¶ Intro and Guest Bio Request
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays. here in miami florida we are at the move studio normally as you guys know i do this in an rv motorhome traveling around the country but we're in miami i'm at the move and i have a back to back to back to back podcast starting off with our first special guest
This gentleman has built up a business that has done hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And as you guys know, we cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to donate to charity. So we're going to start off with our first guest. He's going to give his quick two-minute bio so we get straight to the money.
¶ Early Life and Finding Entrepreneurship
My name's Andrew Bachman. I grew up in Wayland, Massachusetts. My parents were physicians. I had sisters that are 10 years older than me. Spent a lot of time by myself growing up. I'd be in the woods, you know, walking around, playing with, you know.
trying to keep myself busy and i had a lot of confidence as a young young young boy when i was alone um and i always thought i was going to do something great in this world i thought i was going to be an athlete i thought i was going to be a famous actor or something like that when i got to public school It hit me in the face that that was not necessarily going to happen for me. I was very small.
I was a 103-pound wrestler in high school, so I was always a runt in high school. I didn't get laid until I was 18 years old, and I wasn't popular, but I always loved... I loved fighting with the bigger kids and always going to the parties and mixing it up. But high school and middle school was not a safe time for me.
And I remember junior year of high school being in the locker room after wrestling practice and a kid comes in. This is the year 2000. Kid comes in. Mark Zuckerberg didn't exist for six years basically at that point.
So people weren't using the word entrepreneurship. And a kid comes into the locker room all excited because he just got into this college called Babson College and goes, I just got into the number one school in the world for entrepreneurship. And I looked at him. I said, what the hell is that? Like a lung disease?
And he said, no, entrepreneurship. Arthur Blank went to my college. He got fired from his job, went to the coffee shop and wrote the business plan for the Home Depot on a napkin and started the Home Depot. Now he's a billionaire. He owns the Atlanta Falcons. And I said,
¶ College, Early Success, and Setbacks
oh that's what i'm gonna do i somehow took a gap year i applied to babs and i got in and uh freshman year literally day one uh that would have been the fall of uh 2002 i was in london I got there. August of 2001, 9-11 happened the next month. I finished my semester there. I got into Babson. I came home the next fall. I started at Babson. And I drive into campus, and I'm driving a Ford Explorer wearing Abercrombie and Fitch, thinking that's his bling.
bling as the world got, because that's all I knew. And that's when I saw a bunch of Arab kids and international kids flying around campus in Ferraris, living at the Ritz-Carlton. And I get all excited. I get invited out to a nightclub in Boston. I show up.
I didn't know you needed $20 to pay cover charge, so I had to sneak into the nightclub. And when I got downstairs, it was called Aria back in the day in Boston. I see these kids buying crystal on black cards. And this wrestler... competitive rush came over me and from that moment on I just started trying to start and build businesses and I failed thousands of times ended up
¶ From Trouble to Rebuilding Life
partnering with a really smart kid out of my college dorm room. We made a million dollars from college. We subsequently did a billion dollars in sales in the affiliate marketing space. I got into a bunch of trouble. Learned my lesson for about five, six years of my life and started working with a Harvard neuroscientist who was trying to sell the Department of Advanced Research Projects.
The U.S. military has a branch called DARPA. It stands for the Department of Advanced Research Projects. If you go to DARPA, they literally spend a trillion dollars a year to make sure that we have the safest, most technology advanced military in the world. And if you go to them and say, hey.
hey, I've got this bracelet. When a soldier wears it, their brain's going to be 60% more effective under stress. They'll smile and say, okay, how much you want? And you say $10 billion, and they'll cut you a check because they print the money and they got the budget.
And I was doing that all up until COVID. I wasn't making a lot of money doing it, but I was really into it. This doctor, again, I completely fast forwarded because he only gave me two minutes and I'm probably at five. But this doctor. I needed something to believe in at this time where I'd gone through a really dark stage of my life. I skipped a whole part, but I was this small guy in high school.
put on muscle and become a multimillionaire. In my 20s, I'm living in Boston, driving Ferraris. Everybody knows me. I'm backing everyone's restaurant and everyone's ventures, doing all the Summit series, all your tours. I was kind of a black sheep in that whole entrepreneurship networking world.
boom, my ego gets crushed because I lose all my money. I'm on the front page of the newspaper at about 30 years old. So after about five years of darkness, I meet this neuroscientist who figured, who gave me the... principles that I now live my life by physically, intellectually, emotionally, socially, spiritually, sexually, and occupationally.
¶ Launching and Scaling Creators Inc
I'm working with him, not making a lot of money, but doing something really interesting for the U.S. military. And then boom, pandemic happens. Pandemic happens and I'm sitting at home from my kitchen table and a female friend of mine who knew me when I was.
My young high-flyer, multi-millionaire self in my 20s calls me up and says, I need your help. I've got $100 to my name. I'm some Jewish ladies' nanny in L.A. doing her grocery shopping. I'm stressed out about getting coronavirus, so I made an OnlyFans, but I can't figure it out. I said, what the hell is that?
I logged in and I said, oh, you're trying to thirst trap pictures at scale. You've got no marketing logic. This platform's robust in the sense that it can facilitate transactions, but it doesn't do a great job of taking a creator with a blindfold on and saying, do steps one through 10. You're going to make a bag of money. Made her a quarter of a million dollars in a month. In a month? In a month, she starts to run around LA. She had been the personal assistant for big people like...
Ruby Rose, hi, my name's T, whoa, Vicky, bad baby. She starts saying, hey, don't trust your OnlyFans business to nightclub promoters and rappers. There's these Jewish guys in Boston. They don't simp. Look at my numbers. And so I start getting this influx of clients. I made close to $60 million with one client in year one. One client? What? And it kind of got out who I was, and I was not sure if...
¶ Building a Hollywood-Style Agency Brand
this was kosher or something like I should be publicly doing. And then it was suggested to me that if I built a brand that felt like traditional hollywood like caa uta william morris now don't don't forget this is during covet so actors and writers you know are not getting a lot of work so i built a brand called creators inc and basically all these
big a-list celebrities who are now joining these exclusive paywall sites are coming to me because my company feels like what they're familiar with traditional hollywood and i build this billion dollar company called creators inc that is specifically you know works We monetize mainly from these paywall sites like OnlyFans, but I'm very much trying to branch out into products much like stuff you're interested in.
You know, I'm in the music industry. I have a studio in Los Angeles, and I don't know shit about music, but I just know people get excited when rappers come to the house and people want to be part of Creators, Inc. And, you know, so I can talk a lot about how... I used to have huge margins as a boutique small guy under the radar. And I didn't have a name. I was just Andy, but I knew I was the biggest in the space. And I came to L.A. one day and.
I tried to sign this girl and she looked at me and goes, who the hell are you? I'm with Unruly. And I go, oh shit, I need a brand. And that's the moment I started building Creators Inc. And now I'm pretty sure we're by far the most dominant name in this space.
¶ The OnlyFans Market Ecosystem
So you're only fans of the primary focus, but are there other paywalls you're working on? Not really. Everybody else is competing for crumbs. You've got the passes, you've got the fan fixes, the wide apps, the ultraviolet. they're all kind of like competing for the non-nude girls that want to make the bag, but they're like worried they're not going to get a high value man if they have OnlyFans or they don't want to be associated with the stigma.
They're all competing for really tiny crumbs. I want to say October 2021, OnlyFans came out and said, hey, we have to go non-nude because they were going to lose their processors. all the content creators quickly scattered to signing up for like all these like alt shit versions like Fan Centro, Fan Zen, Fansly, whatever and I think
they all got on these platforms and realized there was no customers, there was no money, and those sites were janky and not prepared for the rush. Then I think the voice of these liberal creators like... you know the sex workers which traditionally large banks don't mess with because they make too much money off main street grocery stores gas stations they don't touch taboo they said
crap we're on the wrong side of this and they opened it up and i think only fans again i'm not speaking fact here so don't quote me but i think only fans went from having to process with kind of like european mauritius So Isle of Man, Gibraltar, they got Wall Street technology and then it opened back up and then they just went like this. So there's word that they're trying to sell for around $8 billion. Is that a real life thing?
¶ Discussing the OnlyFans Exit Strategy
That's the word on the street. I don't have specific proof. I've had conversations. I would definitely keep them private. I think there's some personal reasons that the founders... might be considering a liquidity event. But if you want my... I mean, 8 billion, anyone should be considering a liquidity event, right? Even if it's... That's a big gamble to take. Here's the thing I always think about when it comes to exits. So let's say they keep it going.
Are they hoping to get to 10, to 12, to 14, to 16, to 20? At some point, there's a cap. No one's going to buy them for 20 billion or 40 billion at some point because there's a few dozen companies or private equity groups that would pay that for anything. They don't have the capital for it. So would you gamble in Las Vegas $8 billion to make $12 or $16 or $20? You're talking about the owner's gambling? You're talking about the next guy who buys it? The owner's gambling.
You have $8 billion in front of you. Here's the thing. If I owned the platform 100% of it, I think I do take $8 billion in the end. And I'll tell you why. Because I don't know how someone can even bet... on a five time like I don't even know how someone comes in pays five billion for it and I'll tell you why I say that let's just say it's doing a billion dollars a year
what are the odds in the next five years that AI or regulations don't disrupt it? They're not zero. I'm not saying that's likely, but the odds aren't zero. Right, there's AI influencers, there's AI agencies. I get ads for the OnlyFans agencies of AI girls.
things can change yeah we don't know that's going to change but it can change yeah so it's a big gamble either way but again for me like i started this business with basically zero dollars from a laptop squatting in my parents house on cape cod um so if my business went away tomorrow you know i've said this to you before i'm smiling you know and like i look at only fans that i mean
All-time history, I think revenue per employee, it's like the best company ever, right? They've got 40 employees. They've got 40 employees. I'm a parasite. of only fans i have 800 employees i have 40 employees in my card stores exactly doing one one thousandth of the revenue that these guys are doing yeah and uh like you said i'm doing one one thousandth the revenue and um
You know, I don't even know if I could sell my company. I have an incredible company from a financial and P&L perspective, but I just think that if somebody were going to come cut me a big enough check for me to say, here's the keys to Creators Inc., I'm done, I'm going to walk away.
¶ Acquisition Strategies for Businesses
I just don't know how much collateral I have to give them back for them to be excited besides the relationships I have with my clients and creators. So what we're talking about, guys, is when it comes to private equity groups or larger companies that are looking to acquire.
If they're going to go buy someone's company like Andy's, for example, they have to make a decision. Are they going to buy it and have him walk away? Meaning that they can just assume it. So they're coming. Let's say like a CAA, like a big agency were to buy it.
They have team staff executives that may be able to run his business from an agency perspective. Two, are they going to give him what's called golden handcuffs? Are they going to lock him in for one year, two years, three years or longer by only buying 80% and leaving 20% for him and his team?
so they have another bite at the apple. Sometimes the bite at the apple, the 20%, can be bigger than the 80%, depending on how much they scale the business. But also they'd have to pay him millions of dollars a year, or whatever the number is, to keep the golden handcuffs. Or three, are they going to buy it?
and disassemble it and sell it off for parts, meaning they're going to merge it into their parent company, take one division or add divisions onto it. That's what someone has to decide when they're going to look at buying something. Some of them are just buying it for the revenue, which is the fourth bonus option.
They're just buying for the revenue, and they're going to make money because their stock's going to go up. Quick example. You see some of these acquisitions that happen out there, or you see somebody like Spotify give $150 million to Joe Rogan. And people are like, how could they pay $150 million?
Well, Spotify stock went up a billion dollars that day. So it was free. Sometimes you see companies get bought for $640 million. You're like, how did RX bar or protein bar get bought for $640 million? Well, their stock went up $2 billion when they bought it. So it's free.
So sometimes when you're thinking about acquisitions, which is what we're going back and forth about, there has to be a determining factor for the parent company or for the private equity group on what they want to happen if they buy it. All right, on the make money side of things.
¶ Does the Drive to Make Money Stop?
You've gone through these different roller coasters of your life. You built this company to doing hundreds of millions of dollars and then it stops. Whether you sell it or you keep it going and have someone as a CEO come take over.
Is there a next? Is there something that the make money part? Does the drive ever go away when you start to make a lot of money after you've been broke before? Could you just stop and go sit on an island today? If I handed you a billion dollars, would you just stop? I used to really like golf a lot.
I loved golf. I never grew up with golf, and after I sold my first company, I joined a couple country clubs outside of Boston. I started to gamble with all these guys, and my slice would go like this.
I'll never forget this billionaire from Boston. His name's Patrick Lyons. He was actually a nightclub entrepreneur, but he made a lot of money. Says to me on the first tee at Pinebrook Country Club, one of my first days of learning how to play golf. He goes, how about a $5 game of Wolf? Somehow this fucking guy. beat me for $3,600 in a single round of golf. I didn't say a word. I went home.
I did my research. I flew to Boca Raton. I hired Dave Pels, who was Mickelson's short game coach. I did nothing but chip and putt for a week straight. I went back north and I ate their lunch. I took 20 shots off my game. They were pissed. All these guys up there. I really like golf. I don't know about sitting on an island. Could you just play golf for the rest of your life? I think you go through phases. And I think the grass is always greener. I think once you completely retire...
Like imagine, you know, you work really hard for, again, I can't put this on you because you're a unicorn. But I'm just saying, say you had a $5 billion liquidity event and you took a couple years off and you were just, you know. focusing on health and all the other stuff, meditation. You said, like, I'm going to take a beat on capitalism because I make more money and interest from my $5 billion than I can in my entrepreneurial ventures.
I think like guys like us, you're at the gym and you see these guys coming in and they're on the phone and they're all stressed out and they're in the trenches. I think we would miss that. We would get terrible FOMO. So I think you've got to go through phases. I think you can ebb and flow. I will say this. After I sold my first company, I played golf. I flew my friends around on a jet, and we played core Crenshaw courses all over the country for...
like a year straight, and then I did a reverse merger and took a company public in the subway space because I was like, all right, like, you know, enough of this. But so, like, I think you ying and yang a little bit. I definitely know this, like... The last five years has definitely beat me up a lot. I take care of my health. I only eat a certain way. I don't drink alcohol. I don't drug. I don't have vices, really. I don't chase women. I don't gamble.
um i have a cold plunge in all my homes uh i'm in that thing first thing when i wake up um but my cortisol level has definitely spiked i don't sleep well because you know i i go to bed you know playing chess on all the things that I'm trying to fix rather than sleeping. So, you know, you've got to look into that. And, you know, I want to live a long, healthy life because...
You know, I thought about the other day, if I died tomorrow, I really wouldn't have regrets. But like, I'm always, I'm all my pain and stress is about more money. And I don't need more money. You and I've had this conversation, like, I have a very low burn. i did the math the other day i was like i could live my lifestyle for the next 250 years but yet like i'm just constantly worried about like my next competitor catching me or one of my account executives me over like you know it's like
¶ Overcoming Ego Through Delegation
I guess it's just part of the journey. You've got to check yourself. I have a solution. So for eight years of running the agency, Elevator Studio, I was everything. I couldn't leave the office because... I had to write Kylie Jenner's caption. I had to go drop off Fashion Nova dress at Kim's house. I had to go to Tyga and bring him 50 or some brand, DraftKings or Postmates. I feel like I had to do every, literally drive to their houses.
write their captions copy and paste it i did the wire transfer i wrote the con i thought i had to do everything in 2019 i finally hired a ceo 30 years in the tv game almost 60 years old you know he's got all this experience and i was thinking if i'm going to do this i want to go to where the puck is going i want to hire someone above my pay grade we were doing 18 million at the time and i thought am i really going to give someone equity for the first time no one had a piece of elevator studio
I never raised a dollar. Am I going to pay this guy this much money to do it? We went from $18 million to $60 million. Guess what? The captions were written just fine. The clothes got dropped off just fine. The company ran just fine. And I thought in my mind and my ego, like, no, I have to write the caption. I have to put the emoji right here. I have to go drop the dress off for the relationship. I thought I had to do everything and none of it was true.
It was all in my mind. It was all in my ego. And by doing it, two things happened. I got to break the shackles to leave the office. My stress levels went down because I wasn't dealing with 3,500 influencers and texting and calling.
trying to get a W9, as you know, trying to get a W9 from an influencer, right? Trying to interact with all these people, and everything changed. I started my charity. I started the mastermind. I started speaking in 100 events. I started doing the things that I wanted to do that brought in more business to the company.
And now, six years later, I don't know any of my clients. I don't know most of the staff. I don't know most of the operations. My CEO does. And I'm still on group chats when I want to be. But literally, I don't know them. It's allowed me, from a mind perspective and a stress perspective, to go do other things and not worry about the minutia of the day-to-day. And I'm sure you're going to say great, but how was the P&L performance once you stepped away? I crushed it.
Everything changed so much better. We literally went from $18 million to $60 million in one year. That's incredible. I will tell you, and not to play the contrarian, but I've delegated almost all of those things, but I just feel like before I would make that move, I just... you know when it's your baby and like every dollar you spend is out of your pocket you know because it's a p l game right when you have the equity so
I just don't know. I have not yet found the person that I would just say, like, here are the keys, drive this car. uh only because i my my business is highly competitive there's no ip in the space we all compete on commissions and that's why i had to kind of build brand and go so hard on that yeah i for four months i was torn like i had
And I had to convince him. He had to leave Dr. Phil for me. Dr. Phil's a much more established brand. He had to gamble on a kid that's an agency, as you know. My business is based off of month-to-month contracts. I had no annual contracts. I still have no annual contracts.
Oracle, BET Television, all these big brands, DraftKings, Postmates, Lyft. None of them are more than one month at a time. None of them. But they've all been with me for six years, eight years, ten years, etc. And for four months, I was torn with that emotion. I had to do it. And by the way, I agree with you with the staff of vice president accounting. I felt like that is not someone that could take over. The CEO that I went and got someone that was greater than me with.
30 years more experienced than me, in a different vertical. I would have preferred if he was in my vertical, I thought. But because he was in TV and he ran Fox and Sony for all these years, he invented reality television. He was the CEO for Buena Murray. So he created real world. Simple Life with Paris Hilton, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, etc. So, I don't know that I have someone else in mind. The same way you're thinking, like, who would I have to do that? But I will tell you that...
¶ Investing Philosophy: Bet on Operators
that literally changed everything. And also, I now implement that in every investment. I won't invest in a company unless I have a CEO. I call them a quarterback. So let's say Andy pitched me right now, hey, let's start a table company together.
And we're going to put in a million dollars each. If he said, hey, actually, you don't have to put the million dollars. I'll put in two million dollars. You put in zero. Let's start it. I would say no. Even though he's an amazing operator, he's going to put up all the money. Unless we have a CEO to run it, I'm not in.
Because we both know what it takes to actually run the thing, that we would both be part-time running it. It's very funny you say that. I don't look at investments anymore. I look for operators. Absolutely. Because the table is... is interchangeable meaning if we find a good operator if andy's like hey i got this girl she's got 18 years experience and all she's ever done is this this and this and this and this and she loves furniture fantastic
But if also he said, oh, no, she likes to just sell lamps. Great. The person can sell whatever it takes if they are ride or die. If he knows someone that's a ride or die that that person's a crusher, I would rather invest in that.
Then the thing I used to say, like, you have to hit so many lotteries to win when you invest in someone privately. Number one, is their idea a good idea and forward thinking? Number two, do they know how to run a profitable business? And number three, something we just talked about over there. is even if it does hit
¶ Navigating Private Markets and AI Impact
Are their intentions good? Are they going to pay you or are they going to fuck you? Right. Which is why I don't have a great track record when I'm like, as an angel, I stick to public markets just because of liquidity. and research and I like that playing field a little bit better there's less variables but yeah like like you said like I look for operators I'm gonna
I'm doing something silly in Miami. I shouldn't even say it's silly. I think it's kind of cool. I'm investing in a brick and mortar juice bar. In Los Angeles, I have a big content house and that has a gym, a sauna, cold plunge, music studio, fridge full of drinks, like all of our creators. gather there. They can come 24-7. Aubrey O'Day needed to do an interview for the Diddy trial. She codes in at 5 a.m. while I'm in Miami. She's in L.A. She's using my room. It's a living, breathing thing.
i was going to do the same thing in miami but i didn't quite have the trusted operators i do in la so i'm going to open up a juice bar concept and call it creators inc uh juice kitchen or creators creators juice Content Kitchen. It's still a work in progress. But I had this idea for a long time. I just found an operator.
Colombian girl who ran a similar business with her mom, but wasn't good at marketing is there nine to five, wants to be there nine to five. Finally, I find the operator and now I can do this project because you and I are not going to stand there and do that. Of course not. Right. Okay.
So we talked a bit about the make money side and some exit stuff. Let's talk about investing side. We have so many options, right? You work with all these influencers. Some of them have influencer brands. Some of them have deals. Some of them have clothing brands or restaurants or nightclubs.
But then you can do real estate, stock market, cryptocurrency, NFTs, Bitcoin here, stocks, derivatives, funds. When you have so many options and get bombarded by so many different things, how do you choose what you invest your time, money into?
Well, I'm going to dumb this down because I represent and I guide and I communicate with a lot of 20 to 25 year old young content creators who are getting money for the first time. They haven't been through too many cycles of paying their taxes. They don't even.
think about how they apply that. Right. So when you and I are betting, like I'm showing, I'm showing you my day trading and you're rolling your eyes because you're like, okay, dumbass, you're taking a hundred percent of the risk, but you're going to owe 40% in taxes. Like, you know what I mean? Like,
These kids don't even have that in their brain yet. So what I tell everybody is this. When your dollar sits in your bank account earning zero, you're actually losing money because as time goes on, there's something called inflation. Things get more expensive. So what are your choices? You can park your money in a high-yield savings account and make 4.5%, or you can put it in the stock market in index funds like the S&P 500, and you will probably make twice with that.
high yield savings account pays you but over the long term in the short term six months from now you could get hammered but in the long run if you're long term minded that's probably your best bet plus long term capital gains now that's a very vanilla boring answer but like i said i think for a large audience listening to this that might that might hit the most now when it comes to like you know a hot take
uh right now in my portfolio i am getting everything out that i think could possibly be susceptible to ai that is not like positioned properly for that and i'm going all in on gold standard stuff that I think AI is going to flush. I think we are in the stone ages right now. Gary Vee had a good hot take. He said, the first television commercials were radio ads.
Because that was the technology everybody knew. People only knew the radio. So the very first TV commercial was a guy sitting there reading a radio spot. That is where we're at on ChatGPT. If your friends are sending you outputs on ChatGPT that are still this long, that is not kosher. That is not pee. They're not even thinking like, hey, ChatGPT, can you make this digestible for Dan? He's important. He doesn't have a lot of time.
You know, like we're still there. And I think there's a huge opening in the marketplace. I wish I were the man I was five years ago right now. And that's why I cold plunge. I cold plunge because I'm too lazy to meditate. And three minute cold plunge gets my brain where like 20 minutes a day of meditation does. But. I am going to try to push myself to be so, so, so forward. I'm going to do everything I can to learn right now, like hyper-learn.
everything I can about AI in the marketplace and position. Because I got lucky. I got to make some money in the last five years. And I have real fear. I'm driven by fear more than joy. I worry like... In the AI world, it's really going to be a world of haves and have nots. Like making money right now is so crucial and important. I don't mean to fear monger, but it just feels like.
Yeah. And obviously, like, you know, the tractor didn't kill the world, it created more opportunity. But I just concerned, I get concerned, like, I look at my friends who are lawyers, and I'm like, you know, inefficient people are, you know, frickin inefficient you are, like,
if i just had one conversation with somebody i could solve this in five minutes but like six months later because you're going to forget about an email and two weeks later and you know what i mean like ai is solving that so quickly as someone who's starting a ai for lawyers they raised some ungodly amount 500 million or a billion for their seed round because people realize like most of the things that happens with lawyers is just
regurgitated the same thing that's why it's all based off trials from the past trial law is how most are decide who can figure out trial law better than chat gpt right rather than an assistant that pays 400 bucks an hour to go research old cases
¶ Simple Investing with S&P 500
ChatGPT is going to figure that out in 10 seconds soon. Okay. You mentioned something about the S&P 500. So I wanted to clarify what he just meant. Over the last 92 years, the S&P 500 has returned 11.1% on average. The reason I know this is part of my speech. So I'd love that you said that. You cannot get a financial manager or planner that's going to beat the S&P 500's average over the last 92 years.
There are financial planners that can sometimes make you 20, 30 percent, sometimes lose you 10 percent, etc. But 11 percent average for 92 years in a row through recessions, depressions and all the things that it's gone through is staggering. Last year was 24.6 percent. Think about that for a second. If you could just put your money into the top 500 companies on the planet and let them work for you, it's really compelling for you guys to research the S&P 500. And guess what?
It is super simple. You do not need some big fancy financial planner to do it for you. So it could be a 22-year-old influencer creator that's all of a sudden making hundreds of thousands. they can now put money into something that's returning 11% on average. Can it lose one year? Of course. Can it lose for a month? Of course. But investing to me is things that I don't want to sell. I want to invest in things that I don't want to sell. Otherwise, you're trading.
When you're doing a fix and flip, that is not an investment to me. That is a trade. When you're doing a lot of these type of deals that you're looking for, like buying and selling really quickly or looking at Bitcoin at 100K, sell it for 104, buy it back in 96, et cetera, you're trading, you're not investing.
I invest in Bitcoin when it was $300, and I still invest when it's $100,000 because I'm thinking it's going to be worth millions. I invest into things that I don't plan to sell. How often do you rebalance? I don't. Well, look, right? At one point in future...
¶ Betting on Leadership, Not Just Fundamentals
uh ge and daimler chrysler were the cats meows before tesla right like at some point in time like i think you've got to at least say like okay every three or six months i have to look at my portfolio because you can't take anything for granted like these big companies that we know of as like remember Toys R Us as a kid remember like where are they at right like that was their fault well whatever Toys R Us should still be crushing right now because they should have been an event space
Think about what you would have spent for your birthday parties there ever content creation Who do you put that on the leadership right the leadership for sure so same with blockbuster video? I just think it's important, you know every Quarter to take a look at rebalancing or just
you know, making sure that, you know, your long-term bets are still your long-term bets. Like, I just think like, it's like, I believe in like semi-active management. The things that, if something were to have a major shift. Let's say Tesla had a new competitor that just was crushing them. Or Elon Musk resigns. I would just sell all of Tesla. I'd sell all my Tesla stock. Not based on fundamentals, not based on their revenue, not based on anything, but I'm betting on Elon Musk. Sure.
right the only guy that's going to be a multi-trillion if i could own one company in the world to this day it'd be meta right because i just think zuck is unbelievable if zuck got hit by a bus i'm out out instantly and i don't care if they hire the fanciest ceo in the world i'm out
The guy lived and breathed the same thing. Although Tim Cook did such a, like, you know, post-jobs, like, what a job he's done. Yeah, from an efficiency perspective, not from a brand perspective. Steve Jobs was still the guy that we all... We're enamored by. Tim Cook we don't talk about. We talk about it because we're researching and studying it. But if Tim Cook walked by, no one would know who he was. Steve Jobs, people would be taking selfies.
The brand vision, the efficiency that Tim Cook created, obviously, is much better than what Steve Jobs had. Speaking of Jobs, I think about him every day. Yeah. Yeah, you know, there's...
¶ Steve Jobs, Purpose, and Charity
story about him on his deathbed basically saying like I worked my whole life to become a billionaire for what to get sick and can't pay anyone to take this from me and I think about literally like Steve Jobs like Apple founder, right? Like what he would give to come back and have my shittiest day. Right. All of it. He'd give away $50 billion in a heartbeat.
I think about it a lot and it's actually the reason that I work so much because I enjoy it. I want to do as much for the planet before I go. Now that I have a baby, that will change at some point when she's older, but I'm still in that mode of...
i want to do a lot because i don't know if i'm going to die tonight next month next year or 100 years based on modern technology i have no idea and so i'm just trying to do as much as i can that's why i like the sit on the island thing i asked you about if you handed me 10 billion dollars
or 100 billion dollars by the time i got to the valet i would still be working on something it's not about the money part i just want to do stuff for our society i want to do stuff for charity i want to do stuff for businesses and i think of entrepreneur entrepreneurialism and investing
Ask charity. I want to ask you a question. Please. Talk to me about your wavelength. Dan Fleischman's wavelength. Like, you're very driven, yet you feel very desire-free. Like, your motivation to work... every moment like before you get the valet but not get crushed by roadblocks or no's or failures or things like that or L's I mean you know I know you well enough to know that like
I don't think you're ever going to be hungry or have to worry about a roof over your head. So do you just feel like everything else is bonus time? Is it a monk-like philosophy that you live by? Just touch on that. It's the game. I've had the same watch for 17 years. I haven't bought another watch. For seven years, I didn't even have a car. I don't do it for the stuff.
What I do is the game part of it is so fascinating to me because I look at things that are curable. Homelessness is curable. Hunger is curable. Water is curable. And we think about those are the three things that humans need to survive. Yes, we like love and other things, but really if I dropped you off in the desert, you only need three things. If someone was in a third world country, they need three things to survive. I want to fix those things and I need to become a multi-billionaire.
and make friends and impress a lot of very, very rich people to go do those things. And I need the masses to trust me. What are the three things? Food, water, oxygen? Food, water, and shelter. Okay. And so... I have this obsession in my mind that I can cure homelessness. And I laid out an entire business plan of how to do it. I have a very, very, very tense passion to fix food. Because when you think about even in America, a third of kids are hungry. That's insane.
We're in the number one country on the planet financially. Why would it be anything food-wise a problem when you've got hundreds of billions of dollars a month being thrown away? And hundreds of billions of dollars a month could be given with a tax write-off. Hundreds of billions of dollars a month of inefficiencies from all these Walmarts, restaurant chains, etc. And so...
The reason I do the world's largest toy drives and the reason I do all my charity stuff and I pay for all of it. I don't take, you know, I run everything on what's called a 0% charity. And the reason I go schlep around 11 cities in 17 days is I want to prove that I'm really good at charity.
And I want to prove it to society so that when it comes time and I say, hey, Andy, I want to build this place I call Homeful, which is the competitor to homelessness. I want to build Homeful here in Miami. You and a bunch of our friends would trust me to go efficiently do it.
¶ Efficiency in Charity and Giving Back
Because I'm going to put my own money in. I'm not making money from it. And people will trust in my actions that I'm going to go build this place that's going to remove homelessness from Miami. So I know enough about your podcast and other three core topics. How to make, how to invest. In charity. So I was, you know, I just got to be honest with you. Like, you know, if you asked me like what my stance was on charity, I would say call Dan. And I want that in people's minds.
It really is just because when I think of charities, I think of, I'm a capitalist, so I think of blindly giving money to entities and trusting they're going to do the right thing. I give money to Dan because I think Dan has vetted all of that and found the good stuff. Right. It's the efficiencies of charity, and it's frustrating because in our society, people have that feeling of like...
Well, I don't know if I give money to the Red Cross or this company and they're 82% and goes to the overhead and 18 cents on the dollar goes to this. I hate that that's in my mind, right? I hate that part. And so that's why I do my charities so publicly. I also just want people to replicate my charity stuff because I want it to actually happen at scale. If all of a sudden... What are the top three greatest charities in the world right now?
I think Charity Water is very efficient. Okay, Scott Harrison. I think Scott Harrison is extremely efficient. There's a group that Timothy Sykes has called Karmagawa. Really? Yeah. Shout out to Tim Sykes. Because he's built over 100 schools. Okay. And so from an efficiency perspective, he has what I care. I don't know like pencils of promise. Yes. Okay. I don't know Tim's backend structure of it. I know he puts up a lot of his own money. I just know that.
He is building schools over and over and over and over and over, and that's what I care about. Tim was one of my first friends in the online space. Amazing. And there was one more.
I actually do like Pencils of Promise. They do have a big overhead. So I don't know their financials. But again... i will take efficiency over everything i want to say 15 years ago i wrote a 25 000 check and there's actually a school in guatemala that was built with that money i love that like that with my name on it yep and so to me
The charities that can actually go out there and execute on what they're doing, in the city of Watts, there's called the Watts Foundation. And there's a guy named Styx that runs it. Every year when I do my toy drives or my Thanksgiving food drives,
My back to school days, I give everything extra to him because he's so efficient. He will literally drive trucks around and vans around and give it to the women or single moms, et cetera, in his community. Now big organizations are supporting him because he's been doing it for years and years.
So I really look at the people that are being efficient with it. Now listen, some charities, they need money to survive. They need money to pay executives to be focused on it. It's not easy. So I'm not trying to dissuade from that. It's that... I care about deficiency. And we've seen during disasters where there's household named charities raise a billion dollars and then there's no food there. There's no shelter there. There's no, and I.
the inefficiency bothers me so much. And so that's part of my passion of why I'm working so hard on this stuff is I know that it's fixable and that's the game. So if I create all these different businesses and also if I, you and I invest.
500K into a company. And they go from two employees to 10 employees. That's also charity to me. Those eight new employees are making 50 grand a year, 80 grand a year, et cetera. That is changing a community. That's why I don't mind having thin margins because I support a lot of people.
¶ Guiding New Wealth and Avoiding Mistakes
And so that's where it comes from for me. All right, last question before we wrap up here. When it comes to influencers going from being broke or living on their parents' couch and now you're making them...
50 grand a month 100 grand a month some of them a million dollars a month let's just use a normal number like 20 to 50 grand a month how can we guide them to not just go light it on fire go blow all the money like we've seen happen with a lot of football players and rappers how do we get influencers to actually invest their money so that's a great question um i think you have to let them so from my experience
I tried to be Captain America. I tried to be like their father. Do you have a CPA? Are your tax returns ready? Are you doing the right thing? Are you saving? And a lot of these people don't have positive feelings for their parents. They can't... wait to get away from their parents and sometimes i would have clients leave me over that over trying to give them too much guidance wow and so i had to take a step back interesting
And sometimes you've got to let them light the money on fire for a period of time to get it out of their system. For them to wake up and realize the stove is hot because I burned myself. Like, oh crap. I made a million dollars last year. I spent a million dollars last year. What do you mean I need 400 grand for taxes? I don't have that money.
Like, and then all of a sudden they are ready to listen and ready to get educated. How do I know? Because I was like that. You know, my twenties was getting the material crap out of my system and getting my ego and my self-conscious shit and women getting all that resolved.
before I could mature. And all the bad things that I've been through in my life, the highs, the lows, the legal stuff, like the real hells, I wouldn't trade them for anything because that's what created real character in me. So I think giving them... little bit of room to appreciate their journey and planting little seeds with them and I think the key that I found is sometimes with a lot of people you got to know when telling them what to do
is less than planting an idea that will then become their idea later on. I love that. So that's what I would suggest. And there's a way to do that. You have a very nice way of doing that. You have a high emotional intelligence by... I mean, you're not a friction guy. You're not a guy, think of, who gets into a lot of head-to-head confrontations. You win by being like Bruce Lee. So I'll tell you guys the way I like to say it. It's okay to buy one watch. Don't buy four watches.
the second third and fourth watch you're going to become numb to it it's okay to have aspirations to buy one car when you buy the third fourth and fifth car i promise you're not going to drive them you're going to end up driving the tesla all the time or the range rover all the time you're not going to drive those other cars because you get addicted to one car
You end up wearing one watch. And what happens is people think, oh, I'm going to get a four bedroom house. Well, you live by yourself. You're never even going to go in the third and fourth bedroom at all. Never. Not even once. Oh, my friends are going to stay over. They're not staying over.
it's rarely ever going to happen if they do they're going to sleep on the couch or sleep in one of the extra bedrooms and by the way you don't really want them to stay over that long so you don't need the third or fourth bedroom you know who the first person to ever make that point in my life was
MTV Cribs, Russell Simmons in his house. He's showing off this beautiful him. He was married to Kimora Lee. And Russell Simmons kind of like, he just looks so disinterested while the camera crew was looking around his mansion. And he kind of says like,
You can only sit your ass in one couch at a time. Right, right. Will Smith's dad told him, he's like, why do you have seven cars? You only have one butt. I'm actually going to have Angela. Angela Simmons is coming on the podcast. She has a great... product um it's like a almost like a healthy oatmeal type product like for pancakes um like a batter so all right
How can people find you, the company? What if people want to work with Creators, Inc.? Tell us all those things. Our Instagram is the best place to go, at Creators, Inc. But again, we're building the safest, most positive creator community in the world. I look to sign people who just know how to make great content. I learned very often.
Very early on, it is not about what you look like. It is about your ability to make good content because people who make good content create context with their end user. Their end user feels like they know them. And that is a very sticky audience. They will buy what you want to sell, they will want to see more of you. So it's all about finding good content creators. And by the way, I know you asked one last question about if like something about leaving your kids money.
¶ Leaving Legacy vs. Enabling Kids
What's the question? All right, so as you guys know, I have this one main question I ask on every episode. So after you build up this company into hundreds of millions, hopefully billions of dollars over the course of time, what percentage of your net worth will you leave to children i will consult you for the charity portion i in my will will leave my kids money i just don't see why i wouldn't leave my kids whatever money i had left over but
Not during my lifetime will I give them money. And I'll tell you why. These Babson International kids, and when I see these 26-year-old kids in Miami that own a $30 million house and wear RM just because they're... parents were probably shitty parents and felt bad and just set them up with that stuff. That is not cool to me. That is the most uncool thing you can do for your kid. Because when the wind shifts, they've got no muscle.
They don't know what resilience is. They don't know how to survive and win in this world. I just think that is the most whack thing when I see like the ultra wealthy kids that have. access to this stuff that's just like again like i don't care how rich i am like my kid's gonna work fenway park when they're 14 years old going up and down the thing going hot dogs hamburgers peanut why because it's like in
public sales, somewhat humiliating, like great fucking job. That was my first job at Jack Murphy Stadium, which is Qualcomm now in San Diego. Peanuts, Cracker Jack's here. All right, guys, you're watching The Money Mondays. Check out Creators, Inc. across all social media and have these discussions with your friends, family, and followers. It's important to talk about money because we grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think it's ridiculous. We have to have these discussions.
And it's up to you guys to do that with your friends, family, and followers. We will see you guys next Monday on moneymondays.com.