This Week in Startups - Emergency Pod! Deconstructing the grift: Clubhouse coaching scams with Coffeezilla | E1178

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Check out Coffeezilla on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFQMnBA3CS502aghlcr0_aw FOLLOW Coffeezilla: https://twitter.com/coffeebreak_YT FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

This week in startups is brought to you by Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-R-O-WD.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. I am here with Stephen, Stefan. Stephen or Stefan? Steven's fine. Stephen from the most amazing YouTube channel that I love to watch. It's called CoffeeZilla.

CoffeeZillah. What an intro. And it is the most delightful YouTube channel because on it, Stephen goes and he finds these scumbags, these horrible human beings who try to con poor people who are desperate. This is true. To make a better life for their families, to provide for their families, and to excel, and maybe just move up in their station in life. Desperate people, without jobs, without money.

And these scumbags, these dregs of humanity, try to get that last thousand dollars, these grifters, these just horrible humans. specimens try to extract that last thousand dollars out of a poor person's bank account for coaching services. And these people have never accomplished anything in their lives. And they can't even spell or complete a thought. They have no track records. They have no reason to exist on this planet Earth, except to try to steal from the most vulnerable people who want help in the world. And for that, I am thrilled to have Coffee Zilla on this week in startups. And CoffeeZilla, I think, is having me on CoffeeZilla on YouTube.

So whatever you're watching you, this is my intro for my pod. Hey, hey, let me tell you this. Should we even do a podcast? You just gave the whole thing. That was a beautiful rant, Jason. I don't know if I could do a better job. I might just upload that rant to my channel and then just in the channel there. Unfortunately, I know that you have to keep calling these people

out because a new one crops up every day. That's the problem. It's like you call one out and then another guy with a rented Lambo comes online and they start promising the world to people. It's selling dreams. That's the business. Jason, run the people down with what's been going on. It's the new audio drop in app called Clubhouse and you've been taking these guys to task. But you're like a real angel investor and there's all the real deal. The guys who you, destroy just so deftly on your podcast, on your YouTube channel, the ones who you slice up, you're slicing them up, and I'm actually the real deal. I invest in companies, when they're just starting out, I never take any money from founders.

I wrote a book on Angel investing because I made a ton of money doing that, and it's 10 bucks or you can get it for free. I do teach, of course, Angel University. It's only for accredited investors, and we donate all the money to charity if there's any profits from it. God bless you, Jason. Wow. We did 100,000 in profits from that Angel University class.

And the reason I teach those classes is because I want to see more people back founders. So I am like in your world, you have like the Lex Luthers and the supervillains. Absolutely. Yeah. I am the man of steel. I am the dark night. Yes. I am the actual real deal who actually has succeeded and teaches a course.

but the course is $100 or $300 and basically it's essentially free when you think about it. And it's donated to charity. It's donated to charity because we just want to make sure that those incredible investors actually show up for the course, right?

So we charge them $100 or when we do it in person, I think we charged $500 and that included a $300 dinner afterwards. And literally we broke even on it, right? So anybody who's charging you $5,000 for a course or $10,000 for these courses, and there are nobodies who've never accomplished

anything, you have to really just type in their name, Ty Lopez, J.T. Fox, Brad, whatever that guy's name was. You know them better than me. Kevin, David. We can go down the list. And then just write review or scam. Yep.

At the end of their name, or better business bureau and just look at what people are saying. Oh, yeah. If you take the moment to do that, you'll find all these people, I think, in almost all those cases who say these people are scam artists who are trying to grift. They're grifters.

They're grifting on, unfortunately, the lowest economic ladder of society. Yes. And their goal is to take your money. If you don't know what it takes to be successful and you're trying to improve yourself, they'll come to you with polished up, with all the trappings of success. Unfortunately, we do live in like a visual world now where perception is reality. You don't need a background. All you need is a paid article in, you know, Yash.

Who news from PR wire or whatever. That's the scam, right? Oh, yeah. Fake stories using people don't know this, but there are PR wires. Basically a way to put a press release out, but you put the press release out. And these grifters all seem to have, I think we should deconstruct the grift. I think, I was thinking about how we could be the most helpful together. Because this is kind of like a super team right now.

It's like, you're like this Superman. I'm like this Batman. We could make the Justice League here. I kind of feel like this is a moment where we could both put our skills together to deconstruct for the audience how you're getting grifted. You know you're getting grifted, I think. One thing is when you see the Instagram and somebody like Ty Lopez or J.T. Fox, what they do is, I think the technique is this manipulation technique, this influence technique, is to put themselves

in proximity to other powerful people so they get the halo effect and then to share the trappings of wealth. So somebody like J.T. Fox has all these pictures of themselves. I noticed J.T. Fox had a picture of himself with Julia Roberts. With Mark Wahlberg. Mark Wahlberg. And then other people who I think you can pay them 50 grand or 25 grand, they'll show up for anything. Okay. You're so right, but can I tell you how right you are? Okay. Tell me how right I am. Let me tell you how this grift works in actual practice with a specific example. There's a man named Clint Arthur that I expose like about eight months ago to a year ago. Clint Arthur was a guy who basically ran these groups and he ran a fake Harvard speech event where he would go rent out a room in Harvard, sell out a bunch of tickets.

Everyone in the audience had bought a ticket to speak, but they're sitting in the audience as if people are showing up to watch. And one by one, they all go around the podium, speak at the podium, it's all recorded. And then all of them put it on their marketing material saying, I spoke at Harvard. Talk about proximity to credibility. Oh my Lord, it's such a perfect grip. Now when you put... Yes, you basically are co-opting Harvard.

Yeah. So they all go to Harvard and they spoke at Harvard. They were asked to speak at Harvard. You could say Harvard speaker. Yep. They got kicked out of Harvard. They moved to West Point. They got kicked out of there.

Now they were speaking... During COVID, they were speaking at the CNN Center. They went to the CNN. Center, obviously it's not approved, but they rent it out like the hotel room or whatever. It's a CNN banner in the background. The guy's making probably he cleared a million on sales of this event. Okay. So this is the technique.

People put themselves next to something that we all respect in the world. And they hope to get that credibility by association. This is the technique. So let's put this technique as credibility by association. but when you unpack it, you realize they have no affiliation. Now, compare and contrast this, I, as an angel investor, was so lucky to have invested in so many great companies that Stanford wrote a case study on my ability as an angel investor and networker.

They actually wrote a case study. So you can go to the Stanford Business School. There is a case study written about my career. This is how you are. manifested by one of these business schools. You either went to that school, you were a teacher at that school, or they wrote a case study on you. That's really the only way to be affiliated.

To be totally honest. But these folks have hacked it. Do you ever wish you invested early in some of the best performing IPOs of 2019 and 2020? Well, our crowd investors did invest early in many of those awesome IPOs. With our crowd, accredited investors can invest directly and easily in startups early before they IPO or get bought, R Crowd investors have benefited from companies IPOing like Beyond Meat and Lemonade. How about those returns, right?

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As with the Yahoo News thing, I also knew a guy who his dad was rich, so he paid this, like, he was from India. He paid a, like, Argentinian University, a bunch of money, and they gave him an honorary blockchain doctorate in blockchain. So he calls himself Dr. Evan Lutra. Oh, my Lord. And he was pitching himself as this successful investor. The other thing is, these guys are like 27.

I mean, a lot of them. There are some older ones, so it's not a perfect indicator. But a lot of them are like, hey, I'm a millionaire at 27. And you're like, how do you- Five- Figure, Nine-figure businesses. Okay, so we have the affiliation piece. The next piece is the lifestyle. So they take pictures of themselves with fast cars.

Oh, yeah. And so Ty Lopez, does he own all these cars? Or does he just take pictures in front of them? There's a lot of evidence that they're rented. It doesn't make much. sense for them to actually buy them outright because they're marketing material. They literally, they're just marketing. Got to people who think that wealth is a fast car, that wealth is not, you know, success

in a business. It's rather just like owning things like a, you really what you have to understand, Jason, something that I've realized after looking this stuff for over a year is that they know that most people aren't their target audience. They're only targeting people who are vulnerable, who are vulnerable, who I'm Either, there's kind of two types of people who get scammed. One, they're a first time scammed. So they haven't really been inoculated, you could say.

They don't have the germ in them. They haven't been sort of- antibodies. They haven't been burned. They haven't been burned. Fresh meat, naive people. Fresh meat. Number two, there are sort of repeat kind of,

there are people who get stuck in a cycle of this. And this is where it gets much darker, where I've talked to people who've lost $26,000, $30,000. I am talking to one person right now. The story's still evolving. The DOJ might be involved. He may have lost, and again, it's all alleged, $800,000. On coaching?

On materials? On one of these, on one of this, it's a scam, it's a confidence scam. And a lot of, at the heart of a lot of these things is a competent scam. So this was a Bitcoin thing. There's also, but it all revolves around the same cycle of, of like, I'm a success. I will make you successful. If you just trust me, if you put your trust in me, you put your money with me. Right. It's really interesting because what happened on Clubhouse and the way you and I became aware of each other was I was on Clubhouse, just answering questions.

I make my email address public, Jason at Calicatus. I'm Jason on Twitter. Twitter.com slash Jason. And I make myself available. Great Twitter account. It's okay. Yeah. Top tier. So I make myself available to any founder who wants to pitch me. I run free events like Founder University is free. 250 people come to it. It's free for founders. We do this because we want to meet founders so we can invest in their companies and we make money over 10 years investing in the companies. Now, we don't make money off of selling them, of course. Founder.d. University is free. We do that to get deal flow. We want to meet the next Uber or Robin Hood or Com or whatever it is. And we want to invest in the company and then be aligned with the founder. I saw these people,

J.T. Fox and this guy Brad, and I looked them up, and it turns out they're answering questions, they're coaching people. They might have been a little racist or, you know, in how they approached it. So this kid, JT, got suspended because people were complaining that he might have been a little racist. I wasn't there for that instance. But I just said, you know, this is a scam. I can tell. It's a grift. And I, because I type the names of the people. And this one guy, Brad, is doing MLM-CBD product. So multi-level marketing. of CDBD. So that's like ripping, that's ripping the fabric of the scam universe, CBD and MLM put together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, what else are we going to put in there coaching you on how to do CBD?

Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Start a CBD business. Just wait until you find out about the courses that are about how to sell a course. That'll really blow your mind. Well, I heard about this, that there was a, there was this woman, I think her name was Lauren in the room. And she, the reason I got kicked out of the room was they brought me up as a speaker because they know I'm notable. And she said, well, I'm charging, the way you do this is you charge $8,000, but then you discount it to four, you get people on the phone. You explain to them what, how are you going to hold them accountable? And I said, $4,000. I said, what qualifies you to charge $4,000 for coaching? And they kick me out of the room. But then they brought me back.

And then MC Hammer put me back on stage. And I said, listen, $4,000 is a scam. Like, if you're a coach, why don't you just charge $400 an hour? And if you do one hour and it really helped me, maybe in two weeks I'll pay you $400 again. Like, no, you got to get the $8,000 up front. You got to do it. So this is one of the ways in which you know if you're getting scammed. If you went to a therapist, a personal trainer, a tennis coach, a chess coach, whatever, would they demand you pay them $20,000 up front for 20 weeks? Or would they say, I charge $90 a tennis lesson or $300 to go to therapy or $150 for a life coach or whatever it is?

They would just charge you procession. But these people are not charging procession, are they, Stephen? No, no, no, no. It's the six-week, whatever course. And by the way, because they're all videotaped, it's free. It's like a lot. So there's a difference between courses and coaching, right? Coaching, you can justify a slightly higher price, but I agree.

It's like a per session thing. There's also courses that are being sold. The courses, there's literally a zero cost except customer acquisition, right, from ads. The reason they charge so much is because customer acquisition is so high because the scam market is so oversaturated with people promising dreams to people. But it's led to this weird thing where you're like learning the basics of like Facebook ad strategy. But you're paying $4,000 to do it. By the way, Stephen, all of that is available for free from Facebook and Twitter. They have their own YouTube videos and they are the people who are. Jason, they're educating you because

they want you to use their property. It's the secret to Facebook, wild riches on Facebook. You don't want to just learn Facebook. Do you? You want to learn the proven blueprint to success from a nine figure earner. By the way, had they become a nine figure earner, they sold a course. That's the funny thing is a lot of these guys, they're earning things that they say. They're like seven figure earner, eight figure earner. You just go on clubhouse, tap on a bio. They're making, they're claiming the sales from the course as how they're legit as an entrepreneur. So here's what I realized. They had these bios. I'm just going to read you one of them. I don't know who Ashganadahari is, but eight-figure coaching business and then you start reading these and they all have eight-figure, seven-figure, nine figure,

and they have these giant long bios about how they have many businesses. So the way I busted them was I said to this guy Brad Hager, H-A-G-E-R, because somebody said Google him, it's a scam, and I googled him and he had all these complaints, you know, and people saying he had scam the amount of money. And I realized he has this MLM. So he's on Clubhouse, talking and giving business advice. And then I think what they're doing is this is their funnel, Stephen, to get you into an MLM course, where to get you to join their MLM scam. So I said to him, you have 47 businesses that are seven, eight, nine figures. Tell me the name of the most successful one so I can Google it and do a little research. And maybe there's a New York Times story about it or a profile.

No. No. No. No. They couldn't name one of their businesses. No, no, no, no. So then I have, you know, I have tens of thousands of followers on Clubhouse and hundreds of thousands on Twitter. I said, hey, everybody. And I just named my room, is J.T. Fox in this coaching room a scam? Question mark. Just, is it a scam? So all these people came into and they started explaining to me the scam. And then they started bringing you up and pointing out your videos.

And I was like, oh, my God, this is like a really, this is going on everywhere. Oh, it's not like one person or two people. There's hundreds of people involved in this script. So when I tweeted it, this one kid, Mario. No fall. You know this kid? Okay, so I have had these weird email exchanges with Mario for a while. He's constantly been trying to email me telling me like, bring me on, da-da-da-da-da.

I'm like-me too. What I did was I told people, if you think that room is a scam, there is a report feature. And we can all go, if we all believe this, and report these people for using Clubhouse for some sort of, you know, affiliate scamming. So everybody reported them. They all got banned. So now he blames me for his banning. And he's obsessing about me. He's emailing me multiple times a day.

Not only does he blame you. He started a change petition. A change petition, guys, where, did you not hear about this? You heard about this, surely. Somebody told me that there's a change.org that I'm bullying him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a change. org that stop the cyberbullying.

Okay, Jason. For bullying. Just because I did a Google search on your name. Social, stop social media bullying. bring Mario Nafal back on Clubhouse. He's saying that you accused him of being a scammer, and Jason asked his followers to mass report Mario. I didn't ask, just to be clear,

I didn't ask anybody to mass report him. I said, anybody in this room who you think is a scammer, if you want to report him, here's the report to, I'm going to go report JT and this. But it is kind of an epidemic, and I think it's going to be a problem. Like, the thing is, is that you really gain a reputation

if your platform is hosting all these, scams and stuff. Yeah, I did let them know the folks over at Clubhouse. Like, you probably want to be aware of this. So they're aware of it. They're now training people on how to run clubhouses, I guess. So, I mean, I think we have to pause here for a minute and say, is training okay? And then at what point does training become predatory? Right. Because a book is training, but a book is $10. Correct. And a course, like we all went, many people went to college or taking courses, Of course, that's a couple of hundred dollars for a couple of weeks. That sounds reasonable, right?

Yep. So when do, in your mind, does it tip over into being a grift or a scam or unreasonable? Well, first you have to think about R.O.Y. And then you think about like, what is the replacement value of this thing, of this? So it's like, first of all, you have the R.O.i of anything. So the reason that, like, a $10 book is not a scam is because, yes, most books won't change people's lives. But it's $10. $10. It's $10 and the promises are pretty banal. I mean, it's just like, hey, this is a book about business. It's a book about business. Right. Sure. You're selling a course at college, especially with the price is being now what it is, a question about ROI is reasonable, right? Sure. So you can look at average, you know, how somebody from college performed versus their counterpart, right? And we still say college is still worth it, depending on what you do. Obviously, there are definitely edge cases where this is becoming way less credible. But,

When you talk about courses, you're getting a certificate that no business on earth would value. So what action are you getting? You must be getting some kind of knowledge. Is that knowledge fungible somewhere that is free? In almost all cases, the answer is absolutely. Not only is it free. It's better. It's so much better.

These courses, you should see behind the paywall. It's so bad because it can be bad. Because at the end of the day, what's someone who just spent their last $3,000 going to do to you? Are they going to come after you? So they can't sue you. They're powerless. And they feel shame. I know.

They feel shame, right? Because they got suckered. So they don't actually take action because they don't want people to think that they were stupid enough to give $8,000 in coaching fees to one of these scumbags. One of these guys, and he's threatened me legally multiple times. He's up in Canada, if that gives any hints to some of my followers. who this is. He sued a single mother who quit her teaching job because she was trying to take care of her depressed son. Hold on. Hold on. It gets worse. She was helping people in the Facebook group of scam victims for this guy help them get a refund. This guy sued her to stop her from doing it,

knowing that she's a single mom, all because he wants to make more money. I mean, the level of like sort of predatory sociopath we're dealing with is almost hard to. overstayed. In fact, one of those guys that went to that Harvard thing that I was telling you about was this guy, Jason Bond. He's now being prosecuted by the FTC. His site has been basically shut down, ragingbool.com. If you go there, there's an like an injunction on the website. But my point is that it's not like these guys are making really a lot of money, really fast, but they're cropping up from nowhere. They're the shadiest characters. They have no backstory, no real background besides they took a Russell Brunson course and learned how to set up a ClickFunnels account.

So just for people who haven't been on Clubhouse in the last 30 days, two months, three months, basically they run these rooms where they start talking. And I don't know what you describe it as. I think it's kind of reminds me like it's just kind of a giant circle jerk of like people talking about how great they are as coaches and saying like, sure. If you need help, go ping me real quick. I'll, I'll do this or that for. you or whatever, that's the top of the lead funnel and then they try to upsell you into their coaching program or course. Now, do you want to know how much money these people are making? I don't know if you have like an idea. I got to think they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars off of these courses. Please tell me it's not millions. Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. So, so,

so one one group, I got a hold of their, uh, the employees started coming to me, like literally coming to me with like they were so upset. This company in particular had a $20,000 or roughly $20,000 product and they were encouraging people. They said, if they don't have money, send them to this, send them to get a personal loan. They had partnered with a personal loan. They got kickbacks on the personal loans. And then they go, tell them they need to sign up for the most expensive one because that's really going to help them out. Okay. So I got these people's sales numbers, like sort of the worst of the worst. Anyway, they were making $4 million that month. I've read it.

Wow. So that's why they're able to spend all this money on advertising. Correct. That's why you can't escape them. Yes, they're everywhere. And so it's obviously when people are running these kind of grifts. If it wasn't working, they wouldn't be running them, right? They're grifters.

They would find some other grift. Can I ask you something? Because I feel like I'm going to really piss you off with this one. Have you ever heard of the Angels and Entrepreneurs Summit? I did. They basically took my book and my investment in Uber, which was one of the legendary investments, and they kind of crafted their whole angel investor summit. It was with one of the sharks and Neil Patel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a disgusting scam. They basically are- I was worried you were going to be like, yeah, this is real legit. I was like, please don't say that. This is super disgusting, and they basically cribbed a lot of what I do and use that language. So, you know, I'm famous for making this crazy and, you know, Uber investment, you know, that paid off thousands to one, right?

And I got very lucky in that regard to hit that. But it does happen in Silicon Valley every, you know, five to 10 years. You hit one of the outlier companies, Google, Facebook, Airbnb. Right. That's why you're investing. Yeah. That's what I do what I do. Right.

You're hoping that you hit one in a thousand. Well, I've hit that a couple of times. It's very hard to do, but it is possible. So I wrote a book about that with Harper Collins business. The number one business publisher in the world paid me a lot of money to write that book. It's been translated into seven languages. is the book is $10. I explain to you everything I've learned.

I hope you buy it or I hope you get it for free. I hope somebody passes it on to you and you get it from the library and you get all that value for $10. Because I don't need money from founders or the public. I make a lot of money as an angel investor. You cannot. There's no amount of money that individuals could pay me that could ever match an investment in Robin Hood or Uber or Com. I mean, does that make sense? Of course it makes sense.

No, no, this is what I'm telling my audience. This is what I've been telling my audience is that if they had a better way to make money, they would just do that. They're doing what they do. They're praying on desperate people because they can't actually do what they say they can do. All these penny stock traders, they can't really trade. That's why they sell it. All these. I mean, it's so trite.

It's like the saying like those who can't do, teach. But now it's those who can't do charge $2,000 for a course and then claim to be like, the number one guy in the world. I think I've been watching a bunch of trading funnels recently. I've heard top trader in the world probably 10 times in 10 funnels. And it's like, you can't say that. Well, I guess you can't. But it's a lot, of course.

Well, and I run something called the Angel Summit. And the Angel Launch is the name of my investment front, launch. And we do the launch Angel Summit. So this scumbag, Neil Patel, who I know, because he used to be around the industry, has never made any angel investments I know of. I've never seen him on a cap table. He is, I think, turned into a bit of a grifter. And I can tell you, he's not talented.

And he's kind of laughed at in our industry as like one of these affiliate kids who does this like crazy affiliate summer. Didn't he also copy a lot of stuff? Like, I think he was caught like plagiarizing several times. He's plagiarized me a million times, I think, just in this effort. And then they did that thing where they hire the sharks. So the sharks from Shark Tank, Mark Kuhman excluded because he's actually rich. He's actually rich, yeah.

But I think the other sharks are not actually rich. And he had the one guy do these videos on a yacht. Did you see those? Oh, yeah. And I can tell you Neil Patel is not rich and doesn't own a yacht. But they can rent a yacht. But they rented a yacht. Everything can be rented.

Which shark did he have on this? Robert Hurchivik. Okay. So I don't know Robert. He seems like a nice guy. But Damien and Robert seem to do any paid speaking gig that you give them. And if you give them $50,000, they'll stand next to you. And then what these scumbags do and these courses and stuff is they take them, they give them $50,000.

Then you as an unsuspecting person says, oh, they're from Shark Tank. They're billionaires. Well, they're not billionaires or else they wouldn't need the $50,000 speaking gig. Can I make it worse? So, not only that, they ran, Robert ran real estate. seminar gig, which that's a gigantic scam industry, where it said like, oh, you're going to meet this guy, blah, blah, blah. And then he wasn't actually at these events.

And it's a boiler room where basically they're just trying to sell you on these like $20,000 seminars. Okay, that's him. Damon John is connected to Raging Bull, who remember the FTC guy? Oh, yeah. He had a video endorsing that guy. Because of course, like you said, $50,000. They'll do anything.

I don't think he's ever said anything about that, except to basically, block people who talk to him about it. Then, Damon John also got on a thing with Grant Cardone and told people. I saw your video of that where they said, take the last thousand dollars. We've got to play it for people because they won't believe it. They will not believe this. They're like, if this person has only $1,000 left and it's Christmas, what do you tell them? Damon John says, I tell them to buy it. Buy the course for a thousand. And Grant Cardone goes, kids get no Christmas presents. No Christmas for family. Grant Cardone goes, me too. I would tell them the same thing. That's who we're doing.

with folks. That's who we're dealing with. And you caught them editing their video and editing out the Christmas part. So even these scumbags have a limit, right? I have no idea what possesses you to do this. But my God. I got pissed off. I saw these guys and I got so angry that they set me on this year-long quest. I literally thought it would take me a week to call all these guys out. And then you just find yourself peering down the rabbit hole. You're like, wait, what is this? Why would they be on a rented yacht? Why would they be selling schlocky courses? Or are they just, that desperate for an incremental 50k. Doesn't make any sense.

They're making a lot of money with this. Grant Cardone says he makes the money here and then he plows it into real estate. So it's like, this is the, this is cash flow. And then, oh, I can make my, I can then invest it into like real things and then launder my reputation.

I call it reputation laundering because they're taking money by ways that most people would consider scummy or scummy or distasteful. And then they plow it into things that most people would consider legit like Ty Lopez is in the process of trying to do this and I'm not going to let him he's investing in peer one right he's doing a bunch of like he bought a bunch of old brands for nothing right

yeah yeah yeah okay so anyway here's the clip a guy's sitting there right now watching this and I'm got my last grand dude and I got Christmas coming shouldn't you spend it on this absolutely I'll tell you the same thing they literally would take the last thousand dollars out of mom's purse oh yeah out of dad's wallet oh yeah take it take that last thousand the kids get no presents, coal in their stockings. Don't pay the heat bill. Just take your last thousand and give it to Grant Cardone? I guess what you get for that?

You get a course or a book, an e-book? I don't know. You get Damon John's e-book. You get Damoned on demand, which is like his stupid course or whatever. And then you get a growth, 10x growth con. Guess what that is, Jason? It's a pitch for more stuff. So you're going to go there broke.

And then they're going to go, hey, you got a credit card? You got it. Hey, hey, can you swipe? This is, this is actually a famous tactic where in the back of the room, hey, nobody's watching. Maybe we'll call the bank with you. Maybe we'll, you know, there's a lot of people who do this. Actually, this nudge, anyway, I know so much about this stuff. I don't want to go too much, like, is the little inside baseball.

Dean Graziosi is another one of these guys also got added to an FTC lawsuit because he was charging people, this nudge, like, thing, seminar group was charging people and getting them in debt in the back of the room. So they first make people grow. They get you to come to a free seminar. Then they get you to do $100. Then they get you to do $600. Then they get you to $6,000, right? It's like they're boiling the frog.

Oh, yeah. And you just go, people, I mean, does Tony Robbins fall into this category? Because there are people who I know who go to Tony Robbins seminar. it's a week, it's $5,000, which that's in our industry, a tech conference. That might be what a tech conference calls, but then they pay 10K where they do personal consulting. It seems like a lot of these folks kind of took the Tony Robbins archetype, and then they're kind of rebuilding it as like cheap Tony Robbins.

Yeah. Cheap versions, like a poor, is Ty Lopez and they're sort of poor man Tony Robbins. Yeah, but what I can tell you is that like I recently, So I do this thing now where I used to just analyze the marketing, but now I'm also like some of these guys, I'll go through their course and then I'll also talk about what's in the course. So I have the knowledge business blueprint, which is Tony Robbins new course, right? He sells it for I think $2,000 somewhere in that range. Anyways, so during one of the little modules, he's talking about, you know, selling your business, selling your knowledge. So he's teaching you maybe how to sell a course.

Okay. So he's teaching you this. They talk about how many people they have in the program, Jason. They have something like, I forget blanking on the number. I think it's like 13,000 people or 20,000 people. You come to find out that they've made tens of millions of dollars off an online course that costs them after production, zero dollars. Wow.

besides customer acquisition to make. So the question is, why wouldn't Tony just put it out on his website? Listen, I also don't really have that big of a problem with like, you want to go hear the hoo-rah-rah. There might be some value in that. But what's the value in like spending $2,000 to make Tony richer and to make Dean Graziosi richer versus, oh, maybe we should just like give this knowledge out for free because we're trying to help people, right?

And the people who look up to us, like, yeah, some of them are successful, but a lot of them are like in desperate straits who resonate with Tony's life story of being like broke and destitute. So why not just release the information or like you? Maybe say 100 bucks just to maybe get some commitment, but then like give it to charity. Why $2,000? That's what I can't figure out. I mean, I've done my podcast this week in startups for 1,100 episodes.

It's free. I interview the greatest investors and entrepreneurs in the world. If you were to watch but 10% or 20% of them for free, you would get a lot more than these fake entrepreneurs regurgitating what my guests on my podcast talk about. And all that knowledge is out there for free in podcasts, in audiobooks and in books in your library, you don't even have to pay for it. So just buy the business books and read them and watch business podcasts. I mean, these losers have no knowledge.

They have no knowledge. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. This is a knowledge broker blueprint, right? They break it up and they'll do installments for you. Wow.

And of course they raise the, they raise the price of the installments. Of course. Because, you know, they want to make sure they get the money out of you. Yeah. They're scumns. 594, four monthly payments.

Just so. Because it also tells you who their audience is, right? Because if they're dealing with big players, they would like payment plan. Right. So who are they actually targeting? Who's actually the, this $2,000 course.

Four. They're not targeting somebody who's an accredited investor. Accredited investors make $200,000 a year or more. Those are the only people I really work with as co-investors are accredited. We don't work with civilians, as we call them. It's not meant to be derogatory, but the civilian crowd that's learning, we have free stuff for them. Watch the podcast, read the books. They're all basically free or close to free, right?

$10 for a book is essentially free. I mean, you pay more for, you know, lunch. So I think that's overall, I think we've broken down how you know if you're getting scammed. Is this more than the return on investment test? Can you get this information from a more credible person who actually has business success? And what are they charging for the same information? Free. Or their book, Bob Eiger's book, you know, Mike Ovitz's book, good to great, all the Jim Collins books, crossing the chasm.

There's plenty of books out there. And there's all these tactical books, too, that you can get just on any of these tactical things. And the tactical books are 20 bucks, 10 bucks. They shouldn't be 2,000. You shouldn't add 2 zeros. You should take 2 zeros off. So it's basically a scam. Then if they're trying to upsell you on stuff constantly, you're getting scammed.

And if they don't let you pay as you go for a coaching, then it's a scam, I think, as well. Right. Like if it's a buy-in to like you have to do 12, whatever. I think that is the good indication that you're being scammed. There's another thing now they're doing, which is an action-based refund. which is a way they get a lot of people out. So they go, I have a 30-day money-back guarantee. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is insider baseball for all the people who are wondering, should I buy this, right? They go, I have a 60-day money-back guarantee. That's what they'll tell you. Then you go to their refund policy, and they won't say this in the webinar where they sell you on it. They'll go, oh, actually, to make sure that you try, we need you to watch 40% of the modules, Jason, and we need you to submit two help requests, and we need you to contact 20 businesses in order to get a refund. By the way, you didn't know that's going in. But if you

actually, actually, if you watch 80% of the course or more, you can't get a refund. So you need that Goldilocks zone. You need the Goldilocks zone of you've tried, but you haven't tried hard enough in order to get a refund. And what this ends up doing is people get a refund on day 29, not knowing that they were supposed to jump through all these hoops. And these guys go, oh, yeah, well, it's an easy 30 day refund, but you forgot to jump through the hoax. hoops. Eventually, these guys, they either get sued, they get sued by the Federal Trade Commission, they have so many victims that, like, people just, they cannot keep it out, out of the woodwork yet, or keep it basically suppressed. But it's surprising how long the life cycle is. I got to admit,

that is one of the disappointing things is how long the life cycle. They could just keep going, right? Yeah, a lot of them. I mean, do you know the story of like, so all these guys believe in ideology? So that's important to understand. And a lot of it's informed by Napoleon Hill. Do you know who this guy is? Think and grow rich? Okay. So it's their Bible.

Of all these guys, think and grow rich is their Bible. I've heard think and grow rich. So he was a huckster who said that he met with Andrew Carnegie and learned all his secrets. Andrew Carnegie apparently said, you're the only guy who can go ahead and teach all my secrets, right? This book is like one of the best selling books of all time. Yeah, of course. It never happened though. There's no proof.

And when pressed on this, he goes, oh, I had all the correspondence with this guy, but it burned up in a fire. Among the other lies that Napoleon Hill propagated was that he was the one who wrote the famous words for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. He said that he was part of the armistice. Like he's a famous liar. But he whitewashed his reputation.

And all of these guys think of him as like, the guy to listen to because what his whole thing is is basically the secret. You can, it's not about, it's not about experience. It's not about innovation. It's about attracting wealth. It's about a burning desire towards wealth. Jason, as a real investor, you know that that's bullshit, right? Right.

Real, real, the real path, the wealth is like grit. It's hard work. It's luck. Reservient. It's creating stuff. I mean, yeah, it's creating stuff. There really are three people in the world who make a lot of money. number one is capital allocators, people who actually invest money into companies because you get

what's called carry. You get a percentage of the profits. So anybody who is directing pools of capital of where to invest it, capital allocators, it's a legitimate job, whether you're venture capital, capital, private equity, hedge fund, etc. So capital allocators is one. Then there's entrepreneurs. I was an entrepreneur turned capital allocator. Entrepreneurs create a business.

You get the equity in that business. Eventually the business gets bought or it goes public and you, or it has profit. And then there's a third group which are just people who are virtuosos at something, whether it's LeBron James with a basketball, you know, Britney Spears with pop music or a chef like Gordon Ramsey, somebody who is just so good at their field. Now, those people can also, the virtuosos, have become capital allocators where LeBron James invested incom. Yep, as but one example. Or you might have somebody like Gordon Ramsey start businesses, right? So you do have this interchange of those three things. But there is nowhere in this capital allocator. There's no magical thinking about like,

no. You think about rich. Well, anyway, that's what they all believe. But it's funny to me because when you realize that the source of like this like pseudo guru thing, and by like he's the guy who like supposedly invented the idea of the master class. And that's why they all are talking about their masterclass. You're going to join my masterclass, this and that. Of course, masterclass by itself is not a bad word by any means. But this is the kind of thing that they go into. They're like, oh, oh, this is where the idea of like, you need to basically attract wealth to yourself, think it you will do it. It's also why they think that victims deserve their victimhood because they didn't attract

it to them. They attracted it to themselves. They go, well, I thought it and I did it, right? Because I sold a course. They must be bringing it upon themselves. They deserve it. But I wanted to add one thing. I don't have a problem with courses that qualify.

I think that's really important. Or coaches that qualify their prospects. If you say, I want to run a high ticket coaching thing, and you qualify your prospects to people who have money, I don't have an issue. If you qualify to people who they're not going to be materially injured by the fact that they invest in your thing, I am not bothered at all by that. I am not going to make a crusade at taking those guys down. No.

I think the crusade of protecting people who are naive or who don't have the money for these things is why I think what you're doing is just so important and awesome. I'm wondering if we can find the victims. This is my proposal to you. Can we, you and I, form a super team, the Justice League, and we go after the Legion of Doom Scammers, and we find the victims, and we interview the victims of this, and we get the, maybe they want to be like behind a, you know, silhouette and a change their voices. But if we could actually hear from the victims of these scams, how they actually work the underbelly,

that's, have you ever, ever gotten one of them on camera to interview? Because I'm getting them, DMing me. It's one of my most viral videos is a Dan Locke video of this teacher who quit his job, sunk 26K into this,

into Dan Lock's course. And it describes a cycle of the upsell, because first it's high ticket closer. Then it's, that's not enough. I'm not making any money. I thought I was making money. So I'm going to join closers in black.

Then, okay, wait, wait, closures in black isn't making any money. Maybe I should go join a high ticket millionaire or whatever. He's got like a million upsells, right? Because it's all about getting people keep buying in, buying in. You need that back in. So it describes the process of this victim, and I call him a victim because he literally was out 26K.

He thought he was bad off before as a teacher. Then he was without a job out of 26K. So you do this and these are really powerful interviews. I've talked to a family whose son committed suicide after, seriously, after he was a soldier who came home, was looking for a second, you know, career. And he got into this real estate thing where this guy was, what's his name? That's the worst, man. Somebody went to war to protect our country.

They did this incredible service. And then they get targeted. just like, you know, some of those online universities were targeting them with the GI Bill, where they could, you know, get some money for education, then they taught them some IT thing, you know, over the web and they never really got qualified. Now they're in debt. It's, you know, the thing that really discussed me about all of this is it's so easy to build businesses in the world in the United States.

There's so many opportunities out there to do legitimate business. And that these deranged scumbags can't just build a normal business. They have to go prey on people. I think they get some sadistic pleasure out of taking somebody's last $10,000. I actually think that they're like either, I would say drug dealers are probably more compassionate in that they don't want their folks to go bankrupt, right? Because that would be bad for a business. But I think that this group of people love the idea of somebody giving them their last

thousand dollars as we heard in that video. Like they live for this. I think they secretly enjoy destroying people and taking their last bits of money. So I can tell you this. I mean, as much as I love that narrative, I really believe, I come to believe over time, because at first I didn't believe it. I could not believe that any of these guys could believe they were creating value in the world because of what was so easily demonstrably true.

And you just have to talk to any of their victims. right. A lot of these guys have, especially at sort of the middle of the pyramid, have sort of been duped themselves. So it's like, you think of an MLM, right? So you think of an MLMs, there's people at the bottom and they've been scammed. But then like, as you go into the middle, it's kind of harder to determine, wait, they're making money, but they also themselves are like kind of suckered in, but they're like hurting people on their way sort of to the top. I do think there are some people who have definitely sort of made their deal with the devil where they're like, look, I'm making a lot of money at this. I'm not going to change the way I'm doing business, even though I know it's unethical.

I think there are a lot of people, and that's why I make these victim stories. I try to get them as public as I can is because I want to show these people who they're hurting because what they don't do, they always pin their best testimonials. They always pin their winners. But for every winner, there's 99 losers. And when you're charging $2,000, that's an insignificant amount of money to a lot, or a significant amount of money to a lot of people. And so that's what I tried to shine a light on is because I think a lot of these people are dumb. They're making a lot of money for the first time

and they have every incentive to ignore the incredible amount of harm they're doing to people. So that would be my take. But that's just, you know, my perspective. I find it so enthralling how embarrassing they are. Like, they don't know, like, how cheesy and horrible they look. It's just unbelievable.

I mean, on top of all of it, like I could watch a J.T. Fox embarrassing video every day. It feels like almost he's an SNL character. Like, they don't seem real to me. Ty Lopez doesn't seem like, do they know that they're like coming across as like, as cheesy as Tony Robbins is? they're coming across as like a hundred times more corny.

No, they're corny, right? No, no, yeah, of course they're corny. But they're self-selecting for people who believe in them, right? So it's like, I think before you know how much money they're making, like, most people write them off and so they never pay attention to them again. And so they just self-select for people who are like sort of like, they don't know any better and they're just like trying to make a few bucks. And they see these guys and they see like a superhero who's come down from heaven to save them because they think like, oh, this guy's a huge success. he's going to save me, blah, blah, blah. So actually, I think these guys are in an echo chamber and insulated from what real people think of them.

That's why I really wanted to have you on was like, for a lot of reasons, I think you have a lot of insight, but also because I wanted a real investor to laugh at these people, to laugh at them and call them for the clowns they are. There's some collaboration here that I want to talk to when we're not on air. sure that I think we could take down the whole lot of them I have a plan that is so entertaining and brilliant that I think we could literally take the whole industry down like just boof at once let's do it jason i'm ready to go i'm ready to go whatever you are we have to cut here and then post conversation yeah yeah all right thanks for having uh me on your show and thanks for coming on my show. Yeah, great having you, Jason.