh together it was recently and they were saying that the studies are now showing and again that's studies so we'll see what it does but they're reporting on it that coronavirus attacks fat tissue hence why we and it makes sense like if you're overweight you're more prone to anything it's not just coronavirus but this is why you know so like if you are obese and you get coronavirus they're proving or trying to prove right now in the process of proving that that's why we've seen that those people have a

tougher time because their literal tissue is being attacked by the virus it's like who would this hit the worst china's over there thinking it's true i mean i'm sorry sorry italy sorry italy we you just got caught up oh my god the sickest part is that a conversation like that is not a lot of the realm of possibility it's like a family guy episode who could be hit first like oh my god but shape up americans like get it to stop eating kfc every day what do they think down in puerto rico about that the virus yeah i mean they're taking it pretty seriously i mean there's a lot of people traveling down there so they don't know where

these people are coming from and i i once say you know everybody's super fit down there they just kind of live free and kind of do what they want and you know a lot of people are eating pork and beans so you know that's uh you know common meal down there so it's got to be better in here though in terms of like the infection rate and how you know how it's going in terms of like people in shape you don't see a lot of people working out down there you don't you see a lot more people working out here percentage wise but people aren't i guess eating terribly all day it's not like a bunch of fast food places all over and it makes a difference man a lot of fruits yeah beans whatever i remember back at the beginning my one of my friends his father died of corona his dad was very very old his dad was like

i don't know 85 something like that so he was older and he got it and he died and so i was talking with him a few weeks later and obviously it was sad but you know i guess it's better than if your dad's like 60 and dies and you know i didn't want to talk about the virus with him but he started talking about it and he said you know i went to the beach because his dad lived like down in a beach in delaware or something and he goes i went to the beach the other day and just started looking around and i'm like holy shit like three quarters of the people here are like way overweight like there's no way that this is like in even remotely not a bad thing like it definitely is and this was like i don't know april may of 2020 this was early and he was looking at this and he's like and i'm like you're going to the beach and maybe it was like june it

was like when shit was kind of opened up and he's like yeah i mean it's that's got to be the problem here you're getting old people that makes sense and then you're getting people who are out of shape if if you're overweight it doesn't happen overnight and you have time to correct there's something you can do about i mean genetics is really hard to fight but do yourself a favor i mean i feel bad for for all the families like losing people like that but i mean people are making the same choice every day. It's true. Day after day, month after month, year after year.

It's true. And it doesn't help that, you know, when we're in this whole time, we're at home, everyone's remote, they have time to get on the internet, talk about all this shit with other people, and you get those teams I referred to to and that's what gets the attention i mean the people who are screaming one way or the other are the ones who get it and then everyone else who wants to try to say all right let's eat healthy let's let's do a few things let's live a little bit that doesn't get attention it's just not it's not in vogue it's not the extremism life is all about reaping what you sow honestly what you eat how you treat people how you treat yourself your mental thoughts like starting a

business like you should expect what you should expect like it's karma you know just everything in life you reap what you sow so the same that's my same philosophy on the whole covet situation if you're scared of getting it wear your mask stay away from people protect yourself like don't put yourself in weird situations if you're not scared of getting it like do your thing you know try to be conscious of others if they are weird like you reap what you sow yeah and that's that's the moderate type opinion make your own choice yeah there has to be a point that started with two weeks to flatten the curve like everyone was aware of what this thing was if you're completely disconnected from the world and living out in the

mountains somewhere you know unfortunately nothing in life is 100 so we can't say that we talk to every single person yeah but like by and large if you are with it in this planet like at this time during this era after this thing started i don't know if it was two weeks a month whatever people knew the risks they knew the risk you knew the risk and so it's like at some point when are you gonna say all right my call i'm gonna live with it one way or the other yeah if i'm if i'm 150 pounds overweight and i decide fuck it i'm going back to work i know the risk if i go yeah you know my my co-workers shouldn't feel bad and i know they will because they're human fucking beings but like if something happened that's i knew what i was doing i got the vaccine but i did it mostly to travel yeah and and a lot of people have that attitude

i just did i mean were you were you getting it early did did you have i don't know was it something that you were like cracked up about getting or like did you just not really give a shit and you're like i want to travel my mom wanted me to get it so i wanted to do it for i guess to make other people feel comfortable yeah and and to travel you know both my brothers just had kids recently so felt safe you know i i i am a little bit worried about like it hasn't been out that long there aren't a lot of studies and all that but it's probably safer to get it than not get it but who knows yeah my whole thing is like i really these companies have been around for a long time.

They're full of shit. Like they do their thing. They buy off the media. Like we all know that. If you're sitting here like standing pharma companies as like the modicum or whatever the word is of like morality, that's probably not a good decision. But I don't – I never once thought bill gates was injecting me with a microchip i didn't think my sperm count was going to zero i still don't think that i don't really care the thing that bothered me is when they sold it for a long time and i was even like

all right bet you know where they're like oh it's x percent it's gonna work and then you get it you're good and then it just kept changing yeah and so once i noticed like by the end of september i was just like huh this thing kind of wanes can't they just tell us that i wouldn't care as much if they just told us that get the omicron booster that's what i'm saying and they're just going to keep on making it like that but we're gonna have to start paying a lot for it dude i think they do it i think it's like a marketing plan to divide people. I really do. I just hate the media anymore. I hate the media. Big fart.

You don't know what to trust anymore. I don't. I just try to bet on myself as much as possible. You've definitely done that. Your career path is really interesting. Yeah, got to bet on you. Yeah, I think we should talk about this now. Because when I got connected with you, Ty Martin, who is our friend in common, he was like, Mac worked at Google.

You want to talk to him? I'm like, fuck yeah, I want to talk to him. I haven't had anyone in here from Google. But how long were you there and when were you there? I was there a year. I was there one year from spring 2014 to spring 2015. And what were you doing for them? I was basically selling and consulting Google Ads

to small businesses. Okay, and what office? Out in Silicon Valley? No, so I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan of all places. It was cold as tits. Interesting. How'd you end up out there? So I like to tell the story about how I got

the job because a lot of people were interested in that but the reason I was out there is because when they offer you the job or they're like you know hey I don't know if it was like hey here's the job offer no it's like the final round it's like pick pick which location you prefer to work at and it gives you uh it gives you like their headquarters in mountain view or it gave me the satellite office in michigan i was like everybody's gonna pick mountain view i'm gonna take the like the less selected route you went for the cold office yeah i was like nobody's gonna want this one so like a better chance of me getting hired you're just a good contrarian right and so so that's how i ended up there my my my first time in ann arbor

i went out there for the interview of like i don't know january 2014 it was negative 18 degrees bro brutal there's a foot of snow on the ground i was like fuck bad choice should have chosen mountain view but yeah so you go out there and you were consulting with small businesses now what is that like what does that consist of like are you do you just have a list of clients that you're given that you got to talk to all day and see what their needs are like kind of basic business or are you directly working with the software teams over there like how did that all go the first thing you said exactly so they train you up on like the this is this is google it's the culture and this is the platform you know this is the technology you'll

be using the the crm systems and this is you know how you sell and upsell like three months of all this different training then you finally you know get your book of business and it's a list of i think it was like 300 clients every quarter so these are small businesses spending money on google ads to increase their business you know and so to show up at the top of google you know they're just starting to push youtube ads more uh display ads and so you would call up these people and try to schedule a call be like hey it's mac from google i'm your account rep this quarter you have abc hvac company you know i see you're spending a decent amount i'd love to help you spend it more efficiently and they're like all right cool like either like fuck you or like hey like sure like you just gotta get them with

a hook like hey you're spending too much here like you just gotta get them with the hook like hey you're spending too much here i hope you save some money so that's how you hook them to schedule a call and then you jump on a scheduled call with them half the time they miss it because they're a small business owner busy as hell i know but like that's surprising to me what you mean because you're not just like some salesman calling them with some like marketing offer you're fucking google yes but if you own and run a small business like all you small business owners out there you'll get this you get about three calls a week from google so other people are called oh wait so it's like spammers telemarketers like people trying to sell you my type of services now like people who say they're with google but they're not i don't do that shit but somebody will call you be like hello this is

mac from google and you're like hold on a second yeah the easiest way to call them out is be like all right uh what's your email and you'll be like i want to send you an email just to check out my website i want to send you my website what's your email and if it's not at google.com like don't fuck with them you know i mean i get 12 of them a day 15 20 of them it's crazy why do you get them where are these coming from i don't know they're from random numbers like on the phone so it'll be like 403 974 like all these weird area codes i've never heard of we'll just call my phone and it's it's usually a machine or somebody in another country or like someone's saying the irs is coming after me and i'm just like how do you even tell when you're getting a real call bro i remember well

first off the ones that i hate the most are like just people say like oh like are you moving offices soon or like hey we're from yelp or like hey hey, we're from Google. But I remember my second year in the business when things were starting to take off for my phone shop. So I own Momentum Digital, digital marketing firm. I've been around six years ever since Google. And at the same time, when I moved to Philly, I started a phone repair company called Phone Repair Philly. I forgot about this. That's cool. Yeah. So I own four retail shops. I've been doing that for six years as well. Both seven figure businesses, you know, been hustling hard for five, six years. And my second

year with the phone repair shop. I remember I started like, eating away at the competition out ranking them on Google, just stealing the spotlight, getting all the codes because I knew the shit the codes. So I also use that as a case study for people that want to hire me. I'm like, listen, I've done it. I started the phone repair business with a thousand dollars in a tiny little office cubicle. And now we're doing seven, seven figures a year. You know, we're doing well over six figures a month wow start with a thousand dollars no loan no debt whatever like and that's all seo thousand all seo plus doing the right things business-wise

i did a lot of wrong things business-wise yeah absolutely you have to do in a marketing sense like 90 credit to seo yeah that's what drives obviously the human being drives the success and make sure you put your pants on in the morning yeah when you get to the product if that kind of expertise, I mean, where the fuck are we all going to look for business? We're going to Google. Well, it depends what type of business you are. That's true. That's true. If you're a local service business where it's like, I need my bicycle fixed or plumbing or roofing or whatever the fuck, those are the type of companies that hire us because it's more search demand.

I need it right away. And so we run Google Ads. We do local search engine optimization, managing the shit out of Google My Business, which is really important right now. A lot of companies are getting suspended on Google. What's that called? Google My Business.

So you take your name, address, and phone number. So if you just search Google My Business, it's basically like, you know how you can have a yelp account yeah it's like that for google but like way more robust and google is trying to dominate any business being taken away from them by facebook or yelp or apple maps or whatever because they give the whole suite of every got it yeah so if you if you search phone repair Philly... I'll bet you're at the top. Wait, can people see the screen? I've never done that before where I put videos and pictures down there.

That would be chill. But maybe I can like... I'll figure that out. If not, there you are. Yeah. Well, that's because that's literally your name, so that one's easy. That's a little funny situation. So keep scrolling down. Yeah.

All right, now scroll up. So that's a branded search. This is called a branded search where you search your branded keywords. Obviously, I'm doing a little keyword stuffing here. It's also a great name. Right. But search cell phone repair shops in Philadelphia or something. Cell phone repair shops, Philadelphia or something. Cell phone repair shops

in Philadelphia. Still using a decent amount of my keywords. Hold on. But like right there. Behind Yelp so basically number one. Yeah. Wow.

So we got banned on Google Maps so now they're not showing us. How did you get banned on at google maps so now they're they're not gonna get banned on google maps uh so now they're not showing us up at the top of google maps anymore so i've been trying to hack away getting back at the top do they not like you over there because the whole literally i had three of my accounts suspended a month ago so that's where we get all of our businesses like if you're a small business you show up at the top of google maps that's using the google my business profile and uh bro that took away 40 of my business like that why'd they do that it was that they don't like you i don't know i think it was a bug in their system like there was no rhyme or reason why and i'm quote unquote a google my

business expert and i couldn't figure it out you You have to go through this whole thing. Like if you go to YouTube and search Google My Business suspension you can find out how to fix Google My Business suspension or something. Yeah, we won't be able to put it up because it's a YouTube video. But Google My Business suspension.

I just want to see what ones, if you recognize any there. So I should be the second one down. You're right there. Yeah, okay. So 18,000 views because we show up really high for that. I couldn't even get my own one unsuspended, bro. I was struggling for a long-ass time, and it was a glitch in their algorithm because they rebranded a Google business profile, and a lot of people got fucked. So a lot of people have been watching this video and calling me from it to fix their accounts.

Oh, wow. So that's been like a business thing too. Yeah. So now it's driving business. But I don't know where I was getting at with this story, but Google My Business is very important. Yeah. To me, we have like a society where if you can get something that has eight choices anything i'm not just talking about google right now if you are not one of the first two choices that the literal eyeball sees

yeah you're kind i mean i don't know what your data shows you but i remember data from people smarter than me who did this stuff they used to say like if you're not top three on google now we'll go straight to the google example you're not getting clicked it's like down to 10 or something like that it goes from like 75 to 10 yeah it's crazy and that's for everything too but that is the google society because google is the first place that really made this our expectation like we type in exactly what we're thinking and boom whatever the first choices are we don't have to do the maximum amount of work to get there i think the number like the amount of people that scroll past the first page on google is like seven percent and a lot of that's probably not even people looking for something immediate and then for the top three in the google maps

it's like 91 so it's like yeah you got to be in that top three yeah you got to be on the first page google maps i'm definitely in that 91 number I click one of the first ones Google search I go to page 12 page 15. I'm all over but most people don't no they're like you're you went to page 12. I'm like yeah that's where I get some information well it's the whole reason why people are buying Google ads and while selling Google ads and consulting at Google is to get them to spend more money on ads instead of learning instead of them learning how to figure this out yeah because then they you can automatically put them at the top of the page based on demographics of

who's searching they can figure it out or hire someone that helps them to figure it out instead of Google making a hundred billion dollars on it you know what happens though when like 10 different plumbing businesses in the same 20 000 resident town call you up to buy google ads inside that town like inside that geolocation and you got to sell them all to them like if someone's the 10th out of 10 i mean they're getting bad value no if i was at google i wouldn't get all 10 of those clients if i'm talking about my own marketing agency i would only take one of them right okay so at google they would encourage you to take all of them and fuck nine of them you would not get all your clients from the same area so you would be spread out all over so your friend in the cubicle right next to you would have

you know jimmy's you know, HVAC or whatever you say. Oh, he could get a different one right next to you. Yeah, yeah. And you're like, no, spend 10 cents more than him on that click. Holy shit, man. I always wonder about that, like how deep the customization goes. Yeah. goes like how powerful not just at google like other places like how powerful the algorithm is such that one person's experience forget like the type of content we know that's all way different

but like literally how they see things on a page can be different in one place and you're standing right next to them because maybe they have you have the same update but you have different like for apps especially like instagram yeah you have different features in them and you don't know it. But then the person over there has the same feature as you, but now they're alone, but they have the same feature as that person. And it's like, sometimes I wonder what the value is there. And then I remember, I mean, that's how they get data. They're like, okay, we used, we tested out, we A, B tested these 20 different things over the last 90 days. Here were the numbers of usage rates.

Here were the lag times on the app. That's what we want. And now we're good, right? We have a choice. We're going to go with A. I wasn't involved too much on the data side of things, but I did a TikTok recently. And it was like why I got fired from Google. It got like 50,000 views.

Oh, I got to look at that one. Yeah, it was like why I got fired from Google. It got like 50,000 views. Oh, I got to look at that one. Yeah, it was like a cool creative video. What's your TikTok? Some people fucked with it. Some people said it was bad acting. It's all good. What's your TikTok?

Just my name, Mac Frederick. All right. Let's pull this bad boy up. Yeah, that one. That one right there? Yeah. Okay. Hold on one sec. I'm going to pause it.

I'm going to stick the audio in our ears so that we can hear it here, people. That's all I'm doing. So that basically explains why I got fired at Google. All right, here we go. I care if I rip this. Oh, hell yeah. Go for it. Why do I?

Why am I? Oh, that's why. Come on. Here we go. Mac, why'd you get I... Oh, that's why. More on. Here we go. Matt, why'd you get fired from Google, bro? Really, bro? Yes, tonight, dude. Tell me the story.

Come on. I invite you down here to shoot a promo video and you ask me this shit. This is the best story of this company. Come on. Well, let's just say I breached their contract. Dude, how do you breach a contract with Google? Come on. Well, I started a competing marketing agency with them.

Dude, a competing marketing agency? Dude, how do you- There's the story. Cat's out of the bag. I was supposed to be consulting for Google Ads, but I just helped these small businesses rank higher on Google without ads. Dude, why would you help a small business rank higher on Google without actually paying for ads?

Because I wanted to start my own agency, so let me just show you, dude. Well, why would you want to start your own marketing agency at all? Google's like a sweet gig. I mean, I'm just an entrepreneur, bro. I wanted to work for myself. I don't want the nine to five.

I'm tired of the whole big corporation thing. I wasn't making enough money there. I wanted to make more money. What are you talking about? Here's our headquarters. My boy, Sean. Some of my partners. You're a motherfucker.

You need to pay. You're a motherfucker. You need to pay. You're a motherfucker. Get off the phone real quick. Yeah, shut up. All right. I'll post it later. This is my boy Sean. We got some awards here.

Like, what you got to do, like, we did tons of networking. I got hundreds of business cards here. But, like, really the main thing that we did was just we know the algorithm. We know how to rank at the top of Google. Like, Sean, pull something up real quick. Like, we rank at the top of Google for a bunch of different shit, and that's what we do for our clients. Virtual tour company? We're number fucking one. Are you kidding me? We're on the first page of Google like Sean pull something up real quick like we rank at the top of Google for a bunch of different shit and that's what we do for virtual tour company we're number one are you kidding me one of the first picture no more fucking one so like secrets and just no I was

making 50 grand a year now we're doing over six figures a month you're making 50 grand a year at Google that's what people are like what come on swear bro it's like starting salary. Yeah. Everybody thinks Google, you make $100,000 at least. It's like, yeah. You would think. It's like, yeah, if you're an engineer or computer programmer or coder or something.

So you, that's savage. You were starting the agency on the side yourself where you would then if i heard that correctly you would go to clients who would be clients of google and say hey i know you're buying those ads you're gonna stop that you're gonna stop that did you get a lawsuit over this so it's like a tricky situation in what and how it went down there's like a three-strike policy as there should be anywhere like any companies and so right off the bat like i just didn't fit the mold of google you know i was what's the mold of google someone that's there to climb the ranks you know follow the rules be super googly you know oh is that a thing that's a that's there to climb the ranks, follow the rules, be super googly.

Oh, is that a thing? That's a thing. Googly. Googly. It's someone who's, I don't know, very, they're overachieving, optimistic, fun, bubbly, all these different things. Is there a part about don't be evil in there? Yeah, but Google, i don't know if they've since changed that motto yeah they took that out without telling anyone but go ahead

uh but i i think i was a concern with them right off the bat because i'd have like a very entrepreneurial past and that's why i got turned down from some other corporate jobs i was applying to is because I had this, this history of staying at jobs at a very short amount of time and also starting my own thing. And so I remember I, you know, got to final round interviews with,

uh, BNY Mellon, like KPMG, like some of these bigger companies I was applying for. I'm like, why the fuck am I not getting these jobs? I was like, I know how to talk to these people.

I know how to kill the interview. I have the resume. I've got the extracurriculars and there would be a little red flag in there and it was typically that wait how far out of college were you when you took the job with google i was right out of college just graduated so wait how did you have a red flag then maybe i missed that how did you have a red flag on switching places a bunch from like when you were a kid? Yeah, just like short jobs I had for like a couple months at a time. Snake would judge off that though. That's kind of nuts.

Yeah, yeah. And just like it seems like he's headed towards a path of like being an entrepreneur versus like wanting to, you know, start his own business. So everything happens for a reason. So I was fired for a reason because I had to go all in on this. How'd they find out about it? So there was a couple things. I got in trouble twice.

The one time I got in trouble because I snapped on a client. He was just bossing me around. I was like, I ain't taking that shit. I ain't taking that shit. I'm not feeling very googly right now right right and it was in an email too like a dumbass i like hit send without reading it emails live forever man and so he like forwarded it to our policy team or some shit and i was like

what did it say he i gave him these suggestions for what he should do with his campaign and he had been rude with me on the phone, like super abrupt and all this stuff. I remember he ran some like big private taxi company. And I gave him all these suggestions and you got graded on your job based on performance points. So if you got the businesses to make a lot of changes and upgrades and spend more money and like use new keywords and run new ads

and all this stuff, you got more points. So I gave him this whole strategy that I put a lot of time and thought into. That was pretty in-depth. And he was like, yeah, that sounds pretty good. Go ahead and do that for me. And I was like, what? I don't work for you, dude.

Just go ahead and do it yourself. That's all I said. That's not that bad. Nah, I was like, what? I don't work for you. Just, yeah, I'm your consultant.

Go ahead and do it yourself. I mean, you are supposed to be like customers always, right? So find a way to tell them that without telling them that. But yeah, still, I was kind of expecting like a fuck you,

bro. Like some, some egregious like that. But so they came at you for that. But what was the second thing? The second thing I don't like to talk about too much, but I'll tell it anyway. Yeah.

I think you got to talk about it now fuck let's do it so there was a new there was a newer class before me this shouldn't even count dude this shouldn't even count i see where this one's going go ahead there was a newer class before me and they were like you know we're the older guys on the block now like i i moved into a house with my starting class of guys we all got along like brothers man so we basically had a frat house and we're just young fun went out partied all that what was her name yeah i saw where this was going right how did you did you see that? You can't shit where you eat, man. I broke that rule one time. Yeah.

So the new class comes in, a couple girls. We get a party bus. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. I don't see what affiliation it had to do with Google other than us all working at Google. Yeah. We take a party bus. They could take it that way.

Yeah. I don't know if the event was like for google anyway i don't think it was but maybe it had to be who knows so we take a party bus to detroit oh and bro i am blacked out on this party bus just just like you know dancing like a maniac like just being ridiculous like making out with this girl and like people were watching whatever so i don't know what truly happened here but i heard she was talking about it on monday and like in her cubicle cubicle with her friends and like her manager walked by which i don't remember her name anymore either and she had to say something she's like you

need to like speak to hr about this and she was like oh And she had to say something. She's like, you need to speak to HR about this. And she was like, oh, no, it's not a thing. She's like, yeah, people overheard you, and it's weird. So she had to say something. So I got pulled in for that. For a consensual hookup? I mean, it's still, I understand, because it's just a weird world now. And shit can go wrong in those situations, no doubt.

But that seems excessive. Maybe she didn't want to seem like she was that type of party person right off the bat. Yeah, that's tough. Who knows the story? I was pissed as shit, dude. I thought you were. I was like, this is a drunk moment between two people off campus who are having fun, like nothing to do with Google. So I was fired, this is a drunk moment between two people off campus who are having fun, like nothing to do with Google.

So I was fired up about it. But they didn't unload you. Second strike. So the third strike is, oh, by the way, I've been taking all your business for the last year. So I would always show up at 9 a.m., maybe 9, 10. Like everybody's getting there like 8.30 before 9, whatever. So I tell people, I don't really know what my second strike was, to be honest, because I also got in trouble for, I started a phone repair company on, so while I was at Google, I was, I had just sold a phone repair company.

When I graduated, I took a pay cut to work for Google. And so I was making six grand a month in college fixing phones. And I was part of a startup too that just got a little bit of funding, some angel money. And we were making a watch band. So we were building technology. So I'm on two patents as well. You're making a watch band?

Yeah. So I've got two patents out there. And so basically, if you have like a metal link watch, right? Yeah. If, so the size of your wrist changes throughout the day based on if you're really hot, if you're really cold, if you're working out, whatever. So if you have a metal link watch, it's only as tight in form fitting as the size of the watch band to your wrist. And so if you take a link out, it's too tight. If you put a link in it's too loose and so my two co-founders were like playing golf one day and it was like hot and sweaty

and it was like slipping and sliding on the dude's wrist and use it as like an excuse whatever that's where the idea formed from they brought me in as like the the marketing director we brought in an engineer we raised a little bit of money we won some competitions whatever and what'd you build so it was called vortec watches uh we were making the perfect fit standard with metal link watches so it would use an inter-telescoping band system so the links would slide into each other as you twist turn the dial of the watch so you would turn the dial like this and there's a metal gear system within the frame and the wires would go through the band of the links. Oh shit!

Because I'm looking at the one you have right now and I thought that was the product and now you're explaining it. You're just using that as a model. Yeah, I think these are all links here. Because I don't like when my watch is loose which is why I don't wear many linked watches. Yeah.

And so you would just twist turn the dial and there would be an inner telescoping band system that's the one patent and the second patent is the inter dial engineering system where basically it uses like a ratchet it ratchets it tighter like click click click click click and that was could you integrate that with pretty much any watch? What we were trying to do, so this is why we took sort of a pivot. My goal was to finalize the engineering, make it applicable and licensable to license it to the bigger companies. So we met with Rolex. We met with roll lot Rolex we met with swatch we met with

fossil we just kept getting turned down everywhere and I was like it's because we haven't developed it enough yet we haven't sold it like we haven't created enough proof of concept right so we raised like close to a hundred thousand dollars like the first year and we're just burning through it on engineering and and you're like 22. you're young right yeah 22 21 22 and um we just couldn't get it to work and then i got the job at google i need to take the job like you know i couldn't pass it down my parents paid for most my college they wanted me to get a job like sure i'm too much of a reckless person at this time like partying having fun like doing myself and um so i take the job at google go out to Michigan I'm still with the

watch group they're still back in school for another year and so I'm like trying to help them on the side right so I'm doing that on the side while I'm working for Google some emails during the day it's Google like because you said you get there like nine nine ten was it nine to five yeah nine to five nine to five okay I sometimes stay till six what whatever man it would get cold there so anyways i got bored i'm like i'm the type where i was used to work in the previous couple years like just doing doing something all the time and so me sitting at home or me sitting around that was never a thing never it's it's still never a thing so I was like well

shit I started another phone repair company and like did it well before let's fucking do it again so I figured out now how to rank at the top of Google so with a local service company if you rank at the top Google like we said your phone's gonna ring yeah so I figured that out my phone started to ring and you're you were the guy doing the repair i was the guy doing repairs so during during the day i'm at google my phone's ringing i'm getting emails and form submissions so that's what i got in trouble for so i'm not sure which one of those i got the actual penalty for the strike for maybe both who fucking knows

but fast forward um to March 2015. I don't even fucking know when the time was, but whatever. I was on another call, and I got recorded, and they caught me being like, hey, you could rank higher on Google. I was like, you don't necessarily need to do this. Your website's garbage too. Taking off my Google hat. Hold on a minute. Yeah. I was like, you don't necessarily need to do this. Like your website's garbage too. Taking off my Google hat. Hold on a minute. I work for you now. And so my friend, I started sending him business. My friend who I started a software company with in high school or in college, a different company, he could program websites, design websites,

all that. And I was like, yo, sending him the business for that then I would figure out the SEO and so we started the agency oh so you could offer both yeah right yeah now on the back to the phone repair thing though real quick so you were doing that all yourself like what kinds of repairs basic screen repairs or things beyond that even yeah I would fix it after work so I try to line them all up after work and then sometimes during lunch how long does that take like for one phone if I have a cracked screen I've been doing it for 10 years it depends what phone you have 10 minutes damn yeah and then what would you charge for that I could fix an iPhone 10 11 screen in less than six minutes and what do you charge? A hundred bucks. It's not bad. Parts cost 40.

Yeah. So if you do it by 10 minutes, $60 profit times six, that's $360 an hour. Damn. And then besides like the crack screens, were you doing any internal stuff too? We still do.

I mean, I've got four shops we probably do 30 or 30 repairs a day but at the time even then yeah batteries screens cameras whatever iPads so this is how I ended up really going all in with the agency so I'm still at Google I'm fixing devices this is when I really get deep into like, maybe I should start this agency. So I get a call with this guy wants to drop off his iPad at lunch. And I tell him the location of the building.

So he drops off his iPad and he's like, oh, isn't Google here? And I was like, yeah, I work for Google. And he's like, get out of here. I run like a financial firm right around the corner. And I was like, cool, what is it? And we're just like talking, catching up. I fix it. and then he wants to ask more about google he's like my website's really not ranking i can't find it anywhere on google and uh i was like well i could probably

help they got you on the company security camera picking up the mics and everything like yeah yeah fuck this building we're gonna go out back buddy like you ain't got a wire when you do he's like uh like mike reed shout out bro exchange capital group i don't even know if i can shout you out like that but we just did um and so he's like how much something like that costs and i was like let me get back to you on that no fucking clue and so i go home i do a little research i'm trying to figure it out and i was like it's gonna take three months and it's gonna cost five grand he's like done i was like oh nice you should have said 10 i should have said 10 you should have said fucking 20 i should have said 20 yeah and so what happens is like when you promise to do something you're gonna get paid for it

like you got one of two options you're gonna figure the fuck out and learn it in depth or you're just gonna fucking bamboozle somebody and take their money yeah or they're not gonna pay you that too and so bamboozle them they shouldn't literally like, uh, and I've never wanted to do any sort of bad, bad business. Like if I promise something, I'm going to do everything I can to make it happen. And so it just so happens like a couple of weeks later, I got fired. Maybe they did hear the conversation. Who fucking knows?

Um, so they didn't say anything. They just fired you. It wasn't about that conversation. It was when I got recorded on a call. They're like hey we have this call recording they played it back in front of me in hr and they're like is this you and i was like yeah yeah yeah that's this you it's got your fucking phone number on it all the data your voice on there you're talking about is this you yeah and so and what was on that call

a lot of shit oh was that the phone repair business or was that just like the personal agency business? It was me pitching somebody to redo their website. So I like called out his website and told him to go with me. I was like, yo, your website looks kind of gay. It's like real fruity. Like we got to fix this up a bit. Like let me talk to you afterwards. I'll call you back and um got recorded he said something called the policy team they saved the recording gets brought up and it was like me soliciting business me

calling his website gay like all this shit oh my god yeah so is that like uh the security teams here to escort you out of the building or we're gonna have to talk about this and um yeah we're gonna we're gonna bring you back in on friday and then you never come back in i came back in friday and was like i came back in for i came in every day like just sweating bullets in there you know we're going dude google was dope bro it was sick like that week we had like a company ski trip and i'm there like just sweating like not having a good time like i'm gonna get fired on friday they go in there i was most upset they took my computer i really liked it was my first like real nice macbook but uh

yeah what so they fired me and i was upset because my manager, I'm not going to mention her name, we didn't see eye to eye for a while. But when it came down to it, we were the same type of person in many ways. We like to have fun. We like to get shit done. Very outspoken, so we butted heads a lot. And she wanted me to be a team leader and team player the whole time, and I never was.

That's why I got in trouble a lot. You wanted to build. You wanted to either have a partner or something and not report to people or just report to yourself and go out and start an agency, which is why you were doing it. To me, this is all it was. It was a job that paid me. It was free food and fun activities.

And it was a stepping stone to whatever I wanted to do next in some way, shape, or form. Whether I'm going to go up within the company to their capital team or their investment team or whatever the case might be. Or me starting my own thing. I had very much already thought about starting my own agency. And so i wasn't a team player i didn't have it until like early the year i got fired so like i was a month in of doing this right so but you at least had it yeah when it went down yeah i didn't even have a website a domain a brand or anything yet you know um but yeah so she was like i want you to get more involved and the reason she was saying that is because people in the team looked up to me because my numbers i was always top five in the nation in terms of sales for a small business team

oh so you weren't just doing customer support you were going out and actually because you said you were upselling but is that the only type of sales or were you also like cold calling in sales it was just upselling and upselling so everybody thought this was so hard and i was like guys this is so easy yeah i would put in the bare minimum but i was always first or second in terms of like conversations had to upsells had you know what i mean yeah i'm like guys they're already spending money with us this is the easiest sell ever it's not hard yeah you know all i'd say was like oh you know what would be really cool the most amazing thing you've ever seen i'm like dude have you ever seen a youtube video i was like imagine imagine if this person was about to watch

this youtube video and your video showed up right before. They're literally looking for how to fix their plumbing and your video shows up right before them. Hey, you know, I'm Mr. B's plumbing. He'd be like, that's such a good idea. I'm like, dude, and you can target it within a two-mile radius of your business. Oh, so you were selling a lot of YouTube stuff too. I was pushing YouTube hard.

Wow. And Google was pushing YouTube hard, and you would get bonus points for pushing YouTube. So I was like, I YouTube all day. And they bought YouTube way back, right? Like 07, 08, something like that. 06, I think. Yeah. So they bought it at the beginning.

So they've had it the whole time. There was like a billion or two. What a steal. No, seriously. There's actually a quote about that and i'm going to paraphrase because i'm not reading it but the guy eric schmidt who was ceo at the time yeah some reporter asked him like eric do you think he got a fair deal and i guess he was like the kind of guy i've heard this from people who have at least like been around him like he was a really

kind of gruff to the point kind of dude and And he was just like, that's a really dumb question or said something like that. And he goes, either we just overpaid the fuck out of this company or we just got the greatest deal of all time. And they're the dumbest people of all time for selling this to us. And it's so like you look at any deal that's generally you rarely see any business deal, regardless of size, that turns out to be like a, ah, you know, that was kind of, stayed the same, right? It's either you get something that becomes a liability,

or you get something that becomes an enormous asset, and the guy that sold it never should have. You never know right away. It's always a risk. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

But they really, I mean, hindsight is 20-20 on that, but I feel like, because I remember like as a kid, when I first saw YouTube, like the first year was out you go from having to turn on the tv to like i'm on my laptop i type something in even when they had a smaller library because there were less creators it's like i mean how does this not make sense i think it took youtube i think it took google way too long to figure out youtube. How so?

Look at the shit they're doing now. What do you mean? They copy everybody. The feeds, the suggestions, the categorizations, the keywords. Who are they copying specifically? Facebook, now TikTok. Google is the biggest, worst marketing company. You don't remember any Google ads that you've ever seen in terms of their own marketing for themselves.

They're not creative. They're not funny. They try to copy everybody out. Google sucks at their own marketing. If they didn't have the search engine, they'd be a shit company. The search engine is literally mother goose that supplies all other endeavors that hemorrhage cash for years and years.

Right. Google Glass, like Google Space, like all these other dumb shit they want to do that may or may not be good ideas. They just hemorrhage cash for a while. And YouTube, man, they should have monetized that hard long ago. YouTube is one of the best things ever created. Everything I know how to do right now, I'd say 90% of it is because of YouTube. It's because of other individuals who have figured something out, not from YouTube or maybe from YouTube, that I now know how to learn and do from them. Search engine optimization, fixing a new iPhone, whatever the case might be, I've learned it on YouTube.

Okay, there's a lot to pick off here. I want to touch all this. So bookmark YouTube's copying stuff because I'm going to forget that. But I want to come back to that because we could talk a lot about that. There's a few things i'm thinking of google as a whole though when you say that they're not a good marketing company of themselves a couple things number one they own the center of the internet yeah right and they have the power of people's minds go straight to the verb. I'm going to Google it. Yep.

Right? So. Essentially a monopoly. Yeah. So in a way, being at the center of the actual brain, let's call it, make the internet a brain, being at the center of it, they don't need to market the usage. It's already there. Right. But.

It's like one of those things, all you can do is fuck it up at this point. Exactly. 100%. Like the biggest example of that of all time. But I kind of understand what you're saying when you're talking about like them communicating their message beyond just the search bar, you know? So like communicating, hey, you can do this here through us. You know, people assume things like Gmailmail now because again it's through google like

they kind of they couldn't it up yeah but it's not like i i wonder how much they really cost themselves because they're still printing money but like i wonder how much they cost themselves just because they don't really do much outside of the simplicity of the center of the whole thing does that make sense it's kind of complicated how to say that if they were good at marketing they could own everything think about that do they own everything though in a way when you really think about it they own they do own video to like long form video through youtube they don't own short form anymore we'll get to that but they do own the search as well they do own how businesses locally do business they own search that's all they own what about email basically on that what about drive the cloud I mean there is one drive there's Dropbox there's some other ones but like

Google Drive their their search market share if you include YouTube, is over 90%. Sure, yes. Their email, I believe, is less than 50%. Their cloud, I believe, is less than 50%. But think about it. If you own search, which is the first touchpoint and you own 90 of it why do you not own the biggest real estate search and portfolio like type of company instead of zillow like why do you not you see what i'm getting at with this you could own everything because you control the algorithm

do they own ways they own ways yeah okay so they bought that from israeli company yeah right which i don't know if I'm a huge fan of. Why not? I think they should get a lawsuit over Waze. They have too many pop-ups coming up. Like, if you use Waze and you see all these pop-ups, because they try to integrate their ads into that.

Because I don't think they're a good marketing company. They have an ad pop-up. When I'm trying to take a turn, I can't see it, so I click onto the screen and I'm driving wrong. Oh, shit. i never because i don't use ways i've never used it i use google maps and i at least don't see that maybe i'm not paying attention but it took him forever to realize how to monetize youtube correctly and why like how so because i want youtube yeah like what were they doing i don't remember. It took them so long just to figure out search on YouTube could be a good sense

of ads. Like we still have the... Correlation. Yeah. We still have the organic coming up and then I click on the video and then it's a pre-roll ad because they're thinking television. We're going to show you the ad on TV before you watch

your TV. instead of like oh why why don't we monopolize search ads on youtube with some extra opportunity once they click and then they have the banner pop-ups on youtube i think they need to get rid of that completely that's just a mess like they're awful yeah so like especially on the phone holy shit nobody ever clicks that because they have a direct interest in clicking that banner banner ads period and i won't even speak for google's home page like the actual search which which is the one place where sometimes that can still kind of work because of the simplicity of how they put it up by the way like the white back screen everything but like who the fuck clicks banner ads on anything?

I don't know. The best thing about YouTube ads compared to anything else is you've got to wait five seconds to skip it. That's one of the best things I've ever seen. I should have known this answer too because i'm on youtube but i'm like i haven't paid the closest attention to all the monetization details because i've been building to drive traction to apple and spotify and now also youtube i've turned it towards that yeah but like when i look at my monetization one of the questions i've been asking over the last couple

weeks just like trying to figure out the numbers because now I am looking at it. When people hit that skip, I see online a lot of people say like you get nothing for that. But then sometimes other people are saying like, no, you get something for that. And I'm thinking to myself, how's that value to the advertiser? Someone just hit the actual button like because they got five seconds in front of you? Yeah. Because you kind of remember what the brand was maybe so i'm not talking about the ones that are six second ads that they automatically play the whole thing that's different so think about it you think facebook's not getting the money for whenever

you're scrolling on your instagram feed and a little video pops up that you skip immediately yeah they're getting paid for that. That's fucking crazy, man. But we get a whole extra five seconds than you did Instagram. Yeah. You have five seconds to catch somebody's attention. You're a small business owner.

I'll help you rank at the top of Google. Don't trust me. Try me for free. Like, boom. Just like hit them. You got five seconds to get someone's attention. Like, no one else has that. Except for TV, where I changed the channel. Yeah. you got five seconds to get someone's attention like no one else has that except for tv where i

changed the channel yeah and sometimes i will admit and i'm the guy automatically hitting my fucking because i use youtube all the time because when i make my cuts for my videos where the fuck am i getting them yeah i'm like a youtube searcher all fucking day looking for shit so i'm like always ready to click always have been even before this i can't stand how they have the ads run back to back you'll hit a 15 second and then a six second one you're like and i don't understand like the algo with that like why it happens on this video but not that like i always think about that because i i like to try to figure this shit out but like i can't i've never been like sometimes it'll be a two minute video and they'll have the back-to-back 15 seconds and it's like not abc news it's like some random account. And then I'll go to ABC News and there's like no ad.

And then I'm like, what are we doing here? They can do so much better on the suggested ad video, like a promoted one. It's like always bullshit. If they had better targeting for the suggested promoted video. Never click one in my life. Right? If I did, it was my accent. If it was synonymous to the one you're watching, yes.

But they get so lenient with who could get there it's hard to say though too because they they are held to marketing standards right like they have to do disclosures and stuff like that and yet we're living in a world where people like creators and stuff forget just on youtube like anywhere can get around this stuff frankly somewhat fairly i know there's like the whole sec rule but like i don't want to i don't want to use any examples and docs and people here but like you could work in let's say i'm somebody who teaches people different things you need for camping okay like to go on a basic camping trip i like it and so and i'm making this up because i'm you ain't gonna

catch me camping put it that way so a lot of people would watch it i bet there's a lot of subs out there let's just pretend that like there's a billion different types of scenarios and there probably are a lot but there's a billion of them of different ingredients so to speak that you could put into you know a five or ten thing campsite that you need for one person to go camp in the fucking mountains or two people to camp in the mountains every time i make one of those videos because they're unlimited in this case, I'm using different things. So I might use a tent one time. Maybe the next time I'm using, I don't know, whatever a not tent is. And then one time I'm using a sleeping bag.

The next time I'm using something that's not a sleeping bag or a different one that's built this way instead of that way. Every time I do this, I don't have to say, and by the way, use my friends at blankety blankety blank. I can work in there subtly and be like, and then I got my company X sleeping bag, which I love just because it's like way more comfortable than this one over here. And so we put that in and now you have an ad without an ad. Yes. That's what I'm talking. I love that. I love that.

I've thought about that for the longest time. Maybe it's happening and we don't know it, but I don't think it's happening nearly enough. Maybe 1% of the time. Yeah, I know some people doing it really effectively. Do you? I'll show you after. I need that. It's fucking incredible. Because nobody likes

advertising. Nobody wants to see an ad. Nobody wants to have to skip like... People don't like being fooled either, but they don't mind when they don't know that they were fooled because they got value out of it. It's not even that they're fooled. They use that thing.

So why not mention that thing and get a little bit of commission for it? Yes. Yeah. You love doers. Love doers. I'm not here to promote doers. We just like it. Yeah.

Doers. If you want to pay us $100, everyone, I think it'd be fair. I'll sit you right to promote doers. We just like it. Doers, if you want to pay us $100, everyone, I think it'd be fair. I'll sit you right here, doers. I'll sit you right there next to me. Anyway, yeah, I mean, that's the whole product placement thing before, think about not even the internet. Like these shows, even back in the 80s and 90s,

they'd be drinking Coca-Cola or something. I think that's so much more effective. I agree. I agree. You know? coca-cola or something i think that's so much more effective i agree i agree you know if like if tony soprano's drinking stella instead of heineken inherently you are mentally at the store next and you're like oh stella you may not know why but that's why i'd love to know the number so let's say there's like a hot instagram model with like a million followers right and she i don't know let's say she's promoting fashion nova but she's always wearing you know let's let's call it like something like boutiquey in la instead and like her followers

from la like i want to know the numbers on like how many people are consuming that local shit she wears that's not even tagged in it but they know what it is versus the fashion nova stuff because she's only wearing fashion over for that one post yep versus like that's the other stuff she's wearing day to day like you know she didn't tag it she's just casually in it i mean even think back way before instagram was a thing i you can always point to kanye just because he's like a cultural phenomenon outside of music every time he's done fashion before he ever even had like a serious yeezy company right even when it was at the beginning it was a smaller thing this guy would wear whatever the and

usually he'd do something that was completely uncool to make it cool and people would be like it was like to prove a point people would be like yo kanye's wearing x all right we're wearing that now you know that's it's no different for like you me or somebody who's not known but has an audience or we're known in that way we're just not kanye yeah and we just happen to use doers or we happen to use Wawa Coffee or something. It's no different because the people who are paying attention to us are paying attention to us. And in some way, they're like, hey, what's that person doing? Because there's a reason that I get value from paying attention to them.

So obviously some things they do, I'd love to emulate. it makes you wonder like if you're gonna start your own like clothing brand or some sort of you know brand that's recognizable from from content how would you go about advertising it it's like what i would do is try to give some people a little bit of stake in the game like in just a little bit try to get everybody like stake in the game somehow it's like i'm not gonna pay you for this post maybe i'll give you one percent of the company you know two percent of the company and like maybe a commission of sales that do come through your link tree or whatever the case might be but i don't want you to like brag and promote it all the time like that i want you to just live your life and if you like this product then i'm giving you part of the company if you represent it well i like that model yeah because i think another thing with this whole

one-off like culture that we've created drives me nuts and we've seen it for years now is that people just pump something because they're paid to do it real quick right like i will never put something on here and and pump a product that not only do i use but like that i love right it has to be both it has to be something that's like it's a part of my life it's like i have two well yeah it's announced by the time this episode's coming out i have two brands that i work with who are they i use their products the eight sleep pod pro cover you ever heard of them now what is that fucking insane you got to get one of these what is it it is it comes in a mattress or a cover an eight sleep is essentially this company that they're the first tech company to legitimately go to sleep and say

like oh we're going to disrupt how people sleep so they built a proprietary app that ties right into either the cover which will go right on top of your mattress that you have right now, or a full mattress that is the same thing. You just get a mattress if you wanted one. And then throughout the night, the very first night you use it, you set a couple preferences of what you prefer, and then it learns your sleeping patterns. It learns your stages throughout the night, and it makes sure that whenever they're each occurring, which I don't even understand all the ins and outs of those, it'll change and adjust the temperature of your bed and some other things within there such that you get a deeper sleep.

You don't get up, and when you wake up in the morning, it's like, oh, maybe I slept six hours, but you feel like you slept eight. It's fucking insane. So, like, I use that product as, like, a life changer. I use it. I get the least amount of sleep i've ever gotten right now and i don't feel like i do so if i go out there and i'm talking to people about it i'm fucking using it every night i love it you like the attitude should be like you're out of

your mind if you don't get this what's the second one the second one is privado vpn so like vpn company it's something i was interested in they reached out in august there's a lot of vpn companies so i'm like okay let's see what this is really like the team over there started using the product in like the end of october yeah used it for like six eight weeks i use it on my phone all the time it's fucking incredible so all the things they told me about how no no it matters if you have hardware servers in actual locations versus software to not lose speed. I get to see that over an eight-week period, and then it becomes a part of my life. It's on my computer all the time.

It's on my phone all the time. I'm into privacy as a concept. Not necessarily because we're worried about our privacy because we're the head of the CIA or something, and we're actually worried about people hacking in it's more like if we start to give up like as a whole people on all these slippery slope type things what does the future hold so like to me like a vpn is a really good statement back against that that's why i like it so like the thing is what do i need doing a job like this? I mean, anyone needs this now. I need the best internet. So if I'm using a product that's telling me, oh, you're not going to lose speed, and then I lose speed, fuck you. Privacy is important, but I need my speed first.

Yeah. You know, so, like, you have to believe in shit when you do it. For whatever reason, I don't know why I don't know much about VPNs or how they work. Does it just, so you can't get tracked and it's just like safer and secure or you can't get hacked. I don't really know. It can be either or or both

depending on the product and the strength of the product. And essentially what it does is it masks your IP address, which then a lot of people will argue and they'll argue correctly depending on the company and the product and maybe some tech that we don't know about, that there's a way that they could track you back through that.

What my privado guys have, and there are some other companies that have, but basically when the server gets compromised, it automatically kills the record of all the IP addresses hitting it. my ip through new york and therefore when i go to whatever website they measure because like right now they're measuring me as as um south jersey because i don't have on the vpn while we're recording right now but like if i turn it on they're going to measure me whatever company i go to online even social media they're going to be like that's a new york address oh so it rewires you i could technically do it in other countries too. I haven't really tried that. My understanding, and this I'm really not sure about, because there's no need to do it.

Like I can use New York or Chicago, but if I put it through another country, it could get a little slower because it has to travel a lot farther. Yeah. But I'm not entirely sure about that. The whole point is that if they have clients in the UK or something, well, yeah, let's have some physical servers in London.

And therefore, you know, those people are close to that. They don't lose any speed. Right. That makes sense. Yeah, I just basically got like a four-minute ad in there for the two brands. But all right. Seeing as we just got a nice native reel in there with Mac asking me about the two sponsors, I'm not going to do an ad right now. I just want to point out where the links are for you guys who aren't aware.

The 8sleep link is in my description. If you hit it, you will get $100 off the 8sleep Pod Pro mattress or 8sleep Pod Pro cover like I have at checkout if you use the code TRENDIFIER. So make sure you use that. That's T-R-E-N-D-I-F-I-E-R. The second link you'll see is for Privato VPN. When you hit that, you can get the VPN product that I use on my phone every day of my life for $4.99 a month. And actually right now, if you buy it before January 1st, you can get that product locked in for a year for $2.50 a month. So half off, nice holiday

sale. Make sure you go check it out. And once again, all proceeds from these two companies that you guys do to purchase through these links goes directly to supporting this show. So much appreciation and love to all of you who have helped out there. Yeah, I mean, like, that's my barrier of proof to being able to sell something. I get pissed off because the whole reason we were talking about this, I get pissed off when I see people just like one day just like hawking some brand use the link in my buy on a gun or whatever it's like you because they're not skilled no they're not skilled

so we're gonna take what we can get sorry sorry everybody who's an instagram influencer you look good where's the skill set depends on who they are and what they do you know there's a lot there's a lot especially on instagram where they can hide behind a picture there's a lot that are just fake as fuck where's the america's got talent out there they're on tiktok yes love tiktok way better than instagram a times better. I think you're right. Just so creative. So cool. So creative. So engaging. Catches attention right away. When did you

get on TikTok for the first time? Like just studying it even. Two and a half years ago. So you were early too. Yeah. Now what did you like about it right away or did you have reservations? I didn't get it right away reservations i didn't get it right away i didn't get it right away i was like oh what is this not many people were on it heard a lot

about it you know i've been following garyvee for a long time big fan of garyvee and he was talking about it and i was like he's rarely wrong and so if he's an early adopter like i'm gonna check it out i'm gonna try it what I liked about it is obviously the immediate exposure of people that don't know about you I feel like Instagram anymore like everybody tries to copy somebody because they get complacent and they get stuck and it's like anything in life when you're at the top you might not work as hard like you know whether you're the the fastest runner baseball player, doesn't matter.

And so when somebody else comes along, tries to reinvent it and beat you, then you're like, oh, well, I'm going to copy what that person's doing. So, you know, Facebook with reels and everything they're doing. But with TikTok, I got on and I'm like, wow, I'm connecting with people I don't know about. And it's like a new feeling again. It's like you move to a new city and you're like, oh, wow, who lives around me? And you can and you can see oh I'm gonna add my friends and follow these friends here so it's a cool new experience and uh I don't necessarily remember my first video but I tried to get it back into it again spring of 2020 and then I just started using it again recently it's one of those things where people are like I don't know what to post I don't know

what to do like I'm not creative and I'm right there with them like i've never been a creative person i'm like more i guess analytical or like business strategic but i think it needs to be a priority for a lot of people especially in content marketing i mean the biggest difference with tick tock though was that you literally couldn't hide on there so i i agree with what you're saying because i was on there as well i guess two and a half years ago like march april looking at it and it's all 12 to 16 year olds but i would even notice back then because the wider population hadn't picked it up and thought it was just a kiddie app or whatever, I noticed that even within those demographics, you'd go look at the commenters on different posts and you could tell by the comments, they're all kids. And then you would go click those

profiles and they'd have nothing up, you know, which was also, that is kind of reflected on other platforms with the youngest generation as well. But still, I was like, okay, so there's a lot of people who are just on here socially to consume rather than create. And then a lot of people are trying to create, but the best content makes it. The stuff that's not the best doesn't make it. I think it's an 80-20 thing right now. I think 80% are consuming, 20% are creating, if not more skewed. I was going to say, I think it's more yeah because like i'm not gonna count the people to try like two videos and give up from like june 2020 or some yeah

so when you take that new account i'll bet you're right by the way i'll refill that for you too but yeah um it's not i'm gonna put this on my story yo like oh we got the story going what's your what's your instagram julian d dory yeah he's got the setup in here indeed dory but um the doers and everything i think that the other thing that happened here and i've talked about this before but i'm i'm pretty obsessed with like ui ux yeah and like you saw how perfect the ui ux of tick tock was when it came out and how perfect it remains simultaneously while that was all going down instagram's ui ux which used to be incredible just went in the yeah there's clutter everywhere

you know yes they tried to copy with like reels and stuff and to an extent i guess partially i could get that that's not really my style but i understand they had it they had an attention problem but they also started selling like right up your alley here all this fucking ad space and then putting all these different you know disclosures on it that add text to the screen and then it goes in the middle of all the posts of people you know and Then you can't find the people you know and then they change the algorithm so that you're getting more ads than actual posts of stuff You're following and then the stuff you're following starts to fall through the cracks So you don't see people who like you actually talk with in your feed all of a sudden and now you're not getting the content You want to get you know what I mean? Thank you. Yeah, and so

while all this is going on people go to tick tock getting the content you want to get. You know what I mean? Thank you. Yeah. And so while all this is going on, people go to TikTok and the For You page. And this is also a critical point to bring YouTube back in in a minute. But before I get there, the For You page gives you everything based on the last five minutes of shit you've been looking at. It learns you right away. And then you have the option to go to your following feed where it also orders stuff based on what you're most likely to engage with. Instagram needs to do a better job of putting suggested stuff back into my feed, even though it's my feed. I don't go to the explore much. I don't mess around much.

Like I look at stories and I look at my feed and I mean, honestly, my time is skewed. You know, if I were to break down how much time I spend on the social media apps, if we're including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, I'd say, and Facebook. I might be, I mean, my phone could probably tell me, but I'm on desktop a lot on Facebook and YouTube mobile heavy on Instagram and TikTok so I'd say it's maybe a quarter each I should be on TikTok more just because it's more entertaining but I'm like still transitioning from like getting off of this you know Instagram cycle which everybody's stuck on but the people on tiktok now they're stuck on tiktok heavy which because it's better well now you also have the gen z the oldest gen z influencers of our influencers they're being called creators now let's call it what it is yeah like they're coming

of age right so we're seeing these kids they're 21 22 23 and so now they're in like that prime age of like you're young but like you're big and you have the attention. And so we've seen the transition from Avocado Toast Girl millennial to like basic what's the like Fujicam filter Gen Zer who's not into like all the bullshit. And then that goes over to TikTok where the Gen Zers are also like I'll share whatever the hell I want. Not all of them but there's a big sub-segment of them who are like that, whereas the millennials are still so buttoned up, but everything they put out and like, oh, how does that look? What does my aesthetic look like? There's a huge cultural shift there and TikTok's taking advantage of it. I think TikTok is to Instagram what Instagram was to Facebook.

Agreed. And I think that's just going to progress too because people go to Instagram now who are younger, millennial, to see what their friends are doing. Not so much for entertainment. It's more just to see what your friends are doing, what are people up to, just monotonous. 100%, yeah.

And that's what Facebook is to the older generation. What's before millennial? I don't even know. Gen X. Gen X. And so Gen Z is now on the tick-tock and maybe they'll occasionally go to Instagram just to see what people are up to but they're more so seeing what their friends are up to on on tick-tock even or like what they're creating well the the elephant in the room with tick- Tock that I think a guy like you would really

appreciate probably notice but their algorithm which has been around the shortest time of all these companies think about Facebook Instagram been around way longer yeah YouTube YouTube's owned by Google yeah the greatest algorithm on planet Earth as it's supposed to be but the algorithm for content on tick tock is literally 100 times better than whatever the second place is it is unbelievable how fast it learns your behaviors and how fast it learns attention on new creators or creators who are losing attention or creators who are gaining more attention and getting better and then allowing those numbers to adjust accordingly and therefore improving the experience on the app i don't know if i've used it enough to even notice that but i can understand that because

i don't think the numbers lie in a sense of the cream always rises to the top you know what's good we'll have many views and we'll get a lot of followers or there are there are there are videos with a lot of views and then you see the person who don't have a lot of followers because they have one-off hits too so that's what you're saying that's where it changes though because instagram and facebook don't figure that out quickly. Yeah. YouTube does not figure that out quickly. TikTok will figure out. I mean, sometimes I'll notice it within like five scrolls where they were sending me one type of video, like a trend that was going on that I had engaged with maybe two posts a half hour before. Yeah. And then I skipped a couple and they're done. They don't send it again.

You try that on Reels. You try that on YouTube with even regular full-length videos. They don't stop for a couple days. They keep trying to throw you that again. Days, yeah. Yeah. It's nuts. The same with their ads algorithm too.

How so? You look, I mean, Facebook's creepy with it. I wasn't even looking at a watch. I said something about watches and then my ads for the next three days were about watches do you know much about that the whole listening thing do i i know google and facebook are both listening for sure did they talk about that at google no that was the back room not to my not to my crew that was the back room. Not to my group. That was the back dark room. Just sell them ads. Sorry, go ahead though.

I mean, TikTok might start listening soon too. No, they didn't talk much about that. But yeah, I was seeing ads for watches for days and days. It took almost a week. It's like, all right, I'm not clicking on the ad. You guys are just wasting people's ad dollars now facebook ads and instagram ads advertising like it's gotten so much more expensive and with apple fucking them over with the ios 14 update it's struggling what was the story there so the ios

14 update was uh like a privacy and security update through apple so you basically had to you know people could opt out of being right yes you know tracked completely if you had an iphone and so you know the cost of ads and the cost per acquisition increased probably 30 so a lot of people started moving their ad dollars since spring of 2021 back over to google a little bit over to tiktok influencers other things away from just standard facebook instagram ads it literally had a direct correlation like a strong one because it affects everyone so you might just spread it around yeah so it's like if your ads are going to get a lot more expensive on facebook and instagram especially e-commerce stuff, because at the same time, there's and this is a COVID influx, too.

So a lot of people time off, paid time off from work, you know, work from home. I want to start. I want to be an entrepreneur now. I'm watching all these TikToks and YouTube or whatever. I can start my own business and I'm going to do a clothing line. I'm going to run ads on Instagram and YouTube or Instagram and Facebook. And so now there's an increase of competition in advertisers. Meanwhile, there's a decrease in effectiveness of the ads platform and the algorithm. So you have like a head-on collision here, giving people a terrible first experience, which Facebook, they try to give you the best first experience as some ad platforms. I don't know if they all do, but Facebook and Instagram definitely do where the first time you advertise, let's cushion their stats a little bit, pull them in. What do you

mean cushion their stats with the boost button? So that boost button is how most advertisers, small business owners get into advertising because they don't know how to run Facebook ads. There's a difference here. Google has the same thing too. If you want to unpack this, we can. Yes, please. So I've seen that button before. It's not relevant to me because I make – like on Instagram, I make reels.

I can't – at least I can't. I can't boost them, nor would I I because if like in that kind of sense if you make good content it will go into feeds right so I'm like all right make good content yeah yeah but that button is that only there for people who have never used ads before no it's there for everybody it's there for everyone. It's there for everyone. Yeah. But so why doesn't everyone just hit that? It's there for business pages. Yeah, sure. So why then doesn't everyone just hit that repeatedly, according to what you just said?

Because I don't know anything about this. So I'll try to give you like an example breakdown. So let's say you have this podcast as your business page you've never advertised before. And you don't know how to run true Facebook ads in the ads platform the business manager with the Facebook ads manager okay and Facebook's gotten way too difficult like fuck you Mr. Zucks like you log me out all the time I got a two thought two factor out of that of occasion it's just a mess anyways so you want to get more awareness for your podcast so you're like how do I run Facebook ads?

You're like, well, here's the boost button next to my post, which could be on Facebook or Instagram here. And so let's just say you're on Facebook, you put this post out of our episode, and you hit boost. And so now it's going to give you a limitation of your advertising options. So for example, it'll give you a budget, how much do you wanna spend? It'll already have that preset for you to like 10 days at like $3 or three days at like $5 a day or something, whatever. And then you'll have like targeting options.

And the first option is like, let Facebook do it for you. Let us find it for you, which honestly is probably your best option right off the bat, which most people pick because they're going to let their algorithm run and show it to friends of friends, people that might know about you, people that are in your friend group already but don't see it organically, all these other things to increase the engagement, the cost per engagement,

like it's going to help you feel better about your results, right? Or you could choose your... So they're technically not cooking it. They just give you way better results. And I'm finishing your thought here because I'm trying to follow. But like you're saying when you first click this, they're going to purposely give you way better results than you're usually going to get just to make sure that you're like oh i'm in now but they are actual results like they did send it to those places and those are the numbers

for the longest time and i'm still not convinced all of facebook and and kind, I was just thinking this about TikTok today too, actually. All of Facebook's ads results are legitimate. I'm not going to call this out there and like do a whole like class action thing. Get everybody involved. But I remember looking into it five years ago when I would run Facebook page likes campaigns. And I'm like, damn,

I'm getting page likes for like 30 cents a click out here. Let's go. And so, I'd see who all is liking it because I wouldn't have the Facebook, I would do it as more of a boost instead of Facebook ads. And I'm like, who the fuck is this person, you know, from nowhere I've heard of that hasn't posted in two years right i would literally go into the people that liked and you could see them i would click into their profile and direct message them being like hey did you mean to like my facebook page would they answer 90 of them didn't answer so are they fake the 10 that answered most of them would be like no i have no idea what you're talking about so they did push fake shit and they probably still do i don't see many page

like campaigns anymore but that was a thing heavy this was like 2015 2016 and i'm not making this shit up that's pre-cambridge analytica yeah so anyways back to the boost versus like facebook ads so within the boost you also have the option to like select my targeting so you can choose like an age range location and some general interests so you could say if you're a podcast you want to target people in philadelphia from 18 to 30 who are into podcasts and Joe Rogan or something, right? All right, let's talk about data. Facebook ads manager allows you to create and build the data to use that to your success.

So for example, your best friend is the Facebook pixel, which is what fucked up with iOS 14. The Facebook pixel, which is what fucked up with iOS 14. The Facebook pixel? Pixel. So whenever you create a Facebook page, like a business account, and the Facebook business manager, you can create a free pixel that you put on your website or your app or whatever. And so let's say you have your podcast website. So now you put this pixel and it gives you easily installation tips. If you don't know how go to YouTube, it'll show you how you put the pixel on the website

for Facebook. Now it starts collecting data except for iOS 14 and people have a turned off of every user that comes to your website. Now Facebook knows everything about that user if they have a Facebook account name age what other pages they like what they've shopped for what they've clicked on all this other stuff oh yeah oh yeah heavy is this the thing that people have to up into now yeah because of the whole okay yeah that was the big that was the big, that was the big, you know, Apple saying fuck you to Facebook.

And so I'll give you an example. So for your podcast now, right, you have the pixel on your website. It's been running for 30 days, right? Pixels on the website, 30 days. Yeah, you've driven 1000 users to the website. It knows everything it possibly can about those 1000 users. So now you can say, okay, instead of this boost button, I'm going to create a Facebook ad in the Facebook ads manager that's linked to my Facebook business manager, which has the pixel. There's a big umbrella here. If you're an agency, you pull in different Facebook pages, you manage and add accounts and whatever.

And so you say, okay, Facebook, with this ad, I only want anybody that's been to my website in the last 30 days to see this ad, or I only want anybody who's been to my Instagram page and liked one of my posts in the last 90 days to see this ad. Or if you have an e-commerce business, I only want someone that's clicked on this diamond earring in the last eight days, added it to their cart. Wow. In didn't buy. That's how exact you can get. So imagine as a Facebook ads manager, you have 1000 product products, you can get so nitty gritty with all this bullshit if you have enough time. So big agencies are doing shit like

that. So and that's, can I just yeah jump in jump in that is what blows my mind about why like an algorithm on facebook call it instagram same company obviously can't be as good as an algorithm on tiktok when they've been doing this shit for 12 years yeah think about every single thing they know about every single person. I mean, we watched what happened in 2016 where the data was utilized very well by some bad actors and then also like the Trump campaign where they'd be like, all right, well, let's put red instead of blue right there. Let's put this word there instead of this word right here.

Who was the guy, the Brad Parscale guy, the guy that ran his digital campaign? The guy was smart as hell. Like he figured out like it makes a difference if we use this sentence right there versus that sentence in the third one yeah you know and so that is all based off of all this information that even the end user they are an end user is getting from this algorithm now imagine you're at the company and you can use it that's why I just don't see an excuse for seeing the same content of something that I skipped the last five videos while TikTok over here, it's been around for fucking four years, five years. Let's say they had the data from Musical.ly who's been around since like 2014. Still, the user number, the demographics of the users were nowhere near where Facebook and Instagram was. Right. And yet, their algorithms learn this much. the demographics of the users were nowhere near where facebook and instagram was right and yet

their their algorithms learn this much big data companies that's all they are they just figure like that's what they invest the money i'll give like if you're a small business owner listening i'll give you a perfect example of like how i created a facebook ads campaign using data recently versus hitting that boost button and wasting your money a brewery ten minutes from here Clarksboro is that near here 15 20 minutes I think so yeah death of the Fox brewery they hired us he hits the boost button to get more you know likes or on Google there's basically a same boost button from your Google business account you can click create ad and it's a basically a

glorified boost button instead of going into the account and using data. So, for Facebook, what I did with him, he's got like Christmas at Hogwarts, like new beer for like Harry Potter style beer, whatever. So, he's running a campaign. He wants to get more attendance to an event with the beer launch this Saturday. So, he would hit hit boost he'd create the event facebook's organic reach for business is dog shit so unless you have loyal fans that are engaged with a lot of your stuff nobody's gonna see it it's just their feed is a clusterfuck yeah it's worse than instagram it's defeated yeah and so he'll hit boost and i'm like dude like you're not

getting anything with that and what you are getting is probably not real. Who knows? Basically, you're saying you have to use the toolbox available, not the one that's pre-set up. Got to use the toolbox. Yeah. If you don't have time and if you don't have money, hit the boost button.

Throw a couple dollars and spend a minute doing it. If you have time or you have money, take advantage of the toolbox facebook ads manager so what i did i'll tell you what i did yeah i created a 15 minute video we can put in the link or whatever i just made the video because i showed somebody else on my team if i'm making if i'm you did an ad 15 minute video yeah i just did a bit and so my my video guy is going to turn into a youtube video um so people are engaging with that on social this is on facebook you're talking what i took 15 minutes to do you you put out a 15 minute video no so i created a

how-to video showing you how to create a facebook event ad successfully in 15 minutes in 15 minutes god okay i thought you said it was a 15 minute video and you're running an ad i'm like who the fuck is like if, right, right. Like if I go to YouTube, I'll watch that. Right, right, right. Because you know what I mean? I'm searching for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. Got you. So I'll just explain the dynamics of it. And so, yeah, I created a how-to video using Loom to send it to my other guy who wants to know how to learn Facebook event ads, whatever. So what I did first is make sure his pixel is working on the website correctly firing it was collecting data. So it's been on there for a while, I can see how long it's been firing data for successfully back in the Facebook custom events manager. And so I would go in, take that pixel, and say, create me a custom audience, which is a remarketing list. So remarketing is like targeting people that

have seen or experienced your brand before. I said, create me a custom audience of people that have been to the website in the past 90 days. And then Facebook allows you to create a custom lookalike audience. So this is really important. So if you look at a marketing funnel, at the top of the funnel are people that don't know about your brand. Never heard of it. I'm going to try to target them based on their age, gender, demographic interest, whatever. Similarities to my customer. Yeah. The middle of funnel is potential warm customers who don't know about your brand, but they look exactly like your customers. So this is a lookalike audience.

So with the pixel, wait, who is the top? The top is a cold audience has no idea about you. And there's no, there's no data here. There's no strong data. No data. Okay. Got it. Got it. The middle is like partial data combined with targeting. So for example, I take the strong data at the bottom, which is anybody who's actually been to his website. And I say, create me a copycat audience, a mirrored audience that hasn't been to the website. So this is called a lookalike audience.

And so then you combine that with detailed targeting. So I'll give you the example. That's got to be gold. Anybody who's been to the website in the last 90 days, who also likes Harry Potter, who also likes breweries, who also likes beer, who's 21 to 40 years old, living within a 10 mile radius of this brewery. So that's called a warm lookalike audience. And then I did a remarketing list to compare it.

So that's anybody who's been to the website in the last 90 days, or anybody who likes his Facebook page, or anybody who's visited, engaged with his Facebook page or anybody who's engaged and visited his Instagrams, Instagram posts, any previous ads, all of this lumped into one bigger audience. If you really want to get into the minutia, you can drill it down further and further and further in so many different categories. So that's why it only took me 15 minutes. I created all these audience, these lookalikes,ikes created the ads duplicated the ad copy ab test it and spit it out there so you

understand this is facebook you're talking about and so you've learned all this stuff but how how parallel was it to taking your understanding from google to that versus like how much did you really have to just like start from scratch and figure out how it worked? Everybody learns differently. Obviously, like I'm, I'm someone that has to watch it and then do it. So like you teach me how to like do a soccer move. I'm a big soccer player. I can't read it in textbook and do it. You teach me, you teach me math and I read it in the book.'s not going to teach me i've got to see you do it you tell me how to do it and then i do it i do it again and then it makes sense you're a visual learner yeah so a visual learner so the

same thing with facebook ads i learned it from youtube learn facebook ads completely from youtube i was like are we recording no no no i'm just i was i was checking the production because i thought my volume went out you're good though um so yeah so it's it's trial and error that's been not just marketing that's been in my entire business my entire life and i can't even say that i learned from it right away maybe it takes me two times sure yeah it's like anything i mean even like if you're out there doing something or building anything your company like let's say you're a little over a year in to doing it like i am the things you did it's like anything else the things you did on day one that you thought were like decent you'd jump off a fucking bridge

if you did them today right because yeah you had the you had to change over time be like well that didn't work oh oh my god I never thought of it that way. Okay, let's iterate this. You're constantly finding something new. And so when you're also dealing with something like you do where you're actually working within algorithms that are constantly changing and adjusting and prioritizing new things, user bases and demographics are even shifting at all times. I mean, what you did last month is old i'm still happy i'm in the day-to-day around with things because you need to be like if you're a business owner i don't care how big or small it is if you get out of understanding how

your product works or how to make customers more successful you're going to be bro i've got some stories i can tell you of like things like i fucked up with or learned a long day in 2018 bro i almost completely quit everything like the only time in business that the only time in business that i've literally shut down like i'm a strong-willed person and it takes a lot to shut me down. And I don't get stressed out. I don't think I like to get stressed out very easily. But, bro, I shut down and bawled, cried in the middle of 2018 because I had so much going on and was just crushed. Was that July 2018 when Facebook announced the new changes to the rules

after the Cambridge Analytica scandal? It had nothing to do with that. Nothing to do with that. Got it. Yeah. It was just a personal thing? Just everything I was doing. I'll try to give you the quick rundown.

This story alone could be three hours. I got time. You walked in here tonight, by the way, and you're like, we're going to talk for three hours? I'm like, yeah, I usually have to tell people to stop at the end but this is why i could talk for a while just because i have so many stories and you know i've been on many podcasts and you don't get the true long version of it but no you're doing really well tonight because full disclosure not that i would ever tell you this before but i am so fucking tired today i think i slept two hours the last three nights so like what it's just been it's been a long week but what are you doing get some sleep

i'm working but i'm saying like when i schedule someone we do it so i was like plowing myself with coffee the first like 20 minutes i was looking at you and what you were saying i was like okay i think i followed that and then i woke up a little bit with the coffee and you were kind of carrying it so you're doing great but keep going i get here at 6 30 the man's like yeah you want a cup of coffee i'm like it's the fuck i'm not trying to be up to four in the morning i had one at like 12 30 at night the other night like made coffee and then it was like 5 30 i was ready to go to bed i was like fuck it's just been that kind of week but anyway so you were you were you were getting ready to go to bed i was like it's just been that kind of week but anyway so you were you were you were getting ready to tell a story there well let me just let me just

first say one of the best decisions i've ever made since being in business the end of 2015. like i i'm a third bread like through and through entrepreneur like there's no other game for me oh we can tell um the best decision i ever made ever made, because, man, I've been just tired. I've been tired. Up until COVID turned things around for me, it put things in perspective. And I can tell there's two big stories I have in business. I guess three big stories if you get me starting out, and then the shit in 2018, and then the shit early 2020. All right, let's start.

One, two, three. me starting out and then the in 2018 and then the early 2020. all right let's start one two three well the best thing well i'll tell you i'll tell you the best thing that i've done as a business owner is really trusted someone that deserved to be trusted and allowed them allowed myself to take a back seat to let somebody else grow the company. And that was your partner? And I did that with both companies around the same time last summer. So the agency and the phone repair business. Correct. Yeah.

And you have different partners in those two. Correct. Okay. They're both 24 years old. Wow. They both just graduated and I hand them a gold platter and they deserved it and they've taken it and run with it. I take it that was pretty hard for you because you're, you've been an entrepreneur, like at

least leading up to that point, you've been an entrepreneur, at least in spirit your whole life and also in practice. And now it's like you know how that is you build some shit yourself from scratch there's a certain way of doing things and then the idea that like even like this detail you're going to hand off and turn your head that's tough i don't know if it was a greater power if it was karma that I had deserved at this point. But sometimes in life as a business owner, you're just shown a sign where it's like this, it's now. You've got to do this now. There's no other opportunity like this.

And the reason I say that is because things got tough when COVID hit for everybody, for every business, for every employee, for everybody. And that's when you could really tell if you're already struggling, which I was for both businesses, because my first bit of advice here, if I have given advice already on this podcast, I'm not sure. My first bit of advice is do not start two companies at the same time it's phenomenal advice and try to build them concurrently at the same time without a business partner i like to think i am a successful entrepreneur but i don't know i think a lot of the facts would say otherwise up until recently because bro i burnt myself out so anyways don't know. I think a lot of the facts would say otherwise up until recently because, bro, I burnt myself out.

So anyways, don't start two businesses at the same time. And so COVID hits. And I saw who was truly loyal and still willing to get after it and be hungry, who had been there, who wasn't like brand new, who, who knows the rope, the rules and the ropes and everything. Like who's with me. They wanted it. Who's fucking with me. And like, you don't gotta be the, the, the sharpest in the bunch, but luckily they both were and they're both fully capable. And I had an agreement with both of them. So I got my lawyer involved, wrote up partnership docs, corporate docs, all this stuff. We moved both from LLCs to S-Corps and I gave them both equity and profit share. I'm not going to say how much. Jerry and Sean,

shout out, love you both to death. These guys are brothers to me now. I'd take a bullet for them. Like I fuck with these guys hard. And so I said, here's a piece of my pie. Here's some castle. And you're family now. And that's how we did it. Straight up, Blood Brothers, you're family now. Because this was my baby that I trusted for five years. But I'm defeated almost.

And why was that? Because you said that happened when the pandemic hit. So was it just business? Like a lot of other people just went through the fucking floor for a minute. So it all started in 2018. So like it, it builds upon itself to like, um,

I just, I don't, I don't want to say I got like too big for what I was trying to do, but, um, what point did I want to make, want make real quick uh oh so just at the end of this year this is this is news to everybody so i put this new partnership agreement out for them i'm not in this for the money i don't actually care about money so for everybody listening that's weird as shit to hear um now when people say that like when you

say that and people say bullshit how do you tell them not bullshit i care about freedom and i've built my life up to this point not building something that gives me freedom so i screwed myself over looking for the thing to give me freedom. So you were making money, but you had to do absolutely everything and it just kept going that way. So now I'm getting freedom by giving these guys ownership in everything. I'm still very much involved because I operate like this as a human being and I enjoy it. But I can just be like, oh, like I'm going to take off my first year in business. I'm going gonna take off my first year in business I'm gonna take off I'm

gonna go I traveled forever for the first and a half like first one maybe two years and then things got busy right multiple locations many clients employees all this stuff um but yeah so that's what happened so at the end of this year I'm giving them both more equity than was promised because like i don't i'm not here for them like these are both lifestyle businesses for me like momentum's going to be around for a long time yeah phone repair philly we might sell in the next few years depending on what happens with the the tech market um but it's been crazy so to get to the full story and i i hate talking too much when there should be like a dialogue back and forth no this is why i bring people in here this makes my job incredibly

he's gonna go to sleep now he's like now i can fall asleep now i'm laying back and relaxing but i'm listening very entertained so keep going all right i'll make the short and sweet of it. For the most part. I get fired from Google. 2015. Spring 2015. I'm walking home. It's fucking negative 10 degrees out. Foot of snow. I'm crying on the phone with my mom.

Completely devastated. So upset. First time I ever hit depression in my life was right after that. I've only hit it twice. And so, maybe three times. I had a very fortunate childhood upbringing, like very loving parents that are still together, hardworking, like, you know, middle income family, whatever. And, you know, I was out in Michigan kind of on my own and then made a bunch of friends and I'm having a good time now finally and I get fired don't know what to do I'm

still stuck on this lease stuck in Michigan I had the vortec watch startup to fall back on I had the phone repair company to fall back on how much money were you making on the phone repair business at the time maybe a grand or two a month all right so it was something but it's not enough to live off right and then I had the agency that I had just started and how much were you making a month on that not much maybe another thousand a month oh okay so you had like a little bit of cash flow at least yeah you had a baseline yeah okay and so i lose the salary and the job and everything i file for unemployment don't get it because i get fired for like good reasons or whatever fuck them and but i'm like scared i'm like i'm on i'm out in the middle of michigan i don't know what i'm gonna do

you know i don't know if this phone thing's gonna work i don't know if the agency's gonna work and i was like i'm gonna bankroll in the startup with the vortec watches guys like i've got a family here i've got people that I know and can trust and like, let's do this thing. And meanwhile, they had taken a pivot to launch a Kickstarter to retrofit vintage pocket watches. And they basically said, fuck the technology. Let's build a brand. Totally changed the project. So they take old vintage pocket watches, like the railroad conductors use, like the Hamilton. Does anyone fucking have those?

Like you can find them on ebay and like random auctions and stuff okay and they retrofit them into like our stainless steel 3d printed like mechanisms with like custom leather they changed the brand completely and i was like why not just buy a watch i'm like guys this is a million dollar business what i was building was a billion dollar business so what the fuck because we're gonna license the technology why did they do that because we couldn't get the technology to work and they gave up they gave up they gave up they gave up so we had a fight there this is right after i get fired and they're like yeah we're gonna have to separate ways with you

and i was like too bad like we're going to have to separate ways with you. And I was like, too bad. Like, we've got a fucking partnership agreement. Get lawyers involved. Our lawyers literally had the exact same name. It was so fucking weird. They're piss battling back and forth. We settled. I get a little bit of money, a little bit of like remained equity and IP, whatever.

So I'm like, butthurt about that just got fired don't get unemployment and then my mom calls me she's got cancer oh my mom tells me she's got breast cancer so i'm like i've got to move back right away like i don't know what the fuck i'm doing out here like this is ridiculous and she was like, she goes, she gives me, she gives me my fucking, you know, rescue line. She gives me, you know, the opportunity to breathe. She goes, I know you're going to be successful. Don't worry about me. I'm going to be all right. Just do whatever you think is best for you. Cause I believe in you and you're going to make it work. And I was like, I'm going all in with this marketing agency.

And so I had that, you know, financial company for the SEO. I go hard with that, hard as fuck, dude. And then I go hard as fuck with the phone repair company because I'm out with the startup. I'm out with Google. And so. And you're, you came home. So I'm stuck in the lease for a couple more months. My friends are still there. I'm like trying to patch things up. So I'm there three more months. By the time I leave, the phone repair thing's doing like five, six grand a month again. Wow. The agency's doing four, five, six grand a month. So I'm like, all right. Yeah, you're making over 100K.

Yeah. Is that profit or revenue? Revenue. All right. So yeah, but you're making, you're probably pulling 70. Yeah. I don't know. I'm pulling something in and so i sell the phone shop the the phone repair company which had no office

no shop nothing it was literally mobile i would go to people people would literally drop phones off at my house to a frat house i would go fix it upstairs while i'm eating ramen 15 minutes later come back down drop it back off to him or they'd pick it up later i swear to fucking god so you you basically sell the client list when you're selling that i sold the i sold the ranking on google that's all that she fucking well you have that too yeah forgot about that that's equity yeah that's valuable that's digital equity yep and so she paid me you know 15 grand over the next year she didn't have much money up front. My technician bought it from me. It was this lady, Kat.

Shout out to her. You had another person who could fix this stuff with you. Yeah, I had her taking phone calls and messages, whatever. Got it. I got $15,000 from Vortec and some IP. Not much money at all from either of them. I moved to Philly. I was like, I'm starting this agency legit bought

the domain name create the website my partner from la i was going to move to la versus philly but i was dating a girl at the time moved to philly for her and move into this office space paying like 300 bucks a month i spent some money on tools and equipment because i was like fuck it like i know i can make money fixing phones how many people did you have working for you at this point it was me it was just you it was me for both companies no one else it was me and my partner would help me set up domains help me build websites a little bit i was fixing phones while on conference calls or like building a website or these are like different things like that's so much like your focus is all over the place you know what i mean like i don't

know how you manage time with that especially since just thinking about it i could say this for both businesses but just focus on the phone repair business for a second someone phone it's someone's phone they use it all day every day it's broken they need it fixed they find you they don't need to fix like next tuesday they need it fixed right now so it's like well i got to schedule that at five o'clock it's like your whole and then your agency you got to take care of that something's got to be done by six and it's like you you don't even know what your schedule is at the beginning of the day this is it's funny you say that. I can guarantee there's been at least a hundred times in my life, at least a hundred,

where I've been on a marketing conference call with a client or potential client while fixing a phone for a phone repair customer, while putting the conference call on hold to say I have to pee or do something else, while I'm taking a phone call from an incoming phone repair customer oh no while while i'm on that phone call looking up the notes from what i should be saying on this marketing conference four things at one time at least 100 times in my life i was just talking to this girl the other day about who i used to see and she was like i i've seen you do that and i have no idea how you do it the human brain is not wired to do anything like that the human brain is technically not wired to do two things at once it's like a weird trick

we play where we're not really doing two things at once we just switch back and forth that's like the pseudoscience of it so please check that people but like doing four things at once is like fucking hilarious i mean to me like you know how you can tie your shoes while like talking to somebody that's me fixing a phone now it's hard for me to do but yeah i'm just saying like i focus is a really sacred thing yeah and to do jobs right i mean there are things i can imagine you fix so many phones, for example, and that's a more physical thing,

and it's like, in a way, if I put a blindfold on you after you saw what the phone was, after a while, it's probably the type of thing that you could kind of do it or come close to doing it that way. So it's like a little bit of muscle memory. But God forbid you have some shit

that actually activates the brain. If I'm typing out something simple, if I'm taking notes that I had written from an edit of a podcast and now I'm typing them not direct. There's a lot of notes. I'm typing them into timestamps. Yeah. I can't have a podcast playing in the background when I'm doing that I'm actually engaged with. Right. Like I can have music, but I can't have a podcast because there is like translation and

thinking so when you are activating things that aren't just like muscle memory like pop up up up up and you actually have to think about how to formulate it doing another thing at the same time is actually technically like impossible again please check that but that's what I've heard it's weird how the body and mind adapt to things because i haven't had to do that as much recently so my multitasking skills aren't as good as they used to be it's not the worst thing in the world you shouldn't want to have to do it i was writing an email today and one of my uh guys is sitting next to me and he asked me a question and i'm like what two years ago i've been like yeah dude like exactly do that yeah it's weird but um i'll fast forward in the journey so i started making a little bit of money

reinvesting it all i'm eating ramen and eggs bro i'm living it's always ramen yeah it's always around it's always ramen ramen's not bad dude i have a special way it tastes okay i have a special way it tastes all right yeah it's good I do ramen and eggs together so I make the ramen I blow it I don't microwave it that's a dish right or am I very wrong well it's like it's kind of definitely get the culture wrong but like a dim sum maybe yeah it's kind of like that yeah yeah so it's like uh like a fried yeah I don't even know. It's fire, though. Put a little... I boil the ramen.

Do it correctly. Don't microwave the shit. You're classy. And then empty the water. Put oil back in the pot that I boiled it in. Put the ramen back in. Stir it all together. Crack some eggs.

Mix them all in there. Put some spices in with it. We're good. Get the protein. You get the carbs. It's not too heavy. It keeps your mind sharp. It's a $1 meal.

That's it. $2 a day. Throw some cereal in with that. You got a $2.50 a day, you know, living expense. You know the deal. And I lived like that because I acted like I was poor when I really wasn't. I just got $30,000 from this other stuff, but I wanted to treat myself mentally like I was poor when I really wasn't. I just got $30,000 from this other stuff, but I wanted to treat myself mentally like I was poor. So I did that for a while.

That's a great trait to have. The first couple months, I didn't go out. I didn't drink. I slept like three, four hours a night. Putting your back up against the wall is one of the best things you can do as an entrepreneur because then you see what you're really made of. When you're comfortable as an entrepreneur is when you're fucked yeah i'd say in any facebook and instagram got comfortable tiktok comes like anything real estate company

like you can't get comfortable and maybe i'm getting a little comfortable now so now i've been trying to sign a lot more business and hire a lot more people and like try things that i shouldn't be doing right now that I know I could get in trouble for in terms of like doing too much at once, but like getting comfortable complacency is, I forget the saying it's like complacency is next to death or something. Yeah. Something along those lines.

It's like retiring when you, like if you're a business owner your whole life and you retire, you die within a year. You know what I mean? It is. Same thing for your business. true man people that leave people that go at a million miles an hour not even a million miles an hour they just you know they go at 65 miles an hour they go pretty hard right for 40 years doing something they just they keep

look especially people who are in corporations who are like talented people who could have gone and done something on their own but they did the plan they made a lot of money doing it yeah they're like yeah they kind of hate it by the last especially the last decades what are they doing they're looking up at the finish line they're like oh i'm gonna be playing golf every day i'm gonna be going down to florida having whatever and yeah they get there and they're like this is it fucking early bird special a beach that i sit on there's nothing to do i don't have a purpose i mean the mind ages i'm convinced of this pull up any science i'm very convinced of this by watching other people i've seen it happen to the mind ages immediately and then it affects your body

immediately it is like you can literally i'll bet you could look at a picture of somebody who retired a year ago yeah and put them next to each other and maybe they're getting the most sleep they ever have but like you can just literally see like they were alive they're dead well perfect example is i went to penn state i don't know if you remember the whole sandusky shit that went down oh god yeah i i got interviewed four times i was like around every interview and i always got interviewed and i was joe paul ride or die joe paterna ride or die and what was that like like and when i'm sorry i gotta take a sidebar i was in the middle of that bro in the middle it was my senior year did you shift on that eventually? I did. I did. I still remain true.

I'm listening to this audio book right now. By who? So I'll give it to everybody. I'm listening to this book on Audible that teaches you. It's by Malcolm Gladwell.

So everybody might know Malcolm. Which one? So it's called Talking to Strangers so everybody might might know malcolm well which one uh so it's called talking to strangers talk about a lot on this podcast really yeah phenomenal so so it's about defaulting from truth basically so people always default to truth and so joe paul did the same thing And I'm glad he brings it up in the book because that's what I refer to in the situation without knowing the science behind it, is in the back of his mind, he might have been like, oh, like, I know he could be a bad guy or like, oh, like Sandusky, I've heard about things from him from him before but like there's no way he would do that because he told me he wouldn't do that other people told me he's

a good guy he's helped so many young people so I'm gonna default to truth yeah and so I don't think Joe Paul truly in his sense like he was defaulting to truth yeah and so that was my whole point that I was making whenever I would get interviewed. Thinking back on it, like, I couldn't hate Sandusky more. Like, what a fucked up human being. Yes. Way to put so many kids through that in the school and, like, families. Like, I'm disgusted by it. It was like a, and I mean this in all the wrong ways.

It was like the things that he did in the ways like they pulled it off like whoever else was involved like all these other weirdos it was like that shit's not real that's a South Park episode right and then it's like holy it's completely real and then imagine like all the people who go completely uncaught for this. It's fucking crazy. Right. The weird thing is, he thinks he's in the right because he helps them and they love him. It's like, you're molesting a child.

Like, what? But anyways, yeah, I was caught up in that in the sense of like getting, just being such a loyal Penn Stater as we all were. It was very, I guess, culty and still is. And Joe Paul is not a bad guy by any means, but he was defaulting to truth.

He did. Yeah. I think that's a fair, because I don't remember that part of the book. Like I vaguely now remember he might have mentioned it, but I got to go reread exactly how he went through that. But we live in a society and have for a long time now. And I think that that was one of the ultimate symbols that the shift had happened where it's either all great or it's all evil. And it can't be anything else.

And the minute you give up ground on one side or the other, that means the other side wins they get to say oh it's all good or oh it's all evil and with him it seemed to me that yeah he just there's probably a part of him that didn't want to believe it yeah and it's like if you are sitting at home without you know right now and thinking about this without the benefit of hindsight without the benefit of being somebody like that in that type of position it's very hard to say how you would respond to that now we would all like to say oh we would have gone to the cops right away but sometimes it can be so ridiculous that maybe someone what's the word they analyze it unknowingly in a biased way in their head with that and that's probably a better way of saying default to truth yeah that then they do genuinely feel like they're doing the right thing based on the right reasons and it's not

it's still a mistake but it's not like they're like yo fuck those kids you know what i mean it's imagine like let's say it's like hearing about your your dad and you hear like oh like you know he lied about this thing and he he's a scam artist right you're like what no he isn't yep or anybody telling you anything about someone that you love and trust. You're like, fuck you. I have no signs of this. It literally takes factual evidence, like catching somebody on a video or like having something that's foolproof. And even then you'll still default to truth. Like that was edited. That's a lie. That can't be true. And so, I mean, that, that's a lie that can't be true and so I mean that that's a lot with what happened with Penn State but yes I was I was there during that there was the riots Penn State you know Joe

Paterno getting fired Graham Spanier getting fired and that was my time there and I'd been a ride-or-die Penn Stater like growing up my brothers my dad my my parents met a Penn State like the whole thing so people like to say Penn State's a call maybe it is maybe it isn't but had a good time there yeah and you were I'm trying to remember you were bringing that up because of like something to do with complacency so were you was that what it was so you were saying you were defaulting to truth so it's like kind of an unwanted complacency or i was saying it because joe paterno had football to live for in penn state to live for and he got fired and within a month died oh that's yeah that's for that's what yeah yeah and that's you know what you have nothing to live for

then you can die for anything that's's a phenomenal example. And he was, what, like 84 when he got fired or something like that? His pride, his respect, everything about him was crushed. So you're going to die that much quicker. I remember seeing, because that was like a surreal couple weeks. And he was actually a really good human being. I've met him multiple times. Yeah, and a lot of people still say that and I it's tough it's like you know you get in trouble if you say one thing or the other and I never

really opined on it it's I mean it's not me it's it is I'm like kind of ambivalent to some of that stuff with like people's legacy like I remember Joee pa is a great coach seemed like a nice enough guy might have made a big mistake ida wasn't there i don't know life goes on right but i remember seeing him like that surreal scene i think it was right after he got fired yeah where everyone was outside his house yep and he were you there yeah i was there you know there and he comes out and you just he's like go home like i love you guys go home like thank you and you just see his whole body like it's austin and it's watch the the documentary on that whole that whole thing it's a good i'm about to watch it again tonight you know what i've seen it a million times there right right like the title i can't i'm just like that whole thing was so disgusting for me

you know and and like i we've read the details we've heard the details we saw the cases play out in the media which you know who knows how much they even report maybe there's some stuff that was even worse than they made it appear but i mean it was just it's one of those things where like i get it it was bad this is so fucked up i can't even fathom that another human being did that and and apparently a lot of human beings because it wasn't just him and then all these other people covered up for it potentially it's like i don't need to relive that you know like i know what happened what i can tell you about school though is this is the time to try things that's what i learned from that i didn't pay for food most of my

so i went to school two years i played uh soccer down in virginia beach so i followed my cousin i had a bunch of d1 offers but i was like i want to go to the beach have fun like get away from like all this so i go down to virginia beach i play soccer virginia wesley and really good d3 school for two years didn't like the coach at all but like fell for this girl so i stayed there an extra year and so i'm down at virginia beach that's like two for you you moved to philly for a check you stayed at college an extra year for a check i think there's a pattern here i've done a lot of things i think there's a pat you yeah the whole google thing that was another one i don't know man about the final

um so i was there for two years and the school was like a high school, bro. Like, not challenging at all. Like, it was a joke. I'm like tutoring the other kids. And me and the coach didn't get along, whatever. So, I transferred to Penn State. And the things I took away from Penn State, big school, big opportunity, get involved. And so, that's one of the reasons Google hired me.

I was like very involved, very very much overachiever. That's who I am as a person. But I joined every possible club. The first week, there was a club orientation. Look at all these clubs, like a little club fair. You could join all these different clubs. You're talking about college now? Yeah, Penn State.

And you could join all these different clubs. And so I signed up for every club. Every night of the week, I was at a different club getting free pizza and soda and learning about snowboard club marketing club you know business management club all this different stuff but then you don't just sit there and like eat the pizza meet people make connections go to parties make friends i don't i've never met someone that has a more people in their address book than me i'm very well networked in that sense but the thing that i fucked up on that everybody i wish everybody listening doesn't is stay in contact with people like you can as much

as you want because if you have time do it i didn't have a ton of time running both these businesses but that's one thing there's not much businesses, but that's one thing. There's not much that I regret. That's one thing I regret is letting relationships slip away. People get busy. People start families, all these different things. But my time from when I started working at Google to up about 2017, so about a three-year span, I would travel the country and I would just pay for airfare. I would go stay with my friends

for free who I met during college, who I formed relationships with. Those are the times you're not going to get back in life. Those are the times you're going to remember. Those are the times where you're going to save money and live moments and not have regrets and do cool things. And so like meet people during college, like the young, the young time in your life is where you have time to explore and create and not worry about money as much. So like, don't worry if you don't have it all figured out. Once you graduate, you don't need that nine to five job. And if you get that nine to five job, and you have an entrepreneurial endeavor, or interest in mind, use that as a building block, because that's what i did with google is i learned everything i could about the algorithm and about their ads so that i could

help other businesses and and those are the businesses that i started working with who i formed relationships with while you were while i was working there and that's the sense of it and and you're i am i do not feel bad one bit about it look at this point like you capitalized on it you've walked the talk with your entrepreneurial attitude running two companies and then like even before that but i'm saying like since then like building these two things and and getting to the point you are now years later too like it hasn't been five minutes but the the one thing i would add to that is that people have to know themselves, too. So much. I love that.

There are a lot of people out there who share that type of dog mentality like you and I have, where we are entrepreneurial, we want to go do this, this, and that. There are also a lot of very talented people who, and my friend john ron d came up with this i loved it where he's like there are a lot of people who are intrapreneurs meaning they don't want to take the risk maybe maybe and and actually for many of them that's fair but i'll take it another level as he did which is like they are actually best as like a brilliant number number two or number three like like like a console yeri or something like that yeah you know they're the person that understands like

how to how to plug in any holes that are around there yeah so there's a lot of people out there who might be coming out of college like damn i've been listening to fucking gary v since i was like 15 and he tells me fuck the corporations man you gotta go out there you gotta hustle and you know what you gotta eat shit you You got to eat ramen. You eat nothing. I ate nothing for five years. I lived in an apartment. I didn't fuck till I was 37.

Like, they listen to that and they're like, well, I guess if I'm not doing that, then I'm a fucking loser. But it's not like that for everyone. There are people who can go build through a 9 to 5 and rise through the ranks. I'm sorry to make you laugh that much. But, like, they can go rise through the ranks because that's more who they are. And then they can get to a happy life. You know, you have to understand like which one you are and if you're going to be that entrepreneurial guy, because frankly, or girl, like if you're not willing to do the types of things like that you've talked about tonight, I'm sorry. I don't think my Gary

V is like that good, but. Have you seen sorry i don't think my gary v is like that good but have you seen the stevie emerson or trevor wallace impressions oh my god they're fucking incredible they're spot on have you seen the one with the recent like garage sale i have not seen that i've not seen that he's like how much for that quarter he's like it's a quarter he like, I give you 24 cents for it. That's like spot on, man. Yeah, I mean, you have to like, there are different people out there who may be looking at that societal impression now, like fuck all this other shit. But yet, some of it might be for them. What I don't like to see is when people automatically just decide to default no matter who they are decide to default

to what they feel like is a rat race meaning could be the person that says like all right get the job rise up to the ranks get engaged by the time i'm 29 get married at 31 have two kids start slowing down in the 40s play golf on the weekend with the boys 50s i'm looking at the finish line 401ks at three million dollars 65 i'm retired go to a beach in florida and i die right there's a lot of people who just say well that must be what it is yeah that's not necessarily true but are there people who are like very happy going along making two hundred thousand dollars feeling fulfilled in their work working with people they love having a nice family doing hobbies on the weekend and then retiring on their own terms

fuck yeah i love it's just like if you're you like if own terms yeah i love that it's just like if you're you like if you're you i love that you can't do that no i can't you'd be miserable i'd be miserable right one of the first books everybody should read when you get into entrepreneurship is the e-myth the e-myth because you'll understand where you fit in this paradigm. Who wrote that? I don't remember. But what you'll learn is where you fit in as an entrepreneur. If you are the entrepreneur or if you're the technician or if you're the manager per se. Because a lot of people like, let's say you're like me and you fix phones because you love fixing phones and you're a phone fixer. It doesn't mean you're a business owner.

Doesn't mean you're an entrepreneur. It doesn't even mean you're a manager. You could be a business owner and a manager and a technician, but you shouldn't be an entrepreneur. And what this means is understand yourself, just like you're saying. You don't start a second location. You don't expand. You get really good at what you do. You create a loyal customer base.

You do a great job. You're a technician because you're good at fixing phones. And you try to get better at customer service and social media and whatever you can and stay up to date with the times. Read the E-Myth. If you're an entrepreneur... By Michael Gerber. Michael Gerber, yes. If you're an entrepreneur, realize you shouldn't be the technician. Realize you shouldn't necessarily be the manager. You need to be the visionary. But to be the visionary

of a company, you probably need to raise capital in some nature to be able to afford the manager and the technician. And so, I tried to be a bit of all three. And what I also tried to do, because I am what I like to say is a true entrepreneur, I get caught with the shiny ball syndrome. And the shiny ball syndrome is is i haven't heard of that it's where you see a shiny ball and you start chasing it because there's money behind it so as an entrepreneur you're like oh and especially those who want to start a marketing agency or in a marketing agency is the shiny ball syndrome me hard because i'm sorry with my language all day here, but it really messed me up. They already had a deal with me.

Don't worry about it. They've dealt with you. The major problem there is you already have entrepreneurial tendencies to get distracted. The shiny ball is distraction. And the distraction is another business opportunity where you can make money. Right. And it gets hit tenfold if you're a marketing person, because people come to you who are other business owners and startups with business ideas and startup ideas.

And if they're a good salesperson, I need to deflect a lot of times. Right. So people come to me like, oh, instead of me paying you for your marketing services let's go in on this together or let me pay you on the revenue we generate from it so that's what really messed me up in 2018 combined with bad hiring decisions i don't think i'm a bad entrepreneur by any means i think i've bad made bad decisions based on not knowing better and based on ego leading me to making bad decisions in the past. My ego has messed me up many times because it's a big problem I've had. And I don't have much empathy that I've had to develop empathy over the years to become a better manager. So those are things that I can talk about. When you're talking about the empathy,

though, is that more with in a work setting where you are just so driven like as yourself, you can't understand why someone else isn't exactly like that type of thing? When you develop empathy in one arena, business versus personal, it helps you develop it in another one, but not concurrently one-to-one, equi-relative.

And so if I get more empathy from a learning lesson from something I faced in business, it'll help me a little bit in the personal, but not one-to-one in relation, if that makes sense. I've never heard someone explain it that way, but that makes perfect sense. I hope that makes sense for everyone else. But there is a difference. There are people, and I'm thinking of a couple examples now.

I'll tell you an exact example that I still don't see eye to eye on with one of my best friends that fucked our relationship up with business at the same time. So in 2017, as my business is growing and expanding with both companies, and I have a right-hand person with the phone repair shop, you need a right-hand guy, whether it's a partner or manager, whatever it is. You can be the entrepreneur, they can be the technician. You can be the entrepreneur, they can be the manager. You need all three, really, E-Myth. So for phone repair affiliate, I had this guy, Alex.

There's always going to be nobody's perfect. And so we worked on his issues. We worked on my issues. I'm not perfect, but we are growing together. So there's phone and paraphernalia, me and him, and we had other technicians, we had three locations, whatever. And then momentum, it was me and this guy, Chris, I bought out the equity for my partner because he was, he was going through a quarter life crisis, whatever. So I bought out his equity. This guy, Chris was a jack of many talents, dude, he could do everything. And so we tried to get into Google 360 photography, like Google Street View, Google Street View photography in 2017, as I was really

like building up. And so he was down in Miami, like trying to get in photography. as I was really like building up and so he was down in Miami like trying to get in photography and I was like yo I'm trying to offer this new service line like you're you're doing stuff that you don't want to do down in Miami like you don't love it there move back closer to home I bring him on the team my best friend one of my best friends lived right down the street from growing up for 18 years knew him in and out bring him up to become a photographer on us to build out this new division called momentum 360 which is popping now by the way and bring him onto the team he becomes google street view certified gets his camera gets all this equipment start getting him job i put my reputation that's how that happens yeah i put i didn't even know

that yeah i put my reputation on the line i'm like talking to so many people expanding my network hustling hard doing all the sales stuff bringing us business for it meanwhile momentum side's getting busy too i have phone repair kind of like cruise control right now like doing okay and so bring on bring my friend on and my right hand man the guy running the day to day for momentum he's doing well i bring on these two new guys as employees we can't really afford that at the time and i was like we're gonna get make the money they didn't have enough background or skill set or anything so we bring them on my guys training them instead of doing a lot of client work me and austin are

trying to shoot projects build that side of the business. We go down to Miami for New Year's to shoot this project, but have a good time and party too. I mean, you're in Miami. We're in Miami. And so while I'm down there, I'm like, yo, Chris, write him a Christmas card. Have a good time. Like, he's my right-hand man, whatever. Never heard from him again. Gone.

Ghosted. I'm calling him days, texting, every email, everything. Never heard from him again. Ghosted. calling him days texting every email everything never heard from him again ghosted that set momentum back months and months and maybe years see that's a that is an extreme experience but that's a i mean that makes you question everything so when people fuck you like that that put me into a loop this is why i was depressed in 2018 so this 2017 and 2018 new years. So 2018. Now I just hired these two new guys. I've got other people on my team. I've got phone and paraphernalia over here. And so I'm like, what am I going to do? So

people are like, where's Chris at my clients? My employees are like, where's Chris at? So I'm like, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? Can't get ahold of him. I'm checking obituaries. I'm checking loony bins. I'm checking prisons. I'm checking his friends and family. Nobody's getting back. Did you ever find out? Found out six months later because I was Googling his name every other day. He got hired. He got recruited as an eSports professional to play NBA 2K in Detroit.

Didn't have the heart to tell me. He just bailed. Just bailed. I don't understand that. So I took on all these risks and bad clients in 2018 to make up the money to pay everybody except me because we lost clients and money from him leaving. Sure. So I bring on a blockchain conference client that promised me the world, know ten thousand dollars a month plus revenue share all this other stuff entrepreneur tendency shiny ball yeah meanwhile i was part of a

that was the hot word too yeah i was part of a glory class like a goldman sachs 10ksb program where only the best of the best get selected so So it was basically a free MBA for me. So I'm in a full-time MBA. I'm running phone repair fully full-time with three locations. I'm running momentum digital full-time with many clients and employees. And I'm running a blockchain conference as a chief marketing director.

And one guy walked out on you. And I'm sleeping two hours a night. And my friend after a while wasn't getting paid because i wasn't getting paid i wasn't paying myself for at least six months now zero dollars from either company he's like i'm not getting paid and i'm like really bro you're not getting paid i'm not getting paid i was like you're at least getting something i haven't paid myself in six months and and you're over here complaining about you. But that's not empathy. Right.

It's not. Because I'm still worried about me, and we're both at fault here because he didn't have empathy either worrying about me. See, there's a – There's business and personal, you know? Yes, 100%. But there's a self-awareness personal percent but there's there's a self awareness on that even if it's after the fact from you what's what i find that i can never wrap my head around is when there are people because and i like that you separated this there's business

and there's personal this is one where both happen at the same time that's interesting but like there are people who i've seen who obviously won't name, who are phenomenally empathetic in business. And it makes them great. It does make them great, yeah. Amazing to work with. And in their personal lives, not at all. Like psychopath syndrome, you know? That's true.

And that I don't understand. like you recognize that because you were this guy like 24 7 it was no matter where it was it was like i can't get out of my head and not think like that for a second to see it from other people's way and then it ends up costing you and you're like okay that's gotta that's gotta change you know how like what they say about empathy and reacting when you're really busy and stressed out you don't have time like you just react right i was so busy at that point in my life like i think i'm busy now i was so busy and making no money imagine working 24 hours a day and making nothing well i had that for a while you started out we're only a little bit off the hustle yeah the hustle and so that's what i was dealing with after being in business for three years and uh yeah so when you're stressed out it's hard to be empathetic if you're not an empathetic person

already like you're trying to be better. But you're reacting, you're reacting without thinking about consequences and people and feelings. And so that really hurt that separated business, the business went into so on and so forth. I literally mentally took off 2019 after that fucking bombshell of 2018. What just was on cruise control with whatever clients i had with momentum cruise control with phone repair philly like was trying to escape was trying to find other partners other founders you were at least making money again though right i was like a little bit making a

couple grand a month like yeah nothing crazy nothing crazy at all i was coasting by based on seo it was the only reason i was coasting. And a couple good people here and there on my teams. And so 2019 comes around just to finish out this whole thing. The end of 2019 comes around. I took trips. I tried to escape, come back to reality,

like whatever. With what money too? That's the other question. I'm frugal, dude. I don't spend money. Like I don't have a car. Like I just got this car from my brother. I don't spend money on anything. I don't care about money and i use money to travel that's it and so yeah

the end of 2019 comes around i just got back from a long ass trip and was like oh things are still around like cool like let's see what we can do and i was like why isn't phone repair philly making money like we rang at the top of google we We've got a decent team. Like it's a profitable business. We're making no money. And so I started looking into the books and then I get an audit from the IRS and from the state. And so I'm like, well, fuck me. Now I really need to look into the books to get this shit figured out. And so at the same time, within the past five years, I've had people rob me at gunpoint. I've had people break in. Oh yeah years i've had people rob me at gunpoint i've had people break in and people rob you at gunpoint oh yeah i've had people stab employees i've had employees steal from me i've had customers steal from me i've had it we're a phone shop in philly multiple locations i remind you again you were shocked we were going to talk for three hours tonight but you just put

five things on your hand now we're not even gonna get to i just didn't think you'd want to it's fucking nuts man um broken during the riots twice like you name it um but anyways i go through all the audits the irs this that the other i start listening to phone calls i start taking shifts start figuring out what the hell's going on and i'm like oh well half my team is stealing from me because they take cash from the customer and use my stuff and don't check them out or use any technology and the customer leaves so i fire three people on the spot realize we're stealing because they're stealing they're just taking the cash buy whatever and my eyes off the price because i'm running a whole another company and so now i'm like i gotta work the main shop the busiest location i was like fine whatever momentum i'll put that on pause and then kovat happens so that all comes full circle when kovat hit i assume for about maybe three four weeks weeks right there, I'm just guessing, so correct me if I'm wrong, pretty much every marketing dollar gone.

What do you mean by that marketing dollar? From the Momentum company? Everything stopped. Yes, everything stopped. I had clients on Cruise Control where I'll have a client, let's say he's spending $1,500 us and i have a contractor managing it and i'm paying him 750 a month i'm taking the difference minus whatever overhead we have so i'm i'm but that didn't dry up kovid dried up our clients a lot so we went from like so you did lose some yeah oh yeah we went from like 50 so i'll give you numbers right now january 2020 momentum went from january like 40k a month like barely anything to late february like 10k a month

before nothing before that's before anything hit yeah we're already struggling what dead so was that for different reasons because no one was i always tell the story i was in grand central station on february 28th and usually i was in new york all the time but i didn't march 13th was beginning of quarantine next two weeks i wasn't in there i'm standing in grand central station that was the first day where the dow was down like 1500 i mean it'd be going down for a week but it was like holy and i'm like looking i'm looking down i'm on the phone with a client i'm looking down at the chart i'm looking up at grand central like the whole concourse i'm looking down the chart i'm looking at grand central and i'm like we're gonna be all right this isn't that bad and then

it just hit but like that's that was even in new york no one was really thinking about it but you lost you were losing the business in i guess like like January and February. So that wasn't really correlated to the pandemic then that was like kind of a separate thing. No. Um, momentum took a big hit. Momentum went from like, it, it, it worked out timely for me. Like, I think I finally got a break because Momentum was doing okay, maybe like 40k a month in January, where my one location in phone repair was doing, it did 14,000. It was my best location did 14,000 in January, which traditionally had done a lot more, my best location. And so February comes around, I had just lost a client for an unknown reason in momentum a good one and uh the phone repair shop i was like fuck well i gotta work this now because

i lost i fired the all these guys so i kept whatever contractors freelancers i had for momentum lost like one or two clients and if february comes around we're trying to we're on cruise control I'm running the shop taking this is back when I'm taking conference calls this that the other trying to do everything at once and so I'm like I'm getting so burnt out by this like let's see what happens here March comes around we're in full force like COVID I have most of my clients with momentum drop off phone repair drops off hard for a little bit I'm here of my clients with momentum drop off. Phone repair drops off hard for a little bit. I'm here anyways. My right-hand guy, Jerry, who I promoted to a partner, loyal, stays working. My other guy in University City stays loyal, working.

Not as much, though, a little weary. For momentum, I had a couple contractors. It's all remote online marketing stuff, so they can do that anyways. And it didn't all dry up. It didn't all dry up, It didn't all dry up. Just enough to pay the bills. Yeah. So from January in this phone repair shop, I built out operations, systems, marketing,

procedures, how to, everything that I should have done for the previous couple of years because I thought it's on autopilot. It's fine. Sure. I completely turned the business upside down while running that location and managing the other locations, while managing all my contractors and freelancers,

all within one building for the phone repair shop, just like when I started. So I went from 14 grand to 28 grand. I went from 28 grand to 38 grand. I went from 38 grand to 46 grand. I went from 46 grand to 52 grand i went from 38 grand to 46 grand i went from 46 grand to 52 grand in one location in four months what months was that january february february march march april april through the pandemic with that because it was me there and i had to fucking put it all on

the line and just work my ass their phone i worked every day 15 hours a day straight for four months. Paid off. To turn it all back around. That's something that didn't go away. People were on their phone more than ever. They needed that more and they were at home. So we'll end it with that because Apple closed. Phone repair Philly was an essential business as they called it.

So I got lucky with that. I got lucky with the people that stayed around me. Now I know not to get strayed and carried away with other businesses and opportunities and ideas until home is taken care of until the home is taken care of right you got to be safe in a comfortable place and so um that's what happened my cup's dripping now yeah i'm not some shout out a little while ago too i hope everybody learned something and I'm glad we've done this. That's a, I mean, this is how I think it is for anyone who finds success building shit, but that is a bumpy ass journey.

You know, there's a lot and there were a lot of times where you kind of had to go, all right, blow it up. All right, we were doing that. Nope, we're not anymore. And like, that's what I think sometimes like people who are in the middle of doing that even or like looking to go do something they're like well i know i'm gonna fail a lot because gary v told me oh like a million times but still like what if i fail like four times five like in a big way like six times or what if i have to pivot like you should be to pivot? Like you should be thankful for it. Exactly. You should be thankful for it.

It seems like you just kind of looked at all those. And even if it was like depressing you for a minute, you were able to get yourself out of it. And then it was like, okay, now I got to readjust. Here we go. Right. I mean, you got to fail to move forward. I mean, for most people, failure is a blessing. You just got to realize it soon and pivot soon and so for everybody trying to start multiple business same time don't do it stay focused focus is key and have mentors learn from others watch youtube videos contact me if you have any questions and uh i appreciate you having me here oh hell yeah man i was just gonna say i think that's a perfect spot to end it you got me through a good one tonight that was that that was good i needed someone with

energy i got you brought the heat but thanks for sharing everything about your own story and also some of that expertise was pretty golden i'm gonna go back myself and listen to that like some of the stuff you were talking about like facebook yeah yeah that's really interesting yeah and like how you've adapted this like you started working at Google, so you understood that, but you adapted this across all kinds of platforms. YouTube, baby. It's a gold mine.

That I'm going to talk to you about some more off camera because I got a lot of things. But Mac, thank you, brother. Thank you. We'll do it again sometime down the line. Love it. And everyone else, you know what it is. Give it a thought.

Get back to it. Peace. give it a thought get back to me peace