The Money Mondays - From Rock Bottom to $60M in One Year w/ Andrew Bachman 💵 EP125

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Andrew Bachman went from rock bottom to building a $60M business in just one year. In this episode, he shares how he rebuilt his life, launched Creators Inc, and scaled it into a billion-dollar brand....---Andrew Bachman is an entrepreneur and founder of Creators Inc. After early success and public setbacks, he made a major comeback by building one of the leading agencies for paywall creators, generating over $60 million in the first year.---Like this episode? Watch more like it 👇$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson: https://youtu.be/33aXeZrfzxsMaking Money Online? Here’s What No One Tells You | Dion Pouncil & Brandon Bowsky: https://youtu.be/F3xUCSONZaEFocus on ONE Skill Or Stay Broke Forever | Adam Sosnick (SoSTalks) & Justin Colby: https://youtu.be/KsFz562SnHADropout Teen Mom to MILLIONAIRE Network Marketing Queen – Stormy Wellington: https://youtu.be/mqrfRyg66J4Watch ALL Full Episodes Here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6k---The Money Mondays is a business podcast here to teach you how to make money, invest money, and donate money by showcasing some of the world's most successful people and how they do the same. Hosted by serial entrepreneur Dan Fleyshman, the youngest founder of a publicly traded company in history, this money podcast gives you an exclusive behind the scenes look at how the wealthiest celebrities, entrepreneurs, athletes and influencers make, invest and donate money.If you want to learn more business and investing while you work to improve your financial life, you're in the right place! Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@themoneymondays?sub_confirmation=1Dan Fleyshman,The Money MondaysLearn more here: https://themoneymondays.comWatch all the podcast episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6kLet’s Connect...Website: https://themoneymondays.comPodcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-money-mondays/id1663564091Twitter: https://twitter.com/themoneymondaysLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-money-mondays/about/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@themoneymondaysFB: https://www.facebook.com/The-Money-Mondays-110233585203220/

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays here in Miami, Florida. We are at the Move Studio. Normally, as you guys know, I do this in an RV motorhome traveling around the country, but we're in Miami. I'm at the Move and I have a back to back to back to back podcast starting off with our first special guest. This gentleman has built up a business that has done hundreds of millions of
Starting point is 00:00:26 dollars in revenue. And as you guys know, we cover three core topics, how to make money and invest money, how to donate to charity. So we're going to start off with our first guest. He's going to give his quick two minute bio. So we get straight to the money. My name's Andrew Bachman. I grew up in Wayland, Massachusetts. My parents were physicians. I had sisters that are 10 years older than me. Spent a lot of time by myself growing up. I'd be in the woods, walking around,
Starting point is 00:00:51 playing with, trying to keep myself busy. And I had a lot of confidence as a young, young, young boy when I was alone. And I always thought I was going to do something great in this world. I thought I was going to be an athlete. I thought I was going to be a famous actor, or something like that.
Starting point is 00:01:05 When I got to public school, it hit me in the face that that was not necessarily going to happen for me. I was very small. I was a 103 pound wrestler in high school. So I was always a runt in high school. I didn't get laid until I was 18 years old. And I wasn't popular. But I loved fighting with the bigger kids and always going
Starting point is 00:01:25 to the parties and mixing it up. But it was, high school and middle school was not a safe time for me. And I remember junior year of high school being in the locker room after wrestling practice and a kid comes in, this is the year 2000, kid comes in, Mark Zuckerberg didn't exist for six years basically at that point. So people weren't using the word entrepreneurship. And a kid comes into the locker room all excited because he just got into this college called Babson College and goes,
Starting point is 00:01:50 I just got into the number one school in the world for entrepreneurship. And I looked at him and I said, what the hell is that? Like a lung disease? And he said, no, entrepreneurship. Arthur blank went to my college. He got fired from his job. It wrote, went to the coffee shop and wrote the business plan for the Home Depot and a napkin and started the Home Depot and now he's a billionaire, he owns the Atlanta Falcons.
Starting point is 00:02:10 And I said, oh, that's what I'm gonna do. I somehow took a gap year, I applied to Babson, I got in and freshman year, literally day one, that would have been the fall of 2002. I was in London. I got there August of 2001 9-eleven happened the next month. I finished my semester there. I got into Babson. I came home the next fall I started at Babson and I drive into campus and I'm driving a Ford Explorer wearing Abercrombie and Fitch thinking that's as bling-bling as the world got because that's all I knew and that's when I saw a bunch of Arab kids and international kids flying around campus in Ferraris, living at the Ritz-Carlton.
Starting point is 00:02:49 And I get all excited. I get invited out to a nightclub in Boston. I show up, I didn't know you needed $20 to pay cover charge, so I had to sneak into the nightclub. And when I got downstairs, it was called Aria, back in the day in Boston. I see these kids buying crystal on black cards.
Starting point is 00:03:06 And this wrestler competitive rush came over me. And from that moment on, I just started trying to start and build businesses. And I failed thousands of times, ended up partnering with a really smart kid out of my college dorm room. Made a million dollars from college, we subsequently made a billion, did a billion dollars in sales in the affiliate marketing space, I got into a bunch of trouble, learned my lesson for about five six years of my life and started
Starting point is 00:03:39 working with a Harvard neuroscientist who was trying to sell the Department of Advanced Research Projects technology. The US military has a branch called DARPA, it stands for the Department of Advanced Research Projects. If you go to DARPA, and they literally spend a trillion dollars a year to make sure that we have the safest most technology advanced military in the world. If you go to them and say, hey, I've got this bracelet when a soldier wears it,
Starting point is 00:04:04 their brain is going to be 60% more effective under stress. They'll smile and say, Okay, how much you want, you know, you say $10 billion, and they'll cut you a check because they print the money and they got the budget. And I was doing that all up until COVID wasn't making a lot of money doing it. But I was really into it. This this doctor again, I completely fast forwarded because he only gave me two minutes and I'm probably at five. But this doctor, I needed something to believe in at this time where I'd gone through a really dark stage in my life.
Starting point is 00:04:33 I skipped a whole part, but I was this small guy in high school. I put on muscle and become a multimillionaire. In my 20s, I'm living in Boston driving Ferraris. Everybody knows me. I'm backing everyone's restaurant and everyone's ventures, doing all the summit series, all your tours. I was kind of a black sheep in that whole entrepreneurship networking world. And then boom, my ego gets crushed because I lose all my money.
Starting point is 00:04:54 I'm on the front page of the newspaper at about 30 years old. So after about five years of darkness, I meet this neuroscientist who figured, who gave me the principles that I now live my life by physically, intellectually, emotionally, socially, spiritually, sexually, and occupationally. And so I'm working with him, not making a lot of money, but doing something really interesting for the US military. And then boom, pandemic happens. Pandemic happens and I'm sitting at home from my kitchen table and a female friend of mine who knew me when I was my young high flyer,
Starting point is 00:05:30 multimillionaire self in my 20s, calls me up and says, I need your help. I've got $100 to my name. I'm some Jewish lady's nanny in LA doing her grocery shopping. I'm stressed out about getting coronavirus so I made an OnlyFans but I can't figure it out. I said, what the hell is that?
Starting point is 00:05:44 I logged in and I said, oh, you're trying to thirst trap pictures at scale You've got no marketing logic this platform's robust in the sense that it can facilitate transactions But it doesn't do a great job of taking a crater with a blindfold on and saying do steps one through ten You're gonna make a bag of money made her a quarter of a million dollars in a month. She's in a month She starts to run around LA. She had been the personal assistant for She's in a month. She starts to run around LA. She had been the personal assistant for big people like Ruby Rose. Hi, my name's T. Well, Vicky bad baby. She started saying, Hey, don't trust your only fans business to nightclub promoters and rappers.
Starting point is 00:06:13 There's these Jewish guys in Boston. They don't simple look at my numbers. And so I start getting this influx of clients. Um, I made close to $60 million with one client in year one. One client. And I, and, and, and, uh, it kind of got out who I was and I was not sure if this was kosher or something like I should be publicly doing. And then it was suggested to me that if I built a brand that felt like
Starting point is 00:06:44 traditional Hollywood, like CA, UTA, William Morris, now don't forget this is during COVID, so actors and writers are not getting a lot of work. So I built a brand called Creators Inc. and basically all these big A-list celebrities who are now joining these exclusive paywall sites are coming to me because my company feels like what they're familiar with traditional Hollywood. And I built this billion-dollar company called Creators Inc. that is specifically, you know, works... We monetize mainly from these paywall sites like OnlyFans, but I'm very much trying to branch out into, you know, products much like stuff you're interested in, and, you know, I'm in the music industry,
Starting point is 00:07:22 I have a studio in Los Angeles. And I don't know shit about music, but I just know people get excited when rappers come to the house and people want to be part of Creators, Inc. So I can talk a lot about how I used to have huge margins as a boutique small guy under the radar. And I didn't have a name.
Starting point is 00:07:40 I was just Andy. But I knew I was the biggest in the space. And I came to LA one day. And I tried to sign this girl and she looked at me and goes, who the hell are you? Like I'm with unruly and I go, oh shit, I need a brand. Right. And that's the moment I started building creators. I think, and now I'm pretty sure we're by far the most dominant name in the space.
Starting point is 00:08:00 So only fans of the primary focus and but other other paywalls you're working on. Not really. Everybody else is competing for crumbs. So your only fans of the primary focus and but other other pay walls you're working on Not really the Everybody else is competing for crumbs. You've got the passes. You've got the fan view fan fixes the wide apps the ultra files They're all kind of like competing for the non nude girls that want to make the bag, but they're like worried They're not gonna get a high value man if they have only fans or they don't want to be associated with the stigma. They're all competing for really tiny crumbs. And, you know, I think in I want to say October 2021, only fans came out and said, hey, we have to go non nude because they were going to lose their processors. content creators quickly scattered to signing up for all these alt shit versions like Fan Centro, Fanzen, Fansly, whatever.
Starting point is 00:08:52 And I think they all got on these platforms and realized there was no customers, there was no money, and those sites were janky and not prepared for the rush. Then I think the voice of these liberal creators like, you know, the sex workers, which traditionally large banks don't mess with because they make too much money off Main Street, grocery stores, gas stations, they don't touch taboo. They said, crap, we're on the wrong side of this. And they opened it up. And I think OnlyFans, again, I'm not speaking fact here.
Starting point is 00:09:20 So don't quote me. But I think OnlyFans went from having to process with kind of like European Mauritius Isle of Man Gibraltar they got Wall Street technology and then it opened back up and then they just went like this So there's word that they're trying to sell for around eight billion dollars. Is that a real-life thing? That's that's the word on the street. You know, I don't have real life thing? That's the word on the street. I don't have specific proof. I've had conversations.
Starting point is 00:09:47 I would definitely keep them private. I think there's some personal reasons that the founders might be considering a liquidity event. But if you want my- I mean, $8 billion, anyone should be considering a liquidity event, right? Even if it's- that's a big gamble to take.
Starting point is 00:10:01 Here's the thing. I always think about when it comes to exits. So let's say they keep it going, right? And are they hoping to get to 10, to 12, to 14, to 16, to 20? At some point, there's a cap. No one's going to buy them for $20 billion or $40 billion at some point, because there's a few dozen companies or private equity groups that would pay that for anything.
Starting point is 00:10:18 They don't have the capital for it. So would you gamble in Las Vegas $8 billion to make $12 16 or 20? You're talking about the owners gambling or the owners that next guy who buys it the owners gambling I have a billion in front of you. Here's the thing if I owned the platform 100% of it I think I do take eight billion sure and and I'll tell you why because I don't know how someone can even bet Because I don't know how someone can even bet On a five-time like I don't even know how someone comes and pays five billion for it and I'll tell you why I say that
Starting point is 00:10:53 Let's just say it's doing a billion dollars a year What are the odds in the next five years that like AI or regulations don't disrupt it? They're not zero I'm not saying that's likely but the odds aren't zero right? There's AI influencers There's AI agencies I get ads for the OnlyFans agencies of AI girls. I'm like, things can change. We don't know that it's going to change, but it can change. Yeah, so it's a big gamble either way. But again, for me, I started this business with basically zero dollars from a laptop
Starting point is 00:11:18 squatting in my parents' house on Cape Cod. So if my business went away tomorrow, I've said this to you before, I'm smiling, you know? And like I look at only fans that I mean, all time history, I think revenue per employee, it's like the best company ever. Right. They've got 40 employees. It's like, they've got 40 employees. I'm a parasite of only fans. I have 800 employees. I have 40 employees in my card stores.
Starting point is 00:11:47 Exactly. They're doing one one thousandth of the revenue that these guys are doing. Yeah. And like you said, I'm doing one one thousandth the revenue and, um, you know, I don't even know if I could sell my company. I have an incredible company from a financial and P and L perspective, but I just think that if somebody were going to come cut me a big enough check for me to say, here's the keys to creators, I'm done, I'm going to walk away. I just don't know how much collateral I have to give them back for them to be excited.
Starting point is 00:12:12 But besides the relationships I have with my clients and creators. So what we're talking about guys is when it comes to private equity groups or larger companies that are looking to acquire, if they're going to go buy someone's company, like Andy's for example, they have to make a decision. Are they gonna buy it and have him walk away, meaning that they can just assume it to their company, let's say like a CAA, like a big agency were to buy it, they have team staff executives that may be able to run his business from an agency perspective.
Starting point is 00:12:40 Two, are they gonna give him what's called golden handcuffs? Are they gonna lock him in for one years, two years, three years, or longer by only buying 80% and leaving 20% for him and his team so that they have another bite at the apple? Sometimes the bite at the apple, the 20% can be bigger than the 80% depending on how much they scale the business, but also they'd have to pay him millions of dollars a year or whatever that number is to keep the golden handcuffs.
Starting point is 00:13:01 Or three, are they going to buy it and disassemble it and sell it off for parts, meaning they're going to merge it into their parent company, take one division or add divisions onto it? That's what someone has to decide when they're going to look at buying something. Some of them are just buying it for the revenue, which is the fourth bonus option. They're just buying it for the revenue and they're going to make money because their stock's going to go up. Quick example. You see some of these acquisitions that happen out there, or you see somebody like Spotify
Starting point is 00:13:26 give $150 million to Joe Rogan. And people are like, how could they pay $150 million? Well, Spotify stock went up a billion dollars that day, so it was free. Sometimes you see companies get bought for $640 million. You're like, how did RX bar, protein bar, get bought for $640 million? Well, their stock went up $2 billion when they bought it,
Starting point is 00:13:44 so it's free. So sometimes when you're thinking about acquisitions, which is what we're going back and forth about, there has to be a determining factor for the parent company or for the private equity group on what they want to happen if they buy it. All right, on the make money side of things, you've gone through these different roller coasters of your life. You built this company to doing hundreds of millions of dollars and then it stops. Whether you sell it or you keep it going and have someone
Starting point is 00:14:09 as a CEO come take over. Is there a next, is there something that, the make money part, does the drive ever go away when you start to make a lot of money after you've been broke before? Like could you just stop and go sit on an island today? If I handed you a billion dollars, would you just stop? I used to really like golf a lot. I loved golf. I never grew up with golf and after
Starting point is 00:14:28 I sold my first company I joined a couple country clubs outside of Boston. I started to gamble with all these guys and my slice would go like this. I'll never forget this billionaire from Boston, his name is Patrick Lyons. He was actually a nightclub entrepreneur but he made a lot of money. He says to me on the first tee at Pinebrook Country Club, one of my first days of learning how to play golf, he goes, how about a $5 game of Wolf? Somehow this fucking guy beat me for $3,600 in a single round of golf.
Starting point is 00:14:54 I didn't say a word. I went home, I did my research, I flew to Boca Raton, I hired Dave Pels, who was Mickelson's short game coach. I did nothing but chip and putt for a week straight. I went back north and I ate their lunch. I took 20 shots off my game. They were pissed. All these guys up there.
Starting point is 00:15:12 I really like golf. I don't know about sitting on an island, but. And could you just play golf for the rest of your life if someone gave you $1,000? You know, I think you go through phases. And I think the grass is always greener. I think once you completely retire, like imagine, you know
Starting point is 00:15:26 You work really hard for I again. I can't put this on you because you're a unicorn But I'm just saying you say you had a five billion dollar liquidity event and you took a couple years off and you're just you know focusing on health and all the other stuff meditation you said like I'm gonna take a beat on Capitalism because I make more money and interest from my five billion than I can in my entrepreneurial ventures. And I think like guys like us, you're at the gym and you see these guys coming in and they're on the phone and they're all stressed out and they're in the trenches.
Starting point is 00:15:56 I think we would miss that. We would get terrible FOMO. So I think you gotta go through phases. I think you can ebb and flow. I will say this, like after I sold my first company I I played golf like I flew my friends around on a jet and we played core Crenshaw courses all over the country for like a year straight and then I did a
Starting point is 00:16:15 reverse merger and took a company public in the summer space because I was like alright like you know enough of this but So like I think you you yin and yang a little bit I I definitely know this like the last five years has definitely beat me up a lot I really I take care of my health. You know, I only eat a certain way. I don't drink alcohol I don't drug I have very few I don't have vices really I don't chase women. I don't gamble I have a cold plunge in all my homes. I'm in that thing first thing when I wake up. But my cortisol level has definitely spiked. I don't sleep well because I go to bed playing chess on all the things that I'm trying to
Starting point is 00:16:57 fix rather than sleeping. So you've got to look into that. I want to live a long, healthy life because I thought about the other day, if've got to, you've got to look into that. And, you know, I want to live a long, healthy life because, you know, I thought about the other day, if I died tomorrow, I really wouldn't have regrets, but like, I'm always I'm all of my pain and stress is about more money and I don't need more money. You and I've had this conversation. Like I have a very low burn. I did the math the other day.
Starting point is 00:17:19 I was like, I could live my lifestyle for the next 250 years, but yet like, I'm just constantly worried about my next competitor catching me or one of my account executives fucking me over. I guess it's just part of the journey. You gotta check yourself. I have a solution. So for eight years of running the agency,
Starting point is 00:17:41 Elevator Studio, I was everything. I couldn't leave the office because I had to write Kylie Jenner's caption. I had to go drop off Fashion Nova dress at Kim's house. I had to go to Tyga and bring him Fit T or some brand, Draft Kings or Post Me. I felt like I had to do every, literally drive to their houses, write their captions, copy and paste it. I did the wire transfer. I wrote the con- I thought I had to do everything. In 2019, I finally hired a CEO. 30 years in the TV game, almost 60 years old, you know, he's got all this experience and I was thinking, if I'm going to do this, I want to go to where
Starting point is 00:18:17 the puck is going. I want to hire someone above my pay grade. We were doing 18 million at the time. And I thought, am I really going to give someone equity for the first time? No one had a piece of elevator studio. I never raised a dollar. Am I going to pay this guy this much money to do it? It went from $18 million to $60 million. Guess what? The captions were written just fine.
Starting point is 00:18:38 The clothes got dropped off just fine. The company ran just fine. And I thought in my mind and my ego, like, no, I have to write the caption. I have to put the emoji right here. I have to go drop the dress off for the relationship. I thought I had to do everything, and none of it was true. It was all in my mind. It was all in my ego.
Starting point is 00:18:56 And by doing it, two things happened. I got to break the shackles to leave the office. My stress levels went down because I wasn't dealing with 3,500 influencers and texting and calling and trying to get a W9 from an influencer, trying to interact with all these people, and everything changed. I started my charity, I started the mastermind, I started speaking in 100 events. I started doing the things that I wanted to do that brought in more business to the company. And now, six years later, I don't know any of my clients,
Starting point is 00:19:26 I don't know most of the staff, I don't know most of the operations, my CEO does, and I'm still on group chats when I want to be, but literally I don't know them. And it's allowed me, from a mind perspective and a stress perspective, to go do other things and not worry about the minutiae of the day to day. And I'm sure you're gonna say great,
Starting point is 00:19:46 but how was the P&L performance once you stepped away? It crushed it. Everything changed so much better. We literally went from 18 million to 60 million in one year. Well that's incredible. I will tell you, and not to play the contrarian, but I've delegated almost all of those things,
Starting point is 00:20:00 but I just feel like before I would make that move, I just, you know, when it's your baby and like every dollar would make that move, I just, I, you know, when it's your baby and like every dollar you spend is out of your pocket, you know, because it's a P and L game, right? When you have the equity. So, um, I just don't know. I have not yet found the person that I would just say like, here are the keys drive this car. Uh, only because I, my, my business is highly competitive. There's no IP in the space.
Starting point is 00:20:24 We all compete on commissions. And that's why I had to kind of build brand and go so hard on that. Yeah. For four months I was torn. Like I had, I had to convince him. He had to leave Dr. Phil for me. Dr. Phil's a much more established brand.
Starting point is 00:20:38 He had to gamble on a kid that's, an agency as you know, it's just, my business is based off of month to month contracts. I had no annual contracts. I still have no annual contracts. Oracle, BET, television, all these big brands, DraftKings, Postmates, Lyft, none of them are more than one month at a time. None of them.
Starting point is 00:20:55 But they've all been with me for six years, eight years, 10 years, et cetera. And for four months I was torn with that emotion. I had to do it. And by the way, I agree with you with the staff of vice president accounting I felt like that is some not someone that could take over the CEO that I went and got someone that was greater than me with 30 years more experience than me in a different vertical I would prefer if he was in my vertical I thought but because he was in TV and he ran Fox and Sony for all these
Starting point is 00:21:22 years he invented rally television he was the CEO and he ran Fox and Sony for all these years, he invented Rally Television. He was the CEO for Buna Marie. So he created Real World, Simple Life with Paris Hilton, keep out of the Kardashians, etc. So I don't know that I have someone else in mind the same way you're thinking like who would I have to do that, but I will tell you that that literally changed everything. And also I now implement that in every investment. I won't invest in a company unless I have a CEO.
Starting point is 00:21:48 I call them a quarterback. So let's say Andy pitched me right now, hey, let's start a table company together and we're going to put in a million dollars each. If he said, hey, actually, you don't have to put the million dollars. I'll put in two million dollars. You put in zero. Let's start it. I would say no.
Starting point is 00:22:02 Even though he's an amazing operator, he He's gonna put up all the money unless we have a CEO to run it I'm not in because we both know what it takes to actually run the thing that we would both be part-time running it It's very funny. You say that I wouldn't like I don't look at investments anymore. I look for operators. Mm-hmm Absolutely, because the table is is interchangeable. Meaning if we find a good operator, if Andy was like, hey, I got this girl, she's got 18 years experience and all she's ever done is this, this, and this, and this, and this, and she loves furniture.
Starting point is 00:22:33 Fantastic. But if also he said, oh no, she likes to just sell lamps. Great. The person can sell whatever it takes if they are ride or die. If he knows someone that's a ride or, that that person's a crusher, I would rather invest in that than the thing. I used to say like, you have to hit so many lotteries to win when you invest in someone privately.
Starting point is 00:22:55 Number one is their idea, a good idea and forward thinking. Number two, do they know how to run a profitable business? And number three, something we just talked about over there is even if it does hit are their intentions good Are they going to pay you or they're gonna fuck you, right? Which is why I I have I don't have a great track record when I'm like as an angel I know that I stick to public markets just because of liquidity And research and I like that playing field a little bit better. There's less variables
Starting point is 00:23:24 But yeah, like like you said like I look for operators I'm gonna I'm doing something silly in Miami I shouldn't even say it's silly I think it's kind of cool I'm investing in a brick-and-mortar juice bar in Los Angeles I have a big content house and that has a gym sauna cold plunge music studio fridge full of drinks like all of our creators gather there. They can come 24 7 Aubrey O'Day needed to do an interview for the diddy trial She codes in at 5 a.m. While I'm in Miami. She's in LA. She's using my room to you know It's a living breathing thing. I was gonna do the same thing in Miami, but I didn't quite have the trusted operators
Starting point is 00:24:00 I do in LA So I'm gonna open up a juice bar concept and call it creators ink juice kitchen creators creators juice content kitchen. What is still still a work in progress. But I had this idea for a long time. I just found an operator Colombian girl who ran a similar business with her mom but wasn't good at marketing is there nine to five wants to be there nine to five that finally I find the operator and now I can do this project because you and I are not going to stand there and do that. Of course not.
Starting point is 00:24:30 Right. Okay, so we talked a bit about the make money side and some exit stuff. Let's talk about investing side. We have so many options, right? You work with all these influencers. Some of them have influencer brands. They, some of them have deals.
Starting point is 00:24:42 Some of them have clothing brands or restaurants or nightclubs. But then you can do real estate, stock market, cryptocurrency, NFTs, Bitcoin here, stocks, derivatives, funds. When you have so many options and get bartered by so many different things, how do you choose what you invest your time, money into?
Starting point is 00:24:59 Well, I'm going to dumb this down because I represent and I guide and I communicate with a lot of 20 to 25 year old young content creators who are getting money for the first time. They haven't been through too many cycles of paying their taxes. They don't even think about how they apply that. So when you and I are betting like I'm showing you my day trading and you're rolling your eyes because you're like okay dumbass you're taking a hundred percent of the risk but you're
Starting point is 00:25:23 gonna owe forty percent in taxes, you know what I mean? Like these kids don't even have that in their brain yet. So what I tell everybody is this, when your dollar sits in your bank account earning zero, you're actually losing money because as time goes on, there's something called inflation, things get more expensive. So what are your choices? You can park your money in a high yield savings account and make four and a half
Starting point is 00:25:44 percent, So what are your choices? You can park your money in a high yield savings account and make four and a half percent Or you can put it in the stock market in index funds like sp the smp 500 And you will probably make twice what that high yield savings account pays you but over the long term in the short term Six months from now you could get hammered but In the long run if you're long term minded that's probably your best bet plus long term capital gains. Now, that's a very vanilla boring answer. But like I said, I think for a large audience listening to this, that might that might hit the most. Now, when it comes to like, you know, a hot take, right now in my portfolio, I am getting everything out that I think could possibly be susceptible to AI that is not like positioned properly for that and I'm going all in on gold standard stuff that I think AI is gonna flush. I think we are in the stone ages right now. Gary Vee had a good hot take he said the first television commercials were
Starting point is 00:26:41 radio ads because that was the technology everybody knew. People only knew the radio. So the very first TV commercial was a guy sitting there reading a radio spot. That is where we're at on ChatGPT. If your friends are sending you outputs on ChatGPT that are still this long, that is not kosher. That is not P.
Starting point is 00:27:00 They're not even thinking like, hey ChatGPT, can you make this digestible for Dan? He's important, he doesn't have a lot of time, you know, like we're still there. Yeah, and I think there's a huge Opening in the marketplace if I wish I were the man I was five years ago right now And that's why I cold plunge I cold plunge because I'm too lazy to meditate and three minute cold plunge gets my brain where? like 20 minutes a day of meditation does. But I am going to try to push myself to be so, so, so forward, I'm gonna do everything I can to learn right now,
Starting point is 00:27:36 like hyper learn everything I can about AI in the marketplace and position, because I got lucky, I got to make some money in the last five years and I I have real fear. I'm driven by fear more than joy. I Worry like in the AI world. It's really gonna be a world of haves and have-nots like Making money right now is so crucial important I don't mean to fear monger, but it just feels like yeah, and obviously obviously like, you know, the tractor didn't kill the world. It created more opportunity. Um, but I just concerned, I get concerned,
Starting point is 00:28:11 like I look at my friends who are lawyers and I'm like, you know, how inefficient you people are, you know, how fricking inefficient you are. Like if I just had one conversation with somebody, I could solve this in five minutes, but like six months later, because you're going to forget about an email and two weeks later, you know what I mean? Like AI is solving that so quickly. As someone who was starting AI for lawyers, they raised some ungodly amount,
Starting point is 00:28:36 500 million or a billion for their seed round. Because people realize like most of the things that happens with lawyers is just regurgitated the same thing. That's why it's all based off trials from the past. Trial law is how most are decided. Who can figure out trial law better than Chachie Petit, right? Rather than an assistant that pays $400 an hour to go research old cases, Chachie Petit
Starting point is 00:28:59 is going to figure that out in 10 seconds soon. Okay, you mentioned something about the S&P 500. So I wanted to clarify what he just meant. Over the last 92 years, the S&P 500 has returned 11.1% on average. The reason I know this is part of my speech. So I'd love that you said that. You cannot get a financial manager or planner
Starting point is 00:29:19 that's gonna beat the S&P 500's average over the last 92 years. There are financial planners that can sometimes make you 20, 30%, sometimes lose you 10%, etc., but 11% average for 92 years in a row through recessions, depressions, and all the things that it's gone through is staggering. Last year was 24.6%. Think about that for a second. If you could just put your money into the top 500 companies on the planet and let them
Starting point is 00:29:42 work for you, it's really compelling for you guys to research the S&P 500. And guess what? It is super simple. You do not need some big fancy financial planner to do it for you. So it could be a 22 year old influencer creator that's all of a sudden making hundreds of thousands. They can now put money into something
Starting point is 00:29:58 that's returning 11% on average. Can it lose one year? Of course. Can it lose for a month? Of course. But investing to me is things that I don't want to sell. But investing to me is things that I don't want to sell. I want to invest in things that I don't want to sell. Otherwise you're trading.
Starting point is 00:30:10 So when you're doing a fix and flip, that is not an investment to me. That is a trade. When you're doing a lot of these type of deals that you're looking for, like buying and selling really quickly, or looking at Bitcoin at 100K, sell it for 104, buy it back in 96, et cetera,
Starting point is 00:30:23 you are trading, you're not investing. I invest in Bitcoin when it was 300 bucks, and I still invest when it's $100,000, because I'm thinking it's going to be worth millions. I invest into things that I don't plan to sell. How often do you rebalance? I don't. Well look, at one point in future,
Starting point is 00:30:39 GE and Daimler Chrysler were the cat's meows before Tesla, right? At some point in time, I think you've got to at least say like okay every three or six months I have to look at my portfolio because you can't take anything for granted like these big companies that we know of as like remember toys or us as a kid where they at right like that was their fault. just making sure that your long-term bets are still your long-term bets. I just think like it's something like, I believe in like semi-active management. The things that if something were to have a major shift, right? Let's say Tesla had a new competitor that just was crushing them or Elon Musk resigns, I would just sell all of Tesla. I'd sell my Tesla stock.
Starting point is 00:31:44 Not based on fundamentals, not based on the revenue not based on anything But I'm betting on Elon Musk sure right the only guy that's gonna be a multi-trillion if I could own one company in the world To this day it'd be meta right because I just think Zuck is Unbelievable if Zuck got hit by a bus. I'm out out instantly, and I don't care if they hire the fanciest see on the world I'm out the guy lived and breathed the same thing. Although Tim Cook did such a, like, you know, post jobs, like, what a job he's done. Yeah, from an efficiency perspective. Not from a brand perspective.
Starting point is 00:32:14 Steve Jobs was still the guy that we all were enamored by. Tim Cook we don't talk about. We talk about it because we're researching and studying it, but if Tim Cook walked by, no one would know who he was. Steve Jobs, people would be taking selfies, right, from the brand vision. The efficiency that Tim Cook created, obviously, is much better than what Steve Jobs had.
Starting point is 00:32:34 Speaking of Jobs, I think about him every day. Yeah, there's a story about him on his deathbed basically saying, like, I worked my whole life to become a billionaire for what? To get sick and can't pay anyone to take this from me and I think about Literally like Steve Jobs like Apple founder right like what he would give to come back and have my shittiest day
Starting point is 00:32:56 Right all of it and give away $50 billion in heartbeat I think about it a lot and it's actually the reason that I work so much because I enjoy it I want to do as much for the planet before I go Now that I have a baby that will change at some point when she's older But I'm still in that mode of I want to do a lot cuz I don't know if I'm gonna die tonight Next month next year or a hundred years based on modern technology. I have no idea and so I'm just trying to do as much as I can that's why I like the sit on the island thing I asked you about.
Starting point is 00:33:26 If you handed me $10 billion or $100 billion, by the time I got to the valet, I would still be working on something. It's not about the money part. I just want to do stuff for our society. I want to do stuff for charity. I want to do stuff for businesses. And I think of entrepreneurism and investing as charity.
Starting point is 00:33:44 I want to ask you a question. but please talk to me about your wavelength, Dan Fleischman's wavelength. Like you're very driven, yet you feel very desire free. Like you, like your motivation to work every moment, like before you get the valet, but not get crushed by roadblocks or nos's or failures or things like that or else. I mean you know I know you well enough to know that like I don't think you're ever going to be hungry or have to worry about a roof over your head so do you just feel like everything else is bonus time and like is it a monk like philosophy that you live
Starting point is 00:34:22 by like just touch on that. It's the game, right? I've had the same watch for 17 years. I haven't bought another watch. For seven years I didn't even have a car. I don't do it for the stuff. What I do is the game part of it is so fascinating to me because I look at things that are curable.
Starting point is 00:34:41 Homelessness is curable. Hunger is curable. Water is curable. And we think about thoseable. Hunger is curable. Water is curable. And we think about those are the three things that humans need to survive. Yes, we like love and other things, but really if I dropped you off in the desert, you only need three things.
Starting point is 00:34:54 If someone was in a third world country, they need three things to survive. I want to fix those things, and I need to become a multi-billionaire and make friends and impress a lot of very, very rich people to go do those things, and I need the masses a multi-billionaire and make friends and impress a lot of very very rich people to go do those things And I need the masses to trust me. What are the three things food water oxygen food water and shelter? Okay? and so I Have this obsession in my mind that I can cure homelessness and I'm laid out an entire business plan of how to do it
Starting point is 00:35:20 I have a very very very tense passion to fix food Because when you think about even in America, a third of kids are hungry. That's insane. We're in the number one country on the planet financially. Why would it be anything food-wise a problem when you've got hundreds of billions of dollars a month being thrown away, and hundreds of billions of dollars a month could be given with a tax write-off, hundreds of billions of dollars a month being thrown away. And hundreds of billions of dollars a month could be given with a tax write-off. Hundreds of billions of dollars a month of inefficiencies from all these Walmarts, restaurant chains, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:35:51 And so the reason I do the world's largest toy drives and the reason I do all my charity stuff, and I pay for all of it, I don't take, you know, I run everything on what's called a 0% charity. And the reason I go schlep around 11 cities in 17 days is I want to prove that I'm really good at charity. And I want to prove it to society so that when it comes time and I say, hey Andy, I want to build this place
Starting point is 00:36:12 I call it homeful, which is the competitor to homelessness. I want to build homeful here in Miami. You and a bunch of our friends would trust me to go efficiently do it, because I'm going to put my own money in, I'm not making money from it. And people will trust in my actions that I'm going to go build this place that's going to remove homelessness from Miami. So I know enough about your podcast
Starting point is 00:36:29 and the three core topics. How to make, how to invest, and charity. So I just got to be honest with you, if you asked me what my stance was on charity, I would say call Dan. And I want that in people's minds. It really is just because when I think of charities, I think of, I'm a capitalist, so I think of blindly giving money to entities and trusting they're going to do the right
Starting point is 00:36:53 things. I give money to Dan because I think Dan has vetted all of that and found the good stuff. It's the efficiencies of charity and it's frustrating because in our society people have that feeling of like, well I don't know if I give money to Red Cross or this company and their 82% goes to the overhead and 18 cents on the dollar goes to this. I hate that that's in our minds. I hate that part. And so that's why I do my charity so publicly and I also just want people to replicate my
Starting point is 00:37:22 charity stuff because I want it to actually happen at scale. If all of a sudden- What are the top three greatest charities in the world right now? I think Charity Water is very efficient. Okay. Scott Harrison. I think Scott Harrison is extremely efficient.
Starting point is 00:37:38 There's a group that Timothy Sykes has called Karma Gawa. Really? Yeah. Shout out to Tim Sykes. Because he's built over 100 schools. OK. And so from an efficiency perspective, he has what I care.
Starting point is 00:37:49 I don't know. Kind of like Pencils of Promise? Yes. OK. I don't know Tim's back end structure of it. I know he puts a lot of his own money. I just know that he is building schools over and over and over and over and over.
Starting point is 00:38:00 And that's what I care about. Tim was one of my first friends in the online space. Amazing. And there was one of my first friends in the online space. Amazing. And there was one more. I actually do like Pencils of Promise. They do have a big overhead. So I don't know their financials. But again, I will take efficiency over everything.
Starting point is 00:38:17 I want to say 15 years ago I wrote a $25,000 check and there's actually a school in Guatemala that was built with that money. I love that. Like that was my love that name on it Yep, and so to me the charities that can actually go out there and execute on what they're doing in in the city of Watts there's called the Watts Foundation and This guy named sticks that runs it every year when I do my toy drives or my Thanksgiving food drives my back-to-school days
Starting point is 00:38:43 I give everything extra to him because he's so efficient. He will literally drive trucks around and vans around and give it to the women or single moms, et cetera, in his community. Now big organizations are supporting him because he's been doing it for years and years. So I really look at the people that are being efficient with it. Now listen, some charities, they need money to survive. They need money to pay executives to be focused on it. It's not easy.
Starting point is 00:39:06 So I'm not trying to dissuade from that. It's that I care about the efficiency. And we've seen during disasters where there's household name charities raise a billion dollars and then there's no food there. There's no shelter there. There's no... And I... The inefficiency bothers me so much.
Starting point is 00:39:26 And so that's part of my passion of why I'm working so hard on this stuff, is I know that it's fixable. And that's the game. So if I create all these different businesses, and also, if you and I invest 500K into a company, and they go from two employees to 10 employees, that's also a charity to me. Those eight new employees are making 50 grand a year,
Starting point is 00:39:45 80 grand a year, et cetera. That is changing a community. That's why I don't mind having thin margins because I support a lot of people. Yep. And so that's where it comes from for me. All right, last question before we wrap up here. When it comes to influencers going from being broke
Starting point is 00:40:04 or living on their parents' couch and now you're making them 50 grand a month, 100 grand a month, some of them a million dollars a month, let's just use a normal number like 20 to 50 grand a month, how can we guide them to not just go light it on fire, go blow all the money like we've seen happen with a lot of football players and rappers? How do we get influencers to actually invest their money? So that's a great question. I think you have to let them.
Starting point is 00:40:31 So from my experience I tried to be Captain America. I tried to be like their father. Do you have a CPA? Are your tax returns ready? Are you doing the right thing? Are you put are you saving? And they a lot of these people don't have positive feelings for their parents. They can't wait can't wait to get away from their parents. And sometimes I would have clients leave me over that,
Starting point is 00:40:48 over trying to give them too much guidance. And so I had to take a step back. And sometimes you gotta let them light the money on fire for a period of time to get it out of their system. For them to wake up and realize the stove is hot because I burned myself. Like, oh crap, I made a million dollars last year. I spent a million dollars last year. What do you mean? I need 400 grand
Starting point is 00:41:10 for taxes. I don't have that money. Yeah. Like, and then all of a sudden they are ready to listen and ready to get educated. How do I know? Because I was like that, you know, my twenties was getting the material crap out of my system and getting my ego and my self conscious shit and women getting all that resolved before I could mature, you know, and all the bad things that I've been through in my life, the highs, the lows, the legal stuff, like the real hells, I wouldn't trade them for anything because that's what created real character in me. So I think giving them a little bit of room to appreciate their journey and planting little
Starting point is 00:41:44 seeds with them. And I think the key that I found is, sometimes with a lot of people, you gotta know when telling them what to do is less than planting an idea that will then become their idea later on. I love that. You know, so that's what I would suggest.
Starting point is 00:42:01 And there's a way to do that. You have a very nice way of doing that. You have a high emotional intelligence by, I mean you're not a friction guy. You're not a guy I think of who gets into a lot of head to head confrontations. You win by being like Bruce Lee. Sure.
Starting point is 00:42:15 So I'll tell you guys the way I like to say it. It's okay to buy one watch, don't buy four watches. The second, third, and fourth watch, you're going to become numb to it. It's okay to have aspirations to buy one car. When you buy the third, fourth, and fifth car, I promise you you're not going to drive them. You're going to end up driving the Tesla all the time
Starting point is 00:42:31 or the Range Rover all the time. You're not going to drive those other cars because you get addicted to one car. You end up wearing one watch. And what happens is people think, oh, I'm going to get a four bedroom house. Well, you live by yourself. You're never even going to go
Starting point is 00:42:43 in the third and fourth bedroom at all, ever, not even once. You're like, oh, my friends are going to stay over. They're not staying over. It's rarely ever going to happen. If they do, they're going to sleep on the couch or sleep in one of the extra bedrooms. And by the way, you don't really want them to stay over that long, so you don't need the third or fourth bedroom.
Starting point is 00:42:57 You know who the first person to ever make that point in my life was? MTV Cribs, Russell Simmons in his house. He's showing off this beautiful him. He was married to Kamora Leeally and Russell Simmons kind of like, he just looks so disinterested while the camera crew was looking around his mansion. And he kind of says like, you can only sit your ass in one couch at a time. Right. Right.
Starting point is 00:43:17 Will Smith's dad told him, he's like, why do you have seven cars? You only have one, but I'm actually going to have Angela. She's Angela. Simmons is coming on the podcast. She has a great product, it's almost like a healthy oatmeal type product for pancakes, like a batter. So alright, how can people find you, the company, what do people want to work with Creators Inc., tell us all those things. Our Instagram is the best place to go at Creators Inc. But again, we're building the safest, most positive creator community in the world.
Starting point is 00:43:50 I look to sign people who just know how to make great content. I learned very early on, it is not about what you look like, it is about your ability to make good content. Because people who make good content create context with their end user. Their end user feels like they know them them and that is a very sticky audience. They will buy what you want to sell. They will want to see more of you. So it's all about finding good content creators. And by the way, I know you asked one last question about if like something about leaving your kids money. What's the question?
Starting point is 00:44:21 All right. So as you guys know, I have this one main question I ask on every episode. So after you build up this company into hundreds of millions, hopefully billions of dollars over the course of time, what percentage of your net worth will you leave to the children? I will consult you for the charity portion. I in my will will leave my kids money. I just don't see why I wouldn't leave my kids
Starting point is 00:44:39 whatever money I had left over. But not during my lifetime will I give them money. And I'll tell you why. These Babson International kids, and when I see these 26 year old kids in Miami that own a $30 million house and wear RM just because their parents were probably shitty parents and felt bad and like just set them up with that stuff, that is not cool to me. That is the most uncool thing you can do for your kid. Because when the wind shifts, they've got no muscle. They don't know what resilience is.
Starting point is 00:45:09 They don't know how to survive and win in this world. I just think that is the most whack thing when I see like the ultra wealthy kids that have access to this stuff. That's just like, again, like, I don't care how rich I am. Like my kids going to work Fenway Park when they're 14 years old, going up and down the thing, going hot dogs, hamburgers, peanut. Why? Because it's like in public sales, somewhat humiliating, like great fucking job. That was my first job at Jack Murphy Stadium, which is Qualcomm now in San Diego.
Starting point is 00:45:40 Peanut's Crackerjacks here. All right, guys, you're watching the Money Mondays. Check out Craters Inc. across all social media and have these discussions with your friends, family, and followers. It's important to talk about money because we grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think it's ridiculous.
Starting point is 00:45:52 We have to have these discussions and it's up to you guys to do that with your friends, family, and followers. We will see you guys next Monday on moneymondays.com.

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