The Pomp Podcast - #589: The World’s Most Profitable Nightclub Starts Accepting Bitcoin - Marc Roberts

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

Marc Roberts is a real estate mogul with more than $1 billion in assets across his portfolio. He is also the co-owner of E11even, the world’s most profitable nightclub per square foot.  In this conversation, we discuss building a real estate empire, creating world’s most profitable nightclub, bitcoin, selling a penthouse for $22 million in crypto, and building the E11even brand.  ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now, let's kick this thing off. Mark Roberts is a real estate mogul with more than $1 billion in assets across his portfolio. He is also the co-owner of Eleven, the world's most profitable nightclub per square foot. In this conversation, we discuss building a real estate empire, creating the world's most profitable nightclub, Bitcoin, selling a penthouse for $22 million in crypto, and building the Eleven brand globally. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mark, and I hope you do as well.

Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Circle. Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce, and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin, USDC, which is the fastest growing, regulated, fully reserved dollar stable coin in the world. Now standing at more than $15 billion market cap and adding nearly $300 million of net new digital dollars in circulation every week. The free Circle account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces.

You can learn more today at Circle.com. Again, go to Circle.com. They're the fastest growing regulated dollar stable coin. They've captured the attention of financial institutions and corporations alike. Go to Circle.com to learn more and see why you should be using USDC. Next up is my friends over at Exodus. Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products.

With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. it's supported on both desktop and mobile allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere you can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your portfolio's performance over time and maybe the best part exodus is integrated with the treasure hardware wallet making advanced security easy for everyone you can visit exodus.com slash pomp for your free download or search exodus on the app store or the Play Store. Again, exodus.com slash Pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the

App Store or the Play Store. All right, let's get into this episode with Mark. I hope you enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment, or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm here with a legend, absolute legend of South Florida, really the whole world, but what's going on, man? How are you, Mark?

Everything's great. Thanks a lot for having me. All right. You are one of the owners of the highest grossing club per square foot in the world with 11, which is a club here in Miami. You guys started to take Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as payment. Why'd you do that? Well, we did it really because we pride ourselves to be at the forefront and pioneers in all aspects of business. And the momentum for cryptocurrencies has been incredible, especially in the last six to eight months. And when the cryptocurrency conference was coming to Miami, it really lit a light bulb in our heads. And we said, you know what, we better be at the

forefront of this because somebody's going to do it. It might as well be us. And we're the most well-known club in the world. And with everybody coming to town, it just seemed like an idea that you had to do. So when you announced it, I think at first you were like, oh, you know, it's just like kind of a nonsense move. They're just announcing it. They're not going to actually accepted or people aren't going to really pay but people have been paying in bitcoin right well you know the funny thing is you don't just say i'm taking crypto and all of a sudden you start processing it it took a a lot of complexities to figure it out and our guys that worked for us were incredible at it and we figured it out we threw trial and error we tried a few different

processing uh people and before the conference we hit bingo we we really had a seamless uh a team that just processes stuff without any errors. A lot of other people tried in Miami, and I think we were the only ones who even accepted it because once people saw us, we were accepting it. Everybody in the world tried to accept it, but they were not able to execute on it. And we executed on it to perfection,

and we took a lot of Bitcoin, and it was great. It was a very smart move and a very profitable move and a wise move and everything that comes with it. And we were proud to be the first ones, And we're also planning on staying with it and leaving the forefront because we're very big believers in Bitcoin and the cryptocurrencies. So I know that you, hopefully this isn't sharing too much. I know that you own some Bitcoin, right? You're very interested in this space. The club's now accepting it and people have already paid, but they're not just paying like

$20 for a drink, right? I mean, these are people who are buying tables, they're taking out cash, like they're doing a whole bunch of different things with it. And that's where really you guys have processed a lot of the Bitcoin transactions. Yeah, people are, you know, our tables at our place are from 5,000 to 50,000 a table. Some are 75, 100, depending on the night. And the big boys have been paying in Bitcoin. I mean, they've been coming, they're coming hard.

It's been very profitable, and I'm really glad because I have to say that, you know, you said that I own Bitcoin, I own a lot of Bitcoin because of you, particularly. And you helped me believe in it. And it's kind of contagious because people see I believe in it and people say, you believe in it. And now in Miami, everybody's moving down here in the crypto world. So Miami is becoming like the crypto capital of the world. And I'm just really glad to

be learning and meeting people and get involved. I really believe it's the embryonic stages. And I think it's going to be a significant part of our business going forward. Yeah, I tend to agree. There's a second part of what you do. So I think most people know of Eleven, Gold Rush and kind of the clubs because that's kind of a forward facing big thing. But really, your entire business historically has been from real estate, right? Like you've developed real estate, you've bought real estate. Maybe walk us through just kind of your career and how do you get to this point? It all began when I was in college.

I went to American University. I played Division I college basketball. My basketball coach was Gary Williams, who coached Maryland to national title, I think, in 2002 or 2003. What position did you play? I was a guard. We had a really good team, Division I. We were one of the top 20 teams in the country, actually. We had a really good team.

And I had these aspirations of being a pro, and they were very quickly dimmed when I started playing in college. I mean, I had a very good first year, and then we had a teammate of mine, Russell Boo Bowers, who was the leading scorer in the entire country. And about midway through the season, Bo came to practice very lethargic, and Gary Williams, who was a complete maniac coach.

I mean, he didn't put up with anything. He said, Boa, you're very lethargic. What's going on? He said, Coach, these agents, I get up in the morning, they're knocking on my door. I go to bed, they're knocking on my door. In the middle of the night, they're knocking on my door. I can't even get rid of them.

I can't sleep. So the next agent that came on the campus got arrested. I mean, literally arrested. And he was not out of jail for like four to five days. So word got out, don't go near American University. Mr. Campton, when you're Boo Bowers, you're going to jail. So me, the enterprising young man I was, I said, I want to be his agent. So I started giving him my per diem money.

I started hanging out with him. I started becoming his best friend. And lo and behold, he made me his agent. All right, so hold on a second. You're his teammate, but you realize that all these agents all want to be his agent because they think he's going to be highly selected in the NBA draft, all this stuff. And you're like, well, why would we let them be the agent? Why don't I just be your agent?

Yes, exactly. Exactly. So I became his agent. But there was only one problem. I was a kid. I could barely, like, read. I didn't know what a contract was. So I had a camp counselor from when I was 12 years old.

I remember he became a lawyer. So I dialed him up. And I said, his name was Roy Greenman. I said, listen, Roy, I got an athlete. I go, I want to sign him. You want to be my partner? And he goes, who is it? I said, Russell Boo Bowers.

Now, Boo Bowers is a big name back then. This is going back 40 years ago. He said, you have Boo Bowers? I said, yeah, I've got Boo Bowers. He's like, just sign him. So he said, okay, let's partner up. So I signed him. We became partners.

I started signing other athletes. And all of a sudden I said, okay, I'm not going to be a pro. I know this. And if I stay in the school any longer, back then there was all kinds of stuff going on in college. Learning wasn't one of them. So I said, I better get out of here. So I left college after three semesters and I started my sports business. All right.

And so when you signed him and then you started going to other athletes, what's your pitch to them? Oh, my pitch of them was, you know, these guys are going to be home with their wives and kids. I'm going to be out there working for you. Like, I don't know if it's going to outwork me. That's still my pitch today, by the way, even though I have a wife and kids, but nobody outworks me. I told them I'm going to outwork them.

I said, I'm going to find the best people for you. I said, nobody's going to get you a bigger contract. Nobody's going to find you more endorsements. And I was just like a ball of energy. I mean, you know me now, how I am. You can imagine me when I was 19. And they loved it. Oh, they loved it.

I signed a lot of guys up. So I started signing guys up, and I built a very substantial sports entertainment business. Matter of fact, I was the first one to take a sports management company public on the national NASDAQ. So how long into the lifetime of the companies before you take it public? Well, I started signing guys up. The first thing I did was get into signing up guys, and I was about 19. I got a call from the local PAL representative, and he said to me, Because there was a big article about me in my local paper.

I signed all these guys. I'm an agent, all this stuff. So this guy called me off that article and says, he's calling me Mr. Roberts. He's like the head of the PAL. Like a 19-year-old kid. He goes, Mr. Roberts, I just read about you. How would you like to represent some fighters? I said, at that point, I would represent like a snail.

I'd represent anything. So I said, yeah, that's a great idea. What do you need me to do? He says, meet me at the gym. He gave me an address in Plainfield, New Jersey. He goes, we have three state champions and a couple more national champions. He's like, you know, come manage him. I said, okay, let me go look at him.

So I went down to a sweaty gym in Plainfield, New Jersey. There's these animals working out like beasts. So I go, which are the three best here? He goes, they're right over there. He says, there's national champ, national champ, national champ. He's like, I'll take all three. He said, okay. And he brought the trainer over.

He goes, listen, here's the way it works. You got to put the trainer on a salary. You got to give the guys a little money each week. You got to get them fights, and you'll build them up. I didn't know anything about boxing. So I said, okay, I'll take them. So I went, I said, okay, where do I get the money for all this? I was a 19-year-old kid.

So I go to my lawyer partner that was an agent. I said, how do you go? Well, there's a thing called a limited partnership. I said, I need about 60 grand with all this stuff to take me to like at least a year and a half before I start making these guys some money, I guess. He said, well, you got to form a limited partnership. And I go, I don't understand what he's talking about. I said, listen, how much money do I have to raise?

He goes, well, I said, let's do like six units at $50,000 each. I said, okay. So I went out and I begged, borrowed. I was literally called every friend I ever met, talked to their dads, their uncles, their aunts, everybody. And I raised the money in a limited partnership. That was my first big raise. All right. So you did six units at $50,000 and now you got $300,000.

And what do you do with it? I house the guys. I fed the guys. I put the trainer on retainer, salary, built a little bit of a gym, and then I went out to try to find a fight. So I remember I called up Bob Lee. Well, first off, I just called all over the world to get these guys' fights. I couldn't get a fight to save my life for these guys.

I called every promoter there was in the world. If I finally got the guy, my one guy, Albert Steele Mills, who's a national champ, I got him a fight in Hartford, Connecticut. He was fighting on a card with this guy, Marlon Starling, who was a big, big draw at the time. We drove up to Hartford. I brought my partner. He brought his two partners, the three of us going up there.

Our first fight. It's a four-round fight. My guy gets in there. He knocks the guy from ring post to ring post to ring post to ring post. We're going, yeah, I can't believe it. We have our first victory. There's 15,000 people in the stadium because Marlon Starling was a big draw. The decision comes in.

My guy lost. I go, how the heck did that happen? So I started explaining to him the facts of life of boxing. He goes, you can't fight a guy in his hometown. You got to knock him out. Nobody told me that. So on the way home, I say, you know what? I'm going to start promoting my own fights in our hometown

if that's the way this game works. So I started promoting fights in Plainfield, New Jersey, which is right by where I grew up. And the first fight, I was pulling up the chairs. I was doing the posters. I was doing this. I was doing that. The matchmaking, I didn't know what the heck I was doing.

And two days before the fight, there was like no sales. Literally no sales. I was like freaking because all the money was going to be gone. So I said, what the heck am I going to do? I didn't know what to do. All of a sudden, sales started picking up and picking up and picking up. The fight sold out, 3,000 people, packed arena, packed house. What happened was I was playing from Jersey.

It was a little bit of an urban area. and the day before the fight, two days before the fight was when the welfare checks came out and everybody got the money. Everybody started buying tickets. I didn't even know. I was just lucky to draw.

Lucky to real draw. I sold the place out. A very successful shot. I was the youngest person ever to promote a professional boxing match and hold that distinction to today. I started promoting more boxing matches. I met Emmanuel Stewart

who was the number one boxing trainer of all time. Then I got involved with Tommy Hearns with him. I started doing stuff with Tommy, and I started managing other athletes. And then I signed the 1988 U.S. Olympic team. I got Ray Mercer, the gold medal champion. I managed him to the heavyweight title. My first heavyweight champion knocked out Tommy Morrison. A brutal knockout.

Just a crazy brutal knockout. And then I started – we took that company public to the number one company on Wall Street at the time called D.H. Blair, National NASDAQ. Built that company up. That company sold for a lot. Everybody made a lot of money, a lot of money. That seems to be a recurring theme when you are involved in a business. Everyone makes a lot of money. Yeah, that's the idea.

That's definitely the idea. And then a couple of years later, I took another sports management company public, and we did football, basketball, NASCAR. We did a lot of endorsements. We had a big marketing division. And we built that up, and then I sold that. And then about, that was around like, just about coming to June.

And my accountant said to me, this was back in like 99. My accountant said to me, hey, you know, if you could move to a state with no state income tax, you could save this much money. It was a significant amount. I said, really? So he said, yeah, you go to Florida, Nevada, Texas. I said, okay, I'm going to South Beach.

So I came right down to South Beach. I bought a place at South Beach. And I've been here ever since. And I was going to retire for a year. And what I did is I used to go around to new construction jobs and give deposits on units. This was Miami. It was just starting to get really booming with the high-rises. And I bought maybe 100 condos.

And I started making a lot of money just on- Because you were just buying the units and then renting them out. No, no. I just bought the units pre-construction, gave a deposit. Then the developers did all the work. And then when they were built, you just flip them. Got it. So you just resell them.

I just resold them. It did very well. Then I started getting into the condo conversion business. We converted about 20,000 condos throughout Florida and Vegas and Arizona. From 2003 to 2008, we did very, very well. We were doing like 500 closings a month. It was crazy. And what do you do when you convert them?

It's like you buy a rental building, a garden apartment or a high rise. We did right here at the View at Prickle. The View at Prickle right over here. It's right around the corner. We put that high-rise. We converted like 355 units there. What you do is you buy a rental building. You basically put some little paint down, paint the walls a little bit.

In the garden apartments, you paint the parking space a little white stripes, put two banks in each room, and just put them for sale. Got it. So basically, you buy the building, you spruce them up, and then you resell them. And you convert them into condos. You got to go to condo docks. You take the rentals, convert them into condos. Now you're selling apartments as condos.

And it was a very hot market in 03 to 08. And we did like 20,000 units. And the money we made from that, I took and I started buying land in downtown Miami. And downtown Miami, for those that don't know, when they think of downtown, they probably think of South Beach. But South Beach is not downtown. No, no. South Beach is not downtown at all. South Beach is where the ocean is.

There's a bridge that connects Miami Beach to Miami. Miami, when you hear about Miami, now you're exploding. you're primarily and predominantly speaking about downtown miami yep in downtown miami used to not even have any um cultures or any distinctions fast forward to today you have you know the park west area which 11 is in which is going to be the hottest most booming area where all the big high-rises are being built where the train station is the grand central station that takes you to west palm and fort lauderdale now there's stations being built in aventura and boca orlando will be opening up next year then there's going to go to Jacksonville and Tampa so

that's the grand central stage by right in that neighborhood you also have the American Alliance arena which is now the FTX arena another crypto coming to dominate the marketplace you have the Museum of Art and Science the other Performing Arts Center you have the people mover yeah you have the new on off ramps the two billion dollar project to build on the extend the highway so everything all the infrastructure is going to that area and then that's could be the main area, like the Times Square area with all the action is, Miami at the end of the day. Then from there, you have the tentacles. You have the Wynwood. You have the Midtown. You

have the Design District. Then those are all to the north. Then to the south, you have the CBD District, Central Business District, which is right before you get to Brickell. Then you have Brickell, which has always been booming because that was the first area really built up with the financial markets and condos because the area of Park West where Eleven is, people used to come down and big tractor trailers to come down to go to the cargo port you have to come off the exit go to 6th street and go on to the cargo port which is like the third biggest cargo port in the country and those trucks were the reason that area was never developed before but there was a tunnel built about four years ago that alleviates all that traffic and now it's opening up that area

to be the area where all the new construction is and that's why you see all this infrastructure there and that's where a lot of the real estate you own is that's where all the real estate that we own this. We own, at one time or another, I owned maybe like 30, 40 acres. We sold some off. We arbitraged some. We stayed in some. And today, my partner primarily is Michael Simpkins. When we trot around, Brent Saunders and Ira Safferstein. Michael and I own most of it. And then we have a few other partners in other smaller pieces. But we own about 12 acres. Okay. Enough to build maybe like 20 high-rises.

All right. And so as you do this, at what point do you say, I want to get into the club business? Because I think that this story is fascinating in terms of as you're buying up the land. I don't think the club business was necessarily something that you had in the cards. No, no. Club business was never in my mindset. There was a club in the middle of the whole assemblage because I did all the acquisitions for Miami World Center. I was a co-founder of that with Art Falcone. And then in 2012, I started assembling the rest of the area, which is contiguous to Miami World Center, but right off the highway with Michael Simpkins and his family. And I was going down the street one day with one of my friends, and he points to the club. There

was a strip club there called Gold Rush. We renamed a club that we have up on 77th and Biscayne Gold Rush, but this was Gold Rush. This was the original Gold Rush since 92. This was an outright down and dirty dingy come on the floor you wouldn't even walk in kind of place you know you'd have to shower for a week you have to get it so but it was open 24 hours and my friend says what's with that it's the only thing i don't know the neighbor i said i've never sell he's it's 24 hours this guy's just never selling so that night i want to go you know who says a guy would ever sell let me go see if this guy would ever sell that place because i just want it for the real estate yep i didn't realize i really didn't realize what was coming down the pike so i did

my thing i always buy everything i always bought in the neighborhood with what we call the beard i don't go in myself because they see my name they start hearing bells whistles and i think they hit the lottery so i always get a beard another person to go in and buy something so i called up a buddy of mine so yeah you're gonna be my beard go in call the cfo of the company see what the story is just happened to catch when the owner of the place was uh he was in a hospital and he was ill and it wasn't good it wasn't looking good for him for the future let's just put it that way um so i we did what we do best we penetrated him we uh you know got him to the table and i got him under contract i got him under contract for you know a steal of a

price for me because i was looking at real estate other people in the club business um it turns out this guy was like an icon he had 90 strip clubs this guy wow and every the kingpin of strip clubs in uh south florida yeah this guy this guy's the kind of guy at so many clubs he would say the manager listen give me an envelope this much a week you keep the rest wow he was just going back to old school he'll do like the 70s the 80s the 90s this guy was really old school so i end up it under contract the minute the word got out that i had under contract every strip club operator in the country you know you name them you know you know from from scores to hustler to you know sapphire you name it they came to see me and at that time my partner michael simpkins we said you

know what let's just meet everybody and see what they have in mind and why did they want to come see you guys they want to help you operate it or they want to buy it well firstly i wanted to know was how the heck did you get this on a contract? He promised me he would sell it to me. He was promising everybody in the business, oh, when I sell, you're the one that's getting it. Meanwhile, this guy obviously didn't want to sell it to anybody in the street club business.

These were his competitors. He was never selling it to these guys. So they all came in and they all gave us huge presentations and why they should be the ones to be our partner on it. They all said, listen, we'll give you $5 million. We'll give you 100 grand a month in rent and we'll be 50-50 partners. That was everybody's rep.

So my partner, Michael Simpkins, and I were looking at each other going, man, these people came fast. They didn't just come over a period of a month. They came within a week. We met everybody in the whole industry. They came fast and furious. It was like you were the prettiest girl at the prom. I mean, it was unbelievable.

So we said, you know what? Why don't we go try to put together a management team ourself? See, we do this ourselves. Who are these guys? We can find the right team. So we met and started interviewing other people. Who's going to manage us? Michael and I.

We don't manage clubs. We don't run clubs. It's a real art. It's a different business. It's a different business. And we just wanted a club. We had nothing to do with it. We have nothing in mind.

Didn't even want any kind of club like that, even in our neighborhood. We wanted to do something classy, and eventually what Eleven became. So we met Dennis DeGorey, and Dennis DeGorey really seemed like a really smart guy. He had a great reputation. And we made a deal with Dennis that he would operate the club and put the team together. and then we started forming a concept and a lot of people came up with a concept.

They wanted to do this, they wanted to do that. Dennis had a real clear vision and Michael and I had as well agreed with on turning it into what 11 is today. A very, very high-end nightclub with a very small component of you have beautiful girls because 11 is anything but us. We don't even use that word.

Have any of our staff ever used that word? They had a lot of demerits. What Eleven is is a unique nightlife experience. And what we did was we tore down the building that Gold Rush was in and we built close to a $40 million facility. We put in a tremendous amount of money. We put in the best of everything, the best sound system, the best booth, the best design.

I mean, Dennis was working on this design with the architects for like maybe, I don't know, three, four months. And we built it in nine months, world record time, we built the club. I mean, literally world record time. And it was very challenging at first Because everybody thought we were nuts How are you ever going to make that money back What are you doing

Like what are you doing And at the beginning These other guys Because you did have to have A beautiful girl component The girls Everybody These girls working elsewhere

They were telling them Clubs all throughout Florida If you go work at 11 You're never going to work at this club again And you're never going to work at any club again So we said oh man You know, because these girls were unknown. They were doing fine.

So we had to go hire girls all over the world and fly them in. And we had to pay for their travel, pay for their meals, pay for them to work. It was spending a lot of money each week. The first three, four months was kind of challenging. So it would just start out like a big bang. Then we started getting traction. And we put on shows, the Cirque du Soleil shows. Our service is amazing.

And we started, people started realizing it's a very unique experience. and lo and behold it started getting busier and busier and busier and busier and towards the end of the first year we said we're onto something and then all the girls started coming because the word was out all the heavy hitters were coming there money was being made the social media today doesn't take long for the word to get out when these girls start making money and now fast forward today and we're the number one club in the world we're the number one club in almost every category you know we're number one club selling uh for our tequila or vodka or 11 vac is unbelievable where did the brand come from so you have the 11 hat on it's very unique

in terms of uh for those that can't see it uh it's basically the word 11 spelled but uh rather than one l there's basically two l's or or the number 11 right so it's e 11 and then even where did that brand come from well 11 is on 11th street so we named it 11 uh and the hats were a natural. Everybody's got hats. We put together the hats. And next thing you know, everybody and their mother wanted to wear a hat. We sell seven figures of these hats a year. Really? Yeah, seven figures. And is the double L or the number 11 in the name? That was just like a team?

We have a big marketing team. And it was a collaboration of our marketing team, Dennis Degore, Gino Lopinto, Daniel Solomon. And they all got together. And Michael and I loved it and we just ran with it and it became iconic i mean you see these hats everywhere when i go out of the country i see it by the west coast i see it they're all over new york everyone in miami like i said we sell seven figures a year in hats and which is pretty incredible because most people give hats away for name recognition you sell these hats for fifty dollars a hat and then we have another hat that lights up and we sell that for a hundred dollars a hat and we can't keep them in stock mark roberts the hat salesman of the year

We try. What's fascinating about their brand is obviously you've built this club, right? It is incredible from a financial performance standpoint. It's literally the highest grossing club in the world per square foot. And as you just described the story, it was a real estate kind of play. And you were really focused on real estate. And then you guys kind of backed into the club business. You guys now have two clubs, right?

Between Eleven and Gold Rush? Yeah. Well, Gold Rush is more of a protective measure because there's like two licenses. uh in downtown miami so we're kind of protecting ourselves uh by we want to own both uh we like monopolies and gold rush has really taken off because it's an alternative it's nothing like 11 at all but people love gold rush they love going there they have a great time there it's a different vibe so it's a complimentary because you can't go to 11 every night even though some Some people do.

So, I mean, both places are not going to win and doing fantastic. But 11 is the catalyst that drives everything. Is 11 open 24-7? 24-7. It never closes. That's unique, right? Well, that's very unique, yes. Very unique.

So how does that operate if you're open 24-7? You just have staff that kind of comes through? We do all the time. We have staff three shifts a day. Yeah, and they just rotate. They rotate. Yeah, they rotate. And there's a lot of days between.

What's good about it is it's open, but it gives us a lot of time to clean up. The place looks spotless. Every day we keep it spotless. So we keep all those workers working. It keeps everybody happy. Yeah, yeah. And so the 11 brand now, you guys are branching out, and you've got 11 residences.

So maybe describe the residence tower and kind of what you guys are doing there. Well, the 11 hotel and residences, our big goal, especially this year, is to expand our IP. We were very cognizant of what happened with Playboy. Playboy went out in February at a $400 million market cap. Today it sits at a $2 billion market cap. I can't even find a Playboy.

I don't know anybody who even reads a Playboy. But they took the name, and they were unbelievably successful at taking the IP and creating different verticals with it. So we looked at it, and we said, you know what? We could build a multibillion-dollar business off of our IP. Eleven is the catalyst, the club. I mean, not anybody who comes to town doesn't go there. Everybody wants to go there.

There's 500 to 1,000 people a night trying to get in and clawing their way in. So we said, how do you take advantage of that? So the first thing we thought of is, of course, the hats. And then we started our own Vodka, which Nikki Simpkins, who's my partner, Michael's wife, is the CEO. We've done a really good job, and Nikki's done an amazing job, of getting it all over Florida. Our strategy with the Vodka is let's dominate Florida first, put it everywhere we can, saturate Florida. Obviously, it's the only vodka we serve at the club, which alone is a huge business. And then we'll take a national.

And we came out less than a year ago, and we're in almost 1,000 places now. It's doing amazing. Southern Wine and Spirits who distributes it is on board to help us expand because they see how successful it is. So check that box. And that's 11 vodka. 11 vodka. And we won the double gold award at the San Francisco Tasting Contest about two, three months ago. It's the leading award that you could get in the field.

Like every spirit strives to be a double gold award. And we won it, which is incredible because it tastes so great. And everybody loves it, the taste. And by the way, it's made here in Miami. It's local. And we've gotten some great local support from everybody. And it's local. So I support everything local.

And everybody here has been phenomenal supporting it and branching out into other counties. So now we have the vodka. So then we said, okay, how are we going to make this more iconic, the IP? So last year we went and we said, let's build an 11 hotel and residences, but it's got to be iconic. It's got to be the best of the best because 11 stands for the best. You know if you're going to 11, you're going to get an amazing experience. You're going to get the best of the best.

You're going to be happy, live your life, be happy with your life. Everybody around it is going to be people that are ambitious and happy and positive attitude, and that's really what the brand stands for. so we wanted to create an environment like that in a building so we partnered you know i'm a very good land assembler and we're we're great real estate guys in a lot of respects but we don't build high-rise it's very difficult task so we said who's the best high-rise builder and pmg property management group is built of like probably 100 high-rises very successful so we teamed up with them and uh their two lead partners are kevin maloney and

and Ryan Shear and Ryan lives here in Miami and we got to get to know him real well we started uh figuring there's a lot of synergies and we trusted him and he's a great hard worker oh you know he's got the culture we were looking for so we partnered up with them and we started designing the tower and we came out with it I don't know I guess uh sort of like when COVID was ending and we sold it out in less than a month and that's the residence in terms of uh people can come in and they can actually buy the resident units. Yeah, people come in, they buy a resident, and they have the option.

You can either rent it out when you're not there or just keep it as your resident. You don't have to rent it out. And it went over so big. I sold probably half the units myself to people I know. I mean, literally. And we not only sold it out fast, we sold it out without a sales office.

We don't have a sales office built yet. And we sold out the club. It wasn't even open. The club was closed in the middle of COVID. It's crazy. So it's really crazy. it's a world record we set

like PMG never sold anything out that fast nobody's ever seen anything sell out that fast and the clientele we sold it to are mega names we're getting ready

to announce some of them they're mind-boggling names just a lot of you know the kind of people that everybody wants to associate themselves with

be around and it's what we're going to create is a Las Vegas type of hotel with those kinds of amenities without the casino in a five-star environment

and we're going to have The best of the best restaurants, the best of the best sports bar, the best of the best gym, the best of the best med spa, the best of the best – you know, Deepak Chopra has been announced, the Wellness Center. Deepak lending his name to us is a good milestone for us because it's another vertical that wants to collaborate with us. We're going to have music studios.

It's going to be the place where everybody is going to want to be, and our pool party is going to be second to none. Nobody is ever going to see a pool party like this, ever, that they're going to see at 11 hotel residences. What is the average price of a unit there? Just so people get a sense for it. Well, the average square foot price is $1,150 a square foot. I'd say the average price hovers around a million bucks.

We sold one unit for $22 million, which broke all the records in downtown Miami. My next comment was the unit that sold for $22 million, somebody paid in Bitcoin or crypto? Yes. they're crypto uh guys a lot of crypto people have bought in the crypto community which even made me more enthusiastic about the crypto because you started taking it at the club and then you announced that you were going to accept it for purchase of the residents and and i think

again people were like ah they did the club thing like maybe that's just kind of a stunt oh now they're doing it at the resident no one's going to buy one and then literally you broke the record for a condo sale in downtown miami for 22 million dollars uh and somebody bought it with uh I don't know if it was Bitcoin or something else. Well, here's the way it's going to work. The first 10% deposit, we had not announced yet that we were taking crypto. Crypto wasn't even like really on our radar screen when we took the first 10%. It was a little bit on it.

But then when all the momentum started building and the conference came and I started becoming so gung-ho on it and become such a believer, the second deposits that we're accepting crypto, we've got indications from the guys that are in the crypto business that are buying, of course they're going to pay in crypto. though. So we're expecting maybe a 10% to 15% of the second deposits in Bitcoin. Because we take Bitcoin. People, we convert it. There's other coins. And somehow, my guy's converting the Bitcoin. But I like Bitcoin. So basically, everything, you take everything, but you put

it in Bitcoin. And the goal is to not sell it into cash. You hold it as Bitcoin. I'm a big believer in Bitcoin. This is why we are friends. I'm a very big believer in Bitcoin. All right. And so as you're doing this, what's next for the Eleven brand, right? So you've got the club, you've got the vodka, you've got the residence and hotel. Are you going to look for more opportunities to leverage the brand and kind of do iconic things and build out the IP? Yes. There's some things in the crypto field, very excited things that I really don't want

to announce because everybody seems to copy us these days. So I do it. I'm not going to be trying to copy us. I'll tell you offline, of course. You're my crypto guru, of course. so we have some exciting things we're doing with that universe that we're really excited about

but we're also building right now a real infrastructure we've interviewed a lot of top quality people to be our CEO

of our intellectual property division we've interviewed a lot of people to be second in command and so forth

so we're very determined to build a really big crypto infrastructure between our IP and we could handle the crypto we could handle for instance like we want to do a

cannabis perhaps you want to do you know lingerie we want to do sunglass line we want it we want to do anything that anybody will license we really won't be the licensing business because that's where the money is you license our name we'll oversee it and we'll help market it and push it but let's say we want to hook up the top sunglass manufacturer up the top lingerie manufacturer when I hook up with uh you know maybe uh you know the top cannabis uh uh brand out there um and we've certain brands we're talking to right now at the end of the day we want to really i want to say emulate like maybe what a uh playboy did but we want to uh create a licensing platform that you

can monetize because those are the best because when you're sleeping they're making you money yeah well and also part of it is once you build the brand the commoditization of the goods uh to some degree, works in your favor because you can take your brand, match it with the commoditized good, and now all of a sudden you can create something that people want and really differentiate yourself from the competitors in that market.

Yeah, well, I don't think anybody has the brand recognition we have right now. We've done studies and all that. Our brand is super, super strong. It's well-recognized. The demographics that it's recognized with are the exact demographic that advertisers go after. I mean, listen, how many demographics do you have

where you could go from, I mean, teenage kids aspire to go to 11 for their 21st birthday. I mean, that's like what they, that's, people when I was young, I used to look forward to when I could drive when I was 18. Like literally, anywhere I go with young kids, they're in their teens, 50, they go, y'all, my son, and all he wants to do is go there,

and so it's all he talks about. So we have that capture that audience. Then, of course, you have the 21 to 25 to 30-year-olds. We capture that audience. 30 to 40, we capture that audience. We go right up to 70. We have 80-year-olds come in and have a great time. We have more women than men on a lot of nights.

Really? More women than men. A fact. We do more bachelorette parties than bachelor parties. That's a fact. Wow. That's why the brand is so unique and so strong. Because most people would associate men going there, bachelor parties, that type of stuff.

But actually, it's more female and more bachelorette parties. I'd say if you really had to go throughout the year, it's maybe 55, 45, which is astounding. Yep. but that's just another example it has nothing to do with a strip club nothing to do with it it has everything to do with the unique nightlife experience you see the cirque du lay shows they cost us you know millions and millions of dollars a year to put on we spend real money going putting back entertaining yeah and we bring in top djs and we bring in top acts like we gave drake did his first major performance uh there a few years ago we'd usher this is early on now we have

everybody there. Everybody comes to a place. And in reality, on those nights, we make less money because we have to pay them. But we do it because we want to give the customers and our clients the best experience and they go home and talk about it and so on and so forth. Literally, we're building a

brand. We just didn't know how powerful until we started looking at each other and go, okay, we really got something here. Lightning in a bottle. And in the next this year, you're going to see us lay an infrastructure and I think you're going to see 11 getting licensed in a lot of areas with a lot of credibility to it. You're an IP company that's licensing a great brand.

And what I think I appreciate the most about you is you want to be first and you want to be iconic and being first in everything from accepting Bitcoin to, you know, other things that you guys do. And then the iconic experience of the nightclub, the iconic hotel and residence, right? Like you keep using the same language over and over again, but that's what makes you guys stand out that's what gives the brand kind of the legs that it stands on well you know if you go back you know my career i only had one goal when i left college i never wanted to have a boss my only goal is if i could go through my life without a boss i did pretty good so i was the first one uh to hold a professional boxing match at 19 i was the first one to take a sports manager

company public before i was 30 and then when i got down here you know everybody said nobody's ever bought all this so many pre-construction so yeah put that a little bit of first bracket then we started doing condo conversions we were among the first they really got into that and and then when we and then of course you know it's the first one to start assembling land prime land in downtown miami it's going to be the best land in downtown miami at the end of the day by co-founding miami world center and by uh having the acreage we have left with my partners and then of course the club you know i think was a manifestation of all that and putting everything first mover into that and you know my my uh main partner michael simpkins and dennis

degory we all are very aligned in what we do you know it's kind of like you always have to have i've had bad partners and on this one i got very lucky i have great partners and we're all aligned in what we're doing and building and we first mover and everything we do because we do quick When everybody's aligned, things could work very quickly. These big corporations, it takes between the red tape. That's why it could take them forever. That's why entrepreneurs will always win the day. So we like to fancy ourselves as entrepreneurs, fast movers,

and we're well-financed and we can move quickly, and that's, I think, going to win the day. I tend to think you're doing a great job. Thank you. All right. I asked everyone three questions before we end, and then you get asked me one question to finish up. The first question is,

what's the most important book you think you've ever read? Robert's Rules. I knew you were going to say that. All right, what's Robert's Rules? It's a book I wrote back in 1998. It's a story behind that one too. My buddy, Roger King, who King World Productions,

he owned the Oprah Winfrey Show. And I used to hang out with Roger a lot. And I came out my book and my book is more of like rules, like my philosophies, my business philosophies. teachings and I had a huge publicity campaign going like a half a million dollar publicity campaign in place by my publisher I had the Oprah Winfrey show back then if you want the

Oprah Winfrey show game over you were guaranteed to be a number one seller Roger King on the Oprah Winfrey show he had me set up there I was gonna be the I wasn't not gonna be the book of the day I was gonna book in a month I made the whole thing lined up for me I was in the front of Barnes & Noble, Front of Borders. This whole thing was teed up like you wouldn't believe. As you very well know, I know this, but when you take a company public and have a public company,

before you do a financing, there's something called a quiet period. You're not allowed to talk about your company at all. You're not allowed to promote it. And just as luck would have it, because I did all these deals a year and a half before my book came out. You have to set all this up.

You don't just want to snap your fingers. As luck would have it, I was doing a secondary offering simultaneously with my book launch. So I go on, my book came out, I go on Giants against the Green Bay Packers on a Sunday afternoon at 12 o'clock. I got interviewed right before the game

by Donahan over Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani's wife at the time. Started asking me about my book. So of course I got to talk about the company, I started talking about the company, Worldwide Entertainment, I started talking about this and that. I just said enough, two minutes go by, it was a two minute quick thing.

the next day it was monday my sec lawyer's got a call from the sec listen we see roberts on tv on radio if we even see him anywhere near the airwaves we're holding your secondary offering for six months minimum meanwhile i had a 25 million dollar secondary offering coming like the money was like ready to go okay they called me up so you can't go on the air that's what's going on for winfrey that week okay so i was like oh man it's like one of the worst calls I ever had.

So I was like, 25 million? Oprah Winfrey. And this was going back a while back. This was going back like 22 years. Obviously, the 25 million went out. So I called my publisher. I said, listen, I got very bad news for you. And this guy put a half.

This guy was like ready to go. This guy does 300 books a year. I was his number one book, obviously, in a year. This guy thought we were getting gold. I said, listen, I understand. I can't believe this happened. I can't go on Oprah. I never got cursed out like this in my life.

This guy cursed me for three minutes straight. I deserved it. I just took it. And he goes, you call Oprah. I'm done. And he hung the phone. I never talked to the guy since, by the way. Really?

I never talked to the guy since. This guy was so mad at me. I had to call up the executive producer of Oprah Winfrey's show. I start talking to her, and she starts going, ha, you're funny, Mr. Roberts. You're funny. You're funny. She thought I was kidding around.

I turn around, I can't go on the show. She had no idea what I was talking about. Quiet, period. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So lo and behold, I finally convinced her I can't go on. she told him like the stupidest human thing she ever met hung the phone up and i never went over borders pulled it off because they weren't putting on because i was going on oprah they were getting ready for the avalanche so uh that was very bad for the book but lo and behold the book did well

didn't do great like it should have if it would have done but i think a lot of i got a lot of letters back then there was no emails a lot of letters and loads of letters thousands of letters how to change people's lives and everyone that reads it i think learned something from it and And it was a great experience. And he's got a picture of you on the front. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm younger today than I did back then. It's funny how that works.

I love it. All right, second question is sleep schedule. You and I will text at all hours of the day. It could be 6 a.m., noon, 8 p.m., 2 a.m. You're always on. What is your sleep schedule? Well, that's what happened. I was about 16, 17 years old.

This was the day that changed my life. Okay. I had a big thing going on at night. It was like a Saturday night. I had a big thing going on at night, but I fell asleep. I played a lot of basketball. I was a kid, like eight hours a day. I had a big basketball day.

I went home. For some reason, I just fell asleep. So I woke up. I thought it was the morning. I thought I missed everything. I was panicked. I kept, like, I missed this part. I go, wow.

And I look at the clock. I only slept three hours. Okay, you ever do that? You go to bed and you feel like it's the morning. You don't know where you're at. So I got in the shower, took a shower, and I was just fresh as a daisy. So I started saying to myself, you know, why don't I try doing this all the time? I'll be saving a lot of, you know, I'm going to live a lot, many years.

So I started teaching myself how to get up. So I started doing it three hours, three hours, three hours. So to this day, I only sleep like three hours a night. So I believe my motto is you'll sleep when you die. You do realize that that is insane. Well, people say that, but, you know, it's, I mean, And I very rarely have gotten sick. I very rarely have slowed me down.

And I like to think it's been a big advantage for me because when other people are sleeping, I've been working. And literally, I know you are because I think this morning you texted me at like 3 a.m. Right? So you literally live this. I know you do. Third question is aliens. Are you a believer or a non-believer?

I find it hard to believe there's aliens. You think no. But you know what? I found it hard to believe a lot of things in life. I found a lot of things hard to believe these days. I never thought I'd see COVID. I never think I'd ever see what we've been through. I never thought I'd see the society where you want to defund police.

There's so much I believe in my lifetime I never see. But the older you get, the more you see. The more you see. So you can come down. I used to say during COVID, and I used to see some of the policies people have with taxes and what they want to do to the economy and some of these policymakers. I used to say, you know, if aliens came onto the beach of Miami Beach and started walking up the beach, it wouldn't shock me anymore.

I really was saying that in the middle of COVID when the world was getting really crazy. They got UFOs now. Yeah, yeah. So am I a believer? I find it hard to believe, but nothing shocks me anymore. I think that is a great way to look at life. is to be skeptical, yet understand that the world is a wild place and anything can happen.

All right, you can ask me one question to finish up. What do you got for me? Where is Bitcoin going to be a year to 18 months from now? Oh, I have no clue. Higher than it is today. That's the best answer I have for you. Over really, really long periods of time, for sure, there's lots of short-term price volatility, right?

So you get it goes up, it goes down, it goes sideways, it goes up, it goes down, to go south i mean just over and over and over and over again but i think when you look the longer the timeline the easier it is to say it's going to go up because of the structure of it that the kind of market structure uh but i think that we've got a quite a bit of room to run for this year and then uh we'll see what happens kind of going into next year and uh does it kind of go back into a bear market for a little bit or uh does it kind of level off nobody really knows i have one more question for you all right where will you be at age 40 at age 40 hopefully doing this with you again beautiful great answer all right where should we send people on the internet should

we send them to something about 11 something about you where you want to send them well you know my website's markroberts.com all right there's a great video on there i think people enjoy all right and marcroberts.com yes i think they enjoy that very much there's a lot of stuff about 11 and where we're going it's getting updated all the time but i think everybody uh that uh could afford it be very wise to buy in the 11 hotel and residences that were sold out of this one but you know we're we're going to be uh hopefully uh in the future having a lot of opportunity for people to jump on the 11 bandwagon and embrace the ip live it and uh we look forward to seeing at the club very soon i'm a believer keep going all right we'll do this again in the

future thanks look forward to it