From Rock Bottom to $60M in One Year w/ Andrew Bachman 💵 EP125
Andrew Bachman went from rock bottom to building a $60M business in just one year. In this episode, he shares how he rebuilt his life, launched Creators Inc, and scaled it into a billion-dollar brand.---Andrew Bachman is an entrepreneur and founder of Creators Inc. After early success and public setbacks, he made a major comeback by building one of the leading agencies for paywall creators, generating over $60 million in the first year.---Like this episode? Watch more like it 👇$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson: https://youtu.be/33aXeZrfzxsMaking Money Online? Here’s What No One Tells You | Dion Pouncil & Brandon Bowsky: https://youtu.be/F3xUCSONZaEFocus on ONE Skill Or Stay Broke Forever | Adam Sosnick (SoSTalks) & Justin Colby: https://youtu.be/KsFz562SnHADropout Teen Mom to MILLIONAIRE Network Marketing Queen – Stormy Wellington: https://youtu.be/mqrfRyg66J4Watch ALL Full Episodes Here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6k---The Money Mondays is a business podcast here to teach you how to make money, invest money, and donate money by showcasing some of the world's most successful people and how they do the same. Hosted by serial entrepreneur Dan Fleyshman, the youngest founder of a publicly traded company in history, this money podcast gives you an exclusive behind the scenes look at how the wealthiest celebrities, entrepreneurs, athletes and influencers make, invest and donate money.If you want to learn more business and investing while you work to improve your financial life, you're in the right place! Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@themoneymondays?sub_confirmation=1Dan Fleyshman,The Money MondaysLearn more here: https://themoneymondays.comWatch all the podcast episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6kLet’s Connect...Website: https://themoneymondays.comPodcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-money-mondays/id1663564091Twitter: https://twitter.com/themoneymondaysLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-money-mondays/about/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@themoneymondaysFB: https://www.facebook.com/The-Money-Mondays-110233585203220/
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Transcript
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.
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.
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 and 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 and a napkin and started the Home Depot.
Now he's a billionaire.
He owns the Atlanta Falcons.
And I said, oh, that's what I'm going to do.
I somehow took a gap year.
I applied to Babson.
I got in.
And freshman year, literally day one, that would have been the fall of 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 as 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 and Ferraris living at the Ritz-Carlton.
And, you know, kid invite, you know, 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.
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
technology.
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 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 you know you say ten billion dollars 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 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.
I put on muscle and become a multi-millionaire 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 kind of like entrepreneurship networking world.
And then, 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.
And
so, after about five years of darkness,
I meet this neuroscientist
who
gave me the principles that I now live my life by physically, intellectually, emotionally, socially, spiritually, sexually, and occupationally.
And so 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 lady's nanny in LA 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, she starts to run around LA.
She had been the personal assistant for big people like Ruby Rose, Hyman Amstee, Woe Vicki, 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.
And I've, and, and, um, what?
And
it kind of got out who I was and I was
not sure if 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 forget this is during COVID, so actors and writers 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.
And
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 LA one day and
I tried to sign this girl and she looked at me and goes, who the hell are you?
Like, I'm with Unruly.
And I go, oh, shit, I need a brand.
Right.
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 the space.
So OnlyFans is 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.
And, you know, I think in, 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.
And all the content creators quickly scattered to signing up for like all these alt
shit versions like Fan Centro, FanZen, 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 OnlyFans, again, I'm not speaking fact here, so don't quote me, but I think OnlyFans went from having to process with kind of like European, Mauritius,
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?
That's the word on the street.
I don't have specific proof or 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, right?
And 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, right?
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 owners gambling?
Are you talking about the next guy who buys it?
The owners gambling.
I 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 hand.
And I'll tell you why.
Because I don't know how someone can even bet
on a five times.
Like, I don't even know how someone comes in and pays $5 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 like 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 like AI girls.
I'm like, things can change.
We don't know that it'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.
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 OnlyFans that, I mean,
all time history, I think revenue per employee, it's like the best company ever, right?
They've got 40 employees.
NVIDIA's like, they've got 40 employees.
I'm a parasite of OnlyFans.
I have 800 employees.
I have 40 employees in my card stores.
Exactly.
You're doing one one-thousandth of the revenue that these guys are doing.
Yeah.
And like you said, I'm doing one-one-thousandth of the revenue.
And,
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.
I just don't know how much collateral I have to give them back for them to be excited about 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 to their company.
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 years, two years, three years, or longer by only buying 80% and leaving 20% for him and his team so that 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 that 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 where you see somebody like Spotify give $150 million to Joe Rogan.
And people are like, how could they they pay $150 million?
Well, Spotify's 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, 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, 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.
And 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.
He says to me on the first he 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,
but.
Could you just play golf for the rest of your life if someone gets to go?
You know, 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're just
focusing on health and all the other stuff, meditation.
You said, I'm going to take a beat on capitalism because I make more money in 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 got to go through phases.
I think you can ebb and flow.
I will say this, like 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 cycle space because I was like, all right, like, you know, enough of this.
But
so like, I think you yin and yang a little bit.
I definitely know this.
Like the last five years has definitely beat me up a lot.
I really, I take care of my health.
You know, 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.
I have a cold plunge in all my homes.
I'm in that thing first thing when I wake up.
But my cortisol level has definitely spiked.
I don't sleep well because
I go to bed, you know.
playing chess on all the things that that I'm trying to fix rather than sleeping.
So, you 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,
all of my pain and stress is about more money.
And I don't need more money.
You and I have 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 fucking me over.
Like, you know, it's like,
I guess it's just part of the journey.
You 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 Fit T or some brand, DraftKings or Postman.
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 cont 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 and 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.
And it's allowed me, from a mind perspective and a stress perspective to go do other things and not worry about the minutiae 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?
Crushed it.
Everything changed so much better.
We literally went from 18 million to 60 million in one year.
Well, 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.
Only because
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.
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 is 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, et cetera.
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 was someone that was greater than me, with 30 years more experience 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 rally television.
He was the CEO for Bunan Murray.
So he created real world simple life with Paris Hilton, Kardashian, Keeping Up with Kardashian, et cetera.
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 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 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 than 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, are their intentions good?
Are they going to pay you or are they going to fuck you?
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 you said, I look for operators.
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, a 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 to, you know, 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.
juice kitchen or 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.
You 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 you my day trading and you're rolling your eyes because you're like, okay, dumbass, you're taking 100% 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 what 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 hit the most.
Now, when it comes to like, you know, a hot take,
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 gonna flush.
I think we are in the stone ages right now.
Gary Vee had a 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 Chat GPT.
If your friends are sending you outputs on chat GPT that are still this long, that is not kosher.
That is not pee.
Like, they're not even thinking, like, hey, chat GPT, 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.
Yeah, and I think there's a huge opening in the marketplace.
If 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 concern, I get concerned, like, I look at my friends who are lawyers, and I'm like, you know how inefficient you people are?
You know how freaking 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,
you know what I mean?
Like, AI is solving that so quickly.
Someone was 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 decided 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, 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%, sometimes lose you 10%, et cetera.
But 11% 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%.
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.
So 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 bucks 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, 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, 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 U Us as a kid?
Remember?
Like, where are they at?
Right?
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 and 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
your long-term bets are still your long-term bets.
Like, I just think, like,
I believe in like semi-active management.
The things that
if something were to have a major shift, right?
Like, let's say Tesla had a new competitor that just was crushing them, or Elon Musk resigns, I would just sell all of Tesla, right?
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 were 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, right, from the brand vision.
The efficiency that Tim Cook created obviously is much better than what Steve Jobs had.
So speaking of Jobs, I think about him every day.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, there's a 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
or $100 billion,
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
entrepreneurialism and investing as charity.
I want to ask you a question.
Please.
Talk to me about your wavelength.
Dan Fleischman's wavelength.
You're very driven, yet you feel very desire-free.
Like you like your motivation to work every moment, like before you get to 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?
And like,
is it a monk-like philosophy that you live by?
Like, just touch on that.
It's the game, right?
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.
Someone was in a third world country, they need three things to survive.
I want to fix those things, 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've laid out an entire business plan of how to do it.
I have a very, very, very intense passion to fix food.
Because when you think about it, even in America, a third of kids are hungry.
That's insane.
We're in 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 slept 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 it 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 because I'm going to put my own money and I'm not making money from it.
And people would 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 to know the 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 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 things.
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% goes to the overhead and 18 cents on the dollar goes to this.
I hate that that's in our minds.
Yeah.
I hate that part.
And so that's why I do my charities so publicly.
And 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 have.
Do you like Pencils of Promise?
Yes.
Okay.
I don't know Tim's back-end 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 final name.
I love his 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 the efficiency.
And we've seen during disasters where there's household-name 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 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.
Yep.
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.
I think you have to let them.
So from my experience, I 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.
And so I had to take a step back.
Interesting.
And sometimes you 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 20s 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.
You know, 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 a 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.
You know, 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.
Sure.
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 the aspiration to buy one car.
When you buy the third, fourth, and fifth car, I promise you, 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.
Ever.
Not even once.
You're like, 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 and 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 hymn.
He was married to Kamora 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,
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 button.
I'm actually going to have Angela.
Angela Simmons is coming on the podcast.
She has a great product.
It's like a almost like a healthy oatmeal type product, like for pancakes, like a batter.
So, all right.
How can people find you, the company?
What do 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 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.
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 to hundreds of millions, hopefully billions of dollars over the course of time, what percentage of your net worth will you leave to the 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 their parents were probably shitty parents and felt bad and like 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 going to work Fenway Park when they're 14 years old, going up and down the thing going hot dogs, hamburgers, peanuts.
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 Jacks here.
All right, guys, you're watching the Money Mondays.
Check out Craters 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.