#269: Dan Fleyshman Reveals the Secrets of Influencer Marketing

Dan Fleyshman is the Founder of Elevator Studio, a social media agency that's handled celebrity & influencers campaigns for products ranging from top tier fitness & apparel brands to mobile apps like Postmates & Lyft. In this conversation, Anthony and Dan discuss the story behind the "Who's Your Daddy" brand, how Dan became the youngest CEO to take a company public, what the early days of influencer marketing entailed, how he currently assesses each social media platform, the importance of educating yourself, and why he created the 100 Million Academy to educate entrepreneurs. =============================== Blockset by BRD is your hosted blockchain infrastructure. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near real-time portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more: blockset.com =============================== TaxBit is a refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial. =============================== ~ If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, tech, and finance. Check out my newsletter by visiting pomp.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Dan Fleyshman is the founder of Elevator Studio, a social media agency that's handled celebrity and influencer campaigns for products ranging from top-tier fitness and apparel brands to mobile apps like Postmates and Lyft. Dan also runs one of the best charities, the Model Citizen Fund, and is generally one of the most well-connected and intelligent people I know. In this conversation, we discuss the story behind the Hoosier Daddy brand, how Dan became the youngest CEO to take a company public, what the early days of influencer marketing entailed,

• 0:39Anthony Pompliano?

  how he currently assesses each social media platform, the importance of educating yourself, and why he created the Hundred Million Academy to educate entrepreneurs. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dan, and he didn't disappoint. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our two sponsors. The first is Blockset by BRD, or Brett. If you're building in the blockchain space, then I want everyone to know about a company called Blockset. Their goal is to enable the next wave of developers and business leaders to build amazing applications. Blockset offers accessible data from all the major chains through a single, easy-to-use API. It acts as your hosted blockchain infrastructure, and it ultimately enables high-quality apps to be built at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time.

• 1:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Go sign up for a free developer account at blockset.com and start building today. Blockset is built by BRD, or Brett, the first wallet in the App Store from 2014 and one of the largest in the space today. They've taken the architecture and knowledge they've gained over the past six years to create Blockset, a robust, reliable, and strategic B2B offering for developers and enterprises. Thanks to Blockset, we can all build with crypto assets at light speed using their unified API that has data from all the major chains. See how simple it is by visiting blockset.com, again, blockset.com, and sign up for a free account today. Go build. Our next sponsor is TaxBit. TaxBit makes paying your taxes super simple.

• 2:03Anthony Pompliano?

  They automate your cryptocurrency taxes, enabling you to effortlessly track, calculate, and report your transactions. You can easily Connect your exchanges to securely sync your transactions and run them through Taxbit's tax engine. Generate a completed tax form with a single click. They were founded by tax attorneys and CPAs. Taxbit is the most trusted cryptocurrency tax solution. Get 10% off your tax plan today with a free trial by going to taxbit.com/invite/pomp. Again, taxbit.com/invite/pomp. Go check them out and get your damn taxes paid. Taxbit.com/invite/pomp. Alright, now let's get into this episode with Dan.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang, bang. I have Dan here with me. Super excited to do this. Dan and I've known each other for a little while now and he may be one of the most important people on the internet. Can I say that? I think so. What's going on, man?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Just working away.

• 3:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Alright, let's go through your background first and then we can get into all the different things that you've got going on, but just start with your background.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, quick background. In high school, I trademarked the catchphrase, "Who's your daddy?" for over 300 products. Licensed it out for $9.5 million when I was 19 years old. 23 years old, took it public on the stock market. Next five years, I don't really remember. I got us into 55,000 retail stores in America. Just didn't sleep for half a decade. After that, I wanted another feather in my cap, so I started an online poker site. I put on a backpack, I moved to Malta, started a poker site. Within 10 months, we were the third biggest poker brand in the world. So I signed Dan Bilzerian, DJ Steve Aoki, all these different characters to help build the brand. And then boom, online poker shut down in America. It was called Black Friday. And so I had to figure

• 4:11Speaker 02

  out, what the heck do I do? So I became an angel investor. And I angel invested in 36 companies since then. And I started a social media agency. And the social media agency is my day job. That's my main focus. Last year, we spent $60 million with influencers for products, brands, and mobile apps. And then my main core passion is my charity, where we make backpacks for the homeless with 150 items inside.

• 4:34Anthony Pompliano?

  So like I told everyone at the beginning, you've done a ton of shit. You're have touched a lot of different aspects of the internet. Let's go all the way back to who's your daddy? Where did that idea come from?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  So my friend in high school, he kept saying it and people kept laughing about it. Or they thought it was like quirky or interesting or sexual or sports. There was different meanings to it. And so I just decided to put T-shirts. I just decided to make some T-shirt. And my older brother is like, oh, you should trademark that. But you probably won't be able to because it's such a big name. It was already a music song. It's already like a thing. Well, I went and looked it up and the trademarks are available. So my attorney filed trademarks all over the world. We spent like 20 grand, which we didn't really have. And we trademarked it. And then we went to a clothing convention. We wrote over a million dollars in orders at the convention. And we were right next to Damon John. FUBU started the same year. We're right next to Damon John and Sean John. Because Diddy started the same year also. It's like, I didn't know how big they were going to be back then, right?

• 5:31Speaker 02

  And so we realized we were on to something. And so we went and found a clothing manufacturer, got screwed and made money, got screwed, went through all that stuff. And then got a 9.5 million dollar licensing deal with Starter Apparel. And that kind of helped us through the roller coasters of making money, losing money as kids. And the clothing was our main focus until the energy drink. And that became the huge focus. So we got 43 distributors, 55,000 stores.

• 5:56Anthony Pompliano?

  At what point did you realize like, hey, the clothing store or the clothing line is doing well? And obviously we've got kind of multiple millions of dollars there. But the energy drink could be bigger and that's where we should go focus on.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  So I saw a void in the market. There was 900 energy drinks and they all, they all taste like cop syrup. Nobody enjoyed it. And I looked at the cooler and it was all black cans and silver cans. And so I just noticed that they were all replica Red Bull. But nobody could touch Red Bull because they were multi billions in sales. So I was like, what if I don't make the biggest energy drink? I just make the best tasting one. And so I went on a hunt to find this chemist that made fruity flavors like Gatorade. I found this guy. And we licensed the original formula, which was cranberry pineapple. And he said, if you do a million dollars in sales, I have another one, which is a green tea. I said, okay, great. So we did a million sales in like seven weeks. I like seriously just didn't sleep.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  I just banged on every door, went to every liquor store, went to every distributor. And then we got the green tea. We won back to back flavor of the year. That was the most important because on BevNet, they have 900 drinks to choose from. When we won that, it was over. I went into every retailer, I was like, look, this is us, look, this is us. Hey, we're already in 7-Eleven, we're already in Costco. And I don't really remember out of all those stores I met with ever pitching. Like I never asked for a sale. I was just helping them fill out an order form. I was explaining that they have to carry us because of this. And so I think that, I don't know if it was cockiness or strength or passion, whatever you want to call it. I sincerely don't remember not being able to sell it. And during that time, the clothing kept selling, but it was kind of an afterthought because it would do a couple of million bucks in revenue.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  And the licensees were doing good overseas, but the energy drink had the massive explosion.

• 7:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then when you took the company public at 23, you were the youngest CEO to ever take a company public, right? Is that still the case or somebody beat it yet?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  No, nobody beat it yet. We beat that Michael Dell guy by a year. He got me by a couple of billion, but.

• 7:59Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. And why did you take the company public or what was the idea there?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the investment bankers that came to us, they were basically like, if you want to launch an energy drink, you're going to need a little war chest to go fight with Rockstar, Red Bull and Monster. And they were very right because even when we got orders, you're paying on net 30 or net 60 terms. Hopefully, usually net 90. And so Costco would write us an order for 1.8 million. Sounds great. And so you got to come up with 900,000 to make it, ship it two months from now and get paid a month or two later. And then get reorders in between and they haven't paid you for the first order. And so we always needed more and more money. It was very, very capital intensive. And so I'm glad that we went, it was a headache being public back then. This was right when Starbase obviously started.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  It was a headache being public because most of the time you're spending 10 to 20 hours a week with your accountants and CFOs and going through audits and self audits and everything.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  But.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Being able to get that kind of capital, I needed to be public.

• 8:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  At that time, that's what I was told.

• 9:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. That makes sense. And then what was the fascination on the poker side? Because I know you still play poker, do a lot of charity poker stuff, but when did that start?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so my family always played poker. My uncle won a bunch of championships. They, my aunt and uncle owned like a small poker room in California. My dad loved it, my mom, like, it was just in the family. And so I played a lot and I started playing pretty high stakes in my twenties. Playing with, and I started meeting all these big business people and celebrities and athletes in these poker games. People I would never normally get to meet, I was meeting at these high stakes poker games. And so I started incorporating it for charity poker tournaments every year. I started doing charity poker with Steve Aoki every year. I just started incorporating, so whatever business I was doing, I added poker. So when the opportunity came to start an online poker site, same thing, I saw a void in the market. 550 sites, so a huge competition, but nobody was like the cool one.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  And I thought, what if I go get rosarian, Aoki, Playboy Playmates, Poker Pros and put them all together and make a big team? And so my competitors, they were doing $4 million and $8 million a day in revenue. Like net, I mean, it's crazy. I started, I was the little engine that could. I had 2.5 million total to start a poker site. And so I leveraged their audiences. They all had big TV shows, so I went and started playing on every TV show in the world. Rosarian started playing on TV shows, Aoki started playing. I was training models how to play poker and go have them play on high stakes TV shows. Just because they're like, what the heck's this girl doing here? She's never played poker before. And so we went out there that way and I couldn't afford to outspend them.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  So when they made a $9 million TV show, three of the nine players were my guys wearing my company name.

• 10:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  That's how we did the marketing.

• 10:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, super, super smart. And we're really just trying to understand where is attention, right? Where are people focused and how do you kind of ride that wave? Okay, and then so once you're doing that, you come back to the US and you start the social media agency. What was the kind of driver there?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  So I started buying posts from different people, but this is when social media was first getting started. We're talking 2011 and 12 when it became. You know, right after the MySpace days, now there's some social media platforms. Twitter's just getting around, YouTube is taking off, like this is that couple of years where we were just like, you know, we weren't all on social media, but we knew of it, right? And so I started buying posts, but the posts were completely mispriced. Kourtney Kardashian could charge seventy-five thousand dollars for one tweet back then, right? Twenty-five thousand, fifty thousand, like the numbers were, because we didn't know. But they also would send you a hundred and eighty thousand clicks to your site. Because there wasn't much else to follow, right? There wasn't that many people on these platforms.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  And so I started buying posts from influencers really, really cheap because they didn't know what to sell it for. So I'd pay them a hundred bucks, two hundred bucks, five hundred bucks, two hundred bucks. And then when I started doing that, I was also angel investing. And so some of these brands, I would say, hey, take ten grand or twenty grand. Let's go buy a bunch of posts to post about your health product or fitness product or mobile app, whatever. And I just saw a big arbitrage situation where as I did that, I started getting hit up by friends at owned brands that I didn't have a piece of. And they were like, hey, can I give you a hundred K or fifty K to go play with to do what you did for your brands? And so that's when I decided to formalize an actual agency out of it. And yeah, the rest was history.

• 12:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And early on, like, what was the conversations like? Did the influencers understand how big they would get and kind of really realize how much value they could provide? Or was it more, hey, I want to go buy something at the store, you know, I need ten grand, let me get ten grand, I posted on social media?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, they still don't really understand. There's like this many that actually understand what it means to get as many eyeballs as they do. But back then, actually, I expect that from two thousand and twelve to seventeen, really, that half a decade was the wild, wild west. It's still kind of wild west, like I can still, I have influencers that have five million followers that I pay the same rate as I do people with two hundred thousand followers. Because there's just differences of niche influencers versus mass appeal versus just a hot guy or hot girl. Like there's just different categories that an influencer that has two hundred thousand followers that's just talks about business finance or just talks about welding or cars. Ford would pay that person way more than they would pay a five million follower person.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  And so I saw that back then. They had no idea from 2012 to 2017, literally no idea. And so I was able to just make up prices and never to take advantage of them. It was just like, hey, I'll give you 500 bucks for this post or I'll give you two grand. Can you do five posts for me? And I never had them say no, because it was just free money to them. They're like, we don't have much to post anyways, so.

• 13:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and a lot of these people, my understanding is like from those early days that have become the influencers everyone knows and loves today. A lot of them are friends, right? They kind of grew up together, if you will, understanding, hey, what are you doing? Right? How much are you getting paid? How, you know, how do you get more followers? All that kind of stuff, right?

• 14:01Speaker 02

  That's one of the biggest questions I get is how much should I charge? Still to this day, but especially for those years, they just don't know. Like, it doesn't matter if it was the Kardashians, a fitness influencer, a beauty influencer. It didn't matter. Nobody knew because there was no forefathers of influencers. Like, there was no like guide. In every magazine or article that came out, I've never seen one out of the hundreds of articles I read. Never one that's even close to what the rates actually are. Never, not even close.

• 14:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you tell us what the rates are?

• 14:31Speaker 02

  So it's asking, same thing as like asking, how much is a car?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Is it a Porsche? Is it a Ferrari? Which Ferrari? There's levels to Ferraris, right? There's a cheap Ferrari, an expensive Ferrari, a rare Ferrari. So it's hard because two influencers with the exact same followers that could both have, Pomp has 1 million, this girl has 1 million, their rates are still completely different. You could have almost everything the same and still have completely different rates. And not like by a little. Your rate could be 10 grand and hers is 400 bucks. It's really weird. And so a lot of it is just understanding what their audience is like. What do they talk about? And will people care? Some brands don't care about any of that stuff. They just want eyeballs. Like McDonald's, we're never going to sell more burgers. It doesn't matter if you're a Kylie Jenner, you're not going to sell more burgers for them, right? They won't feel it. Nothing that they could feel when they sell billions and billions and billions of burgers, right?

• 15:22Speaker 02

  They do want more eyeballs, so they would pay. Actually Burger King is the best example. Burger King used to give me rates that were 300 to 600% higher than they needed to pay. And I would tell them very bluntly, like, this is way too much. I don't need to pay this girl or this guy that kind of money. And they didn't care, they just wanted impressions. And they just wanted them to think about them. So I'd go to influencers that I normally give 10 grand to, and I'm giving them 40. And I was like, ah, it hurt me, because I was like, I could buy four posts for you for the same price. Like, no, no, this is great. And so some brands are still so slow to understand what the impressions are worth. And some just want to have as much adoption or as much eyeballs as possible.

• 16:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. How does the pricing work, right? So like, one of the things that really fascinates me is kind of the difference between the brand advertising versus the direct response or actual conversion. Do you see more people wanting to work with influencers on the direct response side? Or is it just, hey, I want to get my brand out there, I want to get those impressions?

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Sure. So movie studios and music-related companies, they just want as many eyeballs as possible. Because they don't care. They have a main idea of their audience, but they want everybody to come to the movie, right? When it comes to physical products, like a Fit Tea, a Sugar Bear Hair, a Fashion Nova, those type of brands, they want ROI. They want to spend a thousand bucks to do $1,841 in sales. And whether they break even or come close to it, they're happy because they know somebody will reorder. Right? If you know somebody will reorder your product three, four, five, six times a year, you're willing to break even or even lose money, knowing that they're going to reorder. If your product, you don't know they're going to reorder, or it's a one-time-use product, like a New York Yankees hat, they might only buy it once.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Because they'll wear that same hat for years, because they love it, right? They're not going to buy six Yankees hats per year. So the New York Yankees would say, hey, I need to spend a thousand bucks, but I need to do at least 2 grand or more, because otherwise it's a failure. So it's thinking about how much is a person worth to them? And we did campaigns for DraftKings, and they knew a player was worth a few hundred dollars to them. So for them, they could spend 500,000, they spent 500,000 dollars with me in one weekend once. Here's 500,000, just for the weekend. Go get DJ Khalid, Amanda Cerny, all these King Batch, get all these characters all together at the same time to post about this promotion.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  And it worked absolutely amazing. They were ecstatic. We actually did a whole nother campaign the following week. It wasn't planned because it just did so well. There's other brands that say, here's a hundred grand, go do this, wah wah wah. Because the main thing about social media is I can lead millions of horses to water, I can't make them drink. Right? Your product still has to be good. Like Quibi, Quibi is getting ripped apart in the media. They have $1.8 billion in financing, and they don't even have, what is it, like 800,000 downloads? That's insanity. Like actual insanity. And they have household names like Kevin Hart and J Lo, like huge characters, that they're just not formatting to make it feel real. And they're not making, it's not a social brand,

• 18:21Speaker 02

  meaning if I watch Quibi on my phone, I can't share it. It's really strange for somebody as smart as Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. These are very smart humans that have built up huge companies. It not having a social media service be social is freaking weird.

• 18:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's super, super weird. On the influencer side, like what are you seeing in the change in kind of revenue streams, right? So obviously, early on, I think a lot of people just said, wait a minute, you're gonna give me money, I'll post on my Instagram or my Twitter account. That sounds like an awesome deal, I'll do that. I think now we've seen kind of a shift, though, from that to more people are launching their own products, their own brands, kind of building companies and going more the entrepreneurship route, or is that me just kind of misunderstanding what's happening?

• 19:08Speaker 02

  So influencers that have a stable following, a good following, where growing following, they should have their own products. Meant to be what, it can't just be another clothing line, right? Like, we started Talent List, the clothing line with Scott Disick. Millions and millions and millions of dollars revenue, fantastic, but he only actually posts it once every week or two. It's not him posting all the time, it's us running paid media about him and to his fans. Most influencers don't realize, if you start another phone case company, or another sweater hoodie company, it's just another product. And at some point, your followers, you've exhausted them. Because if you have a million followers and you post about your hoodies every single day, okay, we get it. After a week or two or three, we got it. Whoever's gonna buy your hoodie would've

• 19:53Speaker 02

  got it already, right? And so that gets capped. The only time that makes sense for them is if they're actually gonna run paid media to go along with it. However, even if it gets capped, they're gonna make more. Let's say they sold 140,000 of these hoodies and t-shirts. That's more to them than what they would have made in paid posts. And it's easier for them to post about because let's say they like planes. If they make hoodies or sweaters with planes on them, that's more relevant to them. Them making more, less, or the same is still worth it to them. And those paid posts won't go away. So they can still post for the fashion brands. They can still post for a headphone company, right? They can still do those posts and have their brand. It's critical, once you have a large, medium to large following to do that, you know, small following is really tough.

• 20:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's super interesting too, I guess, because there's kind of the traditional products that you're talking about, right? Just, hey, I've got another hoodie, another phone case, etc. Versus a very specific like product, audience fit. With, you know, Kylie Jenner is probably the best example with the lip kit. There's a couple of others. It seems like the more people are getting sophisticated, the more opportunity there is. But you do have to be one of the folks with a stickier, larger audience. It's not just, hey, I've got 100 followers, because you can't really build a business or a product out of that.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Sure. And the other thing is, it's becoming easier and easier. Shopify and ClickFunnels have made it so easy to actually spin up a real site that's actually built out for your audience. That's gonna convert well for you. Before, it was like, you know, clicking buttons, trying to figure out how to make a good website. Shopify made a really great platform for that. Also, white labeling has become so easy. Utilizing Alibaba and utilizing these drop shipping companies and utilizing white label specialists. Like, if you want to make a clothing brand, you can just use different companies. The same way that Jake Paul and all these characters, they use different platforms. There's four or five main ones that the influencers all use because they'll do same-day printing or same-week printing.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  And so they don't even have to stock up big inventory because they can just say, hey, I'm an influencer. Whether they sell 120 shirts that say Pom Pom It, or they sell 12,000. They're not dealing with that. You're supposed to be pop, right? You're the influencer. You're supposed to make the content that you create and then have somebody else that's a specialist go sell your shirts for you, deliver them, package them, deal with customer service. So the fact that it's gotten so much easier to do it, you're seeing more and more. That's probably why you're seeing more and more influencers this last year start making products because of just white labeling.

• 22:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, makes a ton of sense. And then how do the influencers work together to grow their followings? Right? I think a lot of folks don't realize kind of the cooperation that goes on and the realization that, hey, one plus one can equal four or five in these scenarios.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so collaborations is one of the main ways to grow followings. Because the algorithm got so tough, it's actually one of the only ways to grow a rabbit, like a real true following. So what happened is the Vine stars did it best. So that's why they all lived at 1600 Vine, that building back in the days. That's where they all got famous because they all lived together, created content together. Funny content, fitness content, beauty content, whatever you did, you would do yourself. But then you would also collaborate with other influencers in your field. Some of them did crossovers. So some of them were like, hey, I'm a funny influencer. You're a beauty influencer. Let's make a funny beauty video. And we'd leverage each other's audiences. And so that happened a lot. It's most critical to do when you're in a niche.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  If you're a fitness influencer, a beauty influencer in the car space, if you're in the car space and you do stuff with other people in the car space, those followings are going to interact and want to follow you. Anybody following a chef, if you're a chef and the three or four of you cook together on Sunday nights, you guys are going to gain following together. Those collaborations are the key, most critical way to grow followings.

• 23:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I guess really what ends up happening is they become friends over time, right? Because really you see a lot of the quote-unquote influencers all hanging out together. This is no different than if you go to the podcast world where you've got kind of like the intellectual dark web, right? Where it's a loose collection of folks who all have podcasts that all go on each other's podcasts, et cetera. And then you also go to even like old school, right? All the CEOs would hang out together, et cetera. Like this has happened just in multiple forms. And now it's kind of appearing on social media, if you will.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Yes, and you'll also notice that certain celebrities are really leveraging it. So you'll see somebody like a Kevin Hart or Steve Aoki or The Rock. They'll actually go out and interact with these influencers like Kevin Hart and David Dobrik will make a video together. Steve Aoki and Marshmello and an influencer and a kid from Fortnite. They'll all start making content together and all of a sudden they go through the roof because they're leveraging each other audiences. But Kevin Hart's not an influencer from the social media sense, even though he has a huge social media following. He's an A-list celebrity, same with The Rock, same with Aoki, same with Marshmello. What they'll do is they'll go get a David Dobrik or a Jake Paul or an Amanda Serny and make content with them.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  And now everybody's happy because the influencers, they die to want to be on TV, right? That is the ultimate goal, even though a TV show only has 700,000 views. And their social following post, one post will get them 12 million views. That is the end goal, getting on the big screen, whether it's TV, Netflix or a movie is all they care about. Vice versa, The Rocks and the Kevin Harts of the world, they want these influencers to post with them to gain them more following to sell more tickets to their shows. Everybody wins, but it's just like rappers want to be NBA players and NBA players want to be rappers. The same concept, influencers want to be movie stars, movie stars want to have influencers type engagement.

• 25:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, why do the influencers want to get on television or movies so badly if they actually get less views there? Is it just the legitimacy of it?

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is like, I can't explain how passionate they are, how many castings they go to, the amount of hours and time and energy they put. They'll be in my office for sometimes six hours, reading a script to go to a casting that they know they're not going to get. But they go through this whole process and they'll go to 40 or 50 castings to get that one thing, if ever. And when it happens, even when the show comes out, that's not anywhere near as big as one post that they can do or how much money they make from their posts. That just adds to them so much credibility and so much, there's so much passion behind it. I really can't explain it, it's intense, like they want it so bad.

• 26:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's awesome. Speaking of passion, one of the things that many people I think now have come to realize that you do is you've got this massive charity. So maybe describe a little bit about what you guys are doing with the backpacks and kind of how that works.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is our eighth year. It's called Model Citizen Fund. We make backpacks with 150 emergency supply items inside. But it's a 0% charity, meaning I cover 100% of costs, expenses, payroll, marketing events, everything. Not a penny goes, anything but the backpacks. And that's how it's going to be forever. So with that, what we do is we ship to emergency disaster situations, like Puerto Rico happens, earthquake in Mexico happens, we're there within a day or two. Like, we are able to ship right away because we don't have the red tape. But our main day to day is we ship to homeless shelters, or we go out ourselves. So we'll ship to homeless shelters, teen abuse shelters, and women abuse shelters. That's kind of like our mainstay, mostly on the West Coast, and then we'll do a bit

• 27:15Speaker 02

  in New York, Miami, Chicago. And then we'll ship to orphanages overseas, in Tijuana, El Salvador, etc. But basically, it's just a backpack with 14-pound supplies, 150 items, half food and drinks, and the other half is like duct tape, a watch, books, sleeping bag, poncho, stuff like that.

• 27:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And is the thought process that the supplies that are in there are obviously things, one, the recipient doesn't have, but two, are kind of everyday items that could be useful, is essentially it?

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Yes. So it's mainly, some of those things are only going to last them a few weeks, some of them will last them for years. So it's not going to change their life forever. It's a more of a Band-Aid. And then some things in there, like the sleeping bag, the backpack itself, those things will last them for longer.

• 27:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And the events that you do to raise money are not exactly your grandfather's charity event, right? So maybe talk a little bit about some of the poker events that you've done on the charity side, and some of the other things you've done.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the charity poker events are our main thing that we like to do. We do four of those a year. And we like to bring in different celebrities and actors, rappers, and athletes to those, because it gets the, my rich friends, if you will, to want to donate more because of the scene. So we create a big fun scene for them. We make it easy. We're able to raise six figures per event pretty easily, because everybody gets excited to be in the room with these other characters. We've done that like 30 or 40 times now. We've done those a lot, four times a year for eight years. And then, a couple times a year, we'll do it for somebody else. So, for example, Steve Aoki will throw his charity poker tournament to help raise money for his charity. Or we'll send a bunch of players to Arnold Schwarzenegger's charity. We'll send players to other people's charity poker tournaments just to support them for their charities as well.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  And then, once a year, twice a year, we'll do some big blowout. Like, we did the world's largest pizza festival. We brought in Tyga, 2 Chainz, Wiz Khalifa, and had this big event for charity. So we'll do, sometimes, big blowout things for charity as well. And then, four times a year, we do it with another charity called Trina's Kids, where we'll do a back-to-school drive, Thanksgiving food drive, report card day, and a toy drive. And we'll bring a bunch of influencers. So a lot of influencers that I named, they actually come every single time, and they'll support it. And we have these 400 families that bring all their kids. And it's the same families for the last five years. And every, every year, we do those four events a year to help those 400 families.

• 29:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and it's pretty cool, too, because not only are you getting the kind of A-list celebrities and the musicians and all of them involved, you're getting in the influencers. And then, what you naturally see is you see people who aren't influencers, celebrities, also wanting to participate. Some of it for the social proof of participating, some of it because they actually care about the cause, and some of it just because that they think that it's something worthwhile and makes them feel good.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Yep, absolutely. The reason I post about it so much is I want other people to go replicate it. I don't care if they donate to me, because for me, anybody can go make a backpack in their own city with 10 items or 3,000 items. They can replicate what I'm doing, so I don't need them to donate to me. I want them to go do stuff. Go feed people, or go do a school event, or go do a back-to-school event. Go do your own Thanksgiving food drive. Like, I post about it so much that I want people to go do it. I don't really solicit funds. It's very rare. I think I've asked three times in eight years to actually donate. And that was only because of, like, Puerto Rico. I was like, hey, I'll put up a kind of, I'll put up a couple hundred grand, but I want to go get way more. You guys, you know? Or the Mexico City thing. I was like, hey, I'll put up 100 grand, but can you guys do more? Outside of that, I don't really raise money from people for my charity.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  I really want them, I really raise awareness for charities to go replicate it.

• 30:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, super cool. Speaking of awareness, the various social platforms have really changed over the years, right? Where are you seeing most of the content being created? And then kind of how do you be talking right now with entrepreneurs or influencers about building the brand and building out their audiences?

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Sure. So each one has a different, not one called niche, but a different reason for it. So Twitter is like a news feed. Twitter is where you go, you want to hear Trump yell about something, you want to find out what's going on in the financial markets, you want to see sports, or you want to see things, Twitter is like that fast fix, and it's really more news oriented, information oriented. Facebook is for the masses. Facebook is where you're going to get your best way to spread out to the masses, but mostly if you're going to spend money, because they're restricting the reach there. So if you're spending money, Facebook is fantastic. LinkedIn has become amazing, because now likes, comments, shares, if I get 8,000, 20,000, 12,000 views on something, that's worth way more to me than

• 31:43Speaker 02

  20,000 on Instagram, obviously, because that's the masses versus all business people. On LinkedIn, you know, everybody on there has a job, wants a job, has a career, owns a company, just got fired, just got hired, is an investor. You know that in the business world. There's no 13-year-olds on LinkedIn. And so LinkedIn is fantastic, because they finally made it with photos, videos, and shareable. YouTube is for long-form content. So you've got to be a really good creator to do YouTube. You can't just do a phone video and post it on YouTube. You can, but it's just not going to have that much traction or feel to it. YouTube is much more produced. It's really good for long-form content, and what I call evergreen content, that you can make a video now that's still relevant four years from now, or 10 years from now. So if you're in the real estate space, you make

• 32:26Speaker 02

  videos about short selling, or VA loans, or whatever, those things, flipping a house, is still going to be relevant 10 years from now. Instagram is the most emotional. That's the one that you want to create your content for, and then repurpose that same video or photo on the other platforms. If you make your content for Instagram or Facebook, that will make it easier for you to post on Twitter, Facebook, etc., your Instagram video, or your Instagram photo. So a lot of times, people get overwhelmed when they hear me talk about a half a dozen platforms. You really need to make your content for one or two platforms, just repurpose it on the ones that are relevant. You're not going to post a funny video on LinkedIn, but anything business-related, post there. On Twitter, you can post anything. On Facebook, post anything. And the last platform that really matters is TikTok. So

• 33:10Speaker 02

  TikTok became all the rage this last year. They spent a couple hundred million dollars with a bunch of my friends and our agencies to get them celebrities posting. The cause is huge. Snowball was turned into an avalanche, and now it's just unstoppable. The reason is, they're the only platform that allows you to share to all the other platforms and is connected to everything. And if anything is doing well on there, sometimes it can go crazy. Like, my wife made a video when she had 2,000 followers, got 1.6 million views. And it was just her touching a wall. That was it. And so, I've got videos that are business videos, that are getting 200, 300, 400,000 views on a video, half a dozen times now. I don't have a large TikTok following, but every so often,

• 33:54Speaker 02

  it's like 3,000 views, 12,000 views, 8,000, a quarter million, 10,000, 15,000, 400,000. And so, that can't happen on any other platform. It just doesn't. You don't have that situation. Unless something goes viral on Twitter, which is once in a blue moon, TikTok actually allows you to go viral if you will, by just doing things right. Make good content, use the right hashtags.

• 34:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And do you feel like most of these content creators are trying to be relevant on every platform? Or do you see them kind of picking one platform, dominating that, and then maybe adding another, and kind of methodically going through it in a sequential way? Or is it just like be everywhere all the time from day one?

• 34:33Speaker 02

  So, I recommend them all to be omnipresent. I recommend them to be on every platform. Very few are. Most of them are focused on one platform, and maybe two. And they're really all in on that one platform. Like, I love Instagram, or I love YouTube. YouTube influencer is literally nicknamed a YouTube influencer. They should just be an influencer. We all call them YouTube influencers, right? And so, same thing with TikTok. If somebody's huge on TikTok, we don't call them a social media influencer. We call them a TikTok influencer. And so, because of that, they're missing out on what could happen or shouldn't happen. Meaning, what if TikTok goes away? Or what if Trump says, you know what? No more TikTok. They have this crazy situation with China. Done. We're done with TikTok.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  What do you do if you're a seventeen year old kid with sixteen million followers on TikTok? And you only have a couple of thousand everywhere else? And so I'm very huge proponent of, hey, you built up a big TikTok or YouTube or whatever. Cross promote, get your other platforms going. You're not going to get as big on the other platforms, but you need to have a base. Because what if, we don't know, we don't know if Instagram goes away one day, or Facebook goes away one day, TikTok goes away one day, it's unlikely, right? Facebook and Instagram, Zuckerberg's too young and too rich, why would it ever go away? It's never going to get acquired, but we don't know. We didn't expect our whole world to get shut down over this karma thing. So like, we don't know what could happen in the world. So it's dangerous to be only on one platform.

• 35:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, and the Vine star saw this, right? Where basically Vine was here, that a bunch of them built up their audiences and it disappeared. But many of them were able to cross out and kind of go onto the platforms, build an audience. But many of them also didn't make it, right?

• 36:08Speaker 02

  No, I know a lot of them that didn't make it.

• 36:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about a hundred million Academy and kind of what you're doing there. And also the mastermind that you held recently. Let's start with the mastermind, because I think that a lot of people I spoke with that either went to it or participated in it, they were just blown away by the quality of the event and the amount of knowledge and value that was shared. So let me tell us a little bit about what it was and kind of how you set it up.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  So a hundred million mastermind experience was a hundred thousand dollars per person. So it's one of the most expensive masterminds in the world. And if I was going to create something that expensive, I had to make it like, holy shit, like this is a crazy level of events. But also not just from the celebrity side, but actual content in it. So what I did was I signed twenty-two instructors, an annual contract to be the instructors. The requirement was that either do over a hundred million revenue, spend over a hundred million on ads, or been seen by over a hundred million people. So those were the twenty-two instructors. So it wasn't just about me and my partner as instructors, because most masterminds, it's all about the one or two instructors, the one or two founders, and everybody else is a guest. So I assigned these instructors, actually have to come the whole year.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  My partner, Joe Marion, he's on one of the biggest email lists in the world, nineteen million person email list, seven hundred million dollar supplement company. And so I wanted him as my partner because, one, the business hack community has, but two, he had that passion and belief with people and he liked to create these large scale events. And so we said, okay, if we're going to charge people this huge premium, a hundred thousand dollars per person, how and why? And so we went out and thought after we're gonna make these weekends multimillion dollars. We spent $2.19 million in three days for our first opening weekend to put on a show. We brought in Mark Wahlberg, Nick Cannon, Tyga, Chris Tucker, Kris Jenner, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Dennis Rodman, all these characters that were across different segments.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  The CEO of Serac, the owner of BeautyCon, all different types of characters to teach Amanda Searney, right? So it was influencers, celebrities, actors, athletes, all in one weekend. And in between there, we had different speakers. So we had the Wolf of Wall Street, Marcus Simonas from The Prophet, Jim Quick, the Memory Coach. We had Carl Lentz, the celebrity preacher. He's like Justin Bieber's preacher. And he was one of the best features of the whole thing. So we tried to hit every check mark of like, hey, we have a preacher, we have Marcus Simonas from CNBC, we have the Wolf of Wall Street. You have all different characters throughout the whole weekend. And so that's where it all came from. It was like, we're gonna make this super high level event, but we gotta make sure that people are paying this kind of money. We have to make sure it's overwhelming for them.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  And that's where the Hundred Million Academy came from, was, well, we only can have 100 people at these events, right? There's 100 people we sold out for. So I wanted something that we can make for the masses. So we made it 100 bucks a month. And 100 bucks a month, it's the same 22 instructors, plus we filmed hundreds of hours of content with other instructors. So we'll invite somebody like Pomp and say, hey, can you come on here? Will you come teach us about business finance and explain to us? And we'll film with you for three or four hours. And we'll go get this instructor to talk about cannabis, this instructor to talk about email marketing, this instructor to talk about social media. We brought on all these people to all teach for three or four hours each, and we have hundreds of hours of content now. And then the difference is, we're actually going live every single day of the week with

• 39:30Speaker 02

  a different instructor. And so they're not just getting the hundreds of hours of content from the past or active content we keep updating, but literally every single day at 6:00 PM, we're going live, and I'm giving away Bitcoin, cash, every single night. I'm like, hey, what's your Bitcoin? Hey, what's your Cash App code? Hey, what's... And I'm just giving away cash and prizes every night with a different instructor.

• 39:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so what's the thought process behind the types of instructors you bring on the live versus that you would record kind of the more evergreen content with?

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Sure. So the 22 instructors, those are people that are part of the mastermind itself. The ones that are coming on for the live are both. So all 22 of them jump on the lives. But in between there, like last night, we had the guy who owns 28 locations of Ever Bowl, the acai chain. Tonight, we have a girl, she has 6 million a year clothing sales and she's one of the members of a different group. So we're trying to make it different where you're going to get all the people that do the 100 million plus, but you're also going to get these, a guy with $10 million retail chain, a lady with $6 million clothing brand. So we're trying to get all of the above, but we're not taking on anybody that doesn't have at least mid 7 figures or higher in revenue. Because we want to make sure that it's all people that you really can like dive into and believe and not wonder if you should be listening to them.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  That's kind of our vending process is that we know them, we know they're doing real revenue and they're going to be helpful to our students.

• 40:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And all of this really, I think, kind of comes down to your belief of just like everyone needs to educate themselves, right? They're not going to get a lot of this education in schools. So maybe talk a little bit about that.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think it's going to be a huge, we're going to come back to new worlds. Like colleges were already like a big thing. You'd always hear about Mark Cuban, a lot of characters were talking about colleges being so expensive and unrealistic and huge college debt, the debt became so unreal, right? Now, a lot of these colleges will just not reopen or they're going to have much lower attendance because parents are realizing like, whoa, I'm paying 40 grand for this place, but she's been learning on Zoom every day just fine and maybe I don't need that. Now, the Ivy Leagues are never going to go away because as parents, you're going to still want Harvard, Yale on your son or daughter's resume, right? However, I just believe that I want to learn from somebody that's done it or like really, really done it.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  And no offense to most instructors, but they haven't built a hundred million dollar companies. There's a big difference in talking about it and reading in history books and actually being somebody that did 148 million revenue or did 600 million protein sales, right? And so I wanted both, meaning I still like the traditional forums that you can learn from school. And I wanted to structure in a way that somebody that did 600 million in protein or 20 million email list or 100 million in cannabis could teach it in a way that we could learn easily and realistically.

• 42:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then what type of students are you seeing that actually are coming in and wanting to learn this? Is this people who are replacing college? Is this people kind of out of school who actually have started a company? What do you see there?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I actually have a lot of adults. We have a lot of people that have a business, they're an entrepreneur, they own three restaurants, they own a dry cleaner. They have accountants and lawyers and doctors. There are a lot of adults on there. I want, I want college kids age and above. It's not, not to say that high school kids and young adults can't watch it, but really our content is for somebody that's got a business or wants to expand their business, or they're an influencer, or they're somebody that built up a podcast and want to learn how to expand it. It's somebody that has entrepreneurial wants and needs. But I say right now, a lot of our members are actually older than I expected.

• 42:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's super cool. And then any main takeaways that you've seen so far? As kind of you guys have started creating the content and seeing how students are reacting from it? Anything that you've either surprised you or has been a main takeaway?

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, the main comments we get is how practical it is because they're actually using it. So I'm like comments this morning, I'm sending in the group chat. Somebody said, hey, my email open rate went from like whatever the number was, 4% to 9%. And just because I did this, this and this. And somebody else in the same hour said, hey, I had a 23% conversion on my website. I changed the buy now button here, just like you said, and now it's 36% for eight days in a row. And so we're seeing comments of just real practical stuff. Because again, the people that are coming on teaching, they're not teaching esoteric like, oh, the secret, and if you close your eyes and hope, you know, the secret's going to make it come six months from now. We talk about really very practical things and that's what I'm getting the most response about.

• 43:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I love that. What's your advice right now for somebody who, who's usually probably a little bit younger? And they say, hey, I actually want to go and, and become an influencer, if you will, right? So they want to be successful is what I usually hear them say. What they really mean is they want to build an audience online. And whether it's to do advertising, is to build a product, or even to one day, you know, be a teacher for a hundred million academy or something like that. What's kind of your general advice for them?

• 44:17Speaker 02

  My main thing I like to say is keep your day job. Because what happens is you need income along the way. And you're going to create better content if you have money. You're going to be able to just travel to more places, do more things. And so you don't need to be rich to be an influencer. But you need to have a couple of grand a month just to like cover your bases, cover your bills. Make sure everything's taken care of. So you're not struggling from post to post. Too many influencers, we joke about the agency all the time. On like the 28th of the month, I get hit up by hundreds of different influencers like, hey, do you have any posts for me? Because the rent's due in three days. And this is the same influencer I paid four grand, eight grand, 15 grand the month before. But I know that's not their overhead, but they spent all their money. And so the main thing I would say is having some consistent income and having some money saved up. Again, doesn't have to be a lot, just that consistency will help.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  It'll help free your mind for your content. And what you have to really think is if you can focus on a niche, you will stand out. A beauty influencer is far and away the number one most engaged content, most engaged influencer in the world. It's not close. Then you drop way down and get to fitness influencers, they do extremely well. And then you have everybody else. But from the everybody else is there's certain pockets. Like people that focus on cars or focus on video games or focus on certain beauty, et cetera. Those people are, they're going to crush it because if you had 110,000 followers and you just talk about video games, I'm going to get you a really good rate from a video game or mobile app company. If you're just 110,000 influencers and you sometimes play video games and you sometimes talk about salad

• 45:44Speaker 02

  and you sometimes talk about puppies, I'm not going to get you any kind of rate. It's going to be like a couple hundred bucks. So if you can find a niche and really go for it on that niche and then build up your content on multiple platforms and find other people in the niche that you like. So if you're in the beauty space and you like these influencers, try to replicate some of their type of content, make it for you. Or the dream is go do posts with them or learn from them.

• 46:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Why is the beauty segment so highly engaged compared to everything else?

• 46:15Speaker 02

  So it's because their content starts off with them, no makeup on, in their rawest form, talking through it with them for an hour. And so because of that, people as fans, we believe them. When you notice, if you see a post and they're just the perfect, pretty post, their engagement, it's very different. When they do a post and they're completely raw and they're bags under their eyes and they're about to do their makeup, their engagement is four, five, six, seven, 100% higher. Because people believe that. And so a lot of times when you even see content and you see Gary Vee and Tyler, because holding up their phone, right? And they're making the content just like this now, it's because that content from their phone doesn't feel like you're selling them something.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  Right? When you see those captioning and titles and all these graphics, it feels like a commercial or a movie. When you see them holding up their phone, you feel like you're talking to them and you don't feel like they're trying to sell you. And so you need both. You need some content that's very raw, which is why beauty influencers do so well. But then they show the finished product. Everybody loves it. So whether you're a business influencer like Gary and you're making this content, people feel comfortable with you during that. And then when you make yourself on stage or you have the big titles, they're not scared of you because now they feel a part of you. And so I would say if you can make your content feel very real, when I say feel very real,

• 47:36Speaker 02

  because it is real. Don't, don't make it, it's hard to say, but like too many people try to make, like feel like they're sad today and then overdramatic, or they say that they worked out when they didn't really work out. People, people can feel it.

• 47:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It almost feels like the authenticity is the, is the great equalizer, right?

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That's why the Kardashians are so big. Because we've seen them all have breakups and deaths and cheating on, and this happened and that happened. And this guy left her for this and this one's dating this one. Like that behind the scenes is why the Kardashians are so big. We felt like we've grown up with them for the last decade. Love them or hate them, both is valuable to them.

• 48:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Do you think that we'll see more people kind of build their audiences off these reality TV shows, or is it straight to social media now?

• 48:24Speaker 02

  So what's tough is there's just too much content available. So when we grew up, the real world was the real world. We can name it because there wasn't any competition. Now, there's 50 different shows on mainstream platforms that are all reality-based, but then there's hundreds of shows on Hulu, Netflix, Apple, Roku, this, that, you know, like, there's just too much content to choose from. When we were growing up, we didn't have that many options. There were just X amount of shows we can name, say by the bell. We knew the shows that were just like in our head in school. Now, there's 999 channels, 24/7, plus Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney. There's just so many different things. So

• 49:06Speaker 02

  it's just too hard. The TV side of it is really meant for credibility. Getting on a Netflix show, huge credibility, but on social media, you're gonna be able to crush way more eyeballs.

• 49:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The top influencers, if you had to break down their revenue, what do you think the percentage-wise, advertising versus products they sell versus, maybe it's, you know, television or Netflix or something like that, like, how do you think that revenue breaks down?

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so very few of them are actually on TV, movie, etc. So that's really rare. And even from those, they're not getting paid the rates that you'd expect, even though they have large followings. They are getting chosen because of their social media following some of the times, but they're not getting some crazy rates. And they're, I don't think they care, which is an interesting part of it. However, on the product side, if an influencer has a large following, their product revenue will crush what their paid post revenue is, if they have a large following. Because if you go sell 10,000 units of something and it's 40 bucks, that's $40,000 revenue. That's not net, but you're gonna make 100, 200 grand on that. That's a lot of money. That same influencer is not making six figures most of the time from their paid posts.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Now, other influencers, if you're talking about like Jake Paul or Logan Paul, I mean, they're making millions and millions and millions of dollars from their paid posts. But even then, their product brands are doing eight figures compared to making seven figures on paid posts. So I will always say, if you can make a product and make it scalable, and make sure you ship the product and make like follow through like it's a real product brand, like you're an actual, act like a CEO, you can make way more money than your social paid posts.

• 50:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's interesting to me is most of the products we've seen, there's very few of them that have built digital products, right? Many of them have actually built physical products. So it's the t-shirts, it's the makeup kits, it's the, you know, all the different physical products. But maybe there's like, I think Sam Harris built like a meditation app, right? There's a couple of people who have built digital products, but not many.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, they should make games because I've watched them over and over, make games number one apps or top 10 apps. So many times it's crazy, like app budgets, I'm getting mid seven figures a year in app budgets to pay influencers, but they should then make their own apps and games themselves. And so what happens is they just don't focus on it. And so they'll like do a paid post for an app or they'll do a paid post for a game for me. And then it does well, it gets the top 10, but they don't ever, I don't know why they don't go make their own because it's not that hard anymore. It was hard four years ago. Now you want to go make a game? There's all these app companies that are like, hey, we'll just white label this for you. We already made this version of Flappy Birds, right? You know, and here you go. We'll call it Amanda Flappy. And then all of a sudden that's their, that's her thing.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  It doesn't happen and I don't know why.

• 51:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I guess really, once you get past the game part of the digital products, there, I don't know really what else they can make, unless they have the niche, right? It's almost harder if you're kind of more of a broad audience to actually come up with a physical or digital product. Whereas like a Sam Harris, the meditation app, right? If you were in a, you know, financial industry, you can make maybe like a financial planning app or something like that. But the niche almost feels easier to build the digital products than the more broad appeal type influencer.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  They should try to go get equity. And I, you know, it's interesting to me because the, some of these household name celebrities and big influencers should have gone and tried to get equity from these companies. Like you look at Ashton Kutcher, well, he got a little piece of Airbnb.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  That's a huge difference compared to most influencers or most TV stars. They don't have a piece of Airbnb, right? Where the Kardashians, for example, I just use them as the easy example. Like if they had equity in an Airbnb, that would be worth more than their humongous empires. Right? Would you rather have 3% of Airbnb worth X amount of billions than? Because the Kylie situation is a rare one-off, right? Think about how many thousands and thousands of celebrities and thousand, thousand influencers? All have beauty brands. What she did is an anomaly, right?

• 53:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Why? Why was she successful and others weren't?

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Because that's all she cared about. She posted about it every frickin' day, every week. And she was actually at the warehouse. She was working with the manufacturer. It was a very small team. There was only seven or eight kids there. It's not some big fancy, they don't have some huge staff. It's fascinating to watch because I watched it from the very beginning. Like it was, and watched the headaches from the very beginning of how much traffic crashing their site. Um, she was all in. And too many times people just put their face on it. No pun intended, but like they just put their face on a beauty brand and that's it. And the reason that you see like a Jeffree Star and, I mean, that kid broke Shopify. Like Jeffree Star.

• 53:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that story?

• 53:51Speaker 02

  So Jeffree Star, he partnered with, like it does, uh, gets like 20 million views per YouTube video. Named Shane Dawson. So Jeffree Star, Shane Dawson, odd couple if you will. Shane Dawson does like exposes on Jake Paul and on different influencers in like long form. They take a year to create and he makes these documentaries. Gets 20 million views per thing. Jeffree Star is this very tall, very flashy makeup artist, covered, painted on makeup. He created a beauty brand doing seven, eight figures revenue. Well, Shane Dawson, Jeffree Star, BFFs made a brand together. They launched it. It's on YouTube. You guys should watch the documentary. It's pretty long, but there's a couple of main episodes where you can actually see the launch.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  They broke Shopify.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  One million units they had in the warehouse. Think about the gamble. They pre-bought one million units. They did over, I think it was sixty or seventy million dollars in revenue in twenty-four hours.

• 54:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  It's hard to like say out loud. Like the gamble, the idea, the concept, they like did a full national rollout with one main chain store, a beauty chain store. At the same time, they did this launch with a million units of their kits, but also they had upsells of brushes, hoodies, bags, etc. And the numbers are staggering. Just look up Jeffrey Star, Shane Dawson, it'll blow your mind, the numbers, right?

• 55:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, this begs the question. Yeah, this begs the question, though. Like, is this the future of business, right? Is it going to be now build the audience first, then go build the product versus the historical model of build the product and then go find the audience, right?

• 55:32Speaker 02

  So I think it's, I think it's interesting is if you can tell the story along the way, people feel more compelled. And so the reason that Shane and Jeffrey worked was they showed the story along the way. The reason Kylie worked was she showed her posting all the time, picking out, posting like, do you like red, purple, or blue? Do you like, which color do you like? And she's like posting, asking questions. People felt a part of it. So by the time they came out, it was it. Everybody wanted it. They felt like they were a part of the process watching it. And so music artists should do that more. Like, some of them posted in the studio. They should literally be posting snippets all the time for those whole, that whole four months. Bieber did it best because he just kept posting snippets behind the scenes, showing him making the album.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  And so when it came out, it breaks all these records because people feel a part of the story. People buy into the story way more than the finished product.

• 56:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I love that. Uh, before we finish up, I do some rapid fire questions. Uh, and then you could ask me one question to end. What, uh, what's your favorite book?

• 56:29Speaker 02

  My favorite book is, uh, gosh, I don't have an easy one for that. I actually like Thinking Rich and just like the old school classic.

• 56:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, he, that's, uh, that's easily one of my top three. Uh, what, uh, what's your most controversial thought when it comes to social media, internet, and business?

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Um, people are sheep.

• 56:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that controversial?

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Well, people don't say it. Everything is controversial now in 2019, 2020. Like, it's just, it's a sad fact. Like, people are, people are sheep and they believe everything and it's, it's scary.

• 57:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What about aliens? Believer, non-believer?

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 57:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 57:12Speaker 02

  I think it'd be egotistical and cocky for us not to think that.

• 57:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's, that's fair. What, what one question you have for me to finish up?

• 57:21Speaker 02

  How do you do it all? So you know, everywhere.

• 57:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I, listen, uh, before, uh, before I met Paulina three, four years ago, I didn't sleep at all. Uh, now I actually sleep eight hours and, uh, somehow I get more work done. So it's kind of this weird thing where when you slow down a little bit, you're a little bit more intentional. You can, uh, you can actually be more productive in some weird way rather than feeling like you're always kind of running to catch up. But I don't know. So far, so good.

• 57:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. I appreciate you doing this and I think people will enjoy, uh, learning from you. And then everyone hopefully will go, uh, so where can they subscribe to 100 Million Academy?

• 57:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, 100millionacademy.com.

• 57:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. All right. Thank you very much.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  I appreciate it. Thank you.

• 58:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.