He Has A $23M Real Estate Portfolio From Going Viral On TikTok

It starts with TikTok because it's one of the places you can go extremely viral. It is a recipe to going viral. Let me break it down. My name is Blake Rocha. I go by Mr. 4-8. In the same way that MrBeast thinks about YouTube all day, all I think about is creating content. I got laid off in March 2020. TikTok popped off. First video, 650,000 views, and that's when I knew I had something. Form video is the way to go. People want entertaining content. You see people just putting shit out to put shit out. Don't do that.

You'd spend 6 hours just for a 60-second TikTok, right?

Yeah, there's a reason why. The video that I just posted, you know, for the people that are watching this, is a recipe to going viral. So let me break it down. The first thing that I do is I'm always trying to be a leader with my content. Like, I don't want it to be the exact same as anybody else's anything, but I do take inspiration from other viral videos and tweak it in a way that I know is going to go even more viral because The algorithm's already telling you what's working, okay? The algorithm says, this video caught our attention. It's making people argue in the comments or they have different opinions. It's shoving it to the world. Okay, so that works. So let's take this concept and apply it to what I know and what I'm trying to teach and reposition it. So I saw this video that was like, here's what it's like to make $100,000 a month.

Hmm.

And I thought, okay, that's great, but that's unrealistic for most people, especially— I've made $2,000 to $3,000 a month my whole life up until 3 years ago. And then I started making a shitload of money. So why not walk people through the steps of what it looks like to make $5,000 a month to $10,000 a month to $20,000 a month to that fuck you money, which is $40,000 a month, and really show people like, this is how your lifestyle can change and break down the barriers of this topic of money that everybody has. And along the way, make some jokes, make it entertaining. And that's another thing that I learned. People want entertaining content. The reason why some of these Twitch streamers and YouTube streamers do so well is because they're entertaining. That doesn't mean that you have to like cross this boundary of being like, know, some of these guys say crazy— they say like racist stuff, or they'll say like, you know, they just say crazy shit because they want to get clout. You don't have to do that. But if you can be funny and entertaining and mix in your personality with viral, you know, content that is structured in a viral way, then you have an ability to scale at— you know, I never— I've never done paid ads. Literally, I've never done paid ads and made all my money organically. So I don't know if it's a subtle flex or it's— Or it's stupid that I haven't done paid, but maybe, maybe I should do paid or some SEO. But, you know, a little long-winded answer. But I think that the marketing stuff, it all comes down to studying other people and reverse engineering what they're doing that's right.

So I don't think you've really studied hardcore marketing.

Well, I mean, to your point, though, what is it like? What does studying marketing mean? Because it definitely doesn't mean college. Definitely doesn't mean school. If they wanted to study marketing, they'd have somebody like myself or yourself go teach a couple of classes at a university because this is, this is where marketing is at now. It's not— there's teaching somebody how to use Canva and how to use some kind of application to create digital, you know, whatever. That's not marketing, in my opinion. So for me, when it came to the marketing thing, it always made sense to me.

Can you walk through how you became so damn creative? Like, what did you— what were your— what's your inspiration? Sure.

The problem that I was seeing when I first started creating content was that I didn't think people were doing it good enough. And I thought there was a couple of guys that did it amazing and everybody else sucked. So if I could just study them and figure out what it— like, there is a structure to what they're doing. Obviously, they know something that we don't. There's a reason why every video is kicking off. And there's different ways to look at things. Like nowadays you have somebody like Gary Vee or the Grant Cardones or whatever, where they're basically just— their whole life is content. Somebody is just clipping everything that they do, everything they say. They say outlandish stuff. And I didn't wanna be anybody that said anything outlandish. I didn't wanna be anybody that was fake. I wanted to be able to be myself and show people what knew and also what I didn't know. And there's something for the people that are wanting to get started with creating content and with marketing stuff, there's something that's sexy about being a beginner and trying to find your way and following the journey and following the process. So that was like one of the first things I learned was these frameworks I was coming up with for myself. I used to think about like, Why was it that my grandma would make me stay up and wait after watching Jeopardy every single, whatever, Tuesday to watch the new episode of Lost? It's because they left her on a cliffhanger. She's excited about what's coming. She's thinking about it all week. And then they start off with this crazy hook in the beginning with this monster capturing somebody and a recap and this and that. So I'm like, okay, so TV shows have it figured out. And what it is is that they've set up a series. And so I started with A series. The space that I started in before any of the education stuff, before any of the Airbnb stuff, was in the stock trading and the crypto investing space. I was already trading and, you know, I was learning as I was going, but I also knew more than, than 95% of people because they just don't teach some of this stuff in school. So I just began creating this series that was like, hey, if you want to learn how to get started investing, here it is. If you want to learn how to make money, here it is. And here's what I'm learning as I'm going. Here's this hack that I just learned that I think you should know too. I wish I knew I knew this. And all of a sudden these videos are compounding with hundreds of thousands of views. I don't even have to show my face. And it's way more about the information that I'm sharing and less about me as a person.

I want to go deeper on that, but maybe I want to back up a second too, just so people get a sense for what you've done. So can you get a sense for the, the businesses that you have right now, the portfolio, whatever you're open to sharing? And also, I think the timeline is important too, because you only started doing this very recently.

Sure. Yeah. So I got laid off in March 2020. I was serving takeout food, got laid off, began creating content around the trading space in about May or June of 2020. TikTok popped off, first video, 650,000 views overnight. And that's when I knew I had something. I built 2 of the largest stock trading communities in the world. They were online subscription businesses. One went on and did 8 figures. The other one did 7 figures. I stepped away from that world just because it was not really my passion. It was, it was just something I was passionate about at the time.

So you just stopped it or you sold it?

That's one of my biggest regrets and like worst mistakes that I've made in business. Everything's moving so fast. You're learning about taxes and this and that. and hiring and firing. And I should have, if I had known what I know now, I should have hired an operator that could have filled my shoes, but I was worried that nobody could fill my shoes. So I stepped away. In the background, I was buying a lot of real estate and investing in Airbnbs. And just kind of, I had this large platform, people trusted me and not exactly just the stock stuff, they wanted to kind of go where I went. So I just started talking about how I was real estate investing, that went, it blew up. And that, you know, has turned into multiple, you know, 7 and 8-figure businesses now. So the Airbnb business looks like this right now. So we have 11 properties. Majority of them are luxury that I own. You know, like in July we did $340,000 in a month. Last month we did $100-something thousand in a month. On average, I do about $70,000 to $80,000 a month in profit.

Hmm.

Which is great because that business is, essentially fully automated. Um, what I did was rather than going out and outsourcing and hiring people or just doing it by myself, I retired both of my parents for one day and then I hired them back to my business.

Yeah.

So my dad was good with his hands. He worked in the prison his whole life. And so now he's our project manager. My mom was good with numbers. She worked at Costco, uh, her whole life. And then so she came and now she does the numbers and kind of bookkeeping for the business. So besides acquisitions, I run the whole, uh, You know, that's a— it's a family business now, and I'm collecting $70,000 to $80,000 a month just from that. From the coaching side of things, that business fluctuates. I do, you know, mid-six figures to up to, you know, I think my biggest month was like $1.7 million in a month from education. That comes from mentorships and coaching and courses.

And when you say coaching, is it group coaching, one-on-one coaching? And like, How is that broken down? Mostly courses? Like, how does this work?

Yeah, so mostly, mostly courses. I have like a high-ticket program that's $6,000 a month. Inside of that program, there's, there's, there is some higher tiers where students get to work with me one-on-one or get direct access to be able to text me, ask me questions. We do live coaching calls. I update the course all the time. And yeah, it's just, it's, you know, it's a community. It's a community of people that are interested in Airbnb and, and want to work with a team that has, that has, you know, actually gone out there and done it. Because one of the things that I didn't like about the real estate space, there's 2 misconceptions, or there's one misconception and then there's one just flat out lie. The misconception is that you can just go buy, you know, some single-family real estate and retire. It's fucking bullshit. It's literally bullshit. I, you know, I learned this firsthand by my first portfolio that I bought was a Section 8 portfolio in North Carolina. I paid, I don't know, I probably put $600,000 or $700,000 down, or maybe even a little more, um, maybe like 30%, maybe close to $1 million because it was a $3 million portfolio. and I had to put down like 30%. So put $1 million down. After all is said and done, every single month when I have to fix one HVAC here and one, you know, broken window here and blah, blah, blah, I make $5,000 or $6,000 a month.

Yeah.

And I'm not complaining about making $5,000 to $6,000 a month, but that is shitty returns on a fucking million-dollar investment. So yes, it is very— you have to own a lot of single-family homes to make money. So for me, the Airbnb thing was like, hey, this isn't just real estate. This is a business and you can automate it and you can make way higher returns. I don't foresee it going anywhere. And we can talk about that in a bit. But yeah, that's, that's kind of how things have been structured.

Your funnel is really unique because it's literally TikTok to Instagram. And your argument, I believe, is Instagram is the place to sell, right? So can you talk about how that funnel works and maybe how many views you're getting per month on these platforms? That'd be helpful for people.

I don't, I don't track analytics at all. I don't know how many views I get per month. I don't, I don't have like a team that tracks any of that stuff. I simply just focus on creating content that I think is going to funnel really, really well. So here's how the funnel works. And this funnel's made me over, well over $10 million. It starts with TikTok because it's one of the places you can go extremely viral just like in a couple of seconds. Like all of a sudden a video is running. And, you know, once I had 1 or 2 videos go like that early on in my TikTok career.

Early on, like 3 years ago.

Yeah, I mean, early on. I realized that, man, Why are people— why is this not translating into any sales or any followers or any anything? It's because I'm not telling people what I need them to do. So I started refining my calls to action. Do I want them to go follow me on Instagram? Do I want them to go check out YouTube? Do I want them to go click the link in my bio? Do I want them to comment something so that I can have an automated message send them a lead magnet and blah, blah, blah? So I started kind of tinkering with that and figuring it out. And what I found was it's really easy to do low-ticket sales on on TikTok because there is less trust and you're just popping up on a For You page. That's why TikTok Shop is blowing up right now, because I can convince somebody to buy a $20 journal that's going to help them deal with depression or whatever, anxiety or whatever it may be, because it's $20.

Yeah.

But if I say, hey, by the way, my true offer is I have a $6,000 coaching program. I'm looking for this type of people, but I have hundreds of thousands of kids following, it's just not gonna translate. So I figured out that I needed to get people over to Instagram. And so that's what I do. From TikTok, I push people to Instagram. Instagram, pick up, you know, let's say on a big viral video, I pick up 10,000 to 15,000 followers. From those followers, they're going to be watching my stories for the next couple of days. And so I'm going to continue to post the same exact post on TikTok as I do on Instagram. But on my stories, I'm going to be creating content around, you know, it's— it may look to the average person that I'm just kind of putting shit out there, but it is high. It's all I think about all day. In the same way that MrBeast thinks about YouTube all day and refining YouTube videos, all that I think about all day is creating content. I dream about creating content.

You wake up with it.

I wake up and all I think about is creating content to the point where sometimes I can't even create content for like a month. I'm just like, my brain is just— I'm all over the place. But the goal is to really just get people to know, like, and trust you. And I use the Instagram stories as a nurture sequence, right? So rather than sending out emails, you know, all the time saying, hey, are you there? Are we still friends? You know, it's Blake here.

Yeah.

No, you don't know me. Get to know me. Let me, let me tell you a little bit about my life. Here's what I'm doing today. Here's some of the struggles I'm dealing with. I've got a few health problems I'm going through. But wow, you know, Airbnb has been kicking butt and we made $17,000 today. And if you want to learn more, here's this, this post. And so then I started kind of figuring out, okay, I can You set up these sequences maybe 2 to 3 times a week where it's like first post is a poll which gets some engagement. Second post is a question which gets some more engagement. Third poll is, hey, here's an update on my student's testimonial. Fourth post is an offer with some shit that like I've never offered before. And so, I was just coming up with all new offers, all new stories. Meanwhile, the program is kicking ass, getting testimonials. And so, it's like this snake that's eating itself. Like you were saying with this agency business, it continues to scale if you can Continue to feed it. So all I needed to do to feed it was make sure that the backend was like solid and sturdy and then create content every single day that was going to drive traffic to my Instagram.

So what I'm hearing is TikTok is really your discovery channel and then Instagram is really your relationship building channel.

Correct.

Yeah. And it's interesting because it's really simple at the end of the day. I think people overcomplicate things. It's like, I need to do every single channel. It's like for you, it's like, no, TikTok, Instagram, simple sales call. I don't need to do paid. I don't need to do SEO. Like, I'm just going to keep it simple.

Do you know the reason why my content works and why I'm able to sell so much? I don't look at what anybody else is doing. And if I do, I— my content— you will visibly see that my content is getting worse.

Yeah.

And that it means that I'm lost. If you ever see me trying to figure out a fill-in-the-blank style video, it's because I am lost with my content. And I think that, you know, to a point, I just got out of a really big rut. Like, for the first time in my life, I'm like, I'm naturally just energetic and positive person, and I was dealing with depression for the first time. And, you know, I'd gotten out of a relationship, and— but it wasn't like an ugly breakup, so I can't really contribute it to that. It was because I was losing my like end goal and like my target and, um, my vision of exactly what I wanted. Because I'm a very like manifestation— say what you want about it, for me it's, it's been everything for me. So like when I can see what the exact goal is that I'm trying to get to, and I know that like the path becomes extremely clear on, on what I'm trying to follow. I didn't know what the end goal was anymore, and I no longer had a path. And so I'm just creating content just to create. And so you see people just putting shit out to put shit out. Don't do that. You will be much more successful if— yes, you can use other people's stuff as inspiration to give you like an idea. If I see some guy talking about this e-com thing, but I think, wow, it's a really good video structure. Let me try that with Airbnb and it goes viral. Well, great. Like, that's fantastic. But be yourself and let other people try and start copying you because you then look like the leader. Like, you are the leader. Everybody that makes Alex Hormozi-style videos, You got to say his name. You got to keep his name in your mouth. So leading the pack is huge.

So I remember there's this— so there's this project, this NFT project back then. It's still around right now called Doodles. And like a lot of artists are tied with it, right? The artist is amazing. And I asked him like, so what's your creative process? Same thing. He's like, I don't look at anybody else's stuff because it's going to start to dilute my stuff.

Right.

Which is interesting. And I think that's the right way to do it. You did mention on the pod you don't follow many people on social, but you do to sometimes get some creative ideas. Is that still a thing or?

Yes. And typically they're not going to be— I try my hardest to not find inspiration from anybody that's in my same sector. So I won't find anybody that's doing real estate stuff or anybody that's doing Airbnb stuff. I think that the, the best way to, you know, to do that, to find inspiration from other people's content, just go on the For You page and start scrolling around. Or, you know, I spend basically like, you know, kind of like right when I wake up, first 30 minutes or like 40 minutes just scrolling. You know, fuck a morning routine.

Yeah.

Scrolling because my mind is like, my mind is firing then. Some people are night people. I'm an early morning person.

You're looking to get creative.

Yeah, I'm looking to get creative. I'm looking for something to inspire me to create a video. Then I'll open up my Notes app and start kind of saving like, hey, bullet point here, remake this video, but do this style and blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, I'll go on about my day and I'll make that video. And that's typically what's going to, you know, lead to going viral.

Okay. So do you have a sense for how many views your biggest video got?

Yeah, I think biggest video, maybe like 10 million views on TikTok and like 3 or 4 million on Instagram. Got it.

It was cross-posted.

Yeah, cross-posted. I cross-post everything.

What percent of your week do you think you're spending on creative?

Like 80% of my week.

Okay. That's important because I want people to understand that like that is how much time it takes to build really strong creative because I believe that creative is the X factor, whether you're doing organic or paid. And 80% is crazy, but it's what it takes. And that's why— that's what I believe has led to your meteoric rise with success.

I agree. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, it's— I eat, sleep, and breathe content. And I, you know, the difficult thing about this is I thought for the longest time that my goal was to be a solopreneur. Basically, I had one closer, like, work for me for, for a couple of months. I had a couple of people working on my stock community. But for the rest of that time, it was me doing the sales. It was me doing the tweets. I've never had anybody write a script. I've never edited— had anybody edit a video for me besides YouTube. And so I was like, I'm so cool. This is me. Total mistake. You know, as I look at my real estate business and my Airbnb business, when I started that and did it all by myself, it fucking sucked. It was horrible.

Yeah.

I wasted all my time doing it. And, you know, not to discourage anybody to do it, but that's kind of what it takes. You got to grind your teeth to get started and figure out— in order to make the systems and the operations and figure out what you're hiring for, you have to know what the tasks are people need to do. So nowadays, when I'm seeing things change, like right now in this creator economy, I'm seeing a massive change. People are not wanting to be sold to the same way they were being sold to before. You're seeing everybody that, you know, kind of came on as like a guru type of person. And, you know, I'm guilty of it too sometimes, like the car and the watch and stuff. Sometimes where I feel uncomfortable, it sucks because it actually drives engagement.

It hooks them.

It hooks. Yeah, it hooks. And then maybe, maybe like my true self and my true story can come across. But fuck it, if I got the Rolls-Royce, I'm going to use it to like try and get some views.

You said it. You're a hooker.

I'm a hooker. I'm a hooker. But But, you know, at the end of the day, it does become— the most difficult part is when you're running your businesses and doing the creative stuff, trying to keep up with both.

Yep.

Trying to keep up with both because business changes. You have to hire and fire. You need to make sure the backend stuff is all implemented, email sequences, the text campaigns, the, hey, now we're going to do webinars and we got to create a new slide deck and all this stuff. Meanwhile, you still have to create that, you know, the 80% of your week to content. I personally, Disagree, and I could just be completely fucking wrong on this. I don't think that everybody can do what Hormozi, what Gary Vee, what Cody is doing now. These people are building fucking multimedia businesses, and they're spending millions of dollars doing so. It is not realistic for 99% of people, and for a lot of people's personalities, even if they had the money, it's not a good fit. You like, you, you got to be, you have to have that X factor like Deion Sanders right now. Yeah, you see it. That's a motherfucking marketing genius. Yeah, no matter how you spin it, he's a marketing genius. And so yeah, you can follow him with a camera around all day because he's saying prolific stuff. If you follow me around with a camera all day, I don't say shit. I, I don't. I'm nonverbal for like 8 hours.

You're like in bed.

Yeah, yeah, I like, yeah, I'm hooking. Yeah, so I'm just like working. I'm in my head and, and I require a lot of peace and quiet time. Um, I'm a creative introvert. And so as much as I like to talk and stuff on the videos, for me to get to where I need to be to create that X factor type of video, yeah, I need to be in that right space.

Got it. So what have you changed your mind on in the last 3 years? So I think you've gotten away from the solopreneur mindset. What else have you changed your mind on?

Well, to be fair, I think that there's something to be said about the solopreneur thing is that you don't need to— I see a lot of people that made the mistake of like Overhiring and overspending and all these overs to get to this like really, you know, big, you know, number that they're making per month, but their take-home is small. I like lean teams. Like, I really do believe that having a lean team of people that you enjoy working with makes the whole process a lot more enjoyable. And this is what we do every fucking day, so it needs to be enjoyable. The things that have changed in the last 3 years, the biggest, you know, changes that I've noticed, my perception around money. Right? Like thinking $10,000 a month was a lot. It was at a time. And then you meet somebody doing $100,000 a month, and then you make $100,000 in a month, and you meet somebody making $500,000 a month, and you go, holy shit, $500,000 a month, that's like $6 million. And then some guy comes in making $20 million a year. That's, you know, well over $1.5 million a month, and they're not working that much.

Yeah.

So now your brain's going, holy shit, how is this guy pulling up in pajama pants, speaking at this thing, and he's making all this money, and he's— and wasn't he in Bora Bora yesterday?

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, you start, and then you start asking questions. So that's number one. The second thing that I realized is like, you really need to focus on finding the right mentors, and there's ways to do it. For me, the way that I was able to find the best mentors and essentially avoid paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for these like mastermind groups where you can meet other people. I'm like, fuck it. I have something that everybody else wants. Everybody that's older than me, you know, I'm 26 years old. Everybody that's older than me that's made it in any part of business knows now that short-form video is the way to go. I'm one of the best in the world at creating short-form video, and I'm one of the best people in the world at driving video content to sales. However you want to piece it up, I consider myself 0.1%.

Mm-hmm.

If I believe that, then why don't I go present this to people and help them out? Like, you know, But I helped Cody when she— Cody was just doing like laundromat stuff and kind of just getting started on Twitter. My pitch to her was, hey, I need you to help me buy a laundromat, and in return I will help you with learning. I'll teach you how to create content. Yeah. And so now she's blown, you know, blown people out of the water. But at the beginning, we were all just getting started and I just had a—

So this is like 2, 3 years ago?

Yeah, 2, 3 years ago.

Wow. Okay. So you did help her on that, right? Because she was sitting in that seat a couple weeks ago. Yeah.

And so, and now she's taken it and ran with it and she— and obviously it's just just to get started and stuff. But I did that with a lot of people that have gone on and made tens of millions of dollars. And so now all of a sudden I have access to any, you know, anybody that I need essentially at my fingertips, whether it be lawyers, whether it be people in the finance space, the crypto space, marketing space, the top dogs.

Yeah.

Or within like one contact. So, right, mentorship is fucking key. Um, mentorship, money, and then, um, yeah, you know, the And then the third thing, and maybe even the most important, I've done something, and I've been extremely intentional about doing this. I haven't switched up on who I am as a person. I dress the same. I act the same. I have the same friends. I have new friends, but I still have my same friends from before. I didn't do the whole, like, you know, you are the 5 people you hang out with. Well, I still hang out with 5 dumbasses, but, you know, they're my dumbasses.

Yeah.

Let me use an analogy. This is a very, very important analogy. That I'll use. Look at I look at this online content creator space, money-making space as a flash in the pan or like I'm a professional athlete. Immediately when I started making money, my goal was to take all that money. You know, I lived at my parents. I owned twenty houses before I moved out of my parents' house. So my goal was to push back anything that I wanted to enjoy and and and just keep fucking working and grinding and buying assets that were going to give me passive income so that when the song and dance is over, when nobody thinks that Blake is funny, cool, or whatever anymore, and I'm not fucking him, that I have $80,000 to $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 a month to fall back on. That was my goal, and that's always been my vision. And so I watched a lot of people get caught up in the same space that, you know, I kind of became friends with, and we're shooting the shit and talking numbers, 'cause very few people can relate when you're on this grind. It's pretty lonely. They were spending it all on just stupid shit. You don't need 4 fucking cars. You don't need 8 watches. You don't need— you damn sure don't need bottle service. So I just stayed true to who I was. I made a few mistakes along the way and maybe, you know, maybe got caught up a few different times. And I think it's all part of learning and growing as an entrepreneur and as a human being. But, you know, that's helped keep me grounded. Still, you know, keeping a family business, talking to my parents all the time, still going back. I try my best. Like, I find that, like, giving back was what I used to really enjoy, you know, Well, not used to, but like I enjoyed doing it, but I didn't have much to give except for my time and energy. Now I can give with my money and see like an actual difference in people's lives. And so I'm trying to do like one random act of kindness a month is like this little goal in my head of like—

What would be an example of that?

Last week we went back to my hometown. So I did a missions trip. I went to a Christian school growing up. I went on a missions trip to Guatemala.

Oh, cool.

With my sophomore year Spanish teacher, Señora Bay.

Oh, nice. You gave her money too?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and so we stayed in touch. She always sends me pictures of us, you know, and it was, for me, that was a transformational trip. I learned like on that trip to be extremely grateful for what I had because there's people that are way happier than me and more grateful and they don't have anything. And so it stuck with me forever. It's a lesson that shaped me and she shaped me as a teacher and just her family's cool as hell. I absolutely love these people. So she hit me up a couple months or a month ago and she's like, hey, you know, Chicharito. She calls me Chicharito.

Yeah. Hey, Chicharito.

I would love it, you know, could you share this story? And she doesn't, you know, she has no social media or anything like that. Could you share this story? We're trying to raise money, and, you know, there's this family. She's sending me videos and pictures of this little kid, um, that needs a home. He's sick. Their home is not a home. It's literally just like a tent, basically. And, um, so it was $10,000, and I just, I went up there, brought her a check for $10,000, and that was it. Like, it was—

Nice.

It was, for me, that's, that's what it's about. I mean, it's about other things. It's about taking care of your family, taking care of yourself, and, you know, being selfish. People, people don't talk about it much, but be selfish. But with the extra money that you have, with, you know, yeah, with some extra money you have, do what you want with it. But for me, that's—

I think you realize very quickly when you have money, first, one individual doesn't really need that much. And then once you make your own money, like, it's like, okay, well, that's, that's I'm good. And then it's like naturally you just want to take care of other people. And so that is a nice pillar of success. So this is interesting. Are you saying that you believe the creator economy is a flash in the pan or what's your take on it?

No, I think the creator economy is here to stay and I think it's only going to grow bigger. What I'm saying about it is things like things change, you know, from a macro perspective. When we look at what's happening right now, we had this like Fake economy, basically, where we're just pumping free money into it.

Deserving.

And people don't have to— yeah, people don't have to work. All people have to do all day is be on social media consuming content. And a lot of the content that they're consuming, you know, is showing them a better life that they could be living. They have a second, you know, like if you think about the mindset of people that were in the pandemic, then post-pandemic, the mindset was, okay, well, look at this kid online that's making way more money than I was, and he's got a cool lifestyle and this and that. And, you know, they see what I want them to see, which is true. It's just I don't share all the shitty stuff in my life. There's a lot of crap that happens.

Yeah.

But, um, you know, they see that, then the, the, you know, money— they start spending money on everything, then money starts drying up, then, you know, the cost of living goes up exponentially. And so you have— and then, you know, for right now, for example, for me, I'm gonna— I'm in a very difficult spot where I'm watching most of my competitors bounce. Okay. Of Airbnb content creators, it's just like level the playing field. I have without a doubt one of the largest Airbnb portfolios that I own out, you know, that I own. It's not— I don't own all $20 million of it. I have, you know, probably 30% equity across the board, but I have a massive fucking portfolio that makes mass— you know, my money is where my mouth is. Right. And so I'm qualified to tell people like my thoughts on this Airbnb market. I wouldn't be pushing it or continuing to invest right now If I thought it was, you know, going away. If you Google Airbnb, what are the— what do you think the articles are that you're gonna see right now?

Well, it's, it's like a shit show right now. I mean, you look at New York, right? They're shutting out. Oh my God, Airbnb is getting kicked out.

Yeah. Yeah. So then, but just think about how this like parlays and I'll relate it back in a second to how difficult it is to kind of deal with this stuff.

Yeah.

All you see on the news all day and people are very uneducated. Bottom line, like if you read some of the, you know, comments and stuff, I'm like, oh my God.

At least you're getting comments.

Yeah. Yeah. God, like God could not help you if he wanted to, but You know, they're like, hey, New York is banned with Airbnb. No, it's not. New York City banned Airbnb. New York State is still fine. Well, it's crashing. I saw that it's crashing. Well, no, actually what's happening is, you know, if we were from 2000 and let's call it 2013 to 2025, if we had this just imaginary chart, you would see Airbnb trending like this. Then you'd see it go to a flat stop. Then you would see it skyrocket because pent-up demand.

Yeah.

And, you know, people are making a shit ton of money and now everybody's running into it. And then now you see it coming back to earth to this like mean Regression line. It's not going anywhere. Is it technically crashing? Well, call it what you want, but I have— I literally have a statistic right here which is super interesting, and I'll just pull it up because this is— I was reading this yesterday morning. Give me 2 seconds here because this is—

By the way, as you're pulling that up, I mean, same thing with Shopify, right? People thought it was going to go crazy and then it's mean regressed. So, right, same deal.

Where are we at here? I apologize. Anyways, the long story short was AirDNA, one of the biggest platforms that comes out with Airbnb research and, you know, going over the real numbers, was showing that July, like this past July and August, were like the biggest July and August on Airbnb ever. So, yes. Are things, you know, am I making less money than I was in 2021 and 2020 or 2021 and 2022? Absolutely. But I was also not buying my properties or investing in my Airbnb investments based on 2020, 2021, and 2022 numbers. I knew that that was already fucked up. I had— I went back to basically 2017, 2018 numbers, and that's how I was doing my calculations, which I was telling my students to do. But at the end of the day, it becomes extremely difficult from my perspective as somebody who's, you know, who not only just makes money from Airbnb, but education is huge. No matter how anybody wants to spin it, they'll come up here and tell you crocks of bullshit all day. I'm not afraid to talk about my education business because I've helped thousands of students and, you know, we have testimonial after testimonial. So, if I can make money helping other people make money, win-win for everybody.

Right.

So, with this business though, now it becomes really difficult because I have to get my message across about Airbnb. I have about 1 minute to do so in a video. Oh, and by the way, I have to try and convince people that from my perspective as somebody who has fucking millions of dollars of Airbnbs, that it's not dying. But all that they're reading and all they hear all day is that it's dying. And so they're going to go to someone else. And, and really the struggle with being a person— do you remember what it was like when you were like— because you're a nerd just like me, right? You've always been interested in making money online. And when you're getting started and you're on forums and, you know, nowadays with videos, there's a million different ways you're getting pulled. eBay arbitrage, Shopify, dropshipping. Oh, Airbnb. Oh, Section 8 this. So then you're like, okay, well, check Airbnb. Airbnb off the list. So now my job as a creator is, you know, I got to sit back and go, do I pivot? Well, I've made, you know, $10, you know, $20 million doing, you know, education. Yeah. Do I go do— am I the coach's coach now? You know, like, you start— you really— that's, that's the inner dialogue that you start having. And I just decided, I'm like, fuck it, I'm going to roll with this because I'm doubling down on my Airbnb right now. I'm buying more properties right now than I ever have. I'm closing on a hotel this week, which is like my first time buying a hotel.

Awesome.

And, you know, it's because there's so much fear out there. And I'm a firm believer that you should zig when other people zag and, and everybody's zigging.

Right. But here's the thing. Like, it takes a lot of courage to do that because all the people you saw talking about crypto moved over to talking about NFTs, moved over to talking about AI now. And you can see this with a lot of YouTube creators, right? And but you're— it takes a lot of courage to focus and double down. And dude, you're only in your mid-20s right now, right? Like, I've learned, I've had to get punched in the face many times to learn that focus is the way to actually build something generational. All of my friends that have built something generational, it's like, as a matter of fact, this is something I want to talk about. A lot of my friends that are locked in on one business now, they own real estate, they've gotten rid of the real estate. They're like, in fact, I would sell all my real estate just to put it back in the business, right? And so, they're thinking now, people in their 30s and 40s, like, forget about real estate, just think about what you actually understand. Which you actually understand real estate. Yeah. So what's your take on that?

Double down on what you know the most. I think that one of the best pieces of advice that I was ever given was, you know, I had shiny object syndrome like everybody else. I was buying houses and I was like, well, I like Cody and she seems like she's doing good buying laundromats. I want to buy a fucking laundromat. What am I going to do with a laundromat? What do I know about running a laundromat business?

You bought one, right?

Well, I was under contract for 2, and thank God they didn't. They didn't work out.

Otherwise I might have had to shift to Yeah.

But, you know, it's really easy to get shiny object syndrome. Anybody— somebody told me the advice, they're like, hey, you know, if you were to put $100,000 or how much are you going to buy that laundromat for? $1 million. How much you're going to have to put down? $200,000. What if you put $200,000 into your current business right now? What if you spent $200,000 making your education program way better? You hired out 3 coaches and you brought on a chief of marketing or a chief of content.

Yep.

Strategy, whatever. How much more money would you make then? What is your returns going to be on that laundromat?

Well, fuck it.

I was going to make, you know, a couple thousand dollars a month.

Yeah.

What would your returns be on this thing that you've already—

Multiple.

Multiple.

Yeah.

So it's a fantastic piece of advice. And I think that everybody should, you know, I've made mistakes. I've chased the shiny object a million times. But as I'm learning as I'm going, you know, I'm not perfect, but I'm trying to just—

Dude, that's a huge win in your mid-20s to get rid of that. 99% of entrepreneurs deal with shiny object syndrome. Some never get over it, and that's why they fail. But the Bill Gates and Warren Buffett story that we always share on the pod is that like when they asked what their secret to success was, they wrote one word on a piece of paper separately, and they both turned it over and said focus. So for you, okay, going back to the— you are, for lack of a better word, you are the creative genius behind the company. How are you thinking about structuring the team moving forward? Like, are you thinking about hiring an operator? Are you thinking about keeping it lean? Like, what are the thoughts? Because I can see it going anywhere, really. Yeah.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this, and I don't know if I have the right answer for you right now, but I will say this. I don't have the same goals that maybe everybody else has. I don't— at this stage in my life, I don't want to be a number one bestseller. I don't want to speak across all these big stages. In fact, as much as I'm out there, I prefer anonymity. I was anonymous for like 2 years, and I think that there's some benefits to it. I haven't had any crazy shit happen yet. But, you know, I can take it 2 different directions. I can take it like the MrBeast route and really more so I'm more interested in Night Media.

Hmm.

Because—

The Louis Duxure model.

Right. Well, I really think that like what I'm at the, you know, I'm an expert in Airbnb for, you know, for what it's worth in terms of like portfolio-wise and what I've built. And I'm great at the marketing stuff. But, you know, I really do believe like when I see creators I see so much potential in them and I see this market only getting bigger. I see digital products only getting bigger. I've built, you know, now we're coming on like 4 or 5, 7 and 8-figure businesses in 3 years and just I can keep busting them out. But, you know, like I've considered going this route of like, I don't even know how to describe it, almost being like a manager.

Yeah.

Which I don't want to be a manager, but like there's people I see, I'm like, hey, look, you're probably making $10,000 a month. There is no way you should not be making $500,000 a month and I want to fucking cut Yeah.

So you could literally do the Hormozi model, but for creators.

I think so.

Right. So because here's the thing, like, the reason I like his model is because courses are good. You can make good money with courses. And if you're fine with the money you make, great. But you can make even more money just by taking stakes, equity, right? That ownership is what matters at the end of the day. And so if you can do that and defer any additional revenue from it and just build your audience that way and take equity stakes, And there's a million different ways to do it too.

I think that the reason why I like digital products so much versus like Logan Paul is Prime, Emma Chamberlain with the coffee. Yeah, that's great because these guys are, you know, they, they from a marketing perspective, you know, somebody, somebody was smart enough to say, hey, look, Chickadee, you've got a million followers watching your videos every single day and all you talk about for the first 40 minutes is coffee.

Yeah.

Fuck a Dunkin' Donuts, you know, affiliate link. Go make your own coffee and slap your face on it. It's easy. Yeah. Yes, there's those, there's those kind of products, but like like those are kind of few and far between, and you really need the right creator. The amazing thing about this kind of idea with the digital stuff, and, you know, I used to use this example with a friend of mine. So you have, you have Anil. I have a buddy of mine too that's like, we just, me and him, we get it. Like we talk about everything and it's, and it makes it, you know, helpful. You know, I told him, I said, why is Ninja, you know, Ninja streaming?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, you know, why is Ninja spending So many hours a day playing. He's basically a slave trading time for money. Mm-hmm. He's making a shitload of money.

Plays a lot of Fortnite.

He— yeah, you know, look, I enjoy playing video games too. If I didn't do—

Nothing wrong with that. I love it.

Yeah, yeah, if I didn't do any of this, I went to school to like work in video games. Like, that was my goal. So, but not, not the point. The point, the point is, is like, what, what is it about him that everybody loves? Well, they love that, you know, when he was peaking, that he was the best streamer in the world. Okay, best streamer in the world, why don't you show these millions of kids that want to be just like you how they can be just like you? And you can create a digital program showing people, hey, look, you want to become a streamer? Here's the exact things that you need from low budget to high budget. This is the kind of content you need to make. Here's why my stuff worked. Here's what didn't work. And here's all the stuff that I learned. And here's the price for $197.

Yeah.

Every fucking kid in the world would go buy it for $197. I would go buy it for $197. And he could have made Literally, I would guarantee you that he could have probably made close to $100 million selling a program like that over the course of 1 to 2 years.

I think there's a lot of variables here. I think it's one, it's like, do you have your nut or not? So do you have your money? If you have your money taken care of, you can do like the Hormozi model, which is delayed gratification, right? Which is where he did that launch recently with the book. Hey, he basically could have made $20, $50 million. Like, you know what? No, I'm going to give you the courses for free. I'm going to build goodwill. I'm going to take equity stakes larger down the road.

Right.

But that's a very long-term view. And in some cases, 99% of cases, people cannot deal with that.

Right. You have to have an exit, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need your nut. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. So, okay.

I've never talked about that out loud, but yeah, I mean, that's, that's kind of like where my— I'm going to, I'm going to continue to stick with the real estate stuff because it's, it's— I enjoy it, you know, like I— there's something about, you know, I don't know if I've ever even told this story before, but like the reason why I fell in love with real estate, I had, you know, I had a mentor that was in real estate that unfortunately, you know, he was a rock star. He took his life and it was like one of my first mentors and he saw something in me. You know, I, when I was like 14 years old, got caught up in some, you know, like it was Vemma. It was like a pyramid scheme type of thing. Because I wanted to, you know, I wanted to drive BMW to school. But I just was already thinking about marketing and sales and doing all that stuff. I didn't even know what I was caught up in. I just knew that like I had the, you know, the rizz of this like business language.

Yeah.

And so he saw something in me and, you know, I was introduced to real estate that way. Anyway, I grew up in a, you know, very middle class. I had never really been around nice houses or big houses. I grew up in a farm town. And so when I got to college, you know, I was at a pretty low point. You know, this is like in college, I got extremely, extremely sick, um, you know, was, was told multiple times that I only had a couple years to live. Like, they, you know, many— I had 2 doctors say that I was going to be dead by 30.

Wow.

Uh, with, with a liver disease. I had stomach diseases, 2 autoimmune diseases, and I was 105 pounds. And so, you know, that, that whole health journey took a lot out of me, and I didn't have a lot of hope for a long time. And I do remember one time this feeling of like ecstasy almost. I had never felt anything like this before. I was notorious for rolling up a joint, grabbing my fishing pole, and sneaking into, you know, in college, like anywhere that I could sneak in to go like fish. I can see that. I was just like, fuck it. Like, what else am I doing right now? Like, everyone's telling me negative things. You know, whatever. Yeah. So one day there's this neighborhood called Lake Sherwood in Westlake Village, and I'd heard a lot about it. Britney Spears lives there, and, you know, $20 million, $30 million houses like that. I'm like, I wanna go there. So I tried one or two times to get in. Hey, I'm here for Spears family. You know, they're all, what do you do? I'm like, tell them Blake's here. And they're like, there's no Blake. All right, so I came back and finally I found this kid that was local, and he was like, yeah, I got some friends there, we'll go in. And so we were— and I'm wearing just like my getup, like just normal sweats and stuff, and I see 2 open houses. And this one open house just like caught my eye. I didn't walk through an open house before. I had no reason to ever walk through an open house, especially on a $20, whatever, $25 million house, I think is what it was. And my buddy's like, dang, you know, it's badass. Let's go check it out. I go, nah, like, what? Like, I'm not worthy.

Yeah.

I can't walk through a $20 million. I'm gonna catch on fire like a sinner walking into church. So anyways, we park, you know, I'm kind of like skittish and we walk in and he ends up knowing the real estate agent was a young kid. So they get to talking and I'm left in this, like, is foyer the right word? Like, like this big room.

Yeah.

With a view over this lake. And I'm sitting there and I just had like chills. And I like, I remember just kind of like closing my eyes and thinking, why, like, why can't I have this? This is fucking possible. Like, I can do this. This is out there. Some other guy that is You know, not smarter than me or not cooler. You know, there's dumb people that make money. There's dumb people that make dumb, dumb money. So I'm like, you know, this is possible. And I kind of just walked around this house and was, you know, feeling the walls and touching, you know, seeing this nice everything. And that was like a very like memorable, like pivotal type of moment for me realizing like, man, I'm meant for more. Like I can do more. And this, like, this will be mine.

This was age 14?

No, this is, this is in college. This is, this is like when I was in college. Yeah. Yeah.

When did you find your mentor again?

He was— he was when I was 18, came home for freshman summer and then he passed away.

Got it. So can you talk a little more about that? Because I think people watching this would like to know how to get a mentor. And yeah.

So, I mean, besides kind of what I mentioned earlier about having like a unique skill or something of value to bring to somebody, you know, typically not asking for anything in return will get you a lot of goodwill. And, you know, ideally, they kind of come to you and say, hey, look, if you ever need anything, there's that word, goodwill. Goodwill, right? So, that's, you know, one of the best lessons I give to people is, you know, give a lot without, you know, expecting to receive anything in return. It's a key. It's helped me achieve almost everything I've done because I've just— even when it comes to sales, give, buy somebody that cup of coffee so that, you know, you get your foot in the door and get goodwill with them. And then they come back to you when they're ready to buy something. because you've already given them something for free. So, I kind of had heard through the grapevine, you know, use your connections too. I'd heard through my mom's friend, that's her brother. So, it was like mom's friend and then that was her brother, that he was the biggest real estate guy around. And everybody had always told me because I was a natural salesperson that I should sell cars and I should sell houses. Well, I sold cars and I fucking sucked at it. I was the worst. I sold half of a car in And that was it.

Really? You sucked at selling cars?

I was the worst car salesman ever. Well, I didn't know anything about cars and I didn't like them. And it was like 100—

Because you didn't care, so you didn't study.

No. And I was like, it was like 108 degrees. I was getting paid minimum wage.

Yeah.

And I had to stand out in the lot all day on the used car lot.

Yeah.

Fuck this. This sucks. Yeah. So anyways, houses and our first meeting kind of talking, he, he saw my like energy and he just said, hey, I see a lot of me in you. I meet with a lot of kids and parents want me to meet. You know, that was it. That's a natural thing. I can't really tell anybody how to do that or how it worked, but I was naturally engaged and, you know, telling him like, hey, I want to be the best, you know, real estate salesman ever. And he was like, come on, like, let me show you the ropes. And then, you know, a month or two later passed away.

But— You know what? I feel like people can detect this energy because the mentors I've gotten in the past when I had nothing earlier, but I had It was clear that I wanted to get better. And it was clear also I had some value because I was an up-and-comer from a marketing standpoint. Like, it's not that I asked them to be my mentor. It's more so like I asked what they needed help with. And not even that, I just did the work for them. And then they're like, okay, let's talk. And then they wanted to get to know you better, right?

Yeah. So, and truthfully, you know, and I'm sure that you've dealt with this too, as you start to, especially because our lives are like so public, As you start making money and, you know, as you start making money, you have a lot of friends and not even less of friends, but more of like acquaintances or high school people or college people that— and they're texting you, calling you, reaching out because they want to know what you know. Well, the amount of people early on that I, you know, kind of felt bad. So I like— not bad, but it's my time. It's giving away a lot of time to like help people out, which is fine. But I can help a lot more people out with my social media than I can one-on-one. With a random high school homie. But, you know, I would give them the sauce. You know how many people followed up and did anything with it?

Less than 1%.

Zero. I don't have a single friend out of that group, you know, of people that ever reached out that ever went on and did anything with investing, trading, or with Airbnb.

They wanted the feeling.

The feeling.

Yeah.

Well, congrats, Blake. I'm like, yeah, thanks. But, you know, I'm going to give this to you. And I think that if anybody— and there's other people that did show up, you know, came to me saying, you know, asking questions and then implementing. And really pushing the envelope. And I'm like, okay, I want to help you be successful because you're taking what I'm saying and you're doing it. Not just doing it, you're going above and beyond. You're doing some things better than I might have even done it. And so, you know, that when you see— there's a lot of motherfuckers that talk, but what it comes down to is doing, you know, taking action.

That's why it's okay to give almost all of your best content away for free because almost no people are going to take action. And the people that do, you build massive goodwill.

That's one of the best pieces of content probably that's been on this podcast is that right there. If you— you can literally give away— I'll give you an example. I know a guy that has made over $20 million in online education, like online sales, teaching people about a certain subject. In this certain subject, he created this online course. Okay, you can find more valuable information and probably 10x more videos on his YouTube for free.

Yep.

On the exact same topics, literally for free. And nobody, you know, I'm not to say that nobody does anything with it because he's a big— he's got a big following. But the point is, is that information is out there. Nothing is new. Nothing is reinvented besides some of this new AI shit that comes out. Very few things are going to be like, wow, I've never heard of this before.

Do you know what I gotta tell you? So, I used to work in online education. And actually, there's a— I'm not gonna name names here, but this guy that was a president of a very large learning management software that you probably know. We were working together for— we were launching this Jim Rohn course, right? And then people were promoting like Tony Robbins, all these people. This is a long time ago, 10 years ago, whatever. And we're sitting in this executive room and we're just talking about course and he's like, you know, everyone—

Yeah.

People buy courses for perceived progress. I was like, oh damn. And because I know when I worked in a startup, in the education startup, I knew that 98% of our students did not finish stuff, right? So for better or worse, that's just kind of how it is. And when you were talking about your friend, I'm like, it reminded me of that.

Yeah, it's— yeah, I mean, we saw similar— not similar numbers, but early on in the course industry, You know, and Hormozi is the person that I heard this from too. I think that he was kind of like, he's a very unique person. I know everybody talks about him, but from what I see and what I've learned from him, it makes a difference. Like you said, when you have your nut.

Yeah.

You can go give everything away for free because like you have just, you just bought yourself 3 or 4 years or 5 years or maybe fucking infinity years to be able to, you know, do whatever. You know how much your lifestyle costs and you know how much like you have coming in. So you can do whatever and say whatever. One of the things he said was like the real true money and education and in coaching and in programs and whatever. Because at the end of the day, I really do believe that he, you know, is a glorified course creator, course seller. Gym Launch was essentially an education program and stepping in and doing ads and stuff.

Which there's nothing wrong with.

No, nothing wrong with it at all. I mean, there's a negative connotation and people take it however they like. It's the truth. It's just I'm in the space, you're in the space, anybody that's in the space can see like what it is for what it is. And so with that kind of, you business model, if, you know, what he says is the money made up front is how you get the foot in the door. The real true money is made on the back end.

Yeah.

And so I focused early, you know, heavily, very early on like getting people in. And then I realized like, man, I'm not nurturing them enough. I'm not taking care of them. Why are we not having enough testimonials? I know that this works. Well, then I go and check the, you know, how many people have watched the course program. Let's say 1 out of 10, you know, 1 out of maybe 15 people has finished it. The rest are like never started it, probably 30% of them kind of started it and maybe halfway started it. Okay, well, they're not going through the program. So then what I started to implement, and I think this is a good lesson for people in the education space too, is you really want to get people to get to the point where they are going to really need your hands-on help and have a backend offer ready. But in the meantime, you need to have like, for example, email sequence, text sequence, and also having accountability coaches works fantastic because somebody So now he's checking in with you saying, hey, it's John from Blake's program. Saw that you bought the program last week. Saw you just getting started. Would love to like help you where I can. Definitely encourage you getting rocking and rolling because we see that the best students finish early.

Yeah.

Okay. So now they're kind of reminded, okay, oh shit, I forgot that I bought that. Let me go through it. Eventually they get to a point where they're like, hey, we need help. Great. What do you need help with? Well, the number one pain problem for me in the education or in my Airbnb space, you just want somebody to do it for Okay, well, I have a done-for-you offer, right? I have a, you know, $20,000 offer in the backend where, hey, if you want help, we can find the unit, furnish the unit, set it up for you and manage it for you hands-free.

Right.

So, and it's a win-win because they're getting what they wanted. I helped them get to point A to point B, they have the education on it, and then they've opted to work with my team because it's just too much headache or too much work. Great. Or you have the people that do it themselves. So either way, that's, that's, that's how we're looking at this education space now is not like, hey, Hey, you bought it, fuck off. Like, hey, you bought it, you believe in me, trust me. You know, let me, let me hold your hand through this process as much as I can with the team that I have.

So if you do add an accountability coach, you do add in a community and there's a sense for— they're in a group where like they kind of look bad for not finishing. Then if the metric flips, it's 98% completion rate. And so it goes the other way.

Yeah, that's good to know.

So rewinding to your way of selling through DMs, like, are you closing $6,000 sales by not even talking to them on the phone? Like, hey, buy my shit. Like, what are you saying?

Yeah, that's it. Well, I just— I, you know, there's a certain amount of programs that we release like every single week or every single month. I will usually wake up one day. I don't have the stuff preplanned and I'll be like, all right, seems like a good day to sell. Like typically Thursdays, Sundays, Tuesdays are the best days to sell. Friday, Saturdays, people are out drinking. They hate their lives. Yeah, Monday they're back to work. And then so by the midweek they're like, well, fuck, you know, I hate my job. Like, you know, this is— this is the time to kind of take action. So, how quickly do you close them?

Like sometimes like they go party.

Under 15 minutes.

Okay, 15 minutes.

Yeah. So, I send a message that looks something like this. Like, hey, you know, like if they were one of the people to respond, hey, you know, you're one of the couple people that responded to this program because it's not like I prequal everybody. So, that's something that not a lot of people do. They try and do the prequal like on a call or like on a text or email or I mean or a DM. On my post, I say, I say, this is the price of the program. This is what's included. If you are one of the people that has this kind of funds and wants to, you know, work with me, DM me this.

Yeah.

So yeah, you get a few like stragglers of people that are like, oh fuck, sorry, I didn't read it. But for 90, you know, 99% of the people, they do read it. And so a couple DMs come through and I say, hey, look, thanks for, you know, reaching out. I, you know, I've got whatever, however many spots are left. Here's the link to join. I'm going to give you 15 minutes to join. Otherwise, I'm going to move on to the next person. Yeah. Does 2 things for me. Saves me time sitting there dicking around all day or my DM, you know, if I have a DM closer, which I'll do in the future, then have them there. But it also puts the time clock on. I'm like, hey, do you really want to take action or not? And so it's, you know, sales strategy.

So it's 15 minutes to get on a call or 15 minutes to—

To just use the payment link.

Okay.

And then the payment link, then we have a set of instructions and it sends automatically. Everything's ready to rock and roll. But yeah, got it. $6K is being sent over.

Awesome. I want to talk— I think you brought this up too, on how you're planning to go hard on YouTube. And interestingly enough, Mark Manson is coming in a couple hours. He's going hard on YouTube. I'm trying to go hard on YouTube now again. What's your take on YouTube long-term?

I think that YouTube is the best platform in the world. I have evidence to back it up from other creators. I think the 2 things that matter the most are cash flow and longevity. In, in the creator space. How much— I don't care how much money you make or how much money you spend. The only money that I care about, whether it's from creating content, whether it's from your other businesses, the only number that matters is cash flow. The only thing that matters is cash flow. So, and then the second thing is longevity. Think back to like, I'll give you a great example. I went on TikTok the other day. It suggested me a live, like those live TikTok lives. So I'm just kind of scrolling through. What are people doing? You got random people doing God knows what.

Yeah.

MS— what is it called when they like tap on cans?

I don't know what that is.

Oh, they talk like this. Oh yeah, ASMR or whatever. Let's dive into that.

Yeah, if you want, we can. Yeah.

But, you know, you're going through and I see Tai Lopez on there and I go, you know, I know Tai Lopez in and out. I used to— as much as I, you know, that stuff was annoying back then or it's spammy or scummy or whatever you want to call it.

It works.

It worked.

Yeah.

And it led a generation of, you know, people, maybe years and years of really kickstarting YouTube ads for like these course creator education people. He had 85 people on a live. He was talking about an— he was talking about an NFT. He was talking about rambling about health and wellness randomness and rambling about something else too. And people had, you know, most of those people in there were like new kids and they had no clue who he was. And he has this new pod— this podcast popped up after I clicked that the next day. I'm like, Tai Lopez again? I'm like, the fuck's going on here? I don't watch Tai. I don't—

never.

You never see me search Tai Lopez. But then the video is like, why I took a break from social media. It's the worst thing you could ever do. It is the worst thing you could ever do. You want to know why he took a break from social media?

Why?

Because nobody cared about what he was posting anymore.

Interesting. Well, I mean, in 2020 when he was buying those companies, I don't think those companies worked out. I'm not sure.

No, they didn't. They didn't. They all—

But that was like the last, like, big thing I saw. But yeah, go, go.

But that's like a big news article. That's not the same people that were like buying his programs from before.

Right, right.

Those guys have been through the rinse cycle of basically like, okay, they had something that worked, then they had a couple of things that worked. And then you see these guys that have a couple of things that work, then they're like, fuck it, pay me $20,000 and I will be your like coach for life coach. And we meet twice a year and it's this like life cycle of this guru. And I realized, I'm like, I don't want to be a guru. I don't want to be this. I want to be myself. I want to you know post and share what I want. I want to help people, and and I don't care that it like I'm also excited that it makes me money. But my goal is like I can help a lot of people. Like naturally, I'm a like I'm a giver at heart. And so if I can help as many people as possible, make money, share my life, and and do this all while like I actually enjoy my lifestyle, like I actually get to go travel, I'm actually spending time with you know real relationships with people that matter. I do what I want to every single day. I don't think that like, you know, you need a bunch of like money or a bunch of anything to be like super, super happy. I found my calling, which is, you know, something that I'm really good at, which is this, you know, content creation and marketing and this whole world that we're in.

Mm-hmm.

'Cause I found that. And then I found that I, you know, I love staying in shape and that this health thing has become a whole part of my life because of, you know, being sick. And, you know, I love cooking. I'm making these home-cooked meals. So I'm like, man, all of a sudden this life is like shaping up for me. I'm super happy, and, and I just, and I realized I'm happy right now. I want to keep this lifestyle going, and I just don't want to be a fucking guru. So I'm doing everything in my power to not be a guru. I don't want to be your guru.

Yeah, you know, so what are you doing on YouTube right now then? Like, is it vlog style? Like, what is the move?

So I started— this is— we can, we can dive deep on this, but I think that this is, you know, the goal initially with YouTube Let me restart. The problem with my YouTube career, which has like 3,000 subscribers and, you know, it just got started last month, I waited too long. I— my— in terms of like people, let's just say searching Mr. Forte 8 or like having my peak exposure was probably during peak COVID.

Yeah.

Okay, because that was when just— it was. I'm not saying that I'm never gonna have a spike like that again, but now it's more like you can see the slow grind versus it was nuclear.

Yeah.

I should have capitalized on it then, and I had every right. I just should have, could have, would have. And you know what? I try not to dwell on past mistakes. That was a major mistake that I've made in my, you know, in this short-lived career. Now that I'm getting started, what is the purpose? The purpose is, you know, I had a good friend of mine who's a mentor. His name's Umar Ashraf. He has 500,000 subs on YouTube. He's been around the trading space for like 10 years. You look at the lifecycle of somebody who's been in the trading space as a top educator and is giving game away for free for 10 years. The lifespan of a creator is not very long. It's like that of a rapper or, you know, that has a one-hit wonder or an NBA player that's great. And then all of a sudden they blow their ACL out. 3 years, adios. So if that's the, if that's the, you know, the case and you have somebody that's been around for 10 years, I asked him, I said, what's the sauce? He goes, you have to think in 10-year increments. He goes, I wasn't worried back then about how much money I was making month over month. I knew that it was eventually going to come. He's making 7 figures a month. He makes money trading, he has education, he has a trading floor, he has this and that, and his YouTube is now growing and growing and growing. And so, when he told me that, I realized, man, I've been thinking month to month, day to day, week to week, and I'm afraid and I live in fear. I have a fear with money. I have a fear that it's like finite and that it's going away and that, you know, God forbid I ever go back to making a couple thousand dollars a month again, or $20,000, you know, this unrealistic number. That's good.

The fear drives you.

It does drive you. But to some extent, though, it also leaves you playing the short game and not the long game. And so for me on YouTube, I think I started— the idea is there right now with basically out of 8 videos that I shoot at a time. So I'm doing 8 videos at a time. We film for 3 days. I write the scripts and then we just bang them out. Maybe like 4 to 6 of them will be on very niche Airbnb topics. Is Airbnb going to be around in 2024? How to find goldmine Airbnb properties, blah, blah, blah. So that I kind of start taking some, some, some shelf space in that online, whatever you call it, shelf.

Yeah. Online shelf.

Some of it though, like the lifestyle stuff, you know, I want to share too so people can get to know me a little bit more. And then, and then on the opposite side of the token, you have these general lists. Iman Gadzhi is a great example. Sebastian Giorgio is a great example where they do have 1 or 2 videos where they kind of interweave this like, you may not know you're being sold, but by the way, hey, I do SMMA and here's my course and this is how I got rich doing what I do. Well, it's like, no, motherfucker, you got rich because, you know, you have— we know, like, you got rich doing X, Y, and Z, but whatever. Fair. Somewhere in between is where I'm stuck at right now, because if I only continue to make niche, hyper niche content around Airbnb, acting as a VSL funnel, essentially, like an evergreen VSL funnel. So for those that are people that are listening to this and you're wondering what I'm talking about, you know, a VSL funnel essentially is like a video funnel where you watch a video and it encourages you to go somewhere else to like set up a sale. Evergreen means that it's on, it's somewhere forever. And so that's the beauty of YouTube is like the algorithm will show you a video from 4 years ago. And so if I have a video that pops, it gets 2 million views talking about is Airbnb gonna crush it, and it has a great call to action, which is like, hey, book a call with my team. Well, shit, that thing is— I never have to do like— I don't have to make any more videos or anything. Like, I just hit the jackpot. So that's the beauty of YouTube. The problem is if you only make hyper-niche videos, then you will be grinding this really slow grind to like 100,000 subs, and I don't want to do that. I think that I have a lot more to give to the world and a lot more to share that's not just Airbnb stuff. So I think So I think with Airbnb as a search topic trending downward, less people are talking about it, less people believe in it. I will probably go more towards like out of 8 videos, 2 to 3 very specific videos on Airbnb and the rest of them be more general broad scale so that I can build up my personal brand and from my personal brand nurture them on other places. That's how I'm thinking about it right now. Maybe you have better advice.

I'll share. I'll share where I screwed up with it. So my YouTube used to get So my topics were mostly marketing and I would get like 100, 200, 300, 400,000 views. Like literally you can see it if you go look at my popular videos. I didn't pay for any ads or anything. And I'm like, man, like I'm— I have way more wisdom than I did before. This is like maybe like 6 or 7 years ago. And my biggest problem was I started talking about other stuff. So I'm like, I'm much more than a marketer. I'm going to talk about like crypto, I'm going to talk about investing, I'm going to talk about health, whatever. Right. But the problem is the algorithm only likes you to focus in a certain area. And now, like, like the last couple of years, some of my videos would get like 100, 200 views or so, right? But recently I started doing these interviews again. And this is where I talked about with Hormozi, Alex, about Warren Buffett talks about the circle of competency, right? But there's also a circle of competency when it comes to content. I've done like 400 or 500 of these interviews. Most people don't know that.

Oh, really?

Yeah. So like, I'm pretty good at doing these and I enjoy having these conversations and then like 2 hours, 3 hours, I can do it, right? And like, I'm not in any penalty box. It's just like if the video is good, it's good. And like, exactly, like the Hormozi videos are popping off. The Cody video came up yesterday. It's popping off. I'm like, okay, like what is my content box? I'm just gonna focus on that and not try to deviate too much because the algorithm doesn't like that, right?

But I do— there is some examples of people that have done it well. I think that there is a— the guy that just sold Hyros, what's his name?

Alex Becker. Yeah, he's great. But his shit is all about making money.

No, but he does health now. He does like health stuff. Does he do health now? Yeah. Everything is about like this peptide and this jiu-jitsu.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah. And he's doing a new AI startup. So he went from, you know, whatever Hyros was at marketing to tracking to crypto to, you know, now he's doing health stuff to now he's going to bounce to AI and he just follows the hot topic.

You might be able to do that with volume. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know. But I'm just saying, like, when I saw that, I was like, okay, not that I want to do that. But one thing that I have learned in this, in this like, um, short— again, short-lived career of mine. I don't want to sound like an expert, but this is just, you know, what I'm learning. It's your experience. Yeah, it's my experience. My experience is, as a creator, you got to figure out what your 2 to 3, like, core pillars are and, um, and, and then pour into those and don't, don't deviate from those.

Yeah.

So for me, as I kind of look back on the stuff that— yes, is it easy for me to get caught up sometimes being like a lifestyle creator, just like, hey, here's my life. Yeah, but it's not paying the fucking bills.

Yeah.

So do I want to be a guy that people think is cool in a cool car, driving, doing cool stuff all day? Or is it like, hey, let me give you some sauce. Like, let me give you some extra, like, wisdom and help you make some money. Oh, and then by the way, once in a while, you know, I'm trying to stay in shape. Oh, and by the way, you know, this, this is some of the stuff that I really enjoy talking, you know, talking about. If you can do like 50/30/20 on that, like 50 of the business, 30 on maybe like personal finance, like for me. So it goes 50% to 60% Airbnb, 20 to 30% like personal finance.

Yeah.

And then the rest of it just lifestyle.

Yeah. And that's, you know what? So I think that will work. I'll give you a hack that Neil used to grow his YouTube to 1.1 million. And it's really not that much about subs, but he did get it to 1.1. It's because he kept hitting his email list and his email list has like 5— no, sorry, it has a million people on it. Now, a couple of years ago, it was like 500,000. You have the power to drive, to make these viral videos, and sometimes you can choose to drive it to your emails if you want. That's how I can see you growing it. But, you know, that's his playbook.

So take what you want. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. I want to talk about health. And before I talk about health, actually, I mean, you're— by the way, just people can't— people that aren't watching this on YouTube right now. So Blake said he was 105 pounds maybe 6 years ago or whatever. Yeah, he's ripped. Now, just so everyone knows. So how do you think— what do you think the problem is with modern dating? Because look, you're very successful, right? You're in your mid-20s, good-looking dude, right? So what are your thoughts now? Total change, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like modern dating. Well, I mean, so I was in a relationship for 5 years. Good relationship and a great relationship. A lot of great memories. Um, you know, she held me down when I didn't have anything, and she believed in me when I didn't have anything.

Like, held you down as in, like, supported you, right?

Supported me. Like, I lived it, you know, like when I was building my first business, um, my parents were in the process of moving somewhere. Before I moved back in with them, I was— my house— I got kicked out of my house because we couldn't pay rent anymore. We didn't have jobs. So I ended up staying with her parents, um, up in Santa Barbara. And, you know, like, she just— she was always there for me and supportive of, of my, like, entrepreneurial vision. And, and so I think when things stopped not working out for me was when I just became so enthralled with my business because I recognized that no matter how you spend— I have no regrets about it, you know, and I've talked to her about this since then. I recognized that I had this window of opportunity to really make something of myself, and I took it. But what that took from me was like literally 16, 18-hour days for like the first 2 years.

Yeah.

That's it. I wasn't in great shape. I was healthy in terms of food-wise. I wasn't going to the gym. I'd like somebody have to remind me to Because I'm like, I'm racing, I'm against the clock. Like my time was now. I saw that I had this gift and the stars aligned. So that was the focus. And then, so whenever, you know, we wanted to hang out or she wanted to hang out more often than I did, I was not present. I wasn't a good boyfriend. You know, I probably, I started having like eyes for other people 'cause I'm like not getting, you know, I'm just in this, my own world now.

Right.

And I'm just like, and you know, I'd never, one thing that I am happy about is I didn't let the money like change how I, I wasn't like, oh, I got money now. I'm gonna go find something better. The grass is greener. Um, but I just— it stopped kind of working out and unfortunately broke up. Since then, I don't know, I've been single for a year. I've dated kind of on and off. Um, never really like done any of the apps or anything. Um, I prefer to meet people and just like, you know, randomly meet somebody, hit it off, and like, oh, let's go grab lunch or dinner. I'm not great at dating, so I probably don't have the best—

You're an introvert, right? Right?

Like, I'm a— well, like, extroverted introvert? I don't really know what I am. I know that I'm not like great at like first dates or anything like that. So I'm probably not the best dating advice person. But I mean, what's been your experience?

Well, I mean, I just think there's like this— the challenge is the paradox of choice now, because like before you would date someone and it's like, well, it's hard to find someone good, so you might— let's figure out how to make it work. And then now it's like any little tick that bothers you, you're just like, all right, well, I'm just gonna go look for something else.

Onto the next one. Yeah, I think that could be there too.

And plus you have like, I wanna talk about the OnlyFans creator economy. Like, what do you think about that too? But we can continue your thought.

Go ahead. Yeah, I don't know. I'm probably not the best person to ask about dating advice.

It's okay. Let me transition to health then. So on the health side, like, what are you obsessed with? Like, what are you doing to stay in shape? Because this guy posted what he's doing today and And then your shirt was off. I was like, damn, man, this guy's super ripped. So what are you into? What do you do for your health and all that?

Sure. Yeah, I try not to be an over-optimizer. 2 things I cannot fucking stand in this online social world is people that over-optimize and talk about it and brag about it and have these crazy strict schedules. Like, to me, the best schedule is one where the calendar's blank. And the second thing I don't like is all these like hyper-masculine, this whole Like everybody that's dick riding the Andrew Tate wave just so that they can get clout and go sell whatever coaching program they have. Like, I can't wait until that's over.

Yeah.

For me, it all comes back to food and gut health. So, you know, my gut—

gut health is—

I'll just give like a brief background of my health journey. I was extremely sick, right? Misdiagnosed with a lot of diseases. I was always regurgitating food. Couldn't— I was eating a lot, couldn't hold weight down, had stomach issues bad. Just like, yeah, really bad stomach issues, migraines, My whole life I had like maybe a weekly or biweekly migraine, debilitating. Didn't know when they would happen, couldn't figure out why they would happen, did brain scans, nothing came back. Here's this drug, here's this drug, here's this drug.

And this is multiple doctors misdiagnosing.

Oh, this is Cedars-Sinai, this is Stanford, fucking everywhere. Yeah, everywhere. And nobody could figure out what's going wrong. My great-aunt, who was like basically my aunt, she got stage 4— diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. She went to, and you know I'm a Christian, and and you know she went to a to go get her first round of chemotherapy done. She's sitting in the lobby, just me and you, just like this, and somebody like kind of puts their hand on her, and they're like, you know God's telling me that you're not meant to be here right now, and that you need to go see this Dr. Nazami, who's like in Newport Beach. So she went to this doctor, and he's like, yeah, if you do this chemotherapy, it's gonna fucking kill you. You need to go like you know try this homeopathic. This stuff is not legal in the United States. States. You got to go to Mexico because the FDA and the blah blah blah, um, you know, because the, the whole game— and I don't want to dive too much into it— but the whole game with the pharmacy system is if they can keep you sick, they can keep making money. And so keep you, you know, basically they find, you know, they make a diagnosis, they give you a drug, the drug covers one problem but makes 10 other ones, and they keep you going back and back for more. So that's how the big like pharma machine works. She went down there, did some high doses of vitamins Completely changed her diet, like dramatically changed her diet. And now it's been like, I don't even know, 10 years since she's been completely— now she has, unfortunately she has cancer again, but she was supposed to die that year. And now it's been 10 years and she's cancer-free most of the time.

Yeah.

So that opened up myself and my family's eyes to natural medicine, healing your body with food, healing your body with these natural types of supplements and stuff like that. And first day that I walk into this naturopath doctor, he's like, has anybody ever told you you might have like celiac disease? probably what's causing a lot of this. It's gluten. I'm like, yeah, what's gluten? Gluten, however you say it. And, um, and what the fuck are you talking about?

Yeah.

And so they do this test and he's like, yeah, man, you have celiac. You probably have, um, uh, Crohn's. You know, your brother looks like he has Hashimoto's disease. Your dad definitely has it since it's hereditary. And my whole family's like, what? So what do we do? Well, start by changing your diet. Go down to this elimination diet. And so I haven't had gluten like at all in 6 or 7 years.

Yeah.

I started putting on weight 'cause my body could start digesting these nutrients. My gut health was all fucked up. I had Candida. I had all these different overgrowths, parasites. And so, I just naturally started healing my body through food, through juices, through natural supplements. And now, it's very simple. Where I'm at, I eat the same food basically every day. So, for breakfast, I'll do either a ground beef or a turkey with like some avocado. For lunch, I'll do another— I'll do a pound of ground beef every single day for lunch. And for, you know, with some other stuff. I had this bowl that I call the Blake bowl that I make every day.

Nice.

And for dinner, I do a pound of steak or maybe like some chicken or some salmon and mainly steak though, with a sweet potato. I do that every single day. I enjoy eating that way. It makes— it removes the decision fatigue for me.

And you're cooking it?

I'm cooking it.

Yeah.

I mean, I could have a chef. I've like thought about it, but I'm eating the same shit every day. So, I enjoy— cooking is one of those things where when you're broke, it's a chore, and when you have money, it's a— if you enjoy it, it's, you know, I put on some music and I— it's therapeutic a little bit.

Yeah.

Um, and then, yeah, my— I just take a couple supplements. The biggest one, I started taking this peptide called BPC-157, which really started healing my stomach lining and my gut. Um, and, um, just very basic magnesium, um, some, some salts in the morning, stuff like That and getting some sunlight. I try and get sunlight every day. That's it. And work out. Stay consistent with the workouts.

Yep.

Um, yeah, it doesn't need to be over— don't— no, it doesn't need to be overcomplicated. In fact, it should be very, very simple. It should be, in my opinion, a whole food diet, getting some sun, you know, and, and really trying to get sleep is one of the biggest things. I don't have an alarm. No alarms. That's my, like, one of my number one rules. Blacked out my shades, sleep way better. You have blackout shades?

I wear this silk sleep mask. There you go.

You get your black— that's murdered out. Yeah. Blacked out shades. 8 hours of— I try and get 7 to 8 hours of sleep, whatever my body tells me. And then I wake up, I try and, you know, wait until I have that energy going of like, man, let's go fucking crush the day. And then once that's there, I roll.

Honestly, like that, like we have the same thing. And honestly, like we don't brag about it. Like, this is just how it works. Like good diet, good sleep, you know, train every now and then and that's it. I did want to share something. So this is like, I was like the reverse view 'cause my mom unfortunately has cancer, right?

Oh, sorry to hear that.

Thank you. So, you know, for her, I actually found something that was more, what'd you call it, homeopathic, right? There's like someone that cured my friend's like stage 4 breast cancer and same thing, vitamins and all that. I was like, oh, this sounds natural, this is great. The problem is they were proposing all these natural treatments and then we had a couple doctors look at it. It's like, well, this is not enough. And then my mom started to feel the cancer like spreading, right? So then what happened was we put her on chemo and she's been able to— a lot of people can't tolerate chemo, but the chemo has been holding it back.

That's amazing. Yes.

But it's like, I do want to get her like back on the natural stuff. So it's like, it just depends on timing. Like neither of us are recommending anything. We're just sharing our experiences. We're not doctors or anything. And then I think you had something else that you brought up right after, but then I forgot what it was. But anyway, those are our experience shares around that.

Yeah, total experience shares. I don't want anybody to misconstrue like me giving advice. I'm just— this is what happened to my aunt. That's what kickstarted what I know now. And—

Oh, the gluten thing. This is what I wanna bring up. Finish your thought first.

Oh yeah, no, just basically like when you start learning about, you know, what fuels cancer, it's sugar, you know, and it's a lot of different things. And so I think that at the very least, you know, a lot of people that, you know, unfortunately Unfortunately, do— again, I'm not an expert on this, just from my experience. I've met— I've had a lot of people in my life die from cancer.

Yeah.

You know, they went on the chemotherapy or they did the radiation, both of which doctors get kickbacks for recommending. Oh, and by the way, if they don't recommend it, then they can get their license revoked.

Yep.

Um, you know, secondly, you know, to that point, these people don't change their diets. Diet is literally everything. It is, it is everything. It is the fuel for your body. It doesn't matter how it tastes or how it looks or how If you can't give up the Diet Coke, which is just this nasty like fake sugar in your body that's just fueling this cancer, you know, it's a very touchy subject, but it is just— it is what it is. Like, I think it needs to be taken into more consideration.

I'm on this big preventative healthcare thing now because like, A, I'm kicking myself because like, you know, didn't get my mom on it soon enough. But like, did you meet Jacob at my event?

I did.

Everspan Life? Yeah, it's That is like a good example of like, you know, getting the scans ahead of time, the plaque for the heart attacks and all that. Like, again, neither of us are doctors, but like, we do— you do enough research and you'll figure out, hey, like a lot of stuff is—

I just want to stay alive, man. You know, there's a good Naval quote that's like, you know, rich man wants a million things and a sick person only wants one.

One thing. Yep. Yep. Okay, so you talked about being bullish on a creator economy. So let's go to OnlyFans creator economy. What's your take on Congrats.

Congrats to the guy that started OnlyFans. You know, I— the 2 businesses that, like, I have a really hard time justifying just due to my, like, faith background would be like the porn industry. Yeah. You know, not to say that I'm perfect and never watched porn, but like, but, you know, I just— I personally, I think it's a genius idea.

Yeah.

If you— if it doesn't tug at your heartstrings like that, what? you know, this is the business that you're in, then fuck it, all power to you. And that's a great business model.

Right.

Um, I don't know how— I mean, definitely COVID spiked it and made it go crazy. How long is it going to last? I don't know. I guess just as long as the, like, creators, the right creators are on the platform. I think that if they probably looked into— and I don't even know how you would go about doing that, getting, acquiring people to do it. But like, you know, just imagine if their business was kind of failing and they bring on like a Kim Kardashian Yeah. For both of them to make, you know, crazy amount of money and stay relevant, stay popular in the same way that like the team at Kick did Aiden Ross and, you know, some of those other people. Yeah.

I just wanted to bring it up because it's like we're talking about the creator economy and I realize I've never brought up the OnlyFans creator economy, but like my take on it is we talked about Alex giving away a lot of goodwill. I think if you do OF, congrats to you if you're making, you know, $50,000, $100,000 plus a month. I know some people that do. And I think the problem is you give up your goodwill as the creator, right?

Well, maybe your goodwill though is like inside of there, like sending people free nudes, you know? Like, I mean, it's truthfully, that's like, that's probably how the business works of like, it is just a different type of like moral compass and like different type of business model. But at the end of the day too, one thing that's, and what I find to be extremely interesting about it is you had people, I didn't think we were gonna talk about this today, but it's funny. You know, beforehand, you know, have you ever heard about Like some of these prices that some of the big porn stars are making, you know, per shoot.

No, do share.

Oh, I mean, it's like just low thousands.

Yeah.

For a shoot.

Okay.

And they're doing a shitload of them throughout the year to stay relevant. And then only the top creators, you know, the top porn stars are making XYZ money. And then the really smart guys, you know, because I've seen some like TikToks, people breaking down the businesses. So I'm no porn expert, but—

So you say.

I'm all like, I got a bug in my ear telling me all the porn stats. But, you know, some of the guys that are guys and gals that like owned their own website or something, that was if you had enough clout and all the stars aligned, you had a website and you had your own subscriptions, you could bypass the Brazzers or the whatever. Then you could make a lot of money. Now you can do less, like way more like striptease, right? Like really not showing yourself as much and selling way more because people think that they're having this personal interaction when really it's just—

Oh, there's some agencies.

It's a virtual assistant from India. saying like they want to see your junk. Yeah. You know, and you're just like, oh my God. And so, you know, some Indian dude is seeing your junk.

So it's like, man. Okay. Well, look, let me, let me ask you this. Um, so let's, we'll come out of the OnlyFans creator economy. So, so for you, I, I think I'm one of the— then this will be the last topic. But, um, I— you're on a podcast and then one of the topics that was brought— I don't know if you or the host brought it up, but it was this concept of the 50/50 Do you want to explain that? Do you remember what you guys were talking about?

The 50/50 rule.

Here, I'll recap. So, I'm basically asking how you're allocating your profits. So basically—

Oh, like the money that comes in?

Yeah. So like 50%, I think one's like 50% is like, oh, you should just spend it on— you should invest in your next— for your next 50 years. The other 50% of your income, you should invest for like the next like 50 days or whatever.

Yeah.

And go have a blast.

Yeah. No, I agree. Again, for me, it all comes back to living a balanced lifestyle. And a balanced lifestyle to me looks like, you know, going on these trips and doing fun things. And it doesn't always have to be expensive. Truthfully, very truthfully, and I had a post like this the other day where I said, you know, if I can wake up in the morning, go to the gym early, do some deep work, like deep work where you feel like satisfied doing, because I enjoy actually, I enjoy working. If I can go to the gym, Go to the gym, do that, eat a home-cooked meal, and maybe jump in the ocean. That is a perfect day for me. Everything else after that— and so that was all basically free except for my membership to the thing and $8 for a pound of ground beef.

Yeah.

So now past that, now there are some other things that make life a little bit more fun. If you can go take the jet skis out or a boat out for the day and it costs you a couple hundred dollars, well then, you know, $1,000 or whatever, fuck it, go do it. You know, life is extremely short, and I feel so blessed to be in the position that I'm in, and also to have been through what I've been through, seeing people in my life pass away or get really sick and certain things like that. And not— I don't feel blessed that that's happened to them, but blessed that it's opened my eyes to realizing how limited our time on this earth is and like what kind of impact and how I want to live it. My dad, during— this is 2021. Everything's going 1,000 miles an hour. It's basically the Blake Show in my house because I'm in this tiny little house with my parents. They're trying to kind of help me. They're still doing their jobs. I'm fucking going 90 miles an hour. They're like, money's coming in. Like, when that money starts coming in and you've never seen it before, it is stupid. It's stupid because you're like, it's— at some point becomes numbers on a screen. It's numbing.

Yeah.

You're like, all right, another big month. month. Like, fuck, what do we do? Um, you know, my dad— I get a— I get this call from my dad who never— you know when you get a call from your parents or from a friend and you know something's wrong?

Mm-hmm.

I was at my ex-girlfriend's house at the time, and I answered the phone. Hello? Hey bud, I need you to come home. Is everything okay? We'll talk about it when you get home. Fuck, dude, somebody has cancer, or somebody died, or a dog died, or something's not good. And I show up and my dad is the healthiest guy I know. I mean, I've maybe seen him drink 2 beers in his life. He eats extremely clean, CrossFit and gym his whole life, no steroids, no nothing, and is in the best shape of anybody that I know. Like the prime example of health. And he's 49, 50.

Mm-hmm.

He goes, hey, I went to go just do an annual checkup. They went over my heart. Doctor says I have what's called a widowmaker. And I'd heard of widowmakers. I've had friends' parents die from widowmakers before. There's a reason why they call it that, 'cause you one day, you wake up and the person next to you is dead, you know, unfortunately. And so they said, we need to have an emergency, you know, open heart surgery. And so that was the first time when he said that, you know, and so he's good now. He had the open heart surgery, not to like leave anybody on a cliffhanger.

Yeah.

And he's been great. You know, there's some little caveats and things that are not as good and some that are way better, But in general, he's healthy and he's doing well. For that week leading up to it, nothing else mattered. Okay? All this money that I'd been making, all this stress that I'd had about these things that don't fucking matter, that I don't even remember now. You know what I remember from that week was thinking for the first time about, you know, in a very long time since before when I was sick, the first time I had to deal with the idea of mortality is when somebody told me that I was gonna die when I was 30. The second time I had to deal with it again, and I didn't want to deal with it, was when they said that my, you know, my dad could not wake up from the surgery. I was afraid to Google the, the life, you know, the, the rate of whatever.

Yeah.

I was afraid that he would die in between then. I, you know, we're talking about wills, we're talking about like these crazy fucking things, like somebody not being here on Earth anymore. And when he got out of that surgery, before they were really on me about like being a tight-ass with my money, because they've never had money before, I've never had— we've never had money as a The Rocha family lineage is a family that's made not much money ever, and it's no disrespect to them. They give me the life that you know the best life that they could. But at the end of the day, he goes, "Hey, look, you know there's that there's that quote out there that he quoted where you know when somebody's on their deathbed, the the first thing that they think about is you know their family, and the second thing they think about is a list of regrets." He's like, he goes, "I can tell you, Blake, you don't want to live a life of regrets." Regret. Go on that trip that you want to do. Take your friends to that concert that you know it's a little bit expensive, that that it's an experience of a lifetime. Work your fucking ass off. You know, work for the fruits of your labor and then enjoy them. And that doesn't mean going out and going on a bender and doing blow and this and this crazy stuff that you know people blow out of proportion. It means do what makes you happy. You know, do what makes you excited and don't live in the past. Try and stay in the present. And, and, you know, yeah, I'm kind of rambling a little bit, but that was, that was the, you know, the biggest lesson from any of this health stuff and really just from life in general.

That's all. So thank you for sharing that. I think it's a good place to wrap. And so would you say then 50% of that, that take-home money is going to experiences like—

Sorry that I got away from that.

No, you're good.

You're good. Yeah. So I wouldn't say that. I would say the way more so the way that it's structured is 50% of my money that I get goes immediately, like it is set aside for investments.

Yeah.

It becomes a little bit trickier at the position where I'm at, you know, where you're probably way higher, but you have to have emergency funds that are big. Yeah, there's— if stuff goes wrong, my expensive cost of living and blah, blah, blah, I try and keep it very low. But, you know, can I keep a business going for 12 months? Can I— you know, my parents are retired and I'm paying them yearly. Do I have enough to pay them? And all these things start to come into place. I'm on wealth, like, I'm on the attack right now.

Accumulation.

I go broke 3 to 4 times a year. And people, people don't— they're like, what, you go broke? I thought you were making millions of dollars a year. In a year, if I were to make $8 million, probably I would get to $2 million liquid, spend it all. $2 million liquid, spend it all. $2 million liquid, spend it all. My monthly expenses, it probably costs me $10,000 to $12,000 a month to live. That's just with house and with food and all that. that shit, maybe a little bit of travel. The rest I spend on buying properties to mitigate my taxes and to give me more cash flow. I'm aggressively buying Bitcoin right now. Anything under $20,000, I'm trying to— my goal is to have 100 coins.

Yeah.

And, and I'm just trying to continue to play the long game because I, I don't need more. I don't need any more right now. So if I don't need more and I do have these goals of like this house that I really want, I have this idea of this house in Hawaii that I really fucking want. That house is $7 million. I want to be able to buy that thing cash. It's going to be $10 million by the time I can buy it. I need to be able to buy it cash. How am I going do that? Bitcoin. You know, that's what I see. And so, you know, not investment advice, and this is just what I do, but I really do believe that if you're getting started with, with, you know, you're younger, and you're trying to, you want to get somewhere in life, then you need to invest, like start thinking 40-50% of your paycheck, or the money that's coming in into long, long-term plays.

I love it. That's a great place to end. So Blake, where's the best place for people to find you online?

Well, I would usually say Instagram @mr428, but now I'm gonna say YouTube, YouTube. Go subscribe to me on YouTube at Mr. 428, or just type in Blake Rocha, R-O-C-H-A, and you will see my YouTube there. Appreciate you having me on the show.

Yeah, thanks so much, man.

Thanks, Eric.