The Secret Weapon for Retirement DIYers | Interview with Boldin CEO

Hey, gang, it's Jeff. And welcome to another video. I'm really excited about this video because we have Steve Chin, the founder and CEO of Bolden personal financial planning software. Bolden, which was formerly New Retirement, is a software that I personally use. In fact, I think it's so good that I approached Bolden and asked them if I could be an affiliate of theirs. Now this is a powerful statement because most of the time affiliates are approached by other companies. In fact, we get 25 to 30, maybe even 40 approaches a quarter, so over 100 a year. So for me to go to them and ask them if I can represent them, that's a pretty big statement because we have a lot of choice. Now, Steve is also the second interview that we've done on the channel. He would have been first, but timing wasn't right for the two of us. But he's an interview that I've really been looking forward to. So let me introduce you to Steve Chen, founder and CEO of Bolden. Steve, it's great to have you on the channel.

Yeah, thanks, Jeff. It's awesome to be here and it's cool to be. Appreciate being the second guest in the interview series. So hopefully it goes well.

I'm sure this is going to go great. So let's just jump right into it. Now, when I think of Bolden, I think about a lot of great things, and we'll talk about those in just a moment. But what inspired you to create Bolden?

Basically, this got started because my brother and I were helping my mom figure this problem out. As she was approaching her retirement. She was like, hey, you know, I have. She had some real, you know, financial challenges even. She was a, you know, white collar worker, small business owner, college educated person. But still, as she approached retirement was, you know, kind of, you know, had some financial pressure that was happening because of some volatility with her business. And, you know, she reached out to us for help and basically we said, okay, first, can we just find a financial advisor that will. That is an expert in this stuff and will help you kind of get on track? What we found was we couldn't find someone that was a good fit for her because basically she didn't have enough money. Her net worth was under half a million dollars. Half of it was in the house. And so that one was like, okay, I guess we're going to do this on spreadsheets. And we saw how complex it was. I think a lot of financial services has been focused historically on the accumulation side. You know, it's like, hey, Learn to save, learn to invest, you know, make good choices, manage your fees. But then as you go to kind of transition to retirement and think about decumulation, that's a whole other set of problems. Social Security, health care, Medicare, estate planning, you know, how long am I going to live? How am I going to manage inflation? You know, how much market risk am I comfortable with? So, anyway, we. We started on a spreadsheet, and then as we helped her and just saw how there were all these different components to it, we felt like this was a big problem, you know, for everybody. And most people were solving it either by not doing anything and just kind of having some forcing function, which is kind of like what happened to my mom. Right. And then figuring it out, or they were building their own spreadsheets. And so that's how we kind of originally saw the problem and got into it, and then we started creating software for it, and here we are.

Well, I have a lot of very strong opinions about spreadsheets. In fact, for those of you who don't know my background, before I was here, I was a banker, and before that I was a public accountant. And I thought that I could save the world by getting exceptionally good at spreadsheets. And so I became exceptionally good at spreadsheets. In fact, many of you will note that on the videos that we provide to you, we'll provide you with spreadsheets that you can tinker with sometimes. Well, I create most of those myself. But the problem with spreadsheets is that this is if something goes wrong, it really goes wrong. And you have to search cell by cell, trying to find the right cell that had the mistake in it. And sometimes that takes hours. It takes if it's a big, complicated calculation. And my experience of the past with personal financial planning software really goes back to 20 or 30 years ago. And most of those had big ads. They were really not super functional, hard to use. They would have. I used to call them Franken software because it looked like somebody took a good idea and started bolting things on. That really didn't make a lot of sense. And so by the time the user got to the software, it was really hard to use. The biggest one for me, of course, was that I was constantly being bombarded by ads for mortgages and credit cards and those sorts of things. So, Steve, what. Tell us a little bit more about Bolden. Tell us about the staffing, where you're located, and just in general, a lot about the. The demographics of the company.

Yeah, there's a. There's a Guy named Simon Simonek. He talks about like the why behind your business. And like, that's so important for people to understand why you're in this business. And yeah, the, I think a little bit about what makes us unique. So we are very. Everyone here is mission aligned. There's about 50 people here working on this problem. Yeah, many of our users have their own spreadsheets and then they find our software and they're like, oh, this is great, I don't have to maintain my spreadsheet. And for folks that build their own spreadsheets, yeah, it's very often a labor of love, but it takes, if you're spending 10, 20 hours futzing around with it for 30 hours a year, it starts to get very expensive from a human capitalist perspective. In January we had 150,000 people log into their financial plans. Those people collectively were managing about $150 billion of their life savings. We take that very seriously. People are making real decisions on this platform about, you know, their future and when can they retire and how should they think about different strategies like Roth conversions and various tax strategies and things like that. And I think what makes us unique is that we get all that feedback and we're completely, well one, we're completely aligned. So we charge, unlike many companies and financial services, we charge the end user for the software. We are completely transparent about how we make money. We're completely aligned with the end user. So there's not like us making money some other way, some back door way that, that isn't obvious. And so that keeps us completely aligned. We're learning all the time. We have, you know, all these users, we can see what they're doing. There's a community of 20 plus thousand people on Facebook. There's thousands of people on Reddit. You know, there's folks that, you know, you know, work with our partners like you, that, you know, they're sending us feedback or you're hearing from your, from your users, like, what do they like and they dislike. So we're always kind of like trying to learn and make it better and so that the platform evolves. And other than that, yeah, we're U.S. based. I mean, I'm here in San Francisco in the Bay Area, so just north of San Francisco. Our team is distributed around the US but there's folks in New York City, there's folks in California, there's folks in Kansas City, there's folks in Chicago, you know, and yeah, like it's, you know, we're cranking away, always working on this problem. And we do feel like there's a big. It remains a big unsolved problem. Like there are. You know, our goal is to help 100 million people. And it seems like a crazily high number, but there's 8 billion people on this planet. Wealth is concentrated, but it's. It's improving. Like, we're improving our quality of life across the board. But we feel like there's a huge opportunity for people to be more financially literate, develop a stronger sense of control over their money, and through that, achieve agency in their lives. So that's a big part of why we do our work.

Wonderful. Just wonderful. And you talk about problems and opportunities. What was it about Bolden that you thought you could create or you created that would solve problems? And you go first, and I'll give you my view on some of the things that I really like about the software.

Sure. Yeah. I think that a lot of this is around the idea that, you know, for people. We want to help people achieve better outcomes across their whole life. Right. So the people that listen to your show, you know, holy Schmidt. And are part of your community and are part of ours, they're frankly, they have made most of them good choices. You know, they tend to be wealthier, and they've probably been making good choices for a long time. They're investing their education, their financial literacy, I should say. And for many people, that's not true. And so we want to, you know, help people be financially literate, embrace the idea that kind of learning and planning is a lifelong practice. And the reason it should be, it's like the analogy is, like, physical wellness, Right. Like, I read this book, Shoe Dog, right, From the Nike founder. And it was like, hey, we didn't know that exercise was good for us until 1949, which seems insane, but, like, because we all take it for granted. Like, we invest in our wellness and sleep and stress and all that stuff now. But, like, before 1949, we actually did not know scientifically that exercise was good for us. And once we figured that out, then companies like Nike and Adidas got created. And we feel like the same thing is starting to happen with financial wellness, that people are realizing that, okay, I need to have some awareness of how this works. I need to make this a lifelong practice and stay abreast of what's happening, because the world's changing, markets change, you know, the interest rates change. Right. Inflation's changing. There's all these things, our own longevity. We're hopefully going to live longer, healthier lives. So we great we live longer. And, you know, you could be 55 or 60 and be like, I actually, instead of planning for, you know, 20 more years, I need to plan for 30 or 40 more years. And what does that look like? You know, like it. You know, we need to be pretty thoughtful about how this works and how long, you know, how we live our lives. So that's. We're really trying to create a platform that supports that. Not just the money, but kind of the health and time part of it as well. I mean, we're definitely focused much more on the money right now, but long term, we're thinking more holistically.

Boland, just from a user's perspective. And take this as a CPA who spends a lot of time with numbers. One of the things that I noticed about Bolden immediately when I logged on was, was that it is really easy to use. It's a natural interface. The Q and A, the interview that the software has, it interviews me anyway. When it interviewed me, it felt very natural. It felt like it was asking the right questions at the right time, very directed, and frankly, a lot different than before. The software from 20 years ago. I referenced this just a couple of minutes ago. It was very much almost like a spreadsheet. And I just. The. The difference is it had labels, so to speak, and really you could only enter in specific information in a couple of different cells. But it was really hard to get through that software and come out with something on the other end without really almost knowing how the software was constructed. Very, very difficult for a user to interface with. Now fast forward to today. Bolden. For me, the biggest problem it solved was that I don't have to really think about much other than just answering the questions that I'm asked.

Yeah, I think that for sure, one of the challenges with financial services overall, and I've worked in financial, like you, I've worked in financial services my whole career. Like, I came out of school, I was an engineer, I was a consultant, worked at Schwab, I worked at Wells Fargo, done some consulting at banks in Europe and stuff like that. And I think the one thing that I saw is, on the one hand, financial services is super important for our society, right? It enables credit and people to make investments and manage their money, all that stuff. There's a lot of good things. But the thing that's strange about it is that mostly it's opaque. You don't really know what you're paying for and there's not costs that you see in terms of like, if I go buy A car. It's like, okay, I spend this much money, I get the car. But if I'm like, you know, buying an insurance product or I'm like making an investment, you know, there's costs and fees and all this stuff behind the scenes that I'm just not aware of. And those things are material. And so I think that, you know, generally I just feel like the world's heading to a place where there's going to be more transparency and more alignment, especially as people get more sophisticated and they realize some of the. Some of the costs that are being incurred. And unfortunately, the less money you have, the less opaque it is, or the less transparent it is, the more opaque it is. So that's where, as people get more literate, they start to see what these levers are, and I think that will help them do better. So, yeah, we just wanted a place where it was safe and aligned. People could learn from each other. I do think this is a big part of it, like what you're doing here. These communities, a lot of our users, they'll have advisors. This is not mutually exclusive, the financial advisor, but they will also talk to their peers and their family, and they'll be just much more, you know, they'll just have much more visibility about kind of the choices they're making. So we're trying to empower people that way and more.

About the mission statement, what is it about the mission statement itself, really? Just the mission of the company that solve these frustrations and turn those into a really wonderful opportunity for your clients, your customers.

Yeah, I feel like we, we are trying as a business so to address a lot of challenges. So one is, yeah, how do we be fully aligned? Right. How do we be transparent? How do we help a lot of people? So we, you know, like our, our offering starts with free. Like, anyone can build a plan for free. And we, we're going to stick with that. We want, you know, 80% of our user base is just taking free classes, getting free content, building a free plan, and just doing it that way. And then. Or 75% and then, you know, 25% of people upgrade and they keep going. And I think people move through that journey over time. But yeah, our vision is like, we really feel like there's an opportunity to help society at scale with these challenges, you know, and through that, it will lead to better outcomes, not just for individuals, but their families. I mean, I see this in, like, in our family. It's like if you're raised by financially literate people, you are much more Likely to make good choices in your own. In your own world and be thoughtful. Like, for us, you know, we're raising our kids, and it's like, oh, you know, we saw the damage that has happened to a lot of society from student loans, right? There are a lot of people that took out $100,000 in student loans. And then, you know, without thinking that hard about it, and then if you're like, oh, I actually don't have a career where I can pay that off really easily, you're sitting there with $100,000 of debt, and then you're kind of like, to some degree, enslaved to pay that debt off. And, you know, like, our kids have gone to public high schools, state colleges, you know, leverage. Like in California, we have one kid in a Senate, you know, in community college, which is essentially free for a couple years, which is great. I mean, you have to pay housing and stuff. But, you know, those choices give them more agency and freedom in their own lives, and that can affect, hopefully, you know, their kids as well. And we ourselves are trying to build wealth so that we can, you know, help our. Help our kids and our community do better. So we want to broadly do that. And I think the one other thing here is that just in general is you have, you know, if you get to financial independence, we see this in our community, it's like, then you can really think hard about your own human capital and what you want to do. And then you get like, you know, I think your. Oh, your story itself is interesting, right? You're a CPA and then banker, you know, New York City banker person, and now, like, YouTube superstar. And, like, it's kind of interesting, you know, would that have happened if you didn't have your own. Your own independence? And. I don't know.

That's very kind of you. I completed my accounting degree at night. I went to night school and got an accounting degree. And I worked during the day because I had to pay for myself. And then at the end of college, I spent several years in public accounting and then went back to business school, and I was a banker for many, many years. And in 2020, my daughter said to me, dad, you know, there are a lot of people that are suffering right now, and you have all of this education. You're helping other family members with that education. Why don't you start a YouTube channel and help others that might need the same information? And with that, the channel was born. I didn't expect it to grow into the size that it grew into, but I guess we're doing something right. And almost every day I'm happy that I'm filming and delivering great content to people. Some days are better than others because there are some technical issues with camera or other. But, but for the most part, for the very, very large part of the job, actually love what I do.

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing, right? I mean it's the, I think this, we're in this world now where, you know, people want that authenticity to kind of know where, you know, their food is made or like who they're talking to and why. And I think that when you come at folks and you're like, well, I don't, you know, either I don't have anything to sell or like, hey, this is how I make money. But like, this is the super clear value proposition and where it starts and stops, I think that makes it, it much more accessible. Yeah, I mean that's, you know, for all of us. It's like anybody can log into your channel and start getting educated and anybody, like with us, anybody can build a financial plan and they can even start for free. But you know, very often people will then start to realize, oh, like our median, the median tax benefit that our users find is $100,000 of tax savings. So like people get into planning and they're like, planning is different than. I was actually talking to an advisor yesterday. He's like, you know, investing, you're trying to like kind of beat the market, which is very difficult. Mostly it's just like time in the market versus timing the market. But with planning, the alpha is just making good decisions. Right. So it's like starting to invest earlier, manage your fees, be diversified, rebalance, be tax efficient, understand how you're going to decumulate your assets and hedge out risks, like how you're going to pay for health care, long term care, how you're going to think about tax efficiently giving your money to your kids if you're, if you're able to build that kind of wealth. So that's why planning is kind of interesting because there are all these gains for people and it's also changing, like just as a quick side story. I mean, I've been in this, you know, you know, financial services and I thought, oh, I'm generally doing the right things. I just discovered I'm like doing HSA is completely wrong. I have an hsa, but I get, I, I put money in but I'm spending it. I'm like, all right, I should be not spending that money.

And it's like, well now tax time is here. In fact, for those of you watching this video, April 15th just passed. Let's talk about what Bolden can do to help people with their taxes. Everything from Roth conversions to planning to anything else that you can think of.

Yeah, I think, you know, a big thing that a lot of people don't think about until they start building more wealth is just how important taxes are. And, and also how you should be thoughtful about, you know, where you're locating your assets. Right. So there's these different vehicles, right? There's taxable accounts, there's tax deferred accounts, and there's tax exempt accounts like roths. Right. Or HSAs. And it's like getting the, getting a diversity of different kinds of savings vehicles is important. And then getting the right kinds of assets and the right kinds of vehicles is also important. But like, what you'll see in our platform is, you know, you kind of build, when you build a plan, it's like your income, your expenses, your assets and your debt. You know, we then are creating forecasts that look at your, like, hey, here's what your income is likely to look like. Here's the federal and the state income tax cost. You know, you can put your cost basis in for your investment. So you can see some of how that gets realized. And then as you look, as you kind of look forward in your life, you're going to see things like RMD is required, minimum distribution. So the government, many of us have saved a lot of money in our qualified 401k IRA buckets. Well, the government wants its money, so it's going to force you to start taking that money out in your 70s. Then it starts taxing it and that the amount you have to take out ramps. So some people realize, oh, I'm going to actually have a lot of income and therefore pay a lot of taxes later in my life. And there are strategies that our users do where they take a much longer term view. They'll look over 10 or 20 years and say, hey, there are things I can do to reposition these assets. Like Roth conversions is a big strategy which is like take money from your qualified asset pool, put it into a Roth. But you want to do that when your income is lower. So there, some folks, they try to engineer lower income. They're like, I actually have enough savings. I want to stop making money, you know, from work and then I want to move money from my qualified into Roth and up to certain, you know, marginal tax rates, get the money into the Roth vehicle and then that can grow tax free. And then it can also be come out, you know, tax free and, or it's also a very efficient way to get money into your estate. So there are these different kinds of strategies that people start putting together when they use our platform, you know, over time.

We talked about spreadsheets earlier, but just as a high level point, what can people do with Bolden that they can't do with their spreadsheets? Especially those of us who love spreadsheets.

Yeah, great question. You know, I think that a couple things. So one is, you know, you've got over 100,000 people that are work actively like using this platform and you know, finding ways to make it better or looking for issues like as you said, you can have this great spreadsheet, but if you have a mistake in one cell and everything's wrong, only you know about it, you're building your own software for yourself. It's not necessarily the most efficient use of your time. You know, we're also, you know, so we're getting feedback from the community. The system is also being kept up to date. Like we're updating federal and state tax rates, we're updating trades. Like it will model different kinds of scenarios where you're based on this stuff. You can link accounts, so you can link your, you know, bank account, mortgage, you know, your, your debt accounts, your investment accounts and kind of that stuff is all kept up to date. So it keeps your net worth up to date. And then we're, you know, we're leaning into AI and like how we can use data to help people see like what, what help people see what other people like themselves have faced as challenges and also good strategies they've taken advantage of. And that's like a human financial advisor is great at this because they, you know, they're pattern matchers, right? You're like, I'm a human financial Advisor. I have 100 to 200 clients. I kind of see what they're facing as they go through their life. And when I talk to you, I'm like, oh, you know, you know, for folks like you, Steve, like, you should think about stuff like this because other clients I've had have done the same thing. Well, we can do the same thing at scale and say, hey, for folks like you, here's things that are good and here's things that could use improvement and here's things to watch out for. Here are the blind spots. A big thing is like blind spots and stuff like that. So it's not just the software, it's software. It's Community, it's classes, it's the fact that it's always evolving. So there's, you know, we try to pack a lot of value into the, you know, 10 bucks a month that.

We charge for folks, wonderful value. And what is it people can expect to see if they set up a plan and they stick to the plan in the months and the years ahead?

Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons we lean into planning is there are some studies that show that people with financial plans end up with about three times as much money as people without financial plans. So now there's some, you know, selection bias. And there are people that have historically spent time on planning or in their spreadsheets. They're also doing other good things. But there really is a economic benefit. So there's that there's being organized. I think for a lot of folks, we call ourselves your financial confidence platform. I think for a lot of folks it's really knowing that they're organized so they have all their stuff in one place. Kind of see where you stand, you see what's possible. Like what are the different things that I could do? And they're building scenarios. So like, okay, here's my base plan. I'm going to work this long, retire at this age, and then I'm going to do this. And then they could have another plan which is like, well, instead of retiring at 60, maybe what happens if I retire at 55 and move to Mexico or retire at 55 and move to Italy or something like that? They can do that. And for many of them, they see that that's possible. And the scarcest resource for all of us is our time. So that's the non recoverable or non renewable resource we have. And I think a lot of folks, as they get older, they really realize like time for myself and my family and like that is becoming increasingly that's more valuable than money. And so they really try to think through how they use that and make the most of it. I do see a lot of, we see a lot of folks that, you know, you don't want to optimize for having like a truckload of money at 90 if you can't, you know, and not using it when you're younger. I think there's a balance, right, of like enjoying your life and, and using your money when you're younger as well and for your family too.

I think there used to be a mantra, get as much as you can and keep it, don't spend a dime. And so what you see oftentimes you see retirees living in two bedroom apartments with seven figure savings just sitting there and they're hoarding it for a rainy day. But the ability to have site beyond sight, so to speak, with personal financial planning software really allows somebody to do more with their lives, in my opinion than they could if they just tried to figure it out on their own.

Yeah, it's our strengths or our weaknesses. I mean we see this a lot too in our community. The people that show up at like 50 to 60 and they've saved up a couple million dollars or over a million dollars. You know, the strength of like being disciplined, being frugal, investing that got them there is their weakness. They can't enjoy it. They can't like learn to spend many people well, so they stay frugal. One thing that's really fascinating, Michael Kitces did a study on this. But people that you know, get to kind of like, you know, couple million bucks, you know, as they have retirement, they keep building wealth over there in retirement. I just talked to Fritz Gilbert, you know, he's, you know, he wrote the retirement manifesto and he's six years into retirement and he was like, hey. I was like, so do you have more money now than when you retire? He's like, I have more money now than when I stopped working six years ago. Just kind of interesting to hear.

There was a study done by JP Morgan several years ago, really. And it talked about how people save. And of course you got to assume that JP Morgan's clients, that data is going to be slightly different. But it's an interesting data point and that is people have a tremendous ramp up in their savings between age 60 and 70, flatlines between 70 and 80 and then goes back up again from 80 plus. And the study also talked about what happens and one of the reasons, and a lot of the reasons really revolve around taxes and required minimum distributions. A lot of people don't even spend any of their savings, at least in their 401k or their IRA until they're required to do so. And because of that you see this massive ramp up in their personal wealth. People do this for a couple of reasons. One of them is because they're afraid they're going to run out of money in retirement, of course. But the other, and it's the one that doesn't get talked about enough, is that they're self funding long term care. And so they think if I have enough money saved, I can fund long term care needed in the future.

Yeah, I feel like this is very often where a coach or A human financial advisor is really valuable, is kind of helping people understand themselves and also making it, giving people permission to spend. You know, sometimes hearing it from a third party, it's like, hey, you know, just seeing like in telling stories like great, you know, you've done a fantastic job Jeff, of building all this wealth and I can see you're really worried about, you know, paying off long term care and you're so therefore you're not enjoying your money. But like, you know, the reality is, you know, you might have 15 healthy years that are, you know, you're really going to be active and doing all this stuff. And then after that like if you say you're 60 years old or something, not you, but like, you know, a friend of mine, he's, yeah, he's in his 60s, like I think I have 10 to 15 years and I really want to make use of this time because you know, at 75 or 80 I might not be as mobile and, or as healthy or whatnot. And don't over optimize for hedging out every risk and not enjoy your life when you're able to because no one's promised tomorrow. Right. And like, you know, there are so many stories of people who, you know, they've done all those great things and but then they like someone has a heart attack and then they're dead and they're just like, okay, well great. They didn't get to kind of like, you know, take advantage of like all this money that they work so hard for and also share it with their family and share those experiences with their family and friends.

And just back to that study that I mentioned a minute ago with JP Morgan, if over 80% and I think was the number over 80% of the people that they studied never touched their retirement savings and they only started withdrawing from their retirement accounts when they had to their prescribed RMDs. The IRS number that they say has to come out really had them running out of money at age 120. Now I don't know about you, but I'd be happy if I got to 90. My grandmother was a centenarian and I can tell you that I don't think she expected that. But 120 is a long way away.

Yeah, well, it depends on how we're living. Right. But yeah, I mean, you know, we all, I think hope to live a long time and, but you know, hopefully we're realistic on it. But you know, if you look at an average 90 year old, they're, they're the 90 years old. Right. It's like, you know, well, what are they doing? You know, they're not necessarily jetting around the world. It's, it's, it's tougher now. I mean, I do think we're kind of in uncharted territory in terms of what's happening with technology and AI and what could happen with medicine. I mean, who knows if we could be 100 years old but physiologically be like 60 or 55, which probably knock on, but you never know. Then I think then that changes things because people might be like, well, hey, I'm happy to exist as a 55 year old for a very long time. Then they're really going to be thinking about wanting to make sure they have enough money and what their world is like.

Yes, sure. Well, speaking of the future, can you give the viewers a sneak peek at what's next for Bolden a little view into the future?

Yeah, I mean we do feel like there's a big opportunity in front of us in terms of what's possible. I mean, I would say that like having, as someone who has, you know, spent my career in Silicon Valley and financial services and now works in fintech and seen like these big tectonic shifts with technology, with, you know, the Internet. I mean it was around when the Internet was born, the web and like, you know, mobile, the cloud. Right. AI feels super real, like, like this could, feels like it's happening and like you can have some magical experiences. So we are leaning into that. We want to use it to help help more people build financial confidence, you know, access, you know, build plans, get literate, see what to do. So we're leaning into AI, leaning into data, you know, thinking about can we use agents. I mean, is there a world where it's like, hey, you kind of, you know, you kind of understand your money, you see what you should do. You know, we help you understand yourself too. Like I, there's many, there's things that I need to do that I haven't done and then like, but I can see that through the plan, like, oh, I said I would do this and I didn't do it. So maybe you need some additional help here and we can help you do that thing if it's like investing differently, if it's like doing a Roth conversion, if it's building an estate plan, but make that easy and less expensive and more accessible and more personalized. So I think that it's an exciting time to be a founder and builder in this space right now and I hope it's good For. For society. I think that we'll see more magical experiences coming. And, you know, even this stuff, what you're doing, like this. This one to many, the fact that you, like individuals, can basically become their own media companies and, like, impact. What do you have? 330,000 subscribers. That's. That's like the size of. I mean, that's, you know, the size of San Francisco almost. Right.

It's like a city, you know, it's a big number. And I try not to think about the number too much, but I try to think about the message, the messaging, what we can deliver to the viewers. But there are times where I'm sitting alone in a quiet room thinking about just the impact. We've had over 50 million views on the channel. We've had 50 million opportunities to help someone. That's a pretty nice outcome, and it's something that I'm very proud of.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's. It's. It's incredible. Like, and I think it. It goes to what's good, you know, that what's out there and, and that people want. There are clearly many people looking for authentic, aligned insights on how to do better, you know, with their money and their time.

You bet. So I think that's a wrap. Now all we need to do is figure out how to get all of this down to 20 minutes, which is a good viewing time for the viewers on this channel. In the meantime, for those of you who have an interest in Bolden, we'll put a link in the description below and also on the banner right about here, right about now. In the meantime, Steve, thank you for your time. I look forward to, at some point, shaking your hand in person rather than doing it via the Internet, I suppose. But we really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today.

Yeah, we'll definitely get together. Yeah. Jeff, thanks for having me on. It's been great, and also enjoyed hearing your story and congrats on what you've built with Holy Schmidt. It's awesome.