Meet The Millionaire Real Estate Tycoon Spending $500,000 Per Month

what's up you guys so before we start i want to intro our guest he's the star of million dollar listing new york and he's one of the most successful real estate brokers of all time he recently created his own brokerage called sarhant that's wildly successful he's done over five billion dollars in sales and he also invests heavily in real estate oh this is going to be a good episode uh did you smash the like button jack i smashed it so hard hey everybody i'm ryan sirhan and you are watching the iced coffee podcast which has so far made 117 and 116 dollars basically yeah is that good that's enough that's fantastic okay great it's almost like you've been on tv before sort of i sometimes i get the numbers mixed in my head which when selling real estate is bad but for this yeah oh it's close enough exactly well thank you so much for coming all the way to las vegas all the way here for you new york yeah this is crazy now what's really cool uh is that we did an episode together maybe like maybe almost four years ago yes it's four years like we hadn't even really started youtube i don't think like maybe it was just at the beginning days just started right we just started and we were in la you were still like a real estate agent right you were working at the uh yeah yeah i'm selling sunset before this is way before though before selling sunset you're in one of his houses i think yeah right it was in jason's house yeah and showed up and he was like working out very into his fitness that's right and you had never met jason offenheim before that day had you no no yeah so i was nervous going into it because i had watched million dollar listing new york of which you're the feature agent of the show and now you've had uh what five billion dollars at the sales is it more than that now in total by the end of this year it'll be a little bit over congratulations yeah thanks yeah so what is these what are these last few years been like for you in terms of the real estate market in terms of yourself are you investing in real estate what do you think of the current market right now it's like oh that's a lot there's a load on the line right there's a lot to talk about yeah uh the last few years have been crazy i mean you know we are primarily sellers in new york but we are global brokers you know so we sell things everywhere we sell in florida we'll sell california i've never done a transaction in nevada but we like it here now um you know we're kind of across the board the biggest thing for me though is in the middle of 2020 i left the brokerage i was at for the last 12 years and we started our own company douglas now we were at a company called nest seekers nest seekers for 12 years yeah small brokerage in the city and i was just there for a long time because they never needed to go anywhere else and there weren't any other good options and before covet even hit i made the decision that you know there are no other good options so i'm just going to go start my own thing and bring in a lot of different verticals all the stuff that i do we're going to put it all under one roof then covet hits and i thought for a day or so like maybe i shouldn't do this especially when the market tanked 10 000 points everyone left new york city and all the big smart wealthy companies started furloughing and laying people off left and right and the real estate market didn't come back in new york until 2021 really right unlike everywhere else in the country where the real estate market bounced back nine days later um and so we started we started the company uh sirhant in september announced in the wall street journal and pulled everything in-house and have been growing rapidly ever since um you know we have the benefit now to a very very fast strong real estate market new york has got to catch up to the rest of the country which is unique this cycle because typically new york leads the way this time new york is playing catch-up um but next year will be a great year because foreigners will finally be able to come back right borders will open on november 8th yeah which will be a big big deal for us but numbers have been awesome volume has been great agent count's been great and so things are looking nice and positive for right now so what were the main reasons you decided to start your own brokerage yeah i have to say dude learning from jason oppenheim running a brokerage is expensive it's a very difficult business model so how is yours different and like jack said why did you start it up so we are uh if you want to call it this we're we're a hybrid right so you have two types of brokerages right now in the world if you will you have the traditional brokerage which which can be mom and pop tiny right some small groups or it can be huge brokerages but they're big brand brokerage they give you your marketing you get an ad budget and you get a split that's it but they own you and then you have kind of like your shopifys of real estate which are the exps the sides kind of now like the keller williams a lot of like the big firms where it's 80 20 or 90 10 split to the agent uh up to a cap and then it's 100 and they're just kind of in the background but there's no brand support there's no marketing support they give you some stuff there is nothing in the middle that has a physical presence in luxury markets which is important for us because we sell in mostly luxury markets that has an exclusive agency role that then also provides a virtual brokerage experience to agents anywhere on any device with any client and that's what i always thought would work really well no one else is doing it so everyone forced me to do it and so that's why we're here and yeah it's expensive but like running any business is expensive but we have considerable income from you you do education as well so we have a big education platform so we have about 10 000 agents now in 109 countries in a subscription platform that sur that kept us going through covid when no one's buying apartments right we have the media business we have the books we have tv we have everything and the brokerage has grown really really fast this past year can you talk about the numbers behind the brokerage because i'm curious what the investment looks like every single month how much office space costs you how many agents you have right now sure what sort of revenue you bring in if you could talk about like let's say the splits or what this looks like for you at the end of the day if you could talk about that you want the nitty-gritty yeah clearly um listen the uh overhead's heavy right the startup costs weren't that crazy because we only have one office and we will only have one office per market which is built out like a clubhouse so in new york city we have a 15 000 square foot space that was the old tommy hilfiger flagship store in soho and it is where all of our production team is based so our education team space there and our in-house creative agency are all there and that way there's no desk hierarchy because there's no desks and so anyone who's licensed in new york city or new york state for that matter can use that space or not use the space the brokerage is completely virtual everything's on your phone every you use computer we give everyone the computers they need we give them all the platforms and resources that they could possibly want and lead flow right which is important no other brokerage really provides solid lead flow and we do that because we've been working on the brand for 13 years so when people think real estate one of the things they think about is my last name which is also why we we named it that versus like sunflower group or something like that yeah right um the office right uh pays i don't know what we pay for the office pay like 40 000 a month for the office um overhead expenses in general are probably like half a million bucks a month wow yeah that's head that's a lot yeah are you ever worried that you're not going to be able to make enough commission to cover that or is there a break-even point where like you got to grow to a certain point for that to start being in the profit i mean our first year in the business we'll do like 1.3 billion in sales right so even if all things stop the education platform is a considerably profitable business way more profitable than the brokerage like education is a profit margin of like 85 percent we carry it about 50 because we just want it to grow and we hire people or they hire my team hires people like every week is unbelievable like take your time let's go find let's go that but they really want to take advantage of the momentum while it's there yeah um and so that business does well and if all real estate sales go away for me as i think about an entrepreneur diversifying income the you know real estate is my oak tree okay one huge branch is real estate brokerage and then there's many branches there's resales there's townhouses there's condos new development is another big branch we sell towers right then consulting is another branch you got leasing landlord representation consulting across markets then the other branch i have is education and sales training right that's a subscription-based business it's between 10 bucks to 25 bucks a month different courses are 4.99 to 1 000 bucks you can bundle them you can do whatever you want and then the pro course membership is really where um the business has really grown and it's made the most impact on agents around the world but it's also a big money driver because that's ten thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars per year for people to come in and we have a whole coaching business and a whole mentorship program and those people now do to kovid get to work wherever they don't have to be in new york city now right our head of that program is based in denver yeah so how big is your team when you reference them uh that's an idea it what we have three businesses we have real estate brokerage right we then have education and then i've got media so i've got studios all combined on payroll i have just under 50 people on pure payroll and that doesn't include freelance contractors and everything but when i talk about brokerage team i don't know i just divide that by three it's pretty sure it's pretty evenly spread okay does that ever stress you out having so many different people relying on you no i need way more people oh my god there's only somebody like you you you realize as you start to build people get their slates get filled real fast and so you realize like when you're small everyone wears a thousand hats because they almost have to but you're also not producing as much as you do much later and so then we get to a point where it's like he only has time to do that one thing now because we do so much of it so the other nine things he was doing before now i need nine damn people to come in and do that if i want to continue to do them and those are decisions that we have to make all the time um it doesn't stress me out to have the people because i'm a very big believer like if you build it they will come the more people i have by default we will sell more we will do more business we will make more money like i just know it and it's always kind of proven that case like when i got my first car and driver way before i could ever even afford a car and driver in new york i just did the math and made it real simple for myself and said okay this is what the car is gonna cost that's what insurance can cost so average gas costs will be car wash once a month let's say and then a driver will cost this what is that total all right after tax for me how many homes do i need to sell in addition to what i do now to afford a car and a driver all right so i got to sell three more homes per year on average not that many um but what is that going to do to my time how can i buy my minutes back so that i can be way more productive so i'm not just selling three more apartments next year to afford the car and driver now i can sell 300 more right because they go from home office to mobile office to office office and backing back and back but first we have to thank our sponsor attitude guys getting a good night of sleep is so important if you're trying to be productive so you've got to make sure you have the right bedding to do so and a lot of the bedding in the bedding aisle is actually made of cotton which uses up a lot of water and is actually damaging to our planet attitude makes bed sheets made from 100 bamboo and because of that they save 500 times more water than cotton and aside from being great for the planet they are the comfiest softest sheets i've ever used seriously guys i've been using attitude sheets for about two months now and you don't realize how nice it is to have good sheets until you have them revolutionize the way i sleep and if you guys are on the fence about trying them they have a 30 day money back guarantee so go ahead try them out for 30 nights and if you don't like it you'll get a full refund but i know you will right now you can get 20 off your order plus free shipping by going to etitude.com iced coffee and enter promo code iced coffee at checkout that's etitude.com iced coffee for 20 off plus free shipping remember guys that's attitude as an eco attitude and with that said let's get back to the podcast so what are the things have you outsourced we outsource um that's a good question uh i feel like i outsource a lot i i leverage everything that i do so all day long what i focus on brand sales that is it you know um i don't do anything else everything else i have done by other people really um we outsource you know coaching on the education side okay we outsource like all those people that people come to us and pay for it doesn't pay for us to have those people in-house right so we pay them kind of what their fee is and then we take the va on top of it from whoever is paying for that service on the brokerage side we'll outsource right now like web service development stuff like that it doesn't pay for me to have an in-house software engineering team sure um on the studio side we outsource not a whole lot really uh i don't know what do we outsource nothing yeah we don't outsource anything i should i should outsource more probably um uh cody you're not gonna be outsourcing outsource you uh uh we don't oh you know what we do yeah so our our app so the apps that we create that team is outsourced again it doesn't make sense for me to have those people in-house got it that's been a really difficult part for me is to delegate uh jack knows uh but even bringing on jack for me was was a significant change because i was doing everything myself yeah dude i remember when you were doing it you everything yeah you're like the ed sheeran of content creation right have you seen have you ever do a concert with ed sheeran yeah he is the most profitable musician of all time why look at that because he will come out on concert sell more tickets than anybody else no band no production one guitar and he comes out he plays everything by himself on stage alone everything is done with his feet and he sets it all up and he makes the music as he goes the most profitable live musician in the history of the world no band behind him he creates the band if you you look like youtube ed sheeran in concert here and there he'll have stuff on like the people yeah we saw him at barclay center like a couple years ago and it's like wait what is happening he comes out by himself and he immediately goes into it he's also the most efficient performer if that concert starts at eight he's on stage at 7 59 and you better be ready wow you go to like you two or any other band right up youtube and you're like all right start today i'm gonna get there at 9 30. yeah yeah yeah once and like it came out at like 11 p.m i do this guy does not respect us ed sheeran he's like two hour concert two hours what i'm gonna give you i like that yeah i like that a lot that's good so that's kind of my philosophy is that you don't need a big team it's just like you could do most of it yourself jack was a a huge help and we wouldn't even have this con this uh this podcast for jack yeah but uh even hiring somebody else beyond jack jack wanted to be two years he was doing it he and i worked together yeah yeah before even getting on a third person and even then i was like oh jack do we really need to why don't you just do this we got a good thing going on and he's like well we could try it but uh i don't know i'm not finding myself that much that much more productive with another person i'm worried about just creating busy work yes uh like you hire another person but you only get two percent more done sure uh versus just doing it yourself yeah yeah yeah so i we we definitely don't hire for busy work we hire for specific tasks that bandwidth does not allow us to do in-house anymore so like what are those tasks like i was saying you know like adrian can only do so much on our studio side cody can only do so much and he might die soon uh because we really overwork him actually wait cody we just hired we just hired somebody else for you what yesterday yeah he joins monday yeah uh someone else so we're really beefing up that team cody's super excited um uh because it's just the work right but we don't we definitely don't hire just to hire if i did that i would have like 200 people on staff um uh and we do not right we keep it as efficient as we possibly can and like my head of new development is also like our acting co um and she's also our acting sales manager you know what i mean like we put that all together um until we can grow comfortably yeah i'm really curious how you balance everything because you have a family and how many kids do you have you have a wife and does one pretty sure i only have one one child yeah that you know of yeah could be more though yep it is it is def it is incredibly difficult like i'm not there now you know right i'm here i'm spending time with you not spending time with my two-year-old daughter that's a that's a conversation that i have all the time like what is most important what will be most important in the future but i'm a big believer and i think we even talked about this last time like i i really believe in manifestation and the power of positive energy and like what i put out there today is where i want to be two years from now and if i don't put it out there now and act that way then it's never gonna happen or i'm just gambling with my time sure and time is our greatest asset so why the would i gamble all right why would i so like i'd rather put it all on the table today because i'm 37 who are you 31 31 yeah how do you 23. get out just kidding yeah uh yeah you have to get out yeah i'm so sorry like you um you know do as much as you can while you have the opportunity to do it you know like i used to work seven days a week every single day saturdays were my office days sundays were open house and running around my relationship time with my girlfriend who's now my wife or anybody else before or evenings i would never take weekends rarely rarely my first three years in the real estate business i didn't take a single day off now saturdays are data days you know and with the baby and i want to be um and it's awesome and then other times i have to face time with her two nights a week my deal is that i'm home very structured so two nights a week i'm home to put the baby to bed if she allows me to but at least i see her before she goes to bed and that's monday through friday we structure that on sundays what are my two nights saturdays or data days one night a week if we can is a date night um so we just like focus and i don't look at my phone got it what's your like work hour like like how do you how do you schedule all of that i um i have multiple assistants um i have a traditional executive assistant who handles calendar gatekeeper kind of culture type stuff um i have an email assistant who's been a godsend for me for the last five years uh he's like are these these are not are they in-house or are they they're in-house they have wow dude i get a house but an email assistant you could outsource that too no not to i could i could outsource admin tasks but someone who can think like me write like me talk like me understand okay that makes sense right so like he sits there i mean i get a thousand emails a day that are not spam and so email is like the email is my life at the end of the day which is really annoying but it's also a non-stop kind of objective list but monday through monday through friday my days start just after four am you know and i'm in the gym by five o'clock otherwise i'd be a total fat kid um and uh so i fight against that all the time and then work starts at 7 30 and it depends on the day right now that covet is totally over well not totally but it is over enough in terms of how work goes i'm you know there's work events now there's dinner parties again there's a lot of stuff i kind of miss covet to be honest i don't know if we say that the team gets mad at me when i say i miss it but like oh new york city during clovid everyone left i could get from the upper east side to tribeca in like seven minutes right yeah no one wanted to meet everyone just wanted to talk and zoom and the only business we were doing was really important sure you know it was like a nice no traffic dude no traffic it was the same with l.a yes insane friday rush hour it's over empty every place all i got to do is pretend to be a politician go on the news and say you guys got to stay home and everyone listens to you it's crazy you should tell everyone stay home and see how traffic gets stay home guys yeah i don't leave i don't leave the house so like i'm one less car on the road especially especially in california not there anymore so enjoy you're welcome but first we gotta thank our sponsor coinbase seriously guys this is a huge one since everyone in this house and my house have been using coinbase to buy and sell crypto so you guys have probably all heard the hype about cryptocurrency lately and i get it it can be a little confusing you might have questions like where do i buy how do i buy or what is cryptocurrency well fortunately we are lucky to announce that this episode sponsor coinbase solves all of that coinbase offers a trusted and easy-to-use platform for buying selling and spending cryptocurrencies and they support the most popular digital currencies on the market and make them accessible to you and they also have a mobile app with learning resources so you can learn trade securely and manage all of your portfolio in one place and millions of people in over a hundred different countries trust coinbase with their digital assets whether you're new and looking for a way to diversify your portfolio or you're just looking for an easier and better way to buy and sell crypto try coinbase today for a limited time new users can get ten dollars in free bitcoin by signing up at coinbase.com ich how much free bitcoin jack dude i ten dollars ten dollars in free bitcoin coinbase.com ich guys this offer is for a limited time only so be sure to check it out today and thank you so much coinbase for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast yep yep yep but it's all fun listen i learned early on like i'm like you you know i wanted to do everything by myself and manage everything alone but i had to make the determination of like do i want to control everything and have it be absolutely perfect or i want to grow and i could be the single greatest basketball player but i will never win the game because i need other players with me you know like lebron's awesome but he also needs the other guys around him otherwise he'll he would never win also he would never be but what about the ed sheeran example where it's like he's winning sure he's the lebron james like by himself correct i'm sure he doesn't produce his own music when he's in you know studios he has a team behind but it's also again it's a different act sure like you have a different act from everybody else like we all have our different stories to write you know mine requires more people yours thankfully doesn't you know it depends on what you want to do yeah um we were just with supercar blondie alex herbert no way cool right so she was in the office uh new york and she has a massive platform of following crushes it on facebook i know dude she's growing on facebook she went hard on facebook when people were like facebook for old people and she was like okay i'm going to show you all the cool cars anyway like she is you know she was like how much you pay for this office that's really cool because we're looking for one in dubai um you know because we're growing i'm like oh growing so how many people do you have working for you she's like oh the next year we'll have like 250. it's like 200 and what do they do yeah it's like you she's like well i have me and then there's all the other people and then we have like all these people per platform like tic toc she hires all these people to do it so that she can just pump and pump and pop and pop it's a totally different i worry people lose their their that like homegrown feel like i i think with tick tock people love to feel like authentic they just it's some person with their phone even though it might not be but then it feels like it's just you and them and that's it yeah and sometimes when i see some of these videos i it's just you could tell there's a production team behind it it doesn't have that same connection dude she gave me advice and i've told the studios team as well and it's something that we wrestle with i asked herbs like listen okay you have a huge platform right um that you started through social i went the opposite way right i started on television and then came into social and have kind of grown it from there slowly but surely like what's your advice alex to me and without even blinking she said raw she's like stop producing if people like see clean lighting and this that they're gonna think that you're automatically selling them something just go raw go raw hold the phone make it shaky show bad lighting and i was like really and so we're still wrestling with that advice unique advice 100 i would do it that's why tai lopez did so well in the very beginning because it was just him and his phone yeah and there wasn't a huge crew behind like what he was doing i've seen some of his videos and he literally just sets up his iphone yeah and that's it and like the obvious quality yeah casey neistat but it worked yeah it really worked for him even doe brick i mean it's like you know these guys kind of running around running and gunning you know we've been with logan paul while he's been vlogging and it's like grab the camera run around you know so it's it's and i don't know but you also have to determine like what is the story you're trying to tell what is your market what's your thing like what are you putting out there like i can't iphone a 20 million dollar property to her unfortunately the seller would not use me you know but why wouldn't they trust you to do that i think you have good judgment so far you have a good track record why wouldn't they say okay you know what we're going to trust you to go through with an iphone in this in this house i think they'd say sure do that um also please do a full production because the iphone's not going to show the lighting the best it's not going to do the sound the best we want a full-on beautiful you know video tour yeah speaking of which i want your opinion on producer michael and the one did you see that video yeah the 500 million dollar house yeah we tried to get up there it's a little bit in some banking problems right yeah we actually did the house on soma uh two days ago on the market for just under 70 million that's like you can like touch the one it's like right above there yeah um house is crazy yeah totally insane what is your what are your thoughts about the developer going so crazy with with both the expense the attention to detail i listen real estate sales is all in the timing and you can never predict it right um uh you know like belair road right we did that property tour it was 188 million dollars okay fawaz uh from saudi arabia came through and he paid 94 million bucks for it and it was fully done with the cars with the candy all that stuff but he wanted something fully finished but the house also sat on the market for a long time and was chopped in price over and over and over um but then in palm beach in february right lawrence mowens and his builder crew years ago paid a huge amount of money for a plot of land at 535 north county on the ocean to build a massive spec mansion all things included and like palm beach which is only for old people right that's never gonna work they finish the house they tco basically uh uh like uh at the end of 2020 they put it on the market fully finished the beginning of january for 140 million dollars which is an insane price that no one would ever pay in palm beach i bring a buyer down from new york on thursday and we bought it the next day on friday and it was the sec it was the biggest home sale ever in the state of florida was done in february and so you could say to them like oh see good timing but we also bought that deal because it was fully finished didn't even have to think about it right everything they put into it it just was all in the timing wouldn't it been a year ago it might not happen a year from now right after kind of the coveted you know buying season ends i have no idea where things go yeah but it's a total gamble yeah yeah that was unfortunate because uh for those that aren't aware this is uh what what they called like the most expensive house and ever made basically 500 million dollars in bel air this guy started the project 10 years ago takes forever bought the plot of land i think it was like 10 million or it was it was some really low price for this old decrepit house that kind of looked like an old warehouse building on top of this parcel of land yeah spent 10 years building it and i think he's probably into it about 150 160 million dollars yep the banks are knocking at the door because they want their money in the house it's been a long time and listen look but at the same time look at billionaire row in new york city look at extel gary barnett like 157 west 57 still not sold out he started that project 11 years ago wow so like this is one guy banking it all on one house looking for one person you know developers will diversify that risk across lots of different types of people but you're also still going for the same type of person yeah you know 157 like you're gonna buy a one bedroom for four million bucks yeah you know are you ever concerned about more people leaving new york because i think covered really disrupted and where people work sure and now that people could work anywhere or at least have an element of their business that's remote people are leaving for low tax states from california a lot of people are coming here from both uh california new york that seems to be where the majority of like this community is from yeah more people moved to new york city than left new york city in 2020 which no one talks about because it's not a good click-through rate for that story right now are we talking about people people moving to or just the population growth of new york city like more people are born there that's a good question i don't think it's population growth i definitely don't think as many people were born in new york in 2020 than they were the year before um uh but people moved to new york because all of a sudden they had the opportunity to so while people in new york who are on the fence said oh this is a good chance to go to florida or nevada or alabama or austin texas there's also a huge sect of people i mean this is it was big business for us saying is new york on sale like yeah we just sold this apartment for 50 off like ah this is a good time to move to new york right everything's be fine yeah i think i'm here everything's fine and so a lot of people then came in and now they're coming in in droves you cannot rent an apartment in new york look for a townhouse to rent in brooklyn of which there used to be many right now brownstone brooklyn there are zero listings i've never seen that in my entire career people are coming in and they're renting and they're paying double we just rented a townhouse at 123 east 61st street pre-covered would rent for maybe 35 40 000 a month we just rented it for 84 000 a month we just rented an apartment at 432 park avenue for a hundred and forty thousand dollars a month just paying that much i'm just curious what type of person is business it is a total mix people have money now in a way they've never had the power like give us the example of like a hundred thousand dollars a month like what what type of are doing finance finance different types of industry technology okay right that's a crypto these days and you supported a lot of your clients crypto people i wouldn't say a lot um but i would say way more than anticipated right um and they're very flashy because you're dealing with you're just dealing with new money right right right it's like it's kind of classic you know you see when you deal with people who worked really really hard for their money and remember every single dollar yeah they are not flashy because they built it through blood sweat and tears when you're working with somebody who made all their money in the last 18 months you know like you're dealing with someone who's like i don't know it's going to go so let me put it into real estate so we have a lot of that that's actually interesting how have you seen your clients change over time for example like your clients 10 years ago because you were still selling luxury real estate got a lot younger so they've gotten younger yeah and at the same time like how their careers been changing they are more and more part of the gig economy right people are not graduating high school and going off to college and w-2'ing the rest of their life anymore at least not as many right but my buyer base has definitely gotten younger which four years ago was a big push or three years ago it was a big push for us to get into youtube right was us and saying okay bravo is not going to be out there forever cable tv won't be there forever right everything's changing so let's get ahead of that and my buyer when they're 15 i want them to know me so that when they're 21 or 22 i'm buying their first place i want them to think of me as their first choice and then they'll be surprised when i respond or someone in my company responds and so let's go after that gen z buyer really really really early even as a company now like my future real estate agent that i am working for today is right now 17 years old you know like i'm not building a company for people that are in their 30s or 40s right they can make educated decisions and be adults they've done that already i'm building a company for people that have either been watching my content since i was since they were 12. yeah right or they're currently 15 and they're thinking about what their life is going to be like and what they want to do and maybe they don't want to be doctors or lawyers or accountants you know maybe they do want to go and take control of their own life and sell something it doesn't even matter that's why they bought shiba inu yeah now available for public down below on the screen now i'm kidding but no i feel the same way i i've even noticed in the whole finance space on youtube uh four years ago it was really predominantly stocks and you would go in and be like oh this stock went up it was tesla stock a few years ago that was always that would be the biggest on clicks yeah what did tesla stock do yeah but now even now people care less and less and less about the stock market and more about crypto and i've noticed that a lot of this is shifting nobody cares what the stock market's doing anymore it's like what is the cryptocurrency market doing sure nobody cares about tesla it's like what's the latest nft yeah what did dogecoin just do today it's wild to see this evolve and then also see that like now i'm the old fart when i come where like i'm trying to unders i don't get nfts at all i i truly don't understand i'm trying to learn but meanwhile like the channels that are kind of blown up now both on tick tock and youtube are like these like 19 year olds who are like yeah i bought this board ape nft and this yacht club and this thing and it's like i don't get it yeah but but that's where the audience i think is is beginning to shift yeah that would be very cool to see it's trading clout right it's trading baseball cards it's um uh and it's on your phone right and it's gamified now so like how do you gamify finance you make it animated so that's what nfts are right and so for a younger audience uh who especially are playing with play money who've been used to using play money that has been totally fake right or real money through like the playstation store or through their parents credit card their whole life if they put money into cryptocurrency when it was a joke and now they have real money at least that's what it looks like on their phone and they're transferring it over to robinhood or they're using coinbase like they can now become you know active quote unquote traders curious do you own cryptocurrency yeah what do you own i own bitcoin i own ethereum i own a few other random things i don't pay attention to it as much but it's been interesting to play with any dogecoin i have some dogecoin how much how much small amount i bought like five thousand dollars worth of dogecoin that's like when uh this is the answer yeah this is crucial no like at the beginning of the year like yeah it's not the beginning of the year would be really good though that would be fantastic you must be uh doing well with don't coin this coin is fine for me yeah um it's not where it should be though uh but also it was five grand like it was just sort of like a let's have some exposure see i told graham to get into dogecoin on a podcast because i told him i put some money in yeah i put in a hundred bucks and graham's like ah you know what i'll throw in a thousand dollars guess what this is when it was a third of a penny yeah which for him is it's nothing right and uh what would it have been at the peak 150 thousand dollars it was a thousand one thousand dollar investment made as a joke on the podcast he's betting so we were i was just talking to uh my guy wall street bets and oh we had him on the podcast literally yesterday yeah such a cool guy to talk to you yeah yeah he's been around but he's also like so real and authentic you know and um uh but it's what it is like people people like to gamble they like to bet and if it doesn't feel like it's your money because you just got it yesterday and you didn't have to go and like dig a ditch to get your hourly wage and it's just sort of showing up sure i'll bet it on something else why not yeah but it's been nuts the wealth creation as you talk about all the time you know in your content like in the last two years has been insane like elon musk is about to be worth 300 billion dollars yeah first ever in 300 world history yeah off of one company and one stock yeah well i think they're also valuing spacex sure yeah the umbrella like the guy you know it's crazy yeah so what consists of your portfolio do you have some cryptocurrency like what percentage of crypto are you in overalls five percent 10 i don't know do you do it all yourself or do you handle it no like i know what i'm good at i know what i'm not good at yeah and i don't wanna be i would be i'd be too stressed out if i'm sitting there like watching my stock portfolio go up and down i just have you know i just put money with uh i've got a good wealth advisor team that i've worked with for a while give them money i'm like don't lose it do you do you know where your money's invested kind of but not really okay yeah if you ever want a second opinion yeah double check yeah sure i would love to see where it is because if if you're telling them just don't lose my money i'm worried about yeah they could be doing bonds and stuff like that yeah no they don't it's not to sometimes i wish it was uh safer yeah like i i know they take enough risk from what i can tell okay but i'm also not a thousand percent it's where we sell a significant amount of real estate right and the businesses are where all of my focus is and then i have guys that invest money and make money on it so what do you know what your like percentage returns are annually because if you do then we'd be able to basically understand how much risk i have no idea i was not prepared for these questions i just showed up of course i mean i think they've been great returns so far right yeah do you have just a set amount that goes in every single month or how how do you structure that portion of your portfolio it depends couple years ago i would like you know i would it was i almost viewed it as like my savings account all right you guys are going to figure out where you're going to invest money and then every month it's going to be a percentage of earnings or it's going to be kind of a set fee right or it's not set fee but like a set dollar amount right and so that way you're always saying okay i'm going to put this away in a way in a way over and over which a lot of people have done with bitcoin too right where they've just said i don't i can't time it so i'm going to put 100 bucks a week right or a thousand bucks a month something like that um but i think like when i first really got started years and years ago it was like all right 100 grand a month like i'm gonna put that in invest it that way i don't spend it yeah you know and then as business grows the dollar amount gets a lot higher do you base that on a percentage of your income that month or you used to amount at one point it was like 10 um and then sometimes it was a little bit more and then sometimes less real estate sales and you want to put more back into the business yeah because i i work for myself right and so it's like am i going to invest this or am i going to hire 10 more people that's always the dilemma that i have to go in as an entrepreneur do i put this into the stock market where i'm not going to see it and hopefully it gives me a return i put my money to work because that's what i'm supposed to do or do i build out this new department in this new vision or do i take the money i earn put it over here and invest it and then go get a loan because interest rates are really low or do i do a pledge asset line through charles schwab and get a really really low interest rate and just borrow cheap money and then grow that way like there's just lots of different options and there's just lots of money out there how do you balance that between real estate in terms of where you invest your money um i invest heavily back into our business okay i believe in the business really really really strongly and i think we can grow it to be something that's incredibly huge and it's been 13 months and so far so good so so far like it i own a lot of real estate but it's not i only own real estate because i see good deals i'm like i don't want someone else to buy that so i'll just do it yeah you know um how many good deals do you see these days now because i've kind of stopped yeah yeah in new york there's still good deals you think so yeah and new york new york is will always have inventory like there's still 10 000 apartments on the market it's a lot um but for quality inventory there's it's getting less and less and less uh just depending on where you want to go like if you want to buy like i just talked about townhouses in brooklyn like if you want to buy a townhouse in park slope godspeed you're paying half a million millions over asking price right if you want to buy an apartment on 57th street you gotta cheat your pick right there's choice because new york city is built vertically so like here you got to build out a whole new gated neighborhood um which by the way how do i get back to the strip from here just go straight down the street it's easy it's yeah on my feet no wait can you call an uber here yes when uber show up oh absolutely because we were in other neighborhoods yeah and uber's like i wouldn't come i could drive you because i'm actually i'm leaving yeah after this oh really yeah yep if you don't mind driving with jack he's totally uh he's a bit of a slow driver but he'll get you there in one piece have you ever ridden in a lamborghini uranus before is that what you drive no i drive a lexus i was just curious a rolls-royce colonist yeah exactly the new maybach it passes your podcast it's crushing it questions for you guys so what is your day like like what do you what do you what do you do during the day what do i do you wake up create content go to bed kind of thing pretty much yeah yeah now what are your businesses now it's not uh well it's five channels yeah so uh my main channel the graham stefan show the iced coffee hour this to family and millennial money iced coffee air clips oh and the link down below the six channels yeah so what what was the fourth one something family what it's the family it's like a vlog channel with like him me macy alex the assistant yeah got it got it so you have six channels and you're creating content for all six channels every day yes yeah between so there are nine videos posted well if we're not counting the clips channel it's eight or nine videos posted every single week and i've been doing that consistently for well probably nine a week for almost a year but seven a week for two and a half years who who creates most of the content for you who's filming most of it i film everything you film everything yeah even this to family stuff no alex films so basically this the family we started because we wanted to just monetize everything sure so we were thinking well if i'm busy working how can i make more money so i could film myself working and i could just post that it's like behind the scenes like i really liked gary vee's style just like document everything so i figured well we're at the house anyway some of the stuff is i think is kind of interesting so we may as well film it so content yeah so our first video was jack and i trying to make a thumbnail uh for my video about buying a ford gt yep and so we think well we may as well film it and i wanted to get this really cool shot kind of laying on top of the ford gt like kind of like crazy and we got a drone just like flying above because yeah like an overhead shot and we had uh our friend colby just filmed the thing and we posted it and it got like a hundred thousand views it was blown away wow there's an audience for this so then i just uh documented setting up the aquarium and uh that was another like 90 thousand i was blown away and so we just kept doing that nice so i mean things have slowed down since then because everyone's excited about like a brand new channel but the purpose behind it is once a week we could just film throughout the week and just post a video and you're actually sitting there editing no no no alex edits alex edits and then i go in and i do a revision and then usually i'll make a few edits on top of that and then we show graham and then or we just post yeah i edit all the main channel videos so everything you see on graham stefan is that that's me got it the graham stefan show that's three times a week that's jack who edits those videos okay so family is uh alex how do you use alex got it how do you determine what you're going to talk about every week on your two minutes so bad channels that's that's honestly probably the one of the most stressful parts if i knew if if i had a topic i just woke up and a topic appeared at six a.m every morning yeah it'd be easy because then i'm like okay i'm just gonna do that yeah once i have a direction the hardest part is picking a direction because if you pick the wrong video all of your work is for nothing you throw off the algorithm yeah so if i i've usually noticed where if i have two bad performing videos in a row the third video suffers by like thirty forty percent like it's really good youtube just won't promote it right because youtube's like okay well their audience isn't watching their videos now uh they're getting few reviews twice in a row that third v we're not gonna recommend it as much because it's probably not good yeah we're gonna push somebody else instead i could only have one video at a time uh not perform well and if i have that one video then it's so stressful it is because then the next video has to hit how do you know that it has to like how are you gonna how do you determine what you're gonna do just it's hours it's it's honestly it's hours every single morning trying to figure out like i read everything on the news i see everything on reddit i see i subscribe like 50 different youtube channels i see what people are talking about the biggest thing that i look at is the homepage of youtube because that's what's getting pushed to you that's their algorithm you're suggesting content so i look at the front page and i say okay well this is what's going on now are getting a lot of views right now i want to talk about maybe i should look into this wow it's gone up in price a lot let me make a video about that in my opinion super smart so it's stressful but that's probably i could spend five hours a day and even then i'm usually texting jack to get his idea because sometimes i'll i'll have this idea that i think is good and i'll send his jackets like ah no that's not that interesting but because you're so in it you can't really you don't really realize that yeah so uh like today there's no topics if i were to post any video tomorrow people wouldn't care unless really it's about tesla or maybe shiba inu and that's it i've already talked about chibi enos so the only thing left to talk about is tesla so i have to make a video on tesla tomorrow if i were to post anything else people do you write this stuff up and you put it in front of you you're just gonna you're gonna riff it oh i never riff it yeah every video is scripted down to the word every joke that is like is supposed to be like five to six hours a day thinking about what you're gonna do and you write it out and i write it out word for word personally yeah holy mother i agree with you i know what you're gonna say i agree with you man you dude do a lot i know but it's your voice but like i am telling you we do a lot of writing and we do a lot of live feed we do a lot of webinar like all that stuff and it got to the point where i was like i need to find someone who understands how i talk and how i think and then they will script it and you improvise the script right so that i so you buy your time back i don't think i can see that but you say that now but five to six hours is a long long time i don't think so i don't think so i think with the nature of the content it's just you have to you have to have such an eye for like trying to figure out what you're basically a newscaster like we talk to newscasters all the time they wake up super early they go there to figure out the news they work on their reports and then they go live and they tell everybody exactly what they've been working on all day long yeah i don't know part of me thinks that's the reason why the channel's ground so much is because i don't know because i've spent the time that no one else would would care like i do on on that sort of stuff that's true but that's true for sure for your big videos for the vast majority of people they watch your content for the transfer of education like they are information they want to learn right every video that you that you post that gets like a million views is like uh very education heavy right yes exactly yeah they're learning from you yeah but it's a structure it's the structure of figuring out what what the hook points are because every you can even revise this to have a hook to keep people watching so there's never a point where i'm just like from start to finish like one thought there's always got to be and this was building up and then this happened yeah and then i have to change the scene to keep the retention high like everything is thought out so so you're going to do this for the next 10 years yes probably probably i i don't know to this degree i've talked to jack before about maybe going down to two videos a week on the main channel instead of three uh it's spending more time on those videos but i know once i go down i'm never going back so like yeah it's like once i i don't know how i'm like able to do this yeah and i know i'm gonna look back and like i don't know how i was able to do it because well now you you put the responsibility on your shoulders right now the audience demands it so now you can't stop it you don't have to go down if you outsource yeah i don't i've tried i'm trying to outsource my editing because that's the only part where i feel where i have probably three to five hours to edit a video i will tell you i would tell you though like the edit is super important and there's a lot of personality that goes into it like i can tell the difference um between who edits our videos depending within studios right because there's certain people that understand jokes or other people that don't certain people know how to color you know what i mean like everything's a little bit different certain people are really passionate about the content other people are just i gotta get this done and so it's like if you're gonna do that you just gotta find an editor who like really again just like writing yeah just like my email management like you gotta get somebody who really understands your voice because that's what people are listening to they could read all the information you're giving them but they're watching it for your voice giving me the information so it could be scripted it's just got to be in your voice correct but the other thing is that for retention rates the video has to be structured in such a way to keep people watching so even though it's my voice there is a portion of people out there who will watch the video and if they're not entertained visually yeah they'll just be like they'll just tune out even if the information is good how much money you're making that's that's that's what no graham will tell you how much he's making i know it's his career it's like who else we were just talking to like who's oh portnoy yeah he's sort of poor noise like he's so open about how much money he never had and then how much money he does have how much does he have now like 225 million dollars i think okay yeah so that's a decent amount yeah yeah from selling newspapers you know it's a cool story um can you give us a ballpark about that the irs is not watching this listen we we i mean we clear so we'll do gross like i don't know 35 million dollars this year um uh and that is a good amount okay and that i'm i take includes your education portion of the business high profit margins the brokerage is probably a lot lower yep okay yep oh yeah any advice what could we be doing better we ask our guests this it's very helpful we improve yeah i mean i've told you already i would embrace leverage i want to micromanage absolutely everything i understand what you're saying with that's why you've gotten to where you are but what got you here won't get you there that's why it's a phrase it's a common theme i've never heard that i've never heard you've never heard that no i'll got you here we'll get you there yeah i've never got you here like i had to do the same thing because i would i would take out every buyer every seller and i got an assistant you know and like everything was me me me me me all the time and then like what got you here won't get you there and so you the the the voice doesn't change the work doesn't change you're not going to get like less busy your work is just going to change you're just going to do more and so you're going to make more you know what else i could do though it's like the exact opposite of what graham thinks yeah yeah well got him here will get him there i'm still going there that's the thing it's like i've not stopped getting there yeah it's it's still going in that direction so why why take a different path when the one that you're on is is is worse yeah which is you know why what is it like if the wheel's not broken then don't fix it right right um but anyway my advice is to leverage what you've created okay right leverage what you've created however you want to do that and maybe it's not doing things through other people maybe it's something else that we didn't even talk about today but this has been a lot of fun thanks for having me one final question yeah that rms is that is that your is that for your name yeah ryan matthew sirhand wow all right well thanks for coming on yeah we really appreciate it thank you so much make sure to hit the like button subscribe we'll link to your information down below in the description thanks guys cool until next time yes and then oh yeah and then we'll finish