Business Money Hacks

Episode 1: Preparing To Begin (Living Inside Fear)

Introduction

[Music]

Dustin: Growth hack your brand, and then destroy anything that moves.

Bridge: You need to grind-hustle your platform manifest.

Dustin: It's all about entropy, elegance, and finance.

Dustin: Blockchain.

Bridge: Invest in real estate every day.

Dustin: Invest in meal estate every morning.

Bridge: You need to mind-hack the mind shackles that are grabbing your mind.

Bridge: Entrepreneurs

Dustin: Entrepreneurs

Bridge: Entrepreneurs

Dustin: Entre-manure

Dustin: Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a day. Eat the man who've just fished, and you'll eat for a lifetime

Leonidas: Spartans!

Dustin: Business

Bridge: Money Hacks

Leonidas: Our arrows will blot out the Sun

Who are we?

Dustin: Hello, welcome to Business Money Hacks. My name is Dustin Taylor Hahn

Bridge: And I'm Bridge Stuart

Dustin: I want to start this podcast off by sort of explaining who we are and why we're doing this.

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Why should we be giving our secrets away, essentially? We're very successful.

Bridge: It really is imparting our potential, that we've definitely maximized

Dustin: Right

Bridge: And being able to utilize that into a streaming form that other people can ingest, cognitively and be able to utilize themselves.

Dustin: Dustin Taylor, you've obviously seen me on TED Talks. I'm best friends with Elon Musk, well I used to be before the acid attack, and I am actually a little bit older than you think

Bridge: Oh wow

Dustin: That's- that's the creams and

Bridge: The cream

Dustin: There's a lot of bloodletting inv- I don’t- we need to get into

Bridge: the whole bloodletting

Dustin: The ceremonies… that can come later

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Essentially, I live in this compound here in New Or- New Zealand, used to be from New Orleans, and then I moved it with helicopters into New Zealand. We're in my compound right now. Bridge is welcome. He's my confidant.

Bridge: I have access

Dustin: You have the gold card

Bridge: yeah, yeah so and I'm Bridge Stuart. I've been involved heavily in tech for the past 15 years. So yeah I'm invested in all the- The Big Five. The big five tech companies, you know what they are.

Dustin: Google

Bridge: Google

Dustin: Amazon

Bridge: LinkedIn

Dustin: LinkedIn

Both: *giggles*

Bridge: And Softsoft. It's the- they create extra soft software, and that's really gonna be driving things. I've been inve- involved in tech for the last 15 years, mostly in very hostile banking in regards to investment, very very heavy investing.

Dustin: Well you were saying that you watched the movie Boiler Room…

Bridge: Yeah, I want it to be the Vin Diesel of software and that's where I am. I mean, I both make a lot of money and I work out.

Dustin: Well it's important to keep your body fit, and then that kind of brings me to what I do. As opposed to technology, I do invest in your companies, but I'm more interested in people and what you can do with the human mind, the human brain. Some people are not really gonna make it. They're not they're not gonna reach their full maximized potential. It's a shame. Why should the brain matter go to waste? And I'll leave it at that.

Preparing To Begin

Bridge: Okay, kicking off with this first episode, we've decided to, you know, basically give a rundown. What we thought would be appropriate is: preparing to begin. You have to start somewhere, and that's where we want to start, is at the start. There's a lot of things that you need to learn. There's a lot of things that you need to prepare in order to begin. And it's scary. The the key is to understand the fear, wrap your brain around fear, and live inside of fear. I grew up in the sewer. I grew up in the sewer, I mean I was- I was raised in Connecticut, but I spent a solid three weeks in the sewer of New York when I moved there, collecting various items. I was doing photography at the time. I was taking pictures of things in the sewer that I'd find, and at a certain point I was- I was walking around the raw feces, and this rat tried to take a sandwich that I had. You know, I was hungry. I was real hungry, and then here's this rat trying to take a sandwich away from me. The rat got the sandwich and ran into one of its rat holes, which they build. And that's when I looked at myself and I'm like “Man, what's going on here? I'm in a sewer.” And that's when I had to climb right out, and it was scary climbing out of the sewer for me because you don't start any lower than a sewer. Again, I was raised in Connecticut, but

Dustin: Yeah your family- you were prominent

Bridge: They

Dustin: members of the Connecticut state

Bridge: The State Traders they, they trade a lot out of Connecticut: deep shipping, and but when I moved to New York I started from the bottom, below the bottom. I really learned to look fear in the face in those dark tunnels.

Dustin: Look fear in a face and shoot it in the face.

Bridge: Grab it by the neck and strangle it. Strangle fear is what I say

Dustin: When I was younger I had no idea how I was gonna live up to my father's potential. There were beatings…

Overhead

Dustin: But right now I want to talk about overhead, and overhead in your life. There's a lot of people that will hold you back. I mean, you've met people in your life that have said “No” to you, and you gotta streamline your life.

Bridge: You gotta minimize is the key. You have to minimize your life. Watch too much TV? Cut it out. Maybe you have a friend that's always coming over and wants to talk about things or something. Be social, interact with a person, connect with the person,

Dustin: Talk about your feelings with the person

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Have relationships,

Bridge: That's a time suck. Slice that right out. Just take the razor blade and *tss* cut that right out.

Dustin: I fell in love with my high school sweetheart. We got married very early. She wanted to start having children. We had one.

Bridge: You had a child?

Dustin: And that's as far as we went. *sigh*

Bridge: And I'm so glad

Dustin: You know, you go on a few da- that's good

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Yeah

Bridge: I'm good I'm go- I'm so glad that you cut that-

Dustin: You date her for several years, seven years, you get married, you have a kid, maybe you have another kid, buy a house

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: At that point you have to say “hey I don't- look, I don't want to lead you on.”

Bridge: Yeah kids are great. Kids are- kids are so much fun. They’re- it's great! Kids are fun. Disneyland is fun. I'm not going to Disneyland every day. I'm trying to make money. I'm proud. I mean, you should be proud of yourself in that regard.

Dustin: I am proud in there are nights, wake up 3:00 in the morning where I'm screaming and and yelling out into the black void

Bridge: of course

Dustin: And saying “What am I doing? What am I doing! Why did I do this! Who am I!” Being a man, being a real man, a man's man, a grizzled grizzly man, is leaving your family and becoming successful.

Both: *giggles*

Bridge: It it's a beautiful thing starting a family. It is a beautiful thing leaving a family. *laughs*

Dustin: I feel like there's a black stone sitting behind my heart

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: At all moments of the day.

Bridge: Well it's interesting because I've sort of feel that as well, and it's almost like that stone hardens and becomes- and it like spreads out and

Dustin: Into a suit

Bridge: Yeah it's like

Dustin: Sort of a stone suit

Bridge: It's like a giant suit. Like, it's almost like inside me I feel like a robot, you know. I just feel like a cold steel robot, and that's it's, after a while it starts feeling good. You cherish that cold comfort of steel.

Dustin: That also brings into what you're trying to do with your with your life is essentially become a cyborg in a certain sense, or

Bridge: In a certain sense, in a metaphorical sense, an emotional se- to a degree a physical sense with some of the technology that's going on in emerging tech sectors.

Dustin: I commend you for wanting to become a technical robot

Bridge: Thank you

Dustin: A man who, who is not a man eventually be is a is a is a post-man

Bridge: That's the goal, is to be um the post-man: an American postman

Dustin: I like to imagine that 100 years in the future you're, you become what you want to be: a robot man, a cyborg man, a man who lives beyond his fleshie days, and I'm some sort of biological creature

Bridge: You’ll- like a like a floating vat filled with various cerebrums floating around using drone technology

Both: *giggles*

Bridge: Just, just hovering around the Eastern Seaboard.

Dustin: It makes me so happy to think: you and I would be walking around the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is the world, you in your robot body, and me: a floating brain. Perhaps you're holding the floating brain like a balloon

Bridge: Yeah, amongst amongst a dire nuclear backdrop.

Dustin: This is our dream, and we want to give you this dream as well

Bridge: And that's, yeah, to a degree, what this podcast is about. We hope to pass this beautiful vision

Dustin: I wish to shred my body and become something more. Next episode we have a great man

Bridge: Our great friend, Trainer Stevens. He's a guy who's deeply involved in agricultural innovations

Dustin: Right, when all the food runs out, what do we do?

Bridge: That's a question I think everybody wants to know, and it's gonna be happening fast. Very, very fast. So thanks for listening to this podcast. Stay tuned for newer episodes. This has been a great beginning I think. I mean we're ending right now, but this is the beginning of the end, as Churchill said.

Leonidas: Your women will be slaves.

Business Money Hacks

Episode 2: Braining Outside The Egg with Trainer Stevens

[Music]

Dustin: Growth-hack your brand, and then destroy anything that moves.

Bridge: You need to grind-hustle your platform manifest.

Dustin: It's all about entropy, elegance, and finance.

Dustin: Blockchain.

Bridge: Invest in real estate every day

Dustin: Invest in meal estate every morning

Bridge: You need to mind-hack the mind shackles that are grabbing your mind.

Bridge: Entrepreneurs

Dustin: Entrepreneurs

Bridge: Entrepreneurs

Dustin: Entre-manure

Dustin: Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a day. Eat the man who've just fished, and you'll eat for a lifetime.

Leonidas: Spartans!

Dustin: Business

Bridge: Money Hacks

[Music Fades]

Bridge: Hello and welcome to bus-

Leonidas: Our arrows will blot out the sun!

Bridge: I thought we were gonna cut that

Dustin: Yeah, I thought we wanted to keep it in

Bridge: It’s kind of-

Dustin: I’ll just, let me just- Hey there, welcome to Business Money Hacks. My name is Dustin Taylor Hahn

Bridge: And I am Bridge Stuart

Dustin: We want to talk a little bit about coming up with new ideas and being your own innovator self-starter.

Bridge: Absolutely, it's it's so important especially in in roles such as ours: you know, leadership roles, business roles. It's so important to be able to think differently.

Dustin: Bridge, you had started a new company called Softsoft. Is there any update on that?

Bridge: Softsoft ,um it's been hectic. It's been really, it's been hectic, you know, but that's the nature of these startups. They get hectic.

Dustin: Well you spend a lot of money on CDs. I've noticed recently that a lot of computers don't have CD drives. So what was the turnaround point?

Dustin: Well um, you know this just goes back to this whole concept of innovation. Nobody's doing it. Nobody's nobody's using CDs, and I thought “Time to corner that market.”

[Dustin giggles]

Bridge: So that's why I invested heavily in CDs.

Dustin: Mmm

Bridge: It's yet to exactly a pan out. I'm gonna be honest like you know, I'm a workhorse. I work a lot, and I expect everyone else to work with me

Dustin: Well yeah you

Bridge: Very- those hours, and I'll be honest. My VP had a stroke.

Dustin: Oh

Bridge: Yeah, he uh

Dustin: Well, I mean, if you can't d- You work, how many hours a day would you say? There’s 24 hours in a day. What's the roundabout-

Bridge: 23? I argue that I work in my sleep.

Dustin: I know that you had this pod that you recently bought that, where you sleep inside of the pod. Is that connected directly into the back of your brain stem, or

Bridge: Yeah it's, it connects in. It fills with like this goo that is really warm, and you just sort of gestate for about an hour. That equals about eight hours of sleep as long as you're in the pod.

Dustin: Oh, I think you’re bleeding a little bit on the floor there. Yeah, we forgot to update your gold card, and the beast sort of attacked you there. I have a symbiotic beast dog pig that protects the compound, and I forgot to update your card, and when you came in the

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: kind of attack you

Bridge: It’s not bad

Dustin: bit of a big

Bridge: Yeah it's not bad it didn't hit muscle. So that's the most important thing.

Dustin: All right

Bridge: But I got to say, no you're doing great things here at this compound. You've really, the pig dog is really

Dustin: Yeah I’ve been

Bridge: It’s a remarkable animal

Dustin: I've been experimenting with splice technology. It’s where I’ve spent most of my time I don't really get much sun. The sun is an evil entity that lives outside the world.

Bridge: of course

Dustin: That kind of brings us to that what we want to talk about, which is like how do you think outside the box as it were?

Bridge: The important thing to think outside the box is you got to think outside the box in every way. I- you know, first things first, I don't say “think” I say “brain”.

[both giggle]

Bridge: So I, like if- and you've heard me say this. If somebody comes up to me and has an idea or something, I'm gonna say “I need to brain on that”

Dustin: Yeah “Why don’t you brain on that for a bit?”

Bridge: “I gotta do some heavy braining.”

Dustin: When I think about thinking outside the box, I think about, you know, what is the box where you, where you brain? It's essentially, it's your skull. and

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Your skull isn't shaped like a box. It's more shaped like an oval. So I

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Just kind of an egg, like an egg shape. Its yolk is the brain. So, I mean, thinking like if you want to think about “braining outside the egg” would be the proper term, coming up with new ideas.

Bridge: It's a very profound concept to brain outside the egg. So that's what we're talking about.

Dustin: I think that's a good transitional point of meeting our good friend, Trainer Stevens

Trainer: Hey guys

Dustin: Bridge met Trainer Stevens, I think were you guys met in a hotel room?

Trainer: It was at the conference I think. the con-

Dustin: The conference

Trainer: Yeah it was that conference in San Francisco

Bridge: Yeah yeah, it was yeah The Deep Seed conference where they were selling new seeds essentially

Trainer: Yeah well it's the biggest seed conference in the western United States obviously

Bridge: Huge

Trainer: And I mean, all the players are there. I mean, it was exciting to also see that as an intersection of technology and people like you showing up for the conference, because I think that's where we'll see a lot of development in the agricultural industry

Bridge: The intersection of technology and big farm

Trainer: Oh yeah absolutely

Bridge: is gonna be a huge thing

Dustin: I'm trying to brain about this for a second. So, Trainer Stevens, you what was your- where did you start? Where did you come from?

Trainer: Of course

Dustin: Yeah let’s just get a little update on what Trainer Stevens has going on because you're a big guy. You, you're, how tall are you?

Trainer: 6’8.

Dustin: 6’8. You’re a 6’8 guy, and you said you don't eat meat.

Trainer: Well, I mean I've obviously consumed protein, but I think it's, for me it's been pretty radically life-changing to think about the ways in which we can get protein, because I think a lot of people assume that it's just beans, just meat, you know there that there's a certain sort of subset of foods that you can get protein from, when in actuality, the truth is there's a lot more avenues, and for me it was sort of really life-changing to think about: okay wow. It's in all sorts of things from veggies to wood pulp. Wood pulp is actually one of the leading areas in which a lot of Ag development is going on right now, because we're seeing that we can suck stuff: protein, vitamins, mineral energy out of material that we would otherwise have discarded.

Dustin: So wood pulp is that the wood chips that you get kids playground?

Trainer: Yeah it's basically that stuff pulverized into a pulp form that we can then typically condense and milk

Dustin: Oh you can milk the wood

Trainer: well everything

Dustin: You could milk a tree?

Trainer: Pulverizing it to the point where it liquefies or where liquid, liquid’s being drawn out of it, but

Bridge: So you can like go to a playground and just start sucking on woodchips and gaining the protein that way

Trainer: No no, Bridge there's actually a process involved that, you know, has to, has to occur

Bridge: Okay

Trainer: But that's what we're looking at right now. I guess I should introduce myself

Dustin: Yeah yeah

Bridge: Yeah

Trainer: My name’s Trainer Stevens. For those of you don't know, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Harvest Home, which is a research and development company in the agricultural industry and one of the largest distributors of agricultural products in the United States, and a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil.

Dustin: Wow like Monsanto but better, but I want to talk more about milking things that generally aren't milked.

Trainer: Mm-hmm

Dustin: What other things can you milk?

Trainer: One of the biggest areas has been the things that people often discard from the human body, and I'm not talking about

Dustin: This I like. This I like

Trainer: And I'm not talking about feces I'm talking about hair. I'm talking about fingernails. I'm talking about the parts of the body that come off us naturally that people would otherwise think of as, you know, disposable, and now we're seeing there's good stuff in there and it's just a matter of how do we get that out.

Dustin: Yeah I

Bridge: That fresh milk

Dustin: I’ve worked on milking plasma out of bone, cuz I have a bone guy that comes to the Coliseum every once in a while, or the compound I guess you would call it, but I want to change it to Coliseum. I have a bone guy who ships bones from around the world. I don't ask any questions, but there's a lot of stuff to do with bone

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: And what you can do with different parts of the human body that generally go to waste, especially if it's fresh

Trainer: Well, and that and that's the thing is that the human population is only growing, right. We're seeing estimates, conservative estimates say by the by 2080 there will be too many mouths to feed. There’ll be over 14 billion people on the planet, and when I look at that I see we, you know, what's this big resource that's being overlooked? All of these people!

Bridge: Delicious bone milk

Trainer: We have all of these people coming out and I, you know, I'm not here waving the cannibal flag, but I'm just arguing that there's an untapped resource here that we seem to be ignoring.

Bridge: I think “cannibal” is just a bad word

Dustin: Yeah

Bridge: In general. I like to consider it more like “human recycling” you know

Dustin: It's a natural process.

Bridge: It's absolutely a natural process, and “cannibalism” it's an outdated word. Animals eat each other. I mean, what's more natural than an animal?

Dustin: Some mother bears eat their cubs

Bridge: Spiders

Dustin: Spiders

Bridge: Spider babies

[Dustin giggles]

Bridge: Spider babies consume their mother when they're born. That is such a beautiful thing to think about. A mass of baby spiders

[all laugh]

Bridge: That is such a beautiful thing to think about, just a mass of baby spiders consuming their mother after she's given birth.

Dustin: And if you can imagine you know, kind of, the braining that I've been doing is

[all giggle]

Dustin: Creating large versions of smaller things, you know, splicing a small spider with an ox would be something that I'd be interested in. It's something I would do at the compound myself.

Bridge: I mean

Dustin: So a giant mother spider being eaten by slightly smaller baby spiders would be something that I

Bridge: Well yeah

Dustin: I could start to work on. I'm sorry, Ste- Trainer Stevens, you're a man after my own heart. This is exactly what I've been trying to work on without the government involved. I'm trying to create a world where I turn into sort of a spliced creature that that I could love, so I could begin to love myself.

Trainer: And that just, you know the big enemy of business is regulation.

Dustin: Mmm-hmm

Trainer: And I and I've said it before and I will say it again, that that's what we see time and time again quelching innovation. It's great to see you trying to push those boundaries, because I think that's where real change happens

Bridge: Absolutely I mean I couldn’t agree with you more. This cage that the government's put everyone in it's like a, it's just like a prison for the mind is what the government is, clamping down on freedom, clamping down on our rights. I mean, you know, with splicing and stuff, like you were talking about, I mean how incredible would it be to see like a bunch of baby ox devour their mother, like when after giving birth? Yeah the government just would never allow that.

Dustin: You're getting heated. You're getting heated up on this, I like it

Trainer: Turning red, I love to see that

Dustin: You’re, oh, bleeding on the floor a little bit

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Yeah, it’s getting…

Bridge: Sorry, I just hate that government

Dustin: No, no I don’t think

Trainer: Well, it's lovely to be here in beautiful New Zealand

Dustin: Yeah

Trainer: I love Auckland. I've been several times, and I haven’t been back in a while

Dustin: Well actually the ground that were on right now is technically New Orleans land

Trainer: Oh

Dustin: There was an issue going on over there, and I just said “I have to get up and go.” So right now I'm having this weird dispute, I mean Land dispute. I need to talk to a lawyer about that, but I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do about the compound at this point

Trainer: Well I guess then, the key question there would be how much of the original dirt is here in New Zealand versus how much of just the materials from the buildings themselves? Because I think where you have legs to stand on is how much of this is physical New Orleans dirt. Because I know for us, we're able to get away with a lot by importing soil directly from third world countries

Dustin: Smart

Trainer: Into the areas of the United States, and then

Bridge: Very smart

Trainer: Being able to operate under, you know, for example, we have over a thousand acres in the Central California Valley that is technically Myanmar

Dustin: Hmm

Bridge: Wow

Trainer: And we're under the basis of Myanmar regulation right there, and that allows us to get

Dustin: Circumvent, get around,

Trainer: Yeah m-hmm

Dustin: It's like, do you know anything about Sailor Law, Bridge I think I think,

Bridge: Yeah yeah

Dustin: Your family was in shipping, I figured you might know more about

Bridge: Yeah 200 miles off the coast, that's where, I’m not gonna say anything goes, but more things go. There's still maritime laws out there, but the cold grip of the US government isn't gonna be able to touch you 200 miles off the coast, which

Dustin: I heard about this island that they're building right now called Africa 2, and it's basically a scaled-down

Trainer: Oh, I’ve heard a lot about this

Dustin: Version of Africa that's located somewhere in the South Atlantic. I'm not really sure what they're doing out there

Bridge: Wow

Dustin: But I invested a ton of money into it

Trainer: Oh that's great

Dustin: Yeah

Trainer: That's great

Dustin: Give it another shot

Trainer: Well I think that's that, there goes to another point of thinking outside the box is not following

Dustin: Or braining outside

Trainer: Braining outside the, yeah, you know not following common wisdom, right. And that's something, you don't know a ton about Africa 2, but you can sense the buzz and can get in there. That's how you really find something to latch on to that you, I mean, I've said it a million times, and I will say it again: I have never bought Apple stock, and I never will. I think it's a big mistake. And I think people are just following the herd on this one, and I've been I've been waving that flag for over 20 years now.

Dustin: Now when you say Apple do you mean the computer company?

Trainer: No, Big Apple I'm talking about the Apple industry. I'm talking about granny apple. I'm talking about red apples. I'm talking about the sweet greens. I'm talking about the sour greens. I'm talking about apples as a fruit.

Bridge: So do you think apples are out, like or do you think consumption is gonna drop for apples?

Trainer: Look, I think apples peaked in the late 1800s and ever since just been

Dustin: Johnny Appleseed was a big, was big on that

Trainer: And no doubt, a game changer in his own right, but I think

Bridge: Yeah

Trainer: Right there was where we saw the peak of the Apple industry, and ever since it's just been a downward spiral, and I think it’s been hanging on only because of PR honestly.

Dustin: I want to get to the core of your idea here of how do we maximize the goal from where we have a small seedling, a small seedling of an idea, where do we go from there?

Trainer: Ithink I think the first thing to think about is who do you trust? because

Dustin: No one

Trainer: Exactly, because the answer should be no one. And I want to make that clear our listeners that the real smart guy, the smartest guys in the room aren't looking to anyone else for answers because they know they’re the smartest ones in the room. So when you have an idea, you have to trust it, and it can be, it can seem like it's crazy. You're sitting there and you're thinking out, and you think you get the idea it's like, boom. “Oh, well you know, what if we started smashing wood into pulp and drinking that?” And I think that's the biggest thing is you don't you don't then go “Oh well I'm gonna call my friends at oh at Columbia and say oh ooh, can we actually do squeezing that?”

Bridge: Yeah

Trainer: I'm not gonna go to the pencil pushers over there. I'm gonna get my boys in R&D to start coming up with solutions

Bridge: That is very inspiring to hear something like that, going with the gut, not letting anybody get in your way, and if they do, you say “Get out of my way. I'm gonna get that milk.”

Dustin: I want- I'm interested in something that Bridge had mentioned when you were in the hotel room after the conference. You were going over some breathing techniques to relieve stress from a stressful day.

Bridge: Yeah you were giving some great advice about how to sort of- these breathing exercises

Trainer: Oh yeah

Bridge: Where it was like

[Bridge breathes in and out three times very quickly]

Bridge: Yeah, it was like breathing really fast

Trainer: Yeah it's a, it's a common misconception that your body craves oxygen. In smaller doses, you're actually forcing your body to thrive off of what it's given. We underestimate the body's potential for rising up to the occasion. So I like to involve myself in a lot of activities which would be called loosely under the heading of “oxygen deprivation”

Dustin: Yeah, I do a lot of screaming at night

Dustin: Absolutely, I think night terrors are one of the key ways for those to- for those of us in positions as such as ours to relieve our stress, right, but going back to your original question about the high intensity, low oxygen breathing. So what you want to do in that scenario

Dustin: Yeah, can we do this right now?

Trainer: Oh absolutely,

Dustin: Something you could do any-

Trainer: The room is a little too well oxygenated for our purposes

Dustin: We could turn that down. I do have a switch

Trainer: I think for right now it’s fine. Just for demonstration purposes. So what you want to do in that scenario is: you're gonna take in a breath, and make it real shallow, as shallow as you possibly can, just barely just in there yeah just

[Bridge and Dustin begin taking breaths]

Trainer: And quick close

[Bridge and Dustin continue taking shallow breaths]

Trainer: And you're gonna quickly, and we're gonna start real slow, and then we're going to increase our intensity right we're gonna

[All three start breathing quickly together]

Trainer: And then we’re gonna start going faster.

[more short breaths]

Trainer: Remember minimal breath, minimal. Keep going. Dustin, you're taking a little too much. You're taking in too much.

[more short quick breaths]

Trainer: Faster, let’s increase the rate.

[All three continue taking chaotic short breaths, getting faster and faster]

Trainer: Great! Great, guys, and if you don't feel relaxed and frankly fully torqued, I mean you're not doing it right, cuz I can tell you right now

Bridge: I feel like a lost 20 pounds, yeah

Trainer: Oh yeah

Dustin: Is there anything else you'd like to say, Trainer Stevens, while we still have you, while the helicopter is still going? or

Trainer: If I have any last advice for the audience I think it really just is, you know

[notification chimes]

Dustin: Well I guess the helicopter’s going so, real quick what's the word? What's the buzz? What's the new buzz word you can give us? What's, what would you say is the new buzz word that works

Trainer: Integrated Systems.

Dustin: Okay, I like that

Bridge: I like that

Trainer: So, for example, what we were just doing with that breathing exercise was getting all of our- we were getting our blood pumping. We were getting our heart beating. We were getting our lungs filled, all to the point, all directed specifically towards lowering our stress, and having a successful erection, and I think for us that's where we're headed in the in the larger scheme of things too.

Dustin: Yeah we were talking about integrating, I want to integrate my system into- I want to lose some of my body mass and just create a larger version of a cerebral cortex. That's what- I want to integrate two animals into one, and myself. That's three animals, and create some sort of large meaty mass that could be

Bridge: Oh yeah

Dustin: That could brain outside the world's egg

Trainer: And that's that’s the definition of Integrated Systems. So I think that right now is that’s definitely the hot buzzword, certainly in the agricultural world

Bridge: Yeah yeah, well it seems like you are doing some incredible stuff, and thank you for coming on board here today Trainer

Trainer: Oh guys, my pleasure. I'm happy to come back any time

Bridge: Thanks for joining us today. Text week we're gonna be joined by Tanner Wyatt. He's a social-media influencer, and we're going to be talking about the significance and just utter importance of branding. So stay tuned.

[Music]

Business Money Hacks

Episode 3: Re-Branding Your Brand with Tnnr Wytt

[Music]

Dustin: Every morning you need to mind-hack and murder-hack your brand.

Bridge: Exponential growth is exponential

Dustin: Look at your calendar, and burn it. What is your personal winning résumé?

Bridge: The number one thing that they don't teach in school is to make money

Bridge: Entrepreneurs

Dustin: Entrepreneurs

Bridge: Entrepreneur

Dustin: Entre-manure

Bridge: Produce, produce, produce, PROduce

Dustin: Iam literally a god

Leonidas: Spartans!

Dustin: Business

Bridge: Money Hacks

[Music ends]

Bridge: Hello everybody, and welcome to b-

Leonidas: our arrows will blot out the sun

Bridge: Forgot we kept that

Dustin: Yeah [mumbles]

Bridge: Alright, well let's start again. How's it going everybody. This is Business Money Hacks. I'm Bridge Stuart. I'm Dustin Taylor Hahn

Bridge: Today we got a great episode lined up. We’re gonna be talking with our guest, Tanner Wyatt, and we're going to be focusing on specifically branding. It's very important to just get your name out there and understanding how branding can take you to the next level in regards to business, in regards to your personal life, whether it be with family, or friends, or you know relationships. Branding hits many levels.

Dustin: We spoke about cutting your ties with your old family and starting anew, and I think that's kind of the thesis of starting anew is putting your name on people, putting your name on things, if not metaphorically, but literally putting your name on things. I have a special burner. I burn my name into

Bridge: That's good, I mean it's important, and you know to own yourself, I'm not talking about slaves here, but you know, own other people, like you own them in a way that you can talk with them at a level where you're owning the conversation.

Dustin: Right, when you're talking in the conversation, sometimes you just want to yell out your name, and then people remember

[giggling]

Dustin: You just want to yell out your name, like we'll do it, we'll do a little play here. “Bridge, how's business been doing?”

Bridge: “Oh it's-”

Dustin: “Dustin!” So now, so now Bridge right now knows that I'm above him in the conversation. Now there's a tactic where a Bridge can yell out his name, but it has to be a little bit louder, and then we realize that the conversation is more about him than it is about me. Let's do this again

Bridge: Yeah, I mean

Dustin: Bridge, Bridge, how's business? Dustin!

Bridge: Bridge! Bridge! Bridge!

[both giggle]

Dustin: Yeah so that's kind of

Bridge: And god, I'd hate to count the number of times I've been in a boardroom where it just devolved into

[both laugh]

Bridge: I'd hate to count the number of times I've been in a boardroom where it just devolved into everybody screaming their own name

Dustin: Yeah, well that's also the issue with, when we discussed making this podcast in the first place, we're like “how many secrets should we give away? This is a huge secret, because we can't just have people in boardrooms yelling out their names and then nothing gets done.”

Bridge: And that was a worry about this podcast is that it was just gonna be us screaming our own names constantly

Dustin: I have the urge every moment to scream my name, and I have this little buzzer on the side of my ankle that buzzes when I think about screaming my name. It hurts a bit, but it happens. It's connected directly into my egg, my egg.

[both giggle]

Bridge: You got it, you got, you have one of those egg implants.

Dustin: There are certain issues that I have with, it’s starting new issues, but we can we can get into

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Into that kind of thing later. I do want to go back to branding before we meet up with

Bridge: Tanner Wyatt

Dustin: Tanner Wyatt, an influencer. So where did branding come from what's the history behind branning- branding? In the old days branding would be cattle farmers or people who owned a lot of land would have to physically brand people or things that are on their farm. My father used to do that, because he had a lot of children. We, I had siblings, and he would brand on the bottom of our feet. So I had, if you could look at the bottom of my foot here, you'll see that there's my family sigil

Bridge: Wow

Dustin: Yeah, well that's a- these are two snakes choking a goat’s neck

Bridge: Oh okay

Dustin: And that forms an “H” and then there's my number right there.

Bridge: Wow

Dustin: And he actually branded both of our feet, because it made it harder for us to run away. So you could see that both of my feet

Bridge: Yeah well that, I mean you must take a lot of pride in that sort of thing. You're your father just, at a young age, branding his children with the sigil of the family

Dustin: Well he took it I, when I was, I think, four, that's the age of becoming, he would take the hot iron and for a while, I don't want to be on the subject too long, but for a while my, he would refer to all of his children as just the number of the baby that came out, what number came out, and then by the time we became a certain age we got to choose our own names, and I chose my name based off of the Dust Bowl, because we, all the siblings got together and we decided we're gonna choose our name based off of tragedies at the time.

Bridge: Okay that makes sense, because from great tragedy comes great greatness

Dustin: Mm-hmm

Bridge: And so you know, obviously you've achieved that

Dustin: Yes absolutely

Bridge: You know, we’re in a compound in New Zealand!

Dustin: Beautiful compound

Bridge: It’s a gorgeous, expensive compound where you're testing on live animals. If that's not success, I don't know what is.

Dustin: Well, thank you, Bridge, and I'm sure, I'll be sure to tell my brothers and sisters, Titanus, Marcus, and Franquake

Bridge: Franquake?

Dustin: Franquake

Bridge: Franquake. Okay.

Dustin: She was based off of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906

Bridge: Yeah. yeah that’s what I probably thought

Dustin: All right, well let's get to it

Bridge: That’s great

Dustin: Unless, Bridge, you have anything more to say

Bridge: No. No, I say we just bring, bring in Tanner. Tanner Wyatt, everybody, we get, we're bringing him on.

Tanner: Suh, dudes

Bridge: Tanner

Tanner: You see my video? Suh dudes. Those guys.

Dustin: First off, Tanner, you smell great

Tanner: Thank you, thank you yeah

Dustin: What is that?

Tanner: It's Axe body spray

Bridge: Axe

Tanner: Yeah, they’re one of my sponsors

Bridge: Wow

Tanner: This one particularly is Phoenix Risen. So

Bridge: Okay

Tanner: I feel pretty good about it yeah

Bridge: And you're being sponsored

Tanner: Yeah, yeah, I mean you know, we were talking about, you guys are talking about branding. That's why you brought me on here, right, and you guys were talking about physically branding yourself, well another way you can do it these days is tattoos. You know, tattoos are cool. It's a good way to get yourself out there, show people when you go on Instagram, you take pictures of your tattoos. I actually get tattoos of all my sponsors. So I have Axe body spray on my back

Dustin: Oh that’s smart

Tanner: I have Big Lots on my thigh, you know

Bridge: Wow

Tanner: And that way, like you know, when I'm doing my shots in my underwear, people get to see my sponsors, you know what I mean, you feel me?

Bridge: Very cool yeah

Dustin: I like that

Bridge: Very cool, Tanner

Tanner: Yeah, for sure, for sure

Dustin: You have an Olive Garden on your neck, now

Tanner: I do, yeah

Dustin: Is that still

Tanner: No

Dustin: Your sponsor?

Tanner: No, no, I'm actually switching over right now. I'm going to In N Out. So it's kind of a conflict of interest. The weird thing is with Olive Garden is they, I guess they didn't like this video I did where I basically had sex with bread. Bread sticks are like a big part of their business model

Bridge: Okay

Tanner: I thought it was edgy. They thought it was inappropriate. I don't know.

Bridge: Give us a rundown on what's your rise to social influencer here

Tanner: Shit, man I was pretty much born influencing people. I mean, when I was a kid everybody wanted to wear the backpack I had. Everybody wanted my hairstyle. I was just that kid, you know. I got my nose pierced in third grade

Dustin: A born winner

Tanner: Yeah, I got my mom to take me down to Claire's, got that shit done. Everybody thought it was super cool. Next thing I know people are wearing fake nose rings. You know, so people were just, they've always, they've always looked up to me. And then when social media came along, I was like “look at this. This is the perfect avenue for me to show people how cool I am.” So I started with Vines. Did some amazing six-second Vines. I had one where I come out of a Starbucks, and this girl hits me in the head with a coffee cup, just bang right in the head, and just keeps playing over and over it is so funny, dude, so funny. That thing got, I think, about 27 million loops in the first day.

Dustin: Wow

Tanner: Yeeeeah

Dustin: Now, a loop

Bridge: Twenty-seven

Dustin: That means people are watching it over and over again con-

Tanner: Yep, that’s right, I mean it’s

Bridge: I like to call it “locked in”

Tanner: Yeah

Bridge: Like they just, they get, they’re eyes are there, and they’re locked in. They're completely focused on you.

Tanner: Yeah

Bridge: And I love it when people are focused on me, you know so that's a very

Dustin: Dustin! See right there, I locked yah

Bridge: I see, yeah

Tanner: I like this

Dustin: Yeah two techniques right there, and I locked you both in. You looked at me for a good,

Bridge: I couldn’t

Dustin: We had the stare, we had the tiger stare.

Bridge: I couldn't take my eyes off you when you screamed your own name.

Tanner: Which that makes me feel very uncomfortable, because I'm used to people looking at me. So I'm gonna take that technique and I'm gonna apply it to every meeting I have. I might just start doing videos of me just screaming my own name, you know, just like: T-Dubs! T-Dubs! Tanner Wyatt! Tanny Wyatt!

Dustin: Dustin! Dustin!

Bridge: Bridge! Bridge!

Tanner: Tanner Tanner Tanner!

Dustin: Yeah, that was, that’s good. I didn’t know who to look at. I was trying to

Bridge: I was confused

Dustin: And Tanner, you have, on your jacket here, on the collar your jacket, you have mirrors on there

Tanner: Yeah yeah

Dustin: So I guess, at any point, when you turn

Bridge: Yeah

Tanner: I guess well it's, the other thing is, I like being able to just, if I need in a pinch, I can just look at my sleeve, and I go “Oh, okay, my eyebrows look good. I don’t need to go in and get them done, you know what I mean”

Bridge: That’s great

Tanner: So it's like, it's kind of like having your phone, you know when you look at your phone, and you can like look at yourself and people use it as a mirror, but like it's like the old-school way.

Bridge: Very cool, very cool

Tanner: Yeah

Bridge: Well, I've definitely seen some of your stuff online

Tanner: Oh, thank you. Thank you

Bridge: And I gotta say, you know the brilliance of how you just suck people in to watching your content is, you know, I would dare say breathtaking

Dustin: It's almost hypnotic the way you do things

Bridge: Yeah

Tanner: Guys you are too kind. You are too kind. I mean it's really more of a gift, you know. It's one of those things that you can try to replicate it, but you just have to have it. It's like what you guys do, you know. Not everybody can be out there testing on animals or creating this massive empire. You gotta have that within you, you know. Part of its your upbringing, you know what I mean. I grew up in the suburbs. I had two brothers. We had a relatively easy upbringing, which made me a really bored kid. So I was like “What the fuck am I gonna do with my time?” So I just decided, you know, let's just do stupid shit, and it's made me millions of dollars.

Dustin: Yeah, I

Bridge: Well that’s

Tanner: So I'm just gonna rebrand my name here. I'm gonna take out all the vowels, you know. So I'm actually, I'm on this show announcing this today. I'm no longer Tanner Wyatt. I'm Tanner Wyatt, but I'm “Tanner” with T-N-N-R W-Y-T-T, because you know it's cool. It's like, you know, it's one of those ways that you can kind of mix things up while still maintaining your original image, but it's edgy, you know what I mean. It's like, who needs all those vowels? you know

Bridge: It’s almost like

Dustin: So how would you pronounce that?

Tnnr: It's still just “Tanner Wyatt” it's the same thing, yeah

Bridge: Yeah, Tanner Wyatt, or like a “Tinner Wutt”

Tnnr: Yeah, I mean like that's the thing is I want to confuse people. I thought about putting a period in the middle, you know like “Tanner dot Wyatt” You know what I mean, and then people are like “do I say the ‘dot’? Or is it a period? Or do I stop? What do I do here?” you know, like grammar is hard for people these days so

Dustin: Confusing people within a conversation is one of the best ways to get attention

Tnnr: Yeah

Dustin: And it puts you above them as well, not just screaming out your name

Bridge: That's a very good point um, one thing I like to do with people is say sentences, but say it like a question. So that really often throws people off. So for example I was in the board room of Softsoft the other day, and I said “I'm gonna fire your ass” to an executive, but I said it as a question, and I looked him in the eyes like “I'm gonna fire your ass?”

Dustin: That-

Bridge: He didn't know how to take it.

Tnnr: Yo

Bridge: He didn't know if he was fired, or if he, I mean, what else could have happened to that guy? I mean, so, I think it's very important to throw people off, is what I’m-

[all laugh]

Dustin: I’m thrown off right now yeah

Tnnr: Yeah, that’s

Bridge: I think yeah, I think it's just very important to throw people off.

Dustin: Even within your close social circle, it's just, you have to you have to be the top dog, or the top cat.

Tnnr: Yeah that's why like, honestly that's why I love doing my prank videos, you know. I got my mom, I got her arrested one day. Oh my god, it was so funny so basically-

Dustin: People like this

Tnnr: Oh they love it, they loved it, so I went and I shoplifted a bunch of stuff from Kmart, and then I put it all in back of my mom's car, and then I called an anonymous tip in to the police and I was like “Yo, there's this white lady. She was driving down the street in a Prius, and she's got a bunch of stuff from Kmart that she stole, and she spent the entire day in jail, and we filmed the whole thing. It was hilarious bro. It was hilarious, yeah

Dustin: How many view- how many loops did you get on that one?

Tnnr: Oh, that one? Over a hundred million, yeah. Yeah, that thing, somewhere- I mean Vine is gone now, but I think that shit’s still looping right now, yeah

Bridge: So you've been able to monetize this pretty well. You’ve found a steady stream of cash flow through this media.

Tnnr: Yeah, the money's coming in bro. I pay people to count my money now, you know.

Dustin: Yeah

Bridge: Wow

Tnnr: That's how much money I have. I mean, it's one of those things where, it's like I didn't go for the money, you know. I went out there to create good content, and then the money found me you know what I mean. So I'm gonna take it as it comes, yeah.

Bridge: You're an artist

Tnnr: Yeah, for sure bro. I know I think we all are artists in our own way.

Dustin: Sometimes what I'd like to do is I like to grab a duffel bag of money,

Tnnr: Yeah

Dustin: Toss it out the window, and try to run down the stairs to catch the money, so it feels like money's just coming at me.

Tnnr: Yo

Bridge: it's like you're

Dustin: It's a race

Bridge: Like it's raining money almost for you

Dustin: I want it to rain money on- that could be a good loop for you

Tnnr: Yeah bro, I'm stealing that shit, which, that's another thing I want to talk about with branding, is like: you don't have to create everything, you know. You can take other people's stuff, throw a watermark on it, like you know, so like, that's what I do. I usually like, probably seventy-five percent of my pictures on Instagram, I just find some photographer who did a good job, I take that shit, slap a watermark on it, throw it on my page. No one ever knows. By the time their lawyers come after me, it's like

Dustin: Natural business

Tnnr: Bruh, I got so much money, it's like, I don't care, you know, they can-

Bridge: I love that, I love that

Tnnr: You know

Bridge: It's, I mean, you know, I think we can all relate to just stealing stuff, like just being able to take, you know?

Dustin: Taking physically and also taking people's minds, and taking their

Tnnr: Dignity, yeah

Dustin: Taking their dig- sure.

Bridge: Yeah, the mental, just the, by sheer w-

Dustin: Well it's not taking if it's, if they're unw- if they’re w- if they’re unwilling. Well, if they're unwilling it's still taking, but if you will them to be unwilling…

Bridge: Yeah that’s totally, yeah

Dustin: That's what I

Bridge: That's acceptable. It's legal, I think

Dustin: Sure well it’s legal out here. It's legal out in the sea

Bridge: I mean, yeah, and I always say, you know “ocean laws or bust”

[Bridge and Dustin laugh]

Bridge: It, yeah

Dustin: So Tanner

Tnnr: Yeah

Dustin: You started with prank videos. Tell me about your earliest prank vi- you said you were doing this when, since you were born.

Tnnr: Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, I was

Dustin: What was like the earliest prank, cuz I noticed

Tnnr: I mean

Dustin: You have a tattoo of OshKosh B’gosh. I don’t know-

Tnnr: Yeah

Dustin: -if that company’s still around anymore.

Tnnr: [simul.] yup yup yup yup yup

Dustin: That must’ve been one of the-

Tnnr: Yeah that was, that first one had to do with- So my brother had this pair of overalls from OshKosh B'gosh, one of my younger brothers, and I thought it would be funny to sew the pant legs shut, so every time he tried to get in, it was just like euugh, he was like trying to jam his legs in, and he couldn't get in, and it just over and over and over again. So I filmed that one. That one was just on like a regular VHS tape back in the day. I released it as like a 20th anniversary edition last year, and it did phenomenal

Dustin: Ooh, Disney, I like that

Tnnr: Yeah

Bridge: That’s great

Tnnr: Yeah

Dustin: Rebrand your-

Tnnr: Yeah, you got to let it out the vault sometimes, you know what I mean?

Bridge: Yeah

Tnnr: But I also just always enjoyed OshKosh B'gosh as a brand. So eventually-

Bridge: It’s a great brand

Tnnr: I'm gonna like, it's not so much for the video, I, they’re more my sponsors

Bridge: It's a great brand. I've, you know, I think the name is a very, you're always gonna remember that, and you know like you were saying, by screaming your name, it’s the most important thing is to, for the other person to remember that name, and there's no way I'm gonna forget OshKosh B’gosh.

[All three yell a cacophony of “OshKosh B’gosh” over and over]

Bridge: There's no way. There’s no way. It sounds like gibberish, and that's what's brilliant about it.

Tnnr: Yup

Bridge: You know, going into this rebranding thing: I've always thought of rebranding as almost sort of like taking your skin off, and like putting on a new skin, you know. It's like you're walking around in a new skin, um when I think of rebranding, and when you go through that process, sometimes it's so profound and deep that you might even forget your own name. It's like I feel like a different person or something.

Tnnr: Yeah

Dustin: I've been experimenting with cloning myself. I would love to, I would love a younger version of myself. So when I get older, as you do, I could put myself into that body, and I know that Bridge, you were talking about creating robo- robotic versions of yourself so that

Bridge: Yes

Dustin: Your brain can, well your egg can go inside

Bridge: Yeah, this

Dustin: The new equipment

Bridge: This shell that can, that is ten times stronger than a normal human body, and can rip open doors, and rip open steel. That's yeah that's the goal

Dustin: I imagine

Tnnr: That sounds dope

Dustin: going into a board meeting yell- screaming your name out “Bridge!” ripping open the door

[Bridge and Dustin laugh]

Tnnr: Yeah that sounds sick

Bridge: That's the dream right there is just a robotic version of me ripping open the boardroom doors and

[Bridge laughs and says “goddammit”]

Bridge: Screaming my name “Bridge! Bridge!” in this animatronic voice that would terrify everybody because it's a giant robot that’s screaming “Bridge” and I think that's, I mean, I certainly would listen to that robot if it was it was charging at me

Tnnr: That's wild, bro

Bridge: Yeah

Tnnr: That's wild. That sounds dope. It's like Robocop. You guys ever see that movie?

Dustin: I love that movie.

Bridge: I love it, it’s great

Dustin: I thought the cop, the Robocop, was sort of the antagonist in my, when I

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: I felt Omni Consumer Products was, they were just doing their job keeping Detroit safe.

Tnnr: Yeah

Bridge: Yeah

Tnnr: Yeah

Dustin: With giant robots

Tnnr: Yeah

Bridge: Well, Detroit seemed like it was out of control in that movie, so

Dustin: And I think right now, if we're looking at Detroit, we might need to-

Tnnr: It’s yeah, we need some robots

Dustin: Art reflects life, or life will reflect art, and hopefully in Detroit we will have giant robots.

Bridge: Um, one question I have: what's new you've conquered the social media platform

Tnnr: Yup

Bridge: What's the next thing? is it the movies? is it, I mean your social media business of some sort I'd imagine? like

Tnnr: You know, bro, like honestly social media has been very good to me, and I love it, but I want to do something different, bro, like I'm trying to put like, you know I'm trying to spread myself across all platforms, you know, like an STD. I just want to be like ooh just everywhere, you know what I mean. So I'm thinking about I'm probably to drop this album that I've been working on, yeah

Bridge: That's great, so you

Tnnr: Yeah it's like a rock, hip-hop thing kind of like a-la like a Limp Bizkit, you know that was my favorite band growing up so

Dustin: Well, that's really popular now

Bridge: Yeah, it's catching back on

[giggling]

Tnnr: Yeah, yeah, so I got some cool features on there. I got a Scott Stapp from Creed. He does the hook on one song.

[all giggling]

Tnnr: Yeah also got, I got, oddly enough I got a Dolly Parton on a track

Bridge: Wow

Tnnr: It’s wild, yeah I mean I just, she didn't actually like record it for me. I just stole something that she worked on

Dustin: Smart

Bridge: That's like

Dustin: Like a new “We Are The World”. remember in the 80s “We Are The World”?

Bridge: Yeah

Tnnr: Yup

Dustin: You might be a little too young for that, but

Tnnr: That's the image we're trying to do, we’re trying to unite people you know.

Bridge: Yeah I mean that sounds like it's gonna absolutely explode onto the music scene.

Tnnr: Yeah, well I appreciate that

Bridge: People are frothing at the mouth for a Dolly Parton resurgence.

Dustin: Rap, hip-hop

[Bridge and Dustin giggle]

Bridge: They're hungry. They're hungry for yeah, that sort of content. I can, I guarantee it, and it sounds like you're, you've got your fingers just squeezed around the pulse

Tnnr: Yeah, deep up in there

Bridge: of what these teens want

Dustin: What was that little hand gesture you made when you said “deep up in there”?

Tnnr: Oh this? Yeah it's like a, I call it a “shocker” yeah. I don't really know. I think it's just because it's like kind of a shocking symbol you know. Like no one really knows what you're doing when you do this. I think that's where it came from, but yeah, like I feel like I got my hands just deep in the pulse of the teens you know.

Bridge: Yeah that's very good that's it’s

[all giggling]

Bridge: It's great to have that.

Dustin: Yeah

Tnnr: Yeah

Bridge: I've branded a lot of teens

[all giggling]

Bridge: So

[Bridge laughs]

Bridge: You know, I've thought about so many rebrands and brands that are so important to American society and stuff, and one thing that always comes up is Steve Jobs

Tnnr: Mmm

Bridge: That guy, that guy was a, in the in the mid 90s he was a failure. He was a huge failure, and everybody hated him

Dustin: mm-hmm

Bridge: And he was able to completely rebrand himself with the iPod, and that is such an inspiration I’ve found, and it's so important to just embrace that rebrand. I'm so proud of what Steve Jobs did

Dustin: A lot of it also is the logo. Now, Tnnr, you

Tnnr: Yeah, yeah

Dustin: You have a lot of experience in logos

Tnnr: For sure

Dustin: Obviously

Tnnr: Yeah

Dustin: Do you have your own logo?

Tnnr: I do.

Dustin: Did you look into logos

Tnnr: I do. So what I’ve found is with any sort of social media avenues: sex sells, you know. I have about, in any given day, 50% of my photos, which is about 100 photos a day, are just pictures of women that are scantily clad or have no clothes on

Bridge: Okay

Dustin: Hmm

Tnnr: So what I did is I took my name, right, and I basically wrapped it up in this like kind of oval-shaped creation, but it's pretty much just a vagina.

Bridge: Mmm

Tnnr: Yeah I’ve found that like that’s, I mean you look at Nike. like Nike, the swoosh is just a dick you know. you feel me, it’s like.

Bridge: I can see that

Dustin: Yeah

Tnnr: Amazon Prime, they have that little arrow thing. it's just a dick

Dustin: It’s a dick

Tnnr: Yeah

Bridge: That's-

Tnnr: Yeah so

Bridge: Apple

Tnnr: Apple, yep yeah, I mean that's just obviously one breast.

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Well, a breast that's bitten into, sure

Tnnr: Yep yeah that's for sure what that is. I mean AT&T, that logo: another breast. You put those two together, you got one and a half, one three quarters breasts

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Subway, all the letters look like misshapen dicks to me.

Bridge: Yeah

Tnnr: Yeah yep, I mean that’s

Bridge: Absolutely, McDonald’s

Tnnr: McDo-

Dustin: Two di- like a split cock.

Bridge: Two dicks

Tnnr: Yeah yeah

Bridge: Yeah two limp dicks just creating an “M”

Tnnr: Pizza Hut just a dick with a hat on

Bridge: Yeah

Tnnr: So I mean that's the way I look at it. I mean, ultimately like it's about what is personal to you, and it's got to have some importance to you, but at the end of the day it needs to be about sex. People don't care about anything else.

Bridge: It's very important. That's very important, and it sells across so many platforms, and you know people want excitement. People want danger with that sort of stuff so yeah

Tnnr: Yeah

Bridge: That's, yeah it's a very profound approach

Dustin: Because you don't know when you're gonna get an STD

Bridge: Well all right this has been a, it's been a great episode I think. I think we've learned a lot through branding, and through Tnnr Wytt about the core of what branding is.

Tnnr: Yo, thank you guys. I appreciate it. You guys do great work up here, so you know keep at it. Tnnr Tnnr Tnnr Tnnr Tnnr Tnnr Tnnr!

Bridge: Bridge! Bridge!

Dustin: Dustin! Dustin!

Bridge: Bridge! Bridge!

Dustin: Thanks so much for listening. Next week we'll be talking to a Mr. Dr. Corvis Sasserson, Harvard graduate in economy uh economy, and he'll be talking about the economy.

[Music]

Business Money Hacks

Episode 4: Creating An Infinite Sandwich with Dr. Corvis Sasserson

[Music]

Dustin: Every morning you need to mind-hack and murder-hack your brand.

Bridge: Exponential growth is exponential.

Dustin: Look at your calendar, and burn it. What is your personal winning résumé?

Bridge: The number one thing that they don't teach in school is to make money

Bridge: Entrepreneurs

Dustin: Entrepreneurs

Bridge: Entrepreneur

Dustin: Entre-manure

Bridge: Produce, produce, produce, PRO-duce

Dustin: I am literally a god

Leonidas: Spartans!

Dustin: Business

Bridge: Money Hacks

[Music ends]

Bridge: Hi, and welcome to Business Money Ha-

Leonidas: Our arrows will blot out the sun!

Bridge: I really want to cut that.

Dustin: What part because I was

Bridge: Where he comes in and he's talking about the arrows

Dustin: You want to cut the whole intro or?

Bridge: No, the arrow part, because it's very disruptive. It feels like it really cuts off the flow of conversation.

Dustin: Well we didn't start the conversation so, I thought, if it's up, if it's all the same to you, we’ll just keep it in, we’ll… Do you want me to do the intro?

Bridge: No, no. Here, I’ll do it. Hi, everybody this is Business Money Hacks, and I am Bridge Stuart

Dustin: And I'm Dustin Taylor Hahn

Bridge: Today we have a, we're going to be talking about economic aspects of the economy, and just dealing with those sort of things that a lot of people, we came to find out, don't actually know a lot about the economy.

Dustin: And we're also gonna be talking about: how do you manage your budget with your personal life? And how do you manage your budget within business? And how do you manage other people's budgets, in a sense. I live in my own economy. If you have your own compound, if you have your own state or country, that's something that I'm building right now so that I can live on my own and not worry about anybody else on the planet

Bridge: That’s-

Dustin: Including its potential friends or anybody who pretends that they would love me but they don't actually love me.

Bridge: It's such an admirable thing that you're doing that. Me, I'm, I am, I personally am still stuck in the global economy, the US economy. Occasionally I'll dabble in the maritime economy, but yeah it's a troubling thing being stuck under the really dogmatic rules of the US government economy. It's so important to know the facts. I wish they would have an economy class in high school so that we could really drill it into these kids, really just grind it into these kids what are the economy is all about.

Dustin: I was home-schooled, and my mother and father would have two drills in their hands when they were teaching me, and they'd say “If you don't learn this I'm gonna drill this into your skull.” that was the threat every morning.

Bridge: Wow that’s

Dustin: So it's an, it's just interesting that you use the same terminology

Bridge: It's, that sounds like a great motivator.

Dustin: And you could see on my hands here, I have two holes in both of my hands stigmata style. I know you'll appreciate that being a devout Catholic. I was drilled to the desk in my home because I wouldn't sit still

Bridge: That’s a great way to teach a kid how to learn. I mean, yeah, just to just to drill your child's hand into a desk to make them learn, I think is a very profound way to you know drill it into their head to be honest.

Dustin: Or drill it into their egg.

Bridge: Drill it into their egg. Crack that egg and drill, is what I say.

Dustin: So let's get down to it, because I-

[Skype ringtone]

Dustin: We could talk about the Economy all day long, but we do have a special guest who I'm hoping that Dr. Corvis, you can help me create my own economy and not work within the confines of the of the US government or the world government. So, Doctor, can you give us a little rundown of who you are just for audience?

Corvis: Yes, so I'm an economic advisor. Currently I’m the personal economic adviser to the Crown Prince Sahib, the second of his name in Nigeria. He is a Nigerian prince. He was currently working on securing, sort of like crowdsourcing funds via email from American citizens. So I've been an advisor to him for the past 7 years. I'm currently serving as-

[Bridge and Dustin giggle]

Dustin: I think I've gotten those emails. They usually go straight to the spam folder. I should look at that

Corvis: That's right. You should. You should look at that, because he's actually a very important prince who's trying to get, just to help out the average American worker. He's very concerned about the-

Bridge: I’m sure he is, yeah

Corvis: Welfare of the American working class

Dustin: Crown Prince Shahib

Bridge: Sounds like a very noble man

Corvis: In Nigeria. Yeah he's very noble, you know, and you can tell that by his robes.

Dustin: This sounds like I can make a lot of money.

Bridge: This sounds like an opportunity.

Dustin: It sounds like a great opportunity.

Corvis: It is an opportunity. It is an investment, and I will tell you. I have seen, you know, his throne rooms at that palace, I mean he has backup thrones this guy,

Bridge: Backup

Corvis: And he's got vaults that are filled with just stacks of money that he is just kind of wanting to spread around some of this inherited wealth, and I, for one, suggest that if you get an email from this Nigerian prince to accept it.

Dustin: With the email, I'm looking at the email right now, and he says he's trying to get money out of- his brother was trying to get money away from him. I'm trying to read it fa- I’m sorry

Bridge: Seems like there's a lot of conflict

Dustin: There’s a lot of conflict with his family and he wants to

Corvis: You know, the royal family in Nigeria, I don’t want to get into details of it, but it's a whole Shakespearean tragedy over there. I mean you've got family members turning on each other and Shahib, he just wants the best for his hoard of cash that he's accumulated over his life, because he is one of the best humanitarians out there in the world today. So I've been advising him, and I'm also the lead financial executive officer for Joe's Crab Shack. Global- globally serving for- working for Joe's Crab Shack.

Bridge: So these are huge clientele. These are very demanding clientele. I mean with your experience in economics, I'm sure that you don't become a doctor in economics just by screwing around. You need to earn that doctorate in economics.

Corvis: That's true. Actually they are honorary doctorates from Harvard [coughs] Community College in Miami Florida, and I actually do sell economy-related DVDs on my web space as well.

Dustin: Sounds legit. Now tell me about Harvard. You said you were a Harvard graduate.

Corvis: I was educated at Harvard Community College it's pronounced “Harvard” but it's actually spelled H-A-R-V-E-R-D “Harverd”

Bridge: Hardverd

Dustin: So econo-

Corvis: Harverd. I am Harverd educated

Dustin: I like that. The “technically” I love, because I use that all the time. I know you do as well, Bridge, the “Technically the gun is safe. Technically I'm paying these people.”

Bridge: Technically, it is Harverd. It is Harverd, technically. so that's, and that's all that matters. That's really all that matters, yeah. So one question we wanted to sort of discuss with you is: The economy seems to be moving so fast everywhere. We, you know, we've got Bitcoin. We've got all these currencies. We've got, you know, China. We've got all these things happening right now. What is the big thing to be talking about?

Corvis: I'm so glad you asked that, because it is true that everyone right now is talking about Bitcoin, digital currency, currency that can't see. Bitcoin, what people have to remember is it's just a little bit. It's not actual money you can hold in your hands, and-

Bridge: I've never seen it

Corvis: It’s like, you know, the roots of the economy, and they teach you this day one at Harverd is that, you know, the money began as seashells, and people would trade you know five seashells for one pig, and then they’d trade, turn around and invest that pig into securing milk from a camels, for instance, or a turtle.

Dustin: Are you referring to early Wall Street

Corvis: We are not that far, you know, removed evolutionarily from our primitive economic ancestors.

Bridge: It's almost like saying “Oh yeah, invest in this mutual fund. It's two cows and a horse.”

Corvis: Exactly. The other thing I'd like to say is that the state of the economy in the United States today is incredibly precarious. If the economy were a meatball that my Nana Gracie made for my sister's wedding, it would be halfway to rolling off the table by now, and if you want to continue with this meatball analogy for a second, you can picture the current trade war going on with China as being not dissimilar to the way that my uncle Tony would drunkenly argue over who gets to eat the last meatball with his older brother Greg, and meanwhile your wife's cousins are drinking Chardonnay and crying in the garage, and this is pretty much where the analogy ends, but it's basically a microcosm that confronts the current US economic reality.

Bridge: So you're saying it's a feeding frenzy over this a meatball situation. Everybody's trying to get a meatball.

Dustin: Everyone's trying to get their own meatballs

Corvis: Everyone wants a piece of the meatball, and there's only so much to spread around at this point.

Dustin: So if I were to try to make my own meatball, if I were to try to make my own Swedish meatball that's actually you could eat, what would be the recipe for that?

Corvis: I don't even want to think about Swedish, because in my analogy I'm thinking of Italian meatballs, and I don't like- I don't even know what goes into a Swedish meatball. If you can clarify that

Bridge: They put berries on it. They put berries they put like the fruit on the meatball, which I have mixed feelings about.

Bridge: Lingonberries

Corvis: Ling- okay. That’s exotic. Yeah, so what was your- the initial-

Dustin: Well, I'm trying to make my own Swedish meatballs. I'm, I have my own compound. I've paid for the land.

Corvis: Okay

Dustin: It's Ne- it’s adjacent to New Zealand. How do I create my own Swedish meatballs, and what's the recipe? What’s the recipe?

Corvis: You want to make sound market investments, and I cannot say that again. Sound market investments. you know

Dustin: Now what is a ma- now what is a- I know what a market is. What's a market?

Corvis: Okay the market is where people trade, and sell, and talk, and exchange, and sometimes fall in love. You've all heard the expression “monkey or fish” to describe market investments in the economy?

Bridge and Dustin: Yeah

Corvis: Okay well in this case

[Guest1 giggles]

Corvis: In this case you know it's neither, because the free market economy is more of a monkey-fish hybrid. So I'm talking: both scales and paws, both booms and busts.

Bridge: And it just has the strengths of both but the weaknesses of neither

Corvis: Exactly, which I mean, there you go. You've just, Bridge, you just describe the economic reality in this country.

Bridge: So it can like hop from tree to tree while just taking a deep dive.

Corvis: The economy is a freeform creature. It's constantly evolving. It's constantly changing

Dustin: Now I drew a monkeyfish. I've been drawing a monkeyfish for you. Is this?

Corvis: That? Oh that's exactly right.

Dustin: If I were to make my own form of currency, and I had a monkeyfish on the cur- I- if I were to create a monkeyfish, you know in my in my scientific rooms

Corvis: Sure

Dustin: Could I then take a photo of the monkeyfish

Corvis: Yes

Dustin: And put it on the coins

Corvis: Yes

Dustin: So that the people working in my, under my wing could

Corvis: Yes

Dustin: Sell each other monkeyfish coins

Corvis: Exactly. Yeah, I think you've got a pretty good grasp on that way that the trade economy is working right now

Bridge: I just think it's a beautiful image. Like you constructing this monkeyfish in a laboratory and just letting it go wild, just swimming and just jumping from limb to limb as it screeches about the economy.

[Dustin laughs]

Bridge: I think is a beautiful sight

Corvis: But I don't want to, don't get carried away, you know. We don't have a utopian vision right now

Bridge: Well yeah, I mean, that kind of brings us to our next point. I mean like you know, we're talking about the global economy. We're talking about the US. What other countries do you see really rearing their head in the global economy right now, besides the United States of course.

Corvis: Yeah, China, you know, obviously

Dustin: mm-hmm

Bridge: Of course. There’s always China.

Corvis: You’ve got President… I think it’s Mau? And he is doing terrible- you know he's got

Dustin: Well there's a cultural revolution going on right now in China with Mau

Corvis: There’s a cultural revolution, yeah

Dustin: I think they're talking about it might turn into a communist state pretty soon is what we’re

Corvis: It might. It might turn communist and

Bridge: And that’s gonna do hell on the markets

Corvis: Fingers cross that doesn't that doesn't happen. Yeah, another I think competition that we've really got to start thinking about is Switzerland. Yeah because they are so neutral that they are so impartial, you know, you get them in a in a board meeting, and they're gonna make sound investment investments, because they have no emotional attachment whatsoever, and that's a threat, because we invest out of pure emotion, and

Dustin: As you, as I do. I always- I mean whenever I have to meet up with anyone, I first make sure to yell out my name as loud as I can just so that people can get attention on me, and my face gets very red at that moment because I start thinking about my past and the mistakes that I've made and the murders that I've done

Corvis: Right

Dustin: And it makes me angry knowing that other people might find out about that.

Bridge: Yeah

[all giggle]

Bridge: Going back to that that Swiss thank you're talking about. Those Swiss, they really, they're a cold-blooded bunch. They don't feel anything. I've done some business with the Swiss, and you know they're not afraid. You know, I like to generally, yeah, enter a boardroom and just start, like you said, just scream at people, really get under their skin. Those Swiss

Dustin: Swiss don’t, they don’t.

Bridge: They don’t care. It's like they're robots, like they're soulless

Corvis: Yeah. Never look at Swiss in the eyes, because yeah they look right back into you, and you won't get anywhere near them. They have cold black eyes.

Bridge: It's just like staring into an oblivion, like

Corvis: Oh yeah

Bridge: Like just, it’s like looking at yourself.

Corvis: I don't trust the Swiss, and you know as long as they-

Dustin: Aren’t they, they're half alien aren't they? Or aren't they half…

Corvis: Nords.

Dustin: They’re Nor- Nords are full hu- they’re full human being or are they…

Corvis: Nords are an alien hybrid race. You don’t know about Nords?

Dustin: No.

Bridge: Well, I personally don't believe in any of that, because, you know God didn't create aliens, obviously, but you know, you're welcome to your beliefs.

Corvis: Well, yeah, okay, picking up on a thread you mentioned about Swiss people being like robots. That's a good point, because that that leads me into something I wanted to touch upon. Everyone's afraid that the jobs are going in the hands of foreign workers, you know

Bridge: Yeah

Corvis: But really it's the it's the automatons that we want to worry about. It is the ro- robots are going to take all of our jobs, including the presidency by 2020, 2021.

Dustin: Oh that’s

[Bridge and Dustin giggle]

Dustin: That’s very soon! That's very soon.

Corvis: It's very soon.

Bridge: That’s three years!

Dustin: That’s three years from now.

Corvis: And what I've been telling people is “Stay behind the robowall at the Citadel. Let's build that robowall high, and let's keep out the automatons.” And that's a good thing for investors. I say the humans should hunker down at the citadel for as long as possible to keep them out.

Dustin: Bridge, you-

Bridge: I am-

Dustin: You're getting a little old hot-headed right now.

Bridge: Yeah I'm gonna be honest. I completely disagree. I say let them roam. Let those robots. The quicker you make them, the quicker you make them, let them out of the factories. Let them do what they're gonna do, because what they're doing is gonna be way beyond what we can do. Even the Swiss which are ba- who are basically robots anyway

Corvis: Basically robots yeah

Bridge: The, I think there's a purity to a robot: that cold steel that is just, it's a beautiful thing to witness, and I feel like the quicker we let those robots start making the decisions for us, honestly the better. I mean I would love it if my family was told what to do in their own home

[Dustin laughs]

Bridge: By a cold steel

Dustin: Doctors Sassman, I do have to apologize to-

Corvis: No, I

Dustin: This is an argument that that Bridge and I have all the time. I don't agree. I don't completely agree with him. I appreciate his cold steel, and his and his cold demeanor.

Corvis: Well it's controversial

Dustin: Yeah

Corvis: I respect the controversy and, sure, is there purity and automation? I suppose. But I don't want to be drinking you know nanomilk anytime soon. I don't want my babies to drink nanomilk from my wife's robotic breasts, and that unfortunately is the very real future that is coming for us if we start making this an automated robot-sourced economy.

Dustin: If there's a possible way, I'm gonna be a mediator here

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Because I'm trying to figure out a way for, so that I could live with my robot companion, Bridge, and when everything does fall apart in 2021, I would like to live in harmony with Bridge’s robot automatons. That would be my world. I'm trying to create a way so that I can turn into sort of a membrane, a brain creature that could roam, roam the skies while Bridge as a automaton

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Can take care of the land.

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Area, and obviously the water has been just dried up at that point.

Bridge: And I understand. I understand the fear that comes with the coming robot takeover essentially. I mean it's a scary thing. It's a scary thing imagining suckling nanomilk

Corvis: Right

Bridge: The fact of the matter is: a nanobreast is going to be 10 times more productive. The fact of the matter is: nanomilk is 12 times more delicious, and these are facts of nanomilk, and the sooner we come to grips- but I totally understand the fear. I was afraid at first, and then I just really had to crush that down.

Corvis: Hmm well, I wish I could learn to accept it as you have, Bridge. I think you're right. I mean, I don't think anyone's gonna argue that the nanomilk has a lot more nutrients in it, but it's not human, and that's kind of my point

Bridge: Yeah, get back to that turtle milk like you were you were bringing up earlier, yeah that that monkeyfish milk

Dustin: Yeah

Bridge: I think we could all use more of that.

Dustin: I think before we got to the nanobot milk, if I could have a shot at it, and create my monkey, my monkeyfish

Bridge: I drink all sorts of milk

Dustin: Hmm

Corvis: But yeau know you know, let's get back to the basics.

Dustin: Again I'm trying to create a my own economy. What's step one?

Corvis: Okay, great question. Picture the biggest Subway sandwich you've ever imagined, not eaten, but imagined. Now double it. Now double that, and you've got a sense of how large your private economy needs to be in order to compete with traditional market growth in the United States right now.

Dustin: So that's a 24-inch, that would be 24 inches?

Corvis: 24 inches is the biggest Subway sandwich you can imagine?

Dustin: Well, a Subway sandwich, the largest Subway sandwich is

Corvis: Right

Dustin: Is a footlong. You wanted me to double it. Double it is 24?

Bridge: That'd be 48, right? Cuz you doubled twice! That's a lot of growth.

Corvis: Yes

Dustin: It grows width, and it grows and it grows length.

Corvis: It grows in-

Dustin: And depth as well! It's a 3D, it's sort of a three-dimensional economy is what you're saying.

Corvis: Oh, that's how it works. And Dustin, I think you just hit the screw on the head there.

Bridge: Well that's a beautiful, beautiful idea of

Corvis: Yeah

Bridge: Visualizing just a Subway sandwich that is protruding in different directions, constantly, infinitely, that is just engulfing everything in its path, absorbing it in its path. I think that's a beautiful representation of what the market is, what economics are.

Corvis: Oh, it's a big sandwich and that's, yeah. So you know one thing to keep in mind is- what I'm driving at here is that endless growth. That is underpinning all of what we're talking about today, right. Endless growth

Bridge: Infinite growth

Corvis: It’s a fact of nature. It's a fact of life. The planet's infinite. No one knows how big the planet is. No one knows how much resources we have out there. It's endless.

Bridge: There's so many people saying “Oh conserve, oh we gotta not do this. We got to not cut this many trees down.” People don't know how big this thing is and how much we can grow!

Corvis: It’s endless. People don't understand. They talk about, you know, factors of climate change affecting the economy. That's never going to happen because of how big stuff is. How long does it take you to run, without a car, to run to your closest gas station?

Dustin: Oh it’s endless

Corvis: You're going to be out of breath. You're gonna be dehydrated, and it's because, Wow. Imagine running from there to the other, to the next closest gas station!

Bridge: Yeah

Corvis: How long's that gonna take?

Bridge: I wouldn't even want to imagine

Corvis: The brain can't even conceive of that kind of distance

[Bridge and Dustin giggle]

Dustin: I know that, with business, Bridge, you've said to me dozens of times, when you're at the top there's nowhere to go but up.

Corvis: Yes

Bridge: There's nowhere to go but up. People that say that there are finite resources is a complete representation of a can't-do attitude. That is so negative, and that is completely unamerican. I'd say it's more European, maybe not the Swiss

Corvis: And globally, globally speaking, when you talk about finite resources, no one knows what's underneath the planet, you know. Underneath the planet is just another planet Earth

Bridge: Yeah

Corvis: And it's not a problem swap one out and bring in the other, and people don't realize that either when they talk about finite growth, and it is a can't-do attitude. It is un-American, and it's defeatist, plain and simple.

Dustin: So the reserve planet that you're referring to which is under the Earth's core-

Corvis: They're endless. And this is what we don't understand because scientists are, you know, I know this is a little out of my wheelhouse, but this is just common knowledge at this point I think, is that scientists can't look down, right? We can only look up at outer space.

Bridge: Because there’s dirt.

Corvis: We can’t look down. We can't look down, because we could only look up.

Dustin: I believe you because you said it three times in a row.

Corvis: We're gonna be okay.

Dustin: So there’s a planet where a Bridge can have his robot uprising and robot world where robot milk is spraying around and creating fountains of love, and then I can have my world where there are hundreds of giant brains that are floating above the land, and you can have your world where the robotic Swedish are no more.

Corvis: You know, and that isn’t even my ultimate goal. I just want to do the best I can to help Prince Shahib, to help people benefit from him, and you know that’s another thing I was going to say is uh, is I'm going to keep sending you guys out those emails. Have you both received the emails?

Bridge: I got them, yeah,

Dustin: As we’re speaking, there’s- my emails are popping up over and over again. They’re- it doesn't stop at this point

Bridge: Wow it's like a, it's like a ticker tape. It just keeps going and going and going, wow

Dustin: Yeah I keep getting more emails. I can't- I keep opening them up, and now, and now… yep now my computer is slowing down a little bit.

[Windows error sound]

Computer: Attention, your computer may be infected with a virus

Corvis: You know, we could talk about, um

Computer: Attention, your computer may be infected with a virus. Attention, your computer may be infected with a virus.

Corvis: The Swiss all day, but at the end of it, all I want is a Nigerian prince-based economy in this country.

Bridge: That’s great.

Dustin: I might have to get a new email at this point.

Corvis: You’re welcome, so

Bridge: Dr. Corvis Sasserson, thank you so much for joining us today. I mean, I've learned so much about, you know, Nigerian-based economy. It’s a very profound thing. I don't know if I'm gonna be learning too much. My computer's, hehe, I think it's about to die here, I might have to

Dustin: Yeah your phone, my phone’s getting hot

Dustin: Might have to

Dustin: You're sending me lots of emails right now.

[Windows error sounds]

Computer: Attention, your computer may be infected with a virus.

Bridge: Burning up in here.

Corvis: You’ll get a lot more, and your families also.

Dustin: Hmm, well this is

Bridge: I think-

Dustin: This is happy virus is what I call this

Computer: Attention, your computer may be infected with a virus.

Corvis: You know they say about spam…

Dustin: Mm-hmm

Corvis: It's cheaper than meat. So eat it up. Eat it up.

[Windows alert sound]

Corvis: Enjoy that spam. Don't filter it out.

Dustin: I do have one issue here, because Bridge seems to be shaking a bit. You know, Bridge has a- Bridge has a chip in the back of his brain.

Corvis: Oh he’s got a chip, he’s

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: He has an egg chip that we put back there, and it is connected directly to his email. So he can check his email whenever he wants through his egg. So-

Corvis: Oh, that’s good.

Bridge: Yeah it’s good, not great right now.

Dustin: Not great right now cuz you are getting

Bridge: My, yeah, I’m really

Computer: Attention Bridge, you may be infected with a virus.

Bridge: Yeah I’m really getting this virus in my head.

Corvis: It’s gonna get hot

Computer: Remove chip implant immediately.

Corvis: [unintelligible] between that and meningitis

Computer: Warning! Warning!

Dustin: We’ll look into that

Computer: Attention Bridge, remove egg chip immediately.

Bridge: I feel like I’m about to puke, so

Dustin: If you could briefly tell me what’s going on in Wall Street right now, I know that there are a lot of- they've let the bulls loose, and they've let the bears loose, and now the bulls and the bears are fighting each other.

Corvis: Last I heard, it's not even Wall Street that's the real center of trade anymore. I mean yeah, Wall Street's old news. Go down a couple blocks. There's like a red painted garage and a neon light, and you want to go down there.

Computer: Attention Bridge, you may be infected with a virus.

Dustin: We got to take care of this situation. I'm so sorry to cut you off, Sasserson.

Computer: Remove chip implant immediately.

Bridge is getting white. He’s not looking good right now.

Computer: Attention Bridge, remove egg chip immediately.

Bridge: I’m not feeling great.

Dustin: Not feeling great.

Bridge: These emails are- they just keep coming in, and I can't see.

[Music]

Dustin: Thank you Dr. Sasserson.

[Bridge coughs]

Dustin: Oh okay yeah, I’ll send you that.

Computer: Warning! Warning!

Dustin: When I create the monkeyfish, I will send you monkeyfish milk. I really appreciate it.

Computer: Remove egg chip immediately.

[Music ends]

Business Money Hacks

Episode 5: Controlling the Narrative & Peeing In the Pool with Sir Spalding O’Henry

[Music]

Dustin: Growth-hack your brand and then destroy anything that moves.

Bridge: You need to grind-hustle your platform manifest.

Dustin: It's all about entropy elegance and finance.

Dustin: Blockchain

Bridge: Invest in real estate every day.

Dustin: Invest in meal estate every morning.

Bridge: You need to mind-hack the mind shackles that are grabbing your mind.

Bridge: Entrepreneurs

Dustin: Entrepreneurs

Bridge: Entrepreneurs

Dustin: Entre-manure

Dustin: Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a day. Eat the man who've just fished, and you'll eat for a lifetime.

Leonidas: Spartans!

Dustin: Business

Bridge: Money Hacks

[Music]

Leonidas: Our arrows will blot out the sun!

Unknown guest: Due to a court settlement, I’m required to bring the cat in lieu of psychiatric evaluation. So I was able to get out of an entire portion of my probation, which would have been 90 days of psychological evaluation, and in turn have to permanently bring around this cat for the duration of his life. So that if ever I feel like doing something which could otherwise have a negative impact, I have to remember- because I don't believe in god. So the idea of god watching is not really in question, but the idea that my cat is watching is a fact.

Bridge: That's powerful. It's powerful. Welcome to Business Money Hacks. I’m Bridge Stewart

Dustin: And I’m Dustin Taylor Hahn.

Bridge: And today we're going to be breaching the subject of information, and specifically how to control that information, and how you can control your own information. Confusing information can have a huge impact.

Dustin: If anybody has anything on you, deny. Deny in the face of atrocity in the face of-

Bridge: I like to think of it as a big fire hydrant. As a public figure, information is constantly just spewing out about you, about your work, about things you're doing behind the scenes, and to be able to clamp down on that, build almost like a structure around that fire hydrant of spilling information, I think is a very great thing to do.

Dustin: There's something called diffusion of responsibility, which is what I like to use in work that I do. Somebody comes to me and says, “This was clearly your responsibility”, I push this off to on somebody else. This is why I hire several different secretaries who have no family and nobody connected to them. So you have them on retainer-

Bridge: It's like a blank slate.

Dustin: Yeah

Bridge: Almost like it seems like a robot or something working for you. Just no background, no past, none of that heavy history just, yeah that's great. I think this segues great into our guest. His name is Spalding O’Henry. Sir Spalding!

Sir Spalding O’Henry: Absolutely, I was about to say “Don't you forget there, Bridge.”

Bridge: Uh, that was my bad I’m sorry.

Sir Spalding: I’ve earned it, damn it!

Bridge: That's a “sir” yeah

Sir Spalding: Yes it is. Yes it is.

Bridge: Sir Spalding O’Henry

Sir Spalding: People always- yeah, that's something that often gets dropped honestly. So I really am glad you remembered it, because I would have otherwise been quite put off.

Dustin: Is every British person a “sir”? Is that how that works? ‘Cause any British person that I’ve met has a “sir” in front.

Sir Spalding: That's a common misconception, right. Only Brits who have established themselves as credible members of society, in so much as they are achievers. You likely run in sort of elevated company, and so I suspect that's probably covered somewhat of your perceptions.

Dustin: Is there a name for people who aren't “sirs” in the British community?

Sir Spalding: Yes! Absolutely. Although-

Dustin: Paupers?

Sir Spalding: Close to a pauper. It’s a poorie. If I were to meet, you know, go to my haberdashery, or what have you, go to my tanner, I would refer to him, to his face, as “poorie”. “Poorie Smith”, or “Poorie Hahn” in your case.

Dustin: And that derives from the word…

Sir Spalding: “Poor”, to not have any money, absolutely.

Dustin: So you can say that those, the individuals that come into my compound who have no name, who have no past who have no future, I could call them “poories”, instead of “a blank slated human”. Because they don't want to hear that.

Bridge: That might improve morale: just calling these people poor.

Sir Spalding: Because you are identifying them still as a group, and it's obviously an understanding, implicit that they're still subject to your whim, right?

Bridge: Yeah

Sir Spalding: But I think it does give you the option- It gives you the ability to connect, and so absolutely. I think if you're getting those blank states into the coliseum to do whatever it is you're going to do to them, I think it's very important to give them a sense of cohesion before you then pull them apart, right.

Dustin: I do have this like flashing light that plays at night when they're sleeping that-

Bridge: I’m sure that helps.

Dustin: It begins to erode their…

Bridge: Sense of self, yeah

Sir Spalding: Oh that's brilliant. We end up going to a lot of veterans homes and finding some have particularly bad shell shock, and to have no recollection of who they are where they're from, and that's-

Dustin: “Shell shock” is the term, the PC term that we're supposed to be using.

Sir Spalding: Yes I believe that's what the correct term for what was formerly called- I think it was- I think-

Bridge: I think it was called “war shakes”

Sir Spalding: Yeah, I think it was the [laughs] yeah I believe that's right, is the war shakes.

Dustin: The war shakes

Bridge: War shakes

Sir Spalding: And so now but now the term is “shell shocked” is that-

Dustin: That's the PC…

Sir Spalding: That's the PC-

Bridge: I preferred “war shakes”

Dustin: Yeah, yeah

Sir Spalding: Well, I thought war shakes was more accurate, but in any case

Dustin: I think in World War II they called it “war shakes”

Bridge: Yeah

Sir Spalding: Oh absolutely

Dustin: Not World War II, the World War II that is in conventional textbooks, but the-

Sir Spalding: the real-

Dustin: the secret- the real-

Sir Spalding: Absolutely

Dustin: Well, we should talk about that as well, because I do want to get into history.

Sir Spalding: Absolutely, for those that don't know, I work for a smaller publishing company called Scrub N Sub Publishing,

Dustin: Mmhmm Scrub N Sub

Sir Spalding: Old Scrub N Sub, so that was actually my grandfather's Jewish name prior to [laughs]

Dustin: What was his first name?

Sir Spalding: His first name was Emilio

Dustin: Emilio

Sir Spalding: Emilio ScrubNSub [breaks character] that’s a terrible name.

[all laugh]

Bridge: Wow, I mean he probably had a couple problems when he came to Britain.

Sir Spalding: Oh absolutely

Bridge: With a name like that

Dustin: Yeah because in Britain they didn't like Italians either. Was he Jewish and Italian?

Sir Spalding: He was Jewish Italian,

Bridge: God

Sir Spalding: Absolutely, exactly

Bridge: Double whammy in Britain

Dustin: Emilio ScrubNSub

Sir Spalding: Exactly, so obviously I feel a lot of pride about how far my family's come.

Dustin: So you said you had a small publishing company, but I see it everywhere.

Sir Spalding: I was being sort of hyperbolically humble. It’s obviously a major-

Dustin: You were acting like a real pourer.

Bridge: That classic British wit from, from Sir Spalding, over here.

Sir Spalding: Ahh, you know I’m ju- what can I say? No, so yeah, it's actually a pretty major media conglomerate, and we own a number of important news channels and newspapers, but I’m the youngest of three brothers. So it wasn't, sort of, me who was going to ascend to the throne initially, and I was sort of pushed, relegated to the side in publishing, but that's where I really honed the skills that would eventually allow me to take complete control of the company.

Bridge: Yeah so I'd imagine with three brothers, there's probably a lot of, you know, fighting, and sort of joshing, and clawing.

Sir Spalding: Ultimately it's all in the family. So, you know, like when I killed Tim's wife, that was something that was like “damn it, you, Spalding, you son of a bitch how-” you know, that sort of like- it's a tit-for-tat sort of relationship, but-

Bridge: Yeah

Sir Spalding: I think when I took ultimate control of the company by, well, let's just say by making sure my brothers were, uh, rightfully prosecuted for some, uh, certain fraudulent crimes that they certainly committed if you understand my meaning?

Bridge: Yes, legally speaking yes

Sir Spalding: Legally speaking

Bridge: So this obviously ties into our concept of information, and you are a man who controls information, how we’re received by the media… You run the media!

Sir Spalding: Yeah

Dustin: Especially in third world countries, I’ve seen Scrub N Sub newspapers all over the floors

Sir Spalding: Oh absolutely

Dustin: And used as toilet paper.

Sir Spalding: I think that's where we do some of our best work honestly, because thestate-run news in those countries is incredibly easy to take control of. You know they have very little in way of anti-corruption regulation in place. So it's exceptionally easy to take command of sort of a bureaucratic system, because information absolutely is the foundation of business. I mean, if you don't have all the information, then you have to make it up, and you have to be sure to make up information that the people you're selling to will find compelling, right? So I think that's it's a big challenge. It's a big challenge

Bridge: That's such a great way to approach media. I feel like everybody these days is getting so wrapped up. I mean I, don't want to say “fake news”, but yeah. People keep talking about fake news. People keep talking about what is reality, what is fiction, what is truth, what is fact. We're all just telling stories at the end of the day. The details: who cares? People want the story.

Dustin: Something salacious, something you know…

Sir Spalding: Sexy, you want it to be sexy.

Dustin: Sexy

Bridge: Sexy, bloody

Sir Spalding: Bloody, you know that's exactly it, right?

Dustin: Nobody wants to hear somebody raised a lot of money to fix some sort of some sort of a [mocking tone] problem with people's tinnitus or you know whatever the new thing is.

Sir Spalding: No absolutely no you want to spin it so it's the things that are exciting, right, so I remember-

Dustin: And that's how you control governments.

Sir Spalding: Oh absolutely. I think to control a government you have to be sexier than your opponent, right? And your opponent is just real governance so it's not that hard, you know, to be sexier than that.

Dustin: Yeah

Sir Spalding: Right?

Dustin: Yeah, keeping things in order, who needs order when you can have chaos? Mass chaos.

Bridge: Yeah there's nothing sexier than a bunch of chaos.Yeah, that's hot.

Sir Spalding: I know, honestly, when I think about that sort of stuff, about how tumultuous a situation is, that's what really gets me going, you know. And that's why I think stories are a great way to really just upend the table in your favor.

Dustin: Something you mentioned earlier: so you don't believe in--I think this was before--you don't believe in god.

Sir Spalding: No

Dustin: No

Sir Spalding: No I do not.

Dustin: I like to believe that there is a god who wants to create chaos on this planet, because it's fun to watch people fight each other and get sick. And when I’m looking at my coliseum I say “this sick kid with one leg, how's he gonna win? How is he gonna win this situation?” Nine times out of ten, he gets run over by a wheel.

Bridge: Yeah

Sir Spalding: I wish I could believe in a god like that. When you say that and describe that, I think there's a part of me that would love to believe that that god of chaos was out there, really guiding us into the chaotic abyss, but I just don't see a lot of evidence for it, unfortunately. So I think ultimately, we as human beings, though… I think I sort of have a humanist perspective that it's up to us to engender the chaos that we so desire. I think it's up to us. Believe me, I wish I could.

Dustin: Yeah

Sir Spalding: I just think that kind of god of chaos is a crutch, honestly

Dustin: We're built in god's image: a god of chaos, a god who creates strife and destruction. These are the feelings that I have every day, every moment of every day. So I want to prove to that god, I will become a god myself

Sir Spalding: And that's beautiful. I mean that's beautiful

Bridge: Yeah, that is an interesting subject, because me, I am a deeply religious Lutheran, and I follow the way of Jesus Christ to the fullest, to an extreme I would say. I believe the resurrection is coming very soon. I think it's through that chaos that Jesus Christ will be reborn through, I believe, a technological way: a rebirth of humanity. I call him silicon Jesus. This rising tide of a techno-Babylonia, if you will, that will encompass the earth, and the sinners will be washed away, and I think that will be coming very, very soon.

Sir Spalding: Right here you see so many interpretations of truth, and to me that just speaks to the way in which we can all control the narrative. That's something that's up to all of us. I can't tell you how many- When I was younger I would take on, as an editor, a lot of the biographies we would be working on at the publishing house, and I can't tell you how many of these I would just really dive into, and alter, and change. I mean details that people wouldn't even think are relevant, right? At one point, I remember I was doing Henry Kissinger's biography, and he mentioned a childhood crush of his named Abigail, and I thought “No, the girl's name was Tonya.” and I changed it, and it's those little details

Dustin: Those little details

Bridge: That’s great.

Sir Spalding: People think, oh, it's all these big episodes, and that's true, but it's also just these little- “that's not her name. It's not Abigail. It's Tonya.” And now, in that way, you are becoming a god, right? Abigail is gone. She never was, and in her place is Tonya

Bridge: You took it away, and you've added to the story. You're telling your story, the way you wanted to tell it

Sir Spalding: Exactly because I fucked a tonya when I was in ninth grade, and that-

Dustin: That's personal to you, and now it's personal to the rest of the world.

Sir Spalding: And now it’s Henry Kissinger's story, and it's everyone's story, exactly

Dustin: Is there a lot more of you in the Henry Kissinger story? Did you add more

Sir Spalding: I think there's bits of me in all of the stories I’ve worked on, yeah. All the biographies and the fictions. I think I come through

Dustin: Hmm

Sir Spalding: In all of them, for example, the character of Boris Bumbridge in the acclaimed children's novel, Over Red Riding Hill, was entirely based on me. I wanted to make sure that the story had a character that reflected my view of the world rather than the author’s, which was explicitly optimistic, and explicitly about the power of friendship. I was like “That's interesting, great, children-”

Bridge: That's interesting, but kind of a snore-fest

Sir Spalding: But let's throw in a powerful, playboy character by the name of Bumbridge who really dominates the story

Dustin: Sexes it up, a nihilist

Sir Spalding: Exactly, and lives just right across from Red Riding Hill, and therefore has this big impact on the story, and people don't realize that one of the most beloved characters from the story, it was actually something I just added in

Bridge: Wow

Dustin: And now that's becoming a future film.

Sir Spalding: A feature film absolutely.

Dustin: A series of films

Bridge: That’s great.

Sir Spalding: Exactly it's a feature film. It was very exciting. I believe right now we have Eric Bana attached to play my role, which I’m not too thrilled with, but-

Dustin: Maybe you get Sean Bean

Bridge: He’s great

Sir Spalding: That's what I thought as well, yeah no. Well, you know, Sean Bean, do you know, I don't know if- maybe you don't is that he actually-

Dustin: His name is spelled S-E-A-N B-E-A-N.

Sir Spalding: Exactly, yeah, people don't realize this. They assume it’s S-H-A-U-N…

Dustin: B-H-A--U-N

Sir Spalding: And it's the E-A vowel connection for both words

Bridge: Yeah, it's very strange. I think his family is actually connected to the bean industry.

Sir Spalding: Is that true?

Bridge: They sort of just altered their name so that they could be associated with their product, and again a great way to control information, control your legacy.

Sir Spalding: And a name is so important because it's all you have, and so you need to be able to make sure that you have complete power over it, how to take it, and own it, and have it become what you want it to be versus whatever it is.

Bridge: Well, one thing that I happen to think gets a little too reported on is issues regarding legality. With publicly traded companies, I think it's a lot of information out there

Sir Spalding: Right

Bridge: And it just seems to always get reported on in the Wall Street Journal, and “Oh, okay, we have this much money.” or “We've lost this much money.” It just seems like that's a little too much information

Sir Spalding: Absolutely

Bridge: That shouldn't even be out there. Who cares!

Sir Spalding: Exactly, that's personal information: what my publicly traded company is worth. That's not something for everyone to know, obviously.

Bridge: They have no right.

Sir Spalding: They have no right to that. What I found is most effective in those scenarios is just to make up numbers, honestly. For our conglomerate, we make up whatever numbers we want

Bridge: You to make them up.

Sir Spalding: We make them up, honestly

Dustin: No one's gonna look into it.

Sir Spalding: Well that's the thing. If they do look into it, then we make up more numbers, and we make up more numbers.

Dustin: Throw numbers at them.

Sir Spalding: We keep throwing numbers

Dustin: What number would you- like if I said “Hey, I heard your family work with Nazis.”

Sir Spalding: Absolutely 40.

Dustin: I don't know what to say now.

Bridge: I just

Sir Spalding: 67, 88, 33, and you show them on charts. You have paperwork ready for that, and you look-

Bridge: They're just numbers

Sir Spalding: And the numbers

Dustin: It’s just numbers and charts

Sir Spalding: And then you look at the charts, and eventually it all becomes obscured, and it's not really clear. It's like, “Well, look at this. Is it? Did I understand this correctly? Maybe I was off with the Nazi money, who knows?” And suddenly it becomes a big pool

Bridge: “You were funneling money through the Cayman Islands?” “Seven. Seven.”

Sir Spalding: Exactly, and they're sitting there thinking “what don’t I know. Oh god. It means something, and I don't know what.” right? So they're panicking. Suddenly you'll see the sweat start dripping down their faces. You throw out numbers, “What are we talking about? I’m supposed to know, aren't I? because he's just throwing out the numbers like I’m supposed to know. So clearly he has a retort that I don't totally understand.”

Dustin: Confusing i-

Sir Spalding: I call it peeing in the pool. Peeing in the pool,

Dustin: Peeing in the pool

Sir Spalding: Because when you pee in the pool, there's so much else in there…

Dustin: Yeah

Sir Spalding: It's immediately defused. No one knows

Bridge: So the pool is information

Sir Spalding: Is information, and you have to make sure all of your pee is going into the pool. You don't want it going into a little cup where someone can look at that, look at your pee. You have to go right in the pool, and it's gone.

Dustin: So I want to go back to controlling history, or telling history, telling your stories. You create textbooks for children all around the world, especially in America, and a lot of people are angry about the textbooks that you're producing, and that are being taught in schools right now. First of all, there's numbers all over the book, but there's a lot of information that I used to believe was true, and now I find out-

Sir Spalding: Yeah, now we've got these truthies coming out here, trying to debunk what we've been printing for a while now.

Bridge: Disgusting

Sir Spalding: Honestly, that's probably been one of the biggest challenges we've faced is this push back we've received. Up until very recently, it wasn't possible for someone to fact-check us on the existence or non-existence of the Dakotas. So now people realize it's not states. Those states don't exist. That space on the map is

Dustin: It’s not

Sir Spalding: not a real space right exactly, and no one has, exactly. Because they're not real, but we'd insisted that they were, and so in the digital age, people have been able to push back in that regard

Dustin: I want to know more about the real World War II.

Sir Spalding: And that's the biggest- that’s

Dustin: Because World War II conventionally is World War III, and we're looking forward to a World War IV.

Sir Spalding: No, exactly, a lot of people don't realize that there have been more World Wars than people were initially aware of, obviously. Number Wwo is in fact the Third, right. So that big Three that you're looking forward to would, in fact, be the Fourth. Most of it was actually fought in the area around what would today be Mongolia, is actually where the majority of the war was actually conducted.

Dustin: The Germans weren't involved in-

Sir Spalding: Not involved at all actually. The general-

Bridge: I assume the Mongols were involved

Sir Spalding: Exactly, no, it was a continuation of a thousand years of Mongol terror, and a lot of people don't realize that that’s sort of been flipped on its head a little bit, and made to implicate the Germans and the Japanese, who were both completely innocent…. So do you guys see what I’ve just done there? Did you catch what I just did?

Dustin: Wha-

Bridge: Sir Spalding?

Sir Spalding: Exactly none of that was necessarily true, right?

Dustin: Ohhh

Sir Spalding: Did you see? Did you catch what I just did there?

Bridge: I remember-

Sir Spalding: But the two of you believed it, right

Dustin: When you print it…

Sir Spalding: That would become fact. If that's what we had printed in the history books, that's what would now be being disputed, right? And so that’s sort of the game.

Bridge: It's the game right there. You just made up a war.

Sir Spalding: Exactly, and it was the mongol-

Bridge: And you said the Germans and the Japanese were faultless

Sir Spalding: And suddenly that would have been history.

Bridge: I don't know what to believe

Sir Spalding: Right there, exactly, and that's ultimately our goal, right? It's not about getting them to believe one thing or eating them to believe another. It's about confusing, obscuring the whole process to the point where

Bridge: It's great

Sir Spalding: “I don't know what to believe anymore. Well, I guess I'll just eat my Cheerios and shut the hell up.” You know?

[Bridge and Dustin laugh]

Sir Spalding: Exactly, and now you're catching on.

Bridge: I don’t know if anything you’ve said today has any shred of honesty, and I love it.

Sir Spalding: Yeah, so

Dustin: is that even real, are you British?

Bridge: Did you just break in here? Are you just some guy off the street?

Sir Spalding: 14, 88, 6, 33, and that's peeing in the pool right there.

Bridge: I’m covered in urine right now, and I feel great about it.

Sir Spalding: Well, and it's such a pleasure to piss all over you guys, I mean, for me, I think people don't understand the significance of a lot of these topics. I think the necessity for controlling information in business, once you understand that then you can begin to control and craft your own story, whether you're what you're doing is legal, illegal, these are the things that proper story control really allows you to manage.

Bridge: Well, Sir Spalding, thank you. Thank you so much for

Dustin: Pissing all over us.

Bridge: You really pissed all over us today.

Sir Spalding: My pleasure. My pleasure.

Dustin: I would love to get a sample of your urine

Bridge: Yeah

Dustin: Just to have, yeah.

[Music]

Business Money Hacks

Episode 6: Creative Appropriation with Tracey & Dakota

[Music]

Dustin: Every morning, you need to mind-hack and murder-hack your brand.

Bridge: Exponential growth is exponential.

Dustin: Look at your calendar and burn it. What is your personal winning resume?

Bridge: The number one thing that they don't teach in school is to make money

Bridge: Entrepreneurs

Dustin: Entrepreneurs

Bridge: Entrepreneurs

Dustin: Entre-manure

Bridge: Produce produce produce, produce

Dustin: I am literally a god.

Leonidas: Spartans!

Dustin: Business

Bridge: Money Hacks

[Music]

Leonidas: Our arrows will blot out the sun

Dustin: Hey everyone, welcome to Business Money Hacks. My name is Dustin Taylor Hahn

Bridge: I’m Bridge Stewart.

Dustin: Today we're going to be talking about small businesses, and how to quickly create a bigger business out of it. As you know, something that's small is minuscule; it means nothing to anyone. Nobody will buy a product from you if you tell them that “I’m a small business”. It's just not how it works.

Bridge: It's very important to know how to scale, how to just expand your business at a very rapid rate. A metaphor we always like to use is this concept of the plague. Now, I mean the plague is obviously- it's a bad thing. That's a very bad thing that happened in history, but you can sort of take a little bit of advice from the plague. It really expanded fast. It really went through Europe, and it's something you can look at and say, “Hmm that's a good idea.”

Dustin: The more important thing to talk about is the word “big”.

Bridge: Big

Dustin: “Big” is not a big word, but big is- it means large. It means big.

Bridge: Its meaning is huge.

Dustin: When something is big, it's bigger, and it's better.

Bridge: It’s bigger.

Dustin: Something that’s smalls is not as good as something that's big.

Bridge: It's insignificant. No one wants to hear about that. I mean that's just a constant theme I’m hearing in the business world is just: small is bad. It's always going to be bad, and big… people want to hear about that. So the quicker you can be big…

Dustin: Something that I’ve been working on in the compound, I don't know if you've seen all the renovations going on right now. It's kind of crazy when you came in.

Bridge: I’ve seen a few.

Dustin: So I’m building a Colossus of Rhodes statue based on myself right now. All the workers are creating this thing for me,

Bridge: Wow

Dustin: In my honor.

Bridge: Okay

Dustin: Do you know the Scales of Liberty? The woman, the blindfolded woman holding the scales?

Bridge: Absolutely, Scales of Justice.

Dustin: So what I’m doing is--the scales of justice, yeah--so what I’m doing is creating a 50-foot statue of myself, and I’m actually holding the woman holding the Scales of Justice by the collar…

Bridge: Oh my

Dustin: On one hand, and on the other hand, the architect that designed the statue, his head.

Bridge: Yeah, well, that's fair

Dustin: I’m going to take somebody else's credit.

Bridge: I mean taking credit--grabbing a hold of credit--I think is a very important thing, and I think honestly that leads us into our guests right now.

Dakota: Yeah, thanks again, guys, for bringing us on.

Tracey: Thank you so much.

Dustin: Thanks for flying in. Thanks for taking the time.

Dakota: We're so excited to be here.

Tracey: I just want to say, what you had to say about the word “big” was really inspiring. I had never heard that before that “big” is a small word. So I had never thought about that, but it's so true.

Dakota: It is so true

Tracey: It is such a small word, and it means huge. It means big, you know?

Dakota: And it's easy to say, and I wanted to just say, what you were saying, Bridge, about the plague… people are still talking about it.

Tracey: That's how big it got.

Dakota: It’s so wild.

Bridge: That's how popular it was that people are talking about a thousand years later.

Tracey: If I could be like the plague-

Dustin: Some would say we need to bring the plague back.

Tracey: Oh my god, totally, I was gonna say if I could be like the plague, that would be a huge win for me. That would be a success.

Dakota: You know they say “gangbusters”, but someday they'll be like, “Tracey, you're the plague. She's a plague”

Tracey: Yeah, I’m a plague.

Dustin: She's just spreading herself all over the world.

Dakota: Just an even layer

Tracey: Should we say our names?

Dakota: Yeah, sorry, we’ve never done anything like this before.

Dustin: We’ve seen a lot of articles about you two.

Tracey: Tracey Rodman

Dakota: Dakota Snerling

Tracey: I’m 25.

Dakota: I’m I’d rather not say.

[All laugh]

Dakota: compare our voices, and who’s younger?

Tracey: I am younger. It is true. Tracey Rodman is younger.

Dakota: But yeah, you know it's been a pretty crazy year for us.

Tracey: Oh crazy crazy

Dakota: And they say “any news is the best news ever.”

Dakota: So for those that don't know what we do, we basically help other smaller businesses grow by- We go in, and we find food that people usually consider kind of gross or scary or yucky.

Tracey: Yeah, like “ew, I would not eat that.”

Dakota: Yeah, or like, “I’m not gonna go there. There are thin tablecloths. I don't wanna touch it.” and we make it more better, and we make it something that everyone wants to eat, and it's everyone. That would be in New York or Portland, everyone. And so what we do is, we kind of restructure their business, but it's ours.

Tracey: Yeah it's like farming where you take something that you didn't create, and then you make it better and sell it for more money, and yeah, I loved what you said about “making it more better”. That's like kind of our thing, kind of our motto. We actually have t-shirts that say that.

Dakota: More better

Dustin: “more better” maybe on the back you could say “more bigger” on the back.

Tracey: Wow!

Dakota: Maybe, we’ll see.

Tracey: Oh my god, what a good idea!

Bridge: Look we're always just taking each other’s ideas.

Dakota: Yeah, anything that we say, though, it's our idea. It's recorded, so… and we are recording this as well. It's not anything about trust. It's just something that we have to do.

Tracey: Yes, legally, we have to.

Dakota: Yeah, legally we have to do for our company.

Dustin: I plan on deleting a lot of this, by the way

Dakota: Cool, I’ll have it.

Tracey: We have all of it. Just so you know, we have all of it.

Dustin: So what other foods are you working on right now? What other foods you are popular?

Tracey: Have you heard of pad thai? Have you heard of pad thai?

Bridge: Yeah I have I have heard of pad thai. It's like noodles or something, right?

Tracey: Yeah noodles

Dustin: It's flat noodles, looks like ringworms?

Dakota: Yeah I guess ring- like a tapeworm.

Tracey: Yeah like tapeworms

Dakota: Pad thai is something that I don't think anyone really knows about, and it sounds kind of gross it sounds like a lily pad, like you’re eating frog.

Tracey: It sounds disgusting. When I first heard it I puked.

Bridge: I can barely pronounce it

Dakota: Yeah it's hard, and so what we did is we ordered a bunch of pad thai from a thai place, kind of in a like “eugh” area, and we threw away the packages, and then we bought plates from Zara Home, and we put the pad thai on it.

Tracey: Yeah we did.

Dakota: And then we got rid of- we burned the chopsticks, and we used these rose gold forks.

Tracey: Oh my god, they're so cute.

Dakota: They're super cute. The rose gold rubs off a little bit, but we're working on that, and we named it “peanut sauce noodles”.

Tracey: Peanut sauce noodles, and let me tell you-

Dakota: With a hint of lime

Tracey: People are going to love them.

Bridge: And that's something I can understand: peanut.

Tracey: Nobody knows what “pad” means.

Dakota: I can’t speak Thai.

Tracey: I don’t know what thai is.

Dustin: It doesn't matter. Who knows.

Dakota: It doesn’t matter anymore because it's peanut sauce noodles

Tracey: Yeah, with a hint of lime

Dakota: But it's all about research. I mean we're here in New Zealand because we've been thinking about aboriginal food. What is that?

Tracey: What is that?

Bridge: I have no idea.

Dakota: It's just alcohol, but like grass also.

Tracey: And you can make grass pretty.

Dakota: You can make grass pretty. You can cut it. You can grow it. There's so many different types of grass, but people would be scared to eat that. You don't want to feel like a cow, but it's all about lighting, and it's all about painting the walls.

Tracey: The plate you use is so important.

Bridge: Yeah I agree

Dustin: You can eat anything gold.

Bridge: Yeah and if you put the word “fusion” in it. That's something I really like, personally.

Dakota: Fusion is something that- I would call that a little bit old school, but yeah

[Tracey and Dakota laugh]

Bridge: This brings up a great point in that I know there's a little bit of controversy these days about appropriating food. You hear headlines about it. “Stealing food”

Tracey: Oh boy, the A-word.

Bridge: People say “You're stealing something from another culture.”

Dakota: Yeah

Tracey: No

Bridge: Steal is a very hard word. That's a heavy word. “Steal something” I like to think of it-

Dakota: It’s a small word.

Bridge: A word I like to use, especially in business, is sort of like “cat burglaring” If a cat broke into my house and stole my stuff, I wouldn't even be mad, to be honest. I would think it was kind of funny.

Dustin: ‘Cause it’s fun. They look like they have a mask on, and it's like-

Dakota: Like Pink Panther, you know?

Dustin: That's a cat. That was a cat.

Bridge: It's hard to get angry at the Pink Panther.

Tracey: Was the Pink Panther a cat? Is a panther a cat?

Dakota: A panther is…

Bridge: Ooh that's a good question.

Dakota: I think it is culturally a cat, but it identifies…

Dustin: I’m creating a cranther right now, which is a half-cat half-crocodile, which eats smaller house cats right now. It’s what I’m working on.

Tracey: That's so scary. How are you making that?

Dustin: In my lab

Dakota: Oh

Tracey: Oh my god

Dustin: I’m trying to figure out a way to eat as many different types of animals as possible.

Bridge: I bet that would be a great mix, you know I don't want to use the word “fusion” like you said.

[all laugh]

Tracey: What are you old? What are you the oldest person?

Bridge: Yeah

Dakota: I’m the youngest.

Tracey: Actually I’m the youngest, we already said that, because I’m only 25.

Dakota: Whatever

Bridge: It's a beautiful animal,

Tracey: The cranther

Bridge: Although it does kind of walk oddly.

Dustin: It's a bit vicious.

Tracey: Is it furry? Is that an appropriate question?

Dustin: I don’t like fur. I want to get an ottery sleekness to it; so there's some otter genes in there.

Tracey: Otter??

Dustin: On its tummy

Bridge: I like animals that are really greasy. That's just something that I approve of.

Dakota: We have been working with this culture that has a lot of grease-based animals, and so we've been kind of flipping- we call it “flipping the script”. We've been flipping the script.

Bridge: A little bit of otter meat, is that what you’re-

Dakota: No, it's like we take all of the regular, the dregs of what is feeding off of the land, and we deep fry it. And so it's like a chicken, and we deep fry it, and it we call it “crispy bird”.

Tracey: Crispy bird

Bridge: Crispy bird

Dakota: Crispy bird

Tracey: Crispy bird

Dakota: It's not crispy bird, it's crispy bird

Tracey: Crispy bird

Dakota: “Are you guys going to Crispy Bird tonight? Are you gonna have a margarita at crispy bird?” but we call those…

Tracey: Lime juice alcohol drink

Dakota: I like to call them “salty dizzies” but, Bridge, you definitely bring up a point. You bring up a point. I think we have the ability--and I’m not saying we're stealing, because we're not--but I think we have the ability to go in, take it, and make it more better.

Tracey: Yeah, this is appreciation, not appropriation.

Dustin: Creative appreciation

Dakota: Creative-

Bridge: Creative catburglaring

Dakota: Exactly

Bridge: Yeah, I’ve been catburglared a couple times, but I accept it, because that's part of the creative process of anything. People give a lot of crap to the robber barons of the early 20th century. Those guys were getting creative. They were getting creative with industry. They were getting creative with how to make money, and I think you guys are doing very much the same thing,

Dakota: And we appreciate that

Bridge: And I’m proud of that sort of innovation

Dakota: Thank you, yeah

Bridge: still happening in the United States.

Tracey: Thank you so much

Dakota: I think people are going to--especially in the next year, in the next fiscal year--I think that-

Tracey: Oh, good word

Dakota: Thank you, I think people are going to be really shocked at what they didn't know they already liked.

Tracey: [Gasp] yes.

Bridge: Okay, that’s something to think about.

Dakota: And if you learn, you should unlearn, that’s what my mother always said to me.

Tracey: If you learn, you gotta unlearn.

Dakota: You gotta unlearn

Bridge: That's a beautiful philosophy to live by: just dropping that knowledge out of your head, yeah.

Tracey: You don't want excess knowledge, because you want to have room for only what you need. So if it's something that I don't need, I say “bye” and it’s out of my brain forever.

Dakota: Yeah, if I didn't learn it earlier, I don't need it now.

Tracey: I don't need it.

Dustin: There's only so much information that your egg can hold.

Tracey: Totally

Dakota: And see that's you creating a better word for your head: an egg. See you would be so good at this.

Tracey: Wow

Dakota: Do you guys travel?

Bridge: Oh yeah

Dustin: I used to travel. I just stay here now. You can see my fingernails are getting pretty long.

Bridge: Yeah you've been shut in a little bit.

Dustin: I just like to shut in

Bridge: For the last couple years

Dustin: I’m getting paler.

Dakota: It’s definitely a look.

Tracey: Ew

Dustin: I just want to be away from it all. I mean, the masks that I wear-

Bridge: I find that mask to be very elegant.

Dakota: It reminds me a lot of like a pirate, and I think that--going back to just expanding--they were the original people that were- they were people of the world…

Dustin: They plundered

Tracey: Pirates

Dakota: Pirates of the world

Tracey: Pirates

Dakota: But they were exploring. Let's not call it “plundering”. Let's not call it “pirating”

Dustin: Catburglaring of the sea.

Dakota: Yeah exactly

Dustin: They were cats of the sea, I think.

Dakota: They were being creative. They wore earrings, and they accessorized, and…

Tracey: I just thought of what your mask reminds me of. Did you guys see? There's this play where there's a ghost at an opera house, and then they--do you know what I’m talking about?--and then they sing a bunch.

Dakota: There's a lot of singing.

Tracey: Phantom

Dakota: And yeah, there's like a phantom.

Tracey: Do you guys know what I’m talking about? It’s a love story?

Dakota: Yeah it's called “Opera Ghost”.

Tracey: Yeah, Opera Ghost

Dustin: Opera Ghost

Dakota: It's really great.

Tracey: I love Opera Ghost. Yeah, that's the mask from-

Dakota: It's kind of like a rock opera.

Bridge: I like singing ghosts. That's something I really enjoy.

Tracey: I love singing ghosts.

Dakota: Tracey was once visited by a ghost while we were travelling.

Tracey: We had sex.

Bridge: Oh wow

Dakota: Yeah, I was in the room. I’ve never told you that.

Tracey: Dakota

Dakota: I was in the room.

Tracey: Dakota hun, I knew you were there

Dakota: I know. I was giggling.

Tracey: But yeah, no, I was visited by a ghost, and we did really hit it off. We had the most chemistry I’ve ever had with someone, and I did lose my virginity to the ghost.

Dustin: Oh, when did this- at what age did- did you lose a ghost to- to a specter?

Tracey: Did I lose a ghost to a specter? Sorry?

Dustin: Well, when you want to lose a ghost to a specter?

Dakota: When did you lose your virginity?

Dustin: When did you lose your ghost, your virginity, to a specter?

Dakota: I mean, you're 32 now; so that must have been a while back

Tracey: I’m 25.

Dakota: Oh right, okay

Tracey: And I actually lost my virginity quite late. I was 16. My ghost boyfriend I broke up actually, because he was yelling too much. So it actually is-

Dustin: So he was a banshee

Bridge: A ghost screamer

Tracey: So I don't love-

Dakota: What was his name? His name was Kerrigan?

Tracey: Kerrigan. Nancy Kerrigan.

Dustin: Nancy Kerrigan, the banshee

Dakota: Kerrigan Nancy

Bridge: Nancy Kerrigan the screaming ghost

Tracey: Kerrigan Nancy, but it was just really- I mean it was a very passionate relationship.

Dakota: Kerrigan came from, it seemed like, a sordid past.

Tracey: Yes, he was from 1840.

Dakota: The Civil War, right?

Tracey: Something like that

Bridge: That was a tough year.

Tracey: Maybe, yeah

Dustin: It was a rough year. I think that was right in the middle of the Civil War.

Tracey: Yeah, 1842, right in the middle of the Civil War

Dakota: I could never tell what side he was on, and I guess it doesn't matter because honestly-

Dakota: What the hell does that mean, Dakota?

Bridge: That’s troubling

Dakota: We're all people of the world, and if you need to fight a battle, and everyone you know- There are both sides-

Dustin: Everyone’s a hero to-

Dakota: There's two sides to every story. I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying, I was wondering…

Tracey: He was on the good side. He was a good guy, okay?

Bridge: He was a good guy,

Dakota: There are two sides…

Bridge: But he was a screamer

Tracey: He was a screamer, a shrieker.

Bridge: A shrieking ghost named Nancy Kerrigan

Dakota: Yeah, Kerrigan Nancy

Tracey: Kerrigan Nancy

Bridge: Kerrigan Nancy?

Dakota: It's a very southern name, which is why I was wondering what side he was on.

Tracey: Hey, Dakota,

Dakota: The crispy birds…

Tracey: Can you not?

Dakota: Sorry I’ve had some salty dizzies before I came here. So sometimes I talk a lot.

Tracey: Dakota, I don’t

Dakota: The altitude

Tracey: I don't want this.

Dakota: It’s fine

Tracey: You need to cut this part.

Dustin: So what would you say is the new buzzword? What's the new buzzword?

Dakota: We've been using this term. It's originally from Europe, but “mozzarella”.

Dustin: Mozzarella

Bridge: Mozz

Dakota: That means like “go out there and seize the day.”

Tracey: It's actually Latin.

Dakota: Yeah, mozzarella

Dustin: Mozzarella

Tracey: “mozza” means “go out” and then “arella” means “seize the day.”

Bridge: So you can say you two are mozzarellaing.

Dakota: We’re mozzarella, which is why that's the name of our company is Mozzarella

Bridge: Oh

Dakota: But it's like “Mozz-her-ella”.

Tracey: We love that. We're really into “her ella”

Dakota: Mozz-her-ella, yeah

Bridge: Just breaking up words

Dakota: We’re women, and it’s the year of women.

Tracey: I’ve been saying “her story”. It’s the year of women.

Dakota: Her story

Tracey: I’m been saying “her story”, I’ve been saying-

Dakota: My story

Tracey: My story, yeah. It’s about women, and actually that's making us a lot of money.

Dakota: Honestly, we've been banking off of a lot of-

Tracey: It's called feminism

Dakota: It’s called feminism

Tracey: And we have been making so much money off of it.

Dakota: The plight of so many women that have been taken advantage of has honestly really helped us out.

Tracey: Personally, I’ve never experienced sexism.

Dakota: Yeah, no

Tracey: So I have a hard time…

Dustin: Empathizing with that

Dakota: Again, it's like if you're putting it out there

Tracey: It’s your fault.

Dakota: And someone's taking it, then maybe you’re

Tracey: It's your fucking fault.

Bridge: Well yeah, I mean that's a great thing. You really are expanding. You’re mozzarellaing your business.

Tracey: Yeah we are.

Bridge: And I really respect that. What has been the hardest stage for you in this expansion?

Tracey: Dakota?

Dakota: I mean, honestly for me, the hardest in the process was when we did our quarterly reports, at the end of the fiscal year.

Dustin: I like it. I like it.

Tracey: We did. And there's four quarters in a fiscal year.

Dakota: There's four quarters in a fiscal- so we did all of them- well, that was the problem: we did them all at the end of the year. So we forgot to do the quarterly.

Dustin: Hold off on it.

Tracey: We actually didn't know about it until the end.

Dakota: At the end. So we forgot to do the first three. So we kind of mushed them together at the end, and that was a learning process, and we learned, and then we unlearned, but we learned it again. So that we're only making money off of people now, and we're not investing any money.

Bridge: Fiscal growth is a great thing, and it seems like you're really mozzarellaing your fiscal growth.

Tracey: Yeah we really are. Well, just fiscally speaking, the quarterly gains are up.

Dakota: We’re in the blue.

Tracey: And we're expanding. We’re actually in the blue right now.

Dakota: Because we’re up in the sky.

Tracey: We’re in the sky

Dakota: We're up in the sky with our income.

Bridge: I hadn't even heard of blue.

Dakota: What are some buzzwords that you guys have been using down here, down under the complex okay?

Dustin: Now that’s inappropriate because we're in New Zealand. That was an Australian accent, you can get a lot of trouble for that.

Bridge: They get very angry at each other, yeah.

Dustin: Down under’s more like-

Dakota: See that's good to know when we go to mine that grass.

Dustin: Australia is more like “down under” and-

Dakota: Down under

Dustin: Down under

Tracey: Down under

Bridge: Down under

Dustin: And New Zealand is more like “down under”

Dakota: Down under

Tracey: Down under

Bridge: It's a beautiful accent. The one buzzword that we've been utilizing a lot, it's a phrase called “dankruptcy”.

Dakota: Dankruptcy

Tracey: Dankruptcy

Dakota: I love it.

Bridge: And when things are- you're going bankrupt, but who wants to hear about bankruptcy? So we go with “dankruptcy” It makes it kind of cool, makes it sort of new.

Dakota: Kind of like a smoke shop, vape vibe.

Bridge: Like a vape vibe

Dakota: I love it, yeah.

Bridge: Exactly, and that's what people usually want to associate with a multi-million dollar bankruptcy. So that's

[all laugh]

Bridge: That’s how we like to operate, is just kind of a smoky vibe.

Dustin: How do you spin it? how do you spin it?

Dakota: How do you spin? What’s the spin?

Dustin: I think that's half of business, is how you spin a bad- a large situation into a big situation.

Dakota: Absolutely

Tracey: Wow

Dakota: Yeah, and honestly, I think-

Tracey: My ghost boyfriend had a daughter. Sorry to bring this up again.

Dakota: No it's fine, it's fine.

Dustin: No, I love talking about dead children.

Tracey: Dakota's getting a little bit mad at me.

Dakota: No, I’m sure we can- let's find the spin on this. How is this business? We'll figure it out

Tracey: Okay, I-

Dakota: But you were a stepmother for a little bit.

Tracey: Yeah, I was a stepmother.

Dakota: And I think that that actually did- you learned how to ignore…

Tracey: I ignored the shit out of that little shit.

Dakota: Yeah, Mirabella Kerrigan Nancy

Dustin: It's easy to ignore a ghost, because ghosts, they go right through.

Bridge: And kids, because they can't chase after you. They're always trying to get your attention

Tracey: Eugh

Bridge: And they have small legs; so they can't catch up to you.

Dustin: You could literally run away, and start another family, or just another life, and your kids will eventually forget about you-

Tracey: Mirabella had polio.

Dustin: -And psychologically they’ll be fine.

Tracey: She had polio.

Bridge: It’s a beautiful thing.

Tracey: Polio, so…

Dakota: So she couldn't really run that fast.

Tracey: She couldn't run; so I was pretty lucky.

Dustin: So you had a ghost stepdaughter with polio?

Tracey: Yeah

Dakota: Yeah

Dustin: Did she contract polio before after becoming a ghost?

Dakota: I believe it was after.

Dakota: I don’t think we gave it to her.

Tracey: Yeah I don't think we gave it to her.

Dakota: I don’t think I’ve ever had it.

Tracey: But I feel like she got it from after she was dead, but still in 1860. I think she still got it then, and I think it was just- some other ghost gave it to her like an STD. It was really bad.

Bridge: And you know polio, that's another one that was just killing it

Dakota: Spreading

Bridge: A few years ago, that really was…

Dustin: That one got a president elected.

Bridge: …something that really took hold of the world.

Dakota: It did, it got a president

Tracey: That got a president!

Dakota: There are for sure movies…

Dustin: A strong, big disease

Dakota: …with polio in them.

Tracey: I think so yeah, yeah

Bridge: That's incredible. Well, all right, thank you, everybody, for tuning in to Business Money Hacks. This has been a very educational experience, and thank you for joining us.

Dakota: Thank you so much for having us,

Tracey: Thank you so much for having us.

Dakota: Bridge and Dustin

[Music]

Leonidas: Your women will be slaves.