#139 - The Rise of "Clout" Kitchens, Why Martin Shkreli is a Rockstar, and a $100m Acquisition

u yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like the days on on a travel never looking back you know what i i've decided i wanted to do i think so like i i've been like ob assessing over the future like what's like our 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 right so by the dip yeah and the reason why is i really think that i think that for a lot of people the this whole like five i i don't think that after i did the diplomatic thing for a while that was hard that was hard but i do think that like there's a world where people are gonna do like six months six months do you agree with that yeah i my ideal i started this a few years ago and then we just paused with the baby but like i would do about about a month and a half in a different country altogether just living somewhere so for example we would live in san francisco for eleven months or you know ten and a half months and then we went down to buenos aires and we lived in argentina for 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 right that felt awesome to me and i i hope i can pull that off with kids i know just kids life just you know i i feel it now where i'm just like yeah it's just easier to stay home wait let's just not go and do things it's it's just a lot easier but i think that's cool and i think whether it's six months six months or nine months three months i think that's a that's a cool luxury to have to be able to do something like that i i think we're gonna do like like a eight four nine three 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 one three and that's that's a lot of you buying you should just if you're just gonna go there for three months you should just airbnb be oh you wanna rent it the rest of the year yes that's what you hard to rent something for nine months out of the year though i'm doing research and i i i'm not sure if it if it is so if so what i or i or i could buy a three unit building so our friend ryan bi is air being being 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 in this great place and he's now in miami or delaware he's all the other the place and he he's air being his place for thirty grand a month he's making off of it gross not what's out profit payment though right like i don't wanna get in into real business too much but he bought upfront he doesn't have a mortgage so he only pays taxes but i do think that what i think what i'm gonna try and do is i wanna try and live breakeven while while i'm 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 air airbnb and well 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 ninety days out of the year it's like do ninety days of the year so now let's say i was trying to do the thing you're doing right eight and four or whatever i can't do the eight months i can't airbnb eight months that means i need a long term lease how am i gonna find a long term lease for eight or nine months that's that's 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 i we have a podcast we could say like hey who what's rent our place you know it's i and i so i think that we could find someone to rent our place at a fair price for ten months out of the year i think it's possible and i think that the reason why i'm pretty better on this time sorry go ahead the reason i'm bringing this up on this podcast is i think that this is gonna be a normal trend of young ish affluent yep white collar workers doing three three three you know whatever i just think you're better off of just renting and just investing your money elsewhere like you're why do 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 with maintenance like okay just rent one place for nine months and then rent another place for three months and then hop around to the next one for six months just rent and put all that other money into stock market or bitcoin or whatever the hell else you want that's that's what i think you should do i think that could be a great a great solution i would only do it if i'm gonna do it to make money i would have to find the right deal if i would do it not to make the if i would do it just because i want to to make me happy then i don't really care if it's gonna make money or not i'm also just i think in general it's best to split if 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 it's all it's only okay as an investment versus like oh this place is a dump i could buy this and rented 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 i 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 there's no right answer her okay well you wanna get it you wanna talk about our boyfriend mark sk do you wanna talk oh i let's talk about this let's talk about the penny border do you know the penny holder you've talked to me about the penny order before but tell me what you wanna talk about i wanna okay they got acquired today for a hundred and five million dollars in cash okay explain what the penny order is okay it's the penny hoard dot com i know about it because i'm in digital media the founder kyle came and spoke at health so i got to know him a little bit there is a wonderful guy he started it as a finance blog where basically he was like a poor twenty year old and he was doing like task grab and uber driving and all types of jobs in order to make ends meet while he was in college because he came from low income household and he would blog about it and eventually this is his origin story i don't know if it's true he was like oh wow uber will pay me two grand for every person i heard of them i'm gonna write a little bit more about this and put more affiliate links and that's what he did and i'm gonna explain the sophistication behind this but to dumb it down it's scaled in eight years to fifty million in sales now that's cool at all but let me show you like what's actually interesting about this and note without this isn't a slight towards them i think it's kind of a i hate this i like this business model but i personally wouldn't wanna 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 link so basically it you're it's a performance marketing company that has a blog and so the way it works is is if you google or they create they write a blog that says here's the ten best ways to save money online and it's like a ten different coupon sites or here's the 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 get become an uber driver and they get two grand but what kyle on the penny order team did is they made this incredibly sophisticated algorithm or a sophisticated website so they rearrange the article to make sure that the most amount of people are clicking the credit card offer or the uber driver offer or the pot like the honey you know the honey coupon clipper they and it's quite interesting and it works so well that this large publicly traded company called fluent made they they they poached one of the penny holders employees and they just duplicated it and run rain ads on facebook and did this whole arbitrage machine and the penny holders sued this company and it was all public it's pretty crazy but anyway that's just how this business model works is they found a and offer and then they create new content marketing and they do performance marketing to drive they get hopefully nickel clicks from facebook two thousand dollar sign ups and hopefully the math works out that they're able to make a profits right yeah so ten started ten years ago looks like a you know email list of about a million people traffic of like ten to seventeen million people a month going to the website and sold it for a hundred and two million and it was doing fifty million a year in revenue and i think only fifty employees are sixty employees yeah that's pretty cool no no so it says twenty eighteen they pledged to create a hundred sixty five positions this year in exchange it did work out okay they laid up they they it didn't work out in two nineteen they laid off everyone oh okay something happened i don't i don't know what happened but it didn't work anyway interesting company about how you could turn a blog to a fifty million dollar 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 kinda kinda cool yeah okay that's cool i don't how much to add but i like knowing about that that's that's interesting alright let's do okay callback to an episode we did with stu iv so he came on as a pinch changer for you you were out with something i don't know whether you're stake sick or something like that and you were like hey this guy stu who's my friend or he like works in my office or something like that i i don't know who he was he's like this guy here today and i was like okay 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 of one of the ideas that he had talked about now this is i don't know six plus months ago he came on and he goes alright here's my idea cloud kitchens and i was like oh cloud kitchen here's no not cloud cloud clout as in like an influencer has clout and i was like oh what do you mean hey he's like well you know how like in the regular world you have you know bobby fl has his burger joint bobby burgers or whatever and you have wolfgang puck or whatever these like kind of celebrity chefs or or you know margarita ville by 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 a uber eats door dash etcetera so i think called that i thought was a great idea i put it in my newsletter i because i i i started ranking in my newsletter some of our best ideas right because i went back i was like dude we spit out like hundreds of ideas over the course of the year what are like the twenty ones that i actually think are good ones and let me put those into my email list and so you just go to like sean dot com email these are and i put in there like here's one of my here's are my favorite ideas from the pod the first or second idea i put on that list was this cloud kitchen i was like i think this is a good idea because you have millions of people every day that are opening up door dash 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 right trust it so and and we we were joking about like it was like asap rocky roads ice cream you know like i forgot what the other ones for is like you know trey songs pizza and like whatever and so we were like we think that these these celebrities of influencers should open up their own branded store and you just have like you know some restaurant underneath that is that is actually fulfilling this or some cloud kitchen that you know hire a chef in a city to to make this stuff so this is what's happening so yesterday or two days ago you have mister beast who is a really really popular youtuber came out and and said hey guys go to your apps any your favorite delivery app and you can order from i think what is called mister beast burgers or brian what's it i'm looking at it mister beats mister beast burgers and menu items include bee 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 in the part of a cheeseburger right and so this guy mister b so he's got like almost fifty million youtube subscribers he's like the eighteenth most popular youtube channel period this guy's you know super super popular and so he launched this thing this so his app for mister beast burgers goes to number one on the store ahead of facebook ahead of instagram had a he spikes to number one 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 two hundred locations overnight because it's a cloud kitchen so in all the cities where they already had cloud kitchen infrastructure he kind of organized so in one day he could have two hundred locations nationwide fucking brilliant right and and he's selling and he's and it's actually not just fulfilled by his his like kitchen not like he's got five people in a kitchen making all these dishes some of the dishes are actually coming from other restaurants 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 in my newsletter tomorrow 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 i'm on their website right now they've got ty chicken bites or ryan cookies and mariah carey cookies mario lopez tortoise paul d the jersey shore guy they have poly d's italian subs and now that mister cheeseburgers burgers let me let me explain to people how i found this because you and i sean we're we're the same yeah the way that i found it is i went to mister beast itunes scroll all the way to the bottom and find out who developed the app is that what you did yep and then i 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 company so i asked them i said hey what are the numbers on these things so he sent me a spreadsheet so i'm gonna do a full breakdown there but i i started to do off top of my head i haven't like compiled at all but maybe we we come back on the pod and talk about it because i think this is fascinating i think that there's gonna be more of this i think it's gonna basically be you know there was nothing there's gonna be a huge spike of this and then it's gonna be kinda played out and people consumers are not gonna know what to choose there's gonna be big quality control issues like okay are mariah carey cookies any good or are they not good is tiger's you know pizza and i'm just i'm with a few winners i'm just looking at this while we're talking virtual dining concepts dot com do you know who the founder is 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 change success yeah and and and planet hollywood again multi billion dollar chain so wow so it hit me the sun yeah exactly so i think i don't know if he's like the one who's doing the work or you know the suns 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 concepts spun up whether it's youtubers and twitch streamers instagram stars or you know kind of like the the mario lopez the sort of seal list deli list celebrities who are like alright i'm looking for my next way to make this work and this is no different than something that's been going on we're sort of like remember i said that framework which was like you know old problem new problem old solution new solution this two by two grid so this is that this is that thing right so this isn't actually taking a old solution to a new problem or if you could look you could you can also look at the other way but if if you look at like george foreman and grill right this was a 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 g 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 two hundred cities and you could have the delivery infrastructure done for you overnight so i think this is pretty fascinating i'm 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 what's going on here i'm all 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 and grill who makes that george foreman alexa okay there's another one what's the what's proactive proactive who's owned by proactive simon and don't the the acne stuff you mean yeah oh gunther rink okay doctor rink okay so what if you wanna learn about this business i highly suggest you you find gun rank i think that's how you pronounce it have you heard this company no okay so it was started by a guy who kinda looks like a i'm six year old version of me he's looks like he's like a tall blonde haired dude it looks like a you blonde bit picture let's see he's like a super white dude who looks like he just has been eating corn in his whole life i mean what him yeah oh yeah yeah i he's still gus hair yeah so bill got the i think is the one anyway so it started out they did a bunch of stuff but originally they bought the rights this guy bill i think he bought the rights to speaking and grow rich like a self help book by napoleon hill and he created info and direct response marketing campaigns on the internet to make it popular then he was like okay this self health stuff is working let's keep going so he partnered with a 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 proactive you like alright let's try proactive and he grew that to a billion dollars 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 a thing this women's bro saying share it yeah you don't use this to whatever this says you don't use it so anyway he grew the the revenue and it's just a marketing company he grew the revenue to eventually billions of dollars and this is the same process that beach body did do you know beach body yep yep yep beach body owns b ninety are all these all use what they call direct marketing which is code for ml m's so no direct marketing not ml because different direct ml is multi level marketing direct marketing like direct response marketing is when you write like copy and someone goes and they'd or they've they purchased right when these guys say we're a direct marketing company they don't mean direct response they mean we have basically salespeople people in the field like beach body does and those salespeople people are basically like they're commissioned they're they're commissioned salespeople people and they operate in a an m ml structure i'm pretty sure that beach body is one of them i know that the like i so for example proactive was developed by those two dermatologists rod and fields and then they spun out and now i've created rod in fields which witches an ml that sells the biggest competitor to proactive and many other care 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 company rate got rake he they they spun out and created rhode fields which is a monstrous company i think based out in utah well i think that your yeah you're right i think they're confusing the two too though because of beach body oh yeah you're right beach body is an ml but they get a lot of their sales from direct response marketing and also info commercials right and so there's just marketing they're just marketing machines and they just look for what's the best and most profitable thing sell the reason i'm bringing this all up is cloud pitches is now a new category of that yes and v is trying to be the gunk rink or trying to be the road at field where they're basically taking famous celebrity brand we are your back end infrastructure now they're not doing the model but they're basically doing they're basically listing on all these marketplaces like door to ash uber eats gru hub etcetera etcetera and i think it's a pretty big opportunity i've also seen something else that's pretty cool i'm gonna talk about it more in endeavors soon it's a company i really wanna invest in probably should talk about it before i invest them but fuck let's do it so all these delivery apps exist and they all need infrastructure so if there's two types of companies that they're today there's two two ways that people are participating the restaurant itself says oh put us on the delivery app we will we will do delivery and then the other one is so you know like a cloud kitchen or a virtual concept like 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 for for for that are consumer facing like it might be pizza and pies right and pizza and pies is there is their brand name but what they're at 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 a list on these these on these marketplaces and they don't wanna deal with you know kind of the marketing of it and so these guys re brand these mom and pops they put them up on the on the delivery apps and they don't have to own any labor any in any you know kitchen infrastructure any equipment any anything they're just like it sort of a a marketing brand that basically creates the concept and when the and they up charge and when they get the order they go place the order at the mom and pop for fulfillment and that's how these guys are doing it it's very smart very capital and they just and they train the mom and pop how to make the or like or they they probably like all all pizza all pizza of companies you guys all probably have the the the right stuff to make what we need you to make but we have to some quality control they give them a tablet that says hey when an order comes for this you're no longer you know deborah 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 weird tablet every time this get you get paid you're wrong i there is it is definitely not a no brainer if i'm a restaurant i'm like dude f off like it's it's like in addition to what you're doing i've gotta 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 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 you're an you're an immigrant family and and i think that like many of them many like lower income hardworking or immigrant families is like look i just gotta pay my bills i pay my bills but i do think that after you've been doing it for like twenty or thirty years you maybe do think like well the way that i may i i really get rich is like like i'm not talking like billionaire rich what i am talking like i've got like the best restaurant in this neighborhood is by doing something that will be really really good in a high quality for forty years am i wrong it's just a split and 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 pie that will do it themselves and then the majority of the pie people that are not gonna do it they've run their business their way for ten straight years and you know the easy proposition which is hey i can add an extra five thousand dollars a month of sales if you just put this tablet here and whenever it 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 tech wave and and switch the way that they they do things to become like kinda delivery heavy i'm not interested in investing at the moment but this would be a fun thing to look at is that that company's deck because i just talked myself out it but 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 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 into your pocket every month very hard to turn that off and so i think that that that might be a problem you know some people obviously will say no i'm willing to to cut off this revenue stream that's bringing me five ten thousand a month and and i think most people will will not wanna do they'll say okay cool i'm gonna do extra work and i'm not gonna take a dip here yeah i and i've never talked to any of these people so i'm just shoot on the hip yeah let's go to the next one next topic which one you wanna to do let's do this martin sc one is 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 sk everyone remembers this guy from two thousand and sixteen he was called pharma bro he was kinda of this prodigy g 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 is called that's it's like the shy tara something yeah if you get a shot when you have an allergic real reaction and he raised the price from like a dollar like a hundred dollars and he's got a really punch face and actually heard his reasoning and and he's was like no look just for the insurance companies that i was like okay so maybe besides bad as reality but who knows but he's very sm very punch and there's one journalist that was covering the story which i've got a story about that too was covering the story is a this woman who's looked like she's thirty eight i think it said she had a husband and she started covering him became president with him he's now in prison left the husband quit journalism is with it was is with him in love with this guy yeah so 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 with her with the guy in the story and secondly you know left her husband and is and also now martin crowley doesn't talk to her so he doesn't like then how it in i didn't even so he won't talk to her anymore because because what i don't it's not clear why i think it's like she was like the story was coming kinda 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 but she released the story to in the hopes of like i hope he reads this realizes how much i really truly love him oh and i hope he returns my call because for prison she can't call in he can only call out so she's just waiting for him to call and for two months he hasn't called yeah well here let me tell you martin's rally story and you all you have one as well i met martin on lab so sean used to run this thing called lab it was like the club house before club i mean you know you all in a chat with people it was pretty cool and martin would come on and and actually you go first did he like had 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 we're using hit like bunch of digital marketers we're using in a couple of brands we're using it a couple of you know friends and we were small like the biggest it was it was a live sharing 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 they were in the chat and so they could listen in on this this conversation that we're having right now and they could request to call in and be like oh i actually have a march trello story i wanna call in and it was like a radio show so that's what bla was it went small and then one day i noticed that oh oh shit there's a stream that has four thousand people in it that's ten times bigger than our biggest stream before this awesome who is this i see seen this guy martin crowley i don't know who that is i google the name martin sc and i see martin crowley the most hated man in america and i was like oh shit what do we get ourselves into and that's when i've learned about this you know what what he was doing so anyways continue on from there and i was a lab 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 is wintertime yep winter must have been winter of two thousand and fifteen fifteen sixteen yeah and like it just turned sixteen and i became friends with him friendly and i emailed them back and forth and eventually we had this woman working for name what was her name i forget her name b b kerr so nice woman like she was like a like a charming cute woman and b went to interview him on the phone and did he must have saw what she'd look like and they kinda hit it off and he b goes or no mark goes i'll pay you ten thousand dollars supply down just san diego go to see me right brit was like should i do this and i was like i mean if you won yeah and she like me became president of them and we wrote the story about him and to this day t because the hustle has talked to this guy t my guy t who writes a daily email talks on the phone with them and trunk called me the day and he goes hey i got martin on the line and it was like midnight on a thursday like are you you want us to cover this i was yeah i mean why not so anyway the hustle and and and martin like i see how he's pulled this off is very charming and it works as well so i wrote this twitter thread i wrote this twitter because i was like i could see how this would happen this guy has this like kind of weird magnetic pull he's like you said he is super sm he can be a total asshole he's not like good looking he's not like you know physically impressive in any way and he having a little rockstar vibe because he doesn't give a shit he does fuck he's like dave port 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 and he came on because we were kinda of his 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'd 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 love fights so these streams were getting really really popular he had gotten kicked off twitch and so he came to lab actually and so he and i remember reading emmett who i didn't know at the time the ceo of twitch came out was just like he banned him like the first day he's like this guy like has no place in our community and no place in our platform the way he acts and the way he's he's acting and i was like celebrating i was like this dude driving traffic man this is awesome for a startup we were desperate for any kind of traction so i was like okay this is this is interesting so he starts bringing on send 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 ten hours a day like in the morning he would log on he would start the room his like kinda of fans and haters would come in there was some like kinda 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 by the way about it he recorded that and he put it on youtube and i watched almost the whole thing it was awesome it's fascinating but he was smart his he would talk about like drug discovery he's like yeah people get mad at me for this because 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 there he goes there's this opportunity where for rare infectious diseases or rare rare diseases nobody's producing anything is like so what i started doing was going and buying up r and d for the ip for 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 he said i'm mostly just charging the insurance companies if anybody can afford it they can get it for free it's just if you can if if you do have insurance i charge insurance more which in turn makes the insurance company bill you a little bit more but like it's really the insurance company paying so that was his his defense he goes if we don't do this no one's gonna fund any research for these rare diseases so you have it either way either you don't pay for it and then nobody no there's no r and d and there's no cures or we increase the price which actually lets me invest in on r and d that is like public justification but that's not it also for the record that's not why he's in jail he's in jail because he committed securities fraud fraud he like he he had a c founder and or no i it's simple he he had 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 you know what he he wasn't stealing money from people nobody but that's not why he's in yes he that's out he went to jail originally this now he's in jail because and this is kind of stupid he threatened hillary clinton on twitter well i think he like extended his time maybe i i don't think he could just go to jail for that he violated he violated his whatever but his his parole and he but he also i read the report he did some weird shit he like called the daughter of the guy who was suing him and he like threatened her i don't know if he threatened him with violence but he didn't he was kind of odd like he he definitely crossed cross the line i don't that's definitely not oh he's a blind cross for sure yeah that's not like jail crossing but that's like you are like you're you're fucking weird and i wanna be around you but he but but what i do this was like he was famous before the robinhood hood people were around but it's like the same group of people who worship at elon who love bitcoin who love robinhood hood they love david day trader yeah i don't know what those group would get like like young men who are kinda nerdy who don't have like a strong male father like who don't have a strong father figure these types of hot balls and i would come onto to that lab at deer there was women that would come on that were like two women that were like the female version of these guys and they allowed him and he told group he could've fooled around with all of them he was a rock start of these women and men yeah and he would do complete troll shit in fact he was getting popular right around the same time trump was right around twenty sixteen 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 i 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 announces like i will buy the statue for ten million dollars but what he wanted to do is he wanted to own this little thing and then be able to e like a troll like kind of statue of himself in times square and he didn't ever even have to go through 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 rap and it's like you know boom headlines right and so martin k found a way to get in the news like every fourth day he would like he bought the wu tang album for two million dollars 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'd would go on the day he'd come back to his apartment but he he'd leave the stream on or anybody oh my be could over hear it and listen to it and he would just be playing chess with this woman or like yeah i saw that i remember that or whatever you know he was just always pushing the 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 deed ddos us which is to you know 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 like startup up and they were hitting us with like five gigabit like ddos attacks every single hour and they were take down not just us they would take down like our service providers a cloud flare and shit like that and they would call us being like y 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 sc so they've decided to just attack us it was a very very crazy time but anyway as long as sure i think there's 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 it's our biggest user and martin has not been in the news lately other than this thing he i think he's gonna get out in a few months he's gonna get out in a a short amount of time i have a feeling this is we're gonna hear a lot more from this guy yeah he's he's he's gonna do something and and and this guy he though is creepy i i don't i'm not anti martin but i like i don't wanna be friends with him he is capable enough that he's gonna mess him stuff up soon that's my prediction yeah he's capable he's got the per he's got the the trifecta that capable or he's like smart like driven and like kinda like a troll and evil so and you've got like all the things yeah nothing that's your path i think that's pretty safe to say alright what do we wanna go through now brady you what do you like on this list let's do elon musk potentially by a hundred billion dollars worth of bitcoin okay so elon tweeted this out he tweeted out a meme of i mean how a fuck you describe me but basically i mean it's a guy and it says me trying to live a normal productive life and then it's like this like you know broth hole horror with bitcoin on her butt and it just says bitcoin he's like trying to avoid looking at it or or or dabbling at it and then the guy we talked about last podcast michael sailor who is the ceo of micro strategy who has bought over a billion dollars of bitcoin office company balance sheet goes if you wanna do your shareholders a hundred billion dollar favor convert the tesla balance sheet from usd to bitcoin the other firms the s and p five hundred would follow your lead and in time it would grow to become a trillion dollar favor and elon responded he goes is is are such large transactions even possible and michael taylor goes yes i've purchased one point three 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 and then by the way elon changes is twitter bio to say on this former ceo of dot of doug coin which obviously it's not but like is kind of like an actual meme coin that was created to sort of like make fun of bitcoin that actually became quite valuable didn't sorry so what's bitcoin at today eight twenty five 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 price a bitcoin at all times yeah that sounds like the horrible way to live that's miserable shit shoot me i alright 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 cool and all i just i'm i didn't i'm i'm i'm over who's kinda loose cannon shit i think it's cool for a little while and it's been healthy doses but i i'm not an elon haters but i wouldn't say i'm i don't like just jump at what he says sometimes i find him annoying yeah i i actually the same way i think he's tried 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 go who goes and watches the s stream like first of out he's like trying really hard to be like cool like oh that's so cool that you did that you know you you posted that meme oh you said dos coin oh you know you sent f to somebody on twitter like it just seems a little bit try hard to me now it's kinda like it's like if you remember the ninety nineties i if i saw him i'd be like you know bow down and like you know they can fool of myself trying to like be friends with the guy so i can't really lie and say i would agree i enough agree but i i just i do think it's annoying it the stick is going a little too far it was kinda like how trump in the nineties remember when trump was on home alone and like trump met like successful rich businessman right now to half the country trump means like liar fraud it's like through like two years ago you were like rocket scientist genius good guy saving the world now you're kinda like and over to be like maybe troll first right like do kind of douche first and then like saving the world and doing all this amazing stuff second yeah you you never go full troll he went full troll and we'll 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 out the price which would strengthen both the story and the price and the like the the 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 one it is the bubble that never pops the more people that believe in it the more people that get behind it the more hype it builds the more real it becomes and so michael taylor is absolutely right if tesla did this if they did legit bitcoin even more than it's already been legit it would only like it would only like if a self fulfilling prophecy it would only increase the likelihood that the price would go up and the returns would be higher sean do you wanna talk about you already talked about this a little bit you had a really cool twitter thing going on were you like talked about your newsletter did do you have any good replies to that yeah a bunch of people were like oh this is cool you know it's just like yeah i did it to try to get likes right like it's a reason to put out a thread like this just to get like it drove three thousand new email subscribers and four thousand new twitter followers which is cool like one twitter thread can do that so that that was cool there wasn't a whole lot i mean a couple of people who were like haters like one guy was like you know it's just funny people who were like oh you worked on this after seven pm like like you know and basically calling me a shitty dad i was like dude my my kid sleeps after seven like that's a bedtime so so he i guess so but okay even if i it 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 the archive we sold i sold like five thousand dollars worth of it yesterday from from that so that's like you know at a hundred dollars piece fifty fifty people i think bought it as of this morning and i didn't put the link in there so i actually just dm it to one guy who asked and then a bunch of people asked him and so he he sold basically fifty of these four me because i didn't 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 i i really wanna write more i really enjoyed 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 not that interesting there the there's one inch more interesting thing that is i'm doing this other thing which i find to be very entertaining so i'm i'm doing all these like tiny life experiments one of which is i'm creating something called club lt tv did i tell you about this you know okay so i have this idea was like okay i wanted to meet a bunch of other people who have like successful d stores i'm i'm interested in the d e comm space so i was like okay cool i want me a bunch of people and i have this philosophy much like you which is that you wanna host the party not attend it right like what you did with hu khan was great like yes it was more work but the rewards are like yeah totally disproportionate to how much more how much more effort it is to just host the event like all the speakers know you they like you they 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 wanna get into something you wanna build your network the easiest way to do it is just to host host something just do the sc work of hosting so i wanted to get into the d world so i was like alright i'm gonna create like a meetup but of course there's no conferences there's no meetups going on right now 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's out like you know i wouldn't even wanna attend my own event so i talked to ben and i was ben how we make this cool and i was like let's just go way over the top so i created this thing called club lt tv and it's literally like a club and it's only for people that are lt tv being lifetime value which is like a a metric every east e commerce store owner cares about i hired like a dj who's coming everybody has to bring a drink i in real life this is a zoom meetup but it's gonna have every like fucking trick i could throw into a zoom meet 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 like it it basically like snappy fingers and it breaks everybody out in the groups of five so they can kind of like kind of go hang out and have conversations on their own i got these like baller like clint craig clement who was on our podcast who's done like a billion dollars in e commerce revenue he's like this is dope i i come from a club background i'll be there and it's so i got these like kinda 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 you have a do you have a long term plan or i have a sponsored yeah it's free to a attend but you have to be a e commerce store owner that's doing over a hundred thousand a month in your store that's good and how many people send out we have fifty people coming in as of right now but i'm gonna try to get this to be more so if you if you're out if you wanna be in the commerce i don't know about that restriction about the hunter k and up i 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 to cup the club lt tv tweet that me and tell me about your e com store can i what well you'll you'll have to like share the url or something for that her people to sign up just go to my twitter just at s and dm me and say i wanted club lt tv there's no what do you you and your family use for personal finance like just tracking spending you mean or what yeah tracking do what what's your personal finance setup up alright my personal finance setup is mint for just aggregating accounts and tracking and then excel i do all my shit in excel why do you use excel and mint so i use mint because i've used mint for a long time i did the started that like i at don't hour twenty ten or something i started using mint so i just kinda 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 like i don't wanna link my accounts i don't wanna link all my bank accounts to random mass 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 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 hand wrote stuff right right something that the something into 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 that every month every you probably like two months yeah so i'm looking at like solutions for this so i'm trying to figure out two things like how to set up all my bank accounts or my wife and i and like because we i've got like eight bank accounts because like we each had four like like the savings and checking that we had were like we're in high school right and then like your new account that you create went do you like oh that's a real job thing sounds cool yeah yeah and then your credit card 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 ten accounts this is like so silly what are we doing so i've gotta figure that out i also have to figure out i'm like well i first personally was using personal capital for and i knew what i spent so like it was no big deal didn't have to track it religiously like i just i used to use this this thing where i wrote it down as well but now there's two of i'm trying to figure all this how there's a software i i found it's an app and an web app called uni need a budget have you heard of it no okay it's called you need a budget and i've never seen a fan such a fan group of people around budgeting and they 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 twelve million to fifteen million a year in recurring revenue and if you go to you need a budget whatever the abbreviation of that you so why need and a y nab there's a subreddit with a whole lot of people and they like are fan mathematical about this in a what is that zero budget think what does that mean so i don't know entire i mean i i know just because like google what is zero based budgeting and the way it works is every dollar that comes in is allocated and spent so it's let's say you make ten grand a month and you save five thousand dollars so that's five thousand dollars that you spent on saving and then so you have to spend two thousand on rent like every dollar must be spent and you have to go in each month and make sure that you've accounted in for each dollar like each dollar serves a purpose to get down to a zero gotcha and i don't and and people like it because of exactly what you said which is they like seeing where everything is going and they wanna 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 gonna 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 three months so that's here's what you spend every month and i'm trying to figure out the best thing to use but it's incredibly complex and like i'm not even like imagine if you're like ultra high network then it's really but i guess it's not that hard you if so much money didn't really matter what your budgeted is but for a young couple young family with ten accounts or whatever i'm like overwhelmed and the zero based budgeting seems incredibly interesting i've never heard and the reason why 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 i don't know kinda describe when you got a big podcast and he's yeah finance kind of adviser well he's a religious he's a he and i'm not gonna judge this i'm just gonna say a facts well no he's all about religion so his yeah he he's a southern guy so know because i'm from this south his finance tips are based off of the bible and and so southern christian conservative folks love dave ramsey and so he's all about and it's and he's a very conservative like you know he he anticipates that his average user is gonna make fifty thousand dollars for a really long time is a teacher needs a safer retirement to get out of debt yada he's not like a get rich chap guy it's just like live a good life with a normal normal meme 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 i'm not a big budget like i basically my my i thinking is this i was like alright i can focus in one of two areas i can focus on saving or i can focus on earning so i try to focus on earning any hours that i have i try to focus on earning that's not saving the second thing is what gives me like stress versus not stress and so like i like to have the snapshot of where we're at every couple months but i don't want to measure what we're spending because i think about the future i'm like alright i'm very confident that over the next ten years when it get to the point where we have more than enough money that we like we have more money than we know what to do with so if that's true if i'm like if i believe that a hundred percent which i do then this is all wasted energy doing this i'd rather literally be sleeping i'd rather be like doing something else and so i i just want like the distressed way of living which is like not measuring anything in fact i told my wife like 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 is inspired by like my my cofounder fe always tells the 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 five thousand dollars i don't want you to talk to me about it and he hung up the phone and fe comes was like dan a baller moved five thousand dollars like that's that's crazy and so then i also heard that story i was like that's awesome and so now i wanna do the same i just think that's just a baller way to live it's like don't the items under five thousand like expenditures under five thousand dollars do not concern me i think that's a cool way to live that's how i roll to yeah i don't know what i don't know what are like it's probably four thousand three thousand like i don't care i just don't wanna talk about i first well i just wanted to ask what you use for first finance i'm trying to figure out how to how to handle all this shit you you do a good job finding these little communities where did you find the was 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 i and and and it's fine for me so i'd like so this reddit the subreddit called fat fire i'm like a huge fan of that i read the book that you and i had talked about via text which is like a finance book or personal finance book kinda and so i just like recommend to know of all of them and i asked my twitter up following what they use and i had one or two people say you need a budget and then it got like crazy amount of likes and i was like what is this like what's this subreddit and there was people who are like defending it like crazy like like they stake their personality on this and i'm like that's crazy this whole zero bit so for a certain group people it seems life changing yeah let me see how many downloads this has i mean the android app alone has over for a million downloads that's pretty impressive for and call oh by the ways but look it costs money so you have to pay fifty dollars i think or a hundred dollars 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 is it cost three dollars a month or ten dollars 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 gonna sign up for it the only reason i haven't is it it's kinda like super dot 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 of the cost a bra just said eighty three eighty three dollars a month how do a year how do you create a cult following around these types of things and like what are they saying that's the opposite what other people are saying in order to make this 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 a desire and you give them a forum to basically trade tips on how they're achieving it and like say when things are really hard so i see this all the time right had a baby so sony and 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 is just off the charts and often they're around certain like for example it could be natural birth versus getting an epi or could be around sleep training or not sleep training it doesn't matter which process it is it's like that that community has like a cult following and it's not that like it's not all about the 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 like comm misery i think that's what the these guys are doing for kind of personal finance i think that it happens with mommy bloggers and i saw not mommy blog just new moms who are trying to go through that together and trade you know why is my baby not sleeping or she's not eating enough or whatever getting that that sort of community help there i think that's where the magic is how many readily people we could have done right we we could've have said we we're gonna really foster a community people who are trying to make the first million bucks people who were who literally they wanna be a millionaire and they're going after it and you know we're gonna build an awesome community around it i i didn't i i i don't know a community building 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 but it's such a clear stated goal and dream like it's baked into the name of our podcast and i think we had the potential to build something as good as these guys it's not over yet i mean we could still do it i wanna i bet you i wonder how this guy got started i bet you we had a personal finance i can build an audience and then launch this right cool