SPEAKER_00: This Week in Startups is brought to you by OurCrowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join OurCrowd for free at O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D dot com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_03: I am here with Stephen, Stephan? Stephen or Stephan? Stephen's fine. Stephen from the most

SPEAKER_07: amazing YouTube channel that I love to watch. It's called CoffeeZilla. CoffeeZilla.

SPEAKER_08: What an intro. And it is the most delightful YouTube channel because on it, Stephen goes

SPEAKER_07: and he finds these scumbags, these horrible human beings who try to con poor people, who are desperate… This is true. …to make a better life for their families, to provide for their families, and to excel, and maybe just move up in their station in life. Desperate people, without jobs, without money. And these scumbags, these dregs of humanity,

SPEAKER_13: try to get that last thousand dollars. These grifters. These just horrible human specimens try to extract that last thousand dollars out of a poor person's bank account for coaching services. And these people have never accomplished anything in their lives. And they can't even spell or complete a thought. They have no track records. They have no reason to exist on this planet Earth,

SPEAKER_17: except to try to steal from the most vulnerable people who want help in the world. And for that,

SPEAKER_18: I am thrilled to have CoffeeZilla on This Week in Startups. And CoffeeZilla, I think, is having me on CoffeeZilla on YouTube. So whatever you're watching, this is my intro for my pod.

SPEAKER_20: Hey, hey, let me tell you this. Should we even do a podcast? You just gave the whole thing. That

SPEAKER_21: was a beautiful rant, Jason. I don't know if I could do a better job. I might just upload that rant to my channel and then just end the channel there. Unfortunately, I know that you have to keep

SPEAKER_22: calling these people out because a new one crops up every day. That's the problem. It's like, you call one out and then another guy with a rented Lambo comes online and they start promising the

SPEAKER_21: world to people. It's selling dreams. That's the business. Jason, run the people down with what's been going on. It's a new audio drop in app called Clubhouse. And you've been taking these guys to task, but you're like a real angel investor. And there's a real deal. The guys who you destroy

SPEAKER_17: just so definitely on your podcast, on your YouTube channel, the ones who you slice up,

SPEAKER_03: you're slicing them up. And I'm actually the real deal. I invest in companies when they're just starting out. I never take any money from founders. I, I wrote a book on angel investing because I made a ton of money doing that. And it's 10 bucks or you can get it for free. I do teach, of course, Angel University. It's only for accredited investors and we donate all the money to charity. If there's any profits from it, Jason, 100,000, we did 100,000 in profits from that angel university class. And the reason I teach those classes is because I want to see more people back founders. So I am like the, in your world, you have like the Lex Luthers and the super villains.

SPEAKER_07: Absolutely. Yeah, I am the man of steel. I am the dark knight. Yes. I am the actual real deal

SPEAKER_03: who actually has succeeded and teaches a course, but the course is $100 or $300. And basically it's,

SPEAKER_36: it's essentially free. When you think about it donated to charity, it's donated to charity,

SPEAKER_37: because we just want to make sure that those accredited investors actually show up for the course, right? So we charge them 100 bucks or when we do it in person, I think we charged 500. And that included a $300 dinner afterwards. And literally we broke even on it, right? So anybody

SPEAKER_18: who's charging you $5,000 for a course, or $10,000 for this, and they're nobodies who've never

SPEAKER_37: accomplished anything, you have to really just type in their name, Tai Lopez, JT Fox, Brad, whatever that guy's name was, you know, them better than me, Kevin, David, we can go down the list,

SPEAKER_18: and then just review, or scam. Yep. At the end of their were name, and then or better business bureau,

SPEAKER_37: and just look at what people are saying. Oh, yeah. If you take the moment to do that, you'll find all these people, I think in almost all those cases, who say these people are scam

SPEAKER_46: artists who are trying to grift their grifters. They're grifting on unfortunately, the lowest economic ladder of society. Yes. And their their goal is to take your money if you if you're if you don't know what it takes to be successful, and you're trying to improve yourself, they'll come to you with polished up with all the trappings of success. Unfortunately, we do live in like a

SPEAKER_22: visual world now where perception is reality, you don't need a background, all you need is a paid article in, you know, Yahoo News, what from PR wire or whatever, that's the scam, right? Oh, yeah,

SPEAKER_03: fake stories using people don't know this, but there are PR wires, basically a way to put a press release out, but you put the press release out. And these grifters all seem to have, I think we should deconstruct the grift. I think I was thinking about how we could be the most helpful together. Because this is kind of like a super team right now. It's like, you're like this Superman, I'm like this Batman, we could make the Justice League here. I kind of feel like this is a moment where we could both put our skills together to deconstruct for the audience how you're getting grifted, you know, you're getting grifted, I think one thing is when you see the Instagram,

SPEAKER_18: and somebody like Tai Lopez, or JT Fox, what they do is, I think the technique is this manipulation

SPEAKER_17: technique, this influence technique, is to put themselves in proximity to other powerful people, so they get the halo effect, and then to share the trappings of wealth. So somebody like JT Fox has all these pictures of themselves. I noticed JT Fox had a picture of himself with Julia Roberts,

SPEAKER_56: with Mark Wahlberg, Mark Wahlberg, and then other people who I think you can pay them 50 grand or 25

SPEAKER_22: grand, they'll show up for anything. Okay, you're so right. But can I tell you how right you are? Okay, tell me how right I am. Let me tell you how this grift works in actual practice with a specific

SPEAKER_59: example. There's a man named Clint Arthur that I exposed like about eight months ago to a year ago.

David Friedberg: Clint Arthur was a guy who basically ran these groups, and he ran a fake Harvard speech event, where he would go rent out a room in Harvard, sell out a bunch of tickets, everyone in the audience had bought a ticket to speak, but they're sitting in the audience as if people are showing up to watch, and one by one, they all go around the podium, speak at the podium, it's all recorded,

SPEAKER_63: and then all of them put it on their marketing material saying, I spoke at Harvard. Talk about proximity to the credibility. Oh my lord, it's such a perfect grip now. Yes, you basically are co-opting

SPEAKER_18: Harvard. Yeah. So they all go to Harvard, and they spoke at Harvard. They were asked to speak at Harvard. You could say Harvard speaker. Yep. Not spoken at Harvard.

David Friedberg: They got kicked out of Harvard. They moved to West Point. They got kicked out of there. Now, they were speaking, during COVID, they were speaking at the CNN center. They went to the CNN center. Obviously, it's not approved, but they rented out like the hotel room or whatever. There's a CNN banner in the background. The guy's making probably, he cleared a million on sales

SPEAKER_72: of this event. Wow. Okay. So this is the technique. It's the technique. People put themselves next to

SPEAKER_03: something that we all respect in the world. And they hope to get that credibility by association. This is the technique. Correct. So let's put this technique as credibility by association. But when you unpack it, you realize they have no affiliation. Correct. Now, compare and contrast this. I, as an angel investor, was so lucky to have invested in so many great companies, that Stanford wrote a case study on my ability as an angel investor and networker. They actually wrote a case study. So you can go to the Stanford Business School. There is a case study written about my career. This is how you are manifested by one of these, you know, business schools. You either went to that school, you were a teacher at that school, or they wrote a case study on you.

SPEAKER_77: Right. That's really the only way to be affiliated. Oh, yeah. To be totally honest. But these

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SPEAKER_46: affiliation. As with the Yahoo news thing. I also knew a guy who his dad was rich. So he paid this like

David Friedberg: he was from India. He paid a like Argentinian university a bunch of money and they gave him an honorary blockchain doctorate in blockchain. So he calls himself Dr. Evan Luthra. Oh my lord. And he was pitching himself as this successful investor. The other thing is these guys are like 27. I mean a lot of them. There are some older ones. So it's not a perfect indicator. But a

SPEAKER_84: lot of them are like, hey, I'm a millionaire at 27 and you're like, how do you your eight figure

SPEAKER_18: nine figure businesses. Okay, so we have the affiliation. The next piece is the lifestyle. So they take pictures of themselves with fast cars. Oh, yeah. And so Tai Lopez, does he own all these

SPEAKER_22: cars? Or does he just there's a lot of evidence that it was there rented? It doesn't make much sense for them to actually buy them outright because their marketing material, they literally,

SPEAKER_46: they're just marketing got the people who think that wealth is a fast car, that wealth is not, you know, success in a business. It's rather just like owning things like a you really what you have to understand. Jason, something that I've realized after looking at this stuff for over a year is that

David Friedberg: they know that most people aren't their target audience. They're only targeting people who are vulnerable who either there's kind of two types of people get scammed. One, they're a first time

SPEAKER_22: scammed. So they haven't really been inoculated, you could say they don't have the the germ in them.

SPEAKER_93: They don't have the antibodies. They haven't been burned before. They haven't been burned.

David Friedberg: Fresh meat, nice people, fresh meat. Number two, there, there are sort of repeat kind of their people who get stuck in a cycle of this. And this is where it gets much darker, where I've talked to

SPEAKER_22: people who've lost $26,000 $30,000. I am talking to one person right now. The story is still evolving,

SPEAKER_59: the DOJ might be involved. He may have lost. And again, it's all alleged $800,000.

SPEAKER_96: On coaching? On materials? On courses? On one of these, on one of the, it's a, it's a scam. It's

David Friedberg: a confidence scam. And a lot of, at the heart of a lot of these things is a confidence scam. So this was a Bitcoin thing. There's also, uh, but it all revolves around the same cycle of proof of like,

SPEAKER_98: I'm a success. I will make you successful if you just trust me. If you put your trust in me,

SPEAKER_100: you put your money with me. Right. It's really interesting because what happened on Clubhouse

SPEAKER_17: and the way you and I became aware of each other was I was on Clubhouse. Just answering questions. I, I, I make my email address public Jason at Calacanis. I'm Jason on Twitter,

SPEAKER_18: twitter.com slash Jason. I make myself available.

SPEAKER_104: I make myself available. Great. Twitter account. It's okay. Yeah. Top tier. So I make myself

SPEAKER_17: available to any founder who wants to pitch me. I run free events like Founder University is free. 250 people come to it. It's free for founders. We do this because we want to meet founders so we can invest in their companies. And we make money over 10 years investing in the companies. Now we don't make money off of selling them. Of course. Founder dot university is free. We do that to get deal flow. We want to meet the next Uber or Robin Hood or calm or whatever it is. And we want to invest in

SPEAKER_18: the company and then be aligned with the founder. Right. What I saw these people, JT Fox and this guy, Brad, and I looked them up and it turns out they're answering questions or coaching people.

SPEAKER_03: They might've been a little racist, um, or, you know, um, in how they approached it. So this kid JT got suspended because people were complaining that he might've been a little racist. I, I wasn't there for that instance, but I just said, you know, this is a scam. I can tell it's a grift. And I, because I typed the names of the people and this one guy, Brad is doing MLM CBD products. So multi-level marketing of CDBD. So that's like ripping. That's ripping the fabric of the scam universe, CBD and MLM put together. It's like, what else are we going to put in there coaching you on how to do CBD?

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, yeah. Of course. Of course. Just wait till you find out about the courses that are about how

SPEAKER_03: to sell a course. That'll really blow your mind. Well, I heard about this, that there was a, there was this woman, I think her name was Lauren in the room. And she, the reason I got kicked out of the room was they brought me up as a speaker. Cause they know I'm notable. And she said, well, I'm

SPEAKER_17: charging you. The way you do this is you charge 8,000, but then you discount it to four. You get people on the phone. You explain to them what you, how you're going to hold them accountable. And I said, $4,000. I said, what qualifies you to charge $4,000 for coaching? And they kicked me out of the room, but then they brought me back. And then MC hammer put me back on stage. And I said, listen, $4,000 is a scam. Like if you're a coach, why don't you just charge $400 an hour. And if you do one hour, and it really helped me, maybe in two weeks, I'll pay you $400 again, like, no, no, you got to get the 8,000 upfront, you got to do. So this is one of the ways in which you know, if you're getting scammed. If you went to a therapist, a personal trainer, a tennis coach,

SPEAKER_33: a chess coach, whatever, would they demand you pay them $20,000 upfront for 20 weeks? Or would

SPEAKER_18: they say I charge $90 a tennis lesson or $300 to go to therapy or $150 for a life coach or whatever it is, they would just charge you procession. But these people are not charging procession,

David Friedberg: are they Steven? No, no, no, no, it's the it's the six week, whatever course. And by the way,

SPEAKER_59: because they're all videotaped, it's free. It's like a lot. So there's a difference between courses and coaching, right? Coaching, you can justify slightly higher price, but I agree, it's like a per session thing. There's also courses that are being sold. The courses, there's literally a zero cost except customer acquisition, right from ads. The reason they charge so much is because customer

David Friedberg: acquisition is so high, because the scam market is so oversaturated with people promising dreams to people. But it's led to this weird thing where you're like learning the basics of like Facebook

SPEAKER_59: ad strategy, but you're paying $4,000 to do it. By the way, Steven, all of that is for available

SPEAKER_18: for free from Facebook and Twitter. They have their own YouTube videos, and they are the people who are Jason, it's the they're educating you because they want you to use the secret to

SPEAKER_59: Facebook to wild riches on Facebook. You don't want to just learn Facebook, do you want to learn

David Friedberg: the proven blueprint to success from a nine figure earner? By the way, had they become a nine figure earner? They sold a course. That's the funny thing is a lot of these guys, they're earning things that

SPEAKER_46: they say they they're like seven figure earner, eight figure earner, you just go on clubhouse, tap on a bio. They're making they're claiming the sales from the course as how they're legit as an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_67: So here's what I realized. They had these bios. I'm just going to read you one of them. I don't know who Ash

SPEAKER_17: Ghana Dahari is, but eight figure coaching business. And then you start reading these and they all have eight figure seven figure nine figure and have these giant long bios about how they have many businesses. So the way I busted them was I said to this guy Brad Hager Hager because somebody

SPEAKER_18: said Google him, it's a scam. And I googled him. And he had all these complaints, you know, and people saying he had scammed them out of money. And I realized he has this MLM. So he's on clubhouse

SPEAKER_03: talking and giving business advice. And then I think what they're doing is this is their funnel, Steven to get you into an MLM course, where to get you to join their MLM scam. So I said to him, you have 47 businesses that are seven, eight, nine figures, tell me the name of the most successful

SPEAKER_18: one. So I can Google it and and do a little research. And maybe there's a New York Times story

SPEAKER_129: about or a profile. No, they couldn't name one of their businesses. No. So then I have, you know,

SPEAKER_03: I have 10s of 1000s of followers on clubhouse and hundreds of 1000 Twitter, I said, Hey, everybody, and I just named my room is J.D. Fox in this coaching room a scam? Question mark just is it a scam? So all these people came into and they started explaining to me the scam. And then they started bringing you up and pointing out your videos. And I was like, Oh my god, this is like a

SPEAKER_17: really, this is going on everywhere. Oh, this is not like really bad one person or two people. There's hundreds of people involved in this grift. So when I tweeted it, this one kid, Mario

David Friedberg: uh, no fall, you know, this kid. Okay, so I have had these weird email exchanges with Mario for a while. He's constantly been trying to email me telling me like, bring me on that. I'm like me to

SPEAKER_03: what I did was I told people if you think that room is a scam, there is a report feature. And we can all go if we all believe this and report these people for using clubhouse for some sort of, you know, affiliate scamming. So everybody reported them, they all got banned.

SPEAKER_133: So now he blames me for his banning. And he's obsessing about me, he's emailing me

SPEAKER_46: multiple times a day. Not only does he blame you, he started a change petition. A change petition guys, where did you not hear about this? You heard about this? Sure.

SPEAKER_137: Somebody told me that there's a change.org that I'm bullying him.

SPEAKER_138: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a change.org that stop, stop the cyber bullying.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Okay, Jason.

SPEAKER_59: Just because I did a Google search on your name. Social stop social media bullying. Bring Mario Nafal back on clubhouse.

SPEAKER_143: He's saying that you accused him of being a scammer and Jason asked his followers to mass report Mario.

SPEAKER_03: I didn't ask that just to be clear. I didn't ask anybody to mass report him. I said anybody in this room who you think is a scammer. If you want to report him, here's the report tool. I'm going to go report JT and this is kind of an epidemic. And I think

David Friedberg: it's gonna be a problem. Like, the thing is, is that you really gain a reputation if your

SPEAKER_18: platform is hosting all these scams and stuff. Yeah, I did let them know the folks over at clubhouse like you probably want to be aware of this. So they're aware of it. They're now training

SPEAKER_17: people on how to run clubhouses, I guess. So I mean, I think we have to pause here for a minute and say is training. Okay. And then at what point is training become predatory? Right? Because a book is training, but a book is $10. Correct.

SPEAKER_18: And of course, like we all went, many people went to college or for taking courses, of course, that's a couple hundred dollars for a couple of weeks. That sounds reasonable, right? Yep. So when do in your mind does it tip over into being a grift or a scam or unreasonable? Well,

David Friedberg: first you have to think about ROI. And then you think about like, what is the replacement value

SPEAKER_46: of this thing of this? So it's like, first of all, you have the ROI of anything. So the reason that like a $10 book is not a scam is because yes, most books won't change people's lives. But it's $10.

David Friedberg: It's $10 and the promises are pretty banal. I mean, it's just like, hey, this is a book about business. It's a book about business, right? Sure. So you're selling a course at college, especially with the prices being now what it is, a question about ROI is reasonable, right? Sure.

SPEAKER_46: So you can look at average, you know, how somebody from college performed versus their counterpart, right? And we still say college is still worth it, depending on what you do. Obviously, there are definitely edge cases where this becoming way less credible. But when you talk

David Friedberg: about courses, you're getting a certificate that no business on earth would value. So what actually are you getting? You must be getting some kind of knowledge. Is that knowledge fungible somewhere

SPEAKER_21: that is free? In almost all cases, the answer is absolutely. Not only is it free, it's better.

SPEAKER_156: It's so much better. These courses, you should see behind the paywall. It's so bad. Because it can be

SPEAKER_159: bad. Because at the end of the day, what's someone who just spent their last $3,000 going to do to

SPEAKER_137: you? Are they going to come after you? So they can't sue you? They're powerless. And they have no shame. I know.

SPEAKER_90: They feel shame, right? Because they got suckered. So they don't actually take action because they

SPEAKER_18: don't want people to think that they were stupid enough to give $8,000 in coaching fees to one of

SPEAKER_59: these scumbags. What one of these guys? And he's threatened me legally multiple times. He's up in Canada, if that gives any hints to some of my followers of who this is. He sued a single mother

David Friedberg: who quit her teaching job because she was trying to take care of her depressed son. Hold on, hold on, it gets worse. She was helping people in the Facebook group of scam victims for this guy, help them get a refund. This guy sued her to stop her from doing it, knowing that she's a single mom,

SPEAKER_21: all because he wants to make more money. I mean, the level of like sort of predatory sociopath we're dealing with is almost hard to overstate. In fact, one of those guys that went to that Harvard thing

SPEAKER_59: that I was telling you about was this guy, Jason Bond. He's now being prosecuted by the FTC.

SPEAKER_46: His site has been basically shut down, ragingbull.com. If you go there, there's an injunction on the website. But my point is, is that it's not like these guys are making really a lot of money really

David Friedberg: fast, but they're cropping up from nowhere. They're the shadiest characters. They have no backstory,

SPEAKER_46: no real background. Besides, they took a Russell Brunson course and learned how to set up a Click Funnels account. So just for people who haven't been on Clubhouse in the last, you know, 30 days, two months, three months, basically, they run these rooms where they start talking. And I don't know what

David Friedberg: you describe it as I think it's, it's kind of reminds me like, it's just kind of a giant circle jerk of like people talking about how great they are as coaches and saying like, sure, if you need

SPEAKER_46: help, go ping me real quick. I'll, I'll do this or that for you or whatever. That's the top of the lead funnel. And then they try to upsell you into their coaching program or course. Now, do you want to know how much money these people are making? I don't know if you have like an idea. I gotta think they're

SPEAKER_56: making hundreds of thousands of dollars off of these courses. Please tell me it's not millions.

SPEAKER_165: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So, so, so, so one, one, one group, I got a hold of their, uh,

SPEAKER_46: the employees started coming to me, like literally coming to me with like, they were so upset. This company in particular had a $20,000 or roughly $20,000 product. And they were encouraging people. They said, if they don't have money, send them to this, send them to get a personal loan. They had partnered with a personal loan. They got kickbacks on the personal loans. And then they go tell them they need to sign up for the most expensive one, because that's really going to help them out.

David Friedberg: Okay, so the I got these people's sales numbers, like sort of the worst of the worst. Anyway, they were making $4 million that month. Wow. So that's why they're able to spend all

SPEAKER_18: this money on advertising. Correct. That's why you linked them. Yes, they're everywhere. And so it's

SPEAKER_03: obviously when people are running these kind of grifts, if it wasn't working, they wouldn't be

SPEAKER_33: running them, right? They're grifters, they would find some other grift. Can I ask you something?

SPEAKER_173: Because I feel like I'm gonna really piss you off with this one. Have you ever heard of the angels and

SPEAKER_24: entrepreneurs summit? I did. They basically took my book, and my investment in Uber, which was one of

SPEAKER_17: the legendary investments. And they kind of crafted their whole angel investor summit, it was with one

SPEAKER_96: of the sharks and Neil Patel. Yeah, this is a disgusting scam. They basically, I was worried you were gonna be like, Yeah, this is real legit. I was like, please don't say this is super

SPEAKER_03: disgusting. And they basically cribbed a lot of what I do, and use that language. So, you know, I'm famous for making this crazy and you know, Uber investment, you know, that paid off 1000s to one, right. And that I got very lucky in that regard to hit that. But it does happen in Silicon Valley, every, you know, five to 10 years, you hit one of the outlier companies, Google, Facebook,

SPEAKER_178: Airbnb, right? That's why that's why you're investing. Yeah, that's what I do what I do,

SPEAKER_03: right? Yeah, you're hoping that you hit one in 1000. Well, I've hit that couple of times. It's very hard to do, but it is possible. So I wrote a book about that with Harper Collins business, the number one business publisher in the world paid me a lot of money to write that book, it's been translated into seven languages. The book is $10, I explained to everything I've learned,

SPEAKER_17: I hope you buy it or I hope you get it for free. I hope somebody passes it on to you and you get it from the library and you get all that value for $10. Because I don't need money from founders, or the public. I make a lot of money as an angel investor, you cannot there's no amount of money

SPEAKER_18: that individuals could pay me that could ever match an investment in Robin Hood or Uber or calm. I mean, does that make sense? Like, of course, it makes sense. No, no, this is what I hate to make

David Friedberg: this audience. This is what yes, this is what I've been telling my audience is that if they had a better way to make money, they would just do that. They're doing what they do. They're preying on desperate people because they can't actually do what they say they can do. All these penny stock traders, they can't really trade. That's why they sell it, right? All these I mean, it's so try. It's like the

SPEAKER_46: saying like those who can't do teach but now it's those who can't do charge $2,000 for a course,

David Friedberg: and then claim to be like the number one guy in the world. I think I've been watching a bunch of

SPEAKER_22: trading funnels recently. I've heard top trader in the world probably 10 times in 10 funnels. And it's like you can't say that. Well, I guess you can. But it's a lot of cool. And I run something

SPEAKER_18: called the angel summit in the angel launch is the name of my investment front launch and we do the launch angel summit. So this scumbag Neil Patel, who I know because he used to be around the industry

SPEAKER_03: has never made any angel investments I know of. I've never seen him on a cap table. Um, he is, um, I think turned into a bit of a grifter and I can tell you he's not talented and he's kind of laughed at in our industry as like one of these affiliate kids who does this like crazy affiliate summit summit. I also copy a lot of stuff like I think he was caught all copy rising several times. He's plagiarized me a million times I think just in this effort and then they did that thing where they hire the sharks. So the sharks from shark tank, Mark Cuban excluded because he's actually rich.

SPEAKER_17: He's actually rich. Yeah. But I think the other sharks are not actually rich. And he had the one guy do these videos on a yacht. Did you see those? Oh, yeah. And I can tell you Neil Patel is not

SPEAKER_186: rich and doesn't own a yacht, but they can rent a yacht, but they rented a yacht. Everything

SPEAKER_187: can be short. Did he have on this Robert Herchevik? Okay, so I don't know Robert. Um,

SPEAKER_17: he seems like a nice guy, but Damien and Robert seem to do any paid speaking that you give them. And if you give them $50,000, they'll stand next to you. And then what these scumbags do in these courses and stuff is they take them, they get the, they give them 50,000. Then you as an

SPEAKER_03: unsuspecting person says, Oh, they're from shark tank. They're billionaires. Well, they're not billionaires or else they wouldn't need the $50,000 speaking gig. Can I, can I make it worse? So not

SPEAKER_25: only that they ran, uh, Robert ran a real estate seminar gig, which that's a gigantic scam industry

David Friedberg: where it said like, Oh, you're going to meet this guy, blah, blah, blah. And then he wasn't actually at

SPEAKER_46: these events and it's a boilerplate room where basically they're just trying to sell you on these like $20,000 seminars. Okay. That's him. Damien John is connected to raging bull who remember

David Friedberg: the FTC guy? Oh yeah. He had a video endorsing that guy. Cause of course, like you said, uh, $50,000. They'll do anything. I don't think he's ever said anything about that except to basically block people who talk to him about it. Then Damien John also got on a thing with Grant Cordon.

SPEAKER_67: I saw your video of that where they said, take the last $1,000. We've got to play it for people

SPEAKER_46: because they won't believe it. They will not believe this. It's unbelievable. They're like,

SPEAKER_18: if this person has only $1,000 left and it's Christmas, what do you tell them? And Damien John

SPEAKER_194: says, I tell them to buy it. Buy the course for $1,000. And Grant Cardone goes,

SPEAKER_18: the kids get no Christmas presents, no Christmas for family. Grant Cardone goes, me too. I would tell

SPEAKER_194: them the same thing. That's who we're dealing with folks. That's who we're dealing with. And you

SPEAKER_37: caught them editing their video and editing out the Christmas part. So even these scumbags have a limit, right? I have no idea what possesses you to do this, but I got pissed off. I saw these

SPEAKER_21: guys and I got so angry that they sent me on this year long quest. I literally thought it would take me a week to call all these guys out. And then you just find yourself peering down the rabbit hole.

SPEAKER_146: You're like, wait, what is this? Why would they be on a rented yacht? Why would they be selling

SPEAKER_03: schlocky courses? Are they or are they just that desperate for an incremental 50k?

SPEAKER_61: Doesn't make any sense. They're making a lot of money with this.

SPEAKER_46: Grant Cardone says he just he makes the money here and then he plows it into real estate. So it's like it's like this is the this is cash flow. And then oh, I can make my I can then invest it into like real things and then launder my reputation. I call it reputation laundering because they're taking money by ways that most people would consider scummy or scammy or distasteful. And then they plow it into things that most people would consider legit like Tai Lopez is in the process of trying to do this and I'm not going to let him. He's investing in pier one, right? He's doing a bunch of like things like that.

SPEAKER_201: He bought a bunch of old brands for nothing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So anyway, here's the clip.

SPEAKER_202: A guy's sitting there right now watching this and I got my last grand dude and I got Christmas coming.

SPEAKER_204: Should you spin it over? Absolutely. I'll tell you the same thing.

SPEAKER_203: They literally would take the last thousand dollars out of mom's purse.

SPEAKER_18: Oh, yeah. Out of dad's wallet. Oh, yeah. Take it. Take that last thousand. The kids get no presents, coal in their stockings. Don't pay the heat bill. Just take your last thousand and give it to Grant Cardone. Oh, I guess what you get for that?

SPEAKER_45: You get a course or a book, an ebook. I don't know. You get it. You get you get Damon John's ebook.

SPEAKER_46: You get Damon on demand, which is like his stupid course or whatever.

David Friedberg: And then you get a growth 10x growth con. Guess what that is, Jason? It's a pitch for more stuff.

SPEAKER_21: So you're going to go there broke and then they're going to go, hey, you got a credit card? You got it. Yeah. Hey, you got it. Can you swipe?

David Friedberg: This is this is actually a famous tactic where in the back of the room, hey, nobody's watching. Maybe we'll call the bank with you. Maybe we'll you know, there's a lot of people do this. Actually, this nudge. Anyway, I know so much about this stuff. I don't want to go too much. Oh, like this little inside baseball. Dean Graziosi is another one of these guys also got added to an FTC lawsuit because he was charging people. This nudge like thing seminar group was charging people and getting them in debt in the back of the room. Wow.

SPEAKER_03: They first make it so they get you to come to a free seminar. Then they get you to do $100. Then they get you to do $600. Then they get you to do 6000. Right? It's like they're boiling the frog. Oh, yeah. And you just go. People I mean, does Tony Robbins fall into this category? Because there are people who I know who go to Tony Robbins seminars. It's a week, it's $5,000, which that's, in our industry, a tech conference that might be what a tech conference calls, but then they pay 10k, or they do personal consulting, it seems like a lot of these folks kind of took the Tony Robbins archetype, and then they're kind of rebuilding it as like cheap Tony Robbins.

SPEAKER_213: Yeah, so like versions like a porn is it Tai Lopez and they're sort of like Tony Robbins. Yeah,

SPEAKER_21: but what I can tell you is that like, I recently so I do this thing now where I used to just analyze

SPEAKER_46: the marketing, but now I'm also like some of these guys, I'll go through their course, and then I'll also talk about what's in the course. So I have the Cape knowledge business blueprint, which is Tony Robbins new course, right? He sells it for I think $2,000, somewhere in that range.

David Friedberg: Um, anyways, so during one of the little modules, he's talking about, you know, selling your business, selling your knowledge. So he's teaching you maybe how to sell a course. Okay. So he's teaching you this, they talk about how many people they have in the program, Jason, they have something like I'm forget blanking on the number, I think it's like 13,000 people or 20,000 people. You come to find out that they've made tens of millions of dollars off an online course that costs them after production, zero dollars. Wow. Besides customer acquisition to make. So the question is, why wouldn't Tony just put it out on his website? Listen, I also don't really have that big of a problem with like, you want to go hear the hurrah, there might be some value in that. But what's the value in like spending $2,000 to make Tony richer and to make Dean Graziosi richer versus, oh, maybe we

SPEAKER_21: should just like give this knowledge out for free because we're trying to help people, right? And the people who look up to us, like, yeah, some of them are successful, but a lot of them are like in desperate straits who resonate with Tony's life story of being like broke and destitute.

David Friedberg: So why not just release the information or like you maybe say 100 bucks just to maybe get some commitment, but then like give it to charity. Why $2,000? That's what I can't figure out.

SPEAKER_18: I mean, I I've done my podcast this week in startups for 1100 episodes. It's free. I interview the greatest investors and entrepreneurs in the world. If you were to watch but 10% or 20% of them for free, you would get a lot more than these fake entrepreneurs regurgitating what my guests on my podcast talk about. And all that knowledge is out there for free in podcasts in e in audio books, and in books in your library, you don't even have to pay for it. So just buy the business books and

SPEAKER_03: read them and watch business podcasts. I mean, these losers have no knowledge. They have no knowledge.

SPEAKER_46: Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. This is a knowledge broker blueprint, right? They break it up and they'll do installments for you. Wow. And of course,

SPEAKER_176: that's a bit of a tell to raise the price of the installments, of course, because you know, they want to make sure they get the money out of you. Yeah, there's 594 four monthly payments.

SPEAKER_59: Just so because it also tells you who their audience is, right? Because if they're dealing

David Friedberg: with big players, they would like payment plan, right? So who are they actually targeting? Who's actually the this this $2,000 course for they're not targeting somebody who's an accredited investor

SPEAKER_03: accredited investors make $200,000 a year or more. Those are the only people I really work with as co investors are accredited. We don't work with civilians as we call them. It's not meant to be derogatory. But the civilian crowd that's learning, we have free stuff for them. Watch the podcast, read the books. They're all basically free or close to free, right $10 for a book is essentially free. I mean, you pay more for, you know, lunch. So that I think that's overall, I think we've broken down

SPEAKER_17: how you know if you're getting scammed. Is this more than the return on investment test? Can you get this information from a more credible person? Who actually has business success? And what are they charging for the same information free?

SPEAKER_18: Or their book, Bob Iger's book? You know, Michael, if it's his book, good to great all the Jim Collins books, crossing the chasm, there's plenty of books out there. And there's all these tactical

SPEAKER_17: books to that you can get just on any of these tactical things. And the tactical books are 20 bucks, 10 bucks that they shouldn't be 2000. You shouldn't add two zeros, you take two zeros off. So it's basically a scam. Then if they're trying to upsell you on stuff constantly, you're getting

SPEAKER_18: scammed. And if they don't let you pay as you go for a coaching, then it's a scam, I think as well.

SPEAKER_229: Right? Like if it's a buy into like, you have to do 12.

SPEAKER_46: I think that is the good indication that you're being scammed. There's another thing now they're doing, which is an action based refund, which is a way they get a lot of people out. So they go, I have a 30 day money back guarantee. Yeah, this is insider baseball for all the people who are wondering, should I buy this? Right? They go, I have a 60 day money back guarantee. That's what they'll tell you. Then you go to their refund policy. And it, they won't say this in the webinar where they sell you on it. They go, they'll go, oh, actually to make sure

SPEAKER_59: that you try, we, we need you to watch 40% of the modules, Jason, and we need you to submit two help requests and we need you to contact 20 businesses in order to get a refund. By the way, you didn't

David Friedberg: know that's going in, but if you actually, actually, if you watch 80% of the course or more, you can't get a refund. So you need that Goldilocks zone. You need the Goldilocks zone of you've tried, but you haven't tried hard enough in order to get a refund. And what this ends up doing is

SPEAKER_46: people get a refund on day 29, not knowing that they were supposed to jump through all these hoops. And these guys go, oh yeah, well, it's an easy 30 day refund, but you forgot to jump through the hoops. Eventually these guys, they either get sued, they get sued by the federal trade commission. They have so many victims that like people's just, they cannot keep it out, out of the woodwork or keep it basically suppressed. But it, it's surprising how long

SPEAKER_59: the life cycle is. I got to admit that is one of the disappointing things is how long the life cycle. They could just keep going, right? Yeah, a lot of them. I mean, do you know the story of like, so all these guys believe in ideology, so that's important to understand. Um, and it's, a lot of it's informed by Napoleon Hill. Do you know who this guy is? Think and Grow Rich. No. Okay, so it's their Bible. Of all these guys, Think and Grow Rich is their Bible. It was,

SPEAKER_233: I've heard of Think and Grow Rich. Yeah.

SPEAKER_59: He was, so he was a huckster who said that he met with Andrew Carnegie and learned all his secrets. Andrew Carnegie apparently said, you're the only guy who can go ahead and teach all my secrets, right? This, this book is like one of the best selling books of all time. Yeah, of course. Of course, it never happened though.

SPEAKER_22: There's no proof. And when pressed on this, he goes, oh, I had all the correspondence with,

SPEAKER_59: this guy, but it burned up in a fire. Among the other lies that Napoleon Hill propagated was that he was the one who wrote the, the famous words for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We have nothing to fear, but fear itself. He said that he was part of the armistice. Like he's a famous liar, but he whitewashed his reputation. And all of these guys think of him as like, the guy to listen to because what his whole thing is, is basically the secret. You can, it's not about, it's not about experience. It's not about innovation. It's about attracting wealth. It's about a burning desire towards wealth. Jason, as a real investor, you know that that's bullshit, right? Right. Real, real, the real path to wealth is like grit. It's hard work. It's resiliency. Yeah, it was a million things. I mean, yeah, it's great.

SPEAKER_18: There really are three people in the world who make a lot of money. Um,

SPEAKER_03: number one is capital allocators, people who actually invest money into companies, because you get what's called carry, you get a percentage of the profit. So anybody who is directing pools of

SPEAKER_17: capital of where to invest it, capital allocators, some legitimate job, whether you're venture capital, private equity, hedge fund, etc. So capital allocators is one. Then there's entrepreneurs. I was an entrepreneur turned capital allocator. Entrepreneurs create a business,

SPEAKER_03: they get the equity in that business, eventually the business gets bought, or it goes public, and you or it has profits. And then there's a third group, which are just people who are virtuosos at something, whether it's LeBron James with the basketball, you know, Britney Spears with pop music, or a chef like Gordon Ramsay, somebody who is just so good at their field. Now those people can also the virtuosos have become capital allocators where LeBron James invested in calm calm. Yep, as but one example, or you might have somebody like Gordon Ramsay start

SPEAKER_17: businesses, right? So you you do have this interchange of those three things. But there is

SPEAKER_22: nowhere in this cap this capital allocator magical thinking about like, you think about rich? Well, anyway, that's what they all believe. But it's funny to me, because when you realize that the source

David Friedberg: of like, this like, pseudo guru thing, and by the way, he's the guy who like, supposedly invented the

SPEAKER_46: idea of the masterclass. And that's why they all are talking about their masterclass, you're gonna join my masterclass, this and that. Of course, masterclass by itself is not a bad word by any means. But this is the kind of thing that they go into, they're like, Oh, this is where the idea of like, you need to basically attract wealth to yourself think that you will do it. It's also why they think

SPEAKER_59: that victims deserve their victimhood, because they didn't attract it to them, they attracted it to themselves. They go, Well, I thought it and I did it, right? Because I sold a course, they must be bringing it upon themselves, they deserve it. But I wanted to add one thing. I don't have a problem with courses that qualify. I think that's really important or coaches that qualify their prospects. If you say, I want to run a high ticket coaching thing. And you qualify your prospects to people who

David Friedberg: have money, I don't have an issue. If you qualify to people who they're not going to be materially injured by the fact that they invest in your thing. I am not bothered at all by that. I am not going to make a crusade at taking those guys down. No, I think you're the crusade of

SPEAKER_17: protecting people who are naive or who don't have the money for these things is why I think what you're doing is just so important and awesome. I'm wondering if we can find the victims. This is my proposal to you.

SPEAKER_114: Okay. Can we, you and I form a super team? Okay. The Justice League and we go after the

SPEAKER_17: legion of doom scammers and we find the victims and we interview the victims of this and we get the,

SPEAKER_03: maybe they want to be like behind a, you know, silhouette and change their voices. Yep. But if we could actually hear from the victims of these scams, how they actually work the underbelly,

SPEAKER_19: that's the, have you ever, ever gotten one of them on camera to interview? Because I'm getting

SPEAKER_61: them DMing me. It's, it's one of my most viral videos is a Dan Locke video of this teacher

SPEAKER_46: who quit his job, sunk 26k into this, into Dan Locke's course. And it's, it describes a cycle of the upsell because first it's high ticket closer. Then it's, that's not enough. I'm not making any money.

David Friedberg: I thought I was making money. So I'm going to join closers in black then. Okay, wait, wait,

SPEAKER_46: closers in black. Isn't making any money. Maybe I should go join a high ticket millionaire or whatever. He's got like a million upsells, right? Because it's all about getting people keep buying in, buying in. You need that back in. So it describes the process of this victim.

SPEAKER_59: And I call him a victim because he literally was out 26k. He thought he was bad off before as a teacher. Then he was without a job out of 26k. So you do this and these are really powerful

SPEAKER_46: interviews. I've talked to, uh, a family whose son committed suicide after seriously after he,

David Friedberg: he was a soldier who came home, was looking for a second, you know, career. And he got into this

SPEAKER_17: real estate thing where this guy was, uh, what's the worst man. Somebody went to war to protect our country. They did this incredible service. And then they get targeted just like, you know, some of those online universities were targeting them with the GI bill, where they could, you know, get some money for education. Then they taught them some it thing, you know, over the web, and they never really got qualified. Now they're in debt. It's, you know, the thing that really

SPEAKER_68: disgusts me about all of this is it's so easy to build businesses in the world in the United States. There's so many opportunities out there to do legitimate business. And that these deranged scumbags can't just build a normal business. They have to go prey on people. I think they get some sadistic

SPEAKER_03: pleasure out of taking somebody's last $10,000. I actually think that they're like,

SPEAKER_18: either I would say drug dealers are probably more compassionate in that they don't want their folks to go bankrupt, right? Like, because that would be bad for business. Right. But I think that

SPEAKER_17: this group of people love the idea of somebody giving them their last $1,000 as we heard in that video, like they they live for this. They I think they secretly enjoy destroying people and taking

SPEAKER_256: their last bits of money. So I can tell you this, I mean, I mean, as much as I love, I love as much as I love that narrative. I really believe I come to believe over time because at first I didn't believe

SPEAKER_46: it. I could not believe that any of these guys could believe they were creating value in the world because of what was so easily demonstrably true. And you just have to talk to any of their victims,

David Friedberg: right? Yeah. Um, a lot of these guys have are, especially at sort of the middle of the pyramid have sort of been duped themselves. So it's like, you think of an MLM, right? So you think of an MLM, there's people at the bottom and they've been scammed, but then like, as you go into the middle, it's kind of harder to determine, wait, they're making money, but they also themselves were like,

SPEAKER_46: kind of suckered in, but they're like hurting people on their way sort of to the top. I do think there are some people who have definitely sort of made their deal with the devil where they're like, look, I'm making a lot of money at this. I'm not going to change the way I'm doing business, even though I know it's unethical. I think there are a lot of people and that's why I make these victim stories. I try to get them as public as I can is because I want to show these people who they're hurting because what they don't do, they always pin their

David Friedberg: best testimonials. They always pin their winners, but for every winner, there's 99 losers. And when you're charging $2,000, that's an insignificant amount of money to a lot or a significant amount of money to a lot of people. And so that's what I tried to shine a light on is because I think

SPEAKER_46: a lot of these people are dumb. They're making a lot of money for the first time and they have

SPEAKER_98: every incentive to ignore the incredible amount of harm they're doing to people.

SPEAKER_68: So that would be my take, but that's just, you know, I just, I find it so enthralling how embarrassing they are. Like they don't know like how cheesy and horrible they look.

SPEAKER_18: It's just unbelievable. Like, I mean, on top of all of it, like I could watch a JT Fox embarrassing video every day. It feels like almost he's an SNL character. Like they don't seem real to me. Tai Lopez doesn't seem like, do they know that they're like coming across as like as cheesy as

SPEAKER_68: Tony Robbins is they're coming across as like a hundred times more corny. No, they're corny, right?

SPEAKER_262: No, no. Yeah, of course they're corny, but they're self-selecting for people who believe in them.

SPEAKER_46: Right. So it's like, I think before you know how much money they're making, like it's most people write them off. And so they never pay attention to them again. And so they just self-select for people who are like, sort of like, they don't know any better. And they're just like trying to make a few bucks and they see these guys and they see like a superhero who's come down from heaven to save them because they think like, oh, this guy's a huge success. He's going to save me, blah, blah, blah. So actually I think these guys are in an echo chamber and insulated from what real people think

David Friedberg: of them. That's why I really wanted to have you on was like, for a lot of reasons, I think you have

SPEAKER_46: a lot of insight, but also because I wanted a real investor to laugh at these people. Yeah. To laugh

SPEAKER_107: at them and call them for the clowns they are. There's some collaboration here that I want to talk

SPEAKER_68: to when we're not on air. Sure. That I think we could take down the whole lot of them. I have a plan that is so entertaining and brilliant that I think we could literally take the whole industry down like

SPEAKER_267: just at once. Let's do it, Jason. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go. Whatever you have to cut here

SPEAKER_129: and then post conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Beep. All right. Thanks for having me on your show

SPEAKER_270: and thanks for coming on my show. Yeah. Great having you, Jason.