No boring ideas: Why great Promotions are more than just great sales copy

Many of the most legendary direct response marketing promotions had a concept built into them that elevated the promotion itself.

A concept that only indirectly had anything to do with the benefits of the product. These were more than simple sales letters or VSLs they were full blown PROMOS.

We start this episode looking at some of those promotions and follow the conversation into more nuanced territory around what makes an editor more promotable, new promotional formats, the nature of relationship building with the prospect and customer, and more.

In this episode I'm joined by Brian Hicks, founder of Angel Publishing, Rob Braddock, the king of "Fintertainment" whose written a ton of big winners in FinPub, and Sean MacIntyre, a senior copywriter with a decade of experience working for the major Agora publishers and working closely with Mark Ford.

In the past four years, Rob Braddock has written and / or chiefed more than $60 Million in financial copy. Connect with Rob at Big Idea Promos.

Sean Macyntire runs the Youtube Channel Copy That!

Brian Hicks publishes at Angel Publishing

FinPub Pro is produced by The Financial Marketing Summit, the #1 networking and marketing conference for financial newsletter publishers, trader educators, and digital financial media.

John Newtson, host and founder of The Financial Marketing Summit can be reached via LinkedIn at John Newtson

Chapters

• 1:48 Clayton Makepeace's Celebrity Coin Promotion
• 8:23 Discussion on the good and bad of selling into market trends
• 17:50 The John Boehner Cannabis Promotion
• 19:56 Rob Braddock's Election Night Promotional Concept
• 27:32 Matt Insley's Armored Car Promo
• 28:30 The $1 million portfolio concept
• 34:13 Joe Schriefer's comparison of customers vs. subscribers
• 38:33 More Promo examples: Meganar. Jetinar, Shark Tank successes and failures
• 43:16 Rob Braddock's "Fintertainment" Concept
• 50:40 Brian Hick's on the Greatness of Bob Ross & why everyone in FinPub should watch at least one show.
• 52:01 Dave Portnoy Hacked American Culture
• 58:02 Promotional Formats from magalog to vsl to fintertainment
• 1:00:23 What forms of content are FinPub customers consuming?
• 1:02:34 Example of a customer relationship to marketing guru Frank Kern
• 1:05:50 Can you create uniqueness for your guru or franchise?
• 1:11:08 How Fintertainment models moves copy away from "claims" and other regulatory issues
• 1:15:15 Finding gurus you can sell.
• 1:22:58 Bill Bonner as the model for gurus
• 1:24:54 How would you elevate or create a kind of a guru brand that you know would be sellable,
• 1:30:49 Why don't publishers invest in building the larger credibility of their gurus? of the
• 1:36:36 Will the industry transition to new media models?
• 1:40:42 Publishers will have to get comfortable with new models
• 1:42:09 The need for new channels as customer demographics change
• 1:50:21 The growth of substack investing newsletters.
• 1:51:22 People will always choose 'their guy' in a sea of information
• 1:55:26 Do customers who consumer long form free content turn in to buyers?
• 2:06:46 Ideas Dominate Newsletter Publishing Regardless of Format

Transcript

Sean Macyntire: 0:00

During the bull market, we didn't have to pay attention to all that stuff because the association that people brought to our packages was crypto go up, right, stock go up. I make money. Yay, yay, yay yeah.

Rob Braddock: 0:12

The conversion rate for like a good promo is now half of what it was in 2018. And those are the people where, if we're talking, we're like they're crushing it. And those are the people where, if we're talking, we're like they're crushing it. Crushing it now is your fucking half of what you were six years ago, which is like what the hell, dude?

Brian Hicks: 0:35

But everyone's like no, we're just going to keep doing the same shit. But there was a group I would say a core group of people here where we bucked the trend, and that's what that's. The role of a legit guru is to buck the trend.

John Newtson: 0:48

All right. So today we've got an esteemed panel of copywriters. Everyone here knows Brian Hicks, whose conversation has FinPub lost its soul. Got like so much feedback from everybody, not just founder of Angel Publishing, but amazing copywriter in his own right.

John Newtson: 1:10

Sean McIntyre been writing copy in FinPub for 10 plus years. Worship Mark Ford, all the big groups, lots of big winners, has an amazing YouTube channel, and then, of course, there's Rob Braddock, who we let come in because it's Rob, that's Rob and that's pretty much it. But the reason I wanted to do this today was there's been a lot of conversations about copy over the last few years and we were just having it earlier about a lot of people how easy it was to sell and how you didn't really have to think. You just had to kind of write oh, crypto's going up, we have a crypto newsletter, buy it. And now people have to think a lot more.

John Newtson: 1:48

And there's an aspect of copy that to me is not a sales letter and I think of it as promo. And so I'll tell you a quick story from Clayton Makepeace back in the direct mail days, when he was selling coins, and I always loved this idea. This, to me, gets at the heart of what promo is is they were selling a rare coin set and before he writes the promo, he took them. He took a bunch of the product and he mailed it to Reagan Thatcher, gorbachev, a whole bunch of people, and so the promo was a picture of Bill Gates was a picture of all these people at the top of the deck and the headline was they've got theirs, now you get yours. And so that is a creative solution where it has nothing to do with the value of the product.

John Newtson: 2:39

There's a concept around the promotion itself that was created that grabs attention, adds credibility, it does things that you wouldn't do if you were just looking at hey, I have these coins, here's the copy that I would write around that it's a promotional idea. And so that was the genesis of this conversation was how do you think like that? And so, to start with, I was like you know, why don't we talk through like why that's important, or how you see that idea of promo versus newsletter or VSL, and then maybe a bunch of other examples, because there's a lot of great ones in this space. So, brian, what's your thoughts on that?

Brian Hicks: 3:22

Well, we used to have a letter here called Like-Minded People, and whenever you are writing a promo or a newsletter, you have to tug on those emotional triggers. That you're one of us, I'm one of you, okay. That you're one of us, I'm one of you, okay. And so that everything that we do here at well, at Angel I can't speak for Agora or any other place, but we always try to connect with our reader through through things like that. Um, you know, I never heard that story before. The gold, the, the, the rare. It's one of my favorites. I've never heard that before, but that is genius. I've never heard that before, but that is genius.

John Newtson: 4:21

But yeah, Clayton, I guess he's the one that wrote the promo is already making a connection to the prospective buyer, the client. And hey look, reagan got his.

Sean Macyntire: 4:24

Now it's time for you to get yours and you want to be like him. Yeah, it's a very direct thing. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, what we're talking about here is stuff that you're going to find in like Don Miller's story brand or like, hey, whipple, squeeze this. Like this is stuff that brand advertisers have been doing for 30, 40, 50 years. You know, ultimately that you tell me that story and I think Michael Jordan on Weezy's box what we're talking about is tapping into every direct response package, every great direct response package, they say like either taps into greed or fear, greed or fear.

Sean Macyntire: 4:57

But if you look at some of the great breakout packages, there's a lot more nuance there. There's a lot more attention to subtler associations. Some of these packages really do put the B in subtle when it comes to stuff like that, and so what you'll find is that you know, the big packages that have broke out for our industry have been a lot like that, where there's been more attention paid to brand or the sort of nascent associations people bring to the products that we're trying to sell. And again, like during the bull market, we didn't have to pay attention to all that stuff because the association that people brought to our packages was crypto go up, stock go up. I make money, Yay, yay, yay.

Rob Braddock: 5:33

Yeah.

John Newtson: 5:34

And I think one of the problems that the industry faces as a whole actually is the amount of sameness, right of sameness, right sameness in the um, the type of content that's delivered. Sameness in the way it's formatted. Sameness in this, in the way it's sold. Sameness in the way that you position a guru. Um, like, it's really common for people not to know that they didn't buy this product from you, because everything is so similar in its tone and expression and like, when you bring a brand, there's, like always been this tradition, direct response that anything related to branding is, you know, bullshit doesn't sell, but it's like, well, there's trillions of dollars sold using it. It's just understanding what it is is very different and it's basically the relationship people have with a company, and so with us it's kind of the guru's brand. It's like people know Brian, people follow Brian. They don't follow me for stock investing advice, because if they did, they would be broke. But, rob, what are your thoughts on this?

Rob Braddock: 6:36

just as a concept, yeah, so everything you said is right and this might not sound. I'm sorry my phone is going off and I have my phone open so I can look at the notes I made, so everyone knows. Um, I think a lot of it actually has to do with transparency, like in a radical amount of transparency, and it might not sound like that at first when we're talking about brand, but the reason everything sounds the same is because everyone's just copying everyone else and that that's not transparent and it's not full of integrity and I really think people throw those words around. But I really think if anyone's going to break out in the future, it's going to be because they have a radical transparency and integrity. Just had the bitcoin having right.

Rob Braddock: 7:43

Every guru on earth was doing bitcoin having promo. We got to do a bitcoin having. You know, even if they weren't like a crypto guy, really, you know it's like someone will put out a, a bitcoin having promo, and it's I can't stand that shit. But they're like okay, you know we can make like some quick money and then move on to the next thing, right? So I would much rather like, I would much rather see someone put out a anti-crypto promo right now and talk about right and talk about when was the last time there's been a hot take in this industry?

John Newtson: 8:23

Well, so I think, like on a basic level, this issue gets to two things. One was the essence of what you said in FinPub has FinPub lost its soul? And the other one is this idea that, like, I don't know how to get attention unless it's just point at the attention that's already there, and one of the things that, like I know about, like, look, we need we sell into trends. It's easier to sell into trends. We should not stop doing that. But if your only reliance on getting people's attention is that, hey, this is a trend that they're already interested in, like you have a creative problem.

Rob Braddock: 8:59

What do you mean when you say we sell into trends? I think I know what you mean. But when you say we sell into trends.

John Newtson: 9:03

I think I know what you mean by it. Bitcoin is going up, so we sell a Bitcoin crypto newsletter. Right Like when cannabis was hot, you had cannabis promos and cannabis products. Right Like, that's a very common. That's part of what we do. It's not the only thing we do and it's not always the thing that we've done. There have been things like great promos in history, like Dow 50,000 that were not.

Sean Macyntire: 9:24

That's coming true right now, right, right. Um why do?

Rob Braddock: 9:27

why do we? Why, I understand what you mean and it makes perfect sense, but just for the sake of friction, why, why Like? Why do we? Why do we do that? Because, all right, let's say we have a, we have a thing going on. You know, we have a publishing business and we don't have a crypto thing and like, yeah, I can see cryptos going up, but I don't, I don't believe in it, right or, or whatever. Why? Why would I like sell, sell into sell into the trend? You know so, and I think that's part of the problem.

Sean Macyntire: 10:10

Why am?

Rob Braddock: 10:11

I? Here's something I've been let me make I'll forget. I actually forgot already just in the time it took me to say I'll forget. You know, when you're doing a writing, a promo, and you talk about like all the predictions, right, that a guru's guru's made, and a lot of times like there's some fancy copywriting fudging going on with that. But I was thinking about this the other day like Facebook came out with like earnings that like a couple of months ago, smashed expectations, right, it was like the big news ago smashed expectations, right, it was like the big news. And blah, blah, blah. There wasn't one effing guru in financial publishing that saw that coming. Every one of you hotshot gurus that like I call this, I call this, I call this my proprietary indicator. Okay, how come no one called that? So we have just people. If the gurus are just reacting to what's already happening, and then, and then we're just selling into a trend that's already happening, like what do I need the reader, what do I need you for?

John Newtson: 11:21

You go ahead.

Sean Macyntire: 11:23

I I'm. I'll defer to you if you want to respond to that first, but I have maybe two things that I would probably say. I mean, I think the first thing is, ultimately we're talking about human psychology and humans. One trick about humans is that they believe that whatever is happening now is going to persist into the future. That's just a fact, and humans are terrible at predicting the future because of that, and so marketers naturally lean into that, naturally want to lean into that, and one of the things that you see with a lot of gurus is you don't see a lot of contrarianism anymore. You know people who buck against trends because they're often ridiculed for that. They're punished for that, oftentimes for years. Like just look at Michael Burry, who was like ran over the coals by his own investors because he spotted the housing bubble in what? 2005? Imagine watching all of your money decline for three years, millions of dollars, until you're proven right.

Sean Macyntire: 12:25

Investment newsletters used to be about ideas like that, because there was a strong little pocket, a market for that. That was not being served. And I think that goes back to what you've been saying, which is all these people are moving in this one direction. Whenever that happens, what you often find is that there's a little pocket of people that gets left behind, and not enough financial newsletters, not enough promos have been really serving that group of people that perhaps don't like crypto, that perhaps don't want the hot new cannabis stock, that perhaps want something that is contrarian, that is interesting. Those are the pockets where you can actually extract a lot of value, because you can deliver a lot of value. There's a reciprocity there that I don't think a lot of more contemporary marketers have been paying attention to, because it's a lot easier to go for the quick money, and I think that's what's happening in terms of what you're talking about.

Brian Hicks: 13:23

Oh yeah, for the quick money and I think that's what's happening in terms of what you're talking about. Yeah, Our industry, you know, we, we used to pride ourselves on Talking about things that the mainstream media couldn't talk about, wouldn't talk about, was just too scared to talk about it. Talk about it. Okay, Angel Publishing we got our birth was really on a single idea, One idea that nobody there was some people out there talking about this but it was one idea that took Angel Publishing from zero to here where it is now, and that was the idea of peak oil.

Brian Hicks: 14:00

Okay, and for years we ran and if you look at Google analytics, you'll see the search history. All that search was from us, from us publishing about it, and then we published a book about it and everything cars, you know, renewable energy, solar wind, all that. And then also, you know, because of peak oil, is the you know it's the end of easy to get cheap oil. All these drillers went back with this revolutionary new technology fracturing, fracking and went back to these old legacy, legacy oil fields like the Permian and the Bakken, and went back and took us, you know, made America the number one oil producer on the planet again. So, the role of for me, the role of a newsletter guru is not to talk, is not to sell into the trend. We're anti, we should be anti-trend, or we create the trend. Um, and that is a very you know. Peak oil is a very good example of somebody in our industry taking an obscure topic and just blowing the doors off of it.

John Newtson: 15:20

And so actually, this is like I agree, I think that's the magic of a great newsletter. I think the issue is that so mainstream trends are really good at grabbing attention. They're just really crappy at converting them right, because you can get the like Bitcoin is going up. The idea then is to buy Bitcoin, and so you have to have some other part of the story that's not there in order to convert it Bitcoin, and so you have to have some other part of the story that's not there in order to convert it, and so, or to take a contrarian view, or to bring something up out of nowhere which is like peak oil, but when it's not like, that's a harder thing on the front end in particular, but it's also what makes a franchise, I feel like, makes it makes a business, is, is, is those kinds of ideas.

John Newtson: 16:04

And so to keep to kind of circle it back to the idea of like promo, it's like I think what we're saying is like there's this issue that we struggle with, which is there's an ease, a promotional ease. With big trends, it's really easy for all of us publishers, copywriters, marketers to either say I'm not going to sell anything to the trend. Then you miss the attention arbitrage that you have, or I'm just going to sell whatever's popular. Then you have a trend letter, which is a great business if you're a trend guy, but everyone's not, and so I think like the idea of coming up with promo ideas and I have an example that was in trend too, but you were about to say something.

Brian Hicks: 16:47

Well, I was just going to say, john, you know it's also a crowded field when you talk about, you know, when you're doing a promo, that's, you know mainstream, you know mainstream trend. I saw I don't remember who this guy, he's an older guy, he's in our industry, but I saw a YouTube ad from him and his first pitch was like hey, stop listening to those 22 year olds that are promoting with TikTok. And you know he's kind of right. You know I maybe I just wasn't paying attention, but man, I am just seeing like ad after ad after ad after ad for algorithms and robo, you know, and I'm just like this is our competition.

John Newtson: 17:30

Well, the algorithms that's a funny thing aside the algorithms promote sameness, right, Because it's like oh, this gets attention. That's why you have dance trends on TikTok, right, Like everybody does the same dance, because the algorithm promotes sameness.

Brian Hicks: 17:43

I mean, we all want the customer, we all want as many customers as we can possibly get, but at what cost?

John Newtson: 17:50

Yeah, but here's, let me throw this promo concept out, because this was perfectly on trend, and one way to look at trends is to be counter trend. It's also to be ahead of the trend where it's like, well, this is what's shifting, like this is a new, the next new thing. Mike Palmer had a talk he did one time where he said it's basically that you're like, well, what's the next part of the story that hasn't been told? And so you're telling that. And so I always think of um.

John Newtson: 18:19

Jed Canty wrote that John Boehner promo for the National Cannabis Investors Institute. So cannabis was huge. There's a big trend. Everyone's talking about it.

John Newtson: 18:36

Boehner this is the promo part of it is John Boehner was a speaker and he was the leading opponent of cannabis legalization on the Hill. Then he retires from that, changes his mind and joins a cannabis company's board. Now they manage because that, like all small caps, need some kind of distribution and eyeballs. They were able to get Boehner to come on and do a promo webinar with them, where he's like, hey, I was against this. Now, I was completely wrong. Here's why.

John Newtson: 19:06

And so the trend was they weren't counter trend, they were saying that one, this legalization is going to speed up. Even the hardest opponents are against it and they found the perfect avatar of that opponent to be on the thing. Like the whole idea of that promo was itself a spectacle, right, but it was on trend, but it was talking about the next part of the trend and that to me is like that's a phenomenal promo because he gets so much attention and then you also have from the customer standpoint. There was a lot of people at the time who were still on the fence like I'm hearing about it but I don't know if I should get on, and so now that perfectly spoke to them. So there's a lot of things that hit with that and it was a big blockbuster. It did phenomenal. I don't remember the numbers right now, but cool promo, not a sales letter or a VSL, a promo.

Rob Braddock: 19:56

I have an example of a promo like promotional thing I did. It's probably one of the biggest flops in the history of financial publishing. Thing I did it's probably one of the biggest flops in the history of financial publishing, I'm happy to tell you about it.

Rob Braddock: 20:11

We can beat that, I'll tell you about it. But I, like I'll tell that story real quick and then eventually I want to come back to it where I think it's bigger than that. I understand, like, what this podcast is about promo or whatever but I think it's much bigger than that and like the I, the reason you have to do think individual promo, like a promo at a time, and like this individual promotion, is because you don't most gurus don't have a, don't have a brand, they don't have a universe Right. So I do want to come back to that. But so, keeping with the theme of like promo, this was, uh, 2018 midterm elections, marijuana was on a referendum in like 11 States. I remember that. So this is going to be like a big deal. Like if 11 States all pass some version of medical marijuana or decriminalization, then I can't remember, but like at that point, it's like 46 states. You know it's almost like de facto federal decriminalization, okay, so I came from the world of politics. I'm like this is my wheelhouse dude. So I came from the world of politics. I'm like this is my wheelhouse dude.

Rob Braddock: 21:26

So the promo was we were going to do live, genuinely live election night coverage of all of the all, like as the votes come in. Like we're doing a CNN panel and it was a Ray Blanco the guru, and we hired Montel Williams to be. He was a big uh uh marijuana advocate. We got David D uh, dan Kennedy's right-hand guy, okay and so. And then the concept was it's going to be like CNN, we're going to watch the results come in, and we actually did this. We're going to watch the results come in and we actually did this. So you'd be like what Missouri's coming in Missouri? Yep, it looks like with 82% of the vote counted, it looks like medical marijuana is now, you know, in Missouri and we'd kick it to Dave D and Dave D had like a map like of like going over each thing. Dude, this was so awesome, it was so great. And then he's pitching throughout. So we do like the update. Blah, blah, blah. So Missouri. So we're going to hear from Ray in a second what that means for all of these pot stocks. You know, blah, blah, blah. So if you want to get like the latest report, the spin was we don't even have the report ready. Ray Blanco was going to stay up tonight. After all, the polls close like up until midnight writing the latest fucking marijuana investment report based on what just happened hours ago. Make sure you're awake, like at seven in the morning, cause that's when the email is going to come through, right, and he's pitched. So we're pitching like click the button now for the whole promo, um, and then we kick it back to Ray and he's like, yeah, okay, well, with Missouri coming in, blah, blah, blah, we do that for the whole night. God, it was so good, like so this is going to be like you know, $5 million, like that night, probably.

Rob Braddock: 23:23

Those are like those days of Agora with the amount of people we had on the hot list. We could see the number of people live watching, watching, and I say watching. Why was this a bomb? The decision was made to host it at like a studio, like off site studio and whatever 2018, whatever they ran tests, everything was good, whatever. It didn't go out. The packets were wrong. So if you're watching it, there's no sound, and then now there's there's no sound, and then like maybe you'd get like a freeze frame of a picture and hear sound, and then maybe you would, you'd hear sound and it would start over from the beginning, like you're hearing the audio from the beginning, but they're they're 30 minutes into the pro anyway super bomb. I think we made like a couple hundred grand the next morning just with like emails we sent out. But I want you to imagine that that did $5 million and just think about so in terms of promotion. That's like that was a that's amazing promotion.

John Newtson: 24:29

That's an amazing story and, sadly, when you couldn't repeat with that story because it's so tied to that, one specific situation and tech could destroy it.

Sean Macyntire: 24:40

Well, no, if you want to change the subject, I want to change the subject, but I wanted to sort of like yoke together that anecdote with the John Boehner promo. With what you X, stock, go up, sell, make a million dollars buy Lambo X pattern.

John Newtson: 25:10

did 30 million.

Sean Macyntire: 25:11

I know.

John Newtson: 25:12

Right, but there were a lot of ones that didn't do anything.

Sean Macyntire: 25:15

Yes, and what I'm saying is that like there are times, like fat times, when those sorts of promos do extremely well just because of the dynamics of the market and demographics that we're speaking to, and then there are times when the market needs something else. Then story tends to do a little bit better. Late 90s same story Stocks, tech stocks go up by tech stocks. That was the story. Nobody needed anything else. Around 2000s they needed something else and it was peak oil. People were more ready to hear different ideas. With pot stocks in particular. That was a fantastic story. With John Boehner switching, that was a fantastic story. All of those are much bigger than pot stocks go up. Pot stocks go up. And I think what we're the. It is incumbent upon us now to find bigger stories that make promotions, that make investment newsletter ideas bigger than what they are, because nobody wakes up sweating into mess it in the morning going I want to fuck a newsletter 100%, 1000%, and what I think we should do is I think there's different like.

John Newtson: 26:26

I want to go through a few examples, more examples, and then hone in on I think there are certain types of big ideas that have been applied to promos that we can go into. Fernando Cruz has done an amazing job in a bunch of ways, and he has kind of some patterns that he repeats in different creative ways, and then I think, kind of where we're leading, though, is that it's more than just the promo. It's how does the editor and guru become more promotable, how does the franchise have an idea that becomes more fundamentally promotable, that allows for more creative things to do, and then there's just the sheer ballsy willingness to try something different and crazy like that. And so do you have any other like promos that you can think of? That, like the idea of the promo itself was a bit of a spectacle and added, rather than just the story of the investment.

Rob Braddock: 27:26

This might have to be one thing. When they like cut and pause, I have to really think about this for a second.

Sean Macyntire: 27:32

Well, I can jump in and then you can go. Yeah, I think about there was a promo that Matt Inslee did where, like there was some code or something like that and they filmed like inside of like a bank armored car, and so they had footage of like the armored car and like the whole premise was like the delivery of like this code in a USB drive that was so valuable, and so, like, the beginning of the promo was all about like the conference of this USB drive to the guru, being like the secret to making money is inside this USB drive, and so it's all about just building up those associations that people have, like, oh my God, like they're transporting this code in an armored car to their offices, wow, and so that's really what Spectacle can do intrigue and, ultimately, investment in people's mind for the things that you're trying to build interest for, without you having to be like and look at all these benefits and look at all these features.

John Newtson: 28:30

This is great and that's where I think of like. I mean, wealthpress did some stuff like that too with the armored car Um. There was the um, I think. I think this went back to to Martin Weiss in 2009, when they were basically going to short the market and everyone was so scared that the market was going to keep going down and so they did their million-dollar contrarian portfolio, where he put a million dollars into an account and said I'm going to put a million dollars of my money into this account and trade it alongside you and that was a huge winner. Of course, it was like at the almost to the day at the bottom of the market. Then they repeated that at the Motley Fool when they did their first back end and they had like a $12 to plus million launch. Then Bill Bonner the Bonner letter what was the name? Oh yeah, they did that with. They had Chris Mayer, who I remember at World Financial Like, this guy has our best track record by far, but we had the hardest time selling him. And then they finally had a great promo for him because they said bills like I'm going to put $5 million of my money into an account and so like, and then showing that right.

John Newtson: 29:40

And then I go back to the trading side and think of that same concept applied in a different way. Tim Sykes, early on, went to I forget how many banks he had to go to. He had to go to, like so many different banks, to pull out a million dollars in cash of his money. And he had a million in cash and it looked so good that he had big-name rappers stealing his photos without him in it and saying it was like them, because it's so hard to get a million cash. And so that idea of putting real money into stuff I did this in a launch in 2009, 2010, where we put 50 grand into an account and had the guy's mother follow his instructions to make the trade and show that she could make successful trades, and so like that is like a repeated idea. Right, yeah, um, any others that jump out, we can get to Fernando's long.

Rob Braddock: 30:34

I was thinking about this Um, a lot of that like the spectacle type of stuff was with the hot lists, a lot of the times Right, and I was thinking. It just hit me the other day I was like I don't does, no, no one does Hollis anymore. I was like when, when, when who's done a hot list recently?

John Newtson: 30:56

Um, andrew Taylor just talked about the test when they were like, can we get rid of these? And he's like, so, let's like so, let's actually try doing a hot list and just starting to promote the promo for the same amount of emails and the same amount of time, and the hot list won. I forget it was like 60%, 70%, higher. Who did that? Alta, oh, alta.

Brian Hicks: 31:15

We're going to try that idea of hot list by building it on our Discord channel. So it's still in the works. I'll let you know how it does. But you know we're we're literally trying to figure, just like everybody else, um, just trying to figure out how to. You know, um, you know, collect hot names. And right now I know, uh, oxford club is having a really good success with their war room, is it called? Yeah, and so we're going to try to do the same thing here, and my idea is, instead of us always having to try to go after the customer, I want the customer to wake up in the morning and say, hey, I got to jump onto this angel discord channel to find out what's going on. So the market's already right there for us.

Sean Macyntire: 32:07

Okay, we'll see yeah, yeah, I mean that that goes back to just branding, like literally building something that people gravitate towards, rather than like making something that people get despite you know their misgivings. And so, ultimately, I think what you're doing, what war room has done, is, you know like what a lot of these tiktok old, you know like. Meet Kevin on YouTube is another example where he's just in discord and being like hey, I'm making, I'm buying calls on Tesla today, you can join on this trade, and then he only shows on YouTube the ones that work and that's it yeah.

Sean Macyntire: 32:40

Yeah.

Rob Braddock: 32:42

I think that, again, that's the. The radical transparency is part of the like as part of that, and the what we're talking about in terms of like the spectacle and promotion and hot lists right, that's all part of entertainment. What I've been like pushing right, it's like from a front end perspective, because if you do entertaining stuff initially and you build the brand and people come into your universe, then not only do you have someone like forever and a million different other potential revenue streams, like all of those guys like have there's guys like that make a million different other potential revenue streams. Like all of those guys like have there's guys like that? Make a million dollars a year selling coffee mugs?

Sean Macyntire: 33:36

like Crowder right.

Rob Braddock: 33:37

Right Coffee mug like Republican, like shit talker. I don't get the connection. It makes a million bucks a year doing it, cause whatever he gets people into the universe and once you have people in that universe, then I think you don't have to do like. Not everything is a like. We got to come up with a crazy promotion for this thing. We got to come up with a crazy promotion for this thing. You have the people in the universe because they came in on like a more traditional branding. Know like, trust. I know like and trust this guy.

John Newtson: 34:13

And selling the relationship first like a great front end, a great like acquisition piece in my mind was always that, like you might be selling a particular idea, but you're selling the idea from within the context of the guru's worldview, because you have to sell that relationship. And if you can sell that relationship you have a lot more leeway afterwards. But if you never sell that relationship and you just sell, the trend which I think we kind of alluded to earlier is all you have is a buyer, not a customer. And I had a conversation last Friday with Joe Schriefer and he made this point. I thought, really well, he's like. Really well, he's like, he's like coming back and he's like you know.

John Newtson: 34:49

I want to kind of write some of the wrongs that I felt like I did first time around, right, and one of them is this idea that like, just because somebody buys something doesn't mean they're a subscriber, right, a customer isn't a subscriber. A subscriber is someone who subscribes to your ideas. They subscribe to this guru, they subscribe to the story of the business, whereas a customer just bought the newsletter and he could care less, right, and so like that distinction, I think, is what you're getting at with branding and everything else.

Sean Macyntire: 35:17

And there's levels to that too. You know, there's a buyer, there's a customer, there's a fan, and then there's a disciple and ultimately, what we can accomplish, what one can accomplish with like what you're trying to do, is something that brand agencies have been doing for years and years, which is basically leveraging earned media, which is, if you have disciples, you know at the highest level that you can go. You have these people that are literally going to be doing advertising for you. Why do we all know Andrew Tate's name? You know, like that, he has disciples. He doesn't just have fans, right, he has people who actively will go to the mat for him.

John Newtson: 35:59

You know, for better or for worse. A great story from in the industry on that was in, I think, 2005. There was a big $25,000 Agora marketing conference and Porter Stansbury spoke and he's like there is no model. We're all different, but in his model because he wasn't doing free at the time he's like okay, if you don't pay anything you're not listening to me. If you pay $100, you realize I'm talking in the room or something right. And he goes up the chain and he's like I don't believe you're actually listening to me until you've paid $25,000 for the Atlas Club or whatever. He's like then I have your attention and that's like the disciple. He's like I have that guy's attention, like he's listening, I can help him. Everyone else has marginal layers of both attention and, I guess, loyalty to the business.

Rob Braddock: 36:47

Earlier about how everyone sounds the same and, like you know, if you changed a couple lines of every promo, you could swap out guru names and the promos could stay the same and other would be different. But and there's a, there's a few gurus that you can't do that with, where they have their unique voice right. So, like he was getting them in like differently than how I think, like the uh, the future is, but uh, he can do that because you know Porter was had hot takes or contrarian.

John Newtson: 37:35

Hey, he, he, he did not have a crypto newsletter. Yeah, he's one of the only ones that said no, I'm not Cause, I don't cause, I don't believe in it, so I'm not going to do it, we don't.

Brian Hicks: 37:45

No, we don't have a crypto now. Thought about it. We're about to launch a. Well, this goes back to the unique idea of our industry. I'm helping launch a new crypto that's based on the coin will be backed by gold, but gold that's not above ground. It's gold that's been proven, a proven resource that's still in the ground. So that is I mean. For me, this is probably the most excited I've been in a very long time. So it's you know and that's the thing Every guru, every newsletter has to have. You know who is Bill Bonner, what's he stand for. You should be able to like right off the top of your head. No, no, right away. A lot of people in our industry. You can't do that, yeah.

John Newtson: 38:33

And then creating a promotion around somebody. That's where, like to your point before about, like you know, you always have to have a great promo or creative idea if nobody gives a crap about the guy. Creative idea if nobody gives a crap about the guy. Um, but before we go into, I wanted I really do want to dive into, like, how do we make a franchise and a guru like more promotable? Let's run through just a few more examples. Um, if I can, because I'm gonna, it's an anatomy if I say I forgot to do these, because fernando has done a bunch of amazing things. Right, he had. They gave away Bitcoin as part of their Bitcoin promo. Right, so you would get Bitcoin back, and that turned out to be a really good win for their people. He did the Meginar, which was the webinar with the most –AR, where the webinar was live on a private jet flying to Switzerland. What was another one that he did? He did Glenn Beck, which is a big name with an audience.

Rob Braddock: 39:39

That was a really good one. It was interesting because at the time, like if you remember how that was done, like that was Glenn Beck's show. It wasn't just like the Bonner idea or John Boehner, that was a cool idea, right, but the Glenn Beck idea essentially the promo was a Glenn Beck show, right, when he was doing the chalkboard stuff and flipping it over and writing all that stuff out, he turned Glenn Beck's show into a promo. That was like really good. He came with audience, he was rating fans.

John Newtson: 40:13

And then a version of this that didn't work as well was Raging Bull tried to do the Shark Tank Angels and Entrepreneurs, and Money Map Jet again had Robert Herjavec from Shark Tank on their Angels promo and it did great. So they got Damon John to do something, but it was a really good example of, I think, why things don't like. It's a big name but it didn't work at all Because they basically had him saying stuff like uh, my team did a research who's the best trader in america? And it's. This guy had nothing to do with damon john's shark tank experience, the, the private investing, any of the things that he was a authority for and a celebrity for, and they just tried to make it like have him say this is the best trader in the world and you know it didn't really work.

Sean Macyntire: 41:05

Uh, similar promo to that was the neil patel promo that moneybap did. Um, you know, it was like neil patel's deal flow and that was the one with herjavec? Oh god, well, it wasn't with herjavec, it was before that, because it was with um mike ward was the the, the host and he was speaking to to Neil Patel to talk about like private deal flow.

John Newtson: 41:28

Yeah, I thought. I thought that's the one on the yacht right. It was before. Oh, they did a version before that.

Sean Macyntire: 41:33

Okay, yeah, and the one with Neil Patel. Um yeah, that was all about, like you know, private deals and deal flow and stuff like that, but that that promo was really differentiated because of just how incredible the offer was. Like you want to talk about like differentiating yourself based on spectacle. That offer was like way differentiated because of that.

John Newtson: 41:52

But Well, the whole franchise. So Jed, with both those the National Institute for Cannabis Research or investors and Angels and Entrepreneurs basically created what the franchise should be as part of the initial promo, and so the offer construction was integrated into what the business was going to be for the customer.

Sean Macyntire: 42:12

Yeah, yeah. Imagine that making your fulfillment before you try to sell it.

John Newtson: 42:18

Crazy, crazy. Did we have a list of other ones? I thought I had a couple more that were different. So, like in here there's like guys like so, just as a kind of a summation. Then you have things like Glenn Beck and Boehner, who you have a big name, a celebrity, come in, that is relevant, that's key relevant. Then you have things that are like giveaways, like the bitcoin thing. Then you have things like hey, the experience of this promo, like your um election night promo or the jet nar or something, is like itself, like the format of the of the promo is a bit of a spectacle itself. You have offer spectacle, um, and then you have, I think, your Fintertainment thing, which maybe we can cut a piece in later to show people. It's basically like Anthony Bourdain on the road kind of promo.

Rob Braddock: 43:16

Yeah, not exactly, but yeah. So the idea of Fintertainment is. I have to give a shout out to Misha Brent, who like co-created the idea with me and like pushed me to do it, cause I was like very reluctant and old school like for a while, right, but then I just kept seeing stuff like go down, go down and down across the board. I don't know what angel stuff is, but I was talking to someone from one of the Agora pubs the other day asking them like you know what what are your conversion rate? You know, people are pretty open about that kind of stuff Like what do you need to work for to go external and whatnot? And it's essentially almost exactly half of what it was like in 2018. Like a uh, the click through rates are half. The conversion rate for like a good, a good promo is now half of what it was in 2018.

Rob Braddock: 44:20

So and those are the people where, if we're talking, we're like they're crushing it. Those are the people where, if we're talking, we're like they're crushing it. Crushing it now is your fucking half of what you were six years ago, which is like what the hell, dude? But everyone's like no, we're just going to keep doing the same shit. So that's why we're like, ok, like what's got to be different, and that's why I think like, yeah, the entertainment thing was born. Sorry, was I supposed to go on a entertainment rant or not? No, I like, and that's why I think like, yeah, the entertainment thing was born. Sorry, was I supposed to go on a entertainment rant or not?

Sean Macyntire: 44:48

No, I like this Okay.

Rob Braddock: 44:50

So yeah, sort of going back to like everything we said about integrity and no like and trust and have a brand and bring people into your universe, and then all that, and then multiple streams of revenue than multiple streams of revenue. Um, it's not just like that. The first one that we did, which no bullshit is coming out today in hours, um yeah, is the con. It's a lot of people pulling you, pulling Right.

Rob Braddock: 45:23

And a lot of potential clients going. We're going to wait to see how this first one does before we kind of check, right, so. So the idea is not just that. The idea is that a way to make money is essentially ancillary. All of us participate in some way with some form of entertainment. Right, us participate in some way with some form of entertainment, right, we watch Yellowstone and, like you'll binge watch it for like three, four or five hours, right, and then the next thing you know, there's Yellowstone beer in the fricking supermarket.

Rob Braddock: 46:01

It just so happens that the the first idea that was picked up Chris Rowe, true Market Insiders, and this is called Uncommon Opportunity yeah, it's the idea of taking the Anthony Bourdain show and mashing it with a financial thing. The pitch was always like okay, have you seen the Anthony Bourdain show? Yeah, okay, you like it. Yeah, okay. Have you seen the Anthony Pordain show? Yeah, okay, you like it. Yeah. Imagine if, at the end of the show, he was like oh, yeah. By the way, if you want to get like the recipes for all, like all the food you saw today, including that like Nona who made the secret sauce in her kitchen, you can get the Sicily cookbook Just go on my website and get it. He would have sold $10 trillion worth of that stuff. Right, so it's. But that's not just entertainment, it's not just that idea. That's the first and probably the easiest.

John Newtson: 46:56

I'm trying to give people like a core. I haven't seen a visual right Like because it looks like that, like. So here's the here's the editor, the, the editor of the guru is like on film he's on the road, he's traveling, he's talking in different locations.

Rob Braddock: 47:09

Yeah, so he's investigating. He's investigating an investing opportunity, but he's not doing like an hour long sit down with the CEO in the office. He goes to this town and there's a backstory of the town and the rise and fall of the town, and he sits down with the bar owner and it's unscripted. He sits down with the bar owner and I was like, hey, what are you hearing? Like what's this? What you know? Give me the inside scoop. And they're literally doing shots of tequila, like 10 in the morning. And then, uh, you know this, uh, this particular thing is it ends up being we reveal that it's healing. And this particular thing is it ends up being we reveal that it's helium, like he's investigating a helium drilling thing and it's on Navajo land. So then we go out and it's gorgeous man. We go out to this 4,700 acre ranch with a drone shot and a Navajo leader with his horses who's like, who sort of like gives his blessing. You know, he's like, again, all unscripted. We're like, hey, man, tell us, like, what do you think about the, the helium stuff? And so it's a show.

Rob Braddock: 48:16

The idea of entertainment, where everyone needs to go is entertainment, like I would watch this show on netflix anyway. Oh yeah, by the way, there's a way you can make money, right. So another example would be it doesn't have to be that like just that style. If you're a day trader, how would you do that? Well, there's like there's a way to do it. I promise you, in the next couple years, there will be a show similar to an idea of, like the real house, the real housewives of day traders. So that will be a show.

John Newtson: 48:51

Like this is actually. There's a lot of stuff that's happened here actually, so I'm going to go back, throw back to Tim Sykes, the probably original trading influencer he got. He got notoriety originally because he was featured in this, this kind of like crazy magazine called, uh, just trader, which was like wall street traders and all this other stuff, but they were like having like crazy, like wolf of wall street parties was what brought down that group, um, but he was featured in there. And then he started going on like these different reality shows like there was one that was something like that like way ahead of its time, that was trading or making money focused, I forget which, and he was the young jerk on there who was crushing it and then he started doing, got PR. He went on like he got banned from CNN Is it CNN or he was on Below Deck.

Sean Macyntire: 49:44

He was on Below Deck.

John Newtson: 49:45

Yeah, but he got banned from one of the news shows because he brought models in and bikinis to carry his charts, stuff like that. But he played it up right, so he was trying to be like entertaining. And then you have, with the success of Shark Tank and other shows. Now you have Darren Marble, who founded Issuance, which is a cap raise platform for reggae and stuff. He has Going Public, which is a show about like it's a reality show about a company going public and they're trying to obviously get. And then you have Unicorn Hunters with like Steve Wozniak and Lance Bass from NSYNC doing kind of like the Shark shark tank for startups kind of thing as well. So this is a thing that's happening, this transformation of, or combination of, media entertainment models with investing more and more.

Brian Hicks: 50:40

I used to make my all my new employees and even my old employees. I always made them watch a half hour episode of Bob Ross. Bob Ross, his business model is no different than our business model. The show was free, you can just watch it on PBS Right. And the entire time, as he's painting, he's telling you a story. He's invisible, he's selling invisibly to you, because at the very end of each show he said hey, you know, drop us a line, we send out a newsletter. I might be in your town next week or next month or whatever, and then he would collect all those names. And then what did he do? Sold him paint supplies, so I think of.

John Newtson: 51:26

And he made, did he? Do? He sold them paint supplies. So I think of, and he made a fortune.

Brian Hicks: 51:30

He made a fortune, he made a fortune Based on.

John Newtson: 51:32

I was having a conversation with Adam Richardson about your entertainment and we ended up talking about Rick Steves Rick Steves Europe on PBS. He built a I think it was like a $70, $80 million business on the back of that where he was doing tours and backpacks and everything else. Because you just followed along with him in the video and like he built a relationship, you like how he travels, you like what he's and he built a whole business off of media like that. So we know it works, you know it works.

Rob Braddock: 52:01

Someone who's done a great job of this. Accidentally, I is Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports. So I think like to wrap your head around it, because I don't think, like, does everyone have to do entertainment? No, like, could you just like do a newsletter for the next 20 years and make a killing? Yeah, some guys probably will, but Dave Portnoy is like hacked American culture. But Dave Portnoy is like hacked American culture and like it was.

Rob Braddock: 52:26

He started with a free gambling like gambling picks newsletter that he would hand out. And now, if you go there, like during the pandemic, there's like no sports, so he couldn't bet on sports. He started day trading and was live streaming it and was like losing millions of dollars, right, and it was so entertaining I loved it, right. And so, like, I'm one of the people that you were talking about, like, I came into, I started watching Dave Portnoy do pizza reviews. Oh, yeah, right, years ago. And then, the next thing, you know, like, oh, now I'm on the website. And the next, the next thing, you know, they had for a minute they ended up stopping it because I I signed up for barstool gold. I don't pay for shit, but I was paying like five bucks a month for barstool gold, and then they would be like, oh, we're doing this special whatever you can get these purple barstool sweatpants for whatever. I have two pairs of purple barstool sweatpants and then, and that, you, two pairs of purple barstool sweatpants and then you know all the stuff that he's doing. Then they have all these other brands under the barstool thing, which again was a free picks like newsletter, you know, betting picks, and now they have like 20 different brands and each one has a podcast and each podcast has merch and they do events and all of that.

Rob Braddock: 53:53

All of that because people were entertained and then they got into the universe and now they're there, like, I might want to really be in your universe, right, like, and so, instead of thinking about this is where, like, copywriters are going to have to become copy producers and gurus, like, especially if you're like trying to find a new guru. You know, I'm sorry, but the track record brand beats track record every day of the week. Some of the worst track record people are the ones selling the most stuff right now. Right, but I want to get into the universe, like, I want to know the other stuff that you do. You know, like I don't know. You like have a motorcycle and like I want to know. I'm like, yeah, this is like a cool guy that I want to be associated with.

Brian Hicks: 54:46

That's what we do in our discord channel. If you go on our discord channel, I bet you 50% of the stuff that we talk about is about the economy, investments, the other stuff, hey, I just got back from Florida with my wife and, you know, play pickleball every day.

Rob Braddock: 55:01

This is the this, this is the cool stuff, and this is why, when you're trying to find a guru, like, gurus are going to have to be interesting, right, they're going to have to be able to talk on camera. They're going to like. If you follow Porter's Instagram, this is where I'm like Porter, please God. And this is with like all do respect Like the Porter's brilliant, but he's posting awesome shit that he's doing on instagram, like um, constantly fishing what is it? Deep sea fishing with fucking sailfish and and I'm like bro, this is this is the thing. No, he's posting on instagram and like eight people see it to the fish and are right on the boat.

Rob Braddock: 55:42

Part of the not only would I want to come in on that and just like cool, I want to follow along on this thing. Oh yeah, how does how this guy make all this fucking money?

John Newtson: 55:51

Oh, so Tim Sykes, he did this. He's done so many like hilarious things that I remember him telling me that they did, and this is literally so. Like I met Tim in the beginning when we helped him launch his first uh newsletter service and and like I remember like having the argument with him that he should show his statements that showed he actually turned 12,000 into 4 million rather than just the profit thing that he owned, um, and he was like this very like quiet, thoughtful, like it was, it was an act, and then he morphed into that person and so at the point that, like later on we were sitting down in, was it Austin? It was Zach, I think it was Austin. It was LA, and Tim comes in. He just got back from Vegas, he drops his backpack and literally stacks $40,000, fell out of his bag, like he's already, like he morphed into that guy. It was hilarious.

John Newtson: 56:45

But he did this thing where on there was a they joke they call her the Instagram madam. It was a. It was an agency where you could pay and they would get all the Instagram girls to to advertise your handle, and so for his birthday he had all the Instagram models like hold a sign up when they're turned around or whatever. Like happy birthday to Tim and he just sat on Instagram and all these dudes were like oh my God, how do I be like you? And he's like oh, thanks, man, buy my shit. Thanks, man, buy my shit. Over and over again. So like that idea that, like people see stuff on Instagram, they're like why are all these girls Well, he paid 15 grand for them to do it and like how do I get in that position?

Brian Hicks: 57:28

Here's how I did it Buy my stuff you remember. Rest in peace. Jim Dines Every conference back in the day, dines wherever the conference was. He would contract out the local model agency and you used to call them dinettes.

Sean Macyntire: 58:00

And he would hire these beautiful women to man his booth at these conferences and his booth, his booth, was always the most crowded one. All because guess, it relates to hot, sexy models as well, you know, as all things do. But it really comes down to like let's talk about what we're talking about here, you know, because we're giving specific examples. But what are we really seeking for? We're looking for the magalog. That's ultimately what we're talking about here. You know, there was a period of time where sales letters were the thing, and then somebody came up with the idea of, like, what if we disguise a sales letter as a magazine? And it just took off in terms of response. And then came the booklog, and then came the VS. We are just looking for the next format to convert what we have that we know is fatiguing, into something that feels bigger than it is.

Brian Hicks: 58:57

That's why we're starting to test stuff on Discord.

John Newtson: 58:59

I would say that there's a couple of things there. One that relates to both of those. One is like you're a hundred percent right, a hundred percent Right, and those format things traditionally from a promotional standpoint were like the you know it's disguised, that's why it works Right. You can't tell immediately that it's an ad and that's why, like, oh, it breaks through, that like kind of attention resistance. Um, but the mag along and book log were tied to a delivery format of direct mail. Yeah, e-letter comes along. You have a delivery format in email.

John Newtson: 59:35

The VSL, as video comes on, becomes more like it got through the webinars. The same thing. It's a format that people were used to getting content on, and so then you put promotion in that content form and the two mixed together with Finnertainment and like that kind of docu-series kind of approach. Now you're saying this is how you watch stuff, but your delivery content then has to in that model. If that becomes your promotional model, your content delivery model has to also then follow that. Like they have to be merged together or else it doesn't really work and so it changes the entire nature of the business, just like the people like Cody Sanchez and other people who have social first kind of businesses their whole content production system in staffing is built around social. Yeah, then they have their newsletter.

Brian Hicks: 1:00:18

Yeah.

John Newtson: 1:00:19

So it will change the nature of the business.

Rob Braddock: 1:00:23

The big miss with the people who don't get it is because they associate it, you know, forever. People say like, oh, we got to go younger, we got to get the younger people. And then everyone says, no, you can't do younger right, because they just don't buy. It's always going to be 45 to 75.

John Newtson: 1:00:41

45 to 60. I think these are sweet 45 to 60 white Republicans.

Rob Braddock: 1:00:45

Fine, right, that could all very well be true, that's fine. But and then those people, the people that are 40, eventually become that age and then become your customer. But what those people are missing is that it's a format change. Like the person who's 15 years old right now I'm just using a very young age for like hyperbolic explanation is not going to be opening up an email and clicking it. I don't think you know, 40 years from now, when they're now like the target demo, there will be some new delivery mechanism.

Rob Braddock: 1:01:28

So people are missing it because they associate like, oh, you want to do like this entertaining stuff. No, I don't want to go for the younger kids. It's not about going for the younger kids. Like 60 year olds are watching Joe Rogan, you know, or watching Yellowstone listening to Joe Rogan Joe Rogan, by the way, another perfect example of a universe you know he does three hour long uh podcasts which people listen to. So that shows I feel like you could be entertaining. People will listen to your stuff. It doesn't have to be a five minute video and then, like you know, he'll interview a guy about aliens building the pyramids and then, like he's selling alpha brain like supplements or some shit, right, I mean it's.

Rob Braddock: 1:02:12

But once you're in the universe, man, you know and you're like this is my guy, because he has a world view you're, yeah, you're in the universe and like, okay, yeah, and the ufc is one of those things, and alpha biohacking is one of those things. Like if you, if you were going all out as a guru, like, yeah, cool Trade. Like you're super into motorcycles or whatever, and like, so am I and like this and that and you go sport fishing and oh yeah, trading is also one of the things you do.

John Newtson: 1:02:34

Right, I have a great memory of how this must look. On the customer perspective, I remember I was at this Internet marketing event with when I was working with make peace at you know, um, and I was talking to this guy. Frank Kern had just spoke and this guy had, you know, he's like 20, making you know, 70, 80 K on his own business for the first time and he's like, he was so excited to meet Frank Kern and I remember him talking. He's like Frank is everything that he's. He literally said this he's like Frank is everything that I want to be and he's like frank is everything that I want to be.

John Newtson: 1:03:06

And he's like, and he goes down the list, he surfs, he does this, he does that, he just went down this list. It's like he's everything that I want to be. And I was like, oh my god, like that's the avatar, like he was so like, like just overwhelmed with a chance that he could run up and talk to the guy who was literally his hero because he was successful in a non-traditional way, lived a lifestyle on his terms that happened to match who he was and what he aspired to. And so I always remember that it's like he's who I want to be.

Brian Hicks: 1:03:34

It's like like-minded people. John, yeah, it's almost like he knows something. So, just to get back on the email thing, 91% of all email doesn't get open. So and I, you know, I started in this business in 94 and I can remember, I can still remember Bill and Mark saying um, you know, the mailbox is getting crowded, it's getting crowded and email is definitely overcrowded now.

Brian Hicks: 1:04:01

And so we, we're doing, we're, we're taking on a different approach here. Now we're starting to test other things. We can be called omni-channel, where we hit them with everything that we can get TikTok, youtube, instagram, texting, sms, past couple of years instead of us chasing down the customer. I want the customer to chase us down, and that's why we're trying to build this Discord community to where it's. You know, it's people. We don't have to ask them to join, they ask us to join. And so I think that's where, for me, I always ask, I ask my employees what's the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Right, you know. I mean, besides, you know, go to the bathroom or whatever. Do you check your email? No, I check my phone, I check my text messages, I check, you know, social media, and I think that's where we got to be.

John Newtson: 1:04:58

Over time. Yeah, I think it's interesting to say that because my interview or conversation with Matt McGarry, who was acquisition for the Hustle and Milk Road, he had a thing about the kind of morning brew world's concept of content in that it was that it was like they're trying to build habitual content. I just want to check this real quick. In the morning it's a thing that's part of your day and I thought that was a really interesting frame, that habitual content, which is exactly what you're saying.

Brian Hicks: 1:05:27

I mean, newsletters aren't going away, email is not going away, it's just a very, very crowded space.

John Newtson: 1:05:32

right now, the direct mail box is no longer crowded. Yeah, I think that's one of those things that especially on the back end, like mailing to the house file is probably really productive.

Sean Macyntire: 1:05:45

I think more people need to go back to physical fulfillment, especially for high-ticket products. Yes, yeah.

John Newtson: 1:05:50

Now to transition a little not transition, but to kind of pull out a point here about like the franchise and standing out, like I think that you can build a guru in ways that are totally unique, that you could never mistake him for someone else, right? And I think there's less energy put into that than there probably should be. And so I have, I have, I have a dream for Charles Mizrahi, who a lot of you know, you guys did work with him, you know him. He's very New York, um, he's born and bred in New York. He traded on the floor, he was a Barron's top-ranked money manager. He's a value investor, he's a Buffett acolyte, he's an Orthodox Jew Very New York.

John Newtson: 1:06:34

And so my dream for him was and we never really got it launched in a way that I thought would have been good, maybe we're too far ahead it was the Park Avenue Investment Club, avenue Investment Club, and the idea was to make him like Mr Big in Sex and the City, mr New York, with the black car limo, new York locations, walking around the city, like everything is, like he's plugged into the New York financial scene and social scene in his community and really bring that forward.

John Newtson: 1:07:02

And it was way too early, like the media wasn't there. But I always thought that that idea of like taking someone like that who has a strong connection to like in his case, a place but it doesn't have to be a place that is associated with finance and making him like kind of like the touchstone avatar of like New York investor, like that could be an amazing brand if you did it right. You could also do it terribly and it wouldn't work, but I think there's a way to do it that is probably easier now than it would have been 10 years ago. I think we thought about it because of like the way that media works and the way it works, and so I think those ideas like that are probably an area that is really ripe and rich for creativity in the space to stand out.

Brian Hicks: 1:07:48

We used to call him Uncle Chuck, but that's a good example of where branding beats track record every day of the week. Charles had a great track record, but we just could not figure out how to sell him at all and I don't know, has Agora figured out how to sell him?

John Newtson: 1:08:06

He's doing well at Banyan, but he's not the biggest. But, yeah, it's harder because he's right and for someone like that in particular, I feel like it's important. If you have that situation, okay, well, it's not the ideas of the investments that's getting people excited. So then, what else do you have to sell?

Sean Macyntire: 1:08:25

Just to stick on Charles for a second. If you're going to sell Fentertainment to anybody at Agora, the person you want to talk to is Aaron DeHug.

John Newtson: 1:08:32

Well, that's problematic, unfortunately. Oh yeah, aaron just left Banyan.

Sean Macyntire: 1:08:37

Then, never mind, you're SOL my bud. That's funny, dang. Yeah, no, because of all the publishers at Agora, who Aaron was the one who actually like got video that got and really understood what we're talking about here and understood that, like the business needs to go in that sort of direction and, yeah, he would be the person that you would want to talk to to self-entertainment. Yeah, he would be the person that you would want to talk to to self-entertainment, because everybody else who's currently at Agora right now, like Agora, had to circle the wagons a little bit, and you're not going to circle the wagons over the crazy asshole who wants to try a bunch of new things.

Rob Braddock: 1:09:20

No offense, I have it tattooed on me.

Sean Macyntire: 1:09:25

No, but here's the thing, Mark Bill they know that you're right. We I think we're all sitting here we know that you're right. And it's not the entertainment that's right, it's the need for that new format, the need to start paying attention to brand, the need to start really getting back to what this business is about, which is establishing a relationship with customers.

John Newtson: 1:09:43

This is funny because I think yesterday right Porter sent out an internal letter and he brings up the idea of brand and direct response and how it needs to be more than just direct response and that the relationship is important.

Rob Braddock: 1:09:56

Yeah, yeah, no, I pitched. I pitched a show idea to Porter like a year and a half ago. He was like no.

John Newtson: 1:10:04

Strong opinions yeah, yeah, yeah, he has strong opinions.

Rob Braddock: 1:10:07

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian Hicks: 1:10:10

But yeah, just for the record, you know, when internet was being born Taipan my old division that I worked for we were the first ones to actually embrace the internet. We had our first website, started building an email list, and Bill Bonner was like this is going nowhere. But you know, bill is smart, he's smart enough to realize when you know maybe he doesn't know everything, and so he allowed us to do it, and you know. Then he started daily reckoning.

John Newtson: 1:10:46

Yeah, I think his um just as an aside, I think his willingness to let everyone experiment is probably the only way that they could have transitioned from direct mail to the internet, because a lot of different ways you could have gone, yeah, and a lot of different ideas and people be able to settle out and figure out hey, this works Like. If it was just a command structure straight down, they might not have made that transition so well.

Rob Braddock: 1:11:28

One of the things that just popped into my head so it's kind of a slightly disjointed but not totally is with the idea of like entertainment, especially, you know, bringing people into your universe, front end in an entertaining fashion. The the more you go towards entertainment, the further away from ftc scrutiny you are. And so, like right now, man, like what I'm seeing, are people starting to use language that they weren't using in 2020.

John Newtson: 1:11:52

They weren't taking a year and a half Right.

Rob Braddock: 1:11:54

So it's like guys, fuck man, is that cycle just going to keep repeating itself?

John Newtson: 1:11:57

That's a phenomenal point is that like these big kind of promotional ideas because you're relying on that or you're relying on the relationship with the? It's less dependent on claims.

Rob Braddock: 1:12:09

In this first promo we're doing, for example, this first entertainment promo. There's no testimonials in there, there's zero claims in there, there's no percentages in there, there's no talk about previous stock picks in there, nothing. And you might hear that if you're in the industry and go, what? That's fucking impossible. No, it's like it's a very entertaining show that builds trust and credibility with the guru. And then, like I said, and at the end, oh yeah, like, if you want to find out everything about this thing, just go ahead and get this report. But you know, so I can sleep well at night.

Sean Macyntire: 1:12:43

No, it's not going to be a knock on the door.

Sean Macyntire: 1:12:46

I the thing that I like about that is it reminds me of like plague of black, black debt, or even the E-myth, revisited. Like if you read those books and you get to the last page, it's an order form that you can send in, like the book is a book. It's not like it will mention the newsletter every now and again, but in passing, but it's like you'll read the book and be like if you're really captivated by that idea, like there's never a point in the book where it's just like go to the last page and send this in because then you'll make a bunch of money. No, it's just. It's just a natural object, a person's experience and acknowledging that there are going to be some people that will want to take action after that, naturally, it's the art of the invisible sail.

Brian Hicks: 1:13:38

That's how Bob Ross, that's how he made his fortune. You had no idea when you were watching the Bob Ross video that he was a salesman the entire time, until the very end.

John Newtson: 1:13:48

And even then you were like you still didn't get it and talk about like having a persona that people to this day love.

Sean Macyntire: 1:13:55

Yeah, he's bigger now than he was ever before and he's been dead for 30 years, I think on a note that you mentioned, you know that the need for a guru to differentiate themselves. I think that that's going to be a unique challenge for a lot of our businesses going forward. One kind of to your point. It reminds me of something that you said on Kyle Milligan's podcast, which is that every man has to have a code, and like when you said that I was just like fuck, yeah, every man does need to have a code, but more importantly it's from the was just like fuck, yeah, every man does need to have a code, but more importantly it's from the wire.

Brian Hicks: 1:14:29

Okay.

Sean Macyntire: 1:14:29

Fair enough but you know afro-po, we're in Baltimore. But like, not only that, but for a guru, they also have to be willing to broadcast their code, they need to wear their code on their sleeve. A guru who does this really well, I think, is Tom Dyson on their sleeve. A guru who does this really well, I think, is Tom Dyson Like, if you read Tom Dyson's editorial, there are certain themes, almost like classical music, lemotifs like that just come through and weave through his editorial again and again and again and again, and like he will restate the same idea in many, many different ways across editorial. So there is that sense of relationship and being built with this person because you know what they stand for, you know where they fall on the sides of debate.

John Newtson: 1:15:10

Which is the essence of it. We're in buffeting communication, exactly.

Sean Macyntire: 1:15:15

The problem with that, though, is that it's hard to find credible gurus who can do that, because most of the people let's what would be our ideal pool of gurus to pull from somebody who was on Wall Street, somebody who, like, has some accolades from Wall Street, somebody who doesn't want to be on Wall Street anymore, and so you're pulling from that. And what do we know about people in that pocket? They're shit writers. They probably have a terrible personality, you know, they're all math geeks, like. So, like, the idea of like using entertainment to sell these people is like. Well, of course, they're all going to be bad on camera.

John Newtson: 1:15:57

They suck I think, but I think that I think, that I think actually, this is the show. Like you, you can invest in training them to be better. Yes, it does, but it does take investment.

Sean Macyntire: 1:16:06

Yeah.

John Newtson: 1:16:07

But I do think that there is this thing of like the quality of what they bring to the table, and I don't mean just in terms of their analysis and track record, but the quality of what they bring to a franchise, kind of to the essence of like, well, what is there? Is there a perspective? Like, do you really have a perspective? And then if you do, because a lot of them don't, but if you do, is anybody going to care about it?

Sean Macyntire: 1:16:31

Yeah.

John Newtson: 1:16:31

And so, like that is harder. It's harder to find people who have sorry, it's harder to find people who have a code and live by it than it is to find people who can write something or analyze something. Yeah, yeah, analyze something, yeah. And like I remember Clayton said this about, like when he was talking about Martin cause in the nineties, um, like Martin had his rating agency and he got called to Congress and of course they took pictures. They use those photos like crazy. He testified in front of Congress and it was like, on paper, martin is a lion. You meet him in person and he's much more sedate and this and that, and Clayton was always like what, and he's much more sedate and this and that, and Clayton was always like. What I try and do is take who Martin is and just make him bigger, and that's what he does in the promo and I think that has to be in the editorial that you have to be bigger, like bigger versions, like lionized or idolized versions of who you are and what you believe in.

Brian Hicks: 1:17:21

Well, we just came out of a period, john, where you knew where people you. Well, we just came out of a period, john, where you knew where people. You saw their code. We were talking about this earlier, covid, okay, here at Angel. Well, we first we bought this. I bought this building in 2019, renovated it for a year, moved in January 1st 2020, and then had to close it. But when everybody came back well, and some people never came back people were still wearing masks, people were still afraid to stand next to you, but there was a group I would say a core group of people here where we bucked the trend. And that's what that's the role of a legit guru is to buck the trend. Um, I was telling Rob this story. Um, I have a house in Florida and in May of 2020, you know, we, you know everybody was stuck home. I was like screw this, let's hop into the car, get the dog and we're going down to Florida. Florida was open, we get down to Florida.

Brian Hicks: 1:18:33

First off, people thought I was crazy for driving all the way down from Maryland to Florida. But as soon as we got there the next day, florida restaurants in Sarasota started to reopen. I told my wife hon, book the restaurant we're going. We got to show people that it's okay to go out. So we go out to the restaurant. I take a picture. It's still on my Facebook page. I take a picture of my girls and my wife posted it on Facebook. The caption first restaurant in three months.

Brian Hicks: 1:19:06

The reaction was 50-50. 50% of the people was like, hey, great job. The other 50 were like how dare you? You're not taking this serious enough. But the entire time I was telling my wife somebody has to be the first one. Somebody has to be the first one to get out there and show the rest of America that it's okay, it's okay to go the first one. Somebody has to be the first one to get out there and show the rest of America that's okay, it's okay to go back to normal. And that's the exact same thing that gurus have to do. They have to not just tell their readers, they have to lead by example as well.

Rob Braddock: 1:19:40

Yeah, and I think it's more than just leading by example in terms of like an investing trend, than just leading by example in terms of like an investing trend, like that scenario you just described in, like the perfect world would be part, would be something you put out to your universe, right, and they would be like, yeah, that's my guy.

Sean Macyntire: 1:19:59

Now I'm going to go buy a t-shirt or whatever, you know. I mean, right now people are buying Donald Trump golden diapers. For the same logic. That's really happening right now.

John Newtson: 1:20:10

Well, that's what I always tell people. I'm like, look at, like, how many people follow Tesla versus following Elon Musk, right? Like yeah, like that. Like saying controversial things being, you know, like taking a stand, whether people agree with it or not. Like yeah, it's definitely, and I say that well, not to cut you off. Like taking a stand whether people agree with it or not. Like yeah, definitely, and I say that, well, not to cut you off.

John Newtson: 1:20:30

But like going back to Buffett, like Buffett took a stand inside finance in ways that, like people like ridic, people forget that people ridiculed Buffett like crazy.

John Newtson: 1:20:41

And then like there's that great sun Valley story that opens his biography Snowball, where he's in Sun Valley, the billionaire's retreat thing and all the tech the 1990s tech gurus are there and he gets up there and he tells a story and they're laughing at him, they're thinking like he doesn't understand the new economy, he missed the boat, he doesn't know anything. And he tells a story about cars and how there were 3 000 car companies and at the time you there's no way you could have told that ford was going to be the winner. The only thing that you knew for sure was the short horses, right, but he has, like this very clear perspective on what a good investment is and what he doesn't invest in. And he was getting shit on for it. And then he, but he stuck to his guns and he stuck into people and same thing. They're like I love that guy, like he's my guy and they're like buffett acolytes right.

Sean Macyntire: 1:21:35

Um, yeah, but sorry you were no, I, you, you, what you just said, that anecdote was better than any bullshit I could have said. Um, buffett, I think, is a really good example of you know that takes a very political stance, a very sociological. You know, I'm planting my flag in this idea and, like you said, it polarized. People, you know, divide a room and everybody talks about you, and that's ultimately what we're talking about when we're talking about branding and finding a guru who can you can build a brand around. You know, buffett is like on the softer side of that, the more investing and nerdy side of that, but you can certainly build a brand around those ideas as well. In the exact same way, buffett ties his morality to the investments and investment ideas that he picks. Not a lot of investment gurus in our business do that.

John Newtson: 1:22:24

Yeah, no, he absolutely does. Like he's phenomenal in that he has so many parts of him. And I think, in general, like you can look at finance and see like there are great case studies of gurus in mainstream financing. They mirror or parallel gurus in our space People like Buffett, people like Thiel, people like Schwarzman, people like Buffett, people like Teal, people like Schwarzman and you have like the rises and falls of people who are just chasing trends and you have all the same stuff. But like guruship matters in finance as much as it does in newsletters.

Brian Hicks: 1:22:58

I mean, Bill Bonner is a great example. You know, when I was starting at Agora, I was, and Bill Bonner hated stocks, still hates stocks. He likes gold, that's it Right. And land, I guess, yeah. But you know, even during the dot-com mania of you know, between 97 and 2000,. You know, he just kept saying it over and over again. Remember his famous quote about Amazon, the river of no return. He still uses that today, Even though Amazon's up what? 100,000 percent.

Brian Hicks: 1:23:34

So, but you know, bill has missed every bull market, you know, in my lifetime and he seems to be OK with that. He's built an entire brand around that. He became a billionaire off of that.

Rob Braddock: 1:23:48

Yeah, curmudgeon yeah, yeah, and it's not again. It's not just. It's not just his investing ethos although that's part of it. I like he's one of the few people or like whatever he puts out. I read when like bill bonner diary when I was out man loved reading that and like he's talking about like fixing the roof on the place he just bought in ireland or getting in the getting in the fights with the native population in the mountains of uh, where does he have the ranch, what you know?

Rob Braddock: 1:24:25

argentina yeah, argentina. Yeah, well, he's like uh up there to like plant the vines for the vineyard and I'm like this is awesome. I read all of it. It's so interesting. His writing style is so unique and none of it's about investing, like he has those other things. But I'm just man. This is the super rich guy living his life in this particular way. I love it.

John Newtson: 1:24:47

It's so entertaining.

John Newtson: 1:24:49

Right particular way. I love it. It's so entertaining, right. That like kind of, yeah, uh, for sure.

John Newtson: 1:24:54

I do think that that, like, I try and think about this a lot and I don't know why, because I'm not writing for anybody at this point I don't write anymore but I think about, like, what would be of like kind of how would you, how would you elevate or create a kind of a guru brand that you know would be sellable, right? Like what kind of things could you do that are so out of the box? And I think this is an area where we don't think what's possible. And I always use this example because it's so obviously true. We're right, here in Baltimore, you got all these newsletters in Baltimore, you guys are in Baltimore. Gore's in Baltimore, market Wise is in Baltimore. You are also journalists. Gore is in Baltimore, mark Wise is in Baltimore. You are also journalists. We're all journalists, right, it would take basically an application process to start to be able to show up at the White House press room, and you're not going to get in every time, but all you got to do is get in there a few times when they're doing economic stuff, right, and I wouldn't say I'm a journalist in that I wouldn't position myself as a journalist to your readers per se, but it puts you in the room when big things are happening and one of the things besides being like counter trend that people pay for is I want to be counter trend because the guy's on the inside right, he has access to things and he knows things that I don't know and you can get into all these places.

John Newtson: 1:26:27

I did this experiment and I ended up like talking to a bunch300 billion fund. It was $60 billion at the time. It was the UAE sovereign wealth fund. He was coming to do deals with newsletters. Nobody wanted to talk to him.

John Newtson: 1:26:38

I think about Porter had this great promo it was a backend promo, did it like 19 million?

John Newtson: 1:26:44

And the headline was basically a long headline about how he had this dinner with all these powerful people and I was like, man, I could put people more powerful than that in this room and we did. We had billionaires, more than one, people who own multi-billion dollar hedge funds, all this stuff and it was like, well, it wouldn't take that much work to have any of your editors or gurus start to plug into places like that. Not because there's more insight, necessarily, but although there will be insight, but because the stories you could tell from it and the things that you could spin off of that to your readers, the insights, the relationships, the way you could build somebody up, and so to me I always thought that that would be like pick an area, like how would be the dream thing for a guru, and like you could actually just dev into that and get him those relationships and help them find that. That would be to me like it's kind of like the another direction to go with this, where it's like he becomes more promotable, right.

Sean Macyntire: 1:27:41

Um, well, I mean, we're talking about the, the dust that falls off of moth's wings. Like you know, everybody wants to like, everybody wants to be dusted with greatness. Yes, you know, like everybody wants to touch the bishop's robes. You know what is the logic of a back end? It either has to be bigger, faster, it has to be closer to the guru. And what we're talking about is getting a lit like people, regular people, wanting to have a little bit of greatness in their life. And so, you know, I use the analogy of like dust falling off of a moth's wings because, like people want to have the experience of being close enough to something that they can actually be caressed by it. And so what you're talking about is, you know, again, michael Jordan on a Wheaties box. It's getting that guru into the room so that the associations we have with that person now are greater than what they simply are. Right?

John Newtson: 1:28:37

And with that video model it becomes instantly credible and interesting, right? So, like, imagine like you're kind of doing the Gary Vee thing of documenting, but you're documenting like hey, I'm about to walk into the White House here and then the video watches you walk through security, you don't even have to say what you're doing, yeah, right, but it's like that kind of stuff that you could do in such an interesting way. Um, I remember Mike Ward telling me and this is the height of money map was. He was like, yeah, do you want to be a guru? And I'm like I'm not. He's like, but I've been doing so much work on the business development and networking side that like he um say, hey, we're trying to get ahold of you know what's the same Bruce? Um, he was founder of canopy cannabis, the deck of corn. He was the big, the guy in cannabis and I forget his I can't believe I'm forgetting his name right now and I was like, well, we like met him last week and filmed with him some stuff so I can give you his admins email address. We have all these other people that you know, guys investing with Bill Gates's family office and things like that. And he's like you know, because, from his standpoint, we can sell that stuff like crazy.

John Newtson: 1:29:47

Just the relationship network, a lot of his guys, like they hadn't been in finance for a long time 20 years ago.

John Newtson: 1:29:54

The relationships have degraded, they don't have the connections anymore and so, like connections is something that we can sell and I was like, well, man, you can just like that just tastes like a little bit of elbow grease. Like you can do that, especially when you already have a publishing asset, because people want to be featured in the news, they want it to be featured places. It's not hard to go out and do that and I think that that's something that is it's not part of regular publishing. But I think you can very much go out and create an amazing set of relationships that would then feel unique. Like how are you going to stand out? Like this is the guy that I see all the time on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and he's doing things that related to that, and so if he's investing in defense, is he you know? You could make those things happen in such a way, make it so visceral with video now, that it's like, well, you're just associated with that, like that's my guy for that.

Rob Braddock: 1:30:45

Why do you think no one does that now?

John Newtson: 1:30:49

There's two, three things I think. Tell me if I'm wrong. I think one is it takes extra effort. It's not part of the day-to-day running of the business, right, it's a little extra. Two, it takes a guru who's willing to go above and beyond, right. So if he's a staff, he doesn't always want to do that If he's not really interested. Three, I think people don't really like they don't know, they don't know that you like.

John Newtson: 1:31:20

So I had this experience, this kind of like mentor of mine in china. It was more of a I was buddhist and all this other stuff, but he I was, and he I always use this story. He built a railroad with the government that he put no money in. He organized it, created billions of dollars worth of real estate, did it because he thought it was good for the people right to bring the development in. But he orchestrated this whole thing. He ended up getting accused of running a shadow government. All this other stuff had to leave for a while but he stopped. Like China was going to invade Taiwan in the 90s and he brokered peace talks and stopped it.

John Newtson: 1:31:57

And he was a monk, had no money, right, and so I'm close friends with the family. That was his main supporter and his probably top Western student is like my best friend. We got to meet him, he was my teacher and it opened my eyes to how you can maneuver. So there's this game, this kind of thing that we would talk about with his student. It's kind of like any room in the world, right? So pick a room in the world the White House, saudi Arabian Palace there is a social path of connection from where you're at to there.

John Newtson: 1:32:34

There are different lengths, different levels of difficulty, but you can get anywhere. You can get into any ecosystem. It's just a. It's a, it's a mental practice and that's not a normal thing, right. But once you apply it like I started applying it in 2018 playfully, just thinking like this would be kind of fun and sure enough, like ended up in places that I never thought I'd end up, and then 2020 kind of put a hold on everything. And then I had to reassess like, hey, what direction do I want to take this now? And then had a thing with my partner, had to get that settled, and now I'm sitting here like reassessing there's a lot of meat here on that exercise, but from a publishing standpoint, I think that, like, you can do almost anything.

Sean Macyntire: 1:33:18

I just want to say really quick one. That's an amazing fucking story. I love that and I want to emulate that for the stuff that I put out into the world. But secondly, I would say that there is one other reason, in addition to the ones you listed, why a lot of gurus and a lot of publishing businesses don't do this. What have we been talking about while we've been at this table? We've been talking about indirect associations, sort of like the subconscious stories that we build around things.

Sean Macyntire: 1:33:49

A lot of times you'll talk to a guru and say, hey, why don't we do this?

Sean Macyntire: 1:33:53

This would be really cool.

Sean Macyntire: 1:33:55

And if the guru is from Wall Street and they've been sitting in a cubicle doing DCF analyses for 20 years, they're not going to inherently or intrinsically understand why that would be good, or intrinsically understand why that would be good, what the benefit of that would be, especially for either a marketing or for a storytelling standpoint. But I mean just on that note, like it goes back to what you were saying before about how, like yeah, gurus can be trained. But one thing that I've really discovered in working with people, especially on the editorial and fulfillment side, is that it's easier to teach an English major or a marketing major how to write about financial than it is to take a financial person and teach them how to write, because there are just so many barriers and blocks to understanding things from a more lateral thinking perspective. To understanding things from a more lateral thinking perspective, like kudos to you for finding a guru who is willing to actually buy into your idea, because I can imagine a lot of more traditional, especially gurus from Wall Street, would balk at that idea.

Sean Macyntire: 1:35:09

One because they have this sort of false perception in their head about the reputation that they want to protect, and they would think that anything related to entertainment would undercut that, which is silly. But that's kind of where we are At least that's my opinion.

Rob Braddock: 1:35:19

Yeah, no, I don't disagree. Maybe it's just a matter of time, right Like there's a final snowflake that causes the avalanche.

John Newtson: 1:35:30

I think actually that that's a really interesting point because there is a lot of resistance to what kind of comes off is, and have heard them use the term carnival carnival barking. It's a lot of difference than like feeling like you're Billy Mays pitchman versus Anthony Bourdain Right, I think, visually like, because it is it. It is a social acceptance thing for some of these guys. I had a guy who was like he had a $100 million hedge fund at this point. He used to work at Morgan Stanley, had crazy connections and things like that, and he was like don't ever, ever tell anyone. I have a hundred million dollar hedge fund and I'm like why? It's fucking embarrassing. It's embarrassing. A hundred million dollar hedge fund is nothing. It's nothing like on wall street. Like you talk to guys and they're like you know we have people in our space. Well, I had a 31 hedge fund and it's like that doesn't? That only gets you credit. People who don't know anything. That gets you. That loses you cred with people who do know anything.

Rob Braddock: 1:36:29

Because having 100 million dollars, 200 million dollars, is like oh you're, this is your starter fund, huh like yeah, so I guess it's just a you know, a matter of time until, like, a full transition takes place. That's just my guess, like I'm sure people resisted email at first well.

John Newtson: 1:36:48

So you know that's. The idea of a full transition is interesting, right, because of what it's it implies is that everyone's going to switch over to one thing, and I think that's part of the problem is this belief that we're going to switch over to one thing rather than creating a unique space and that includes your media choices and includes your format choices. And it includes because I don't think.

Rob Braddock: 1:37:08

I think that's what when I say full refracturing, I agree. When I say full transition, I think we're fracturing, I agree. When I say full transition, I mean where it becomes a standard and common practice. Some people do it and some don't. But like pitching the idea doesn't get you a. What the fuck are you talking about, right, you know? It's just like oh yeah, we don't, we know it works for those people. That's what I mean when I say full train.

Brian Hicks: 1:37:28

You'd be surprised how many people don't want. I mean, they're given the opportunity to be a guru but they never seize one. We've had a lot of editors here who have just let slip through their hands, and so it takes a different kind of personality. It takes a different kind of personality. Some people are just content with the status quo. I myself, I mean, you know my guru status is fluid. Sometimes I'm a guru and sometimes I'm not. Yeah, I'm guru fluid. Honestly, I just really just got back into the game just a year or two ago. So it's, it takes a different kind of personality to really really sort of seize it and, you know, milk it for all it's worth.

Rob Braddock: 1:38:22

I mentioned earlier, copywriters are going to have to become copy producers, right, and that's part of it. Like finding, like recruiting a guru, like casting calls, like you know, it's going to go more that way than the traditional way where you get assigned to some boring guy. You've got to figure out a way to do something interesting. You go find the interesting person and turn it into the thing. I think that's where where we're going.

Sean Macyntire: 1:38:57

Yeah, I have a suspicion that we would have an easier time finding that person who has already built a small following on like YouTube, for example, and then just going them, bringing them into the ecosystem. Sure Like, do it the MNA way.

John Newtson: 1:39:07

There's some phenomenal like little letters out there. Right now I talked to Sven from undervalued chairs if you've seen them, so I'm gonna tell you his he has a conference that he he added, and once I tell you the name of the conference, you'll understand sven's a little bit. He's cut a little bit different. The name of the conference is weird shit investing, and he's like there's nothing in here that you will ever find Talked about.

John Newtson: 1:39:32

He's like band investments, like everything right. It's like weird stuff and he's always traveling and doing stuff and so, like people like that, coming into the space, forming relationships with bigger pubs and doing things, I think, yeah, you're going to find that's awesome.

Rob Braddock: 1:39:48

But it's also somebody who's I want to sign up. Yeah, I already going to find that's awesome, but it's also somebody who's I want to sign up.

John Newtson: 1:39:52

I already want to sign up, but it's somebody on the ground who's building something for the first time. I think that has that excitement. It's harder to get somebody who's employed to get on the plane, go out and do some crazy stuff. Then, like Brian coming back, like Brian, brian, he's going to do what he's going to do. If he likes the idea, he'll do it. There's no limits on him in that sense. If he doesn't like the idea, he's just not going to do it. But if he likes it, like there's nothing stopping him from doing whatever the hell he wants, because he runs the show and like he loves the business and that like it's a.

John Newtson: 1:40:28

You know all I want to do, john except for, maybe, your wife telling you how to do it I love my wife too.

Brian Hicks: 1:40:33

All I want to do is play pickleball every day. That's it. That's all that. That's that's where I am in life right now yeah, you have to.

Rob Braddock: 1:40:43

And you have to have, like, if you have a publishing company and whatever, you know, these businesses are all set up differently. But you have to have a publishing company, that's okay, with brands doing what they're going to do. And sorry, to go back to the Barstool sports analogy, you know there's the CEO who runs it and he has his own thing and then he's got 20 brands. He doesn't tell them what they're doing their own, they're kind of operating independently and doing their own thing under the umbrella. You know he's not saying no, don't do this, no, and micromanaging and that kind of stuff. And so the publishers, you know someone's going to have to be okay with that.

John Newtson: 1:41:26

Yeah, and there's also like a timing thing here too. That I think is just in general right now is we're still we're, we're still crawling out of the worst period in industry history in 15 years, Um, and so people have to kind of recapitalize. Things are working again. Let's kind of focus on fundamentals, get things working again, and so I think you're probably going to find more appetite for creative attempts. Which is why I want to have the conversation now, I think is over the next few months, six months, year like, as things kind of continue to come back. Then there's more cash to try things, there's more appetite for that kind of thing than like kind of the hey I'm, I survived, Woo, yeah, that's, let's get healthy again.

Sean Macyntire: 1:42:09

And you know, I think we're all in agreement on the panel that there is a need for new channels, there is a need for new formats, and there's always going to be a strong resistance to every new thing, like at every single level of management and implementation, because new is attractive but it's also scary.

Sean Macyntire: 1:42:28

You know it's an alluring thing, but yeah, it's. It's going to be an interesting period of years here because, you know, at the same time all these changes are happening, a very large portion of the steady, steadfast, like stable demographic that we've always been speaking to they're going to start dying off a little bit, right, and so I'm not saying that we need to start speaking to, like, 23 year olds who, like, want to learn day trading on tech talk. I'm just saying that there's somebody who just turned 30 and suddenly became aware, you know, suddenly had a concept of the cosmos appear in their head and said you know I should get my finances in order. You know I should probably learn more about finances in the stock market, and there's always going to be an influx of new people that want this information, but where they want to get that information is going to constantly shift and so, you know, really ultimately. Right now, it sort of feels like, as we're making this transition, we're stabbing in the dark a little bit.

John Newtson: 1:43:37

That was part Well to that point.

Brian Hicks: 1:43:41

You know I try to get my information. You know, on a firsthand basis, I have nephews and they're in their 20s right now. And you know on a firsthand basis I have nephews and they're in their 20s right now. And you know I wasn't surprised when they said, oh, uncle Brian, you know I'm a big investor in Bitcoin. That kind of makes sense. But I was surprised when they said, uncle Brian, you know, do you own any gold? I was like, yeah, a lot of it.

Brian Hicks: 1:44:08

And I was like this gives me hope. You know, they're in their 20s and they're talking about central bank, crypto, dollars and all this stuff. And I was like, wow, okay, there is hope. These 20-somethings are actually talking about stuff that I've been talking about for the last 30 years. So there is going to be. There is going to be and I you know I don't want to. I also do airsoft. You know what airsofting is, so I do airsofting with my son and whenever I you know, whenever we're playing, you know there's always a group of you know older teenagers and guys are in their twenties and all that. Whenever you know we're eating lunch or something I can hear them just talking about. I'm going to buy some more gold today or tomorrow, whatever, and I was like okay.

John Newtson: 1:45:00

So that's our future subscribers. So in my FMS every year I do a state of hip-hop thing and I did this whole thing on demographics this year. Demographics this year and that was the thing was that the younger generations are investing on a percentage basis at extraordinarily high numbers relative to previous generations and they are consuming content in different places, different platforms, and that's part of the shift that's coming Right now. You have like, and Andrew Taylor did some actual study on this at Investor Place and he said that we think of them as the late-stage boomers as our primary customers, but according to his data, it's already it's Gen Xers mostly.

John Newtson: 1:45:39

And early, you know, like Gen X, so you're like into like mid-60s.

John Newtson: 1:45:45

But, that's still the so if you think about it from a lifecycle standpoint we always had this conception, and I think it's true is that people come into the market in their 40s, 45, and they really start to think about investing for retirement. And then they're real hardcore into retirement and then for the first few years after retirement figuring out how they're going to generate income, and then it kind of gets. They're at where they're at and some people stay, but most of the market kind of fades out, and so what we're seeing is that millennials hit 40 two years ago. The first one is leading edge. They invested at levels that nobody else ever had. Gen Z is investing at like 17, 18. They started at levels and so, yeah, it's a transformation of the audience.

Brian Hicks: 1:46:30

My son is 15. He has a stock account. I mean it's custodial, but I mean he asked me and my wife he's like you know I want to open up an account and I was shocked when his first investment was a dividend-paying stock.

Sean Macyntire: 1:46:45

Nice Good for him. Now, I think, just on that note and this sort of ties into what we've been talking about vis-a-vis branding, but, like one of the things that I've noticed in my my career has certainly been shorter than your guys' but, like over the course of that career and also knowing people that have been in the career for a long time, there's always an allure like a sort of shiny object, like glow around more illiquid markets, more illiquid opportunities, things that are just like beyond the scope of the mainstream. I think crypto is attractive right now because it's still kind of a little bit of a pain in the ass to buy crypto. Becoming less so like anybody can sign up for a Robinhood account in five minutes and get one. And becoming less so like anybody can sign up for a Robinhood account in five minutes and get one.

Sean Macyntire: 1:47:32

But somebody who's 62 and just heard about Bitcoin for the third time and is like I am going to buy a Bitcoin, that person doesn't know the chain of like OK, I can get Robinhood on my phone, I can get a Bitcoin, and so one of the things that I think is happening, especially with stocks, and it's happening across our businesses we're starting to see fatiguing numbers, not just because of the nature of promotions that we're putting out, but also because stocks are a little bit old hat. Like younger, people don't really want to invest in stocks.

John Newtson: 1:48:04

Well, there's a few things there. One is there's fewer than ever before. Yeah Right, there's fewer stocks. Period, part of the JOBS Act and the whole Reg A funding space was kind of to create a model that almost looked like the early IPOs of the 90s and stuff, so that they could get there and hopefully go public to create a new kind of wave of pubcos. Whether that's going to work or not, we'll see, but there's way fewer of them than ever. At the same time, like retail participation, like 2020, market participation was it's a straight lineup right and it stayed so. Like, market participation is super high on the retail side. It's at record-breaking levels, and it stayed at record-breaking levels while we were in the shitter in FinPub. And so there's this interesting dichotomy of hey, there's people investing in public markets at a level that they never have before. They ain't buying our stuff, and that's possibly because of this generational issue.

Rob Braddock: 1:49:09

Well, it's also because there's never been age aside there's never been a time where you could get access to free information, more entertaining and interesting financial information, like by some dude that like better done, better researched, than the fulfillment not just than the promos of the biggest companies in FinPub and also their fulfillment. You ever get one of these like masterclasses on options training and you know that you, like, we've all written for and then like, you can go on youtube right now and get that and get hours and hours and hours of it for free and it's better than what we sell. It just is like anyone got a problem with me saying that tell me and I'll send you YouTube links of people crushing what you're putting out that trend of information quality and move to free is definitely like a persistent trend.

John Newtson: 1:50:21

You also have with the sub stack guys, like you know. You say a lot of the finance guys can't write but some of them can, especially some of the analysts. Finance guys can't write but some of them can, especially some of the analysts and some of the Substack letters from real niche experts who are like this is like the top three analysts in this sector is writing a thing on Substack. He doesn't have a huge following but he has.

John Newtson: 1:50:41

I think a lot of the top customers in the space are out there seeking information, People who are real investors, consuming things and they're showing up on places and like I know a few of these guys and they're getting questions from retail people who are subscribers, Right, Um, and so like those spaces, like we don't exist in a vacuum, for sure, and the free information um trading in particular is harder because it's skill based and so if you're doing education, that's like people are on there teaching it, Investing is, it moves. So the information is there, but like you can still sell, like I love this guy, I want to do it, I want to see what he thinks, and so it's back to selling first.

Rob Braddock: 1:51:21

Well, so on those YouTube channels, because I mean there's anything man, there's name it. I can go like I hate financial YouTube channels.

Sean Macyntire: 1:51:28

How much do you need? I know, name it, I can go like uh, I hate financial youtube channels how much do you need I?

Rob Braddock: 1:51:31

know, like this dude, he's got one right, right, like you know how much do you need in uh dividend stocks to retire? Like if you have this much like really done. Really well, like right, great marketing, great thumbnails, great headlines and then great information yeah, this, this is a I mean this is probably a better big conversation.

John Newtson: 1:51:49

I think that there's a movement to that that probably needs to happen in towards being more of a it's a combo niche media company where, like it's not just the newsletter, there's an event focus, there's community, like you're doing discord. I think building like something that is more robust than simply the information is kind of where we have to go.

Rob Braddock: 1:52:08

Sure, but like where I was going with that, those channels, youtube, it's saturated with them, but I'm still going to choose the one that, like I feel like, is like my guy, right, right. So it's a you know, and you can see that by the subscriber count.

John Newtson: 1:52:28

That's also why I actually personally, I love long form because and I consume a lot of short form, like everyone but I found that, like anything that's long form that I listened to, like I'm I'm a buyer of that short form stuff I consume like, oh, it's interesting, but that doesn't convert me to anything. Yeah, long form If I'm like wow, convert me to anything, but long form if I'm like wow, because you get to know the person you get to know what they're looking at things, you get to understand them and then like you build that relationship and bam, you're.

Sean Macyntire: 1:52:57

you know, well, you've also subconsciously committed yourself to that just by spending that time You're like. Well, that time I spent must have been worth it.

John Newtson: 1:53:04

Right, and that's also where I think that kind of tying this back to some of the other conversation. I think that the use of a podcast shouldn't be as a substitute for an e-letter. They're fundamentally different things and what you can do with the podcast is build those relationships. It's the guests you can get on right, that add, like the expertise you can build. That is not your investment picks, but it's like hey, wow, he's connected with everybody, he has all these relationships, he's plugged in over here. His credibility and the things that he's talking about that are not directly like I recommend this stock, but are, hey, he's picked gold, he's got Randy Smallwood, who's the head of the World Gold Council, on there and they're talking deep and then they're going to go do something afterwards. He's connected and he understands that space. Oh, and it's over here too, and then that that's stuff that you can then bring into your copy, into your editorial for the recommendations. But the two things aren't necessarily.

Rob Braddock: 1:54:01

They can be, but I don't think they have to be the same thing, you know, yeah um, most of the time you think about it, we're asking people to buy, you know, like a back-end $1,500 product, whatever 2,000 2,500 bucks and like the entirety of like.

Rob Braddock: 1:54:21

My concept of knowing this person is like maybe a paragraph of copy that could be boilerplate copy for every other guru. I was on wall street and then I decided like I wanted to work for the regular guy Right, and I was like or or, here's the big shift, wait, I was on the CBOE. And then I like that's the big difference, you know.

John Newtson: 1:54:45

But here give me 1500 bucks, like uh, where um angel Suarez did this presentation in the first London FMS that I did, and he's talking about this issue of like well, I'm selling Paul Manpilli's. He's like this is who I'm selling and he takes pictures of Xerxes from the 300, the Spartans like golden god and puts Manpilli's face on it and he's like this is what I'm doing to him. In the copy it's not the paragraph. It's like you're gonna think paul is the greatest thing in the world period by the time we're done with this.

John Newtson: 1:55:17

Yeah, and it's like versus, like you said, like right there's literally people I know who, like they're cutting and pasting bio sections from yeah, what a promo to the next one.

Rob Braddock: 1:55:26

I mean, just think about it. It's like you do it yourself. Like, why do we expect the, the, the readers, to behave differently? You just said you do it. You personally consume hours worth of content and like, get to know a person, right, and then maybe you know, maybe do it.

Rob Braddock: 1:55:43

Why do we treat the potential customer differently? Say here, asshole the potential customer differently. Say here, asshole, trust me, boilerplate, boilerplate, buy this thing. Geez, why are conversion rates half of what they were? I don't like, why is no one getting this message? And one of the things that might be, I think, is that with this potential shift, or whoever shifts or doesn't, there might be a longer sales cycle, right, with, like direct response, click bang, boom, okay, we know what the conversion rate is. Well, I don't know. Maybe if I watched, if I watched, I'm just throwing this out, this is off the top of my head okay, if you had a pub and we just put out so much free information and videos and not just about trading, about everything, right, your personal life, et cetera, and like, could we track and see, okay, we didn't sell anything at the end of this, but we noticed that, like, the conversion rates on our other videos or other promos went up half a percent.

John Newtson: 1:56:49

This is already proven to a point. So, um, uh, I think it was at the legacy like kind of mash, right. I went to um, they were talking about the trajectory trajectory of leads versus paid customers, right. So, um, they're inverted. So if a customer buys here, his buying goes, goes down right, he'll buy a few things, right, and it goes down Leads. They start with nothing and then it goes up.

John Newtson: 1:57:18

And what we found in different groups has had versions of this is that if you do have good lead gen and you do have good relationship building in newsletters, that that lead it does take longer but he tends to be more valuable because by the time he buys he's so committed to you that you're a better customer, right? Um? And then a related story was from money map, where mike ward was like you know, when they would bring a new guru on, he would not launch a front end. What he would do is say you're going to write a, uh, an e-letter for six months. We're not going to launch anything until we start hearing from subscribers, hey, do you have anything to buy? And then, if that doesn't happen, eh, contract's over.

John Newtson: 1:57:57

If it does happen, they know they can launch the first product at a back-end price point and move front-end unit numbers the only time you can do that. But it's because of that free relationship that's been built. And so with e-letter content, we know that's true and I think the problem is that the e-letter is super, super crowded in the inbox. Um, so I think, with like, but to your point, I think it's already proven that, at least conceptually, that's true, right?

Sean Macyntire: 1:58:27

um, people who come in and consume the content, the long-form content, build that relationship, become better buyers yeah, yeah I um, I want to touch on some points that you've also been talking around too, because this is also a source of frustration for me, with our industry a little bit too, which is that you know, some of the best copywriters and marketers in the world work for Agora, but the moment they sit down to make a YouTube video, or the moment they sit down to do something that's like just in slightly a different format, it's like every principle of copywriting and good marketing goes out of their head and like to the point where, like I'll, I'll see like a Paul Manpili YouTube video and be like who are you making this?

John Newtson: 1:59:13

for oh, I do this terribly, like I just start my things I don't think about like the copy structure and video structure the way I should. I know I should, but I don't do it. I do think I was having this conversation with somebody else a couple weeks ago and I was like you know what I need to do. I was like you know what I need to do, not just YouTube, but like I need to go like watch movies and docuseries and shows the way that I watched or read newsletter or promos when I started to become a copywriter Deconstruct the beats of the visuals and how it's set up, because that's one, it's just the idea of doing that is interesting to me, but that's how you learn deconstructing, to integrate it into how I think, because I haven't done it yet. It's a gap.

Sean Macyntire: 2:00:02

Well, I mean, if you want to go meta about this particular podcast, we can go meta about this podcast, because I've been living on YouTube for like the last five years, like, for example I got this concept from Ed Lawrence, but it's something that we're all familiar with which is, you know, say you have a target, you know, with one at the center and 10 at the outside, and one is a disciple, a person who's just like, if you send them an email that says buy MFR, and then it takes them to an order form directly, they'll buy. That's a one, and so you can make content for a one. And then, if you go all the way out to the 10, now we're talking about like entertainment. Now we're talking about like going very far afield, trying to get as people who might not be interested in the topic whatsoever, but they're kind of intrigued, they're kind of interested in what you have to say, they want to be entertained and normally, like fin pubs typically target like your three to six range.

Sean Macyntire: 2:00:59

There's not a whole lot of attention being paid to entertainment, which is why I think that there's space for what you're trying to do in our world, but when it comes to like a podcast like this. You have to sort of decide like, ok, based on the packaging, based on the thumbnail, based on the title, like it's exactly like a sales letter. You know, you have to think about when we're talking about branding and things like that, we have to think about who this stuff is, for whom this stuff belongs or is going to, and one of the things that I think is a major obstacle that a lot of more old school DR copywriters going to have to contend with as we shift into more branding stuff is paying attention to stuff like that, because not not a whole lot of that is done and that's often as simple as like putting a sizzle reel at the front of your video, like hiring a really good graphic designer yeah, like I think about this, for for this podcast too, and I've, I've one.

John Newtson: 2:01:51

It's just me doing it, so I'm not doing a whole lot. But two, I have a commitment inside FMS. I have another business that I do, that's not directly related to this, but the FMS stuff.

John Newtson: 2:02:02

I made a commitment for the event that it's going to be the ones and twos in that scenario period, because I don't want, because I don't want it, because I don't want to like. One of the benefits of an event like FMS and the community like FMS is that it's the exact opposite of traffic and conversion. Right, you go to traffic and conversion. There's 6,000 people here. It's going to take you three days to find one person that you can actually do business with. When you go to FMS, it's like 95% of the people in the room will do business with you and will want to do business with you and so.

John Newtson: 2:02:32

I'm very careful about like I don't want to expand this audience dramatically. It's a very tight audience intentionally. That's also a good excuse to be lazy on that stuff. But you're 100% right, because I think about that too. Like there's times when I'm like, oh, I should do a sizzle reel with this. I'm not trying to get more views on youtube, it's more of a. I use it there to host stuff, um, but there is other stuff that I do that I'm like, if I don't do that, I know it won't work. Yeah, at all, because it has to right.

Sean Macyntire: 2:03:01

But I mean, we can go back to what we know about e-letters too. If you don't start an e-letter with like a captivating story or a stinger or something interesting, something that to attract, even if you have like a one, they're probably going to, you know, either not pay attention or the attention will fatigue over time. And so, like you know, we, like you could, we can say that use another analogy here Like what would you rather read a scholarly article or Malcolm Gladwell book? You know, like that summarizes that scholarly article. Like we want and we crave, even for stuff that we're interested in, we crave it to be packaged in a way that is palatable to us. And I think that you know, as we shift into entertainment or to different channels, a lot of copywriters and marketers are going to have to really start paying attention to that kind of stuff in a way that they never have.

John Newtson: 2:03:53

Yeah, 100%. I think you're 100 right on that. Well, any final thoughts?

Rob Braddock: 2:04:02

why are you looking at me?

John Newtson: 2:04:03

wait for your wisdom on high no, um, no, I don't.

Rob Braddock: 2:04:11

Final thoughts I think this was good, yeah. Final thought let me think okay, um, yeah, hey, everyone that I pitched a f entertainment show idea to and you said, no, by the time this podcast comes out, the price doubled asshole. So, uh, because, uh, the first one will have been out by then. So there you go, feel free to cut that out. No, no, I'm not cutting that out, I might go into sizzle reel I like that.

Sean Macyntire: 2:04:43

I like that I, just on the note of entertainment, like I was thinking about this stuff too, and I actually I have a have a couple of YouTube videos coming out. One of them, you know it's it's actually based on an old Mark Ford you know piece of content that he put out like around his early to rise days about, like the cost of use. And so what I did was I was like I took that piece of editorial and I thought, like what could I do in my life to make this interesting and captivating? And so right now I'm working on a YouTube video called Lamborghini versus minivan, and so I hired about 12 supermodels, I got, I rented a Lamborghini, I went to Mark's house, I filmed this. It's coming out on my channel relatively soon, but it's just like trying to pay attention to stuff like that.

Sean Macyntire: 2:05:31

And I think that you know, like I've, the stuff that I'm doing is stuff that you, in parallel, have been thinking about and working on too. So I think that the zeitgeist is there, like the need for something like greater spectacle, greater branding. That's all there. You're on discord Again. We're all sort of rowing in the same direction, but parallel to each other. It really just comes down to a matter of, like you know, somebody is going to crack it in a way that none of us has cracked it yet and we're still trying to figure out, like, who's going to be that person, what is going to be the new format, what is going to be the new like modification to the model, and I don't think that you know. Again, like I said earlier, we're still stabbing in the dark a little bit.

John Newtson: 2:06:10

Yeah, but we're seeing a lot of good signs. I know there's social to phone floor stuff. You're 60 to 100 million librarians out there with that model. Yeah, You're seeing lots of different things working on the small space that aren't scalable at all but are coming in and so it is like the transformation of the environment is like slow, slow, slow, slow, slow and then all at once.

Sean Macyntire: 2:06:41

Hockey stick.

Brian Hicks: 2:06:46

I mean, yeah, we can talk about the transformation of the formatting, but at the end of the day, guys, it's all about ideas. Our industry is built on ideas that they can't get anywhere else, and we just have to keep reinventing these ideas. Reinventing these ideas. You know, like I said earlier, angel Publishing was built on a single idea called Peak Oil. We've gone from Peak Oil now to a cryptocurrency that's backed by gold, and it's still in the ground. That's cool, and it's how we tell the stories. We're storytellers and our readers want to live through us. And you know, look at Bill. You know, sometimes I feel like Bill is living this romantic life. You know, he's fighting with the rebels in.

Sean Macyntire: 2:07:44

Argentina.

Brian Hicks: 2:07:49

You know, a couple of his buildings get burnt down by them, but he's living the life. He's Ernest Hemingway meet Warren Buffett. That's a great title and I was reading something from him from a few years ago and now he's being referred to as Don Bill. And I have a friend who lives in Columbia, the country Columbia, and I was like you know, tony, what does you know? Instead of senior, what does Don denote? He's like that means you're the master. So Don Bill, nice.

John Newtson: 2:08:28

Nice, awesome, all right. Well, anyone wants to reach you. Brian, you are on, obviously, angel pub and in the discord fms pro um linkedin. You guys have a podcast. Uh, as well, sean, you have your name, your podcast uh, youtube channel.

Sean Macyntire: 2:08:44

If you want to hear me talk about writing stuff, search, copy that show on youtube. If you want to see me talk about writing stuff, search, copy that Show on YouTube. If you want to see me talk about financial stuff, search DIY Wealth on YouTube.

John Newtson: 2:08:54

There you go. I'll link those up, mr Braddock.

Rob Braddock: 2:08:57

Bigideapromoscom.

John Newtson: 2:08:59

Yep and FMS Pro Discord You're in there I am Awesome. Well, thanks, guys for doing this. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me Cool. Thanks for letting us use the studio. This is amazing. Yeah, it's cool Killer, all right.