#139 - The Rise of "Clout" Kitchens, Why Martin Shkreli is a Rockstar, and a $100m Acquisition
You know what I've decided I wanted to do, I think, So like, I've been like obsessing over the future. Like, what's like, how are people gonna live in the future? And I think I'm gonna try and purchase an apartment in a cool part of New York that is currently not COVID awesome. Like that is not wonderful during COVID So—
Buy the dip.
Yeah, and the reason why is I really think that, I think that for a lot of people, this whole like 5— I don't think that after I did the nomadic thing for a while, it was hard. That was hard. But I do think that like there's a world where people are going to do like 6 months, 6 months. Do you agree with that?
Yeah, my ideal— I started this a few years ago and then we just paused with the baby. But like, I would do about a month and a half in a different country altogether, just living somewhere. So for example, we would live in San Francisco for 11 months or, you know, 10 and a half months. And then we went down to Buenos Aires and we lived in Argentina Argentina for over a month. And we just like got an apartment, just bought groceries. It wasn't like a vacation. It was a vacation, but it wasn't at the same time. That felt awesome to me. I hope I can pull that off with kids. I know it just gets, life just, you know, I feel it now where I'm just like, eh, it's just easier to stay home. Like, let's just not go and do the things. It's just a lot easier. But I think that's cool. And I think whether it's 6 months, 6 months, or 9 months, 3 months, I think that's a, that's a cool luxury to have, to be able to do something like that.
I think we're gonna do like a, like an 8/4, 9/3 thing. Because I got family in New York. And I think like, it's still expensive. You can get an apartment in New York though, for like 1/3.
And that's, that's a lot of money buying it. You should just, if you're just gonna go there for 3 months, you should just Airbnb it. Oh, you want to rent it the rest of the year?
Yes, that's what I want to do.
Hard to rent something for 9 months out of the year though.
I'm doing research and I, I, I'm not sure if it, if it isn't. So if so, what I— or I, or I could buy a 3-unit building. So our friend Ryan Beagleman is Airbnb— he bought this really nice house in Williamsburg. Have you seen it? Like, Ryan's like into architecture and he spent a lot of money on this great place and he's now in Miami or Delaware. He's all over the place and he, um, He's Airbnb-ing his place for $30,000 a month. He's making off of it. Gross, not profit.
What's the payment though, right?
Like, ah, I don't want to get into his business too much, but he bought it up front. He doesn't have a mortgage, so he only pays taxes. But I do think that what I think, what I'm going to try and do is I want to try and live breakeven while getting equity in these homes. I think I could pull that off right now. Yeah.
I think. You know, the rules change pretty frequently though. Like, so for example, when we bought our place in San Francisco, I was like, oh, this is great. We'll do this. And then if I leave, we could just like Airbnb it. But like, San Francisco was like, oh, Airbnb can only be done under these specific conditions. You must live in the unit. You must not do more than 90 days out of the year. It's like, dude, 90 days out of the year? So now let's say I was trying to do the thing you're doing, right? 8 and 4 or whatever. I can't do the 8 months. I can't Airbnb the 8 months. That means I need a long-term lease. How How am I going to find a long-term lease for 8 or 9 months? That's where it gets tricky if you're depending on Airbnb.
But here's where things are a little bit unfair, which is I've got a huge Twitter following, so do you. We have a podcast. We could say like, hey, who wants to rent our place? So I think that we could find someone to rent our place at a fair price for 10 months out of the year. I think it's possible. And I think that the reason why I'm pretty confident—
Sorry, go ahead.
The reason I'm bringing this up on this podcast is I think that this is going to be a normal trend of youngish affluent, uh, yuppie white-collar workers doing 3, 3, 3, you know, whatever.
I just think you're better off just renting and just investing your money elsewhere. Like, why even buy the home? Who cares about the home? Who cares about trying to rent it out and dealing with the tenant and dealing with maintenance? Like, fuck it, just rent one place for 9 months and then rent another place for 3 months and then hop around to the next one for 6 months. Just rent and put all that other money into stock market or Bitcoin or whatever the hell else you want. That's what I think you should do.
I think that could be a great solution. I would only do it— so if I'm going to do it to make money, I would have to find the right deal. If I would do it not to make— if I would do it just because I want to make me happy, then I don't really care if it's going to make money or not.
I'm also just— I think in general, it's best to split. I don't like to dual purpose making money with enjoyment because I tend to find some middle ground. I'm like, oh, I would like to live in this place and it's only okay It's only okay as an investment versus like, oh, this place is a dump, I could buy this and rent it out for hire and, you know, maybe do some maintenance on it or whatever. That might be a great investment, no enjoyment. And so like, personally, I've found that my best investments are ones that I don't try to mix business with pleasure. But I don't know, I mean, there's no right answer here.
Okay, well, you want to get into it? You want to talk about our boyfriend Martin Shkreli? Do you want to talk? Oh, I know, let's talk about this. Let's talk about the penny hoarder. You know, The Penny Hoarder?
You've talked to me about The Penny Hoarder before, but tell me what you wanna talk about.
I wanna, okay, they got acquired today for $105 million in cash.
Okay, explain what The Penny Hoarder is.
Okay, it's thepennyhoarder.com. I know about it because I'm in digital media. The founder Kyle came and spoke at HustleCon, so I got to know him a little bit there. He's a wonderful guy. He started it as a finance blog where basically he was like a poor 20-year-old and he was doing like TaskRabbit and Uber driving and all types of odd jobs in order to make ends meet while he was in college because he came from a low-income household. He would blog about it. Eventually, this is his origin story. I don't know if it's true. He was like, "Oh, wow. Uber will pay me $2,000 for every person I refer to them. I'm going to write a little bit more about this and put more affiliate links." That's what he did. I'm going to explain the sophistication behind this. To dumb it down, it scaled in 8 years to $50 million in sales. Now, that's cool and all, but let me show you like what's actually interesting about this. And note, without— this isn't a slight towards them, but I think it's kind of a— I hate this. I like this business model, but I personally wouldn't want to do it. But basically what it is, is it's a blog that gets a bunch of really free, like free traffic by writing about personal finance topics. But they make all their money through affiliate links. So basically, it's a performance marketing company that has a blog. And so the way it works is, is if you Google, or they write a blog that says, here's the 10 best ways to save money online, and it's like 10 different coupon sites, or here's the, uh, signing up for Uber is more profitable than ever, here's how much you can make in a year, and it's an article about that. At the very bottom, it says sign up now to become an Uber driver and they get $2,000. But what Kyle and the Penny Hoarder team did is they made this incredibly sophisticated algorithm or a sophisticated website. So they rearranged the article to make sure that the most amount of people are clicking the credit card offer or the Uber driver offer or the coupon, like the Honey coupon clipper. And it's quite interesting and it works so well that this large publicly traded company called Fluent, made— they poached one of the Penny Hoarder's employees and they just duplicated it and ran ads on Facebook and did this whole arbitrage machine. And the Penny Hoarder sued this company and it was all public. It's pretty crazy. But anyway, that's how this business model works, is they found an offer and then they create new content marketing and they do performance marketing to drive— they get hopefully nickel clicks from Facebook and $2,000 signups and hopefully the math works out that they're able to make profits.
And I think only 50 employees or 60 employees.
Yeah, that's pretty cool. No, no, no, so it says 2018, they pledged to create 165 positions this year in exchange for— It didn't work out. Okay.
They laid off, it didn't work out. In 2019, they laid off everyone.
Oh, okay.
Something happened. I don't know what happened, but it didn't work. Anyway, interesting company about how you can turn a blog into a $50 million business. And maybe a lot of our listeners don't know who this company is because it's more like a middle America mom type of website. But hey, kind of cool.
Yeah, okay, that's cool. I don't have much to add, but I like knowing about that. That's interesting. All right, let's do, okay. Callback to an episode we did with Stu Iverson. So he came on as a pinch hitter for you. You were out with something, I don't know, you were sick or something like that. And you were like, hey, um, this guy Stu, who's my friend, or he like works in my office or something like that, I don't know who he was. He's like, this guy's here today. And I was like, okay, uh, I'll talk to this guy on the podcast.
And so he's great, he's great, by the way.
And he came on and he had a fantastic episode. And one of the ideas that he had talked about— now this is, I don't know, 6+ months ago He came on and he goes, "All right, here's my idea. Clout Kitchens." And I was like, "Oh, Cloud Kitchens." He goes, "No, no, no, not cloud, clout. Clout as in like an influencer has clout." And I was like, "Oh, what do you mean?" And he's like, "Well, you know how like in the regular world you have, you know, Bobby Flay has his burger joint, Bobby's Burgers or whatever, and you have Wolfgang Puck or whatever, these like kind of celebrity chefs or celeb or, you know, Margaritaville." And he's like, you know, these celebrities create their own restaurant chains. I think people are gonna do this as cloud kitchens on top of Uber Eats, DoorDash, et cetera. So I thought it was a great idea. I put it in my newsletter, 'cause I started ranking in my newsletter some of our best ideas, right? Because I went back through, I was like, dude, we spit out like hundreds of ideas over the course of the year. What are like the 20 ones that I actually think are good ones? And let me put those into my email list. If you just go to like seanperry.com, there's an email newsletter and I put in there like, here's one of my favorite ideas from the pod. The first or second idea I put on that list was this cloud kitchen thing. I was like, I think this is a good idea because you have millions of people every day that are opening up DoorDash, opening up Uber Eats, and they're scrolling and they're trying to decide what to pick, what to order. And a lot of the restaurants on there are just like the mom-and-pop restaurant that's around your corner, but you probably don't know too much about I don't trust it. So, man, and we were joking about like, it was like ASAP Rocky Rhodes ice cream, you know, like, I forgot what the other ones were, it was like, you know, Trey Songz pizza and like, whatever. And so we were like, we think that these celebrities or influencers should open up their own branded store and you just have like, you know, some restaurant underneath that is actually fulfilling this or some cloud kitchen that, you know, hire a chef in a city to make the stuff. So this is what's happening. So yesterday, um, or two days ago, MrBeast, uh, who is a really, really popular YouTuber, um, came out and said, hey guys, uh, go to your apps, any— your favorite delivery app, and you can order from, I think, what is called MrBeast Burgers, or what's it called?
Yeah, I'm looking at it. MrBeast— MrBeast Burgers. And, uh, menu items include Beast Style Burger Combo, Chicken salad combo, chicken sandwich combo, not special. Chris style, Chandler style, it's nothing special. It's just they have put their name to the front of a cheeseburger.
Right. And so, um, so this guy MrBeast, so he's got like almost 50 million YouTube subscribers. He's like the 18th most popular YouTube channel, period. So this guy's, you know, super, uh, super popular. And, um, so he launched this thing, this— so his app for MrBeast Burgers goes to number 1 on the store ahead of Facebook, ahead of Instagram, ahead of— he spikes to number Number 1 on the store yesterday. The app crashes because tens of thousands of people are trying to order burgers in their cities at once. He deployed his restaurant in 200 locations overnight because it's a cloud kitchen. So in all the cities where they already had cloud kitchen infrastructure, he kind of organized this so in one day he could have 200 locations nationwide. Fucking brilliant, right? And he's selling, and it's actually not just fulfilled by his, his, uh, like, kitchen. It's not like he's got 5 people in the kitchen making all these dishes. Some of the dishes are actually coming from other restaurants. Um, so like, you know, if you order a lasagna from him, it's actually coming from this Italian restaurant branded as his thing. So this is actually— I'm doing a full breakdown of this, uh, in my newsletter tomorrow. Um, that's because I wanted to know how does this actually work. And so there's this company called Virtual Dining Concepts.
Have you ever heard? I'm on their website right now. They've got Taiga's Chicken Bites, Mariah's Cookies.
Mariah Carey's Cookies, Mario Lopez's Tortas, Pauly D, the Jersey Shore guy, they have Pauly D's Italian Subs, and now they have MrBeast Burgers.
Let me explain to people how I found this, because you and I, Sean, we're the same. The way that I found it is I went to MrBeast iTunes, scrolled all the way to the bottom and found out who developed the app. Is that what you did? Yep. And then I Googled that with quotation marks and I found their website and there's not a lot out there. And so anyone, anyone who cares, that's how I did my research.
And then there's one guy on my mailing list who actually works at one of the big cloud kitchen companies. So I asked him, I said, hey, what are the numbers on these things? So he sent me a spreadsheet. So I'm going to do a full breakdown there, but I can sort of do off the top of my head. I haven't compiled it all, but maybe we come back on the pod and talk about it because I think this is fascinating. I think that there's going to be more of this. I think it's going to basically be, you know, there was nothing. There's going to be a huge spike of this and then it's going to get kind of played out and consumers are not going to know what to choose. There's going to be a big quality control issues like, okay, are Mariah Carey's cookies any good or are they not good? Is Tiger's, you know, pizza any good or not?
I'm just—
I'm with a few winners.
I'm just looking at this while we're talking. VirtualDiningConcepts.com. Do you know who the founder is?
Uh, I don't know their name now.
Okay, the founder is the former CEO of Hard Rock Cafe, which— that's irrelevant now, but that was a multi-billion dollar chain. And Planet Hollywood, again, multi-billion dollar chain. So, wow. So it's him and his son.
Yeah, exactly. So I think, I don't know if he's like the one who's doing the work or, you know, the sons had this kind of like more forward-thinking idea, like, okay, Dad did this in the traditional brick-and-mortar world, we're gonna do this, which is this idea that is only now possible because delivery apps have taken over the world. And so a lot of people are now reaching out to these guys to try to get their own virtual concept spun up. Whether it's YouTubers and Twitch streamers, Instagram stars, or, you know, kind of like the Mario Lopez, the sort of C-list, D-list celebrities who are like, all right, I'm looking for my next way to make this work. And this is no different than something that's been going on, but remember, it's sort of like, remember I said that framework, which was like, you know, old problem, new problem, old solution, new solution, this 2x2 grid. So this is that thing, right? So this is actually taking an old solution to a new problem. Or if you could look, you could also look at the other way. But if you look at like George Foreman Grills, right, this was an old solution to how a famous person who no longer has their income stream going can use their brand to sell a bunch of product, branded product. And, you know, George Foreman Grills was one example of that. But now you have a new space, a new opportunity, which is these delivery apps that are, you know, you could just list in 200 cities and you can have the delivery infrastructure done for you overnight. So I think this is pretty fascinating. I'm curious to see how this works. And I'm investing in a couple of companies that are doing something very similar to what's going on here.
I'm all in. Okay. Do you know— I think it's a good idea. Do you know— okay, so I'm just looking— I'm just thinking as we're talking, I haven't done any research. George Foreman Grill, who makes that? Okay, there's another one. What's the— what's Proactiv? Proactiv, who's owned by Proactiv? Uh, Simon and, uh, Proactiv, the acne stuff, you mean? Yeah. Oh, Gunther Ranker. Okay, Gunther Ranker. Okay, so what if you want to learn about this business? I highly suggest that you find Gunther Ranker. I think that's how you pronounce it. Have you heard of this company?
No.
Okay. So it was started by a guy who kind of looks like a 60-year-old version of me. He looks like he's like a tall blonde-haired dude. He looks like a blonde picture.
Let's see.
He's like a super white dude who looks like he just has been eating corn his whole life. I mean, you see him? Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
He's got hair.
Yeah. So Bill Guthrie, I think is the one anyway. So it started out, uh, they did a bunch of stuff, but originally they bought the rights— this guy Bill, I think he bought the rights to, um, Think and Grow Rich, uh, like a self-help book by Napoleon Hill. And he created infomercials and direct response marketing campaigns on the internet to make it popular. Then he was like, okay, this self-help stuff is working, let's keep going. So he partnered with a variety of other products and he started selling them. And then eventually he was like, okay, let's try this. Like someone brought to him like Proactiv and they're like, all right, let's try Proactiv. And he grew that to $1 billion in sales. And then they partnered with Brooke Shields and they launched a shampoo line and they partnered with Cindy Crawford and they developed a, what's called Sheer Cover. You probably don't know what that is, but it's just this thing, this women's makeup hair—
Bro, you're saying my hair doesn't have sheer?
Yeah, you don't use this, whatever this is, you don't use it. So anyway, he grew their revenue. It's just a marketing company. He grew the revenue to eventually billions of dollars. And this is the same process that Beachbody did. You know Beachbody?
Yep, yep, yep.
These are all, these all use what they call direct marketing, which is code for MLMs.
So no, no, no, no, no, no. Direct marketing is not MLM. It's different. Direct marketing, MLM is multi-level marketing. Direct marketing, like direct response marketing, is when you write like copy and someone goes and they, or they purchase right away.
When these guys say we're a direct marketing company, they don't mean direct response. They mean we have basically salespeople in the field like Beachbody does, and those salespeople are basically like they're commissioned, they're commissioned salespeople and they operate in an MLM structure. I'm pretty sure that Beachbody is one of them. I know that the, like, so for example, Proactiv was developed by those two dermatologists, Rodan and Fields, and then they spun out and now have created Rodan and Fields, which is an MLM that sells the biggest competitor to Proactiv and many other skincare products and is a multi-billion dollar company. So these two women who probably didn't get, you know, their fair shake with, with this guy Gunthy Raker, he— they spun out and created Rodan Fields, which is a monstrous company, I think based out in Utah.
Well, I think that, uh, you're— yeah, you're right. I think they're confusing the two though, because Beachbody— oh yeah, you're right, Beachbody is an MLM., but they get a lot of their sales from direct response marketing and also infomercials. Right. And so there's marketing, they're just marketing machines and they just look for what's the best and most profitable thing they could sell. The reason I'm bringing this all up is CloudKitchens is now a new category of that.
Yes, and VDC is trying to be the Gunthy Ranker or trying to be the Rodan and Fields where they're basically taking famous celebrity brand, we are your backend infrastructure. Now they're not doing the MLM model, but they're basically doing, They're basically listing on all these marketplaces like DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it's a pretty big opportunity. I've also seen something else that's pretty cool. I'm going to talk about it more in depth soon. It's a company I really want to invest in. I probably shouldn't talk about it before I invest in them, but fuck it, let's do it. So all these delivery apps exist and they all need infrastructure. So there's two types of companies— today, there's two ways that people are participating. The restaurant itself says, "Oh, put us on the delivery app. We will do delivery." And then the other one is, you know, like a cloud kitchen or a virtual concept like these guys are doing, where they create a brand on top of this. There's a company that's doing something in the middle. They're creating a brand like a cloud kitchen, but they're fulfilling it using real restaurant staff that already exists. So they don't, they're basically creating these cloud brands that are consumer-facing, like it might be Pizza and Pies, right? And Pizza and Pies is their, Pizza Hut is their brand name, but what they're actually doing is they're fulfilling by using actual pizza shop, mom-and-pop pizza shops that don't know the first thing about technology. They don't know how to get listed on these marketplaces, and they don't want to deal with, you know, kind of the marketing of it. And so, these guys rebrand these mom-and-pops, they put them up on the delivery apps, and they don't have to own any labor, any, you know, kitchen infrastructure, any equipment, any anything. They're just like a sort of a a marketing brand that basically creates the concept, and when they upcharge, and when they get the order, they go place the order at the mom-and-pop for fulfillment. And, uh, that's how these guys are doing it. It's very smart, very capitalistic.
And they just— and they train the mom-and-pop how to make the— or like, or they probably say, all pizza, all pizza companies, you guys all probably have the right stuff to make what we need you to make, but we have to do some quality control.
They give them a tablet that says, hey, when an order comes for this, you're no longer, you know, Deborah's Kitchen, which is your real brand. You are pizza and pies. Put it in that box and it comes to this order. Here's just more orders that are coming to you. You want more orders, right? It's like a no-brainer proposition to a restaurant. Hey, here's your tablet. Every time this thing rings, you get paid.
You're wrong. It is definitely not a no-brainer. If I'm a restaurant, I'm like, dude, fuck off.
Like, it's in addition to what you're doing.
I've got to make a brand here. Like, I can't, like, you know, like McDonald's—
That's not how most mom-and-pop restaurants think. They're not trying to create a digital brand and expand and do all that. They want their shop to, like, not go out of business.
I don't know if I agree with that. I think that, like, you're an immigrant family, and I think that, like, many of them, many, like, lower-income hardworking or immigrant families, it's like, look, I just got to pay my bills, I got to pay my bills. But I do think that after you've been doing it for like 20 or 30 years, you maybe do think like, well, the way that I really get rich is like, like, I'm not talking like billionaire rich, but I am talking like I've got like the best restaurant in this neighborhood is by doing something that will be really, really good and high quality for 40 years. Am I wrong?
It's just a split. I think there's a pie chart, right? There's some percentage of the pie that's already doing it. There's some percentage of the pie that will do it themselves. And then the majority of the pie are people that are not going to do it. Uh, they've run their business their way for 10 straight years. And, um, the easy proposition, which is, hey, I can add an extra $5,000 a month of sales if you just put this tablet here and whenever it rings up one of your orders, fill it. That's a very easy proposition for a lot of people who are not gonna be part of this tech wave and switch the way that they do things to become like kind of delivery heavy.
I'm not interested in investing at the moment, but this would be a fun thing to look at is that, company's deck because I've just talked myself out of it. That I think— I actually think that that's a bad idea because I think a restaurant owner will start using it and they're like, well, shoot, I'm no longer really like a small business that I own. I'm just like a factory worker. And I think that the churn for those folks might be quite high.
It could be, it could be. But it's also very hard to say no to a consistent once money starts coming in your pocket every month, very hard to turn that off. Uh, and so I think that, that, that might be a problem. You know, some people obviously will say, no, I'm willing to cut off this revenue stream that's bringing me $5,000, $10,000 a month. And, um, and I think most people will, will not want to do that. They'll say, okay, cool, I'm not going to do extra work and I'm not going to take a dip here.
Um, and I've never talked to any of these people, so I'm just shooting from the hip. Yeah. Let's go to the next one.
Next topic, which one do you want to do? Let's do this Martin Shkreli one. It's kind of interesting. So did you read this article that came out yesterday or the day before?
The Bloomberg lady?
So explain to people who didn't read it what this story is and what you thought about it.
So you'll have to fill in any gaps here, but basically Martin Shkreli, everyone remembers this guy from 2016. He was called Pharma Bro. He was kind of this prodigy businessman, pharmaceutical guy. He created multi-hundred million dollar companies in the pharmaceutical space. He got in trouble because he increased the price of a drug that you need if you get like a nut allergy. I forget what that drug's called. It's like the shot.
Para something, yeah.
If you get a shot when you have an allergic reaction, and they raised the price from like a dollar to like $100. And he's got a really punchable face, and I actually heard his reasoning, and he was like, "No, look, it's just for the insurance companies." And I was like, "Okay, so maybe it's not as bad as reality, but who knows?" But he's very smug, very punchable. And this one journalist that was covering the story, which I've got a story about that too, was covering the story. It was this woman who looked like she's 38, I think it said. She had a husband and she started covering him, became friends with him. He's now in prison, left the husband, quit journalism, and is with him.
In love with this guy. Yeah. So he goes to jail and she goes from married with a job to has to quit her job because she fell in love with the story, uh, with the guy in the story. And secondly, um, you know, left her husband and is pers— and also now Martin Shkreli doesn't talk to her. So, uh, he doesn't like—
oh, is that how it ends? I didn't even finish it.
So he won't talk to her anymore because, um, because what? I don't— it's not clear why. Um, I think it's like she was like— the story was coming kind of coming out that she's in love with them and all this stuff, and he didn't want her to like do the story or something like that. I didn't fully understand why he stopped talking to her, but she released the story in the hopes of like, I hope he reads this, realizes how much I really truly love him, and I hope he returns my call. Because from prison, she can't call in, he can only call out. So she's just waiting for him to call, and for 2 months he hasn't called.
Yeah, well, here, let me tell you a Martin Shkreli story, and you'll— you have one as well. I met Martin on Blab. So Sean used to run this thing called Blab. It was like Clubhouse before Clubhouse. I mean, you know, you log in and chat with people. It was pretty cool. And Martin would come on and actually you go first. Did he like have like, you had like the Martin wave, right?
Yeah, we basically were like a small startup and we had a bunch of like marketers actually were using it. Like a bunch of digital marketers were using it and a couple of brands were using it, a couple of friends. And we were small, like the biggest, It was a live streaming platform. So imagine a Zoom call, but the Zoom call was public. It was like a public room that somebody could come, they could join in, they could be not on camera, they were in the chat. And so they could listen in on this conversation that we're having right now, and they could request to call in and be like, oh, I actually have a Martin Shkreli story. I wanna call in. And it was like a radio show. So that's what Blab was. It was small. And then one day I noticed that, oh, oh shit, there's a stream that has 4,000 people in it. That's 10 times bigger than our biggest stream before this. Awesome, who is this? I see this guy Martin Shkreli, I don't know who that is. I Google the name Martin Shkreli and I see Martin Shkreli, the most hated man in America. And I was like, oh shit, what did we get ourselves into? And that's when I learned about this, you know, what he was doing. So anyways, continue on from there.
And I was a Blab user and I saw Martin on it and I called in, I became friendly with him. I was only, this was in the winter, I believe, right? This was wintertime? Yeah. So winter, must have been winter of 2015.
2015, '16, yeah.
Like it just turned 16, and I became friends with him, friendly, and I emailed him back and forth, and eventually we had this woman working for us named, what was her name? I forget her name, Brina, Brina Kerr, nice woman, she was like a charming, cute woman, and Brina went to interview him on the phone, and he must have saw what she looked like, and they kind of hit it off, and Brina goes, or no, Mark goes, I'll pay you $10,000 to fly down to San Diego to see me. And Britta was like, should I do this? And I was like, I mean, if you want, yeah. And she like became friends with him and we wrote this story about him. And to this day, Trung, because The Hustle has talked to this guy, Trung, my guy Trung, who writes the Daily Email, talks on the phone with him. And Trung called me the other day and he goes, hey, I got Martin on the other line. And it was like midnight on a Thursday. Like, you want us to cover this? I was like, yeah, I mean, why not? So anyway, the hustle and Martin, like, I see how he's pulled this off. He is very charming and it works well.
So I wrote this Twitter thread, I wrote this Twitter thread because I was like, I can see how this would happen. This guy has this like kind of weird magnetic pull. He's like you said, he is super smug. He can be a total asshole. He's not like good looking. He's not like, you know, physically impressive in any way.
And but he has a little rock star vibe because he doesn't give a shit.
He doesn't give a fuck.
He's like Dave Portnoy, but like not as cool. Like, I don't necessarily think that he's a bad guy, but like, I don't think he's like a great person.
So when he came on the platform, he came on because we were kind of this live place where you could just host a room, people could come at you, they could come talk to you, and you could talk back, you could boot them out. So he loved it because it was like having his own radio show. So he basically The first few days he was just fighting people and people loved fights. So these streams were getting really, really popular. He had gotten kicked off Twitch and so he came to Blab actually. And so he, and I remember reading Emmett, who I didn't know at the time, the CEO of Twitch came out and was just like, he banned him like the first day. He's like, this guy like has no place in our community, no place on our platform, the way he acts and the way he's acting. And I was like celebrating. I was like, this dude's driving traffic, man. This is awesome for a startup. We were desperate for any kind of traction. I was like, okay, this is interesting. So he starts bringing on hundreds of thousands of people per month just through his channel, which like we had like Tony Robbins came on, the Jonas Brothers came on, ESPN was using us. Nobody could drive numbers like this guy. And not just that he drove people to come check it out, like come check out the car crash, but he actually used us like 10 hours a day. Like in the morning he would log on, he would start the room, his like kind of fans and haters would come in. There was some like kind of back and forth. In the afternoon, he would sometimes do these like educational streams where he would stream himself like looking at stocks and talking through it.
By the way, he recorded that and he put it on YouTube, and I watched almost the whole thing. It was awesome.
It's fascinating. He was smart. He would talk about like drug discovery. He's like, yeah, people get mad at me for this. He's like, the reality is Big Pharma doesn't even invest in these small drugs for small— like, basically, it's really hard to make a drug that has a cure. So if you're gonna do it, you do it in the markets that are the biggest, basically the most popular diseases. So then he goes, there's this opportunity where for rare infectious diseases or rare diseases, nobody's producing anything. He's like, so what I started doing was going and buying up the R&D for the IP for all these rare conditions, because I could accumulate all this stuff and I could build, I could add them up and build a big company. And he's like, yeah, and I increased the prices on some of them because like you said, I'm mostly just charging the insurance companies. If anybody can't afford it, they can get it for free. It's just, if you can afford, if you do have insurance, I charge insurance more, which in turn makes the insurance company bill you a little bit more, but like, really the insurance company paying. That was his defense. He goes, if we don't do this, no one's going to fund any research for these rare diseases. You have it either way. Either you don't pay for it, and then nobody— there's no R&D and there's no cures, or we increase the price, which actually lets me invest in R&D. That was his public justification.
Also, for the record, that's not why he's in jail. He's in jail because he committed securities fraud. Fraud. He had a co-founder and—
or something. No, no, I got it. It's simple. He had hedge funds before he was in pharma, and so he had two hedge funds. And I think he had lied to the investors about how the returns were for the hedge fund, and then he used profits from the pharmaceutical companies to pay back his investors from the hedge fund. So he wasn't stealing money from people.
He was lying. But that's not why he's in— yes, that's how he went to jail originally. Now he's in jail because— and this is kind of stupid— he threatened Hillary Clinton on Twitter.
I think he extended his time, maybe. I don't think you can just go to jail for that.
He violated his parole, but he also, I read the report, he did some weird shit, man. He called the daughter of the guy who was suing him and he threatened her. I don't know if he threatened her with violence, but he was kind of odd. He definitely crossed the line. I don't know, that's definitely not—
Oh, he's a line crosser for sure.
Yeah, that's not like jail crossing, but that's like, you are fucking weird and I don't wanna be around you. But what I do, This was like, he was famous before the Robinhood people were around, but it's like the same group of people who worship Elon, who love Bitcoin, who love Robinhood.
They love Davey Day Trader.
Yeah, I don't know what this group would get, but it's like young men who are nerdy, who don't have a strong male father, who don't have a strong father figure, these types of oddballs. I would come onto that Blab, and there's women that would come on that were cute women that were like the female version of these guys, and they loved him. He totally had groupies. He could have fooled around with all of them. He was a rock star to these women and men.
Yeah, and he would do complete trolly shit. Uh, in fact, he was getting popular right around the same time Trump was, right around 2016. And I noticed that both of them were doing the same thing, which I just started calling troll marketing, which is basically he would do something like, let's say, uh, I remember once there was some monument or statue that was like for sale in Times Square And he was like, he just goes in public and announces like, I will buy the statue for $10 million. But what he wanted to do was he wanted to own this little thing and then be able to erect like a trolly, like kind of statue of himself in Times Square. And he didn't ever even have to go through with it, but he was like, say a thing, bang, headlines. And Trump was doing the same thing at the time. He's like, Mexicans are rapists. And it's like, you know, boom, headlines, right? And so Martin Shkreli found a way to get in the news. Like every fourth day, he would like He bought the Wu-Tang album for $2 million, the one copy of the album. And, you know, it's like, boom, found a way to get news. He would, like, he did a thing on our platform where he would go, he would swipe through on like Tinder or whatever and come like get a date with somebody. He would go on the date, he'd come back to his apartment, but he'd leave the stream on so anybody, thousands of people could overhear it and listen to it. And he would just be playing chess with this woman or like, you know.
I saw that, I remember that. Wine or whatever.
But he was just always pushing the boundaries. And so, I don't know, he was pure entertainment. It was, for our platform, it was good and bad. A lot of people hated him, and so these hacker groups came out and they would DDoS us, which is distributed denial of service attack, which is basically like flooding our website with fake traffic to take down our servers. And we're just like a simple startup, and they were hitting us with like 5-gigabit DDoS attacks every single hour. And they would take down not just us, they would take down our service providers like Cloudflare and shit like that, and they would call us being like, yo, what's going on? We're seeing really weird traffic patterns to your sites taking down our infrastructure. And we're like, yes, sorry, like people hate Shkreli, so they've decided to just attack us. Um, it was a very, very crazy time. But anyways, long story short, I think this is a wild story, but I am not surprised because I, for a weird reason, ended up spending a lot of time observing this dude because he was on our platform and he was our biggest user.
And Martin has not been in the news lately other than this thing. He— I think he's going to get out in a few months. He's going to get out in a short amount of time. I have a feeling this is, uh, we're going to hear a lot more from this guy. Yeah, he's going to do something. And, and this guy, even though he's creepy, I, I don't— I'm not anti-Martin, but I like— I don't want to be friends with him. Um, he is capable enough that he's gonna mess some stuff up soon. That's my prediction. Yeah, he's capable. He's got the per— he's got the, the trifecta: capable, or he's like smart, um, like driven, and like kind of like a troll and evil. So he's got like all the things.
Yeah, sociopath, uh, I think that's pretty safe to say.
All right, what do we want to go through now?
Um, Brady, what do you like on this list? Um, let's do, uh, Elon Musk potentially buying $100 billion worth of Bitcoin. Okay, so Elon tweeted this out. He tweeted out a meme of, uh, I mean, how the fuck do you describe a meme? It's basically a meme where it's a guy and it says, me trying to live a normal productive life, and then it's like this, like brothel whore with Bitcoin on her butt, and it just says Bitcoin. He's trying to avoid looking at it or dabbling in it. Then the guy we talked about last podcast, Michael Saylor, who's the CEO of MicroStrategy, who has bought over $1 billion of Bitcoin off his company balance sheet goes, "If you want to do your shareholders $100 billion favor, convert the Tesla balance sheet from USD to Bitcoin. The other firms in the S&P 500 would follow your lead, and in time, it would grow to become a trillion-dollar favor." Elon responded, he goes, "Are such large transactions even possible?" Michael Saylor goes, "Yes, I've purchased 1.3 in Bitcoin in the past months, and we'd be happy to share my playbook with you offline, from one rocket scientist to another." First of all, what a cool thing to be able to observe. By the way, Elon changes his Twitter bio to say, "I'm the former CEO of Dogecoin," which obviously he's not, but is an actual meme coin that was created to make fun of Bitcoin that actually became quite valuable.
I don't know. Let's see. I'm trying to buy this desk price tracker, just like a clock, but it's not a clock. It's just showing me the price of Bitcoin at all times.
Yeah, that sounds like a horrible way to live. Sounds miserable. Shoot me. All right, well, what are we gonna say about— I mean, I don't know. I don't give a shit, to be honest. Like, I think Elon's cool and all. I just— I'm getting— I'm over his kind of loose cannon shit. I think it's cool for a little while, and it's good in healthy doses, but I'm not an Elon hater, but I wouldn't say I'm a— I don't like just jump at what he says. Sometimes I find him annoying.
Yeah, I'm actually the same way. I think he's trying too hard now. It was cool when he was like a legit visionary CEO who happened to have a sense of humor, and now he's like one of those guys who goes and watches the Shreli stream. Like, his personality is like trying really hard to be like cool and irreverent, like, "Oh, that's so cool that you did that. You posted that meme. Oh, you said Dogecoin. Oh, you sent F you to somebody on Twitter." Like, it just seems a little bit tryhard to me now.
It's kind of like, uh, it's like, do you remember in the '90s?
If I saw him, I'd be like, you know, bowing down and like, you know, making a fool of myself trying to like be friends with the guy. So I can't really lie and say I wouldn't.
I agree. I agree. I just, I do think it's annoying. The shtick is going a little too far. It was kind of like how Trump in the '90s— remember when Trump was on Home Alone and like Trump meant like successful rich businessman? Now to half the country, Trump means like liar, fraud. It's like, dude, Elon, like 2 years ago, you were like rocket scientist genius, good guy saving the world. Now you're kind of like trending over to be like maybe troll first, kind of douche first, and then like saving the world and doing all this amazing stuff second. Yeah.
You never go full troll. He went full troll. And we'll see what happens. I think that one thing that's cool there is just that with Bitcoin, it is one of those self-fulfilling prophecies. If they were to actually do this, it would add more money and more legitimacy and drive up the price, which would strengthen both the story and the price and the— like, the returns, which would drive more companies to do it, and which would again drive up the price, drive up the returns, and bolster the story. And so that's the beauty of Bitcoin. It is the money— it is the bubble that never pops. The more people that believe in it, the more people that get behind it, uh, the more hype it builds, the more real it becomes. And so Michael Saylor is absolutely right. If Tesla did this, if they did legitimize Bitcoin even more than it's already been legitimized, it would only— it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It would only increase the likelihood that the price would go up and the returns would be higher.
JACK MALLERS] So do you want to talk about— you already talked about this a little bit, but you had a really cool Twitter thing going on where you like Talked about your newsletter. Did you have any good replies to that?
Uh, yeah, a bunch of people were like, oh, this is cool, you know. It's like, I did it to try to get likes, right? Like, it's a reason to put out a thread like this is to get likes. It drove 3,000 new email subscribers and 4,000 new Twitter followers, which is cool. Like, one Twitter thread can do that. So that was cool. Um, there wasn't a whole lot— I mean, there's a couple people who are like haters. Like, one guy was like You know, it's just funny, people are like, "Oh, you worked on this after 7:00 PM?" Like, you know, basically calling me a shitty dad. I was like, "Dude, my kid sleeps after 7:00. Like, that's bedtime, so yeah, I guess so, but okay." Even if my kid wasn't asleep, weird takeaway for you to have out of this thread.
That's what they said.
Yeah, a bunch of people bought the vault of like the archive. I sold like $5,000 worth of it yesterday from that, so that's like, you know, at $100 per book, 50 people, I think, bought it as of this morning. And I didn't put the link in there. So I actually just DM'd it to one guy who asked, and then a bunch of people asked him. And so he sold basically 50 of these for me, 'cause I didn't wanna promote selling it. I just wanted to put the information out there and drive people to like my free email list. 'Cause I really wanna write more. I really enjoy the podcast and I wanna do written stuff more too. That's like where I'm having a lot of fun. So I don't know, it's not that interesting there. There's one more interesting thing that is, I'm doing this other thing, which I find to be very entertaining. So I'm doing all these like tiny life experiments, one of which is I'm creating something called Club LTV. Did I tell you about this?
No.
Okay, so I had this idea, I was like, okay, I wanted to meet a bunch of other people who have like successful D2C stores. I'm interested in the D2C e-com space. So I was like, oh, okay, cool, I wanna meet a bunch of people. And I have this philosophy, much like you, which is that, you want to host the party, not attend it, right? Like what you did with HustleCon was great. Like, yes, it was more work, but the rewards are like, yeah, totally disproportionate to how much more effort it is to just host the event. Like all the speakers know you, they like you, they're grateful to you because you brought a bunch of cool people together. Every attendee starts to know you and your brand. And so I've always had this philosophy, which is like, if you want to get into something, you want to build your network, the easiest way to do it is just to host it. Host something, just do the schlep work of hosting. So I wanted to get into the DDC world. So I was like, all right, I'm gonna create like a meetup. But of course, there's no conferences, no meetups going on right now. So I was like, okay, it's gotta be digital. But digital events are so fucking lame that I was like, I don't wanna do like a boring ass like Zoom networking event. That sounds like, you know, I wouldn't even wanna attend my own event. So I talked to Ben and I was like, Ben, how do we make this cool? And I was like, let's just go way over the top. So I created this thing called Club LTV and it's literally like a nightclub. And it's only for people that are, LTV being lifetime value, which is like a metric every e-commerce store owner cares about. I hired like a DJ who's coming. Everybody has to bring a drink.
Wait, this is in real life?
This is a Zoom meetup, but it's gonna have every like fucking trick I could throw into a Zoom meetup to make the Zoom more fun. I'm making it fun. So I got backgrounds, I got a DJ, I got, everyone's gotta bring a drink. We're using this little tool that lets it, like, it basically, you like snap your fingers and it breaks everybody out into groups of 5. And so they can kind of like, kind of go hang out and have conversations on their own. I got these like ballers, like Craig Clemens, who was on our podcast, who's done like a billion dollars in e-commerce revenue. He's like, "Oh, this is dope. And I come from a club background. I'll be there." And so I got these like kind of cool people that are just gonna be at the club. And I don't know, I'm gonna try to, I'm like, if I'm gonna do a boring networking thing, I'm gonna make it not boring. And I don't know what the answer is, But I'm gonna have a—
do you have a long-term plan? Or—
I have a sponsor, right? Uh, yeah, it's free to attend, but you have to be an e-commerce store owner that's doing over $100,000 a month, uh, in your store.
That's good. And how many people signed up?
Uh, we have like 50 people coming as of right now, but I'm gonna try to get this to be more. So if you, if you're out there, if you want to be in e-commerce— I don't know about that restriction about the $100K and up. I, I might drop that. Or I might just like split the group into two, which is like, you either have this tag if you're like legit or not, like some kind of status symbol. I don't know what I'm gonna do with that. But if you wanna come to Club LTV, tweet at me and tell me about your e-com store.
Can I, well, you'll have to like share the URL or something for that, for people to sign up.
There's no website. What do you and your family use for personal finance?
Uh, like just tracking spending, you mean, or what?
Yeah, tracking. What's your personal finance setup?
All right, my personal finance setup is, uh, Mint for, uh, just aggregating accounts and tracking, and then Excel. Um, I do all my shit in Excel.
So I use Mint because I've used Mint for a long time. I did— I started that like, I don't know, 2010 or something. I started using Mint, so I just kind of have it. There's a whole bunch of other software out there that's like supposed to be better, but I don't trust any of them. Um, like I don't want to link my accounts. I don't want to link all my bank accounts to random ass services. Mint, I kind of already did. It's kind of grand— I already took the risk. So, you know, I get some benefits from it, but I actually just prefer to do it in Excel because for me one of the valuable things is it's sort of like, you know, when you wanted to get better at copywriting, you like handwrote stuff, right? Right. There's something in the practice of writing out my finances that makes me think about it and like spend time with it rather than just like checking a dashboard real quick.
Do you do that every month?
Uh, every probably like 2 months.
Yeah. So I'm looking at like solutions for this. So I'm trying to figure out 2 things, like how to set up all my bank accounts— or my wife and I, and like, because we— I've got like 8 bank accounts because like we each had 4, like the savings and checking that we had, like when we were in high school, right? And then like your new account that you create once you like have a real job.
Oh, this digital thing sounds cool, yeah.
Yeah, and then your credit card, and then maybe like your early credit card or your new credit card, and then you combine that. It's like, oh shit, we've got 10 accounts. This is like so silly. What are we doing? So I've got to figure that out. I also have to figure out— I'm like, well, I personally was just using personal capital before, and I knew what I spent, so it was no big deal. I didn't have to track it religiously. I used to use this thing where I wrote it down as well, but now there's two of us. I'm trying to figure all this out. There's this software I found. It's an app and a web app called You Need a Budget. Have you heard of it?
No.
Okay. It's called You Need a Budget, and I've never seen such a fanatical group of people around budgeting. Budgeting. And they used what's called zero-based budgeting. And this app, it was created by one guy and a small team. I bet they do $12 to $15 million a year in recurring revenue. And if you go to You Need a Budget, whatever the abbreviation of that, YNAB, there's a subreddit with a whole lot of people and they are fanatical about this.
But what is that zero-budget thing? What does that mean?
So I don't know entirely. I mean, I know just because I Googled what is zero-based budgeting, and the way it works is every dollar that comes in is allocated and spent. So let's say you make $10,000 a month and you save $5,000. So that's $5,000 that you spent on saving. And then so you have to spend $2,000 on rent. Like every dollar must be spent, and you have to go in each month and make sure that you've accounted for each dollar. Like each dollar serves a purpose. To get down to zero. Gotcha. And people like it because of exactly what you said, which is they like seeing where everything is going and they want to do a little bit of manual work in order to know exactly what's happening with your money. Now, and so what it does is it gives you a little bit better perspective on what you're going to spend in the future, whereas Mint does a little bit better job of probably telling you what you spent in the past and it averages the trailing 3 months and says, here's what you spend every month. Month. And I'm trying to figure out the best thing to use, but it's incredibly complex. And I'm not even like— imagine if you're ultra high net worth, then it's really hard. But I guess it's not that hard. You have so much money, it doesn't really matter what your budget is. But for a young couple, a young family with 10 accounts or whatever, I'm overwhelmed. And the zero-based budgeting seems incredibly interesting. I've never heard— and the reason why is I've never seen a group of people that are rallied around this. Although I guess I have a little bit with Dave Ramsey. Do you know about Dave Ramsey?
Yeah, yeah. I don't know how to describe him. He's got a big podcast and he's a finance kind of advisor.
Well, he's a religious— he's a— he— and I'm not going to judge this. I'm just going to say the facts. He's all about saving. Well, no, he's all about religion. So his— his— yeah, he's a Southern guy. That's how I know him because I'm from the South. His finance tips are based off of the Bible. And, and so Southern Christian conservative folks love Dave Ramsey. He's a very conservative, like he anticipates that his average user is going to make $50,000 for a really long time, is a teacher, needs to save for retirement, needs to get out of debt, yada, yada, yada. He's not like a get-rich type of guy. It's just like live a good life with a normal means. Anyway, you need a budget. So fascinating. I've never seen such a cult following around a freaking finance app.
Yeah, that's cool. I like that. Um, I'm not a big budgeter. Like, I basically— my thinking is this. I was like, all right, I can focus in one of two areas. I could focus on saving or I can focus on earning. So I try to focus on earning. Uh, any hours that I have, I try to focus on earning, not saving. The second thing is, um, what gives me like stress versus not stress. And so like, I like to have the snapshot of where we're at that every couple of months, but I don't want to measure where we're spending because I think about the future. I'm like, "All right, I'm very confident that over the next 10 years, we're going to get to the point where we have more than enough money that we— We have more money than we know what to do with." So if that's true, if I believe that 100%, which I do, then this is all wasted energy doing this. I'd rather literally be sleeping. I'd rather be doing something else. And so I just want the de-stressed way of living, which is not measuring anything. In fact, I told my wife, Set a budget, like not a budget of what you can spend, set a threshold of when you have to talk to me about it. Like, don't ask me about anything that's under X dollars, right? And this was inspired by like, my co-founder, Furkan, always tells a story at a previous company. This guy's wife kept calling him and he just picked up the phone and he goes, if it's under $5,000, I don't want you to talk to me about it. And he hung up the phone and Furkan was like, damn, that was a baller move. $5,000? Like, that's crazy. And so then I also heard that story. I was like, that's awesome. And so now I want to do the same. I just think that's just a baller way to live. It's like, don't— the items under $5,000, expenditures under $5,000 do not concern me. I think that's a cool way to live.
That's how I roll too. I don't know what— I don't know what are like— it's probably $4,000, $3,000. It's like, I don't care. I just don't want to talk about those. Well, I just wanted to ask what you use for personal finance. I'm trying to figure out how to handle all this shit.
Yeah, you do a good job finding these little communities. Where did you find this? Was it from Reddit that you found this?
I tweeted out what people— so I'm a personal finance, I would say a little bit of a nerd. Like, I like to see what's out there. I don't— and it's fun for me. So I like this Reddit, the subreddit called FatFire. I'm like a huge fan of that. I read the book that you and I talked about via text, which is like a finance book for personal finance book, kind of. And so I just like, I'm in the know of all of them. And I asked my Twitter following what they use, and I had one or two people say you need a budget, and then it got like crazy amounts of likes. And I was like, what is this? I went to the subreddit and there was people who were like defending it like crazy, like, like they staked their personality on this. And I'm like, that's crazy, this whole zero-based. So for a certain group of people, it seems life-changing.
Yeah, let me see how many downloads this has. I mean, the Android app alone has over a million downloads. That's pretty impressive for a—
and it costs— oh, by the way, but look, it costs money. So you have to pay $50, I think, or $100 to use it. And I love that. I love that, that they're charging for it. I think that is such a smart move. How much does it cost? $3 a month or $10 a month or something? It costs money.
So I think it's free to download, but then it's probably you pay to use it in some way.
Yeah. And I almost— I think I'm going to sign up for it. The only reason I haven't is it's kind of like superhuman.com or something else where it requires some work to learn and I just haven't had the time to learn. And so, but people love this thing. And I was trying to figure out like, how do they build a cult following around this? Like, what are they teaching? How much does it cost? I believe you just said $83. $83 a month, a year. How do you create a cult following around these types of things? And like, what are they saying that's the opposite of what other people are saying in order to make this?
So here's the commonality. I don't think it's the cult following around you need a budget. I think that what happens is if you take a bunch of people who all have a shared goal, or like kind of a, like a desire, and you give them a forum to basically trade tips on how they're achieving it and like say when things are going really hard. So I see this all the time, right? We had a baby, so Sonya's in all these like mommy forums and mommy kind of like groups, and it's the same thing, right? Like these mommy groups have like such a strong, like, I mean, the engagement's just off the charts. And often they're around certain, like, for example, it could be natural birth versus getting an epidural, or it could be around sleep training or not sleep training. It doesn't matter which process it is. It's like that community has like a cult following, and it's not that It's not all about the brand up top, it's about giving a bunch of people who are trying to do a hard thing a place to trade stories and tips and commiserate. I think that's what these guys are doing for personal finance. I think that it happens with mommy bloggers, or sorry, not mommy bloggers, just new moms who are trying to go through that together and trade, "Why is my baby not sleeping?" or, "She's not eating enough," or whatever, getting that community help there. I think that's where the magic is.
like, we could have done that, right? We, we could have said we're going to really foster a community of people who are trying to make their first million bucks, people who literally, they want to be a millionaire and they're going after it. And, um, you know, we're gonna build an awesome community around it. I, I didn't— I, I don't know, community building is not something I'm good at, so I didn't do that. I have a Facebook group, but like, that's not a real great community. Um, but it's such a clear stated goal and dream, like it's baked into the name of our podcast, that I think we had the potential to build something as good as these guys.
Oh, it's not over yet. I mean, we can still do it. I want— I bet you— I wonder how this guy got started. I bet you he had a personal finance blog and built an audience and then launched this, right?
Um, cool.