How I Got to 850k Subscribers in 3 years | Pat Flynn (Deep Pocket Monster)

It's pretty incredible that this thing that was just a hobby during the pandemic become a main thing that has blown up.

Pat has a YouTube channel called Deep Pocket Monster, and it's growing like a weed. It's growing faster than your main company, SPI, right?

Actually more profitable than SPI. The numbers are so much higher.

How about for the events? Because the events are very difficult.

People have been talking about it in terms of like, this is like camp. Like, it feels like camp. Seeing my friends, they're able to kind of connect with each other. We created a world record. By the way, it's not cheap. The Pokémon industry goes up and down, you know, and I'm just, I'm just here to ride the waves.

Pat, how we doing?

Doing well. Thanks for having me, Eric.

Yeah, it's been a long time. So it's a funny story about this podcast. You were actually the very first guest 10 years ago. No shot.

That's crazy.

It's been great. But just for everyone, I'm going to do a quick background. So Pat has a YouTube channel called Deep Pocket Monster and it's growing like a weed. I think it's 750K subs now.

Almost 800K and it's been It's been about 3 years. So it's a new-ish venture that has taken off. And yeah, you know, a lot of people see it and they're like, wow, this is an overnight thing for you. And I was like, no, this is like year 12 of YouTube. And I finally figured out something that's taken off.

But not even that. You've got— there's, there's podcasts offer you've launched, there's physical products you've launched, there's SPI, which is your main thing. We're going to talk about all these things. So basically, Pat is a— he's a serial entrepreneur and he's one of the OGs, I think, of Not even just affiliate marketing, but just marketing in general. So I think that's going to be a great conversation, wide-ranging. Did I miss anything with this intro? Do you want to add anything?

No, I mean, you put it kindly. A lot of people say I'm a serial entrepreneur, but others would say I'm just not focused. So I appreciate that. But as I like to say, you know, pad of all trades, master of fun.

So why don't we talk about that first? I mean, no, actually, no, we're gonna talk about Deep Pocket Monster first. Okay. So you've done this for 3 years and there's I think it's growing faster than your main company, SPI, right? And there's only 2 employees working on it. Like, can you break down how that all works right now?

Yeah, so it's myself. I'm the sort of on-camera talent. I have a producer, and then we have an editing team of 1 or 2 people depending on the size of the video. And that's it. We have a Discord manager who helps with the community. And, you know, on top of this, there is a separate company that puts on an event called Card Party. I partnered with the Podcast Movement company to create an event for this community, and we had We had 2,500 people in Anaheim last year show up for the first year, and this year we're going to have 5,000 in Orlando.

Amazing.

And it's pretty incredible that this thing that was just a hobby during the pandemic, something I discovered new with my kids, has now become a main thing that has blown up. And it's, you know, actually more profitable than SPI because it's very lean and it's, you know, the ceiling for the audience on YouTube for this space. It's more entertainment-based and it's cross-generational versus business. You know, the ceiling is only so high.

Yeah. You talked about this with Noah Kagan, but you kind of shared some numbers around the Deep Pocket Monster channel. So I think it was like $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a month from AdSense, whatever you're comfortable sharing. I just want people to get a sense for like how that business is going in terms of numbers.

Yeah, I mean, it's very seasonal depending on how ads are spending money on YouTube for this audience, but the CPMs are pretty low relative to my other channel, my business channel. But just the numbers are so much higher. We have videos that are in the 5 to 10 million view range, right? And in general, per month on average, we're getting maybe $35,000 to $40,000. Uh, that's not including potential sponsorships. We've had some people come on for, uh, $15,000 to $20,000 per sponsor spot on an individual video. That's not regular, but that is nice when it happens. Uh, but our record month was November of 2022. In that month alone, we had $75,000 in ad revenue on YouTube. Um, and just the Pokémon industry goes up and down, you know, and I'm just, I'm just here to ride the waves.

Got it. And How about for the events? Because the events are very difficult. That's a whole nother type of business, right? So how did you coordinate all— I mean, 2,500 people, 5,000 people, like, how did you get that going?

First of all, it is not profitable yet, but it is something that I wanted to step forward to do to serve this community. You know, it's some stuff that I have experienced in the past. I've put on events in the business space. However, this community is only used to events that are more vendor-like, more swap meet-like, right? Just buy, sell, trade, that sort of thing. A big convention center. And then you're kind of just on your own to enjoy that experience. But I noticed that a lot of my audience were families and a lot of people who had kids or people who were reliving their childhood through Pokémon now that they have money and they're adults and it's not just allowance anymore. And there was nowhere where they were bringing people together to just enjoy the hobby and to meet each other, right? And I wrote a book called Superfans that was published in 2019. And, you know, I always hypothesize that the way to long-term business success is by bringing the people in that community together. It's not just you talking to them, them talking to you. It's finding a space to create for them to find each other. And that's exactly what we're doing here. And the event is structured kind of like a VidCon, where it is the celebrities of that space, the other YouTubers, who are sort of the headline, right?

Mm-hmm.

So we really featured the creators. It's not just me. There's several other creators who've been in the space for much longer than me. And so we were able to create that environment that benefits them because they're able to show up and look like a rock star. Not only are we featuring the sort of A-listers in that space, but I really wanted to focus on the sort of lower level people who have maybe subscriber counts of even 1,000 or even just hundreds.

Right.

And actually putting their face on the website and saying, hey, no, you are a celebrity here too because of what you create. And they hardly ever get any recognition at all, yet they become the people who promote the event more than anybody else because they are feeling recognized. They feel like a sense of belonging, which is, which is really cool. And so they're able to meet their fans. They're able to kind of connect with each other. Not only that, the sponsors come on because they're like, oh, All the creators in this space are here. Like, we should go. Great, we got the sponsors there. And now the creators are like, great, the sponsors are here that we can make deals with. So again, becoming that person to facilitate those interactions and bring those people together has been really neat. And people have been talking about it in terms of like, this is like camp. Like, it feels like camp. I'm seeing my friends. It's a pa— it's a place for all these people who normally when we speak about Pokémon to other people, or especially at school or at work, it's like, that's your— That's weird, man. You're into that. And here you're like, yes, your tribe. These are my people. Yeah, these are my people. So it's been great. And to see just the excitement for it this year and people like— we've not spent any money on marketing because we developed the perfect community event and then we could put all those extra resources into, into just making it, making it a great experience. And then in the future, more events, maybe bigger. I don't know if I'd ever want to go 5,000 is a lot. Yeah, 5,000 is a lot. I mean, it's definitely a challenge, but it's also really exciting and fun and I get to do what I do best, which is get on stage and talk to people and entertain. And then it's just like, then I can rest for 2 weeks and just do nothing because it's a lot.

So, okay, 2,500, you weren't profitable. 5,000, not going to be profitable. How much are you guys charging per ticket on average?

Per ticket for the 3 days, $99.

Okay.

And what's interesting is all these other events that are more swap meet-like, which are great. There's one that I'm actually headed to in a couple of days here in L.A. called Collecticon, which is fantastic. Uh, the ticket price is much cheaper because it doesn't come with all those other experiences. But initially we got a lot of pushback last year because they're like, Pat, your ticket prices are much higher than this other event that we're used to. A, we're not established like them, so we have to charge a little bit higher. But B, it's a completely different event. So a lot of people didn't really believe in what we were creating.

Hmm.

But the people who were there who then went home and were like, this is different, this is incredible. We're like, this is you need to charge more for this.

Right.

And so we got— we had to get those early adopters in and make their experience amazing. And now they're telling everybody else who was on the fence last year to come. And now it's— it's—

it's—

we're hoping to break even, maybe even profit. A big reason why we didn't last year was because it was in Anaheim and because it was supposedly like those other events, there was no reason to stay at the hotel. Yeah. And when you run an event at a hotel, you need to sell hotel blocks that you reserve. And if you don't sell those hotel blocks, You owe money on those hotel blocks. That's where we got screwed. But this year people are like, oh, like there's stuff that happens in the hallways and people are up till 2 a.m. trading and doing big deals. Like, I got to stay at the hotel, right? The hotel is pretty much sold out already at this point, which is great.

So you're going to be good this year?

I hope so.

Yeah. Okay. Because 2,500 times $99 is about $248 grand or so. And then the venue itself, everything. And there's also logistics. Like when you have 2,500 people, like it adds up, right? There's food and everything.

There's a lot of other costs. I mean, food and beverage minimums, there's You know, we do get some money through a VIP ticket. So the VIP ticket's like $499. They get a lot of perks and access and things like that. The sponsorships is where we, I think, could really double down.

Yeah.

And this year we have a couple of big sponsors coming in like CGC and even PSA is coming in, which are big names.

Yeah.

To be a part of this and, you know, offer onsite grading and experiences like that. That's pretty cool. So anyway, a lot of, a lot of industry-specific things are happening there, which is great.

I want to sit on this one for a little longer too, because I mean, even for your first event, you got 25 So how do you get 2,500 people to your first event?

So again, it was focusing on the creators who are coming. Some of these people in this space watch these people every single day and have become a part of their lives. So the ability to have a chance to meet them is incredible.

So it was really influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing. Yeah. And again, focusing on them. In fact, one thing that I did to make sure these creators knew how great of an opportunity this was, was Before the event, I got them all in a room, in a Zoom room, and I was just like, hey guys, this is what this is going to be like. Here's how it's different than the other events you may have been at. And you are the hero of the story here. Like, we want this to be about you. You're going to get time on stage in front of people. You're going to be able to meet your fans. We're going to have meet and greets. And that was another decision we made. It wasn't like a lot of other events where the meet and greets are you got to pay to get an autograph. It was like these creators actually love this opportunity that they would be willing to do it for free. And some of those creators were so happy to stand for 4 hours to just meet all their, all their audience members there in person. But a lot of influencer marketing, a lot of, you know, there are some strategy you can do with raising prices over time. You know, anytime we had a, you know, a price increase coming, we make a big deal about it. There's email marketing involved with this as well. But we never required any of our creators to talk about this. We just said, we want you to talk about it because It's worth talking about. And they all did it because the event was worth it.

I think what's really smart here too is I think people don't understand that, okay, the events that charge a lot of money, they didn't start that way. Like it might have been a really low price first and just to get the base going, the community going, and then over time they can start to increase their price and then it becomes super profitable over time. Like there's an event that Neil and I spoke at last year in Dubai and tickets were anywhere from $1,500 to $5,000 and there was like a couple thousand people there. So it's like, man, I'm making millions of bucks there. But it's like, it takes time to get there, right? And from my understanding, you're planning to do this for not just a couple of years, but decade plus, right?

We want it to be the camp that everybody can look forward to every year. Even people talked about how they met new friends and they're coming together and they met each other off, you know, outside of the card party calendar. We also got inspired by Chris Guillibeau. He used to hold an event in Portland called World Domination Summit. And at that event every year, he would do a world record with his audience. And I was like, that's the coolest thing. Like, what an amazing community experience to have together. Can we do something like that at Card Party? So I did the research and in fact, it's pretty easy to just make up a world record that you could do. Guinness, uh, which fun fact is the same company as the beer company.

Um, oh really? I didn't know that.

It is.

Huh.

Yeah.

Guinness World— yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Look it up. Trust me. Although Maybe I am getting duped. I don't know. But anyway, apparently Guinness back in the day used to have, um, like trivia nights in their bars, but there would be fights about like, you know, the right answers. So they created the book that would answer questions about a lot of these things that were in their trivia nights so that they'd sell more beer. Yeah, something like that.

That's like the whole Michelin thing too. It's like—

Exactly. Yeah, that's the same company, like, right?

Yeah.

So, uh, anyway, uh, so We created a world record. By the way, it's not cheap. It costs $21,000 to do this world record. And even if you fail, you still owe that.

Oh, you have to pay to get— oh, wow. That's smart. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's a great business model, right? And so paid $21,000. We were going to set the world record of most people opening a pack of trading cards at the same time, which was going to be a great community thing. But it was— it was— there was so much logistics. The guys had to come in and there was all this like paperwork and it It was worth it.

Yeah.

Because people remember that. People saved their packs that they opened. We handed out a pack to everybody that came in. It was numbered. We had to do this thing where the adjudicator, Michael, who is the same guy that you see in the Dude Perfect videos, like the same world record guy, he came to our event and he did a good job like making it dramatic and stuff and getting everybody involved. But we had to open the packs within 30 seconds, hold it up in the air and count till 30. And then we, there were like these judges around to make sure everybody was doing it right. And then he had to calculate how many we got. And then he made the announcement and we all got the world record and it was something that we could celebrate together. And I'm grateful because I get to keep the certificate at home. But so many people wanted to take pictures of it. People can go home and say, I am a world record holder at Card Party because it's not Pat Flynn, it's Card Party. It's a Card Party event world record. And we'll be doing another one this year.

Yeah.

And we were like, okay, should we do the same one? We know there's going to be more people. We know how this works, but we don't want to just do the same thing. So we're doing something a little bit different. That's kind of a— I can't say it here because it's a surprise for everybody.

But, and then you can just do the same one again 2 years later. Yeah. So yeah, you can repeat it. Well, okay. What's interesting to me, I'm like trying to justify this as a marketing cost now. So you pay $21,000, but how much, how many views do you think that, that world record got?

It's, it's so funny because my team, my, uh, event team was like, that's expensive. Like, I, you know, if we're gonna cut anything to save some money, we should probably cut that because, I mean, the world record's cool, but like, what is that gonna do? It is the That's one of the number one things that people were able to walk away with and talk about and immediately feel a connection to, to the, to the event. So as far as how many views, I mean, I did a video on Deep Pocket Monster about it and it doesn't have that many views compared to some other videos. That's not what it's about. It's about the experience that people have who are there that they can then take home and talk about organically and feel like they're a part of something that they cannot get anywhere else. Right. And that's what that— that's, that's worth the cost.

I think it was more word of mouth marketing that you can't really measure at the end of the day. People like to call it dark social or whatever, but this is one of those situations where, you know, like, okay, for example, if you set a world record, you're gonna go tell all your friends, you're gonna go tell your spouse. And so that is the real reach. And you guys are doing it again. So obviously you feel like it's working. So.

Yeah. One thing we did do to help amplify a lot of this was we— it's a card event. These are all collectors. We're all obsessed with like finishing our sets and stuff. Uh, we created a set of cards, 9 cards that were designed specifically for this event that you can only get at this event. And the art on the cards were actually created by artists artists in our community, people that everybody knows or some people know. So it was cool to highlight the art portion of Pokémon, which often gets underserved, uh, and, and, and unrecognized. Um, but also it really, I mean, I didn't know it would work this well. People were going crazy trying to find all the cards. And what was really cool is we designed them in a way to force people to go to different parts of the event. Uh, our Platinum sponsor had a card that was only available at their booth. So of course everybody went there and the sponsor was so happy.

Yeah.

Uh, we had an area where you could throw, uh, energy cards, which are like cards that are in every pack at things to try to earn points. And you get a card if you go there. If you participated in the world record, when you left that room, you got a world record card that said that you were a part of this. And people have it up in frames and their desks at home and in their office. I see it every once in a while. It's just like so amazing.

Yeah.

So we're trying to create these little touchpoints and all the things that I talk about in my book, Superfans. Like, I'm just doing that. So I need to write another edition now because—

This is almost like you're gamifying a lot of things. I mean, the world record, you're kind of gamifying it for people. And then this card thing, you're gamifying it for people. By the way, how much did it cost you to do all the cards?

$5,000. I mean, not much. Got it.

You know, yeah, but it was, again, it's like hard to measure, right? So I think it's like a pure, like, finance person or private equity would cut that immediately. Yeah, but it's clear that it works. Yeah, that's cool. Okay. And so I'm just curious. So what's the most expensive Pokémon card that you have right now? And how valuable is your collection overall?

I mean, I have some cards that are close to $7,000 or $8,000. There's an, uh, XY promo from 2016 that crosses over Mario and Pikachu. Oh, um, there was some boxes that were for sale for $25 back then where you can get the Mario and the Luigi. Yeah. Uh, those individual cards graded at a PSA 10 now are in the $5,000 to $6,000 range. And I have a few copies of those and there's another card that I love from, uh, a set called Phantom Forces, which is an all-silver Dialga card. It's a secret rare in that set, and it's the only all-silver card in all of Pokémon.

Yeah.

Which is why I love it. And there's only 53 of them in a PSA 10, and I have 7 of them.

Wow.

So I'm trying to corner the market.

Yeah.

Uh, I'm not gonna sell 'em, but, uh, yeah, I mean, it's just, that's the cool thing about Pokémon. It's so vast. And one thing that I used to teach in business, and I still do, it's this idea of the riches are in the niches, right? You need to find your focus. To be able to focus your learnings, to focus your expertise, etc., focus your audience. It's the literal same thing in collecting because a lot of new collectors are coming in. There's been a lot of hype and they want all of it. They want to collect every single set, all the cards. But there's so many that you're just going to be wasting your money. You're going to be unfocused. And so pick a lane, right? So I encourage people to pick a lane when it comes to collecting, right? And I'm just collecting some specific promos that I just love because I love them. And then Pikachu promos, because that's like, that's like my niche in this space. But more than the cards I'm collecting, I've become a creator in the space and I've actually become seen as a person who's really here to serve the audience. In fact, I've had many conversations with some of the creators in the space who've been in here for years.

Yeah.

Who are now coming to us and saying like, hey, can you teach me how you tell a story like you do?

Right.

And we're happy to do that. In fact, at my event, there is an hour and a half block where my producer and I are teaching YouTube Because we don't need to keep these things secret, because if we can get everybody to create better videos, it benefits the entire community.

Yeah.

So it's been really neat to be seen as a leader. And of course, I come from a business background, an entrepreneurial background. So, you know, a lot of the things that I've included in not just the videos tactfully, but more, more like business. I'm a top affiliate for a binder company and I've done, you know, I'm an advisor to companies in this space now. It's like the business side of it is injecting itself there and there. are opportunities to, you know, generate more revenue. But I, I'm here for the long run. I don't need it right now. So I'm going to take it slowly and do it right.

So do people— okay, on the streets, I remember sometimes we'll have some YouTube business creators on here and people do recognize them on the street, right? So are you recognized more for now Deep Pocket Monster or now you are the SPI piece?

I am getting recognized. And it's so funny because anytime I do now, I have to like kind of gauge, like, do you follow SPI or Deep Pocket Monster? And 90% of the time now it's Deep Pocket Monster. The most common interaction now is I'll be at like a Trader Joe's or something, and then I'll hear some kid freak out.

Yeah.

And go to his mom and be like, I got to tell my mom, this is YouTube. And she's like, that, that guy? Like, that guy's important? And then, and then I go, hi, I, uh, your son probably watches my YouTube channel. And then we take a picture and it's just Always so fun. And what I always hear is the parent is like, oh, you're— oh, you're that guy that my son like literally watches every single day. They say, thank you for being family. Like, thank you for being a positive channel that I could share with my kids. They'd rather have them watch me because I do teach life lessons and entrepreneurship in a lot of my videos, kind of, you know, in a way.

Yeah, exactly.

But that's the best because they're like, Oh, thank you for giving me something that's not just like, yeah, mindless, you know, insert channel name here. Yeah. For their kids.

And this is on what you're getting, like 10 million views a month, 5 million views a month.

Currently we're a little bit down relative to where we were, but we're still at about 5 million views a month, which is incredible.

And these are long form.

These are long form videos. In fact, we've cut off short form.

Interesting.

People think we're crazy for that because a lot of people are getting a lot of views with their short form video, but I mean, we could get deeper into that.

Let's talk about that. Let's talk about the fallacy of view chasing. What's your philosophy?

Yeah, I mean, if, if you're doing things just for the views, just like if you're doing it for the money, you're doing it for the wrong reasons, right? You want to do it because it's making an impact or because it's entertaining. And then the byproduct of that is the views or the revenue. I like to talk about short-form content as if it's like, like Halloween candy. Right. And you are a house on the block. There's a lot of houses on this block. A kid's going to come up, ring the doorbell. That's the same as a swipe. You give them a little bit of candy, they're getting a little bit of an endorphin hit. And what do they do? They say thank you and move to the next house.

And they never remember you.

And they don't remember you unless you have the giant-sized Snickers bars. But in the world of creating short-form content, it can take a lot of work to create a giant-sized Snickers bar. Snickers bar. Metaphorically, I'd rather be the chef at a restaurant that people come to and there's an expectation of what that service is going to be like. There's an— there's a connection to the brand. There is a dish that they love that they always order. There is the opportunity to bring a friend or a family knowing and trusting that the experience there is going to be more. And what happens at a restaurant? You sit down, you spend a lot of time with it.

Yeah.

You build memories around that. You talk about that with others and then invite others in later. Nobody's doing that after October 31st, let alone after they turn the block.

Right, right.

That's my feel on long form. And yes, there are opportunities to take your long form content and chop it up. And I know you do a great job of that. We just don't have the time and resources to do that. And yes, we have money. We could show people how to do that. But even if we do that, it's still a a mental distraction from learning better storytelling by going deeper into the analytics of our long-form videos. And short-form is great for views, but it's a view and go. We want to view and stay. We want to view and ask questions. We want to view and have people go, this, this is incredible. Like, I want to subscribe for the next thing. And in this world now where things are getting quicker, faster, Things are getting shoved in everybody's face with AI coming, dehumanizing the content experience. You're going to have to bring emotion into it in some way in order to connect. Let me say that again. You're going to have to bring emotion into the content in some way in order to connect, because if you don't do that, it's just going to be like any other regurgitated thing that anybody else can create in a moment.

Mm-hmm.

The only way to really get deep emotionally, unless you are a brilliant short-form storyteller, Even then, you still can't get to the same levels as long-form building a relationship, creating tension, releasing that tension, and all these little things that you can do within a 20 to 30 minute period that really help a person on the other end feel something.

Right.

And even MrBeast now is moving into more storytelling because he wants people to feel. And even I can even see him experimenting and it's still quick and it's still— there's still explosions and stuff.

Yeah.

But even he is, quote unquote, slowing down to get more emotional and he's figuring it out. He's not nailed it yet. There are other people who I feel are even better creators at telling the story, like Ryan Trahan. He can take something as simple as a penny or going to a diner that had a 1-star Yelp review and actually putting real emotion and story into it. I've cried watching some of Ryan's videos, right? Mainly because I'm just like, dude, you're so brilliant, right, at the storytelling. And then he— and he like, you know, the climax at the end or the punchline or the release is just like, oh, this is— thank you for that gift. And he even said in an interview that I watched once where he said he treats every video like it's going to be a gift for his subscribers. And I love that because you don't just like haphazardly put something together if you know it's going to be for somebody that you care about, right? You take the time and effort to make it great. And just like they do in Japan, they kind of overengineer the package around it. to make the full experience from, from first ribbon pull to the gift inside beautiful.

I mean, when you're in Japan, everything you see, even the way the janitor cleans, right? Everything is, is like an art, right? And they take everything very seriously. And it takes time to do it, to your point. And it also takes time to build a relationship to the best short-form people I've seen. So there's, there's Jenny Hoyos, right? And so she does great, but it's, it's cool, but it's like, I feel like I'm left wanting more. And then there's these other guys. They get like 100 million views a month from their short-form. Shorts, but they're not able to monetize or do, do much with it. Right. And so there's a big argument to go long.

I mean, how many millions of views will you need to get to $50,000 on a video that I filmed, for example, in Hawaii, watching me complete a set over 2 days and going through the struggles of completing the set, getting comments like, I don't know what Pokémon is or what this man's doing, but I am crying at the end of this video. That video that is now over 11 million views that was filmed in early 2022. has generated over $55,000.

Yeah.

One single video. Yeah. And no, we don't come out with a video every single week. We come out with a video regularly, as regularly as we can tell amazing stories. And it's so funny because, you know, a lot of these people who have been in the space for a very long time see that, but then they just go back to what they were used to doing. But yeah, it's not working anymore. Just opening packs of cards and And like, people are over that. But the stories, the emotions, that's something that is human. That is something that will always last. And we just happen to want to try to figure out how to use today's technology to write those stories and create that emotion.

And just to give people another frame of comparison here, there's one video I looked at. We got like 400,000 views on the long form. That one made, you know, $4,000 or $5,000 or so, which is not bad. And then when you, when you look at a short-form one, same amount of views, it's like $20 or something.

Oh yeah.

And so it's like, that's the actual value of it, right?

Right. I mean, there is some value in being able to reach audiences that you wouldn't have been able to otherwise, introducing your brand and brand exposure. I mean, it's, it's cheaper to do Shorts than it is to pay for ads to get in front of the same amount of people by far. However, what do you do with that attention? Can you hook a person enough within 10 to 30 seconds to then have them go, okay, I want to go deeper. I'm going to stop my mindless doomscrolling scrolling, right, to then take this other action.

Yeah.

Listen to a podcast. Yeah. Download this product or whatever. Jenny is a great example. Like, oh, how are you going to make— you're going to give a $1 present to your grandma. How are you going to make a present with $1? And what is her reaction going to be? And now I know about her family. Now I see that she's frugal. Now I'm like, man, this girl knows what she's doing. She's only, what, like 17 or 18?

Yeah.

Yeah.

The big thing about her is her story's continuing. It's like with each short, like you're seeing her grandma more and her mom more.

Yes. Yes. It almost becomes a series. In fact, we had a video that I filmed where there was a set of Pokémon that came out called 151, and it was sort of, uh, honoring the original 151 Pokémon. There's over 1,000 now, which is crazy. Anyway, the set came out. It was awesome. I created a challenge to finish the set in one 151-minute session. So 151 minutes to complete Pokémon 151. There's over 200 cards in it, and I failed. And people love when I fail, but I had a, I had a round 2. So, okay, we're gonna do this again. We're gonna try round 2. And I really wanted to succeed because I didn't want to fail twice. I failed again, and it was 2 cards at the end that I was missing. And, you know, we, we dramatized it. I was on the ground, like, in the end, like, defeated.

Yeah.

And then I was like, we're gonna go one last time. So many more people subscribed on that second video because they saw me in defeat and they saw me wanting to see what would happen next. And it's very similar to the Ryan Trahan Penny to House in 30 Days sort of, you know, series. Instead of creating a one-off video that is packaged, what if that one-off video, yes, could be seen on its own, but was part of a much bigger whole? And I'm wearing this Zoro shirt from One Piece.

Yeah. Yep.

I'm thinking about the channel now in arcs. So that was the story arc of 151 that had a start, had the ups, the downs, the metaphorical dragons that we had to slay, the guides that helped along the way. And in the 3rd video, the guides were these little kids who were just amazing on camera that I filmed in Hawaii who helped us finish that set. Spoiler alert, the arc ends with a successful finish. Now we're building this arc where I was able to work with the binder company that I'm an affiliate for. Amazing things happen when you move products for companies. You can have conversations and actually create things together. This is something I did in the entrepreneurial world with ConvertKit and Circle, doing it here in the Pokémon space as well. So I'm working with a company called VaultX. They are a binder company out of the UK. And what's nice about them is unlike other binder companies, they're just small and nimble and quick. So they custom built me a binder where every page in this binder holds 64 cards. It is 4 feet tall, probably the largest binder that exists. I don't know for sure, but that's not the world record we're trying to set right now. This binder holds 1,024 cards because the goal in this arc— I'll look it up. Yes. Is all Pokémon, every single Pokémon in the Pokédex in this binder. And we've already filmed the first and second videos, which has only taken us to about 400 cards in. So this will be the Big Binder Arc, or as we're calling it, the Giga Binder. We've named this binder Chad, by the way. We have other characters on the channel, like our— in our 151 series, we introduced a timer. And I bought this timer on Amazon and I put googly eyes on it and I said, I'm going to name him Steve. And Steve has now become a character on the channel, so much so that people want to buy a plush version of Steve.

Wow. Yeah.

A timer with eyes, googly eyes.

I love it.

And we put him in the camera and I've like, you know, in this 3rd and final installment of the 151 video, we're in Hawaii and I'm like, okay, I got to get a scene of me and Steve talking on the beach and just like, you know, trying to help each other out to get it right. So I put him on the beach on a towel. He has a little tiny surfboard, which is just a cutting board next to him. And we just created this story. And now people are referencing Steve in the comments. They're like, Steve is so mean. Or like, you know, I feel like Steve was trying to make you fail. Like, we're, we're, we're putting human characters through these non-human things. And I'm pretty sure, uh, Chad, the Giga Binder or the Giga Chad, uh, is going to become a character too. And, uh, even the few people I've already shared some of these videos with, like we often will share the videos with people before they're seen so we can know what to cut and stuff. Um, they're like, can I buy that binder? I want it.

Yeah.

And it's pretty crazy.

This is a real life Pokédex. Nobody's, nobody's ever done this, right?

I can't confirm that. Nobody on YouTube, I think, has created a series about it. Yeah, but again, going back to the point of this is the arc. So when you see video 1, why wouldn't you subscribe to get the full story? We're leaving an open loop as the mechanism to subscribe, right? Versus what most people think of a subscribe is that's the reward for a good video, right? That's how 99% of creators think of a subscribe. A subscribe is a vote that, yes, I want more of what I just saw.

Mm-hmm.

So if you preface the subscribe call to action with, you will see more of this, or the next step, or the next chapter, your subscription rates are gonna go up.

This message is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a marketing agency ran by yours truly. Single Grain does paid media, SEO, creative, conversion rate optimization, and has worked with a handful of companies such as Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce, to startups venture-backed startups, a lot of different companies. And ultimately, our mission is to do innovative marketing that drives customers. If you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com. Again, it's Single Grain, grain like wheat, and we'll see you on the other side. You know what's— I mean, the last maybe 20 minutes or so, the common thread here is everything comes down to storytelling, right? So then it's very clear that you've worked on it. So how do people go about telling better stories so that you can get more sales?

Listen and watch to more people telling stories with and through the lens of what are they doing that's making me really engaged? What is making me tune out of everything and everything else and just learn? You can learn from absorption, but more than that, it's important to learn by doing. And so any moment I have— and this is why I'm really grateful that I am invited on amazing shows like this and a lot of other podcasts— it gives me an opportunity to continue to hone in on that craft. And so Get on other shows, get on other podcasts. And that's easier said than done, obviously. However, there are many opportunities during the day with your kids, with your spouse, with your friends. Instead of just like, hey guys, something crazy happened the other day. Yeah, I got a ticket. Why don't you just try to tell the story of that? Hey guys, so I was driving down the 5 and all of a sudden I hear it, the sirens behind me. And you know when you see a cop on this, on the side and you're like, please don't pull me over? Well, this one was going to pull me over. And I was like, I'm dead, dude. I'm dead. Do I have drugs in my trunk? I don't know. I don't even do drugs. You know, again, you just practice and you can't help but have an audience just go, well, what happened next? This is how you become the person in the room that gets remembered. This is practice from years of storytelling on stage and on YouTube podcasts. And the beauty is any of us can have a platform. We have access to platforms to practice this storytelling. I teach YouTube on SPI. And we always say, just, you know, in fact, quality is important, but in the beginning, quantity is actually important because you've got to get the reps. So get more reps, fail, learn what works, see what your audience loves about the way you do what you do, and you're going to develop your own style. Yes, absorbed and enhanced and inspired by others, but you're going to make it your own.

Right.

Based on who your audience is and who you are.

Right. You know, we've done it. We've done these occasionally. We'll do these entrepreneur dinners and you've been at some. Right. And so, you know, it is obvious, like the ones that command the attention in those rooms, they are the storytellers. Right. But let's say someone's more introverted and I would say I'm introverted. I think you're a little more introverted.

Introverted?

Yes.

I force myself to go out and talk to people.

Yeah, but you weren't the one like telling stories in there, even though you have a lot of stories to tell.

Right.

So how do introverted people get out there? Because some people want to storytell so they can command the attention of a group or their friends.

I think it's putting Putting yourself in a room that you're comfortable in first. It's going to be very difficult to be an introvert and get invited on a stage in front of a group that you've never spoken to before without some practice. Getting to know who's in the room or just being with friends is probably the easiest way to do that. The other thing, and I got this strategy from Ramit Sethi, actually, he has what he calls a story bank.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know if it's on Evernote or Notion now or wherever, but he says that in his life, through his day, If anything just remotely interesting happens, he pops it into a story bank and he puts it into a category that might relate to something. And he has a lot of money stories and, you know, housing rental stories.

Yeah.

Yeah. So he'll pop these stories in. And I know another creator entrepreneur, Stu McLaren, does this very well. He does it even more so in putting it into spreadsheets based on the problem and/or obstacles that that person had that he's spoken to or whatever the scenario was. And you are then able to utilize those stories And see them, remember them because you've written them down. Oftentimes we don't even recognize the things that are happening around us and then expand on them and perhaps even use that as a bank to pull from when you're in a situation. And it's hard to do that on the fly. You only can do that after practice and after you've been in your story bank and if you've unlocked these stories and fine-tuned them. But it's really helpful when you know that you're going to be in a place where maybe some of those stories are relevant, and especially if you're going to be live in front of an audience, uh, or even for a YouTube video, it could be very useful. I have a story bank myself that I go to every once in a while. It's full of a lot of kids' stories, which is why when I'm on stage, you'll hear me talk about my family a lot, because a lot of those stories— like the story of my son trying to make a paper airplane, and I was trying to show him, but he rushed it and his plane flew nowhere, and he was like, I'm no good at planes.

Yeah.

And I'm like, you didn't even follow what I was doing. You just wanted to jump to the conclusion so fast. So I used that in the beginning of my book, Will It Fly? Right? So these stories that happen around us that are who we are are so much easier to tell because they're just based on us instead of, you know, I remember when I tried to write my first book, I was reading a lot of Malcolm Gladwell and I was like, oh man, this book is amazing. Like David vs. Goliath and, you know, Outliers and Blink. And I was like, I have to write like him. I can't write like him, but I thought I had to because I was reading that. And so I was like trying to do all this research and put it into my book and I was like, this isn't me. But I have stories that support the arguments that I'm making from my life. So I'll just tell those stories. And now people are like, oh, these books are very personal and it's obvious, like there's a different connection. And I've realized, well, I'm not Malcolm Gladwell, I'm Pat Flynn, and you're you and you're you and you're you. So anyway, I might be on a tangent here, but—

No, no, you're good. Actually, that's a good one because earlier in our entrepreneurial career, it's easy to look at other people. Oh, they're making so much more money. They're doing this. Oh, they're doing this. I want to do that too. Right. And there's this comparison trap that happens. So How did you learn to get away from the comparison trap?

Oh, it's hard, dude. It's hard, especially when everybody's putting it in your face how awesome they're doing or what their numbers are. And I did that myself. I had an income report on SPI for so long. But what I ended up realizing was that there was nothing— literally nothing good can happen when you compare yourself and your success to the success of somebody else. A, you're on 2 different pathways. Oftentimes we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg and maybe we see a success story, but we don't realize that they've gone through hell the last 20 years to get there. And then if you realize that, you're like, oh snap, like I actually am doing pretty good compared to where that person was. They're just further along in the journey. Maybe we don't know yet. We're basing our entire life and personality and mood on what we see in an instant, which is, which is, is human nature. It's human nature, but it's also dangerous. What I have found out is that when I compare myself to myself, that's when good things happen. I can reflect and have time to get inside of myself and realize, okay, well, maybe that wasn't the best way to go about it. Or I can learn from my mistakes or I can know that I've made an incremental improvement compared to the last video or the last blog post or the last interview I did. And it's with that micro, that incremental improvement that over time those things exponentially grow, à la Atomic Habits, right? And James Clear. So compare yourself to last week, to last year, to 10 years ago. How are you doing on that graph? And you'll you'll hopefully start to see that you've made some good decisions and have made a lot of progress. Or maybe you start to realize like, oh, okay, maybe I'm not on the trajectory that I want to be on, right? But knowing where I am now, I have a foundation and a baseline to base everything off of.

That's actually a good question. It's like, you know, what would a 10-year-younger Pat Flynn think of themselves today? Like, would they be proud of who you are today?

I mean, if we lead with the Pokémon thing, I think I'd be very surprised because if this was not even on my radar, I would have not seen it at all.

But when I saw it take off, I was like, this is it.

Yeah. I mean, it kind of almost beautifully combines literally everything that I've done in the past from business to being live. And, you know, I'm live every Monday in front of thousands.

Yeah.

During the pandemic, I was live every day for my entrepreneurial audience. So I gained that experience then, you know, the business acumen plus the entertainment plus just understanding YouTube and relationship building and affiliate marketing. It all kind of plays into role. But I feel like I would be surprised that I wasn't speaking as much, that I wasn't, quote unquote, you know, trying to chase every opportunity. I'm very— even though it sounds like I do a lot, I'm very intentional with where my focus goes. And back then I was very intentional of saying yes to literally every opportunity because I didn't believe that those opportunities would continue to come.

Yeah. So it's a scarcity mindset.

It was a very scarcity mindset. Now, Literally, if I lost everything, I know that I could pick it back up, right? I know that I can do that. I'm confident. It took years to get that confidence, and that is such a freeing, uh, mentality to just go, okay, like, even if this fails, I'll be fine, which allows me to take bigger risks, which, guess what, has bigger rewards, right?

Mm-hmm.

Because I didn't quote unquote need the Pokémon channel or have to make money from it. It was literally out of passion. And because I wanted to, I could experiment and take those big risks that many of those YouTubers in that space now are afraid to take because it's different, because they're locked in. Right. So that's— that's— I feel very grateful for that. And I wish that for everybody to have the space and the mental clarity to just take risks so that they can get the results they want without feeling locked Was there a moment in time where that scarcity mindset just clicked for you?

It's like, no, this is not the way. Like, I know I can rebuild everything if I need to.

No, there wasn't necessarily a moment in time. However, there, there, there were events that kind of signaled that. Um, one of them being the SwitchPod, right? Uh, Caleb, my videographer, and I had no business creating a physical product. Literally, there was no reason to do it other than we were just curious. And we saw a problem that we wanted to solve. So we were at VidSummit not too far from here in L.A., actually, in 2017, and we saw everybody holding a GorillaPod to put their cameras up. And it was just like such a clunky solution because no solution existed for holding out a camera and vlogging. And we can thank Casey Neistat for the sort of revolution to do that.

Yeah.

And Caleb and I were like, there's got to be a better way, but we don't know how to build a physical product. Like we're busy already, but I love to offer myself 20% of my time to just play, to experiment wherever my curiosity wants to go. I give myself a contained area of my, my schedule to do that. So I call that the 20% itch rule because I tried the one thing, right? Gary Keller and Jay Papasan's book, The One Thing. I tried the one thing to just like have proper one thing only focus for so long, and I can't do it because I am an entrepreneur and I'm curious and I want to play. But the problem is the other extreme is saying yes to everything. and doing everything and getting nowhere. So 20% of my time is allocated for play, right?

Just—

I think Google does the same thing. They allow their employees 20% of time to just build.

Who knows now? We'll see.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. But the SwitchPod, I'd never done e-commerce. I'd never done a physical product. Yet we were able to use these skills that we learned in business and the relationships that we had to figure it out. And we'd go to these events year after year and month after month showing our prototypes. They were plastic at first, and then they became 3D printed and all this stuff. And then we got some metal ones crafted. And then we launched it in February of 2019, and it launched to about $500,000 in 60 days. Very successful Kickstarter campaign. Peter McKinnon got behind it, which was incredible. And those were all based on relationships that we'd built. Again, that's the part of business I know, and we were able to put it into a new space. And now the SwitchPod just kind of continuously sells on its own. It's— we could lean into it, but we don't. My partner had twins, so we're just like, you know, just let this run on autopilot for a little bit. And, and that's when I was like, oh man, we created something from nothing. But it wasn't nothing. We created something from all the steps we've taken to get here. So therefore I have all the information and relationships I need to go anywhere. And it's now a matter of like, well, what excites me? Pokémon lately. Yeah. And bringing that community together.

So I think the SwitchPod is a good one because it's like, oh, don't know how to do a physical product. To your point, I had to learn all these things. I had to get distribution and to partner up with all these people. And that gave you the confidence to be like, I'm good now, right?

Yeah.

And that's huge. And by the way, so that you said it's on autopilot right now. Can you give people a sense for like what that means in terms of how much they can make a year if a product's on autopilot?

Yeah, I mean, there's such a wide range of what that word autopilot means, right? I mean, it's selling on Amazon, it's selling on our Shopify store, and, you know, there's a few sales coming in every day. It's not a ton, but we're literally not lifting a finger to do that, right? Because it's out there. It's a very— the nice thing about physical products or things that you can see is that when you see somebody else using it, you're like, what is that? Oh, it's a SwitchPod. You just go get it on Amazon. So people are talking about it with each other.

Yeah.

Some people have bought dozens of these to put into their, you know, equipment or to buy for their team and stuff. So, you know, we're making, you know, a few thousand dollars a month without doing much. I mean, the inventory is held in a warehouse in Utah through a third-party logistics partner that just automatically gets those orders and ships them out for us, basically dropships our own product.

Right.

And, you know, we are experimenting with a smaller version and just kind of seeing what that, you know, calculating what that might look like and if that makes sense. So, you know, we're slowly moving forward and, you know, if one day maybe a company is like, hey, you know, we can scale this and would you sell this to us? We'd probably entertain that.

Right.

You know, so, you know, there's, there's no rush, but also the opportunities are there. And if we are ready to start leaning into it more, we could build out more products. We have, you know, a ball head that goes on it now. Uh, we sourced a mobile adapter and other things that kind of create a package now that people can buy. So, you know, it's, it's generating revenue where it's making profit. You know, profit margins are pretty good and it's there. So, I mean, it's kind of— it's again, one of several projects that I have that is out there generating revenue and diversifies that, that portfolio, I guess.

Got it. Yeah. And I want to talk more about some of your other companies in the portfolio. But here's the other thing. I know you said the one thing didn't work out for you, but I think we're kind of the same where we like to dabble, like to try a lot of different things. Very curious. Right. But, you know, I've been slapped in the face or punched in the face enough, like I've been knocked— my sense has been knocked into, okay, I'm just— I am focused now, right? I would also argue that you're focused too, because you're not saying yes to everything anymore. But so we're like focused in our own unique ways, right? I just want like aspiring entrepreneurs watching this to understand that there probably is value in focusing long term, because when you look at the people that have built generational businesses, that's what they've done, right?

So yeah.

Would you agree or disagree with that? Because I do think you're more focused though than before.

I, I definitely am more focused than I was before. I think I've just better understood me, right? And what are my values? I think a lot of us need to spend some time to define, like, what are our values? And are the things that we're doing or saying yes to aligned with that? And it's so much easier now that I know who I am and what I'm doing this for and who I'm doing it for, uh, to say yes or no to opportunities and, and, and say yes to them even though it might, you know, start to stretch things out, right? Because they're aligned with that, about that value set.

And it takes time for you to start to really understand yourself. It's not like a year or 2-year thing.

Oh, no. I mean, it can take years, which means you've got to keep going. And even if you're failing, you just stay consistent, right? I remember interviewing MKBHD on my channel and he said that his first 100 videos were for less than 100 subscribers. And look where he's at now and he's still doing it and he's getting better and better at it. He was able to basically kill Fiskars with a video. He's that powerful. Yeah. And I'm wearing his Atom shoes now. I mean, he's co-branding.

I didn't know he had shoes.

Yeah. I mean, he's co-branding with all kinds of things like— and that would have not happened if he didn't have focus.

Right, right.

But it took him over 100 videos until one of them finally took off and started to teach him about himself on what people enjoyed about what he did.

I mean, a big piece of this all is just the name of the game is to just stay in Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, be persistent. And that speaks to what are the mechanisms that you include around you to stay consistent, right? That's sort of 2 functions. One, getting the distractions off your plate, but also having a support system in place to amplify what it is that you've already said yes to. So in my world, I'm a part of 2 mastermind groups that I've been with for over a decade each. Like, we meet— one of them meets every Monday.

Yeah.

We've done that for over a decade. The other one meets every Wednesday, 12 years for that one. And these are people who are brutally honest with me when I need it, when I need it. And they are there to encourage me. They're there to put me back on the right path when I get off of it. And in the same way, I am in their, in their path as well.

Right.

And that's an example of a mechanism I have to stay consistent and to stay persistent, being very involved in conversations with my literal audience. A lot of people still are surprised by the fact that I still have phone calls or Zoom calls with my email subscribers every month, and I just pick 5 to 10 random people, but I get on a call with them and they're like, that's not scalable. I'm like, yeah, exactly. This brings me back to who it is I'm doing this for, and it encourages me to either keep going down the path that I was going because they're validating that I'm on the right path, or they might be giving me some insight on some new things that I wasn't even thinking about directly from the minds and mouths of who it is that I'm building my business for. And this is why the community events are so key, is because it allows you to have direct contact with who it is that you're serving. And that's why I love what you're doing. You're bringing people together in a room and that is so powerful. And I would just encourage more people to have conversations with who it is that you're serving. A lot of us try to hide behind the internet. I think the internet— the best way to grow your online business is to get offline.

Speaking of the mastermind, real quick, when you say you've been in these groups 10 to 12, One's 10 years, the other one's 12 years. How big are these masterminds?

4 to 6 people each. No bigger. Any bigger than that, then it doesn't feel like you get your— what happens is every week somebody's in the hot seat and they get all the brainpower attention on them about a problem. Or if there's no problem, they're presenting something that's working right.

This is like an hour meeting.

An hour meeting.

Okay.

On Zoom. Most of us aren't even there with our face. We're just conferenced in, listening in, and we're there with our full attention on the other person. And I can't tell you how many times I've gotten out of a rut because of them. And I can't tell you how many times these conversations have changed all of our lives. So very formalized, very structured, very much centered around encouraging each other, but also being brutally honest and being that observer on the outside of our own businesses. It's, it's really easy to get lost in your own work and you need that outside perspective. You can't read the label when you're inside the bottle.

Got it. And how are these— I'm assuming you guys aren't paying for this group or anything. It's just like high-performing people. What's the difference between Group A versus B?

Just it's a different clique, different, different group. I mean, they're each made up of different entrepreneurs, so they're all entrepreneurs, but they're in different sectors. One of them, we had a person just to give you a sense of like the range of kinds of entrepreneurs. One person in one of the groups, he's no longer in the group because he moved on to something else in his life, but he was a hypnotist and a sword swallower. You're like, what are you doing in a mastermind group with a sword swallower? And he's like, I can't tell you how much stage presence I've learned from, from Roderick.

Mm-hmm.

He travels around the country and speaks at high schools and does these shows, and he can engage an audience of crazy distracted kids. And if you can learn from somebody who can do that, Then you can move an audience and tell a great story and hold an audience captive for an hour. For an entrepreneurial audience, I've learned so much from him. So I think a problem that a lot of entrepreneurs have when they hear this idea of a mastermind, they're like, okay, I'm in the finance sector. Let's get five other finance people together and let's just talk finances the whole time.

Echo chamber.

It is an echo chamber. You need people on the outside who are who are introducing you to new things and who you can introduce new things.

too.

It's just so much better that way. So the other issue with mastermind groups is sometimes you'll put yourself in a group where either everybody else is way ahead of you or you are way ahead of everybody else. And you don't want to be in those groups either because it either feels like you're only taking and you have nothing to give, or you're only giving and there's nothing to take, to take. So it's important that you're within like a good range of experience and, and, you know, you're not going to nail it the first time when getting into these groups or trying to form one. It takes time and relationships and perhaps years to make sure you're with the right people, but oh my gosh, they're so important to me. I would not be here today without them.

And I have to assume these, these 2 groups, because it's been a decade plus, that some of you have really outgrown others and others maybe not so much. Right. So how do you balance that?

Yeah, I mean, that is a good point. I mean, there's some people in our group that, you know, have gone on to do incredible things and are in a completely different world now. But because of the human and who that person is, you know, oftentimes the conversations do become more than about the businesses. It's about about life goals. It's about family now. We're all growing up together with families now. So conversations are not just about business at this point. Yeah, but it's true. There was another group that I was in that just, you know, we just— it just didn't make sense for certain people to be in anymore. And it's important to have those honest conversations so that you're just not kind of mechanically getting on calls because you had a call schedule. It still continues to remain worth it. And if, you know, just honesty and communication—

You got to audit your time.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. I want to go over to SPI. Well, actually, before we talk about SPI, so with all the different projects that you're working on right now, how are you— what percent are you allocating towards Deep Pocket Monster versus the others?

So I'd say 50% of my time now is allocated to Deep Pocket Monster, even though it started 20%. But this is while at SPI, my time has been decreased there because of certain business decisions that we've made to focus more on community. And a lot of that is self-driven and we've hired people to focus on engaging in the community. I'm not in there as much as I was once involved in SPI, like when I was on the blog and stuff. I've cut down on the podcast. We used to have a podcast called Ask Pat that came out 5 days a week.

Yeah.

We cut that because it was just, you know, let's focus all our efforts on our one show and go deeper with that. So the other 20%, 20-25% of my time business-wise is really focused on helping other companies. I do a lot of advisory work now. I advise over 10 different companies at this point in the startup and, you know, creator economy. Some of those I advise on my own. Many of them I co-advise with my partner and CEO at SPI, Matt. He and I are forming a group called SuperAdvisors.com to actually be a resource. We have a really nice one-two punch combo, right? I'm more visionary, creative. He's very integrator, into the weeds, finance, operational. And when you get both of us, like, great things happen. We've helped a lot of companies do really, really well, and we want to do more of that. So 20% of our time, typically on Fridays, I'm on calls with these companies and we're just getting a lot of feedback on what maybe feature sets are coming out and we're giving honest feedback or just helping to squash some problems or making introductions, those kinds of things. And it's really neat because a lot of those companies, most of them, we own a share now, like a very small percentage, but we are now shareholders of those companies and we can help influence where the company goes and how it grows. without doing the day-to-day work in those companies, which is really neat. We can use our high-level sort of bird's-eye perspective and our connections to make things happen for them. And a couple of companies that I advised over the last couple of years have recently got acquired, which is great. So those are nice paydays for, for me. And, you know, then, you know, we're just adding more to our portfolio.

Got it. So I got 50% for Deep Pocket Monster, 25% helping other companies. What's the last 25%?

For SPI.

Okay.

So So on podcasts for creating content, getting on video. Our mechanism for sales now is really amazing because it focuses on webinars. Webinars are not a new thing, but the way we lead people into our community from there, because we're no longer selling— excuse me— just one-off online courses. We had done that since 2017 and we made $6 to $7 million selling one-off courses on podcasting, YouTube, affiliate marketing, email marketing, webinars, building online courses, creating communities.

Yeah.

But around 2020, it became very apparent that people weren't— people didn't want to learn like that anymore. People— it was harder to get people to be self-driven, to sit down, watch a course, and do the things. And so we experimented with cohort-based learning. We had built some cohorts and to take people through our courses in groups in real time. And we actually taught that material in real time as well. So on Mondays, we'd meet and we'd give a lecture. It was the same material that was in our online courses, but it would be more direct and we'd be there to answer questions. And then on Thursday there were office hours and we can help people through the building of that. And we would charge like $5,000 to get people through those courses. And it was like 100% success rate, right? Because they're going through it with us.

Completion rate's a lot higher. Yeah.

But only like 20 people could take it with us at a time because, well, you'd have to have your Mondays and Thursdays open. You need to dedicate all this time and you need $5,000 to get in. So although it had a really amazing success rate, We could only serve a small number of people who could afford that.

Yeah, there's a lot more work for you too.

Way more work. Way more work. Definitely not passive at all, but very fulfilling.

Smart active income.

Yeah, exactly. But in 2021, when we started to think about community and people were craving community, we were like, well, we have these online courses, but there's no community in there. Can we combine the two? Can we create what we now call community-powered courses? Community-powered courses. We didn't coin that term, but we really love that and feel almost like positive peer pressure, right? Peer pressure is not always bad if everybody's helping each other do amazing things. So we've created this environment on a circle called Platform Circle. I'm an advisor to as well, along with Matt, and we've been able to help shape it to what we need and what a lot of other entrepreneurs need to build a community to learn in, but also stay connected and collaborate and be held accountable in. And So when people join our all-access pass, they can get access to all those courses with a, with a monthly membership fee, right? Which is great. Now they have access to all the courses that combined, if you were to buy them all one-off, would be thousands of dollars. But now for just a lower monthly price, cool. But that would be a disservice to just have that because more information is not what people need.

Right.

People need not just the right information, but the right guidance through that information and the right people around them to support them. Them. So we have now what we call our accelerators. So yes, you can go in, you can go through those courses on your own at any time. However, throughout the year, like monthly, like this coming month, we have actually a, uh, our course Heroic Online Courses. You can go through the Heroic Online Courses accelerator with other people. It starts on this date and it ends on this date, just like the cohorts, except instead of learning in a lecture-like format, you can learn This week on your own, go through Module 1. Whenever you can go through Module 1, go through Module 1 on your time. The lessons are there in the online course already. We don't have to do that live, and a person doesn't have to show up at 8 AM on a Tuesday or Monday. They get through that, and at the end of the week, if they need help, there's office hours with one of our coaches, somebody on our team, to answer questions and help them so that they can unlock Module 2 for the next week. And we found that people are 2.5 times more likely to succeed and actually get a result going through this.

Mm-hmm.

This versus just the one-off courses. So on the front end, we're getting paid less as a company because a person's paying, you know, $199 a quarter versus $499 for one course and then $699 for another course, right? We're not getting paid as much upfront, but because the community's there and because once they finish one course, they're like, okay, now I can move on to the next one and to the next one. We're already seeing— we're at the point now where we're seeing we're generating more revenue longer term. There's a higher LTV, lifetime value of our customer, because we're able to continue to prove those results again and again and again for them. And because oftentimes people come for the content, but then they stay for the community. So actually we're generating more revenue, but people are even happier. They're getting better results. And now there's other people that they don't want to leave. So we have really, really low churn rates, like 3 to 4%.

Hmm.

And so this new business model that we've created, we want to almost set the example for other entrepreneurs who have been struggling with selling, you know, online courses. And it's again, online courses by on its own were great. It was very passive. This is not passive. It requires active humans. Maybe you are not the human, maybe it's a team member that you hire, but it does involve people to guide. So the way we sell and market now is we do these webinars to tie the loop back. We do a webinar and like before, we deliver amazing value on a topic. Like creating online courses or podcasting or whatever it might be. But instead of buy the online course, the discount goes away by this date, right? Which is the scarcity and urgency which was required. I hated discounting, but that was what was working. Now we don't discount anymore. Now we say, here's the podcasting course, the accelerator starts next week, and you can join hundreds of others to go through this with you, to support you like gym partners and get a result. You are 2.5 more times more likely to do it if you do it this way. So sign up by next week. That's the urgency. Now sign up for the class of people who are going through this with you, and that is working even better than the discount.

So sign up and then sign up so you can join this next cohort next week.

Correct.

Okay. I love it. And so you mentioned 3 to 4% churn rate. How are you measuring that?

Is it quarterly or monthly?

Okay. Monthly. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Because usually for a subscription, what does it look like? Like, I think it's significantly higher.

8 to 10.

Okay.

Typically, I mean, every community is different depending on the pricing model and the financials. Like 8 to 10% might be amazing, right? Depending on what it is that you're offering. But for a community like ours at a, you know, $599 range per year, to have a 3 to 4% churn rate is incredible.

Yeah, it's not bad. I mean, you know, you still got to replace a good chunk of customers, but it's good for, for communities, I think.

Right.

And how many members do you have in the community?

I think at this point we have over 1,000 members.

Okay. Is it— so it sounds like they joined the cohort and then almost the community members are helping each other out. They're almost like your, your support.

Yeah.

And then you're coming in maybe every now and then doing like a, you know, like a workshop once a week or something.

That's correct. Yeah. And there's ongoing events that are not related to specific courses that continue. Like I did a workshop the other day on AI and things to look out for, how to use ChatGPT, which was Not related to any of the courses, but was still relevant to anybody who wanted to join that. So that's another benefit of being in the community. And with it, again, just the economics of it, it's the first time we've made recurring revenue in the business, so it's much more predictable.

Yeah.

Now it feels good. It feels good. It doesn't feel like, oh gosh, if we just stop working or if this next launch doesn't do well, like we're screwed. Yeah.

Which I know a lot of people fall into that Yeah, that launch trap is super exhausting because once you do the one, you know this, right? Like you have to get ready for the next one immediately.

Immediately after.

Yeah. And how, how are you filling the webinars? Is it through your YouTube organic? Are you buying traffic?

So we're not spending any money on ads or anything. We probably could do better of a job of doing that, but we're, we're serving our audience with webinars to our warm audience. So these are people who are already on our email list. And we found that running the webinars on my Pat Flynn YouTube channel, not Deep Pocket Monster, this is totally separate.

Yeah.

But running the webinars as a livestream on YouTube helps us reach even more people.

Interesting.

And it keeps the engagement going with audience members after the fact. Typically when a webinar is over, it's, it's siloed. It's, it's, it's just there for people who you direct it to through email. And the follow-up process is important. Most of our sales come in Probably on the last day before the class starts. Typically 60% of our sales come in on the very last day.

And are you just reminding them, hey, it's time to buy?

Yes, yes. 3 emails on the last day. And as much as that sounds crazy, all of those emails convert and we wouldn't have gotten those sales otherwise. Right. And if we didn't get those sales, we wouldn't have been able to help those people otherwise. So I've gotten over the fear of just like asking for— asking too much. Right. If I know— and this is the big secret for beginner entrepreneurs— if you know that what you have to offer offer is helpful, is a solution, then it's your responsibility to make sure people get it.

Right.

Right. And the byproduct of that service, that transformation is the sale, the revenue, the money coming in. The problem is most people who are starting out from scratch haven't proven that what it is that they're creating is actually going to work. And so there's doubt and that doubt shows up in messaging and emails and positioning. So anyway, Yes. So, so that works really well. The webinars I've gotten, again, adding the storytelling element in there, just kind of, you know, fine-tuning those as we go has been, has been really neat. And what we've also found is because of the community and the members, they are doing amazing when we feature them, when we make them look like the hero of the story. It's not about us, it's about them. This is Donald Miller and StoryBrand, right? 101.

Right.

When they become the hero of the story, it encourages others. who are just a few steps behind them to want to go through the same path.

Yeah, right.

To go with the same guide.

Yeah.

And many times we'll invite people who are members who have succeeded literally live on those webinars to show a real live testimonial, which I think more people need to do.

Right.

I don't think we think about that as much. You know, we put a name and a photo and a testimonial. Well, why not just bring them on? If they really loved it, they'll talk about it.

And then a person seeing them in real time Yes, I think you do a really good job of celebrating people from the cards, the Guinness World Records, and then also, you know, the people in your community. And I feel like you didn't just learn it from StoryBrand. Is there anywhere else?

Just experience. I mean, just when I've been celebrated, it feels good. And then I promote that thing, right? Like when I started business in 2008, I was a part of a community called Internet Business Mastery with Sterling and Jay. They were hosts of a podcast called Internet Business Mastery, IBM. And when I had built my successful business in the architecture space through their program, they flew out to San Diego to capture my story. And I was on the beach in San Diego and they were asking me questions. And it was— this was like before all the— like, like before that was easy, like giant cameras and everything.

Yeah.

And I remember feeling amazing being recognized, but also I saw the comments from people who were listening to the same podcast as me, call me out by name and say, Pat, that was an amazing story. Like, you're encouraging me so much. And it's like, wow, okay, if I can highlight stories in the same way that I was highlighted, like, I know firsthand how that feels as the person being highlighted, but I also have seen firsthand how that encourages others too. So I think it's firsthand experience. It's, yes, getting sort of reconfirmation in StoryBrand, but then doing it ourselves. It's the easiest kind of marketing. My most profitable podcast episode was one where I invited 3 of my podcasting students on, and I didn't ask them to come on to talk about my program.

Right.

I knew this is what was going to happen though, because I asked them, why did you want to start a podcast? And they each told their various stories. The one person I want to highlight, her name is Dr. B. She's over 60 years old, and she had lived with ADHD and wants to help people with ADHD. And this was her story of why she wanted to start. But then you follow up and say, well, what were the challenges? Why hadn't you started one yet? Oh my gosh, the technology. I'm just an old person who doesn't know anything. I can barely click a mouse. But you know what, Pat? When you taught me how to do it through your course, like, you made me feel like I knew what I was doing. And now I have this show. And then I just like organically, by telling her success story, her transformation, Yeah. my guidance comes up. And the people listening, I remember getting sales because Because we, we timed that podcast episode to come out during a launch week. And so, I mean, for obvious reasons. And I remember I must have got like 5 or 6 emails from people who said, Pat, you, you gotta give some money to Dr. B because she sold it for you.

Yeah, like the people that just converted.

Yeah, they're like, Dr. B is the reason why I'm here.

Yeah.

And I was like, testimonials, like real-life transformational stories, not just this program is great, Great, but here's where I was before. Here's where I am now. Here's what made it happen.

I want to go back to the process a little bit and then we'll explore more on SPI. So your webinars, how often do you do them right now? And you said they're purely YouTube Lives?

Yeah, I run them through Ecamm Live, which is the tool I use because it allows me to do some fancy things that I learned during the pandemic when I went live every day. Every day during the pandemic, I was to get better every single day.

You have the sound effects and everything.

Yes, I have a Stream Deck next to me and I'm using Ecamm Live, which integrates with Stream Deck so I can push buttons to change camera scenes. So I have 3 cameras set up. 2 of them are just using a phone and I use a tool called Camo, C-A-M-O, to enable my phones to be webcams. And so what I do is I just kind of flip between cameras and I just insert pattern interrupts. If I'm telling a really intimate story, a deep story, I'm looking straight on at the main camera. But then if I'm teaching and I'm doing these other things, or I have little jokes or something, I go to the side camera and I wave or something like that, and it just kind of interrupts the pattern a little bit. I'll go to another one that puts the screen on stage, but then I'm on the bottom, and then I can fade myself in and out if I happen to be blocking text or it's not about me right now.

Yeah.

So those kinds of things work really, really well for keeping people engaged during a live stream. And we do those once a month on different topics. That way we can hit any of the topics topics, really focus on that, drive all of our marketing on that, because maybe a person who didn't want online courses this month, they might really be interested in starting a YouTube channel next month. And we often will survey our audience to also understand kind of like what are the hot things right now that people want to learn about, because anybody who's in the Alex's Pass can get into any of those accelerators with their membership already. So we can already start to see people getting in there. So we can honestly say there's already 100 people who are taking this course. If you're not in here yet, like, get in here. Your peers are here waiting for you, right? And it almost— that combined with those stories from the members helps a person go, oh my gosh, these— this is where I need to be. So I will invest this and see. And if there's a guarantee— there is a guarantee, obviously. So if it doesn't serve them, they get their money back. So it removes that fear. And then our job is to just really lean into them and their experience so that they can not just want to come back, but also share that experience with others.

Got it. And I want to go back to the fact that you don't pay for ads right now. And so you're getting like hundreds of thousands of views, maybe millions of views per month on your YouTube. Are you driving them to an email offer to get them on the list and then on the— you're emailing them to join the webinar?

So the webinars, because they're still valuable, some of them pop off. Some of them still get a lot of views. We had our— I think it was our community one a community-focused webinar that drove into our accelerator for our community program, which we partnered with Uncircle on that, which was, which was really fun. That one has like 30,000 or 40,000 views. I mean, it's not millions like Deep Pocket Monster, but for people who are specifically interested in community—

Qualified views.

Super qualified views.

Yeah.

So it's a lot for a webinar. We could probably do a better job of getting email subscribers from the replay. However, we are getting direct sales from that as well.

Got it.

Like directly. So we changed the description after to point to the All Access Pass.

Got it. So Ecamm here, I'm just fascinated by this because I don't know of many people that are pushing mainly through YouTube. So you're scheduling a webinar ahead of time using Ecamm and then it's like, okay, you know, this webinar is coming up. How many people do you typically have on So we'll have 700 to 800 people. It's a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is, which is great. Some people I see every time and I'm like, I recognize them. Others are new because they just heard about it. And when you set up that, that page on YouTube for an upcoming stream, you know, that's now on the channel, it's now organic and people can find that. Right. And that's something that, again, piggybacking on YouTube and the mechanisms and the algorithms there, I mean, you're not going to get maybe, you know, tens of thousands of views or, you know, people coming your way for a very niche topic. But those videos, especially afterwards, can pop off when YouTube goes, okay, this video's here. It's a replay about whatever. What YouTube does is it sends a number of impressions to certain groups of people and tries to discover, is this video worthy of getting pushed out to more? Because people are clicking on it. So title and thumbnail, very important. And then B, are people sticking around to watch it? And because it is much longer, typically the watch time is longer.

Right.

So you can get a benefit if get people to click over.

I think what's important about your 2 channels, actually Deep Pocket Monster and SPI, is that you're the one that's teaching. And so your audience is used to that, right? The problem with— so we have a marketing school channel that's growing up. But the problem with this channel for leveling up is now it's all interviews, right? And so if I come out of nowhere and I try to teach something, don't know if that's really going to get played because that's not what I'm known for.

I think it could work though.

Really?

This has been proven. John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneurs on Fire.

Does he do webinars on YouTube?

He has done webinars. forever. I don't know if they were on YouTube. Yeah, but he paid for cold traffic to get, to get there. And by the way, we haven't even talked about the potential of YouTube paid traffic, which would likely perform very, very well. And that's something that we do definitely want to experiment with. But, you know, just the idea of being the interviewer and building authority through association with those who you interview, like, I mean, if you just show a picture of you with Hormozi in this chair, Yeah, maybe that's why it's sunken so low, because he was in here. Um, you know, that says something about you. You were able to get access to him. And if people watch that interview, they like the vibe, they're get— they're vibing, and they're for Hormozi, right? But now you as well, right? And John was able to build an entire empire through the idea of who he's had on his podcast. And not only that, and just like you, you're downloading all this amazing information at the same time.

Yeah.

And being, you know, literally learning as you As you, as you create. And John has gone on to help tens of thousands of people change their lives. And he's written books and he's got this journal and, you know, now he's in Puerto Rico with a kid.

Yeah.

Which is awesome.

So, you know, it's interesting about you two for— because John continues to share his income reports, but you've stopped.

I have stopped.

Yeah. And it's funny because on the Marketing School podcast, Neil and I were like, we don't think it's very beneficial to share income reports. And then he like tweeted at us like, no, it's been really good, blah, blah, blah.

It was good at first for me.

Yeah.

In the beginning, it it showed transparency and authenticity in a space that nobody was sharing anything.

Uh-huh.

Right. And it's not just numbers, though. I had people go, oh, he shares his numbers, they're probably fake. But then you look at the Excel files and like the accounting and the summary of like why those numbers are that way, then it's not even about the numbers. It's about why did it grow this month? Why did it not grow this month? Where, where did we fail? What can we learn from this? Where did it work? What can we learn from this?

Right.

And in the beginning, it was really inspiring to people. In fact, this is what put me on the map initially back in '08 by doing my income reports because again, that was back then was really revolutionary.

They're very motivating.

I did that because there was a finance blog. I was big into the personal finance blog space, just like consuming everything. There was one called mymoneyblog.com and this guy finally did what I was just searching for forever, which was when he made investments in the stock market, he shared exactly what he was buying and how much. Now, he didn't show his face, but I was like, thank you for sharing literally what you were doing and teaching. And sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down, and he reflects on that. And I was like, I want to do that in business. You know, companies that you invest in the stock market do a quarterly earnings report to share the health of that company, right? So this isn't anything new, but in the blogosphere, especially in the world of entrepreneurship, it was. And I was like, okay, well, people aren't investing in my quote unquote stock, but they're investing time to consume my information. That is just as valuable. So I should go and be forward with how much money I'm making. And it started out my first month in October was $7,908.55.

Wow. You remember?

I do. And that was from an ebook that I sold helping people pass an architectural exam. And the next month was in the $9,000s, then the $12,000s, and then $30,000 in May of 2011. And then I started generating revenue through SPI months after, and as an affiliate through hosting companies and tools I was using. Remember Market Samurai was big back in the day, and then Long Tail Pro, and then many others. And then it got up to 6 figures a month, and then it got unbelievable. Like, even though it was real, people were like, okay, Pat, you're out of my league.

Yeah.

Like, I was inspired when you were making $10K to $12K a month because I feel like I could do that. But you're at another level now. This was actually pushing people away. And this was after 8 years of doing this.

Could you see your growth slowing down, like traffic-wise?

Oh yeah, we kept very close attention to the hits on those particular— those were— those used to be the number one things people would look at. Like, they'd literally go there. We used to— can't remember the tools that we used at the time. Hotjar. Yeah, like, like they would just scroll down and look at the income and that was like the most popular thing. Like, it put us on the map and kept us on the map. But over time it was just less and less people left, less subscribers.

Yeah.

And it became more of a, oh yeah, okay, we get it, Pat, you're killing it, fine. But like, what would help me now?

Yeah.

And that's where we switched to income reports to more case study-based reports. So I wrote a really big report in 2016 About my book, Will It Fly? And I was like, I'm gonna do an income report style thing like I used to, but I'm gonna go deep into this one thing. My book that I launched on Amazon, I self-published it in 2015. It became a Wall Street Journal bestseller, which I didn't even know was possible as a self-published book. And I was like, I'm gonna show everybody exactly how much money I made from this process because it wasn't just about the sales on Amazon. It was the fact that that book was driving email subscribers to a companion course. Inspired by Walking Dead, actually, because they had a companion thing to watch while walking— while watching The Walking Dead. And I was like, if people can read this book alongside a course that I built for them for free, I know I'm gonna get their email address, and then I'm gonna promote a course after that. And in total, after about 2 years, this one book on Amazon that, you know, wasn't a bestseller forever generated over $300,000 in sales.

And what Fly on Will It Fly? Got it.

Yeah, and people are like, this is great. Like this is the kind of thing that is relatable, and and sure, I made 250k that month. That that number wouldn't have taught anybody anything. This taught people something.

Got it. This message is brought to you by Leveling Up Founders, and Leveling Up Founders is an invite-only event for founders. It happens once a year, usually during August, and past attendees include people such as Ali Abdaal, Cody Sanchez. Neil Patel, Vanessa Lau, and the list goes on and on. And ultimately it comes down to the quality of the group of the people. We try to keep the group high caliber. That's why it's invite only. So if you are a founder at the top of your game, you can go to levelingup.com/founders to learn more about it and you can apply and we'll see you on the other side. SPI, I think one thing that's unique that I haven't really heard of people do is like, okay, you realize that you're a visionary, you're a creative type, right? And you're not necessarily the integrator, which is the more operational But what you did was you went to go acquire the talent to plug into SBI. So can you share that story?

Yeah. So there's a book called Rocket Fuel, which speaks to this visionary and integrator role, the perfect combination of people, the person who has the big ideas who often are— that are often way too big, but then they act on them and then things go crazy. But along with an operator, right, the integrator, the person who goes, no, no, no, Pat, like, we can't do that. Like, literally, we can't do that. It brings me back down to earth, right? Like, I need that. So it's a nice yin and yang. Um, I started working with a guy named Matt Gartland in 2013 when I wrote my first book. Literally hired him to help me edit and publish my first book called Let Go.

Mm-hmm.

And I had such great experience with him that he and I ended up working together. I, I hired his agency called Winning Edits to help me with the production side of a lot of my stuff.

Yeah.

So publishing my blog posts, later publishing my podcast episodes, producing my next book, Will It Fly? They helped with that. So they were just a part of my team and I was always just still on my own as an employee. I was just a solopreneur who hired this agency, but I was paying agency prices for this. And eventually the economics made sense because number one, Matt and his team, I was their number one client. I was like 75% of their client work.

Oh, okay.

Right. And on my end, I'm paying these agency fees. So not just like the hourly rate, but a percentage on top of that.

Yeah.

Um, it was just like, what would it look like? So let's, let's just look at the numbers. What would it look like if I acquired this team and the talent and Matt, you came on board to operate SPI solely and we still had the same people editing and publishing and everything, but they're just part of Team SPI now. It's like, oh, well, when you run the numbers, well, you'd actually be saving money.

Yeah.

And the only thing holding me back was, oh, well, now I have— now I have employees, you know, and that's like scary.

Yeah.

But I knew that this was the right move because it allowed for these people to fully dedicate their work to the audience at SPI, which they did. And not only that, I'm able to save money.

Okay.

So that happened. But then we worked like that for a few years, and then eventually it became very clear that Matt was doing a lot more than just like managing. He was literally operating the business and working on the finances. So I brought him on. I shared some equity with him to come on as CEO. I stepped down because all I want to do is get on the shows and podcasts and get on video and do the talent stuff.

Yeah.

And so that's kind of where we're at now. He's— he is CEO of SPI Media and I am here as just the person on camera, I guess.

That's great, though. That's what you like. That's what I love. Yeah. And so the deal you— so when you acquired them, you just bought the whole thing. There's no equity for Matt out the gate?

Not out the gate. No, I paid cash. Got it.

And he still stuck it out with you for a couple of years because you would think usually some of those entrepreneurs are like, no, I'm on to the next thing already. I need equity, I need upside. But he stuck it out. And how long? What, 3 years? 4 years?

2 and a half years.

Yeah.

But I mean, the nice thing about Matt is he is also pretty visionary. So he always felt like he and I have a really good relationship. We chat a lot and he is able to inspire a lot of the actions that we take as a business. He's not just behind the scenes like, you know, cranking gears. He's literally on like now showing up on the podcast now and he's taking lead on some projects and such. And one thing that I have to give him credit for is, is what we are now calling our Experts in Residence program.

Yeah.

So we have a higher level community now called SPI Pro for higher level, more growth and strategic planning kind of conversations, mastermind matching there versus the All Access Pass, which was just kind of the course and community.

Got it.

We have now a program in SPI Pro called the EIR program. So we are now recruiting experts to come in to give accessibility to those higher level entrepreneurs in our community to have conversations, to learn from people who have specializations. And we are partnering with these people. It's not like they're guests or just like affiliates. They're literally now a part of the company in a way that allows us to also support them because these are people we're reaching out that our target are entrepreneurs who have audiences and email lists. They want to start a community, but they don't have the time and the know-how to build the community. Well, we have the community. Just house your community with us. You become a part of the company. It's not just Iron Man now, it's the Avengers.

Mm-hmm.

And we can all work together to benefit all of our audiences together. So now And now the whole company's growing. And the cool thing about this is now Pat Flynn is just one component of a much larger whole. And what used to be synonymous with Pat Flynn, SPI, is now this more— this media/educational company that is making some pretty big waves.

Got it. And your splits with these creators, I'm assuming something like 50/50 or whatever.

I mean, they get a larger than normal affiliate deal, but they actually get a piece of the overall pie.

Got it. And then if people are out there, they're like, oh no, I would like to hire a CEO. Like, how much equity should they think about giving up? And this is not a blanket statement. This is really just your— how you think about it.

Um, you'd have to ask Matt that because that's, that's not my world. You know, Matt is very much the driver of a lot of things related to finances, equity, and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, I trust him and he trusts me. But, you know, he has at this point 30% equity in the company. Yeah. And I'm satisfied and very happy with that. And it's well deserved for sure.

And where I'm going with this And part of this is my experience too. It's like, you know, did these acquisitions, right? And then, you know, hired— have hired GMs, have hired CEOs in the past. Right. And it's nice, you know, you give people— you could give 5, 10, 20 points or so, but at the end of the day, you still have to be involved. Right. And so, like, I guess my question to you would be, how often are you interacting with Matt? How involved are you? You're not just letting him operate in a box, right? Like a black box?

No, not, not at all. However, he does have a lot of agency and does a lot of things Honestly, you're not micromanaging him. Not micromanaging. No, not at all. That's the opposite of what I want to do. In fact, um, we could probably connect even more, but we do connect every week. We have our check-in calls, and he has done a good job of also releasing a lot of the efforts on his plate by hiring the right people. We have directors now that are in charge and responsible for certain parts of the business who have agency to make decisions and have a budget to work with, as long as we're all meeting what they call the commander's Yeah. Right? We don't want to—

Do you want to explain that real quick?

Yeah. So you've heard about this? So this idea of, you know, there's 2 ways to sort of lead a troop. And I think maybe this was a true story or not, but like, you know, a, a general comes in and says like, you know, hey, you know, we're losing the war. Why? Well, we had this whole plan and we were telling everybody what to do. We told our commanders and, and the generals what to do, but they're just not, you know, like things changed, but we had a plan and things are different now. So what do we do next? Versus as long as you just tell those people who are in charge Like, what ultimately is the goal? And then say, not I don't care, but like, I trust you to figure out how to get us to that goal. If you have to make moves and make changes, as long as we get the commander's intent, the overall goal is the goal, then you do what you need to do to get us there. And I trust you, right? It gives that responsibility to that person, but also a sense of ownership, right? And oftentimes we'll see in our company, that people who have that responsibility get creative. They start thinking out of the box. What would happen if we told them the exact way to do things? We'd lose that opportunity to get creative, perhaps become more efficient, perhaps save even more money, perhaps get in front of more people. So that's the idea of the commander's intent. I didn't tell that in a very good way, but I hope—

No, that was good.

It came across well. I was mixing up my commanders, generals, captains. Yeah, all those things.

All good. But it's also like trust. Absolutely. Absolutely. But what I've learned is you got to verify too.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And test, micro-experiment, small projects first, large projects later. Have them earn their way to that ultimate trust. And again, that's where I've, over the last decade, built trust with Matt and trust him to make certain decisions, just as he trusts me to come on shows like this and properly support the company in a way. and display and amplify what it is we're doing. And, you know, without that trust, you know, it'd be very difficult.

You know what's interesting? So SPI stands for Smart Passive Income. And I think over the years, I mean, you have— there's a team now, right? Before it was like, okay, maybe let's not try to build like a full-time team and things are becoming more active. So is there— is it like, are you going to change the name at some point or?

Well, you've probably heard me say SPI a bunch of times and not Smart Passive Income. That is purposeful. Yeah, we have been trying to move away from the passive income part of it, not because passive income is impossible, although in many senses of the terms it is. I mean, there's always going to be something active, even with real estate, stock. There's always active.

Mm-hmm.

But the path, like, honestly, the reason why it's passive income in the domain name and the brand is because that was a highly searched for search term, low competition. Good for 2008. Yeah, yeah, that's why. And the smart on top of it was so that I could hopefully get in front of people who are also teaching passive income, but in dirty ways, right? In the snake oil salesman kind of way.

Right, right.

I wanted to get in front of people and go, no, this is how it works. It's actually a lot of upfront active income. I know you're here, like dangle the carrot and then give them what they need, right? So the carrot is passive income and then we go, okay, here's Here's the truth. Passive income is like the last stage of this whole thing where you either automate or remove yourself from the process. You're not there yet. You got to start active.

So anyway, yeah, because most people don't want to put in the work initially, right? Yeah, correct.

So, so, so that's, that was the whole reason behind that. The truth is now the term passive income has come with a little bit of a negative connotation because of that similar kind of sense of the term. And so when we are trying to grow and expand our business, And we're doing these enterprise-type partnerships, unless we already have a relationship and they kind of know the history of SPI, they see, okay, well, what's SPI stand for? Oh, Smart Passive Income. Yeah, passive. I don't know if that's what we want to partner with right now. So there is some conversation on the team about perhaps changing the brand name, or maybe the P and I mean something different.

Smart Personal Income.

Smart Pat Income. Smart People Incorporated. I don't know. Maybe you have some ideas out there in the world, but in the comments. But, you know, we, we are exploring that for that reason where we want this to grow because even with our EIRs, our experts who are coming in, they are now a part of Smart Passive Income.

Yeah.

Is that right for them and their brands? Maybe not versus a— I mean, we're not this, but like MasterClass, like that is a brilliant name, right? Like they already took that. But, you know, something of that nature that sums up the whole of what this is, is a Incredible. And some term probably exists out there and it's, you know, probably some expensive domain that exists. We'll have to eventually—

Well, this just goes to show you too. I mean, you've been— you've had SPI for really 16 years.

Yeah, very long time.

So like things change over time. It's been over a decade.

So for sure. Yeah, for sure. I think the riskiest thing to do would be to just continue to do what feels safe. And these are 10x moves that we're making, right? 10x is easier than 2x. Ben Hardy.

Yeah.

Uh, and I love that philosophy because if we wanted to 2x the business, we would just do twice as much of what we're doing or spend twice as much time trying to get twice as many people in. You know, we just lean into what we're already doing. But if we want to 10x this thing, we have to think different. We have to make bigger changes, bolder changes. And in order to stay in front of things and stay relevant, we got to take bigger risks. And so it is risky to get more people involved. It is risky to change our name if we wanted to. It is risky to, you know, focus just on community. But I also think that that's where the future lies for businesses, right, in the world of community.

Yep. And I mean, speaking of community, the evolution of the business— initially SPI was mostly affiliate income, right?

Yeah, like 100% of it was affiliate income.

What's the most you made in a year just off affiliate?

Probably $1.5 million.

$1.5 million. Okay, that's a lot. And I think, you know, people want— people look at affiliate as like, you know, negative connotations, right? But to your point, like you're doing it in a very clean way.

Oh yeah, dude. Affiliate marketing can be amazing if you understand what it is, the goal of your audiences and how a product that's not yours fits into that goal. The problem with affiliate marketing and the reason why it's had a negative connotation is because technically it's easy to become an affiliate for any product. Yeah, for the most part. So you take a product with a really good commission that might be like crappy and you just shove it down people's faces or you hire a really good copywriter to sell ice to an Eskimo.

Yeah.

And then they don't have a great experience and then it's like, oh, affiliate marketing, like, you know, sucks. Versus like you find this incredible product that aligns perfectly with your audience in any industry, like the Vault X binder company for Deep Pocket Monster, and you create a partnership You co-create together, you do fun things together, and maybe you get to the point like I have with ConvertKit or Circle or whatever. Yes, I'm an affiliate for those companies and they perfectly align with the goals of our entrepreneurial audience. If you are an entrepreneur who wants to build a community, I recommend Circle. There's a lot of other places out there. I know Hormozi was here. He talks about Skool. They all basically do the same thing, but I love Circle. Anyway, Circle is great. And not only am I now an affiliate, but because I've worked worked with that company and I've sold volume for them, I'm now an advisor to the company. I'm working with them in an even deeper way. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs who are affiliates should think about deeper relationships with those companies that perfectly make sense for their audience because it's of benefit to literally everybody for that to happen. It's a benefit for me because not only am I maybe getting a higher affiliate commission than normal, but also I am also somebody who could you know, cut a big check when, when the company, I don't know, IPOs or gets acquired or whatever. But this is good for the company because now my name is on here and I can go, okay, not only am I an affiliate, but like I actually am a part of this company. Like you could trust my recommendation a little bit more. So boom, sending people over. But not only that, it helps the audience because they can get a sense that I am here and fighting for them. There have been many cases with a lot of companies— I won't name names— where I've had to fight for my audience to get certain features done or certain things things fixed faster. Like, maybe a little problem is they come to me now because they know they can get access to me instead of a CEO of a company that I advise. And I— and that is a little bit of my role as an advisor, is to go, hey audience, like, what is wrong? Okay, let me report back and see what I can do to help, like, at least get this in the CEO's ear in case they're far removed from the issue.

Right. And for you to become an advisor, I have to I mean, people are like, oh, I want to become an advisor, but you're pushing a lot of volume first and then you're like, hey, maybe we should talk.

It's an easy entryway in when you do volume, but it's not necessarily required. I've seen some friends and colleagues who I've coached become affiliates and, you know, that gets them in the door. But even if they're not pushing a lot of volume, if you can demonstrate that you can help a company, then it can make sense. Right. Do a Noah Kagan style, write the marketing report before you're even asked to do it and show up with that thing like he did at Mint. I think that's how he got hired at Mint. Yeah, they were like, he went in for Noah Kagan.

He was sitting there too.

Oh, was he? Oh yeah. Get his new book.

It's awesome.

It's the only green book on the shelf. Really smart. He went in to get an interview for Mint for their marketing department. They said no. And he's like, no, I'm not going to take that. I know I can help here. He developed a whole report that like kind of blew them away when he came back and followed up. I mean, that showed persistence. His lead backed it. But it was his lead, right, into that job. So same, same thing here. So yeah, I think when you can demonstrate or come up with ideas and you know they're helpful, well then present that. Maybe ask to get to a dinner or something or coffee and meet up and share. Maybe go to a conference where that company is speaking so you can get in front of them. Be proactive. And if you've done all you can, then you've done all you can. Not all companies are going to see that and go for it, but many will. And you won't know until you try.

Got it. You talked about— this was on a podcast with Noah, actually, about just realizing that you don't need to speak at every conference. You don't need to take on every single opportunity. Right. And, you know, I think that podcast was maybe a year or two ago. So what's your philosophy on it now? That's something I've been reflecting on a lot.

Do you have kids?

No.

Well, when you have kids, something happens. You start to get a barometer for how quickly time goes, and it's literally in front of you every day. It's in front of you in how tall they are. It's in front of you in their changes in attitude and mood. And it's in front of you in terms of how deep your son's voice gets. My son's voice is deeper than mine now. It's crazy. He's taller than my wife. So my son's 14. I got 4 summers left with him basically until he goes to college if he wants to or does whatever. And so I have a choice when I'm asked to go and speak. Do I say yes and remove myself from these— the fewer days I have with my family? And if I do, it has to be be a hell yes. It has to be very obvious that this is worth doing. And I'm in a very, very blessed stage in my life now where if I'm offered $20K to go somewhere, it's not an automatic yes anymore like it once was.

Hmm.

Because I'm seeing and I understand, and this points to something I said earlier, is I know what means the most to me right now and all the decisions I make are related to that. So my kids growing up have really helped me slow down so that I can be more present with them. I grew up in a household where— and I love my parents, but they were never home. My dad was always at work. My mom was always at work. I was a latchkey kid. I grew up with Saved by the Bell and Family Matters. Those were my families that I grew up with.

Yeah, yeah.

Full House.

Yep.

But those were fictional, right? And this is nonfiction, my relationship with my kids. So I want to be there as much as I can for them. And already with my son especially, I'm starting to see more time away from the family because he's with his friends, he's doing activities, he's out there. My daughter will follow very shortly. And so, you know, I could always go up on stage later. I could always make more money. I'm never going to get this time back.

Right.

And we want to just create as many memories as possible. So that might be a cheesy answer, but that's my answer.

That's perspective. Yeah, that's good. So I'm This leads me right into the thing I've been wanting to ask, which is how do you think about parenting as an entrepreneur? Because even 10 years ago when we were talking, I just noticed how you've been very intentional about parenting, probably you along with your wife, obviously. You get him— you get involved with the things he's interested in, such as Pokémon or the trumpet or everything, right? Fortnite. So yeah, how do you think about parenting as an entrepreneur?

Well, I'm just me, and maybe I can base my answer based on things I've learned as an entrepreneur. But if my audience as an entrepreneur is my email list and my subscribers and my followers, and the best way to serve them is by getting involved with what they're doing and really hearing from them, I'm doing the same thing with my kids. My kids is my audience. I'm going to get involved in what they're doing because I want to have conversations. I want to learn about what's going on in their head so that I can better serve them. serve them. But serving a kid is maybe a little bit different in the sense that, okay, I'm not going to create an online course for them or anything like that. I'm going to coach them.

Yeah.

So I don't do a ton of coaching in my entrepreneurial world, but the coaching I have done feels pretty similar to the way that my wife and I, quote unquote, raise and/or coach our kids because we don't tell them what to do. That is not our philosophy. We help them realize what the right thing is to do by asking them questions. So we ask a lot of questions. Another thing that maybe I can pull from entrepreneurship that I found is fascinating is that people love when I fail. They love it because it's an amazing lesson. It's, uh, humbling, I guess. It's something that shows that we're all human, and that's something that we display to our kids as well. We are not perfect. And I grew up in a household where I was supposed to be perfect, that if I didn't get a 4.0 average, I was a bad kid, that if I wasn't studying all the time, I was And the Asian way. Totally the Asian way. I'm half Filipino, so I'm partway there, but I got that from my dad too. Yeah. And so like when my wife or I make a mistake or get called out by our kids on something, which they— we've taught them to do, like, hey, if you see us doing something that you don't agree with, tell us so we can talk about it versus we're always right.

Right.

And if we tell our kids that we're always right, then what position does that put the kid in when maybe something isn't right or something is wrong? How are they going to feel comfortable when they did something wrong? So one of the first things that my wife and I talked about when we had kids is like, hey, if we fuck up here, like, let's be honest with each other, but also be honest with our kids as they grow up, because we want them to see that we're human and we make mistakes and that it's totally cool to make We can learn from these things, right? So when you combine that with the question asking and coaching, then that's great. The other, like, there's probably a— I should write a post or something about this because there's so many parallels. Thank you for unlocking this for me. Learning by teaching in the entrepreneurship world with our members, we can see so much growth happen when we offer the microphone or the platform or the livestream on Circle to our members to teach other members. It's like they learn and they get excited. They'll do the work because they're going to be in front of people. people. We encourage our kids to teach us. So instead of— this was really big back when school started, you know, when school happens with your kids and, you know, they come home from school, oftentimes the question is like, so how was school today? Fine. What'd you do today? Nothing. Right? That's common. But we started to implement this strategy. They'd come home from school and we'd say, what's, what's one thing that you learned today that you could teach us? And then we have a space for that, right? That's the other important thing, like not just saying that and then kind of like fiddling on my phone while I teach, like being engaged, looking them in the eyes, being active, and then not just going, oh, that's cool. That's not the answer I want from them. So I am not going to give that answer back. I'm going to say, wow, how does that work? Or wait, can you show me that again? Because— and, and tell me, why do I think that happened. So they're able to then understand that, oh, they could teach us something. And that helps encourage them to want to serve and share. And that to me is really an important characteristic of an entrepreneur is the ability to see how you can help others. So to instill that on our kids early on has been really great. And we often see that. We'll often see our kids helping other students. I remember my son, we were teaching him how to tie his shoes. And this is something I have to give my wife credit for because She has the most patience in the world. She literally worked for like 2 days straight to get my son to figure out how to tie his shoes. He just could not figure it out. But we didn't get mad and get frustrated, although we were, we talked about it a lot. But to him, just, hey, we'll try again. We'll try the 2 rabbit ears approach. We'll try the loop-de-doop approach, whatever. And finally he got it. It clicked. And then he was so proud of himself, right? That was the moment that we were shooting for, that proud moment.

Yeah.

And we wanna shoot that for our own audiences. as well. Um, when, when you show how proud you are as the creator for the audience that you have, they get stoked on that. And that's something that we say to our community all the time. We're so stoked for you when you succeed.

Yeah.

Because that helps everybody. Anyway, then later on we started to see our son helping his friends learn how to tie their shoes. He got so stoked about him unlocking this new skill that he wanted to share it with others. And we had some of the other parents in the community go, Keoni was teaching our kid how to tie his Like we hadn't even gotten there yet and we're just like, yeah, that's pretty sweet.

That's awesome. It's pretty cool.

The last thing I'll say, and this is a big one because my son wanted to create a YouTube channel. I mean, how could I say no to that? But also, well, that's kind of— for a young kid, that's a little dangerous, right? And, you know, I still have to— you have to be a certain age to be on YouTube. But I mean, I mean, I think it's obvious why it's dangerous. There's like you expose yourself to people, the comments, who are trolls behind their keyboard who say things who would never say that in real life. And it just opens up a world that we weren't quite sure we were ready for. But we also don't want to discourage him from the excitement of creation.

Yeah.

I mean, I am a creator.

Yeah.

And he will likely be one too. And he did become one. You know, we would use this opportunity to create videos. I bought him a camera. No, that's not true. I gave him a hand-me-down camera.

Yeah.

As a parent.

As a parent would.

Uh, as a parent would. Yeah. Um, and it was okay, but, uh, you know, we weren't too worried about all the technical aspects of it. Like, it captured audio fine, whatever. We didn't go all out on it. Uh, but we created these videos together and we had— I had him come up with the ideas and they were all random, but it wasn't like I was going to tell him no. I was like, okay, well, what is of interest to you today? Let's film that. And he did a video where he cut out holes in cardboard and we made like a little skee-ball machine. A lot of this stuff was just like construction, like makery crafting kind of stuff. So we built this, um, skee-ball machine out of cardboard and balls and we played with it and I, I taught him how to edit. So he was learning how to edit and, you know, I could go really deep with that, but I'm like, nope, let's just do it easy. Let's take the mistakes out. Let's put music on it. Here's how you put words on the screen. And he did it and he published that video and it was one of maybe 10 that were out there at some point, and that video blew up. It had like 38,000 views.

Wow, that's a lot.

Which was really cool. And if you go back in time, he's like, his voice is really— he thinks it's cringe now, I think it's cute, but his voice is really high. Anyway, before we got on YouTube, we told him straight up, you are going to have people leave comments that are bad. They're going to try to make you feel bad. They're trying to get you upset. And the truth is Those people are going through something in their life that make them say that. They might be hurting or they might be sad and they're just taking it out on you. And so we taught him what took me years to learn. Something in 2012 happened to me similar to what I'm about to share with you that almost caused me to quit. And it wasn't until Derek Halpern said, dude, every second you're wasting on this hater is a second you're wasting on somebody else. A second you're wasting—

Could be helping someone else.

Potentially to help somebody else.

Yeah.

So that got me out of that funk. So we taught him that and also the fact that hurt people hurt people, right? And again, he was like 8 at the time. Uh, one day comes down, he goes, Daddy, there's a really mean comment on one of my videos. It was that skee-ball video. And he was like, can you teach me how to delete a comment? Because he didn't know how to do that. So I go on his computer, look at the comment, and the comment on his video was, You should kill yourself. And I was like, oh shit, that's major.

Yeah.

Uh, so I look at him and I go, how does that comment make you feel? And he said, I hope that person's okay. Sorry, it's just— That was a very proud parent moment. Um, the fact that he had empathy for somebody saying that and the fact that he's already shielded from the hurt that a lot of us experience. on these platforms. And then I told him how to delete it and he just went on with his day. He wasn't affected by it. And to have grown up in my life as somebody who was bullied for being short and being weird and being into things that were different, maybe this is why I love Pokémon so much, because I found my nerd, my nerd crowd. You know, I'm so proud of him and it wouldn't have happened if we didn't prep him for it.

Yeah.

And I am not here to tell you how to parent. or anybody how to parent. This is just the way we figured out how to do it, and this works for our kids. But we wanted to prep him for the world of creating content and the amazing things that can happen doing so by also, you know, giving him the armor to shield himself from the also downsides of it too.

Yeah, you gave him the power-ups to deal with that situation. So I guess I have to ask you, and thank you for sharing Hearing that, that was powerful. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show. You mentioned your wife is extremely patient. I'm just trying to—

She's still married to me. That's how I know.

Well, that's a whole nother— we can do that in part 3. How do you stay patient? Because entrepreneurs, we're not naturally patient people, right? I know, like, you know, there's this personality test, like I'm like in the middle on composure, right? Like I need things fast, fast, fast, right? So how do you do it?

I'm in this— I'm in the same boat as you. So I'm working on my 4th book now. This is my first traditionally published book. Why go traditional? I already have an audience. Like I can sell it myself because I just want to learn about it. I'm so interested in this. It is such a slow process. Oh my gosh. Like it is tearing me apart in terms of how slow This is, but this is how it is and I'm learning from it. So a lot of times when it comes to things that take a while, I try to find the learning moments within that because those are the things I'm still curious about. How do publishers do this? What is their schedule like? How do they plan for what books go where? And I'm learning actually a lot more than I would have if we just rushed into this, actually, which I think will benefit me when this book comes out, whenever it comes out. The other thing is I always try to find the fun in things. That's something that I found has worked really, really well to keep me excited about things that may not be as exciting. Right. So I always try to gamify things. If I'm for some reason having to edit something myself, I try to, you know, beat a time of sorts and just see if I can get it done in 10 minutes. And that forces me to get creative. And, you know, maybe I can sharpen my ax a little bit by finding some shortcut on YouTube and then going and doing the thing. And that learning process, again, that curiosity is what's keeping it fun for me. But also, I know that I'm here for the longer— the long game. And I think that's, you know, I think it was Gary Vaynerchuk who said macro— no, micro hustle, macro patience. And I love that.

Yeah.

Because on the little things that I know I'm focused on next, I'm gonna hustle to get that thing done. You know, nothing else matters except the next thing. And I'm learning anything and everything I can about just that thing. Everything else— that's what's called just-in-time learning, just learning about the next thing. I'm gonna micro hustle on that. this. But as far as results, I'm gonna give it time because things take time. And maybe I am lucky because I grew up in the '80s where we didn't have the internet, we didn't get results right away. Our Google search was going to the library.

Yeah.

You know, which took a lot of time. And, you know, Dewey Decimal System, yay.

Yep.

Maybe I have the benefit of at least growing up with a little bit of experience of that kind of living and some patience. I know that's very tough, especially even for my kids nowadays, to kind of like, yo, it's just a half-hour line in Peter Pan. This is actually good at Disneyland. Half hour, that's good.

Yeah, you can spend time with each other. Yeah.

Yeah. And thankfully the queues are a lot nicer now at Disney than they once were. Anyway, that's a different topic. But, um, yeah, it's just, you know, it doesn't have to happen right now. And again, if you could find the fun and the other people to do something with, as long as you're waiting together, just like in a queue at Disneyland, Like being by yourself sucks, but being with others and just having fun with whatever you have access to is great.

Yeah. Well, Pat, this has been a wide-ranging conversation. What's the best way for people to find you online?

So if you go to smartpassiveincome.com, which is the current domain, it'll probably redirect at some point if we do change it. That's where you can see the All Access Pass and SPI Pro and all the things we have going on there and the podcast and such. But Deep Pocket It's not just for kids, dude. I get recognized by adults on the street whose kids are like, who's that? Um, a lot of us kids who grew up in the '80s and grew up in the '90s with Pokémon and an allowance to buy a pack of cards back then, uh, are now adults who have salaries that spend a load of money on this hobby. And I'm here to just make it more fun. So, uh, Deep Pocket Monster or card.party if you want to check out the event. And, uh, just thanks for having me on, man. It's a pleasure to be here. And I'm so honored to to have been reminded that I was the first interview here. And it'll be interesting to go back. I'll need to watch that and maybe cringe a little bit.

It's cringe for me, but I think you were good.

Because of me?

No, no, no, no. It was cringe because of me, because I had like super spiky hair and all that. So yeah.

I remember.

Thanks again for doing this.

Yeah, man. Appreciate it.