The Money Mondays - From Rock Bottom to $60M in One Year w/ Andrew Bachman 💵 EP125
Episode Date: June 9, 2025Andrew 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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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
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,
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.
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
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,
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.
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.
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.
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
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,
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.
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.
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,
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?
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.
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
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
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,
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,
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,
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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
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.
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,
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,
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
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,
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,
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.