The TikTok strategy that’s printing MILLIONS right now… (ft. Rob The Bank)

The TikTok strategy that’s printing MILLIONS right now… (ft. Rob The Bank) Rob The Bank: The point of this conversation is this is a gold rush and who knows how often these come around. Sam Parr: How much revenue will your brands do using this TikTok model this year? Rob The Bank: A hundred plus. Sam Parr: So five brands, you're going to do over a hundred million this year. And this is the playbook you're running across all of them. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Sam Parr: So what's an example of one of these videos? Rob The Bank: I think this video had made this kid close to $50,000. The single video. Sam Parr: What you said in this video will make people millions of dollars if all they did was just try to act on it. Rob The Bank: Millions are being printed on TikTok. Sam Parr: What are the mistakes people make? Rob The Bank: My advice is be an observer, not a consumer. That's the best thing you can do. Sam Parr: Let's brainstorm live. A hundred million dollar TikTok. Rob The Bank: Yeah, I'm gonna show you something that the world was never gonna see, but I'm gonna show how serious I take this. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. Rob The Bank: Has anyone ever wore a cutoff like this before? Sam Parr: The first one to bring the gun show to MFM? Rob The Bank: So I was just thinking like I've watched a lot of these and I've seen a lot of guests and I was like I'm different in a lot of ways so I might as well visually capture that, you know? Make a statement. Sam Parr: You were early to the Amazon trend and you took $5,000, you turned it into a $30 million company, you sold And what you told me was basically that this now is the first and biggest thing you've seen since that Amazon opportunity. Is that right? Rob The Bank: It is. It is. And I've looked for these. I didn't appreciate it in the Amazon era. But I look for these moments in time where you don't need a ton of startup capital, you don't need to raise money, and you can basically just find something that works. A system, a platform, latch onto that and create something of substantial enterprise value. And TikTok represents that. Sam Parr: So what I want to do is I want to go through the big idea, so why people should be caring about TikTok right now, what you see as the big opportunity, and then specifically What are some examples of people that are crushing it? How are they crushing it? What's the playbook? And then where are the opportunities that you see that are still open that anyone could go do? So that's my game plan. Rob The Bank: Absolutely. Top of the funnel here. Fundamentally, people don't appreciate what's actually happening with TikTok. Shop is a component of that. That's the center of their model. But you think about even restaurants. You think about Google. You think about Facebook, meta ads. There's a paradigm shift. So a good example, Now ex-wife and I went to Tokyo like a year and a half ago. And if we went five years ago, she would have gone to Google to search for restaurants. She would have yelped. Now she goes on TikTok and wants to visually see what is going on, right? That shopping is turning more live. All of these things are fundamentally changing. Even the Creators of this last generation, the influencers, they're coming up off short-form content. We all know how important, you know, clipping and all that stuff is. Sam Parr: By the way, I read that 30% of Jan Ziega's primary news source is TikTok. Rob The Bank: Yep. Sam Parr: And then same thing, primary search engine. So in my company, we did a little poll there. We were trying to work on our Google-like search result. Rob The Bank: Yep. Sam Parr: And I was asking our employees, I was like, so when you Google for this, what do you do? They go, I don't really Google for that. I just go to TikTok and type in the name and then whatever comes up on TikTok is what I use. That blew my mind because I wasn't using TikTok as a search engine. Rob The Bank: Yep. And that's the paradigm shift. And that's the opportunity because it's so early. And it's, I don't like the word like gamifiable, but when you just think through these new models and like how information is being shared, that's where the brands of the future are being created. That's where the artists of the future are being created. That's where like fashion design, it's all happening through this new means of distribution. Unknown Speaker: Do you guys remember when marketing was fun? When you had time to be creative and connect with your customers? With Hubspot, marketing can be fun again. Turn one piece of content into everything you need. Know which prospects are ready to buy and see all your campaign results in one place. Plus, it's easy to use, helping Hubspot customers double their leads in just 12 months, which means you have more time to, you know, enjoy marketing again. Visit Hubspot.com to get started for free. Sam Parr: By the way, this happens in everything. So I don't know if you ever heard the story of why Obama was so successful when he did his first presidential run. Do you know this story? Rob The Bank: Just tapping into the social media and all that? Sam Parr: It was kind of social media, but he got this big grassroots movement going from two reasons. One, he was one of the first presidents to build a huge email list. At the time, the people who were running, they were doing, you know, fundraisers, they were doing TV, they were doing, you know, traditional interviews, but they weren't building an email list. And he built a giant email machine before anybody else. And then he started using social media on top, and he basically hired people. Trump did the same thing. When Trump won in 2016, even this year when he won, he raised way less money than his opponent, right? The first time, way less than Hillary. This time, way less than Kamala slash Biden. And in both cases, it was because he was using a different marketing strategy. His was all Facebook and online and the others are doing all like traditional TV buys, commercials, stuff like that. And so when you see this, like you said, paradigm shift, it's like a new marketing opportunity. If you can pounce on that, that's where you can get rich. Can you quickly just say like, What you saw in Amazon and when that was back in 20, what was it, 14 or so? Rob The Bank: And I'll go from that to now, like the numbers we're seeing the difference in terms of like ROAS, right? And it's. It's challenging for people because it's happening so fast. I think a lot of people still think that digital marketing is the new paradigm. Actually, it's all the way over here now. Amazon's a great example. I remember seeing brands. Billboards were a huge strategy back then. I started by working with brands. That's how I got my start, as a consultant, helping them sell on Amazon. I'm going, guys, you're spending $50,000 on a billboard campaign. And when you give me $5,000 to spend on Amazon, you're having trouble tracking that. But right here, we're making $5 for every dollar spent. And this is me as a 22-year-old kid. They're like, no, this is the way it is. Or like, you know, we're going to double... Bodybuilding.com needs these. You know, GNC needs these. And by the time I finally, it probably took me like a year, I'm going, these guys are slow. Sam Parr: At first you think you're dumb. Eventually you realize they're dumb. You're like, yo, I keep putting a dollar into this magic money machine and $5 are coming out, which is a 5x ROAS. For people who don't know, ROAS is return on ad spend. So it's for every dollar I spend on marketing, how many dollars do I get back out in revenue? TV, billboards, you don't really know, right? The famous advertising saying is half of our advertising doesn't work. Problem is we just don't know which half. And like and actually for a while CMOs didn't mind that because if you can't track it, you can't be held accountable. But then Facebook and all these guys came and all of a sudden every dollar you put in you get a like verified amount of How much revenue you're getting out of it, now you're held accountable, but that also presents an opportunity. Just for a kid like you, you're like, all right, if this works, it's inarguable. This is working and I'm getting 5x return on my money. Rob The Bank: And so now what we're seeing, what happens over time is that compresses, right? Enough guys like me do podcasts like this. Facebook ads are great. Sam Parr: Goddamn podcasting. Rob The Bank: But it shrinks the margin. And so like you look at like an Amazon now, which has been my, you know, I've been doing ads on there for, 10 years now. And like a one to one and a half ROAS is like good in a hot category, which is not profitable, but you're, you know, that's where you're like, okay, repeat customers, building the brand. And so you have that modeled as like, that was the last couple of years. And then TikTok comes along and that organic algorithm is so damn good. And then if you this is where now it almost goes back to the billboard era of like actually tracking becomes a little more difficult. But we're seeing just money spent on this system, which we can get into a little bit later. But this system is like 7, 8x minimum return versus a 1x ROAS. And upwards of like, when I first did this with Jimmy 18 months ago, it was like 30x. And then the question was, how can we spend more? Sam Parr: I mean, it's like PEDs for marketing, right? It's like if you're going to get, I can use this channel that not everybody understands, this playbook that not everybody understands and get 7x. Or I go to Facebook and Amazon, I get a 1x, 1.5x. I mean, that's like cheat codes in the game of business. Can you give people a sense? How much revenue will your brands do using this TikTok model this year? Rob The Bank: So directly attributable to TikTok Shop, we modeled probably like 40-ish million. Sam Parr: And overall, the halo effect of all that. Rob The Bank: A hundred plus. Sam Parr: So your brands, which is three, four, roughly, how many are you running right now? Rob The Bank: Five that I either own a majority of or a meaningful, yeah. Sam Parr: So five brands, you're going to do over a hundred million this year, and this is the playbook you're running across all of them. Rob The Bank: Yep. And by the way, how old are these brands? One or two years old. It's actually, it's unreal. And it, I don't want to say things stress or scare me at this point, but it's one of those things where it's like, all right, we got to see this through because the point of this conversation is this is a gold rush and who knows how often these Come around, right? And so I feel like I'm getting to go back to my 22 year old self and saying, Hey, like this is going to be really big, you know, focus right now, do the right things, execute, you know, and, and, and that's where we're at. Sam Parr: Is that a conversation you had with yourself back when you were 22 and the Amazon gold rush was happening? Rob The Bank: I took it really seriously, but you don't know what you don't know. Right. And just, I didn't appreciate like who knew private equity was going to come in and value all these brands and who knew that Amazon was going to grow To that extent, it was still kind of a discount site when I was first on there. That's why brands didn't want to do it. Sam Parr: You were in the supplements category and you said the way the supplement game worked was you had GNC or these like retail stores. If you wanted to be, if you wanted to win in supplements, you had to win in retail. And then you're like Amazon came around and changed the game because now you have this online retailer And suddenly new supplement brands could win there where you couldn't get on the shelf at GNC. You were saying now the same thing's happening to Amazon. Rob The Bank: Exactly. Sam Parr: There's a new one coming in and sweeping the rug and creating the opportunity where maybe you weren't going to win on Amazon, but now you can win in this new way. Is that right? Rob The Bank: That's exactly right. It's these continual paradigm shifts. Like Amazon, it was, you know, there's this brand BPI Sports, who was number one in GNC. And then I just remember seeing that flip where Amazon all of a sudden was like 50 percent of their revenue. And then they didn't focus on Amazon and then there were brands passing them up, right? And so the brands of the future were born on that digital platform. And Amazon was, you know, their Facebook ads, their other digital means, but we'll call it the e-commerce era. And now it's happening again with like the short form discovery era. So it's much less about what does your website look like or this and that. It's like, how are you optimizing for this means of information dissemination? Sam Parr: And you know, I think when most people say gold rush, if you call 10 things a gold rush, then what's really a gold rush? But I think like you genuinely believe you're like, yo, this I'm not fucking around. I'm serious. Right now there is a window where something can happen. Could you like make your pitch not to me but to like the next Rob who is 23, 24, 25, 30 years old. It doesn't matter what age but like to be like, yo, take this seriously. You can even just direct to camera like what's your message to that person about this opportunity? Rob The Bank: No, honestly, I'm gonna hijack your friend here. How many businesses a day do you think Ben looks at just in general? Sam Parr: 10 to 15 a day. Rob The Bank: A day. Sam Parr: Yeah. Rob The Bank: A day. So he's constantly looking at opportunities and he sent me a text and he goes, oh, This TikTok thing really does seem to be the best opportunity to go from like no net worth to like one to five million with no skills, no background, no tech, whatever. And when he sent me that, because obviously I accept my opinion is going to be biased. I do this every day. But when Ben sent me that, I was like, oh, OK, yeah, no, this is for real. And then you look at our own, you know, like we're doing this, our company growth, even though we have skills when we're doing this a while. But to go from zero to You know, a hundred plus million run rate is actually insane with no, you know, it's not raising, it's more profitable. It's super profitable. Sam Parr: Yeah. You bootstrap these, right? Like, you know, I'm a small investor on it, but you didn't take our money for the money. Rob The Bank: You just, no, we love you. Sam Parr: You just want us to be on board. Uh, all right. So let's, let's stop, uh, teasing. What are the brands like, tell me some stories. Like I don't live in this world. You do tell me some stories of some brands that are crushing it. What are some examples that make this real? Rob The Bank: One that I think we can start with is this company Roos Research. And this guy had a little Amazon experience. He's 27. And this is like a nine figure play. And I just couldn't be more excited for him. And so I'm like, you know, hyping it up here. But he reaches out to me two and a half years ago before TikTok's even taken off. And he's like, hey, I'm thinking about starting a supplement brand on Amazon. He picked the right category. He's like, longevity is getting bigger. He gets on Amazon. He's doing all right. And then TikTok comes around and he pours all in on it. And two years later, I believe this month, you know, he'll do north of like $15 million between all online. Sam Parr: This month? Rob The Bank: This month. Sam Parr: So what is the product? What do they do? Research? Rob The Bank: NAD, Roost Research. And it's that like, you know, it's that every couple of years, a new supplement category comes along. We're like, this might have long term staying power. Collagen was the last huge one, you know, $4 billion exit vital proteins to Nestle, and he's betting on that. And then he went all in, all bootstrapped, no raised money, not even like, he hasn't revamped the brand yet. If you go look at it, you're like, no, this looks a little like, you know, it doesn't look like a multi hundred million dollar thing, but that's what he's building. So I'd say that one. Sam Parr: So he spotted the health trend early, early enough, not like the first guy, but early enough. We built a good product in that space. You said he went all in on TikTok, you know, figured out TikTok. What did he actually do to make it work on TikTok? Rob The Bank: He tapped into this creator model. So should we go in detail? Sam Parr: Yeah, what's the playbook? So if I, for all these ideas, they have a playbook. What's the TikTok playbook? Rob The Bank: So it's important to preface it with this. Everyone is used to YouTube, Instagram, like where your followers matter, right? Like you have, An Instagram following of a million people, that's valuable. TikTok shattered that. And you have to look at everything through the lens of views. You start a brand new TikTok account, I do. We walk out of here, we start a new TikTok account together, we start a video of dancing in the street, that could get 10 million views. And so that's the center of this whole model. Swings at bat. Screw your brand page. Roost doesn't have a brand page. They might run ads, but the key part of the model is how many people can we get creating product-specific content for the brand? Sam Parr: Like an army, instead of one influencer becoming Kim Kardashian or The Rock or whatever, instead of, I will become famous and get a lot of followers and then sell product. What you're saying is, the new model is, an army of people need to create content and then... It's just the content wins. One of those pieces of content needs to pop in order for this to work. Is that it? Rob The Bank: Yeah, exactly. And the first big use case of this before product was Andrew Tate. Like that's how he, can we say that? Can we say that name? That's how he broke the internet. Not even like intentionally, but he had affiliates making Tate content. And so he's not, Tate's not on TikTok, but he has 500 hungry little minions who love him. Sam Parr: And he was paying them or they were just inspired? What was going on? Rob The Bank: Yeah, there was an affiliate commission back to make more videos for him. So like, like you could get people paying $50 a month by making this content. Sam Parr: He created basically like a content MLM almost. Rob The Bank: Pretty much. Sam Parr: Yeah. Rob The Bank: No, exactly. Sam Parr: So he, and what, what was his, I mean, that's kind of genius of him to do that because no other, you know, we were content creators, podcasters, whatever. But if we created content, we just put it on our channel and it was just us or like we would hire people to create clips for us. But on our one channel, what he did was different. He's like, yo, Here's a bunch of raw material. Rob The Bank: Send it. Run it. Sam Parr: You figure out how to go viral. And if you do, I'll pay you, what, per view? Or what was he doing? Rob The Bank: Per sign-up, they got back to the community that would teach you how to do that. And the end result was most Googled man on the planet, right? And so now you see that everywhere. Streamers like Aiden Ross and those guys, they spend six figures a month paying on a CPM metric, paying people to chop up their streams and put it out on new TikTok. I do that, right? My stuff, like someone from my team will chop this up and you might see it. Swings at bat. And so now take that same idea. Sam Parr: When you say my team, do you literally mean like my employees or you're like both? Rob The Bank: Like both. We're trying to hit it from everywhere. And brands are too. Like this is the fundamental thing. How can you get as much good quality swings at bat as humanly possible? And sometimes it's freelance people and then sometimes it's internally. It's a little harder on shop. So beautiful because the model itself incentivizes it without us having to You know, like internally, I'm trying to figure out metrics, like, you know, like all that, right? Whereas if you have talented creators, they just go. And that was Tate's too. It worked. It fed itself. The economics fed itself. So shop feeds itself. Sam Parr: So just to explain, instead of just sending it to famous people, influencers or random people, what happened was certain people realized, oh shit, I can make money doing this. So instead of just doing it once, what if I made Five videos a day. Rob The Bank: Yep. Sam Parr: What if I started picking brands that I thought would perform well and they started making $500 a month and $5,000 a month. You have creators that make, how much is like the most successful creators make per month? Just creators. They don't own the brand. They don't buy inventory. They don't have to run the operations. They're just making TikToks. Rob The Bank: What do you think? What do you think? Sam Parr: I've heard that like there's like 20 year olds that are able to make a hundred grand a month. Rob The Bank: Yeah, like, like, yeah, like a lot and way more than you'd think. I was at an event for one of our, you know, the group that I own a little piece of and we've had 27 people make over $100,000 in a month as freelance creators. And the important part is these are not influencers. Like Jacqueline, I have a YouTube video with, she was working as a server eight months ago, making 20 bucks an hour. And she made like 180 grand last month. Sam Parr: And what did they do? They go in the lab and they're basically like, all right, I have to figure out what content can I create that will make this product, you know, interesting, appealing to other people. And then they get like, they're making like 30, 40, 50 videos a month. Most of them don't do well, but a few of them start to do well. And they're studying and learning, oh, If I do this hook, that grabs people, but it's not converting. Okay, what can make it convert better? And they're just specializing in the craft of short form content. Not too dissimilar than David Ogilvie in the past figuring out how to do print ads that are going to convert. All the great marketers in the past. It's just instead of going to an ad agency, you're going to these creator armies where young people are specializing in How to create short form content. Rob The Bank: Direct response marketing. That's what this means. That's exactly what it is. And there's varying degrees of it. There's like the innovators who can sit down. The algorithm is the algorithm. You have to capture attention. You have to keep them watching. And then, you know, something to convert. And then there's the second wave of that. Whereas, you know, one of the innovators hits what works. And then there's literally 500 kids that are going to copy that same idea. Only make 20% of it. But then what does that do for the brand? Right. Then all of a sudden you have all these videos going nuclear. Sam Parr: I bet you. So show me a video. So what's an example of one of these videos that this is a great one. Rob The Bank: I think this video last I checked, I think this video had made this kid close to $50,000. The creator. The single video. And he paired You know, modern thing, Trump, like getting elected with a conspiracy and all this, whatever, just got into office one day ago and is already going after one of the most predatory industries in the world. Watch this. Unknown Speaker: We have a public health system that. Rob The Bank: So that was the hook. Sam Parr: So the hook was first he's writing the news trend, Trump, instead of saying, hey, I have a product I'd like to tell you about. No, no, no. Starts by talking about Trump. And then he has this curiosity. What would you call it? Rob The Bank: It's that information gap, right? Where all of a sudden he went after one of the biggest industries in the world. What did he do? Sam Parr: Most predatory. Which one? What's that industry? And what did he do? Rob The Bank: And then you hear in the background is that mysterious. It's a trending sound, you know. Unknown Speaker: Starting today. Well, you know what's crazy? His buddy Donald White was coming after. Sam Parr: By the way, even how raw this is, he's taking a video of like an Android phone. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Sam Parr: So if you don't think this is an advertisement. Rob The Bank: No, exactly. And everything nowadays is shifting to that just raw, organic, like you don't want to feel like an influencers selling you. And that's not what he is. You know, like this is like this is a random dude making telling you a story. Yeah. OK, let's see. Unknown Speaker: You put the raw. Rob The Bank: materials back into your body needs, which are supplements and things that you're deficient on. Now, this is where it all gets interesting because around the same time, they were trying to silence this doctor for doing this in a natural way, and he ran a whole lot of causes to get at the same time. Unknown Speaker: The product is a sinusitis around a fungus problem that lives up and through here, and oil of oregano is the absolute best remedy for that. It's antimicrobial, antibacterial. Anti-fungal, anti-candida, anti-viral, anti-parasites, and anti-mold. Sam Parr: So really, you get the idea, right? Rob The Bank: And then he still hasn't sold you. He's building this idea of oil oregano, and then at the end, I believe he... Unknown Speaker: Taking two of these pearls any time I feel like I'm coming down with something and it knocks that shit right out. The only bad thing about this product is how fast they sell out, especially around this season. So if you're sick of being sick and you want to try these out for yourself and you see that orange cart right there, that means they are still in stock and the flash sale is still live. Rob The Bank: Masterful TikTok shopping. Sam Parr: That's a masterful TikTok shopping. Rob The Bank: If you don't market and you see it and you go, yeah, but you forget like the average person sees that and they're like, You know, they're going to the coffee table at work the next day and talking about, man, you know, like mold and fungus is everywhere. By here, you take this oil of oregano. Sam Parr: Dude, I got cousins that will send me this. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Sam Parr: And they'll be like, yeah, you got to start taking this. Yeah, the government's out to get you. Yeah, whatever. They have these like that conspiracy combined with, you know, in ancient times, this used to be the way we do things. And then, you know, his last like scarcity call to action where he's like, the only downside is they sell out so fast. So if you see the button is orange, that means they still have it. Just get it while I'm still there. Rob The Bank: And it's on flash sale right now. You know, it's like, did you see, um, you know, the, the brand you're invested in? Did you have anyone send you content from that at any point? Sam Parr: Like just, not only did I have people send me content from that brand, which we were the, the founder of it doesn't want us talking about it. All right. But then also he sent me a video of other people creating videos being like, I'm tired of hearing about this, which is like the ultimate sign of respect. It means it dominated TikTok so much, which is the video was like, if I see one more video telling me about this, I'm not going to buy your thing. But like even that video had 7 million views of the person complaining about seeing this so much, which means mission accomplished. Rob The Bank: We got 600 million views in a month. Like that is an insane, insane number. And that was before Shop. Sam Parr: How much did you spend that month to get 600 million? Rob The Bank: It was a little over 100 grand. That was before Shop. So Shop now is changing the unit economics. I'd say like not in the favor of the brands, but at the end of the day, it adds a level of scale. But now with commissions and stuff, that was when we were like sending it to Amazon and just... We're not even tracking it. We're just like, if we can get 600 million views, we're going to be all right, you know, for a hundred grand. Sam Parr: Well, it creates this amazing flywheel, right? Because you hear about a brand, a bunch on TikTok. You go then Google it and click the link or you go to Amazon and you search on Amazon. It tells Google, it tells Amazon, people are searching for this brand name. It ups your rank there. So now you get organic ranking off of this social, in addition to the direct conversions on social. Rob The Bank: Yeah, no, exactly. Sam Parr: Where do you go to find these brands that are crushing it? Rob The Bank: This tool, this is the other crazy thing. CaloData is directly plugged in to TikTok's API. CaloData. K-A-L-O-Data. D-A-T-A. Like so they, if you go to the homepage here, you're seeing top products, top videos. So you can go look at like. Sam Parr: You can study. Rob The Bank: You can study. That's, that's that kid's video. I know him. He's in our, in our group. But that was like the, one of the top videos from last week. It made him. Sam Parr: So if you go right now to like the top products, what do you see? And they just, it's like rankings weekly or how do they do this? Rob The Bank: Yeah. So like beauty, beauty and personal care. You can filter it however you want. So this is last. Sam Parr: Are you, are you in this list? Rob The Bank: This is last 30 days. We are in this list. We're top five and we're not three, four, five. Unknown Speaker: My friends, if you like MFM, then you're going to like the following podcast. It's called Billion Dollar Moves. And of course, it's brought to you by the Hubspot Podcast Network, the number one audio destination for business professionals. Billion Dollar Moves. It's hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling. Sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist. And with Billion Dollar Moves, she wants to look at unicorn founders and funders, and she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader. Many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic. She does it with unfiltered conversations about success, failure, fear, courage, and all that great stuff. So again, if you like My First Million, check out Billion Dollar Moves. It's brought to you by the Hubspot Podcast Network. Again, Billion dollar moves. All right, back to the episode. Rob The Bank: And then I think if you expand it, like we have a couple of products in the in the top 10. Can you talk about what your products are? Sam Parr: Which products can you talk about? Rob The Bank: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like a really good example is, are we gatekeeping here? Are you? No, I don't. I mean, I, I yap about stuff on Instagram all the time. So evil goods has been a really good case study of beef tallow and the You know, skincare section. Sam Parr: How'd you decide to do beef tallow? Rob The Bank: That was an investment. And so one of our students or whatever, like saw that category as similar to longevity. Like, okay, holistic wellness is obviously becoming huge. People don't like toxic skincare. This seems to have some good supporting, like it has this like grassroots Twitter movement. Let's bet on that. And so, you know, that's what we did. And pretty much And whenever you see the ability to market to fear like that, Big Pharma or whatever it might be or insecurities for an individual. Yeah. Sam Parr: Whatever. Rob The Bank: That will do well on this platform. Just period because people feel like they're learning something. And so it checked all those boxes. He came out with a crazy aggressive name. Evil Goods is like, you know, we'll see because that could disrupt the ability to go to retail and stuff like that. But at the same time, liquid death. Sam Parr: Yeah. So it could be a liquid death. Rob The Bank: Exactly. Exactly. So hopefully plant a flag on that. But this thing has gone just nuclear. Sam Parr: What's your Cologne brand? Rob The Bank: Top Shelf. And so this ties back to my thesis that massive industries are overturned, like in these eras. I want Top Shelf. It's like a passion project of mine, but I want to build a creed for Gen Z, you know, creed like fragrance. And it presents the opportunity to do that. Sam Parr: So the way that cologne, like, I don't know much about cologne, but it seems like it's kind of luxury sold through retail traditionally, super high margin, like crazy margins is basically, you know, water and a little bit of essential oil or whatever. And so how do you sell that? How do you make a popular, how did you make a popular cologne brand? And could you say like revenue wise what that's going to do this year? Rob The Bank: We've been doing, we've been doing close to a million bucks a month. So it's been, it's been, but it's, it's a unique challenge for me that I like. This ties back to, I mean, seriously, everyone in this world, if you're venturing into it, pick something you like and see some area of disruption and make stuff for yourself. Like that, that's really what I see. And as I've gravitated more towards, you know, we talked about offline, but I like high fashion. I like design. And so this seems like the perfect segue for me to go from consumable to something that can play in that world, right? Sam Parr: Fashion, culture. Rob The Bank: Yeah, exactly. And so like a creed is relevant at like these big fragrance houses are relevant in Paris and stuff like that. And so for me, it's been a... Sam Parr: I know it's luxury because I've never heard of what you're saying. Must be good. Rob The Bank: Have you seen Creed or no? Sam Parr: No. Rob The Bank: You probably see a Creed Aventus. It's like a, you know, popular fragrance that sells for $250 a bottle. And so when I'm seeing that, I'm going, I can... There's a lot of margin for error. Sam Parr: Let's walk through it. So you're like, all right, I want to go into cologne. You get it made. How? Where'd you go to make it? Rob The Bank: So I had to hire a, he called himself a professional nose, you know, and it's been like designing fragrances for God knows how long. And so I'm learning. Sam Parr: You just Google this guy or how'd you find him? Rob The Bank: Relationship through our other business partner. He had done skincare before and this guy was like a known guy in the industry. Charges an arm and a leg, made one good product. Don't think I, Like it, right? So I'm like, how can we build this out internally? And I've learned more about the industry, like what, you know, what smells actually fascinating, like, like how it makes people feel and what's fascinating about it, just all the different, you know, mechanisms and mixes and like, like, You go to Abercrombie, you know exactly what it smells like. It can be a signature of branding. It can be a signature of a person. Sam Parr: It's probably like the least used scents in marketing. Rob The Bank: A thousand percent. But you think about like a fresh pair of Nikes. That's intentional. Sam Parr: New car smell. Rob The Bank: New car smell. So it's just been a fun avenue to learn more, and I'm far from an expert in it, just to be honest. Like we have the one product we're moving well with, and then we're trying to build out. Sam Parr: So tell me, so you say you went to the nose, nose makes something for you, that's what you use, or you say you didn't like it? Rob The Bank: So he actually made us eight different samples. We chose the one he wanted to use. We blow it up. We did 700 grand our first month. It just gets murdered with bad reviews. People hate it. Like hate it. And so now all of a sudden I got... Sam Parr: You liked it or no? Rob The Bank: No. Sam Parr: You yourself were like one star. Rob The Bank: Yeah. And I'm kind of, I didn't hate it. I didn't hate it, but I wasn't like, Oh, I would, I would wear this. And, um, And at the time, with Genius, I was really big on making products for yourself and being all in on that. And then we have all these things going nuclear and so I'm like, money. Right. Where's the money? $90 bottle. Sam Parr: I'm trying to make something for myself, but this time it's money instead of a product. Rob The Bank: And honestly, I blew up in my face a little bit. And so we revamped on the second one and had a, you know, it's a winner. And it was very methodical. And so that's the one doing like a million bucks a month. Sam Parr: But before I made a billion a month, I must have made a dollar a month. So what did you do initially to get that to work? So you go to the creators. Rob The Bank: That was the nice part. The first fragrance, we got the playbook, like the angles that worked. Sam Parr: So good marketing, bad product. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Sam Parr: So what was the angles that work? Give us an example for that. Rob The Bank: That's another one. It's huge in this This Gen Z era, I don't like saying Gen Z actually, it's TikTok person and male, there's a billion users on there, right? So it's a disservice to the app to say it's just Gen Z, although that's where a lot of these ideas percolate from. Like the self-improvement and dating and all these little boxes that this generation is trying to check are hyper relevant to smell. Like that's a thing in their world. Like how do you smell around the girl you're trying to talk to? Very easy fear. Sam Parr: Yeah, what's the name of your thing? It's like Her Loss. Rob The Bank: Her Loss. Sam Parr: Where did that come from? That's genius. Rob The Bank: It's actually I went through this whole like Drake era on my personal brand and he has an album called Her Loss. It's like don't reinvent the wheel. It succeeded. Sam Parr: What would be like a killer hook to sell that cologne on? Rob The Bank: They do actual skits. So actually one that worked really well is we had female creators do it and they started calling it Like pussy magnet juice, if you gotta leave that. My boyfriend came home in this or whatever, you know, and really high converting stuff. Sam Parr: There's a story. So I just did a podcast with this guy, Craig Clemons. Do you know Craig? Rob The Bank: Monster. Sam Parr: He told a story of like OG marketing that's super relevant for this. So I'm going to retell it because his episode is going to come out too. He talks about like one of the greatest headlines he's ever read in marketing. He goes, I got four for you. And the first one he told was he talked about this headline. He goes, here's the story. This guy's a famous marketer. He's one of the best. He's known as one of the best marketers on earth. And this Hollywood actor hits him up and he says, my wife wants to launch her own perfume brand. Will you come and help us with the marketing of it? So he goes, he meets the wife. Wife says, I want to do this. He goes, say no more. I'll make this happen. And he goes and he starts studying fragrances and he goes to a mall. And you know, the guys at the mall who are like, you know, they had like a make your own fragrance thing or like, you know, you have all these oils you can mix your own. And he just asked the guy, he goes, what's the number one fragrance that women love? And he goes, oh, sir, easy. China musk. And he goes, China musk? He goes, yes, China musk. Smells good. So he takes it and this is like, you know, he's only a couple weeks in, but he doesn't go back to the Hollywood wife. He sits on it. He's like, I need to make her wait for her to value this. I need to make it feel more important. So after three months, he comes back to her and he goes, I'd like to meet you. I have something for you. She goes, OK, what you got? He goes, I've traveled the world. I've tested, you know, thousands of things I've studied. I've talked to everybody and I found it. I found the greatest fragrance for you. She smells the China musk. This is perfect. In the meantime, he goes to a jeweler and he goes, I need you to make me the fanciest bottle you can come up with for this thing. It's like this, like whatever, diamond shape or whatever. And so he comes up with this beautiful bottle. He's got China Musk. And then he tells her, we're going to do a launch. And she goes, yeah, we could do it at this like small place. And he goes, no, no, no. We need to do it somewhere bigger. How about the Crowne Plaza Hotel? And she's like, that's huge. Like we would need a few thousand people to show up. He goes, that's my job. So she begs the bet. She books the hotel. And she's like, you better not embarrass me. So he goes home. He's like, I got to figure out a way to get thousands of people to come to this grand launch. And he goes home and he writes this headline that says, wife of famous Hollywood star swears under oath that her new perfume does not contain illegal sexual stimulants. And he goes, she is. And then the sub is he's like to prove its safety and that it is not made of not not not what people are claiming. She is doing a live testing where she will prove without a shadow of a doubt that this that this fragrance works and is safe. I'm at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on this date. And like 10,000 people show up to this thing. It's like he hires like armed security guards to walk in with handcuffs to a briefcase that contains the perfume. So people see them walking in. They're like, holy shit, what is this thing that's being presented in this way? And there's this whole story. It ends up becoming this bestseller. And he's like that headline. But he's like, you know, he broke down the elements. He's like, Life of Hollywood star, Curiosity Gap, which Hollywood star, swears under oath, right? That's kind of like the conspiracy, the seriousness, the drama, the stakes of the situation. And then doesn't contain sexual stimulants. So like, how good is it? People think it's so good it should be illegal. And, you know, evil goods or the stuff you're talking about with like your your cologne is like hits those same notes. Now, that was back in the I don't know, like the 70s or something like that is a long time ago, but same playbook. Rob The Bank: Just read on today in 2025. And then Craig took it and put it in Facebook ads and I'm taking it and put it on TikTok. Quick side note, too, for anyone. I know there's like a vast Internet world of gurus and people that talk about stuff. And if a guru or like talking head in the marketing space doesn't know Craig, they're not really tapped in on the world. Sam Parr: Simple test. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Like it's actually a simple, very like anyone that like, I don't know Craig personally. I don't know if he knows me. But I know that operation is run like fucking Skunk Works. He has popularized a lot of things. Actually, that framework has been seen on a Facebook ad from him that his name's, that he's, you don't see him. Sam Parr: You don't know him, yeah. Rob The Bank: Exactly. Sam Parr: He's a madman. What else could you show me? So give me a couple other stories that you think are pretty badass that we should know about, the stuff that's working on TikTok. Rob The Bank: Underbrush Gum is another example of Really startup, scrappy entrepreneur that's doing millions a month now who makes this gum himself. And they built their own factory and he's had a crazy rush over the last month. But brands will go like this and then down. You gotta find the new angles, right? Like that Trump video I just showed you will work for a month and then it'll go away. Underbrush just hit a huge one this last month playing into TikTok's going away. My small family business is gonna get crushed. And it was the founder doing like some ASMR video of like how he's making it. Sam Parr: Right. While talking about that. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Well, no. And then he just gave that out and then the army picked it up and all put their own play on it. Sam Parr: Gotcha. Rob The Bank: So it was the same angle over and over again with different voices and some claiming it's their business. But that did millions for him over the last like 30 days. Sam Parr: Can I put you on the spot? Yeah. Let's do a little magic trick. Let's brainstorm live. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Sam Parr: $100 million TikTok brand. Rob The Bank: Yep. Sam Parr: So where do we start? I'll be your wingman. I'll be your brainstorming partner. Rob The Bank: Let's go right into Gen Z and this younger generation that there's so much change. We've talked about looks maxing, right? Sam Parr: Explain what that is. Rob The Bank: Looks maxing, it's interesting to say the least. But there's this subset of like young men that are hyper focused on looks almost to the point of like it being super feminine, but like they're optimizing it. Yeah, exactly. And it's like they're again their hearts in a good place. Most things can be boiled down to basic human desires of like they want to reproduce, right? But how they're going about it is all of a sudden like have you seen those funny videos on morning routines now? It's almost like Patrick Bateman-esque, but it's just like so elaborate. Yeah, I can trim each like that. That's so that but there's a market there. There's not enough products there like the so it's kind of like a community. Sam Parr: It sounds silly right when you say it sounds superficial, but you know how different is that than you know, maybe the bodybuilding movement in the early days. It's like these guys who take it really seriously and they're counting the reps and the sets and they're figuring out, you know, what type of training is going to lead to like, you know, this muscle right back here the lower head of the tricep. And it's to anyone else, it sounds like overkill, but they got into it. They got passionate about it and they wanted to like, what if we took this to the nth degree? Brian Johnson doing that with longevity right now. Yeah, it sounds crazy. It's easy to make fun of him, but he's he's like, I'm going to take it to the full money. Rob The Bank: Yep. Sam Parr: And there's people who like rallied behind that and they think that that's cool. And you're saying look maxing is this early wave where people are doing that. They're taking guys taking their looks as seriously as women take their looks. Rob The Bank: Yep. Sam Parr: Because we all know women have this huge, you know, like, tutorials on eyelash extensions and every little, you know, nook and cranny. Now you're saying guys are doing it. Rob The Bank: It's happening exactly for guys. Sam Parr: Okay. Rob The Bank: And there's no, it's an underserved market. You've seen products like there's a product called Jar Size. Have you seen that? Sam Parr: Oh, Jar Size, like your jawline? Rob The Bank: Yeah, exactly. That's like the, one of the core foundations of looks maxing. And so that product, Blue Up. Sam Parr: Right. It's like a jaw exercising thing, right? Rob The Bank: You just bite it each day. Does it work? Does it not? I don't know. But then, you know, the kids are mewing. Sam Parr: And so you're just studying culture, it seems like. You're just watching. And I want to point out one thing, which is I had a really early friend in Silicon Valley teach me this. I never forgot it. He was the first product manager at Twitter. And if you remember, Twitter at the time was really like made fun of when it came out, because it was, you would text a phone number. There's no app. You just text a phone number, whatever you wanted. And anybody who was subscribed to your phone number would get a message that says like, Shaan's eating. It was just saying, I'm eating a ham sandwich. And so it got made fun of. You go look up old TechCrunch articles, people make fun of it. It's this like frivolous, stupid thing. But it turns out, you know, now it's like the beacon of free speech. Like that's what happens in the world, right? And so at the time I go, why'd you take the job at Twitter? Did it seem like the next big thing? He goes, no, but he goes, I had figured out that anytime there's a phenomenon of behavior that you see as weird, you don't even understand why they're doing it, but they are undeniably, they are doing it. You should lean in as an investor or like an entrepreneur. That's your signal to lean in. Whereas most people use that same signal and they point, they laugh, or they push away. Rob The Bank: Yep. And it gets harder the older you get. But staying tapped in on that and not being oblivious to the change in the future. Because that was my dad with Instagram. What a stupid platform, people posting pictures. And now everyone knows you have to have an Instagram. And so that's happening again. And I think it's great advice. Sam Parr: Like we were hanging out with Mr. Beast last week and he has this thing he says, which is you're crazy until you're successful. Then you're a genius. And he goes, I've been doing the same thing the whole time. I used to sit in my bedroom and make ridiculous videos. At the time I had no money. So his ridiculous videos back then were me counting to 100,000 and it's like a 19 hour video or something or him taking a plastic knife and cutting through a plastic table. Uh, with just like a knife and he's like, it was just a stunt. Now it's like taking a bulldozer and cutting through the Eiffel Tower, right? Like he just scaled it up, but he's like, at that time I was seen as stupid and crazy. Why are you wasting all your time on this YouTube thing? Go to school, get a degree, get a good job. And now I'm this, you know, I used to be weird. Now they call me passionate. I used to be, you know, I used to be kind of like, you know, Crazy, now I'm obsessed. And he's like, I didn't change the whole time. And so kind of what you're saying is you see the culture doing something that seems novel, seems new. Instinct as somebody who's a little bit older is. Rob The Bank: That's stupid. Sam Parr: That's stupid. And now you're like, get curious instead. Rob The Bank: My advice is be an observer, not a consumer on all of these platforms. And so observe what's actually happening. Like hold your opinion to yourself. Just be super matter of fact and observe. Looksmaxing views are going up month over month. That just is. I don't really care what your opinion on it is. That just is. That's fact, right? And work backwards from that. So looksmaxing, I mean with that, all of a sudden it's literally, this is how broad it becomes. Just like when pet supplements became a thing on Amazon, it's a category that becomes potential billions overnight with nothing in it. And so men, like who makes men's skincare products well? Like two or three brands that aren't even focused on it. And so, I mean, right there, you can build anything. Sam Parr: So you would be like, look at Maxine Tren, and then you would brainstorm maybe like skin care. Rob The Bank: Mastic gum. Sam Parr: Jawline stuff. Rob The Bank: Yeah. I like to look at exploding topics, and I like to still look at Amazon data. There's different tools you can use, and you'll see searches for those things. Sam Parr: And do you get afraid, oh, somebody's already doing this or whatever? No, it's like more validation of the idea. And then you're going to try to out horsepower them on the marketing. And then you come up with the hooks. So like, what would be like an example of a hook? Let's say, let's just go looks maxing. Now, what's an example of the product? It would be like a gum or like a jaw thing or you think skincare, which one would you go into? Rob The Bank: Let's just say a gum. Sam Parr: Because what? Rob The Bank: Consumable, novel, repeat buys, probably relatively straightforward to do. Sam Parr: Okay. And now you have a gum. Great. We got our product. You want to name it as part of our improv here? Ooh. Unknown Speaker: Chat GPT. Sam Parr: Yeah. What would you prompt? Because you use AI for a lot of stuff. Rob The Bank: A ton. I actually do. Let's do it. Sam Parr: Let's go on chat GPT. Rob The Bank: It's actually gotten so good. Sam Parr: Do you think the jaw angle is the trick with the gum or would it be breath or what do you think? Rob The Bank: No, it would be jaw. You'd call them feminine in some capacity for not having a strong... Sam Parr: I like how your brain went there. Like I have this phrase that I say, which is the only positioning is counter positioning. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Sam Parr: Like a lot of people just want to say their position. Oh, we're healthy. We're good for you. And it's like, everybody is saying those same things. So you got to be counter. You got to have something that is the enemy or you got to call, you know, diagnose a problem and then sell the solution. So the only position is counter position. So what you're saying is, if you're not working on your jaw, you probably have a feminine jaw. Rob The Bank: Exactly. Sam Parr: And if you can live with that, if you could sleep at night with that, then that's on you. Rob The Bank: Okay. Yeah. Okay. So I started by asking ChatGPT, like, do you understand looks maxing? Yes, it's about small natural tweaks. The goal is to maximize aesthetic appeal, emphasis on facial harmonetry, symmetry, and overall attractiveness. I'm creating a product for a jawline enhancement gum every day. I like dual meanings and stuff too. I love when names have like, you know, I like double entendres. I like stuff like that. So that's where I would probably go with this. I would say, That would consume every day. I'm looking for a clever, powerful name that has, you know, dual meaning. Chisel. So Chisel's a nice, I feel like that's a nice name. Sam Parr: Is that what it gave you? Rob The Bank: Yeah, Chisel's the first one. Masticate is chewing but also sounds intense and Chad Chew. These are all great names. Sam Parr: I like Chisel though. Rob The Bank: Chisel's good. Yeah, Chisel's my favorite so far. Sam Parr: So we got Chisel Gum. Rob The Bank: Yep. Sam Parr: And now you got to come up with how we're going to market this. So you're going to go to your creator army. You tell them what you want to do. You just let them go. Rob The Bank: I'll go. And this has been part of. Respecting the future, but understanding that I'm not the person in that anymore. Sam Parr: Letting go. Rob The Bank: Yeah, exactly. Sam Parr: So let's pretend we're those creators. We're not. So we're like, we're going to be, you know, white belts at this, whereas there's black belts. But like, I see videos trending on TikTok all the time about transformation. So it's like weight loss, whatever. And so you could almost make it where you're not talking about a gum, obviously. It's like, You know, somebody being like my, you know, they use the trending music that people are using. Rob The Bank: They would put them up there and they would like highlight the different things on the facial symmetry and this and that. And then like, look at his jawline. Right. Sam Parr: And why this what you're saying, why this person is attracted, the human mind is attracted to symmetry, the golden ratio, stuff like that. Exactly. You use like, oh, I'm kind of teaching you a science about why Or you could even do like, why guys don't think this guy's attractive, but girls do. And you're like, oh, OK, what's the difference there? Or you could do a transformation and be like, I did five things. I took creatine. I did this. The third thing is I started chewing this gum daily. Honestly, I didn't believe it. But look at this, boom, boom. And then you're like, it's available on Amazon. Back to my story about like, you know, my transformation. It'd be a video like that. Rob The Bank: Yep. That was one of the first ones that blew up on evil goods was literally that this girl had like hormonal acne. And it was like the, it was the three things that helped with that. And she showed it before a picture and after, and that was part of it. And it just went nuclear. Sam Parr: All right. So we got our, our, our, our hooks there. Uh, we got our brand chisel. So what was the other one you said you're like, Basically, we can fund a startup right now. We can find an operator. It's a request for operator. Rob The Bank: Yes. Luxury Pet is screaming at me. Like Louis Vuitton is doing full pop-ups of $500 dog bowls. And it just shows again, it's like luxury is such an interesting world, right? Because it's just like, signaling and status. What are people willing to pay? There's no luxury pet brands yet. Sam Parr: Did you hit it again where my initial reaction is, oh my God, that's so stupid. What a waste. I can't believe people are doing this. But you're saying people are doing this, period. Rob The Bank: Louis Vuitton, that's the important part. Louis Vuitton validated it. Sam Parr: This is stupid. It's the second part of the sentence. People are doing this. That's a fact, Jack. You can't deny that. Rob The Bank: Well, I've just seen, so I had this idea probably like 18 months ago when I was just hearing what people spend on their pets. Like it's actually insane from a, like even the pet supplements, you know, it's like they're paying more for pet supplements than human supplements. And so I'm like, okay, there's something here. I wonder if you could ever do anything luxury. And then Louis Vuitton rolls out literally like, you know, it's like lovers, like pet lovers and they're doing $500 dog bowls and you know, $300 high-end leather collars. I'm just like, oh, validated. And how many do you have to sell in that area too to have a successful business, you know? Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rob The Bank: A lot less. Sam Parr: So my initial My hesitation would have been, can you build luxury on TikTok? Like isn't TikTok kind of like, you know, it's more like a Walmart than it is like a luxury, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's just, there's a billion people on it. And so you can't generalize like that. Rob The Bank: That, and that's why I said, let's not do a disservice to the app and the platform they build. That's what I did on Amazon with Genius. Genius is a very high-end supplement brand. Like we were selling We had a $130 product that was, by all intents and purposes, luxury. I'd never work on Amazon. It's a discount site. TikTok has a lot of those components in it now, too. But again, you tie back to a billion people. My cologne is $90. That's not cheap. It's not a $30 cologne. $30 colognes outsell us, but I only need to sell one of those for every three. And it's done well, so I think it's there. Sam Parr: And how would you, if you did this luxury thing, what would you do to make it, to build the brand? Because I think you study high fashion. You study the cool stuff in culture. What would you do if you were translating that to the TikTok world? What would you do for Luxury pet brand. Rob The Bank: Do you know Rene Girard? Like Peter Thiel? Sam Parr: Yeah, like memetic theory. Rob The Bank: I love that. And so I think. Sam Parr: Explain the simple explanation of that. Rob The Bank: I mean, people don't know what they want, so they want what others want. And so from our perspective as brand owners, influencing influencers and finding, you know, those names, I think the most straightforward way To run this one is find one of these streamers or, you know, if I could get a clip of Drake using my cologne and then give it to the creator army, we would do millions of dollars. And I think you can do that in PET where, I don't know if Kim Kardashian has a freaking poodle or whatever. Sure she does. But not even that, you don't even need that big of name, just someone in that space and then you feed it to the army. And I think that's the most straightforward thing. And I think it would go overnight. Sam Parr: Yeah, I almost wonder if you could even just use the outrage. Rob The Bank: So like, yeah, the cost of it of the cost. Sam Parr: I was thinking that I can't believe people are doing this. This is the craziest thing I've seen. Celebrities are doing this. It makes me sick, whatever. And some people in the car like it'll get to so many people and most of the comments will be. Negative about the idea, but it's just going to get so much reach that some people are going to either just plant the seed that this exists, that I'm not doing it, that other people are doing it, that, hey, maybe I would do that. I do love my pet. Rob The Bank: Or even like you could even play into Louis Vuitton doing it like with the you know, there's. I think there's a lot of different ways to approach it. And I just like those areas where there's there's that much margin to play. There's just more. And again, it ties back to human nature. We exist in a culture, in a world where we've created so much abundance, like bottom line, like we could afford things like universal basic income and we're automating the hell out of everything. And anything and everything is freaking possible. And so with that in mind, there's really no shortage. Like you see some of the services that exist for billionaires. Like it is just the most absurd, hyper, but it exists. And the people providing those do well. Isn't that like a Hormozy thing? He says, I want to sell to people with more money or whatever. Sam Parr: Yeah. Rob The Bank: Something like that. Sam Parr: One of his genius insights. Sell to the people with money. But there is a, there is a like a actual like business framework here, which is if you take what the rich have, But you find a way to democratize it, you can build a huge business. So Uber is a classic example of this. Rich people had private drivers where, you know, when they're done with the meeting, they send a text, done. Driver pulls up, they get in, they get out. They don't have to go worry about parking and gas. There's a guy who does that. Uber democratized that private driver experience. And literally that was their homepage, was a private driver for everyone. And so that was the start of Uber, black cars, even Airbnbs. What is an Airbnb? It's having a vacation home. It's being able to go and stay in a home in Tahoe or in all these different places. Airbnb became a thing that rich people have, vacation homes in different cities, but now everybody gets access to that. And in a different way, Marquee Jets was private flight. So instead of buying a private jet, you know, $50 million, $100 million, you would instead buy a fractional share and get to ride certain hours. And there was a huge market of people that wanted to do that. Rob The Bank: Even JSX now, probably to some extent. Sam Parr: JSX is exactly like that. So, you know, if you can find a way to drop the cost and, you know, even Duolingo, like we have rich people who will hire a Mandarin tutor for their kid. But then if you have an app that can teach your kid a foreign language, in a way it's doing the same thing. And so I think that is just generally a business model. What are the mistakes people make? So like if somebody was to go into this, what are the common pitfalls someone could fall into that you could just like save them? Rob The Bank: Super top of the funnel here, how they treat those affiliates. It's very culture based. I've seen brands There's so much money being made right now, brand owners need to be super generous because, you know, a market's a market and right now people are paying, you talked about the goalie challenge. Sam Parr: Yeah, explain this because that was in an old episode. Rob The Bank: Yeah, yeah. Sam Parr: Explain what they were doing. Rob The Bank: This brand comes in and in an effort to get as many creators as possible, put together all these prizes with like the number one, if you did a million dollars in sales for them in a month, I believe they'd give you a condo in Brickell or the cash equivalent, which was like 600 grand. Or something like that. Sam Parr: Lamborghini was the next one. It was like this like rewards to your list. Rob The Bank: Rolexes left and right. Sam Parr: And you're selling goalie gummies. Like they just make these like apple cider vinegar gummies basically, which also was a health kind of like a holistic health wellness things. Apple cider vinegar has benefits in your gut and whatever. Rob The Bank: Maybe. Sam Parr: Maybe. Yeah, well that at the time was the narrator. Rob The Bank: The creator said so. Sam Parr: Yeah, this 22 year old who's trying to win a condo told me that that's how the world works. Rob The Bank: Oh man. Sam Parr: Do you believe any advertising at this point? No. Once you've seen how the sausage is made. Rob The Bank: There's a reason I hate supplements too. I'm not launching new supplements. I mean, there's some good stuff out there, but overall, when you really peel back all the, like it really, like a decent amount of health advice online nowadays is coming from 18 year olds making conspiracy videos. Sam Parr: That's pretty wild. Rob The Bank: It's reality. So a brand like Goalie comes in though, and they, they set the stage for how creators are being treated. And obviously they have a lot of money and they're trying to mess the game up for everyone else, right? They can afford that, maybe lose some money. But then if you're this startup brand owner and you're coming in and you're, no man, I don't want to give you 25% commission, I'm going to give you 20. And that can be super off-putting. And so in this current era, I would say, and even the culture from like the group we own part of, it's like abundance. It's like, put it out there, it's going to come back. And I think as an owner of a brand, Bringing that not, you know, accepting that we are a different generation and not infringing on them. I think that's the best thing you can do. Unknown Speaker: New York City founders, if you've listened to My First Million before, you know I've got this company called Hampton and Hampton is a community for founders and CEOs. A lot of the stories and ideas that I get for this podcast, I actually got it from people who I met in Hampton. We have this big community of a thousand plus people and it's amazing, but the main part is this eight-person core group that becomes your board of advisors for your life and for your business and it's life-changing. Now, to the folks in New York City, I'm building an in-real-life core group in New York City. And so if you meet one of the following criteria, your business either does $3 million in revenue or you've raised $3 million in funding or you've started and sold a company for at least $10 million, then you are eligible to apply. So go to joinhampton.com and apply. I'm going to be reviewing all of the applications myself. So put that you heard about this on MFM so I know to give you a little extra love. Now, back to the show. Sam Parr: Give me your, like, just summarize. If I tuned out and I just need to hear one thing to summarize what your thoughts are on this kind of TikTok opportunity. Give me a little summary and then I want to ask you about some other stuff. Rob The Bank: Millions are being printed on TikTok Shop. Sam Parr: What are you doing? Rob The Bank: Just starting brands and trying to get as many... I'm trying to perfect short-form content and short-form content distribution. Period. Sam Parr: Why do you believe so much in short-form content? Rob The Bank: It's changing the world in front of our eyes. It's from personalities we know to songs we know. It's music even. We're hearing songs that are blowing up from this world. It's the future. Sam Parr: We have this friend, Connor Price. Have you seen what he does on TikTok? Rob The Bank: Wait, who's he again? Sam Parr: He's a rapper, white guy rapper. Rob The Bank: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Sam Parr: He used to work in Ramone's warehouse, like moving boxes. Rob The Bank: No shit. Sam Parr: And he was like, and then during COVID, warehouse shuts down. He goes home. His wife's like, you should put your music out there. Let's do something. We're just sitting at home. And he was really shy about it. And she's like, you got to start making content. He puts out a YouTube video and it gets like, you know, 11 views like most YouTube videos do. And then she had this genius. She's the real mastermind behind it because she was like, let's make a TikTok. And he was like, he had the same reaction. TikTok, that's stupid. That's not serious. I'm an artist. I'm a musician. I'm not just one of these kids dancing. And what he did was he started making these videos. We'll put one on the screen here so people can watch it. But he created a little skit. So his instead of just saying what I would have done like a boomer is I would have been like, hey, guys, I got a new song here. Or I would just make a video of like playing the song. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Sam Parr: And guess what happens when you when you're scrolling through TikTok, you're swiping every three seconds. And a song starts to play that you've never heard before, you just keep swiping. Like it doesn't grab you right away. So instead he started doing these funny skits where he would, he was three characters, almost like an Eddie Murphy movie. He would open the door, like every skit starts with him opening the door and there's, uh, that's the rapper coming into the studio. He's got the guy with the headphones on. That's him, him as the producer. And then you have the weird brother and the weird brother is kind of the key to make the whole thing work. So he would walk in and he'd be like, Yo, you ready for a session? Whoa, what's he doing? And just immediately you want to know, well, what's he doing? Why is he surprised? And the weird brother is doing like, he has one where he's taking a carrot and he's drilling holes in a carrot. And you're like, and it's like the sound of a drill. It's the carrots, visually weird. And they're both like, he's being weird again. And then he's like, let's get down to work. You want to play that song? And then you hear this flute playing and they both look at the brother and he's playing the carrot flute, but it's the beat. Of the song, like it just, he overlaid it that way as if that was the beat. And the producer's like, go with it, go with it. And then he starts rapping and then the song hits and the song is almost the punchline of the skit. And dude, he became like independently, no record label, billion streams on Spotify. Doing no marketing on Spotify, only on TikTok. Rob The Bank: Off that. If I want to summarize all of this, it almost seems dark for a second, but like one of my favorite quotes is, you know, if you tell a lie enough times, it becomes truth. And that was obviously war propaganda back in the day. But you take that idea and then you just think purely in terms of views and more specifically, cost of acquisition of views. So you have like a, um, You know, if you're a tobacco company whenever and you're getting doctors to promote it, like you have the money to get the views and the net and control the narrative. Right. And the more you can do that, it's usually a pay to play game, except in these windows when all of a sudden an Andrew Tate burst on the scene. Does it matter what he's saying is real or not? He's getting seen a billion times a month. And so all of a sudden that becomes there is some narrative there being formed that he has serious impact on. And these Gold Rush windows are when there's the ability for normal people without, you know, multinational level marketing budgets to form a mainstream narrative or get a billion views on a Spotify and, you know, become something because of these windows. We couldn't have done that. He couldn't have done that without TikTok. Like he just, the old Instagram, you wouldn't have gone viral and there's no means of connecting. Sam Parr: Yes. It's amazing circle. Like 12 years ago, Instagram comes out and imagine if you were like, What are you doing all day today? It's like, oh, I'm filming myself. I'm cooking at home and taking pictures of it or making videos of it. Rob The Bank: Yeah, you're a weirdo. Sam Parr: Dude, get a job. Rob The Bank: What are you doing? Sam Parr: So you go from weirdo wasting his time But you were early on the platform to now, let's say you wanted to go become a food creator. It's like, dude, it's too saturated, man. It's impossible to win. But now everybody's accepted that influencers are a thing and that they can move product. They can become rich. They can become famous doing this. And what you're saying is kind of like on TikTok, it's the same model, but instead of you becoming a famous creator, it's your product can become famous. By putting it in the hands of talented people who are going to make all kinds of videos, taking literally like a thousand shots on goal a month. And if they get the right story or the right premise and they keep innovating on that, your product gets famous that way. Whereas, dude, you weren't going to be able to walk into Walmart or Target and get on the shelf. You're not even going to be able to really go onto Amazon and just rank number one in these categories because they're so competitive. You're not going to become an influential creator on Instagram. It's harder. This is where the green field is. Rob The Bank: My dad called me an idiot when I was pouring into Amazon. Like, actually, like, you know, like, like, question my sanity as like, as a human, right? Like, it was like a crazy experience. Now, in hindsight, it's like, God, thank God. Sam Parr: $30 million later. Rob The Bank: Yeah, thank God I didn't listen to my parents, you know, and. It's just, it's just, that's why I admire guys. Elon's a good example. I think when you look through things, look at things from like a very ground up perspective and don't take the common, there's so much arbitrage everywhere because humans are narrative machines and we live off that. So it's like common knowledge becomes whatever. And yet technology is reshaping everything. That's why I just want to keep leaning into that and being, I think more people that aren't afraid to just Send it with like that in mind in some capacity, the more it gives others the confidence to stand up on their own right and do their own thing, you know? Sam Parr: Right. I like that you said send it. You have this phrase I like. So we talk about looks maxing. You have said this phrase before, life maxing. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Sam Parr: And I kind of like the philosophy, but I don't really fully know it because we've only hung out in group settings a bunch of times. What is the life maxing philosophy? Is this something that you think more people should be? Kind of taken as a mantra? Rob The Bank: Yeah, I think so. I think there's a lot of existential dread in today's world and there's also a lot of us trying to... Sam Parr: Even amongst successful people you mean? Rob The Bank: Especially amongst successful people. Especially amongst successful people. And it manifests in all sorts of weird ways, you know? Look at Brian Johnson. I'm kidding. That's a crazy take. Love you, Brian. No, he's awesome. He really is. He really is. And I think he's a good example of someone that's all in on life maxing. Because everyone... My thing is we have this... Sam Parr: He took it literally. Rob The Bank: He did. Sam Parr: Lifespan maxing. Rob The Bank: Lifespan maxing. But we have this blank, you know, scorecard, right? We have this finite time here on the earth. And I think the more you can fill it up with things that you thoroughly enjoy and then kind of like maxing out those stats, so to speak, we're capable of so much. And instead, we fall into this like, oh, I'm only going to chase money or oh, I'm only going to do this, where living a well-rounded life. Sam Parr: What's the difference between just being well-rounded and life maxing? Are they the same thing with just a cool name or is there a difference? Rob The Bank: I don't see many people, it ties back to that full sending it thing. I don't see many people that are really like, yo, I'm living for this. What was your shower thoughts this morning? Sam Parr: My shower thought was, I realized that the The optimal way in terms of how, the optimal mindset for me is to be ignorant of the past, realistic about the present and delusional about the future. Too many people are living in their past or they vacation there all the time. They just keep going to visit and they tell themselves it's for all kinds of reasons. Maybe it's therapies, tell them to go think about their childhood. Maybe it's they're saying, I'm going to go learn lessons. Reality is the more you live in your past, the less happy you are. You want to be delusional about the future. Why not? Why be realistic about the future? Because you can be only when you're a little bit delusional about the future. Do you actually like kind of blow your own mind? You get to do more than what you thought was reasonable. But then you got to be realistic about the present. If you're just delusional about the present, you're like, no, I am the best dad, but you're not. Then you go nowhere, right? Oh, I'm already uber duber successful. Bro, your bank account's three digits right now. It's like you got to be realistic, but just say like, all right, that's where I am. That's not where I'm always going to be. Forget the past. It don't matter if I failed 10 times. The most successful people, when you talk to them, they're like, yeah, 10 years, you grind it. If you ask them, be like, what was that like? What were you doing? It's almost hard for them to even remember. And it's not because it was so long ago. It was because there's actually a useful part of your brain that just blocks it out. It's like my wife, she did natural delivery of birth three times. And if I ask her about it, it's like her body has a mechanism that's like. Rob The Bank: You never forgot that, though, did you? Sam Parr: I never forgot. I'm traumatized. I'm like, how could you do this to me? Unknown Speaker: She's like, what are you talking about? Rob The Bank: I'm with you. Sam Parr: I'm fainting, right? And she's like, forgot about it. She's like, only remembers the good. It's like, wow, your brain gave you a survival mechanism that was actually really good for you, that you don't remember how bad it was, how hard it was. And I think ignorant of the past, realistic about the present, delusional about the future. I think that's a good motto to live by. Rob The Bank: So I take that. There's two things. I'm obsessed with this idea of character design and that's what I'm living real time. I think we have the ability when you zoom out long enough to create literally whatever type of thing you want to be. Like you can truly design that. And so you have that and then you have another idea I'm obsessed with which is Bezos' 80-year regret minimization framework where he wants to like that view of his deathbed, you know, he wants as few regrets as possible. And so when you work through those two avenues, You can quite literally like do anything. Sam Parr: So explain the character design because I've heard the regret minimization, which is basically like if I'm dying, I want to have the least regrets possible. So therefore today. Which, if I have a fork in the road, do the one that will lead to the least regrets when I'm 80, when I'm 90, when I'm 100 or so. Rob The Bank: Yeah, and that ties back to your piece. Be relatively delusional about the future while being very aware of where you're at today while pretty much disregarding everything. Sam Parr: Right. Rob The Bank: And so when I look at this, this is music I've been working on, right? And I remember going to a show in Puerto Rico, John's Summit, and I was in the booth right next to the DJ thing and just watching him command that crowd and the energy and like the impact. And I was like, you know, if I'm 80 years old and I didn't at least try to send it in this space, I'll regret it. And then I start thinking through the character lens of what does an artist look like and what is this? Like things I have in me. So I'm not like completely disconnected from reality, but now taking all of the, hey, this is a business. Hey, now the product's music. Hey, this is streaming. Hey, you know, marketing. And that's where I'm at with it. Sam Parr: One of the things that you're reminding me of when you're talking about Let's say the music production or getting people to remember is you were talking about whether it's marketing or music or if you have something good to say, you almost owe it to yourself. It's like, do you believe in the thing you made, the thing you have to say? Because people are very bashful about marketing. They're bashful about putting it out there. I know this. I would write things. I wouldn't even send it to my own friends and family. I wouldn't post on social media. I wouldn't promote my product. I just kind of wanted it to be organic. And when I look back at that, I'm like, damn, I did myself a disservice. Did I think the thing I did was good or not? If I think it was good, then I owe it to that to do marketing. Rob The Bank: To send it. Sam Parr: To fully send it. And you know, when you talk about storytelling, music, You got to study the art of how do you get your stuff out there. Rob The Bank: It's a phenomenal skill. It's like a crazy, crazy. Sam Parr: Like that's the vehicle. You put the package in the trunk, but you need the vehicle that's going to actually get it out there to the masses. It's crazy, dude. We're going to watch this video, this YouTube video right now. You just said it yourself. What you said in this video will make people millions of dollars if they all they did was just try to act on it. Give it two years. Try to act on it. You will become a millionaire if you just follow what you just said. And if I go look at the YouTube video stats, the retention chart is going to look like it's just a downhill slope. Most people are going to click off within 30 seconds. And then by the end of this, there's only going to be, you know, 25% of people are still watching this at the end. I mean, 75% of people clicked on this because they wanted something out of their life and then are not going to even stick with it enough to watch the video. But that's just the laws of nature. Rob The Bank: And don't be that guy. But with that in mind, I think this last chunk of the video where we're talking about these stories and the ability, like, The model is becoming less important the more I understand people. And tapping into whatever that innate thing in all of us is, is way more important. And I want to bring that out of more people because I've been through a lot of stuff in a short period of time. And I think the more I can bring that forward, the more general impact there'll be. One of my other favorite internet clips, you know, for the Elon Musks and like what, Brett Hancock. Do you have him on or not? Sam Parr: Hancock, yeah, Brett Hancock. Rob The Bank: Hancock, sorry. There's those mimes that are just like obviously incredible in their own space but then there's that Elon interview and it's like, Elon, you inspire everyone in this room. Who inspires you? It's like Kanye West, of course. Unknown Speaker: Is that what he said? Rob The Bank: It's hilarious. That's the opposite side of that. Yeah, okay, Kanye is nuts in every way, but just that ability and desire to create and stand up for new things and have that confidence in yourself, regardless of what people say, is nothing short of Not only incredible, but necessary for people. Sam Parr: I love the send it attitude. I mean, I want to make merch with the send it thing. And also I think you made me realize. There's probably the way I used to think about it, which is well-rounded. You know, Mike Posner came on the podcast, famous musician. He wrote, like, Took a Pill and a Visa and all those songs. First song went viral. And he tells the story, he's like, first song went viral. I'm like, of course, that's what I do. You know, like, I guess that's what I do. I put out a song, I go triple platinum. And then the second song went double platinum, then single platinum, then no platinum. And then he was on the shelf. The record label was like, it's not even worth paying to produce your music because we don't think it'll sell. But also you can't go do something else. You're under contract. So he was like, dude, I'm shit out of luck. He like went back to school and started learning how to sing better. He's like, I'll just work on my craft. And then he came back and now he's had he's like had this resurgence. But he talked about he goes, I had to look at my life and realize Yes, I was uber-duber successful in my career, but I was a desert wasteland in relationships and health and whatever. He's like, that I realized was just not success for me. And so I was inspired by that and I started thinking, yeah, you do want it to be well-rounded. You want to be the dad, the husband. You also want to be having fun. You also want to be, you know, being creative and making cool shit, being successful, making money. But the well-rounded thing is more like a check the box. It's like, am I doing, you know, a sufficient amount of X, Y and Z? Whereas life maxing is saying, what would it look like if I really sent it in terms of my fitness? Like, yeah, I'm going to work out anyways. But like, I know you do Muay Thai, right? You're like, I'm going to work out for an hour anyways. What could I do that makes me like, what would be full send on this workout? Rob The Bank: Dramatically better. And that's the great example. It's like two years ago, I couldn't fight at all. And I feel pretty comfortable like in there with a lot of people that aren't named Jon Jones, you know? But just taking things seriously and really putting that notch on your belt. It's like now music or even like learning Spanish is one that I'm like, I'm going to do and I'm going to take it very seriously. It's not going to be I'm half learning Spanish. Sam Parr: I'm going to be fluent in, you know, do you do these one at a time or how do you, how do you like, how do you not stretch yourself? Rob The Bank: That's what I'm discovering. It's like, like how much, I like that healthy balance of pushing yourself to, we're capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for. I've already, I've already seen that, but there is, Some line. And so I don't have a good answer for that, but that's I'm trying to also be an open book and show it all real time. Like I want you to look back at my fighting clips from two years ago, and I want, you know, to meet like all of it. I want to be an open story that is ongoing and constantly iterating. Sam Parr: So this year, I Jesse Itzler came on the podcast. He gave this idea of a Misogi. He's like, oh, this is Japanese tradition and the way kind of the American translation of the way he translated the Japanese idea is One grand challenge a year, but specifically like do something so grand that it changes you. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Sam Parr: That it changes you. So then it's like so he for him, it was like he ran this hundred mile race like and every year he picks a different one. One year was write a book another year. So he's done this for like 15 years or so. And I was like, damn, I never really do something like that, right? Like I have like New Year's resolutions, things I want to improve on myself, but I never really like put out the Masogi, the grand challenge for the year. And so I made one. I was like, all right, I want to and I like that it's one because I was like, oh, I want to do this and this and this. And all that was going to do was guarantee none of them happen. Rob The Bank: Yeah. Sam Parr: So what's the one for this year? And I was like, I would love to be, I was like, I want to have more fun in my life. I have fun playing basketball. I have fun doing the podcast. I have fun, you know, in business, my kids. Where can I, where can I dial up fun? And I was like, I want to be able to jam out with music because music is like its own little like magic potion. Music makes you feel good in 13 seconds. I can play a song and change your mood in 13 seconds. There's not much I could say to you that's going to do that, like to change your mood for the better. And so I was like, all right, I want to be able to jam out on a piano. But then I was like, all right, what's the life maxing version of this? So I was like, all right, not only am I going to learn to, not only just going to learn piano, like I'm going to get good, I'm going to be able to jam out to any song I want on the piano. That's going to be my mission. What if I could also teach my daughter? She's five. I was like, what if she could do it with me? Now I'm getting dad points while I'm getting piano points at the same time. Rob The Bank: Finding those synergies to weave it all together. Sam Parr: Oh, it's integration. I'm not choosing family or my piano hobby. It's both. So she comes with me to every single lesson. She begs me to do piano now every night. I'm like, okay, that's cool. Then I was like, all right, what would be like, The full send version of this. If I really was to send it, what would I do? And at first I was like, would I make a song? Would I perform at a theater? And I felt like that's kind of playing somebody else's game. So I think a key part is like pick what's real for you. Don't just like take somebody else's scorecard and be like, that's now how I'm going to judge myself. So I had this idea from my cousin of Go play a recital at an old folks home. I was like, oh, that would be just like more fun. That would just be more fun for me, more meaningful for me versus like post it online and get a bunch of views or perform it in front of other people. Dude, go to this place where I've been to a bunch of like senior centers. Not a lot is happening there. Like I could go be there, Kanye, because there's nobody else there. And for me, that would be meaningful. Like I made other people's day brighter if I did that. So I was like, to me, that was a real learning lesson of like how to choose these side quests, how to choose these misogys, these one year challenges in a way that I'm going to use now going forward. Rob The Bank: Absolutely. I think you hit the nail on the head with being hyper individualized. My life maxing scorecard is not yours and it shouldn't be. We're all drawn to different things and I think keeping it individual is important while keeping that. My main framework is don't let anyone else dictate it for you or don't let anyone tell you what you can't be or can't do. Sam Parr: What's yours? What does that scorecard look like for you? Rob The Bank: Muay Thai is starting to take a back burner thing. I'm putting You know, being a dad at the top of that, which has been so that that's like reshuffling everything because I'm learning what it means to be present as an individual. And that means like, you know, way less phone, which inherently means like it starts to crumble some of the other pieces. But the beautiful part of this is when you put your priorities in place, things start to handle themselves. Like then all of a sudden you start thinking smarter just naturally, like, OK, like that still has to get done. So I have to trust You know, my team for that and this and that. So that's at the top of it. The music is the second piece. And then still the other, you know, it's like I'm taking content as one of these things now, like just from a storytelling. Some of the stuff I'm going to do on YouTube, I think is going to is going to. Sam Parr: Well, let's talk about content real quick. When I first met you through a mutual friend, you showed up and you had this like, again, you always have a different like crazy outfit on. And somebody was like, oh, you got to check out his Instagram. And I go and I was like, bro, like I was having a great conversation with you. And then I went to your Instagram and I was like, I was like, I would never talk to this guy. Your brand name was like the genius CEO. Every video was like Dan Bilzerian meets like Instagram meets like Dropshipper. It was like it was like, oh, man, this guy's selling courses. And every video was like over the top. He's talking about how you can make millions instantly as a get rich quick vibes. But I met you. I was like, dude, you, you. Yeah. And you and you were like, I'm like, you're like, it's an experiment. Like, I'm being intentional. I'm intentionally turning that knob up that way because I want to see what happens. And you were into that at the time. I think now you're making a shift. But like, can you just describe what you what you did there? Because I almost once I met you and I was like, oh, that's he created a character. That's actually respectable in a way. Rob The Bank: I'm huge. One of my core things is obviously intense ownership of oneself. And one of my problems after I sold that business with Genius, I had my first daughter. I was really frustrated with the world. I just was. And it started to become like a cope. People have weird ways of ducking ownership and responsibility and disconnecting from their own unhappiness. And I remember just thinking I don't like where the world's headed. And so I could sit there and keep crying about it or I could try to have some influence or some dent on it. And that's what kind of drew me to intentional social media. I tried to do like this cool health content like I was doing. Not full Brian Johnson, but like Dave Asprey level stuff like seven, eight years ago, like Hyperbaric Chamber, Red Light, and like literally nobody cared. Nobody cared. And now in hindsight... Sam Parr: The nice guy was finishing last. Rob The Bank: Yeah, and in hindsight, I didn't know how to make the content. Yet, right? But I saw this like clear formula of, Oh my God, if I post a car, like I am actually rich, I still have business. And if you post a car or watch or whatever, people respond. And so as that started to work, I started doubling down on those, those things. And, um, it wasn't until like, you kind of got to play the game to change the game a little bit. It was, was my opinion. And, um, that's when you met me kind of in that wave where like, Pseudo-relevant, even if maybe not in the right lens. But until you have learned those skills and learned to kind of, you know, develop a platform, then literally nobody cares. Like, nice guy does finish last. And so, I guess that's just been my personal evolution. Like, it's been fun. I'll be the first to say, I got way too far in that stuff. Like, I got lost in it. Like, that actually does happen. Ben, you're Your partner flagged that for me like seven or eight months ago in a really casual Ben way, but like, you know, non confrontational. Sam Parr: What did he say to you? Rob The Bank: It was just something along the lines of like, well, if you if you do that stuff enough, don't you start to kind of believe it or become it? And that stuck with me, and I don't think he knows that stuck with me. I don't know if he remembers he said that, but there were a lot of little things like that that prompted me to go. Sam Parr: It's like an actor. You stay in character because you're doing it for the role, but then at some point. Rob The Bank: It's method acting. Sam Parr: Yeah, you lose yourself. You get lost in the sauce. Rob The Bank: And actually that happened to me. Unfortunately, like a lot of the things I was leaning into do make you like cool or whatever. So now there's this audience that looks up to you in a very specific light. So you have two choices. You keep down the same path or you say, whoops, you know, like this is what I actually am. And so I feel like I've separated a lot of the Negative parts. I love fashion. I love design. I genuinely do. I think it's individualism. I think there's like, you know... Sam Parr: Can we do the fashion? Okay, so here's me. I have Nike shoes. It should have been this New Balance to go full dad mode. I'm wearing sweatpants and a plain black shirt. Rob The Bank: Are those Kobe's though? Sam Parr: No, these are not Kobe's. These are $90 Nike's. I just like this color of green. So let's go head to toe. Teach me what you got on here. Rob The Bank: Full San Francisco. And I love it. Sam Parr: I got matching socks today. That's only because I knew I had to step my game up for you. Normally it'd be mismatched socks. It'd be more sweat jeans. These are Lulu's at least. And then like, this might be my daughter's, but I was like, Oh, hold on. He's going to have hella accessories. Let me come strong with the accessories. Rob The Bank: So start with the wrist. How much do you think this is? Sam Parr: You start with the wrist. Is that like part of the fashion? Rob The Bank: No, no. I don't want to talk about Louis Vuitton. Okay. Sam Parr: Uh, that looks, it looks fancy to me. Rob The Bank: All right. Sam Parr: My honest guess would have been that that's a $20,000 watch. Rob The Bank: This is a vintage Oakley from like the nineties and it was like $3,500. Okay. So, so I don't believe that like expense and cost, like I have some expensive stuff, but I think like it's way cooler to put together like unique kind of stuff. This shirt is a, this, this gentleman, The brand's ERL. I can't pronounce his name, but he's like the head photographer for Vogue. And like he did all of Kendrick Lamar's stuff. And again, not super expensive, but like very on the come up. The jeans were from Kanye's, like this is probably, like he's not cheap, like probably 300 bucks or something, but not mind blowing. Um, Kanye's Free Larry Hoover tour with, with Drake. These were probably like 150 bucks, not expensive. Louis Vuitton boots, which were expensive, they were $2,500. I love what Pharrell is one of my business idols. I think there's a huge gap between like artistry, culture and actual business. Pharrell has that quote. It's creativity without business is victimization and business without creativity is just dumb. And I think he stepping into the head of Louis Vuitton like a brand I would typically never wear or care about is the perfect example of Those two things merging creativity with meaningful enterprise. Bernard Arnault is top three richest people because of that. All right. Sam Parr: I got a little bit. I got a little bit cooler. I don't think I could pull it off. But maybe I don't know. You got to give me like the the dad baby steps version of this. I'm going to start just I'm going to start at the wrist. Take it simple and then we'll go from there. Actually, I should just show up for, we should have done a thing where it's like, I don't know if you've seen Rick Glassman. He does these interviews where he does a podcast, but he'll go. And then it'll cut and they'll switch outfits. It's so funny when they do shit like that. But we'll just pretend I did that. Rob The Bank: That's awesome. Sam Parr: Rob, thanks for coming on, man. Everyone should find you. Rob The Bank, which is one of the greatest handles of all time. Rob The Bank: Thank you for that. Sam Parr: Well, you were already saying it. I didn't come up with it, but I was like, dude, that should be your handle. That should be your brand. What is this? The Genius CEO? No, no, no. You should be Rob The Bank. Rob The Bank: And just wait, full disclaimer before we, you know, my last company was the Genius Brand. So I didn't just, you know, it just looked bad. It looked bad. But no, thank you for having me. Seriously. Like this means the world. I really appreciate it. Awesome. Sam Parr: Thanks for doing it. Hey, Shaan here. A quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story. He started Twitter and before that, he sold a company to Google for $100 million. And somebody asked him, they said, Ev, what's the secret, man? How do you create these huge businesses, billion-dollar businesses? And he says, well, I think the answer is that you take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for thousands of years, And then you just use modern technology to take out steps. Just remove the friction that exists between people getting what they want. And that is what my partner Mercury does. They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has, managing your money and being able to do your finance or operations. And they've removed all the friction that has existed for decades. No more clunky interfaces. No more 10 tabs to get something done. No more having to drive to a bank, get out of your car just to send a wire transfer. They made it fast. They made it easy. You can actually just get back to running your business. You don't have to worry about the rest of it. I use it for not one, not two, but six of my companies right now. And it's used by also 200,000 other ambitious founders. So if you want to be like me, head to mercury.com, open up an account in minutes. And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC. All right, back to the episode.