$6 billion of savings deposits just disappeared, leaving more than 400,000 depositors of six rural banks in central China’s Henan province devastated.
The journey to get to the bottom of how such a large sum of money disappeared started to unravel a series of systemic financial corruption.
Allegations of crime and corruption are spreading through China’s small banks as more depositors are being locked out from their life savings. And it appears the CCP is making the situation worse.
Hundreds of people took to the streets of Zhengzhou to protest their inability to withdraw money from four local banks since April! Similarly, citizens are accusing their local officials of widespread corruption and mismanagement. It’s getting ugly…
The demonstrations turned violent when a group of unidentified men in white shirts attacked the peaceful demonstrators.
Chinese authorities appear to be pinning blame for the banking issues on a group of “criminals” in charge of the local banks. But the issue runs much, much deeper. Watch the video for the full story. This is far from over…
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Experts are likening the situation to be worse than the US 2008 financial crash and warn of it’s global impact.
The ‘finger-lickin’ good’ chicken has been dominating the American fast food fried chicken for decades after a man named Harland Sanders mastered his 11 herbs and spices recipe. But not many people these days know, that he did it from inside his gas station during the Great Depression.
It started way back in the 1930s when Colonel Sanders, who went by his name Harland Sanders back then was running a gas station in his home town in Kentucky.
Here’s the full story…
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From Gas Station to Multi Billion KFC Franchise
Harland was born in 1890 and raised quick on a farm outside Henryville, Indiana. His father died when he was just five years old. The oldest child, Sanders was left to care for his two siblings.
His mother taught him how to cook when he was seven. By 13, Sanders left home to pursue a series of professions including railroad worker and insurance salesman. Neither panned out.
In 1930, he took over a Shell filling station on US Route 25 just outside North Corbin, a small city on the edge of the Appalachian Mountains. It was at this gas station when he converted a storeroom into a small eating area using his own dining table, originally serving home cooked meals like steaks, country ham, and fried chicken to his gas station customers. He called his side hustle, Sander’s Café.
Things were going great until one day when became absolutely obsessed with the thought of mass producing fried chicken. Here’s why…
The Simple Invention That Made KFC Immortal
Sanders was supper dissatisfied with the 35 minutes it took to prepare his chicken in an iron frying pan. Time is money and during the Great Depression, his customers couldn’t didn’t have either to spare.
To make matters more complicated, Harlen refused to deep fry. Although a much faster process, in Sanders’ opinion it produced dry and crusty chicken that was unevenly cooked.
The on the other hand, if he prepared the chicken in advance of an order, there was sometimes waste at the end of the day. Then a new product emerged…
In 1939, the first commercial pressure cookers were released, predominantly designed for steaming vegetables. Sanders bought one and modified it into a pressure fryer, which he then used to prepare chicken. The new method reduced his production time to be comparable with deep frying, while simultaneously retained the quality of pan-fried chicken. Now he could prepare high volumes of quality fried chicken at scale.
That is, as long as he could get anyone to buy into the his franchise model.
How Did Harland Sanders Franchise KFC?
In July 1940, Sanders finalized what later became known as his Original Recipe of 11 herbs and spices. Although he never publicly revealed the recipe, he admitted to the use of salt and pepper, and claimed that the ingredients “stand on everybody’s shelf”.
Sanders hit the highways pitching his chicken concept to as many restaurant owners he could meet. Independent restaurant owners would pay four cents on every piece of chicken sold as a franchise fee, in exchange for Sanders’ his recipe and method, and the right to advertise using his name and likeness.
Coined the name “Kentucky Fried Chicken”. Sanders adopted the name because it distinguished his product from the deep-fried “Southern fried chicken” product found in restaurants. Tripling his sales in the first year alone.
That’s when he met Wendy’s future founder Dave Thomas…
The Time Sanders Met the Future Founder of Wendy’s
By 1956, Sanders had six or eight franchisees, including Dave Thomas, who eventually founded the Wendy’s restaurant chain. Thomas developed the rotating red bucket sign, was an early advocate of the take-out concept that Harman had pioneered, and introduced a bookkeeping form that Sanders rolled out across the entire KFC chain. Thomas sold his shares in 1968 for $1 million and became regional manager for all KFC restaurants east of the Mississippi before founding Wendy’s in 1969.
Then, in another random series of cosmic associations, here’s the brief time a serial killer was made a KFC franchise manager at the request of his father in law..
The Time When a Serial Killer Became a KFC Manager…
In the 1960s, John Wayne Gacey was made manager of several Iowa KFC franchises where also around this time and would start his murder spree raping, torturing and murdered at least 33 young men and boys. Gacy regularly performed at children’s hospitals and charitable events as “Pogo the Clown” or “Patches the Clown”, personas he had devised.
There’s currently a documentary that covers the story on Netflix called Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacey Tapes.
It looks absolutely freaking terrifying…
Outside of the documentary, it’s often claimed that Gacy was such a fan of his workplace, he would provide free fried chicken to his colleagues and even insisted on being called the ‘Colonel’.
It would seem his love for the chain continued right up until he was put to death by lethal injection at the age of 52. His last meal request? A bucket of original recipe KFC.
The Fast Rise of the KFC Franchise
In 1960 the company had around 200 franchised restaurants; by 1963 this had grown to over 600, making it the largest fast food operation in the United States. At 73 years old, Harland Sanders sold KFC for $2 million in 1964 ($17.5 million in today’s dollars).
The company went through multiple acquisitions over the years to eventually Pepsico than Yum Brands who still owns and operates the franchise today. Yum Brands operates KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and The Habit Burger Grill.
Today KFC is pulling in $2.793 billion in revenue with 22,621 locations across 150 countries. And it all started in a gas station in Kentucky…
Turns out, pretty rich actually. But how much money are we talking about?
For starters, according to a study, becoming a professional YouTuber has officially become the most desirable jobs on the planet.
Which makes sense given some of the biggest YouTubers are generating more money than professional athletes.
The amount of money they are generating is pretty crazy. Here are some of the top content creators on YouTube with the highest earnings.
These Top YouTubers Are Making How Much Money?
Ryan’s World — $22 million
Jake Paul – $21.5 million
Dude Perfect – $20 million
Daniel Middleton (DanTDM) – $18.5 million
Jeffree Star – $18 million
Mark Fischbach (Markiplier) – $17.5 million
Evan Fong (VanossGaming) – $17 million
Sean McLoughlin (Jacksepticeye) – $16 million
Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie) – $15.5 million
Logan Paul – $14.5 million
Which begs the question, how many views do you have to get on your YouTube channel to get a fat paycheck?
How Much Can You Make Off Your YouTube Videos?
YouTubers charge brands anywhere from $10 to $50 per 1,000 views, depending on the estimated amount of total views for the pending video. If the video hits 1 million views, then the YouTuber makes anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000.
Crazy right? But there’s a little more to it than that. Here’s the catch…
The Truth About Making Money on YouTube
The vast majority of YouTubers don’t make any money and despite how easy people think it is. Creating a quality YouTube audience and content is a hell of a lot harder than most people think. And it’s only getting harder…
It’s a competitive marketplace. As of 2022, there are more than 51 million YouTube channels out there. The number of channels is growing strong: last year it grew by 36%. People all around the world are creating a YouTube channel, and uploading 500 hours of video every minute.
But obstacles be damned, if you’re up to the task and are interested in cashing in on the billions of people tuning in to watch YouTube videos (and ads), here’s a video that breaks down exactly how to make money using the giant cash printing machine:
The video conference app (Zoom) that brought the world together during COVID was invented by a guy named Eric Yan who built it to video call his girlfriend.
Here’s how it happened…
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Who Invented Zoom?
Eric Yuan is the Founder and CEO of Zoom. He was born and raised in Tai’an, Shandong Province, China.
Eric had been inspired to find a solution to visit his girlfriend, so he developed a piece of video telephone software in 1987. A decade later, Eric moved to San Francisco and was one of the first 20 hires on the WebEx team. In fact, Eric was one of the founding engineers and proved crucial to the success of its online meetings product.
Ouch. Cisco Turned it Down?
WebEx was acquired by security and networking giant, Cisco, in 2007 for $3.2 billion. Under Cisco’s new ownership Eric became Cisco’s VP of engineering. At Cisco, Eric pitched them his original idea for a mobile-friendly video system. They turned it down…
This mobile friendly video system is what became Zoom.
They Couldn’t Have Gone Public at a Better Time…
In April 2019, Zoom went public. Zoom stock shot above its $36 IPO price almost immediately and peaked at $104.49 in mid-2019.
In early 2020, the world was rocked by the coronavirus pandemic, with millions of people forced to work from home. In March, Zoom was downloaded 2.13 million times in just one day.
Today, Zoom has some staggering usage stats with over 300 million daily meeting participants and 3.5 trillion annual meeting minutes,
Thanks to Eric’s girlfriend in 1987, Zoom has become the world’s biggest video conferencing giant.
Blackrock is a company that virtually no one had heard of until recently. They have become one of the largest organizations on the planet with $9 trillion in assets under management.
That’s larger than the gross domestic product (GDP) of every single country around the globe, with the exception of China and the United States.
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For perspective, the grand total of wealth funds managed by over 91 funds across the world is projected to be worth approximately 8.2 Trillion US Dollars. A single investment management firm based out of New York manages more funds than all the sovereign wealth funds in the world.
Crazy right? In fact…
If you were to make $1 every second, you’d be worth as much as BlackRock in about 240,000 years.
What’s more, if you research every major publicly traded company in the world and you’ll find that BlackRock is its first, second or third-largest shareholder. They also apparently own part of CNN and FOX.
How Much of the Media Does BlackRock and Vanguard Own?
18% of Fox
16% of CBS (and therefore also ofSixty Minutes)
13% of Comcast (which owns NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and the Sky media group)
12% of CNN
12% of Disney (which owns ABC andFiveThirtyEight)
Between 10-14% of Gannett (which owns more than 250 Gannett daily newspapers plusUSA Today)
10% of the Sinclair local television news (which controls 72% of U.S. households’ local TV)
So yeah they own a pretty influential piece of the news.
Where Did Blackrock Come From Anyway?
The Company was co-founded in 1988 by a very well-connected billionaire by the name of Larry Fink, who has been described as “a defacto middleman and lynchpin between Washington, DC, and Wall Street.” The firm operates globally with 70 offices in 30 countries and clients in 100 countries.
BlackRock started making headlines during the 2008 financial meltdown.
When the financial crisis of 2007-2008 hit, the US government hired BlackRock to clean up the mess from the crisis by managing the toxic assets that were owned by firms like the Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac. In fact, even amidst the current financial crisis caused due to the Coronavirus outbreak starting in 2020, the Trump administration turned to Blackrock to bail out companies overleveraged in debt. the government is once again looking for BlackRock’s expertise.
Given the company’s habit of forming shadow cabinets ahead of presidential transitions and its involvement in the new Federal reserve programs, Bloomberg even went as far as calling BlackRock our “fourth branch of government.”
Pretty impressive positioning for a company that’s only 34 years old.
The Federal Reserve has been printing money like it’s going out of style in an attempt pay for about $29 trillion in U.S. debt. While it’s nothing new for a government to print money to cover some debt, what is new however, is that the 40% of US dollars in existence were printed in the last 12 months alone.
Which doesn’t seem like it will end well…
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Why is the US Printing So Much Money?
As part of its effort to stimulate the economy, the U.S. government issued stimulus checks to millions of employed Americans. With money they didn’t have…
The government had to borrow by selling its debt in the form of U.S. Treasury bonds and other types of securities.
On a similar but not altogether different note, here’s Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet explaining how, if the government prints too much money, it ends up like Venezuela.
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How Much Money Will the U.S. Print This Year?
For the 2022 fiscal year, a range of 6,876,800,000 to 9,654,400,000 pieces of money will be printed, totaling from $310,572,800,000 to $356,179,200,000.
13 years after Jeff Bezos promised the world drone delivery, it appears they might be making good on that promise soon. The company is planning to roll out its first city this year.
Which feels like something out of a sci fi movie. While it still seems logistically impossible for drones delivery to actually work, I wouldn’t bet against Bezos’ ability to pull it off…
If you haven’t heard of their drone delivery network yet, it’s called Prime Air.
So what the hell is Prime Air exactly?
What is Prime Air Anyway?
Prime Air, is a drone delivery service currently in development by Amazon that will deploy delivery drones to autonomously fly individual packages to customers within 30 minutes of ordering.
In order to qualify for 30-minute delivery, your order must be less than 5 lbs. The products also have to be small enough to fit in the cargo box that the aircraft will carry… and have an Amazon delivery location within a 10-mile radius of a participating Amazon fulfillment center.
After years of testing and delays, the company is finally set to launch. At least for products 5 pounds or less…
Watch this video to learn more.
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How will Prime Air Actually Work Though?
When a customer places an order eligible for Prime Air, they’ll receive an estimated arrival time and status tracker for their package.
The drone uses a sense-and-avoid system to safely fly packages while also dodging obstacles such as other objects and aircraft.
“As our drone descends to deliver the package into a customer’s backyard, the drone ensures that there’s a small area around the delivery location that’s clear of any people, animals, or other obstacles,” said an Amazon representative.
Once it gets low enough, the drone will release the package and just fly off.
Is Anyone Else Doing Drone Delivery?
Walmart said their drone network could reach up to 4 million households in six states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Utah and Virginia. Items including Tylenol, diapers and hot dog buns could be delivered in as little as 30 minutes…
Similarly, drone company Wing, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, announced in April plans to launch a commercial drone delivery service in Dallas. Walgreens is among the retailers partnering with Wing to offer items delivered by drone.
Jan Koum is a Ukrainian-American billionaire businessman and computer engineer. He’s the co-founder and former CEO of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging app that was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for an absolutely mind boggling $19.3 billion.
Facebook paid $12 billion in stock and the rest in cash. What’s even more badass than the exit was the fact that Koum arranged for the $19 billion deal to be signed at the same welfare center he used to collect his welfare checks in his teens. Only this time, he drove there in his Porsche.
Jan moved to California from Ukraine when he was 16. As a young immigrant, Koum and his mother had to rely on food stamps. Koum became interested in programming and eventually landed a job at Yahoo! Where he worked for 9 years.
Then in January 2009, Koum bought an iPhone and realized that the then seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry for app creators.
WhatsApp was initially unpopular, but it quickly became one of the fastest growing apps on the market. WhatsApp allows user to send messages, images, audio or video at a cost significantly less than texting.
The app gained a large user base. So large Facebook was monitoring the app for years obsessively. They were paranoid WhatsApp could eventually be a Facebook killer.
Pepsi is a brand that everyone knows, because as their website states, their products are sold in 200 countries. Which is pretty freaking crazy considering Google says there are only 195 countries on earth…So it’s safe to assume they have officially saturated their target market.
But as big as they are, they’re even bigger than you might think.
Pepsi is no longer a beverage brand. They are now Pepsi Co, a conglomerate that consists of 23 brands that generate of $70B in annual revenue. Pepsi is one of the biggest companies on the planet.
A Brief History of Pepsi:
Pepsi was originally promoted as “Brad’s Drink” in New Bern, North Carolina in 1893 by Caleb Bradham, who crafted it at his drugstore. It was later renamed Pepsi-Cola in 1898, “Pepsi” because it was advertised to relieve dyspepsia (indigestion) and “Cola” referring to the cola flavor.
You read that right, Pepsi was originally marketed as a cure to an upset stomach.
As product sales increased, the company pivoted overtime to appeal to a larger audience and diversify its products.
Fast forward to 1950 Alfred N. Steele, a former VP of Coca-Cola Company, became the CEO. He focused on creating giant advertising campaigns to increase sales. His efforts increased Pepsi’s earnings 11-fold during the 50s and made it the instant competitor of Coca Cola.
In 1965 Pepsi-Cola merged with Frito-Lay, Inc. They then diversified further with the purchase of three restaurant chains:
Looking to add even more diversification PepsiCo acquired both the Tropicana and Dole juice brands from the Seagram Company in 1998, and in 2001 it then merged with Quaker Oats company.
Here is the massive list of brands Pepsi Co owns today.
