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

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) discuss: - 00:30 Is it better to rent and invest your money elsewhere? - 05:32 Penny Hoarder acquired for over $100m - 09:20 MrBeast Burger and clout kitchens - 17:01 Guthy-Renker and the lucrative world of direct-mail - 20:57 Will mom and pop restaurants become cloud kitchens? - 25:25 The guys chat Martin Shkreli stories - 38:13 Elon Musk buying $100B in Bitcoin? - 42:44 Shaan discusses ending his newsletter - 47:47 The guys discuss how they track their finances Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. Oh, yeah. You know what I've decided I wanted to do, I think?

So, like, I've been, like, obsessing over the future. Like, what's, like, how are people going to live in the future? And I think I'm going to try and purchase an apartment in a cool part of New York that is currently not COVID awesome. Like that is not wonderful during COVID. Right. So by the dip. Yeah.

And the reason why is I really think that, I think that for a lot of people, this whole like five, I don't think that after I did the nomadic thing for a while, that was hard. That was hard. But I do think that like there's a world where people are going to do like six months,

six months. Do you agree with that? Yeah. My ideal, I started this a few years. years ago and then we just paused with the baby, but like I would do about about a month and a half in a different country altogether, just living somewhere. So for example, we would live in San Francisco for 11 months or 10 and a half months. And then we went down to Buenos Aires. And we lived

in Argentina for over a month. And we just like got an apartment, just bought groceries. It wasn't like a vacation. It was a vacation, but it wasn't at the same time. That felt awesome to me. I hope I can pull that off with kids. I know it just gets life just, you know, I feel it now where I'm just like, it's just easier to stay home. Like, let's just not go and do the things. It's just a lot easier.

But I think that's cool. And I think whether it's six months, six months, or nine months, three months, I think that's a cool luxury to have to be able to do something like that. I think we're going to do like an eight, four, nine, three thing. Because I got family in New York. And I think, like, it's still expensive. You can get an apartment in New York, though, for like one three.

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

So our friend, Ryan Beagleman, is Airbnb. He bought this really nice house in Williamsburg. you seen it like Ryan's like into architecture and he spent a lot of money on this great place and he's now in Miami or Delaware he's all over the place and he um he's air being his place for 30 grand a month he's making off of it gross not what's a payment though right like I don't want to get into his business too much but he bought it up front he doesn't have a mortgage so he only pays taxes but I do think that what I think what I'm going to try to do is I want to try and live break even while while getting equity in these homes. I think I could pull

that off right now. Yeah. I think. You know, the rules change pretty frequently though. Like so, for example, when we bought our place in San Francisco, I was like, oh, this is great. We'll do this. And then if I leave, we could just like Airbnb. And like San Francisco was like, oh, Airbnb can only be done under these specific conditions. You must live in the unit. You must not do more than 90 days out of the year. And it's like, do, 90 days out of the year. So now, let's say I was trying to do the thing you're doing right, eight and four or whatever. I can't do the eight months. I can't Airbnb be the eight months. That means I need a long-term lease. How am I going to find a long-term lease for eight or nine months? That's where it gets tricky if you're depending on Airbnb. But here's where things are a little bit

unfair, which is I've got a huge Twitter following. So do you. We have a podcast. We could say like, hey, who wants to rent our place? So I think that we could find someone to rent our place at a fair price for 10 months out of the year. I think it's possible. And I think that the reason why I'm better off. Sorry, go ahead. The reason I'm bringing this up on this podcast is I think that this is going to be a normal trend of youngish, affluent, yuppie white-collar workers doing three, three, three, you know, whatever. I just think you're better off just renting and just investing your money elsewhere. Like, why even buy the home? Who cares about the home? Who cares about trying to rent it out and dealing with the tenant and dealing with maintenance.

Like, okay, just rent one place for nine months and then rent another place for three months and then hop around to the next one for six months. Just rent and put all that other money into stock market or Bitcoin or whatever the hell else you want. That's what I think you should do. I think that could be a great, a great solution. I would only do it. So if I'm going to do it to make money, I would have to find the right deal.

If I would do it not to make them, if I would do it just because I want to make me happy, then I don't really care if it's going to make money or not. I'm also just, I think in general, it's best to split. I don't like to dual purpose making money with enjoyment because I tend to find some middle ground. I'm like, oh, I would like to live in this place. It's only okay. It's only okay as an investment versus like, oh, this place is a dump. I could buy this and rent it out for hire and maybe do some maintenance on it or whatever.

That might be a great investment, no enjoyment. And so, like, personally, I've found that my best investments are ones that I don't try to mix business with pleasure. But I don't know. I mean, there's no right answer here. Okay, well, you want to get into it? You want to talk about our boyfriend, Martin Screlli? Do you want to talk? Oh, I know.

Let's talk about this. Let's talk about the penny hoarder. You know the penny hoarder? You've talked to me about the penny hoarder before, but tell me what you want to talk about. I want to, okay, they got acquired today for $105 million in cash. Okay, explain what the penny hoarder is. Okay, it's the penny hoarder.com. I know about it because I'm in digital media.

the founder Kyle came and spoke at HustlCon, so I got to know him a little bit there, he's a wonderful guy. He started it as a finance blog where basically he was like a poor 20-year-old and he was doing like CaskRabbit and Uber driving and all types of odd jobs in order to make ends meet

while he was in college because he came from a low-income household and he would blog about it. And eventually this is his origin story. I don't know if it's true. He was like, oh, wow, Uber will pay me two grand for every person I refer to them. I'm going to write a little bit more about this and put more affiliate links.

And that's what he did. And I'm going to explain the sophistication behind this. But to dumb it down, it's scaled in eight years to 50 million in sales. Now, that's cool and all. But let me show you what's actually interesting about this. And this isn't a slight towards them. But I think it's kind of a, I hate this. I like this business model, but I personally wouldn't want to do it.

But basically what it is is, it's a blog. that gets a bunch of really free, like free traffic by writing about personal finance topics, but they make all their money through affiliate links. So basically, it's a performance marketing company that has a blog. And so the way it works is, is if you Google or they write a blog that says, here's the 10 best ways to save money online. And it's like 10 different coupon sites. Or here's the signing up for Uber is more profitable than ever.

Here's how much you can make in a year. And it's an article about that. At the very bottom, it says, sign up now to become an Uber driver and they get two grand. But what Kyle and the Pennyholder team did is they made this incredibly sophisticated algorithm or a sophisticated website. So they rearranged the article to make sure that the most amount of people are clicking the credit card offer or the Uber driver offer or the coupon, like the honey, you know, the honey coupon and clipper.

And it's quite interesting. And it works so well that this large publicly traded company called Fluent, uh, made, they, they poached one of the penny hoarders, uh, employees and they just duplicated it and run, ran ads on Facebook and did this whole arbitrage machine and the penny hoder sued this company and it was all public. It's pretty crazy. But anyway, that's how this business model works is they found a, an offer and then they create do content marketing and they do performance marketing to drive, uh, they get hopefully nickel clicks from Facebook, $2,000 signups and hopefully the math works out that they're able to make it profits.

Right. Yeah, so it started 10 years ago. It looks like an email list of about a million people, traffic of like 10 to 17 million people a month, going to the website and sold it for 102 million. And it was doing 50 million a year in revenue. And I think only 50 employees or 60 employees. Yeah, that's pretty cool. No, no, no. So it says 2018, they pledged to create 165 positions this year in exchange. It didn't work out.

Okay. It didn't work out. In 2019, they laid off everyone. Oh, okay. Something happened. I don't know what happened, but it didn't work. Anyway, interesting company about how you can turn a blog into a $50 million business.

And maybe a lot of our listeners don't know who this company is because it's more like a middle America mom type of website. But hey, kind of cool. Yeah, okay. That's cool. I don't have much to add, but I like knowing about that. That's interesting. All right.

Let's do, okay, call back to. an episode we did with Stu Iverson. So he came on as a pinch hitter for you. You were out with something, I don't know, your sake or something like that. And you were like, hey, this guy's Stu, who's my friend?

Or he, like, works in my office or something like that. I don't know who he was. He's like, this guy's here today. And I was like, okay, I'll talk to this guy on the podcast. And so he's great. He's great, by the way. And he came on and he had a fantastic episode of one of the ideas that he had talked about.

Now, this is, I don't know, six plus months ago. He came on. on and he goes, all right, here's my idea. Clout kitchens. And I was like, oh, cloud kitchens. He goes, no, no, not cloud, clout. Clout as in, like an influencer has clout. And I was like, oh, what do you mean?

And he's like, well, you know how like in the regular world you have, you know, Bobby Flee has his burger joint, Bobby's burgers or whatever. And you have Wolfgang Puck or whatever. These like kind of celebrity chefs or, you know, Margaritaville. And he's like, you know, these celebrities create their own restaurant chains. I think people are going to do this. as cloud kitchens on top of Uber Eats DoorDash, etc. So I thought it was a great idea.

I put it in my newsletter because I started ranking in my newsletter some of our best ideas, right? Because I went back through. I was like, dude, we spent out like hundreds of ideas over the course of the year. What are like the 20 ones that I actually think are good ones? And let me put those into my email list. And so if you just go to like shampuri.com, there's an email newsletter. And I put in there like, here's what my favorite ideas from the pod. the first or second idea I put on that list was this Cloud Kitchen thing.

I was like, I think this is a good idea because you have millions of people every day that are opening up DoorDash, opening up Uber Eats, and they're scrolling and they're trying to decide what to pick, what to order. And a lot of the restaurants on there are just like the mom and pop restaurant that's around your corner, but you probably don't know too much about and trust it. So, man, and we were joking about like, it was like ASAP, Rocky Roads, ice cream. you know, like, I forgot what the other ones were like, you know, Tray Sons pizza and like, whatever. And so we were like, we think that these celebrities or influencers should open up their own branded store.

And you just have like, you know, some restaurant underneath that is actually fulfilling this or some cloud kitchen that, you know, hire a chef in a city to make the stuff. So this is what's happening. So yesterday, or two days ago, Mr. Beast, who is a really, really popular YouTube. came out and said, hey, guys, go to your apps, your favorite delivery app, and you can order from, I think what is called, Mr. Beast Burgers or, what's it called? Yeah, I'm looking at it. Mr. Beast Burgers. And menu items include Beast Style Burger combo, chicken salad combo, chicken sandwich combo, not special,

Chris style, Chandler style, it's nothing special. It's just they have put their name in front of a cheeseburger. Right. So this guy, Mr. Beas, he's got like almost 50 million YouTube subscribers. He's like the 18th most popular YouTube channel, period. So this guy's, you know, super popular. And so he launched this thing. So his app for Mr. Beast Burgers goes to number one on the store.

A head of Facebook, ahead of Instagram, he spikes to number one on the store yesterday. The app crashes because tens of thousands of people are trying to order burgers in their cities at once. he deployed his restaurant in 200 locations overnight because it's a cloud kitchen. So in all the cities where they already had cloud kitchen infrastructure, he kind of organized this. So in one day, he could have 200 locations nationwide. Fucking brilliant, right? And he's selling, and it's actually not just fulfilled by his, like kitchen.

It's not like he's got five people in a kitchen making all these dishes. Some of the dishes are actually coming from other restaurants. So like, you know, if you order a lasagna from him, it's actually coming from this Italian restaurant branded as his thing. So this is actually, I'm doing a full breakdown of this in my newsletter tomorrow. That's, because I wanted to know how does this actually work. And so there's this company called Virtual Dining Concepts. I'm on their website right now.

They've got Tygo's Chicken Bites, Mariah's cookies. Mariah Carey's cookies, Mario Lopez's Tortoise, Pauli D. D., the Jersey Shore guy. they have Polly D's Italian subs, and now they have Mr. Beast burgers. Let me explain to people how I found this because you and I, Sean, were the same. The way that I found it is I went to Mr. Beast iTunes, scrolled all the way to the bottom and found out who developed the app. Is that what you did?

And then I googled that with quotation marks and I found their website and there's not a lot out there. And so anyone who cares, that's how I did my research. And then there's one guy on my mailing list who actually works at one of the big cloud kitchen company. So I asked him. I said, hey, what are the numbers on these things? So he sent me a spreadsheet. So I'm going to do a full breakdown there, but it's hard to do off the top of my head. I haven't compiled at all. But maybe we come back on the pot and talk about it because I think this is fascinating. I think that there's going to be more of this. I think it's

going to basically be, you know, there was nothing. There's going to be a huge spike of this. And then it's going to get kind of played out. And consumers are not going to know what to choose. There's going to be big quality control issues like, okay, are Mariah Carey's cookies any good? Or are they not good? Is Tigas's, you know, pizza any good or not? I'm just, I'm, with a few winners. I'm just looking at this while we're talking. Virtual dining concepts.com. Do you know who the founder is?

I don't know their name now. Okay. The founder is the former CEO of Hard Rock Cafe, which that's irrelevant now, but that was a multi-billion dollar chain. And Planet Hollywood, again, multi-billion dollar chain. So, wow.

So it's him in the sun. Yeah, exactly. So I think, I don't know if he's, like the one who's doing the work or, you know, the sons had this kind of like more forward thinking idea, like, okay, dad did this in the traditional brick and mortar world, we're going to do this, which is this idea that is only now possible because delivery apps have taken over the world. And so a lot of people are now reaching out to these guys to try to get their own virtual concept spun up, whether it's YouTubers and Twitch streamers, Instagram stars, or, you know,

kind of like the Mario Lopez, the sort of C-list, D-list celebrities who are like, all right, I'm looking for my next way to make this work. And this is no different than something that's been going on. But remember, it's sort of like, remember I said that framework, which was like, you know, old problem, new problem, old solution, new solution, this two by two grid. So this is that, this is that thing, right? So this is actually taking a old solution to a new problem. Or if you could look, you could, you could also look at the other way. But if you look at like George Foreman Grills, right, this was a old solution to how a famous person who no longer has. their income stream going can use their brand to sell a bunch of product, a branded product.

And George Forman Grills was one example of that. But now you have a new space, a new opportunity, which is these delivery apps that are, you know, you can just list in 200 cities and you can have the delivery infrastructure done for you overnight. So I think this is pretty fascinating. I'm curious to see how this works. And I'm investing in a couple of companies that are doing something very similar to what's going on here. I'm all right. Okay. Do you know, I think it's a good idea.

Do you know, okay, so I'm just looking, I'm just thinking as we're talking, I haven't done any research. George Forming Grill, who makes that? George Corning Grill, what's it? Okay, there's another one. What's proactive? Proactive, who's owned by Proactive? Simon and Gond. Proactive, the acne stuff, you mean?

Yeah. Oh, Gunther Ranker. Okay, Gunther Ranker. Okay, so if you want to learn about this business, I highly suggest that you find Gunthy Ranker. I think that's how you pronounce it. Have you heard of this company? No.

Okay. So it was started by a guy who kind of looks like a 60-year-old version of me. He looks like a tall blonde-haired dude. He looks like a... I'm pulling up this picture. Let's see. He's like a super white dude who looks like he just has been eating corn his whole life. I mean, you see him?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's got some blush hair. Yeah. So Bill Gutti, I think is the one. Anyway, so it started out, they did a bunch of stuff, but originally they bought the rights, this guy, Bill, I think he bought the rights to think and grow rich, like a self-help book by Napoleon Hill.

And he created infomercials and direct response marketing campaigns on the internet to make it popular. Then he was like, okay, this self-health stuff is working. Let's keep going. So he partnered with a variety of other products and he started selling them. And then eventually he was like, okay, let's try this. Like someone brought to him like proactive. And they're like, all right, let's try proactive. And he grew that to a billion dollars in sales. And then they partnered with Brooks Shields and they launched a shampoo line. And they partnered with Cindy Crawford and they developed a what's called sheer cover. You probably don't know what that is. But it's just a thing. This women's, um, Bro, you say my hair doesn't have sheer. Yeah, you don't use this. Whatever this is, you don't use it. So anyway, he grew the revenue. It's just a marketing company. He grew the revenue to eventually billions of dollars.

And this is the same process that Beachbody did. You know Beachbody? Yep, yep, yep. Beachbody owns P90X. These are all, these all use what they call direct marketing, which is code for MLMs. No, no, no, no, no, no, direct marketing is not MLM. It's different.

MLN is multi-level marketing. Direct marketing, like direct response marketing is when you write like copy and someone goes and they, or they purchase right away. When these guys say we're a direct marketing company, they don't mean direct response. They mean we have basically salespeople in the field like Beachbody does. And those salespeople are basically like they're commissioned, they're commissioned salespeople and they operate in an MLM structure. I'm pretty sure that Beachbody is one of them. I know that the like so, for example, proactive was developed by those. two dermatologists, Rodan and Fields, and then they spun out and now have created Rodan

and Fields, which is an MLM that sells the biggest competitor to Proactive and many other skincare products and is a multi-billion dollar company. So these two women who probably didn't get their fair shake with this guy, Gunthy Raker, they spun out and created Rodan in Fields, which is a monstrous company, I think, based out in Utah. Well, I think that you're, yeah, you're right. I think they're confusing the two, though, because Beachbody. Oh, yeah, you're right. Beachbody is an MLM. But they get a lot of their sales from direct response marketing and also infomercials. Right. And there's marketing, they're just marketing machines and they just look for what's the best and most profitable thing they can sell.

The reason I'm bringing this all up is, cloud pitches is now a new category of that. Yes. And VDC is trying to be the Gunthy Ranker or trying to be the Rodan Fields where they're basically taking famous celebrity brand. We are your back end. infrastructure. Now, they're not doing the MLM model, but they're basically doing, they're basically listing on all these marketplaces like a DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubh, etc., etc. And I think it's a pretty big opportunity. I've also seen something else. That's pretty cool. I'm going to talk about it more in depth soon. It's a company I really want to invest in. I probably shouldn't talk about it before I invest in, but fuck it. Let's do it.

So all these delivery apps exist and they all need infrastructure. So there's two types of companies, today, there's two ways that people are participating. The restaurant itself says, oh, put us on the delivery app. We will, we will do delivery. And then the other one is, you know, like a cloud kitchen or a virtual concept like these guys are doing, where they create a brand on top of this. There's a company that's doing something in the middle. They're creating a brand like a cloud kitchen, but they're fulfilling it using real restaurant staff that already exists. So they're basically creating these cloud brands for, for, for, uh, that are consumer facing.

Like it might be pizza and pies, right? And pizza and pies is their brand name. But what they're actually doing is they're fulfilling by using actual pizza shop, mom and pop pizza shops that don't know the first thing about technology. They don't know how to get listed on these marketplaces. And they don't want to deal with, you know, kind of the marketing of it. And so these guys rebrand these mom and pops. They put them up on the delivery apps.

And they don't have to own any labor, any, any, kitchen infrastructure, any equipment, any anything. They're just like a sort of a marketing brand that basically creates the concept and they upcharge and when they get the order, they go place the order at the mom and pop for fulfillment. And that's how these guys are doing it. It's very smart, very capital. And they just, and they train the mom and pop how to make the, or like, or they probably like all pizza, all pizza companies, you guys all probably have the right stuff to make what we need you to make, but we have some quality control. They give them a tablet that's,

says, hey, when an order comes for this, you're no longer, you know, Deborah's kitchen, which is your real brand, you are pizza and pies. Put it in that box and it comes to this order. Here's just more orders that are coming to you. You want more orders, right? It's like a no-brainer proposition to a restaurant. Hey, here's your little tablet. Every time this thing rings, you get paid. You're wrong. It is definitely not a no-brainer. If I'm a restaurant, I'm like, dude, F off. It's in addition to what you're doing. I've got to make a brand here. Like I can't like, you know, like McDonald's.

That's not how most mom and pop restaurants think. They're not trying to create a digital brand and expand to do all that. They want their shop to like not go out of business. I don't know if I agree with that. I think that like you're an immigrant family. And I think that like many of them, many like lower income hardworking or immigrant families is like, look, I just got to pay my bills. I got to pay my bills.

But I do think that after you've been. doing it for like 20 or 30 years, you maybe do think like, well, the may that I, I really get rich is like, like, I'm not talking like billionaire rich, but I am talking about like, I've got like the best restaurant in this neighborhood is by doing something that will be really, really good in high quality for 40 years. Am I wrong? It's just a split. I think there's a pie chart, right? There's some percentage of the pie that's already doing it. There's some percentage of the pie that will do it themselves. And then the majority of the pie are people that are not going to do it. they've run their business their way for 10 straight years.

And, you know, the easy proposition, which is, hey, I can add an extra $5,000 a month of sales. If you just put this tablet here and whenever it rings up one of your orders, fill it, that's a very easy proposition for a lot of people who are not going to be part of this tech wave and switch the way that they do things to become like kind of delivery heavy. I'm not interested in investing at the moment. but this would be a fun thing to look at is that company's deck because I've just talked myself out of it that I think I actually think that that's a bad idea because I think a restaurant owner will start using it and they're like well shoot I'm no longer really like a small business

that I own I'm just like a factory worker and I think that the churned for those folks might be quite high. It could be, it could be, but it's also very hard to say no to consistent. Once money starts coming in your pocket every month, very hard to turn that off. And so I think that that might be a problem. You know, some people obviously will say, no, I'm willing to cut off this revenue stream that's bringing me $5,000, $10,000 a month. And I think most people will not want to do that. They'll say, okay, cool, I'm not going to do extra work and I'm not going to take a dip here. Yeah, and I've never talked to any of these people, so I'm just shooting from the hip. Yeah, let's go to the next one. Next topic, which one you want to do? Let's do this Martin Schrelly one. This is kind of

interesting. So did you read this article that came out yesterday or the day before? The Bloomberg lady. So explain to people who didn't read it what this story is and what you thought about it. So you'll have to fill in any gaps here, but basically Martin Screlli, everyone remembers this guy from 2016. He was called Pharma Bro. He was kind of this prodigy businessman, pharmaceutical guy. he created multi-hundred million companies in the pharmaceutical space. He got in trouble because he increased the price of a drug that you need if you get like a nut allergy.

I forget what that drug's called. It's like the shot. Para something, yeah. If you get a shot when you have an allergic reaction and it raised the price from like $1 to like $100. And he's got a really punchable face. And I actually heard his reasoning. And he was like, no, look, it's just for the insurance companies.

And I was like, okay, so maybe it's not as bad as reality. But who knows? But he's very smug, very punchable. and this one journalist that was covering the story, which I've got a story about that too, was covering the story. This woman who looked like she's 38, I think it said. She had a husband and she started covering him,

became friends with him. He's now in prison, left the husband, quit journalism, and is with him. In love with this guy. Yeah. So he goes to jail and she goes from married with a job to has to quit her job because she fell in love with the story. with the guy in the story.

And secondly, you know, left her husband and is, and also now Martin Shrelly doesn't talk to her. So he doesn't like that she. Oh, is that how it in? I didn't even finish it. So he won't talk to her anymore because what? It's not clear why. I think it's like she was, like the story was kind of coming out that she's in love with them and all this stuff. And he didn't want her to like do the story or something like.

that. I didn't fully understand why he stopped talking to her, but she released the story to into hopes of like, I hope he reads this, realizes how much I really truly love him. And I hope he returns my call. Because for prison, she can't call in. He can only call out. So she's just waiting for him to call. And for two months, he hasn't called. Yeah. Well, here, let me tell you a Martin Trell story. And you'll, you have one as well. I met Martin on Blab. So Sean used to run this thing called Blab. It was like a clubhouse before club. I mean, you know, you log in and chat with people. It was pretty cool. And Martin would come on. And actually, you go first. He like had like, you had like the Martin wave, right? Yeah, we basically were like a small startup and we had a bunch of

like marketers actually were using hit like a bunch of digital marketers were using in a couple brands were using it, a couple of, you know, friends. And we were small like the biggest. It was a live sharing platform. So imagine a Zoom call, but the Zoom call was public. It was like a public room that Somebody could come. They could join in. They could be not on camera. They were, they were in the chat. And so they could listen in on this conversation that we're having right now. And they could request to call in and be like, oh, I actually have a Martin Schrelly story. I want to call in. And it's like a radio show. So that's what Blab was. It was small. And then one day I noticed that, oh, shit, there's a stream that has 4,000 people in it. That's 10 times bigger than our biggest stream before this. Awesome. Who is this? I see this guy Martin Schrelly. I don't know who that is. I Google the name Martin Schrelly. And I see Martin Schrelly, the most Aided man in America. And I was like, oh, shit, what do we get ourselves into? And that's when I learned about this, you know, what he was doing. So anyways, continue on from there.

And I was a blab user and I saw Martin on it and I called in. I became friendly with him. I was only, this was in the winter, I believe, right? This was wintertime. Yeah. So winter, it must have been winter of 2015. 16. Yeah.

And like, it just turned 16. And I became friends with him, friendly. and I emailed them back and forth and eventually we had this woman working for us name, what was her name? I forget her name, Brina, Brina Kerr. Nice woman. She was like a charming, cute woman

and Brina went to interview him on the phone and he must have saw what she looked like and they kind of hit it off and he, and Brita goes, or no, Mark goes, I'll pay you $10,000 to fly down to San Diego to see me. And Brina was like, should I do this? And I was like, I mean, if you want, yeah.

And she became friends with them, and we wrote this story about him. And to this day, Trung, because the hustle has talked to this guy, Trong, my guy Trong, who writes a daily email, talks on the phone with him. And Trung called me the air day, and he goes, hey, I got Martin on the air line. And it was like midnight on a Thursday. Like, are you, you want us to cover this? I was like, yeah, I mean, why not? So anyway, the hustle and Martin, like, I see how he's pulled this off.

He is very charming and it works well. So I wrote this Twitter thread because I was like, I can see how this would happen. This guy has this like kind of weird magnetic pull. He's like you said, he is super smug. He can be a total asshole. He's not like good looking. He's not like, you know, physically impressive in any way. And.

But he has a little rock star. vibe because he doesn't give a shit. He doesn't give a fuck. He's like Dave Portnoy, but like not as cool. Like I don't necessarily think that he's a bad guy, but like I don't think he's like a great person. So when he came on the platform, he came on because we were kind of this live place where you could just host a room. People could come at you. They could come talk to you and you could talk back. You could boot them out. So he loved it because it was like having his own radio show. So he basically, the first few days, he was just fighting people. And people loved fights. So these streams were getting really, really popular. He had gotten kicked off Twitch, and so he came to Blab, actually.

And so he, and I remember reading Emmett, who I didn't know at the time, the CEO of Twitch came out was just like, he banned him like the first day. He's like, this guy, like, has no place in our community, no place in our platform, the way he acts and the way he's acting. And I was like celebrating. I was like, this dude's driving traffic, man. This is awesome for a startup. We were desperate for any kind of traction.

So I was like, okay, this is interesting. So he starts bringing on hundreds of thousands of people. per month just through his channel, which like we had like Tony Robbins came on, the Jonas brothers came on, ESPN was using us. Nobody could drive numbers like this guy. And not just that he drove people to come check it out, like come check out the car crash, but he actually used us like 10 hours a day. Like in the morning he would log on. He would start the room. His like kind of fans and haters would come in. There was some like kind of back and forth. In the afternoon he would sometimes do these like educational streams where he would stream himself like looking at stocks and

talking through how to do things about it. He recorded that and he put it on YouTube and I watched almost the whole thing. It was awesome. It's fascinating. He was smart. He would talk about like drug discovery. He's like, yeah, people get mad at me for this. He's like, the reality is big pharma doesn't even invest in these small drugs for small.

Like basically, it's really hard to make a drug that has a cure. So if you're going to do it, you do it in the markets that are the biggest, basically, the most popular diseases. So then there he goes, there's this opportunity where for rare infectious diseases or rare rare diseases, nobody's producing anything. He's like, so what I started doing was going and buying up R&D for the IP for all these rare conditions because I could accumulate all this stuff and I could build, I could add them up and build a big company. And he's like, yeah, and I increased the prices on some of them because, like you said,

I'm mostly just charging the insurance companies. If anybody can't afford it, they can get it for free. It's just if you can afford, if you do have insurance, I charge insurance more, which in turn makes the insurance company bill you a little bit more. but like it's really the insurance company paying. So that was his defense. He goes, if we don't do this, no one's going to fund any research for these rare diseases. So you have it either way.

Either you don't pay for it and then nobody knows no R&D and there's no cures or we increase the price, which actually lets me invest in R&D. That was his like public justification. But that's also for the record, that's not why he's in jail. He's in jail because he committed securities fraud. Fraud. He like he had a co-founder and or something. No, no, I got it.

It's simple. He had hedge funds before. He was in pharma, and so he had two hedge funds. And I think he had lied to the investors about how the returns were for the hedge fund. And then he used profits from the pharmaceutical companies to pay back his investors from the hedge fund. So, you know, he wasn't stealing money from people. He also, no, but that's not why he's in, yes, he, that's how he went to jail originally. Now he's in jail because, and this is kind of stupid, he threatened Hillary Clinton on Twitter.

I think he, like, extended his time maybe. I don't think you can just go to jail for that. He violated his parole or whatever His parole But he also, I read the report He did some weird shit man He like called the daughter of the guy Who was suing him

And he like threatened her I don't know if he threatened her with violence But he didn't he was kind of odd Like he definitely crossed the line I don't know that's definitely not Oh he's a line crosser for sure Yeah that's not like jail crossing But that's like you are

Like you're you're fucking weird And I don't want to be around you But he uh but what I do this was like he was famous before the Robin Hood people were around but it's like the same group of people who worship Elon who love Bitcoin who love Robin Hood they love Davey Day Trader yeah I don't know what does a group like but it's like young men who are kind of nerdy who don't have like a strong male father who don't have a strong father figure these types of odd balls and I would come on to that blab and there's women that would come on that were like cute women that were like

the female version of these guys and they loved him he totally had a groupies he could have fooled around with all of them. He was a rock star of these women and men. Yeah, and he would do complete trolly shit. In fact, he was getting popular right around the same time Trump was right around 2016. And I noticed that both of them were doing the same thing, which I just started calling troll marketing, which is basically he would do something like, let's say, I remember once there was some monument or statue that was like for sale in Times Square. And he was like, he just goes in in public announces, like, I will buy the statue for $10 million. But what he wanted to do was, was he wanted to own this little thing and then be able to erect like a trolly, like kind of

statue of himself in Times Square. And he didn't ever even have to go through with it, but he was like, say a thing, bang, headlines. And Trump was doing the same thing at the time. He's like, Mexicans are rapists. And it's like, you know, boom, headlines, right? And so Martin Schrelli found a way to get in the news, like every fourth day. He would like, he bought the Wu Tang album for two million dollars the one copy of the album and uh you know it's like boom found a way to get news he would um like he did a thing on our platform where he would go he would swipe through on like tinder or whatever and come like get a date with somebody he would go on the date he would come back to his apartment but he leave the stream on so anybody oh my god over hear it and listen to it and he would just be playing

chess with this woman or like you know i saw that i remember that or whatever uh you know he was just always pushing the boundaries and so i don't know he was pure entertainment it was for our platform it was good and bad. A lot of people hated them. And so these hacker groups came out and they would DDoS us, which is distributed denial of service attack, which is basically like flooding our website with fake traffic to take down our servers. And we're just like a simple like startup.

And they were hitting us with like five gigabit like DDoS attacks every single hour. And they would take down not just us. They would take down like our service providers, like cloud flare and shit like that. And they would call us being like, yo, what's going on? We're seeing really weird traffic patterns to your sites, taking down our infrastructure. And we're like, yes, sorry.

Like, people hate Shrelli. So they've decided to just attack us. It was a very, very crazy time. But anyway, as long as for sure, I think this is a wild story, but I am not surprised because I, for a weird reason, ended up spending a lot of time observing this dude

because he was on our platform. And he was our biggest user. And Martin has not been in the news lately other than this thing. I think he's going to get out in, in a few months. He's going to get out in a short amount of time. I have a feeling this is, we're going to hear a lot more from this guy.

Yeah, he's going to do something. And this guy, even though he's creepy, I don't, I'm not anti-Martin, but I don't want to be friends with him. He is capable enough that he's going to mess him stuff up soon. That's my prediction. He's capable. He's got the, he's got the trifect that capable,

or he's like smart, like driven, and like kind of like a troll and evil. So he's got like all the things necessary. He's like a sociopath. I think that's pretty safe to say. All right. What do we want to go to now? Obreu, what do you like on this list? Let's do Elon Musk potentially buying $100 billion worth of Bitcoin.

Okay. So Elon tweeted this out. He tweeted out a meme of, I mean, how the fuck do you describe a meme? It's basically a meme where it's a guy and it says, me trying to live a normal, productive life. And then it's like this like, you know, brothel whore with Bitcoin on her butt. And it just says Bitcoin. He's like trying to avoid looking at it or dabbling in it.

And then the guy we talked about last podcast, Michael Saylor, who's the CEO of Micro Strategy who has bought over a billion dollars of Bitcoin off his company balance sheet goes, if you want to do your shareholders a $100 billion favor, convert the Tesla balance sheet from USD to Bitcoin. The other firms in the SEP 500 would follow your lead, and in time it would grow to become a trillion dollar favor. And Elon responded, he goes, are such large transactions even possible?

And Michael Saylor goes, yes, I've purchased 1.3 in Bitcoin in the past months, and we'd be happy to share my play with you offline from one rocket scientist to another. First of all, what a cool thing to be able to observe. And then by the way, Elon changes his Twitter bio to say I'm this former CEO of Dogecoin, which obviously he's not, but like is kind of like an actual meme coin that was created to sort of like make fun of Bitcoin that actually became quite valuable. Didn't, uh, it's all right. So what's Bitcoin at today, 25?

I don't know. Let's see. I'm trying to buy this desk price tracker, just like a clock, but it's not a clock. It's just showing me the price of Bitcoin at all times. Yeah, that sounds like the whole. a horrible way to live. That's miserable. Just shoot me. All right. Well,

what are we going to say about? I mean, I don't know. I don't give a shit, to be honest. Like, I think Elon's cool and all. I just,

I'm, I'm over his kind of loose cannon shit. I think it's cool for a little while. And it's good and healthy doses. But I, I'm not an Elon hater, but I wouldn't say I'm a, I don't like,

just jump at what he says. Sometimes I find him annoying. Yeah, I'm actually the same way. I think he's trying too hard now. It was cool when he was like a legit visionary CEO who happened to have a sense of humor. And now he's like one of those guys who goes and watches the Schreli stream. Like his personality is like trying really hard to be like cool and irreverent. Like, oh, that's so cool that you did that.

You posted that meme. Oh, you said Dogecoin. man, oh, you know, you sent F you to somebody on Twitter. Like, it just seems a little bit try hard to me now. It's kind of like, it's like, do you remember in the 90s? Not gonna lie. If I saw him, I'd be like, you know, bowing down and like, you know, making a fool of myself trying to like be friends with the guy.

So I can't really lie and say I wouldn't be fucking up to him. I agree. I just, I do think it's annoying. The schick is going a little too far. It was kind of like how Trump in the 90s, remember when Trump was on home alone and like Trump meant like successful rich businessman. Now to half the country, Trump means like liar fraud. It's like, dude, Elon, like two years ago, you were like rocket scientist, genius, good guy, saving the world. Now you're

kind of like trending over to be like maybe troll first, kind of douche first and then like saving the world and doing all this amazing stuff second. Yeah, you never go full troll. He went full troll and we'll see what happens. I think that one thing that's cool there is, just that with Bitcoin, it is one of those self-fulfilling prophecies. If they were to actually do this, it would add more money and more legitimacy and drive up the price, which would strengthen both the story and the price and the returns, which would drive more companies to do it, which would, again, drive up the price, drive up the returns and bolster the story. And so that's the beauty of Bitcoin. It is the money,

it is the bubble that never pops. The more people that believe in it, the more people that get behind it, the more hype it builds, the more real it becomes. And so Michael Saylor is absolutely right. If Tesla did this, if they did legitimize Bitcoin even more than it's already been legitimized, it would only, like, it would only, like, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It would only increase the likelihood that the price would go up and the returns would be higher. Sean, do you want to talk about, you already talked about this a little bit, but you had a really cool Twitter thing going on where you, like, talked about your newsletter. Did you have any good replies to that? Yeah, a bunch of people were like, oh, this is cool. You know,

I was just like, I did it to try to get likes, right? Like, it's a reason to put out a thread like this is to get likes. It drove 3,000 new email subscribers and 4,000 new Twitter followers, which is cool. Like, one Twitter thread can do that. So that was cool. There wasn't a whole lot. I mean, there's a couple people who were like haters. Like, one guy was like, you know, it's just funny.

People were like, oh, you worked on this after 7 p.m.? Like, like, you know, basically calling me a shitty dad. I was like, do my kid sleeps after 7. Like, that's a bedtime. So, yeah, I guess so. But okay, even if fucking wasn't asleep, weird takeaway for you to have out of this thread. That's what they said.

Yeah, a bunch of people bought the vault of like the archive. I sold like $5,000 worth of it yesterday from that. So that's like, you know, at $100 piece, 50, 50 people, I think bought it as of this morning. And I didn't put the link in there. So I actually just DMed it to one guy who asked and that a bunch of people asked him. And so he sold basically 50 of these for me because I didn't want to promote selling it. I just wanted to put the information out there and drive people to like my free email list. Because I really want to write more.

I really enjoy the podcast and I want to do written stuff more too. That's like where I'm having a lot of fun. So I don't know. It's not that not that interesting there. There's one more interesting thing that is I'm doing this other thing, which I find to be very entertaining. So I'm doing all these like tiny life experience. experiments, one of which is I'm creating something called Club LTV. Did I tell you about this? No. Okay, so I had this idea. I was like, okay, I wanted to meet a bunch of other people who

have like successful DTC stores. I'm interested in the DTC e-com space. So I was like, oh, okay, cool, I want to meet a bunch of people. And I have this philosophy, much like you, which is that you want to host the party, not attend it, right? Like what you did with HustleCon was great. Like, yes, it was more work, but the rewards are like totally disproportionate to how much more effort it is to just host the event. Like all the speakers know you, they like you,

they're grateful to you because you brought a bunch of cool people together. Every attendee starts to know you and your brand. And so I've always had this philosophy, which is like if you want to get into something, you want to build your network, the easiest way to do it is just to host, host something. Just do the schlep work of hosting.

So I wanted to get into the DDC world. So I was like, all right, I'm going to create like a meetup, But of course, there's no conferences, no meetups going on right now. I was like, okay, it's got to be digital. But digital events are so fucking lame that I was like, I don't want to do like a boring ass like Zoom networking event. That's not like, you know, I wouldn't even want to attend my own event. So I talked to Ben and I was like, Ben, how would make this cool?

And I was like, let's just go way over the top. So I created this thing called Club LTV. And it's literally like a nightclub. And it's only for people that are LTV being lifetime value, which is like a metric, every e-commerce store owner cares about. I hired like a DJ who's coming. Everybody has to bring a drink. In real life?

This is a Zoom meetup, but it's going to have every like fucking trick I can throw into a Zoom meetup to make the Zoom more fun. I'm making it fun. So I got backgrounds. I got a DJ. I got, everyone's got to bring a drink.

We're using this little tool that lets it, like it like snap your fingers. and breaks everybody out in groups of five. So they can kind of like kind of go hang out and have conversations on their own. I got these like ballers like Craig Clemens who was on our podcast, who's done like a billion dollars in e-commerce revenue.

He's like, oh, this is dope. And I come from a club background. I'll be there. And so I got these like kind of cool people that are just going to be at the club. And I don't know. I'm going to try to, I'm like, if I'm going to do a boring networking thing,

I'm going to make it not boring. And I don't know what the answer is, but I'm going to have a long-term plan? I have a sponsor. Yeah, it's free to attend, but you have to be a e-commerce store owner that's doing over $100,000 a month in your store. That's good. And how many people send out? We have like 50 people coming as of right now, but I'm going to try to get this to be more.

So if you're out there, if you want to be in e-commerce, I don't know about that restriction about the 100K and up. I might drop that or I might just like split the group into two, which is like you either have this tag if you're like legit or not. Like some kind of status symbol, I don't know what I'm going to do with that. But if you want to come to Club LTV, tweet at me and tell me about your ecom store. Can I, well, you'll have to share the URL or something for that for people to sign up. Just go to my Twitter, just at Sean VP and DM me and say, I want it to ClubLTV. There's no website. What do you and your family use for personal finance?

Like just tracking spending, you mean, or what? Yeah, tracking. What's your personal finance setup? All right. My personal finance setup is Mint for just aggregating accounts and tracking and then Excel. I do all my shit in Excel. Why do you use Excel and Mint? So I use Mint because I've used Mint for a long time.

I did the start that like, I don't know, 2010 or something. I started using Mint. So I just kind of have it. There's a whole bunch of other software out there that's like supposed to be better. But I don't trust any of them. I don't want to link my account. So I don't want to link all my bank accounts to random as services. Mint, I kind of already did.

It's kind of grand. I already took the risk. So, you know, I get some benefits from it. But I actually just prefer to do it in Excel. Because for me, one of the valuable things is it's sort of like,

you know, when you wanted to get better at copywriting, you like hand wrote stuff. Right, right. There's something in the practice of writing out my finances that makes me think about it and like spend time with it rather than just like checking a dashboard real quick. Do you do that every month? Every probably like two months, yeah.

So I'm looking at like solutions for this. So I'm trying to figure out two things. Like how to set up all my bank accounts or my wife and I. And like because we, I've got like eight bank accounts because like we each had four. Like the savings and checking that we had like when we were in high school. Right. And then like your new account that you create once you like have a real job. Digital thing sounds cool.

Yeah. Yeah. And then your credit card. And then maybe like your early credit card or your new. new credit card. And then you combine that. It's like, oh, shit, we've got 10 accounts. This is like so silly. What are we doing? So I've got to figure that out. I also have to figure out. I'm like, well, I personally was just using personal capital before. And I knew what I spent. So like it was no big deal. I didn't have to track it religiously. Like I just, I used to use this

thing where I wrote it down as well. But now there's two of us. I'm trying to figure out there's a software I found. It's an app and a web app called you need a budget. Have you heard of it? No. Okay. It's called you need a budget. And I've never seen a fanat, such a fanatical group of people around budgeting. And they used what's called zero-based budgeting. And this app, it was created by one guy and a small team. I bet they do 12 to 15 million a year in recurring revenue. And if you go to, you need a budget, whatever the abbreviation of that, you, so why need NAB? There's a subreddit with a whole lot of people. And they like are fanatical about this. What is that zero budget thing? What does that mean? So I don't know entirely, I mean, I know

just because I Googled what a zero-based budgeting. And the way it works is every dollar that comes in is allocated and spent. So let's say you make 10 grand a month and you save $5,000. So that's $5,000 that you spent on saving. And then so you have to spend $2,000 on rent. Like every dollar must be spent. And you have to go in each month and make sure that you've accounted for each dollar. Like each dollar serves a purpose to get down to zero.

Gotcha. And I don't, and people like it because of the. exactly what you said, which is they like seeing where everything is going and they want to do a little bit of manual work in order to know exactly what's happening with your money. Now, and so what it does is it gives you a little bit better perspective on what you're going to spend in the future, whereas Mitt does a little bit better job of probably telling you what you spent in the past and it averages the traveling three months and says, here's what you spend every month. And I'm trying to figure out the best thing to use, but it's incredibly complex.

And like, I'm not even like, imagine if you're like ultra high network, that it's really, really hard, but I guess it's not that hard. You have so much money, doesn't really matter what your budget is. But for a young couple, a young family, with 10 accounts or whatever, I'm like overwhelmed. And the zero-based budgeting seems incredibly interesting. I've never heard, and the reason why I've never seen a group of people that are rallied around this, although I guess I have a little bit with Dave Ramsey. Do you know about Dave Ramsey? Yeah, yeah. I don't know how to describe me. He got a big podcast and he's a finance kind of advisor. Well, he's a religious, he, and I'm not going to judge this. I'm just

to say the facts. He's all not saying. Well, no, he's all about religion. So his, his, yeah, he's a southern guy. That's how I know him from the south. His finance tips are based off of the Bible. And so southern Christian, conservative folks love Dave Ramsey.

And so he's all about, and he's a very conservative. Like, you know, he anticipates that his average user is going to make $50,000 for a really long time. Is a teacher, needs a safer retirement. He needs to get out of it. debt, yada, yada, yada. He's not like a get rich type of guy. It's just like live a good life with a normal, normal means. Anyway, you need a budget so fascinating. I've never seen

such a cult following around a freaking finance app. Yeah, that's cool. I like that. I'm not a big budgeter. Like, I basically, my thinking is this. I was like, all right, I can focus in one of two areas. I could focus on saving or I can focus on earning. So I try to focus on earning. Any hours that I have, I try to focus on earning, not saving. The second thing is what gives me like stress versus not stress. And so like I like to have the snapshot of where we're at every couple months, but I don't want to measure where we're spending because I think about the future. I'm like, all right, I'm very confident that over the next 10 years, we're going to get to the point where we have more than enough money that we, like, we have more money than we know what to

do with. So if that's true, if I believe that 100%, which I do, then this is all wasted energy doing this. I'd rather literally be sleeping. I'd rather be like doing something else. And so I, I just want like the distressed way of living, which is like not measuring anything. In fact, I told my wife, like set a budget, like not a budget of what you can spend, set a threshold of when you have to talk to me about it. Like, don't ask me about anything that's under X dollars, right? and this was inspired by like my co-founder Furkan always tells a story at a previous company this guy's wife kept calling him and he just picked up the phone and he goes if it's under $5,000 I don't want you to talk to me about it and he hung up the phone and Furcom was like damn

that was a baller move $5,000 like that's crazy and so then I also heard that story and I was like that's awesome and so now I want to do the same I just think that's just a baller way to live it's like don't the items under $5,000, like expenditures under $5,000 do not concern me. I think that's a cool way to live. That's how I roll too. I don't know what, I don't know what are like it's probably $4,000, $3,000. It's like I don't care. I just don't want to talk about it.

Well, I just wanted to ask what you used for personal finance. I'm trying to figure out how to handle all this shit. Yeah, you do a good job finding these little communities. Where did you find this? Was it from Reddit that you found this? I tweeted out. what people, so I'm a personal finance, I would say a little bit of a nerd. Like I like to see what's out there. I don't, and it's fun for me. So I like this Reddit, the subreddit called Fat Fire.

I'm like a huge fan of that. I read the book that you and I talked about via text, which is like a finance book for personal finance book kind of. And so I just like him in the know of all of them. And I asked my Twitter following what they use. And I had one or two people say you need a budget and then it got like crazy amounts of likes and I was like what is this like what's the subreddit and there was people who are like defending it like crazy like like they stake their personality on this and I'm like that's crazy this whole zero bit so for a certain group of people it seems life changing yeah let me see how many downloads this has I mean the Android app alone has over a million downloads that's pretty impressive for a and it call oh by the way but

look it costs money so you have to pay pay $50, I think, or $100 to use it. And I love that. I love that that they're charging for it. I think that is such a smart move. How much does it cost? $3 a month or $10 a month or something? It costs money. So I think it's probably you pay to use it in some way. Yeah. And I almost, I think I'm going to sign up for it. The only reason I haven't is it's kind of like superhuman.com or something else where it requires some work to learn. And I just haven't had the time to learn. And so, but people love this thing and I was trying to figure out like how do they build a cult following around this like what are they teaching how much of the cost a bray you just said 83 a month how do you a year how do you

create a cult following around these types of things and like what are they saying that's the opposite of what other people are saying in order to make this polarizing here's the commonality I don't think it's the cult following around you need a budget I think that what happens is if you take a bunch of people who all have a shared goal or like kind of a like a desire and you give them a forum to basically trade tips on how they're achieving it and like say when things are going really hard. So I see this all the time. Right. We had a baby. So Sonia's in all these like mommy forums and mommy kind of like groups.

And it's the same thing. Right. Like these mommy groups have like such a strong like, I mean the engagement is just off the charts. And often they're around. certain like, for example, it could be natural birth versus getting an epidural, or it could be around sleep training or not sleep training. It doesn't matter which process it is. It's like that, that community has like a cult following. And it's not that like, it's not all about the brand up top. It's about giving a bunch of people who are trying to do a hard thing, a place to trade stories

and tips and like commiserate. I think that's what these guys are doing for kind of personal finance. I think that it happens with mommy bloggers. Sorry, not mommy bloggers, just new moms who are trying to go through that together and trade, you know, why is my baby not sleeping or she's not eating enough or whatever, getting that sort of community help there. I think that's where the magic is. How many, um, related people? Like, we could have done that, right? We, we could have said, we're going to really foster community people who are trying to make their first million bucks. People who are who literally, they want to be a millionaire and they're going after it. And, um, you know, we're going to build an awesome community around it. I didn't, I don't know,

community building is not something I'm good at. So I didn't do that. I have a Facebook group, but that's not a real great community. But it's such a clear stated goal and dream. Like it's baked into the name of our podcast that I think we had the potential to build something as good as these guys. It's not over yet. I mean, we can still do it. I bet you, I wonder how this guy got started.

I bet you had a personal finance blog and built an audience and then launch this. Right. Cool.