My First Million - #145 with Reed Duchscher - MrBeast's Manager Joins the Brainstorm

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) discuss: - Who is Reed Duchscher - How does managing a YouTuber work - Who is MrBeast and how he got so big - Creating empires with celebrities and influencers - What is a "Personal Media Company" - How much did MrBeast Burgers make? - What're the biggest opportunities in management right now? - Why you get into the management business (the access) - What should MrBeast be doing right nowInfluencers in unorthodox spaces - Influencers ran banks - Faceless creators are booming - Shaan thinks Influencers should get into the sleep business Thank you to our sponsor this episode, Flatfile! Spend less time on Excel and more time building your business by easily importing data using Flatfile. Check them out at flatfile.io/hustle. 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. Editing thanks to Jonathan Gallegos (@jjonthan)  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. What's up, everybody? We've got a special guest in the house. Reed, Duxer, and, read, this room is baller. Is this your office or is this your bedroom?

Yeah, this is our office in Dallas, Texas. I wish this was my bedroom. Maybe I need to rethink what my bedroom looks like and add a bunch of toys and stuff. And I see you got the painting on the wall. I feel like I get retargeted for that ad constantly for that painting. If I see it right, I don't know. It's a little bit blurry.

You got the fancy blurry camera. So I'm not sure if I'm seeing it, right. Yeah, it's the Ari Gold's. I've had this thing for like seven years. It's when Ari Gold, like, bought, this is from Entourage for people that don't know. It was an HBO series when he went in and he bought like a rival agency and he went in with a paintball gun and basically fired people. It's like an iconic episode. He goes, Lord.

Yeah. I will find you. Dude, that was a pretty good Ari impression. I like that. I too grew up watching that. Ari was one of my heroes for a while as well. Yeah, it was weird. Like, I loved the show, and I thought everything they did with the show is so fascinating.

But I was always into the character E, not specifically, like, him as his specific character, but what he did, like, his manager, like, the manager role that he played. I'm glad you said not him specifically because he was boring as fuck. Yeah, yeah, boring character. but his job. I was like, his job seems to be so interesting because it's like management isn't about like necessarily just about managing a client. It's about access and the access that comes along with managing a client like Vincent Chase where it's like when you're as manager, you're kind of open to all this stuff that

exists, right? Whether it's talking to different actors, actors, musicians like deals that come through. So that's what fascinated me about it. And so that's pretty good segue. So why don't you tell people what you do? Yeah. So I run a company. called Night Media. I formed it in 2015. Was an NFL sports agent working with some cool guys that

people probably know like Barry Sanders, Marcus Allen, Tim Brown. And I did client services for them within a sports agency. And I met a YouTube group named Dude Perfect in 2015. And that really started my my career as a digital talent manager. And now fast forward to where we are in 2021. We currently manage people like Mr. Beast, who I'm sure if you're logging on to YouTube, you probably see his videos on trending and we work with ZHC and a few others. And what we specialize in is we say gaming, lifestyle, technology, and entertainment is really where we like to focus at night media. So how does the economics of that work? I mean, do you have employees or is a manager just, you're a one-man show? What's that look like? It used to be a one-man show. It's got a

little bit more complicated as the years have went on. So we have quite a few people internally at night media. And we also, you know, I think about talent management a little differently than most people do. And I think about it and like what's a new age talent management company look like and how do you serve as creators. And so for us, like the management bucket is one that becomes important. And so we have a lot of internal talent managers that work with clients. We also have an organization, more of like an incubation studio for owned and operated companies like Mr. Beasberger that people have saw in the news recently and a few other companies that will launch with creators. So we also play the business partner role. And then we also have a have like a venture side of this business where we

invest in emerging software and studios and companies that we find interesting. And so to me, that's kind of like the three pillars that like a new age talent management firm or digital talent management firm should have. And are you used to invest? Are you using your own cash flows? Or are you using your clients money? A little bit of both. It started out as like us investing off the balance sheet of like, yeah, we think this company's cool. We think this studio's awesome. We'd pull some clients in. The most recent one we did or announced was backbone. We did it 18 months ago. for those of you don't know, it's like a mobile controller, but it also has a lot of software to basically turn your phone into a switch. And so Mr. Beast invested personally, pressed in like a bunch of our clients invested personally. And it's just kind of got us thinking of like, okay, maybe we should actually operationalize this and have LPs come into a specific fund within Night Media. And so that's now how we operate. Are you the sole owner of this business? No, there's multiple owners. We obviously have, you know, people that have equity and we've had investors along the way. And so it's been quite a ride. I was the sole owner up until 20, 2018. When you're a football agent and you sound like a pretty legit football player clients,

and then you're like, oh, this YouTube group, Dude Perfect. And like, Sam, I feel like you're the target demo for Dude Perfect. You like Dude Perfect. I love Dude Perfect. Of course I know what they are. Of course. And so you're like, oh, you know what? It's not about Barry Sanders anymore. It's about, you know, I don't know what the hell of the guys names are, but Dude Perfect dudes on YouTube. I'm going to take this leap of faith. What was the like kind of reaction? Were people like, Oh, yeah, that makes sense? Or was it like, what the hell are you thinking? It was what the hell are you thinking? 100%. I had worked so hard to get into the sports agency world. And I'd watched Jerry Maguire probably 37 times as a kid growing up. And I wanted to be a sports

Asian. I played college football. I had friends that are now playing in the NFL. And it was like just the easy segue of like, yo, I should represent them when they turn pro. And so everything I did for like three to four years was like, how do I get in with a bigger sports agency? And so, I remember having the conversation when I wanted to leave the sports agency and I was going to go, you know, help this YouTube group that at the time had probably two and a half million subscribers. People thought I was nuts. They're like, this isn't a legitimate business. How are they going to make money? How do YouTubers make money? Like it was just, it was all so new in 2015. And it seems weird to say that because YouTube was founded in 2007 or 2009, someone

of the two. Also, there's a lot of YouTubers at that time that were actually doing incredibly well. It just wasn't known. And so in 2015, when I made that. jump to start working with dude perfect. People just thought I lost my mind. Can you actually go through and answer that question for us? I mean, I don't know anything about show. I know close to nothing about show business. I know a lot about technology, a lot about software, a lot about media.

But when it comes to managing YouTubers, how does that business model work? I mean, I'm one of those people that would say, how does it make money? Let's do it this way. I'm going to throw out a straw man. I'm going to explain how I think it works because of what I've seen from the outside. And you say, yeah, you kind of got it, but these parts were wrong, right? Okay, so here's what I've seen. And this is more in the Twitch streamer world than YouTubers.

So guy, you know, sits at his desk every day, makes videos, starts to get famous. At some point, they're like buddy slash girlfriend, slash, you know, boyfriend, whoever is like, oh, okay, I'm your manager now. And that's like, manager one that they have. And then that person's like, okay, here's what I'm going to do as your manager. I'm going to read your email and like, I'll actually respond to some of these. And it's almost all inbound initially. and they basically read the inbox, they reply to stuff, and then like, oh, these guys want to give you a bunch of money to do this shoutout.

Okay, they act as kind of the agency where they're like, all right, pick a number out of thin air type of thing. I get 10% because I'm your manager. So like I think a cut is like 10%, 15%, something like that. You tell me if I'm wrong. And then the talent does the thing. And like the client is like, you know, somewhat happy because they like half read the brief. And then you move on to the next one.

And then like some of guys like you that are pretty forward thinking start to realize, holy shit, we can do a lot more with this influence, and that's where you get the venture arm, and that's where you get Mr. Beasberger, and you get a bunch of other stuff. But let's just talk to typical and not your case, because I just wanted to explain to people the typical talent manager first.

Was that right or wrong? It's a good point. Mine's completely different. And I think what you just explained is what currently happens still to this day. I see a lot of it. Mom's best friends, uncles. And it's really like, you know,

someone starts going, you know, from say a thousand views to 100K views. The question is like, what's next? I'm getting attention. There's people reaching out. How much do I charge for this? Do I sell merchandise because all these companies are reaching out? And it's just someone to help them navigate that.

And I still think that even the talent management space for digital creators is really under saturated. There's not a lot of management companies that I think, and not necessarily think about it like us, but are just like there to service creators and like have their best intentions in mind. There's still not a lot. And so because of that, like it falls on friends and parents. And, you know, like I said, uncles. And it's not a bad thing.

It's just as the space matures, like, that's just, you know, progression. What's the difference then between what Sean described and how you guys are doing it now? So we really view creators more like entrepreneurs and media businesses. I think the brand deal thing, the filming creators is all, or filming videos is all great. But we see a much bigger opportunity with creators actually owning and operating their own sustainable businesses outside of just the normal filming YouTube videos and maybe sell a honey ad or like a dollar shape club ad you saw some of that with mr. Beasberger will announce a few more products coming up mid this year with a few other creators that we think fit and so to me like

when you think about these businesses it's less of like hey this is just a single YouTube channel it's more of like what are the pillars that you know a typical media company like vicarc would build or like if we were to think about sponge bob what are sponge bob's other like tentacles as an IP and where are they all making money like That's how creators should start thinking about these businesses. For us, like, we kind of view ourselves as more of like an outsourced COO. We're less of like a manager because we play the manager hat, but there's so many other things that we have to do now to service digital creators,

like operational plans, how much money should you be spending? Is it time to hire seven employees this month? Those are like all things that kind of hit our desk. As management companies evolve, these are the things they're going to have to think about, is like how do we service this like new age, digital creator because we've been doing actors and actresses for a long time, and we understand that. But these people need help. They need to hire people. They need to scale businesses. They need to build out consumer products. And so we just think about it a little bit differently than

most people are. And then how many clients do you have? Currently, I believe we have 17. And do they pay you a flat fee? I mean, because you're describing so many different things, how do you track what fee is yours and what isn't? I imagine you just get some type of percentage. If let's say Dollar Shave Club comes to you and you say, all right, Well, these four people might fit for you. Hey, four people, you guys want to do this? All right, they do. You get your little cut or your big cut, who knows what it is.

But then you're talking about all these other deals. Figuring out who is owed what seems a little challenging. And that split seems hard, right? Yeah, I mean, we've operationalized it pretty well. And yes, we receive a cut on everything our clients do. But we also start businesses with them. So it's like, what are those joint ventures? Like, what are we doing in these joint ventures?

Are we hiring the management team? So there's like, there's two different sides of this, right? Like there's the management side and then there's like this owned and operated side. We're playing both. That's kind of how night media is built right now. And yeah, the manager is like same with the agents. They receive a percentage of income. One question real quick.

So our audience may not know Mr. Beast in the same way that like kind of the general population knows Mr. Beast because he's pretty popular. But the TLDR, I would say, is he got famous by giving away stuff and kind of filming the reaction. He would do these stunts where he'd be like, oh, I'd go to a restaurant and I'll leave a $4,000 tip. on a $9, like, bill. And then he would film the reaction of the person

kind of from a far, like secret camera type of thing. And those videos were awesome to watch. And then he would do things like, you know, buy a Lamborghini and then invite four friends over and be like, put your hand on this Lamborghini. And then the last person with their hand on this Lamborghini gets to keep it. And then he would film like a two-part series of that or whatever. So first, is that a fair characterization or am I, like,

dumbing it down too much? Yeah, you hit on some of our most popular videos. I think what Jimmy focuses on is like virality. How do I get as many people to click on this video as possible on YouTube? And thus, like, YouTube works in two senses. It's like get high click through rate, get high average euteration, video does well. And so those are the things he's focused on. And like crazy ideas that nobody could probably think about.

Like, we did a two-part series, three-part series, about giving away an island. You know, like, how do you buy an island? Okay, now that we acquired the island, let's go, like, do the Survivor series to give it away. Those are the things that we're trying to figure out. early on before he's Mr. Beast with 50 million subscribers or whatever, how did he bootstrap this? So, you know, where did the $1,000 tip come from? And how did he jump from the $1,000 tip to the $10,000 to the $50,000? So I know he had like, I forgot quid or whatever it was that was sponsoring him.

Were they just footing the whole bill and he had enough views to offset it? Or like, can you just talk through that bootstrapping phase of how he got there? Yeah. So I met him around. I think he had like 1.9 million subscribers when I met him. And at the time, he wasn't really making any money. focusing on doing these like weird challenges watching its everyday bro for 24 hours etc and so quid which is uh i think it's still around it's like a sticker digital sticker app right where you collect

stickers they basically were trying to sponsor jimmy and he had this idea about giving money to a homeless person it was like i want to give like 10 000 to a homeless person and the conversation was basically like give us 10 000 we're going to give it all the way the video's going to do well and then the ad sense is just all upside for me and so that's really a how the company was bootstrapped in the beginning is like, we're making all this sponsorship money, we're giving it all away to create bigger and bigger videos. And then the next video was Honey,

after a few quid videos and such, like Honey came in and they gave us money to donate to Ninja's Twitch stream. So Ninja was doing a St. Jude's Twitch stream, and this was right as Ninja was like taking off. And he did this St. Jude stream on Twitch, and we filmed a video around donating, I think it was $40,000 to Ninja. And that video exploded.

And we basically gave away all the money, the sponsorship money for that video. And then we just kept, as the videos continue to get better, the sponsorships continue to become more and more and more. And the videos just now have gotten to the point where we're giving away an island. Sean, have you heard of Ithaca Holdings? It's Scooter Braun's thing. I know about Scooter Braun. I've never heard that name, though, Ithaca.

It's pretty interesting. Basically, the crux of it is like the same thing. I mean, would you say that you guys are inspired by how he's building, how he has built his business? How he built Ithaca. Yeah. I think, you know, Night Media acts as like a holding company. for a lot of other subsidiaries and businesses that we do.

I think from a business structure standpoint, very similar. He did it in music with Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, and we're just kind of playing it in the digital creator landscape. So basically, Sean, he, I mean, I only read articles about it, but it's, Ithaca Holdings was like the holding company for the agency that Justin Bieber, I guess, was the cash cow, but then he got Ariana Grande. Then eventually he started making some lift and Uber investments.

Then eventually he raised some money from, Carlisle and he bought Taylor Swift's catalog. It's like a miniature conglomerate, which is exactly what it sounds like Reed you're trying to do. And it sounds fun. It's the same model Troy Carter did with Lady Gaga and then. Yeah, Adam Factory. Adam Factory, exactly. Yep. I know about all these. I've taken a lot of inspiration from each one. And I just

thought it was a matter of time before someone built this around the creator community. It seems interesting from the outside because you're able to have your hands in a lot of different projects and your day is different all the time. Is that right? Yeah. Completely different from today. But what is like the cash cow? What's like the one stream that keeps us all alive? Just the boring normal management? Yeah. And it's the same with Ithaca. I think it's the same with what Adam Factory was. The management company is the core of the business that keeps the lights on. And everything else is just

kind of upside. It's like you're playing upside in different businesses and different venture investments and things like that. And so that's how our business is built. But we also understand the management company is what keeps the lights on. And so for us, like it is one of our core focuses and will be for the foreseeable future. Well, if you need help raising your rolling fund, I got you. I feel like this is the new model. I was looking at this for, I forgot, I was talking to somebody who, Bology, he has this phrase that he calls his personal media companies, PMCs, and he's like, PMCs are going

of replace or, you know, just sort of swarm traditional media companies because you can have the Joe Rogans and you can have the Tim Ferriss and you can have the Mr. Beasts and you can have all these different people just be personal media companies where they generate content, content goes viral, gets them audience, audience, you know, becomes loyal. And then you layer on top of that, like either like money from sponsors and audience. And then you basically say, cool, now that I'm like a unique property, I can now do partnerships other people can't do. I can launch businesses. I can get into investments that other people can't get into because I have this unique media front that a traditional, let's say, let's just say you're trying

to invest in startups. There's a reason Troy Carter can get into Lyft or Uber or both or whichever one he invested in early on because he's like, oh, yeah, you know, you should take my check because, like, my check is kind of like Lady Gaga's check and, you know, these other three people. So he's going to get into all those deals. All the VCs want to be his buddy because that's their way to be like, oh, yeah, I know Lady Gaga's manager. So he's going to get to like, you know, skim the top. And so the same thing happens with athletes and others.

But I feel like not everybody has caught on to, like, how big that can be and how the old wave, like, didn't monetize it fully, right? I'll give you an example. Tim Ferriss, he's a buddy of your Sam, right? And he was like big, pre-Twitter, right? Like, so he built his audience kind of on the blog when blogging was like the big way to build your audience. And he built this huge audience. And then he was like, all right, the way I'm going to translate this into money is basically like books.

And he wrote a bunch of books and he sold a bunch of books. So books are like a slow and pretty crappy way to make money. And then he's like, okay, what about this podcasting thing? And then the podcast became the moneymaker and books became like the footnote. And then because he was Tim Ferriss, he got into the Uber like kind of seed round. and then that was the way to make all the money. And, like, podcast was just like a cost of doing business, just another way to build your name.

And I feel like he didn't even touch 10 of the things that the guys who are doing it now do. Like, he did no courses. Like, imagine if he had done the four-hour work week course, how much, you would have been making millions and millions of dollars way more than he made off his books, whether it's courses or merch or actually raising a fund because he just kind of, you know,

wrote his own personal money into a few angel investments, and that was kind of it. I just feel like there's a lot more. And guys like Reed and Mr. Beast are kind of like, showing what the fully evolved business looks like for a personal media company. Yeah, I mean, hopefully down the road, like five years from now, people will look at like what Jimmy is built and be like, that's the blueprint for what a creator business should look like.

All those pieces of that company, right? And so that's kind of how we think about it. And virtual dining is a new one for us, like launching Mr. Peaceburger. It's like we really didn't know how it was going to go. Like there's still some unknowns, but I mean, just the sheer volume of sales and just how many people have loved the brand and the launch. that might become a pillar for creators five years from now. Instead of like merchandise and hoodies, they might be like, yo, what's your virtual

dining? Like, what are you doing for virtual dining? We'll see. Can you reveal what the sales were? We'll probably come out with the full sales numbers at the end of 2021 just to let people know. Here's what I want to know. I put out a Twitter thread with some guesses.

I don't know if you saw that, but I put out some guesses. But the big kind of like, I don't know, not criticism or critique, but the big like open question is like, cool. It's definitely a dope marketing stunt, right? because it's like, boom, I have my own restaurant chain in 300 cities overnight, you know, surprise, surprise. And cool, a bunch of people who go and they order because they want to try it out. There's like a novelty.

And so the question is like, even if it was just a marketing stunt, that'd be awesome. But, you know, six months from now, am I really going to open up the app and order Mr. Beasburger or am I going to order like McDonald's or this, you know, some established thing that like I know about I've been eating for years and like, have you guys seen the sales dip basically after that first week of hype? Look at his smile. He's got a kind of a shit-eating grin right now. He won't tell me that the sales have crashed, but I'm trying to ask him if the sales crashed after the... Just go on Twitter. I mean, every day, I get tagged in hundreds of tweets of people still ordering, and I can see all the numbers.

And it definitely has not slowed down. I think over the next few months, you'll see, like, we have a lot planned with this brand. We have a lot of collaborations with this brand. Like, it'll be, you know, we think of this as like a sustainable virtual concept. Whether we do brick and mortar in the future is a conversation we're talking about. but we would have never launched the business had we just thought it was like a marketing stunt that would work for a couple weeks. Like there's a lot of conversations about sustainability of brand, new menu items, quality control, like all these things are continually talked about every day. And we're actually hiring people within that company.

So in two years, we have goals for where we think this is going to be. What's that goal? We want to be around 2,500, 2,000 to 2,500 virtual locations. We want to have a few interesting brick and mortar locations. I mean, for us, it's like, are we going to be able to compete with five guys, right? That's kind of like what we're looking at right now. Yeah, he said he wants to own in and out when this is all said and done. That's what he's trying to say.

Ooh, I like in and out too much to want to own that business. They just need to keep doing what they're doing. You said earlier that in 2015, you left sports to do this and people were kind of laughing at you and being like, what are you crazy? What is around in your industry now that you're thinking, this is kind of interesting? It seems a little nutty right now, but I think this might have legs. Is there anything that stands out that maybe not a lot of other people see? I sent out a tweet yesterday about this, and I think this is something to keep an eye on

as the NCAA actually lets student athletes, and I was a student athlete, and we couldn't make money off our likeness because of amateurism, and the NAA has now lifted that. And we've seen student athletes in the NAA start posting on TikTok, start making money off YouTube. I think it's just a matter of time before the floodgates open and like Division 1 college football players that like Florida State are going to make this content house. They're playing on national TV every Saturday.

Now they have this content house that they're like playing video games in. They're posting on TikTok. I think the crazy thing is like you're going to have like these girls that play like basketball or volleyball or whatever now. They have an only fans and they have a TikTok. And there's like, I think the interesting thing to look out for in the next two to three years is this becomes. And I don't know where the NCAA is out with them.

it, I do know that like athletes, student athletes are going to start taking advantage of this image and likeness situation and they're going to start benefiting finally benefiting off it. And I think it's going to be a lot of content houses. I think it's going to be a lot of like, well, it's like they're already living together. I lived with five football players and it probably wouldn't have been great content, at least like it would probably have been more NELC than anything. But I do think that they'll grow interesting businesses around like gaming. Like, hey, we all play video games.

Like let's just have a gaming channel and like let's make money off it. And that's going to become so big. The question's going to be, hey, do we continue playing football or do we go all in on this content thing because it's actually a big business? That's going to be the interesting stuff that we're going to see in the next few years. It's like football or content creation or basketball or content creation. I had a friend who's a VC basically like schedule a call. He was like, hey, I have an idea.

I'll fund you if you quit your job right now and you go do this. And he was telling me about this exact same thing. He was like, well, the ruling has just. change. California now says that athletes can monetize their name and likeness. That's going to inevitably roll into other states. This was pre-COVID. So it was like at this time, it seemed like sports were going to keep happening in a normal way. And he's like, somebody's going to have to build. So this is on the software side. So I think what you're talking about is like from an athlete's perspective, making a content house from a maybe talent management perspective, this is where you can

jump in early on a stock that's going to rise and build your name in that category. But then the other one is basically building the angel list for college athletes to monetize on this. So basically building the software stack that's going to say, okay, here's a bunch of athletes, here's a bunch of brands, and here's a bunch of universities. And those three all need to talk about all this like monetization is going to happen because there are going to be rules where you're going to have to report, you know, the local car dealer paid you X dollars to do this thing. That's how they're going to avoid like kind of bribery to come to the school.

You're going to have to do it all above board. And he's like all that paperwork and all that like documentation and all that sort of like record keeping, somebody can build the platform that does that for college athletes because this is now inevitable. And I thought that was a pretty interesting idea. Do you think that, I mean, say someone has a Patreon, right, and they're playing college basketball, do you think they're going to have to report those Patreon numbers and subscribers to the administration? Yeah. They're going to have to figure it out. There's going to be a bunch of like, it's sort of like with sports betting and it's like, wait, how do you make the players not just throw, you know, a random preseason game because of whatever? And so I

think that there's going to have to be kind of like a very clear set of rules that you're probably going to see a few people get slapped on the wrist for for not for not following because this opens up like the whole you know booster thing to a whole new level and I don't think they're going to be able to control it. We have a lot of people on here who have mostly internet companies. So software or mobile games, ad networks, all types of strange stuff. You have an agency which a lot of people in our audience, they all want to start different types of agents. And then a lot of people who have agencies, they say, oh, shit, I freaking hate agencies. I hate client services. And then also, like, on the software side, they're like, oh, my gosh,

this is taking forever to grow. And like, it's hard to pay myself a lot of money unless I sell the company. Where do you fall on that scale? And that grass is always greener type of side, because, like, are you wishing that you had more recurring revenue or do you like the setup that you have? I mean, I want to know, like, what your sentiment is towards the agency business. Yeah, towards any service business. I mean, it's always a grind. right like recurring revenue is tough i think for me like i never saw building an agency like that though i saw it as an access point to everything else whether we're investing in software or doing this like mobile app with jimmy like i think if you're i mean gary viz talks about this a lot too is like

vayner media is a service business he's like i wouldn't tell anyone to build this business like of service like 250 employees like break even business he's like the reason i built vayner is like the access to everything else and the access to these brands and being able to do different things with personalities and who we work with, that's the same thing that I'm doing is it's an access point. I wouldn't want to do it any other way because I get access to everything, whether that's investments, other people like Elon invested in Team Trees with Jimmy. Like that was an amazing day for him to have like one of his mentors put a million dollars into team trees.

It's like that kind of stuff is like why you want to be in this business. right? If you're just building an agency and seeing it as a service business, like, you just need to understand it's going to be a grind and weeks are going to be incredibly stressful. It's just, I don't look at the business like that. And I enjoy what I do every single day. I love YouTube. I'm obsessed with it. I'm on it every single day. To me, like, money's great. But when you have enough money to pay your bills and everything's fine, like it's all about enjoying life, right? And enjoying what you do for a living. And so that's kind of how I look at it. It's like Jimmy and I take advantage of a lot of things that come with this business,

but we enjoy every minute of it. What's been the greatest, the greatest perk and the greatest thing that has ever happened? One time, like, here's a small one. One time Lance Armstrong came on our podcast. I'm a huge Lance Armstrong fan. And it's like one of the very few times

I would ever have had the ability to hang out with him. What about you? There's a lot. I think there's so many creators that I've looked up to before I started this business that I've got to meet and speak with about their content strategy and about their business.

I don't want to like name any specific ones. but I've gotten to speak with a lot of YouTubers and now a lot of athletes reach out to me because they want to play with typical gamer. They want to be on Mr. Beast's YouTube channel. So it all kind of came full circle of like people thinking I was dumb for leaving the sports agency world because being in traditional sports is like the pinnacle.

And now it's like all these athletes are like, wait, what all these YouTubers and content creators are doing is awesome. How do we get involved in that? And so it's for me that's probably been one of the most rewarding things It's like seeing it kind of come back around where people are calling me crazy for leaving that job in traditional sports to now seeing a lot of what people are doing in traditional sports kind of come over into this digital media sector and all these athletes wanting to play video games with our clients. You said you had listened to a few episodes of pod and you came with a few zany ideas at least. I say we jump into it. I think when we release this, what we should do is we should move the ideas to the front because for us it's cool because we're just nerd not want to get to know you.

And it's much easier to have a brainstorm when you, like, have known the person for more than five seconds. But I think it would be a, I think we should shift into ideas and see here kind of what's interesting to you. What are some half-baked ideas that you've had or opportunities you see in the market? And then we can riff off those if you have any handy. I really wanted to talk to you guys about. And let's just start with one. So this is one thing that I think is interesting. And I wanted to stay in the creator space for this one is consumer products.

And so you guys have probably seen a lot of consumer products with different creators. And it's a good thing I wanted to ask you guys about is like, what do you think like creators are doing wrong in this space? Because we've seen a lot of them launch consumer products. And I think that they think that just because I have an audience, this is going to be successful. I think we've seen a lot of consumer products go, great for a second month, gone tomorrow. Right? And so it's one thing I kind of want to talk about with you guys is like, what do you think creators are specifically missing about running a consumer package goods business aside from just like, I need to grow an audience? I got two ideas there.

So, and by the way, Sam, what was the name of the rap snacks? We had a funny-ass episode. Reed, do you know rap snacks? I haven't. Now I need to look for rap snacks. Sam, tell them about rap snacks. It's hilarious. I think Lil Romeo came out with it.

It's like Lil Romeo flavored Cheetos or it's Soja Boy Crisp or Master P this or Flavor, or boozy. They just took all the famous chips, like a Cheeto, a Dorito, a whatever, and they just re-you know, we have their rebranded version of it. And then they have like, you know, Cardi B, whatever. whatever, I don't know who they actually have, but they kind of have all the stars. Yeah, like the Cardi B one's the best. It's like a Cardi B, red hot cheddar potato chip.

And so Sam's like this funny kind of like country ghetto kid somehow. And so he like somehow in Missouri was eating rap snacks or something like that. So I thought this was a hilarious brand. But I'll give you, I'll give you two things I think they're doing wrong. Creators are doing wrong. If I was day media and I was trying to work with some creators and help them grow their business, here's what I would do on the consumer product side. I think the first change would be on the business model.

I would be acquiring and not partnering or licensing brands. So there are a ton of companies that are out there that have hit some mid-level of success. They're doing $5 million a year in revenue. They're doing $10 million a year in revenue. Growth has kind of slowed. They kind of don't know where to go. The operator has been doing this for five to seven years and they're kind of tired. And they've done all the hard work of like the product is now like made and has had like 10 iterations.

The supply chain works. They even have some distribution. the website is built all that good stuff and i think you know one of our buddies who comes on the pod a bunch is this guy andrew wilkinson and he's basically built like a you know like a billion dollar empire just buying businesses rather than starting them and so like i think in silicon valley we have this huge bias to start it oh you got to be the hero who comes up with the genius idea i think Andrew really shatters that when he's like what are you talking about there's just like tons of if you're a good operator or you're a great operator like just go buy a good business at a fair

price and just own it and grow it over time you don't need to like keep thinking of genius ideas from scratch because that's hard and it's low probability of success. So I think on Silicon Valley, we worship starting from scratch too much. And I think in the kind of like celebrity world, there's a business model that everybody's used to, which is just like kind of like license your IP, license your face and your name and your likeness, do a partnership, get a rev share, get a profit share, maybe get an equity stake in the company, but not a majority stake. And I think it's much easier to go buy these brands.

I would go buy like, we've joked about Tutsyroll, but like, I don't know, like redhots candy. I'd go buy some old candy brand. So I would go get private equity money. I'd buy a candy brand. I would own 60, 70% of it. Let the investors put up the money on the other 30%. And then I would go get, you know, a great operator from another candy brand and be like, you're going to run this. But now we're the distribution. We're going to basically refresh this brand and bring it to the mainstream again. And we're going to own these assets. And I would basically go into all the categories that print money. So it's like soda, bottled water, candy, chip. tips, like, you know, like all these product categories that ideally fit with your brand,

but really, like, it's just a category with super high margins, high repeat purchase and like high, like, you know, like stickiness amongst the, amongst consumers. And so I would say that would be my first change is I would just go be taking majority stakes in brands, maybe even old brands that have kind of lost their luster and rebranding them kind of with the fame that creators have. Where does that land with your read? What, yeah, I mean, trust me. We've looked at all kinds of stuff.

I think, you know, for us, like, it'll be interesting to see, like, what the mix is over the next few years of, like, owned and operated versus, like, just acquiring a, like, what did you say? Tutsi Roll was the one you gave. Yeah, Tutsi Roll or Red Hot, you know, like, what is it? Dude, Tutsi Roll is interesting. It's family owned and the CEO is like 98. It's a woman. She died. Remember when we looked up?

She actually has... Oh, yeah. Did she just die? But the other one is Warheads. Like, go buy warheads or, like, you know... Or, you know, Pongs or, you know, like, whatever. Like, go buy some brand that, like, you know, like, whatever. Like go buy some brand that like has that nostalgia factor for some people and we'll get new.

We get a bunch of earned media for doing it. But you're going to be able to get it for pennies on the dollar because it's kind of lost its way and leverage your distribution and leverage your fame to like bring it back to the mainstream. Yeah. It's frustrating to us that especially the candy companies, they just will not lean in to this space. I don't know if it's just because they're a little too old school. They've made money doing the same thing for 50 years. We've spoken to almost all of them and they're just not open to doing like anything outside. side of the box with any of our creators.

That's, I think, the point that they're missing is, like, if you figure out how to leverage this creator community in a way that's authentic and not super cringy and coming off as overly branded, there's a massive win. And so it's like someone needs to come into this space and understand that. And I just haven't seen it from the candy companies yet. So here's the other thing I would do. So, and I'm just thinking of this off top my head. So feel free to be like, yeah, that's a dipshit idea because of, because I've actually

thought this through. But the first exercise I would go through is I would sit down and I would write, who's got all the money? Who the fuck has all the money? And all the money, basically, if you look at where is money made? Money is made in a few types of business models and a few industries. So, for example, a lot of money is made in investing or financial management, right? And I would think about like, okay, is there a world where either, you know, like, what are all the different variations of that? Okay, we have our own VC fund.

That's one way to do it. The other is that we create kind of like a multi-GP system where we get 10 of the largest YouTube creators in the world and we create our own fund that way. Another is like we create our own version of Robin Hood and we use our distribution to like we basically sponsor our own videos because we see how much money is made if you were the default app for a Gen Z and millennial person who wants to invest their money or acorns or whatever. So I would try to figure out who's got the money and then how do we be them? I thought about this for for platforms like YouTube and Twitch. If you look at, let's take Twitch, for example, and I won't give away any inside data. This is what I was thinking before we got acquired by them. I was looking at it and I was like, well, a lot of these networks that look really big and have a lot of users are very, very top heavy.

The top kind of 1% of creators are getting X percent of the audience. I won't give the exact percent, but it's like a very significant percentage of the audience. The platforms are worth billions of dollars and the top creators are worth, let's call call it single digit millions, maybe now double, you know, like now they've broken into eight figures, like one or two creators will break into eight figures. And so isn't that weird that the creators, which is who the audience shows up for, don't have any equity stake in the platforms, YouTube, or Twitch. The platform is worth, you know, 100x what even the top creator makes. This is kind of like a union thing, but like if the creators actually were able to get together and they were actually

able to spin off and build their own platform, it would be extremely risky, but it would have extremely high rewards if they were able to do it. And I kind of did the envelope math of how many creators you would need to buy in in order for this to hit a tipping point where it would actually work. And it's a smaller number than you'd think. It's enough people that you can get together in one room, one hotel ballroom, and kind of walk everybody through how this would work, if we all agree. So I think there's some big plays like that if you just looked at what are the most valuable businesses to own? It's marketplaces, platforms, it's financial services, and it's like, let's say, consumer package goods that have high margins like soda and

high repeat purchase, right? And I would just try to figure out how to go own the companies that do those. One of a good example is, Reed, have you seen, do you know who Doug DeMorrow is? I don't. A YouTuber, he's got two million subs maybe. He's like legitimately a nerd, and they make fun of them for it in a funny way. And he just started a car marketplace called Cars and Bids. And I've been following this since he launched maybe eight months ago. And the traffic is crazy. And he owns it. I don't know how many employees, if any, but he's been, had been building it for months and months. Do you see what I'm talking about? Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. The marketplace for cars is a very valuable business if it works, right? If it works.

Yeah. And I forget what the category is called, but I know how to describe it. It's like cool cars that car enthusiasts loves from the 80s, 90s and recent. Like some people love station wagons or a woody Jeep or something like that. It's sick. And I've seen the traffic grow like crazy. Here's two other examples that are in that vein. So you have a bunch of like kind of toys slash collectibles slash cool novelty items behind you. Right now, there is a race in the tech world to build the platform that's going to be like kind of take the collectibles part of eBay and like unbundle it. Like just do it as a focused app. Sort of the way that Stock X and Goat did it with sneakers. Everybody's trying to do it now with Pokemon cards and sports cards, right? And they probably

approach you as like be an investor or, you know, like that sort of thing. But that's the kind of business that is, I think you would want to be in that business. Because I think you would want to be in that business because I think the audience would resonate with the audience. You could do basically like free customer acquisition through through a bunch of partners. And instead of taking a, like, let's say you would become a seed investor in these companies. You're owning one percent or less of the company. I think you could build the, you know, why let what not or rally road or Otis or these different platforms. Why let them win? I would basically be in that business, I think, if I was, if I was highly ambitious and had infinite time, which is, of course, that's one of the constraints.

have infinite time. Yeah. One space that we've been looking at a lot is like the neobank space, which I think is incredibly interesting because creators with a like the banking, NeoBank, like chimes of the world, we've seen like what a bank is valued at with like one to two million users and it's incredibly high. So it's like if you can get creators that have that specific audience, like probably a little like over 18, like a little bit higher spending power, it becomes incredibly valuable to those banks. It's also, but it's, I mean, we've been looking at this for months. It's also incredibly daunting to build your own bank. That's like the give or take is like small percentage of equity in a bank that is probably past failure. And I think a few of

them now are kind of past failure. They're going to work. It's just what are they going to exit for? Do you bet on one that's like probably raised a small seed where you can get more of an upside, but it's not past that failure threshold yet. So it's like kind of flipping a coin or do you do it yourself and potentially take the biggest risk and have to like actually put up some money? We got pitched something like that, Sean, didn't we? Like a creator's credit card? Yeah, there's the creator credit card version of this, but the bank, when he's right, is better. Banks, you're absolutely right.

There was one I saw recently. It had about 2 million accounts with deposits in it. And I think they were selling, I think the deal's gone through so I can probably talk about it now. But it was selling for basically like $8 to $10 million. Wait, $8 to $10 billion or million? Million. That's low because that's the fire sale price. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

You said a bank with a million users sold for $8 million? Exactly. This is the fire sale price. So they basically realized, look, we can't win this neobank game. They couldn't get their follow on B-round investing. And, sorry, their B-round of investment. They built all the technology, and they had a million accounts, but they weren't going to get to like $5 million, $10 million.

They weren't keeping pace with Chime and some of the others that were out there. And so, you know, their problem, their bottleneck had become growth and distribution. And so, you know, which bank is this? I can't say the name. But basically, I had never actually heard of them before this. And it's like, oh, this is a Challenger Bank in the U.S. I've never heard of this even. When they were trying to pitch their price, they were like, look, this is a fraction of what this is really worth.

Like, if you go look at the valuations of these, this is the dollar per savings account that most Challenger banks or most neo banks should be valued at. And so I just thought, man, at this fire sale price, somebody should buy this. But even at the time, I was thinking, well, you're just going to end up in the same problem they are where it's really hard to grow. It's really expensive to do paid acquisition for this. And that's why, for you guys, it would be a totally different game because you wouldn't be doing paid acquisition through Facebook and Instagram ads. as the like, you know, I'm paying $150 in ads to get one customer, and then I have their savings account, which is not that lucrative. You have to then build all these other financial services on top. And so if you had a way to get a bunch of free distribution, which businesses could you go by that are kind of stuck somewhere?

That would be, I think, a really interesting exercise. Unfortunately, what gets you here won't get you there, meaning the things you have to be great at to be a great content creator that really knows their audience and goes viral and is great with the community. And is great with brands. Like that doesn't necessarily make you a great, like, you know, private equity person who knows how to go assess businesses and buy them out and restructure them and we go operate them. And so that's the big challenges. Can you do both? Yeah.

And finding the team or the hiring the management team to then go operate that business that you bought, right? That's kind of like a, how are you guys doing that? How are you finding your people for this most recent, the burger thing and your other, how are you finding your managers? Yeah. So each of them is a little different. And so for the burger situation, we partnered with Earl Enterprises, it's the company behind the hard rock casino and the planet Hollywood. And so an old school restaurant ownership company.

And so that was one special case where we were like, let's go find someone to handle the back office operations that understands this world. In other situations, we actually have a team internally that's just interviewing potential executives. It depends on the business that we're launching. And Ezra, our president, Ezra Cooperstein does a lot of that, like vetting. He was the, he founded Maker Studios and then he was one of the, or co-founded Maker Studios and co-founded Full Screen. So he's been in the space quite a while. And so he helps us do a lot of the vetting of who we're hiring, but it's a challenge.

I mean, it's like one of our bottlenecks is like, as you launch these businesses, like, how do you operationalize them and how do you, how do you hire a good management team that actually has upside in the business? Like you're, you're always going to have to like give a percentage of equity or something, you know, to that management team, especially if you're bringing. on high-level executives. And so these are all like things we've had to think about over the past year. And so it does become challenging when you kind of pivot from just being a management company

to getting into some of these other businesses. But that's also what's exciting is we kind of get to play in all these spaces. But yeah, back to banking. I don't have a good answer. We've looked at all the banks. We know like what the valuations are. We know which ones have just raised large amounts of money at multi-billion dollar valuations with a couple million users.

And so for us, it's like, where are we making that? bet. Who are we going to bet on that we think is, and we have to hit. I don't think it's a space where we can miss, right? I think like we have to hit. Whether we hit on a small amount of equity or a large amount of equity, we have to make sure that we swing and we hit the ball. Like the last thing you want to do is like in this banking space is like swing and miss over the next two to three years. And then you look back on it and you're like, well, that was X amount of millions of dollars that we missed out on because we made the wrong decision. That's with everything. It's not just banking. I mean, there's a lot of spaces we're continually looking at. It's like, what, what's the play? Small equity investing

owned and operated. It's the question I have to ask every day. What are some, a few answers to that or other ideas that interest do you? I think outside of the banking space, I think one thing that we found really interesting in just the content space, and you guys have seen this too, is like faceless creators now have become so prominent on YouTube and Twitch. And it started with like these two-d avatars. So I think corpse is a good example of someone that's done really well. What's that? I don't know what that is. Corpse is a creator, but he doesn't show his face. What I mean by faceless creator is like a, he's a YouTube creator.

He has a channel, but he never shows this true identity. It's just a voice, right? That sounds like the greatest thing ever. Right. And it is. For him. You know, for him, for Dream is another one. He's one of the biggest, he's the biggest Minecraft YouTuber currently.

He had a climb from zero to 10 million subscribers in under a year, and nobody knows who this kid is. It's a complete, like, gas and mystery. It's like what marshmallow was for music and, like, nobody really knowing who he was. Now we've seen this kind of transition in the gaming space with all these faceless creators that film videos. And another good example is Technoblade is a YouTuber that also plays Minecraft. And he had, like, 175,000 concurrent viewers a couple days ago. And there's no face camp.

It's just him playing the game talking, right? Nobody knows what he looks like. And so for us, like, we've been doing a lot of research on, like, this faceless creator ecosystem. And like if we see value in it. And also the other thing, it's like there's cancel culture has become very prominent in this industry. Right.

And it's like you do something bad when you're 12. It comes back to bite you when you're 20. If you're a faceless creator and you're just a voice, it'll be interesting to see if like there is a world where like something bad happens to one of these guys. We had a situation with dream where he was, you know, allegedly caught cheating within Minecraft. You don't really know the true identity.

of that person. Can they just disappear and start another identity and another channel and just kind of start over? Wait, that was the that was the controversy? Is that he used like a cheat code? No, no, not a cheat code. So he basically beat the speed run record in Minecraft and people put out videos that he allegedly cheated to beat that speed run and it became this whole big thing and it's still ongoing. But when there's no person associated with, it's like a different conversation. Like you're yelling at like someone who you actually don't know who that person actually is. What do you think of like even one step further the virtual influencers like Lil Michaela and stuff like that where it's not even faceless it's like a cg i it's like a you know it's a virtual influencer i think it depends on

what the strategy is i think with her it's it's really hard to turn that into a bigger business like how are you actually going to make money if it's just like an instagram picture and things like that i think that's how it started i think where you start actually seeing a considerably bigger business is when you actually get into long form content and you can figure out how you get you know 10 20 30 minute videos out there where you start building on this personality and then you can sell merchandise and you can license videos i think that's where this becomes really interesting i don't think they've figured it out with little macaa yet i think they do a little bit of video but it's like five second video not a ton you can do there i think you have to figure out like what's the youtube strategy or what's the

twitch live stream strategy interesting why is that that's because instagram doesn't monetize as well if you're just posting photos it's just you're limited in some way or what the fans don't love you in the same way or what happens? Yeah, I mean, it really doesn't monetize it all unless you sell direct sponsorships to certain posts. And even then, the Instagram market's so oversaturated that to get a sponsorship deal on Instagram is a lot more difficult with a million followers than it was a couple years ago. Now a million followers on Instagram is like, okay, that's like cool. But like all these people have 10 million now.

That's cute. And engagements are much higher, right? That's crazy. And it's also like the argument to YouTube creators. But I feel like at least from where I sit, all brands have started spending considerably, more money on YouTube than they are on Instagram because it's like long form video. You can drive people to a link. You can pull residual views for years and years and years and years and people will just continue to see that ad and click on that link in the description. And Instagram just doesn't offer that yet.

Oh, by the way, I have the simplest business idea for you. You're welcome. This is going to be at least $10 million a year in your bank account. I'll send you some paperwork. Is this a sporting recruiting thing? No. I'll send you some paperwork to get my cut. I can't get involved in the sporting other recruiting sports kids. This is different. This is very simple. Sleep apps. So Calm and others are really big.

There's a ton of these apps that basically just help you fall asleep. These apps do really, really well. They have very high retention because you build the habit of every night before you go to sleep. You basically listen to a bedtime story for adults or just sounds. And you're able to monetize them through in-app subscriptions. Low price, but people are willing to pay to have, you know, different variety of more sounds and whatnot.

And, you know, you have a lot. calm on one side that's already like broken out become a billion dollar company you have a whole bunch of smaller apps that built all the same functionality but they're just going to struggle to acquire users and i think this is somewhere where if an influential person said hey dude sleep is super important for all of us and like when i have a good night's sleep i'm less anxious the next day and i just feel better i have more energy this is what i use and you can even do some fun kind of viral like mr bese could read the bedtime story for one of them or you could get some some friends to do it some celebrities to do some of the other bedtime stories

Having your own branded sleep app, I think you could just buy one of these off the market. I can send you five that are good. And you guys could print money with this one. I'm all about it. I use calm almost every morning, so to meditate. I like Brain FM. That would be one of my categories for Mr. Bees. Brain and FM.

They're quite small. It's only two guys. They create music so you can focus and then music to sleep. I like Sam Harris is a good example of someone who's done as well. It's a really easy, really easy category to go into broadly applicable to everybody. super easy to monetize and the bottleneck is distribution. So I think that's the hallmark of what you want. I'm into it. Jimmy's going to hear this podcast and be like, where are we at with that project?

It's a good one, man. I bet you Sam Harris is waking up app does $12 million a year in recurring revenue. That's what I would bet. I think looking at acquiring, we haven't dug into as much as we should. Did you guys see Finger on the app? What Jimmy put out? So we're in the process of doing Finger on the app too. And for him, like our mobile strategy is like, how do we create, you know, what he does on his YouTube channel, how do we bring that to the masses, right? Like, how do we, like, creator games was rock paper scissors. Like, how do we make the biggest rock paper scissors tournament of all time through a mobile phone?

All right, here's another easy one. Have you ever heard of ketchup games? Catchup game. Yeah, it's sold to Ubisoft, correct? Yeah. Did you ever play any of their games? Oh, yeah. And I play a lot of voodoo.

I. So I'm so into, like, the casual gaming space. Hyper casual, yeah. Exactly. That's a great space to go into. And again, tons of talent, little indie dev shops that, like make games that will never see, never just reach, you know, 10,000 users because they don't know how to, like, market it and they, it would just be too prohibitively expensive to do so.

But you could build a catch-app games if you have the kind of, like, brand that Mr. Beast has. I think that's a easy one. There's a company called App Loven that my co-founder had previously co-founded. It's a huge ad network, like a multi-billion dollar mobile ad network. And then they just launched, they realize this. They're like, oh, look, there's a bunch of these hyper-casual games that, like, do actually pretty well in terms of engagement and monetization, but like they'll just never get mass distribution to compete with Zinga and compete with all these guys who spend so much money on our ad network.

So why don't we just take like 5% of our in-house ad inventory that we just have lying around? It's not super expensive. We don't make a ton of money off of it, but it's just house inventory. They bought this little dev shop, and they call it Lyon Studios. And they just published their own mobile games and they just pump it through their own ad network with the cheap house ad slots. And that's become like a multi-hundred million dollar. business unit within their ad network now. And I think that's just like, amazing.

Sean, I think you need to just ask Reed for an internship. I'll get your coffee, man. I'll work for you for free over here. I'm doing it already. This is my interview. Yeah, I have someone sitting over here taking notes as you're talking. They're just like, okay, and we need to talk to that company. I'm just telling you all the things I'm looking at buying. And then when I'm looking at buying because I think it's a good business. And then I'm just like, well, if I had, you know, 40 million YouTube subscribers who love me and would listen to me, this would be way easier to like, you know, 10x the value of each one of these things. So, yeah, you can hit me up afterwards.

I'll send you some links and then go from there. Yeah, I'm all about the hyper-casual space. It's like you get people in the funnel and you just keep coming out with really unique games. I think Voodoo now is doing like a game every three weeks. It's gotten a little crazy. And they just keep people in that funnel of games and they just continually come out. And some of them go off for 100 million downloads. And most just get like 10 to 15 million downloads and they run them through it.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's such a good, it's such a good, dumb business. I love it. Yeah. I had someone pitch me on acquiring old mobile games that, like, didn't catch steam. You go in, and you basically act as a publisher. You'd go in and, like, acquire 50 to 60 percent of the revenue for these games, and then you'd bring along this whole influencer network that would, like, basically post

and push people to these games. I can't remember what the company was called, but I thought it was a really sound, like, operation of what they were trying to do. We just didn't really, I mean, for us, like, we were just kind of, point we're like if we wanted to do it we could probably just build it we would just need someone that was just living on the mobile app store finding games the hard part now is like there's a lot of noise it's like hard to stay focused on like what you know you can execute on and so a lot of um myself and esra and a lot of the executives at night media like we have like our plan for 2021 and we're so focused

that like a lot of this is just like all the pitches that we get and stuff like that it's really hard to pay attention to everything because there's so many opportunities. You just have to be like, where are the ones that we know we're going to win on? And let's make sure we execute on that and not miss the one in front of us because there's nine over here that we're paying attention to. Story of a life. Yeah. Well, I think we usually try to keep these at right about an hour. Sean, what do you think? Yeah. I think this was very cool. And where should people find more about you? You have your own podcast with Blake, right? Or you're just a guest on that one. No, I do. It's called Creator Economics.

For us, it was about educating the creator economy and like pushing it along. I think, you know, if I can do anything and when I leave this business, who knows when that is 10, 15, 20 years down the road, like hopefully I left it more educated and hopefully that we push the ball a little further and people understanding what creators are capable of. That's really why we did the podcast. It's something that Blake and I love. We just came out with a new video today about the top five or the five YouTube channels we think will break through in 2021.

probably five channels nobody's ever heard of and one that only had like 60,000 subs as we were filming the video and now I think is up to 100. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff we want to do. And so if anyone wants to watch it, it's called Creator Economics on YouTube or any of the podcast network, Spotify and Apple iTunes. And do you use Twitter? I use Twitter a little bit. Read JD. Same on Instagram.

Read J.D. I use Instagram a little more than I use Twitter. Blake is Blake is, Blake Robbins at Ludlow Ventures. He's getting me more into the Twitter swing. but it wasn't something that I really had used up until about six months ago. Cool. Well, thank you, man. We really appreciate this. This is fun. I appreciate guys. Thanks for having me out. Thank you.