I Lost My 7-Figure Fortune and My Wife to a Rare Disease

Sean Weisbrot: Matthew Spaur is the owner of marketing, the social Good, a strategic marketing firm for B2B companies, and he also offers fractional CMO services. So I picked Matthew to be a guest because I wanted to speak with someone who had built a seven figure portfolio, lost it, and then rebuilt it once more.

Sean Weisbrot: So tell us, Matthew, how did you make it? How did you lose it? And we'll go from there.

Matthew Spaur: I was a lucky English major who got to be a technical writer at Microsoft. And, very early on, like we're talking way back in the Reagan administration, frankly.

Matthew Spaur: and, and that was good for me. It wasn't as good as the developers I know who made piles of money at the time, but I made enough, right? And so that plus some time was able to get me a seven figure portfolio. and with that I went off to graduate school to be a creative writer. 'cause that had always been a passion of mine.

Matthew Spaur: and after graduate school, I started a weekly newspaper. I. And that's where it all went downhill. 'cause it was sort of the perfect storm of everything, right? Startups are tough. And, at Microsoft we had the term of investment mode, right? We're putting money into something. And, newspapers are notorious for that.

Matthew Spaur: and in fact, the title of my book, making a Small Fortune comes from the joke of how do you make a small fortune? You take your slightly larger fortune and start an X, right? Every industry uses this joke. For me, it's to start a newspaper. but at the time I ran into not only tough local politics, but the Wall Street Tech bubble burst, and then nine 11 happened.

Matthew Spaur: And then my family also had two pretty, very severe medical conditions. Both my new wife and one of her sons at the time developed a very severe and rare disease. And all of that was just a perfect storm to not have success in business because it's very hard to focus with all of that going on.

Matthew Spaur: And so after four years in business, I had to close my newspaper.

Sean Weisbrot: What was the hardest part from starting that first company?

Matthew Spaur: There were a lot of hard parts. a lot of it was just, just a sort of an operational steep learning curve. 'cause not only did I do this. I started a business having never owned a business before, which probably a lot of your audience does, but I hadn't gone to business school and I was doing journalism as a business, but I'd never worked on a newspaper, never taken a journalism class, never sold an ad.

Matthew Spaur: I mean, I was just a rookie at all of this. I was, I'm, I'm smart and I had good computer skills. Obviously I was a writer. I had some native stuff, but learning all of those other things just operationally was hard. The people part was also hard too. 'cause it wasn't just me, it was, I have employees now and I have to do what?

Matthew Spaur: Those are the most messy, complicated, and amazing pieces of equipment. Any business is gonna have. So there was a lot of that that went on too. That was hard. and then also just trying to find balance, right? There was a lot of family stuff going on, good and bad for me. So how do you balance all of the work stuff and still have a life?

Sean Weisbrot: People say work-life balance is a thing, but it's not because you're either working or you're living, you can't do both. You can't really balance them unless you say, I've got eight hours in the day that I'm committing to one thing and four hours goes into one and four hours goes into the other, but. That's not how life works, especially if you have a spouse and kids, because those eight hours you think you got eight hours. But really it's, it's not like that gets dwindled down really fast.

Matthew Spaur: The term I like is work life integration, right? How do they fit together? Not, they're two separate things that balance, but there's two things that should mesh.

Matthew Spaur: They should come together and how do they do that? and, and sometimes there's just too much to put together, right? Then it becomes like not integrated, and that was kind of my case. There was just so much going on.

Sean Weisbrot: I think a lot of business owners struggled to do that, especially in their first time. I know my ex-wife complained often that I was working too much and it's not like I wanted to be working.

Sean Weisbrot: Like if I had, I mean, I did have a choice. We all have a choice about how we manage our time, but. Like in a perfect world for me, I would never work and I would always spend time with my wife. Right. But obviously that's not how it works. How difficult was it before you found out about

Matthew Spaur: Her illness? It was manageable, I'll say. I mean, it was still, as they say, drinking from a fire hose. I was still learning stuff. but it was okay and we were making progress, towards being. Getting out of that investment mode, knowing what we're doing. We started publishing two issues a month and we wanted to get to weekly. And so we were, we were climbing up this curve and, and that was going well.

Matthew Spaur: But then the whole nine 11 thing and then my wife's illness, happened pretty much at the same time. She, nine 11 was just a weird day in general. And shortly after that is when she really started feeling like I have too much on my plate to do both this startup.

Matthew Spaur: 'cause she was the editor of the paper, and took care of the kids and the family and be the person who I wanna be. I can't integrate both of these, right? They're, they're not fitting together and something's gotta go and I can't, I have to prioritize the kids, which totally made sense. But Then it just became harder, because I lost a really valuable ally at the office, and then at home I gained somebody who needed a lot more support, just a lot more support and so that made it exponentially harder.

Sean Weisbrot: What was your actual business model? What, what was your newspaper about?

Matthew Spaur: So our newspaper was called The Local Planet Weekly, and, and we really wanted to cover our local planet. It was the same sort of paper. and maybe not everybody's seen these, but, the Village Voice, LA Weekly Chicago reader, those sorts of the stranger in Seattle, Willamette Weekly in Portland, those are sort of the biggies, but they're known as alternative newspapers.

Matthew Spaur: Usually they come out on a weekly cycle. They try to do more in-depth stuff, more critique. They also cover a lot of local culture, arts, and fashion. Things going on about town. The business model is that the paper is free to the reader. They can just go pick it up. It's supported by advertising.

Matthew Spaur: if I could get a quarter for every issue that people picked up, I would've been rich.

Matthew Spaur: But that's not the model. and so it's all, all definitely advertiser driven. This was happening at a time when the whole advertising driven model was being completely turned on its head because of the internet. Right? That's when a lot of this advertising driven content started showing up and also classified advertising just went away.

Matthew Spaur: 'cause there was a thing called Craigslist, which was new then. And believe it or not, also one thing that sustains a lot of alternative newspapers, especially in their early days, is.

Matthew Spaur: Sex advertising or sex oriented advertising. So things like strip clubs, sex toy shops, escorts even. They're all legal businesses, but they're not necessarily the ones that are gonna show up in the daily paper, but they, they deserve a place to advertise to.

Matthew Spaur: And if we're alternative, those are maybe, sort of alternative businesses. People said that Spokane was too much of a prudish town to support an alternative newspaper. and they're probably right too, a little bit.but that's definitely the model. Advertising supported, free to the reader, kinda looks a little bit like the internet except on paper in some ways.

Sean Weisbrot: Sounds very complicated, at least with the benefit of 20 years. Looking back on that period, it seems like it would've been a very difficult business to run.

Matthew Spaur: It's tough. I mean, you've got. You've got two different audiences you have to serve, right? Lots of businesses say, here's my customer, right? And in that model, you've got two customers. You've gotta serve the readers because those are the people that are gonna see the ads. And you gotta serve the advertisers. 'cause those are the people who are paying for the service. And so you have to balance both of those.

Matthew Spaur: yeah, it's tough. It's tough. It's not like we have one app or we have one website or one, whatever.

Sean Weisbrot: I mean, it's kind of like any content creator now where you pretty much are creating, like, I, I've been doing this for over two years. I've put out 122 episodes, and I've, I've made zero on it.

Matthew Spaur: Well, well there's always the, how am I getting paid? Right. You're. You may not be getting paid for this content, but you may be making connections that feed into another part of your business model, right? That's part of the content game as well.

Sean Weisbrot: Correct, but there's no reason why the content itself can't directly make money through an advertising model or a membership model.

Matthew Spaur: Yeah, absolutely, but, but that's a tough game and it's only getting tougher. Right? It used to be really easy, or I, I'm gonna say comparatively easy, when all there was to compete was the daily paper. Radio and maybe television, right? That, but then you take that same pool of advertising dollars and you split it among all of the digital stuff that's going on, plus all of those things, and it just becomes very fractious.

Sean Weisbrot: I would say that there's probably more money available now because. Because of globalization, the internet really allowed globalization. Where before you might only be able to get advertising money from someone in your local area. Maybe if you're lucky you're getting money from someone in New York or in Georgia or another part of the US but my guests are from all over the world.

Sean Weisbrot: And so that, that network that I'm building. Is global, which means advertising can potentially come from any country in the world that I have access to. So I think the amount of money available has drastically increased.

Matthew Spaur: I mean, you have a global topic too, right? You're talking about entrepreneurship, and business. We were talking about a city, right? And so how do you import advertising? And there are some ways there. There are people from outside of the city that advertise like concerts that come to town, right? They're not a local business, but they advertise in the local market. So there is some, some external money to access, but a lot of it is just who's there, right?

Matthew Spaur: That's the audience we're serving.

Sean Weisbrot: In our intro call, you had said that you learned a lot from your experience and was able to use it in other ways as time went on. So I'm curious, what are some of those things that you'd learned from this experience and through the experience of working through your wife's illness?

Matthew Spaur: Wow, that's a big question. I mean, I learned a lot about a, just how tough business is, I gained an appreciation for that. I ended up going and getting an MBA because I became interested in this. and in particular in distribution, that's a key issue of newspapers, but there's lots of other places where distribution is a major concern.

Matthew Spaur: So I ended up working in the energy industry, which is very much a distribution model. I ended up working in the education industry, which is also, if you think about it, a distribution model. and so that became an interesting thing to me. That's one area, but it. That's, that's kind of, mundane in some ways.

Matthew Spaur: I learned a lot about myself in terms of how much am I capable of doing? I can do a ton of stuff, but I also learned the question, if I can do a bunch of stuff, should I, where is the line? I probably should have stopped investing in both the newspaper and my family. At unachievable rates, long before I did and, and really should have focused on my family.

Matthew Spaur: I would've been better off. They would've been better off. So I learned that just because you can do something doesn't mean maybe you should do something. along the way, I've also learned the saying of don't be good at things you don't wanna do. So I'm trying to be better about that.

Matthew Spaur: Like I can do a bunch of stuff, but really should I, do I need to, where, where's my priority? Where's the thing that I can do best? What can I do uniquely that is going to feed me as well as provide value to somebody else? and then, I think I also learned, probably on a different level, just an appreciation for.

Matthew Spaur: The role that story plays in our lives. I mean, we wrote a lot of stories, me and the whole staff at the local planet, and there were some amazing stories. And, I was answering a PR query the other day about, have you ever saved a life? And I said, yes, I've been a lifeguard. I saved a life then.

Matthew Spaur: But our newspaper wrote stories that saved lives. I mean, literally, there's one story I think of, About these two girls who had a very strange osteo disease in Spokane who were gonna lose their state health insurance. And if they lost it, they would die. And it was a major bureaucratic problem that they couldn't solve.

Matthew Spaur: And they came to us and we wrote a story that helped them get through that log jam and get the kids the medical cover they deserve. So, I learned that stories have value. And that's a role that I could play. So, I was very happy to learn that stories do have an amazing power out there.

Sean Weisbrot: What is the most important thing related to distribution? Since every business has a distribution problem.

Matthew Spaur: I think distribution comes back to the question of audience, like distribution is how do you reach your audience? How do you reach them in the best way? And so, to solve distribution, you need to understand your audience.

Matthew Spaur: Where are they looking for your content? How are they accessing it or where are they looking for your product? Whatever it is, and when, so to me, that's really the, the key, the mechanics of it. Like we could get people to throw our newspaper in their car every Thursday and drive around and put it in our racks.

Matthew Spaur: That's what we had to do. but where do we put those racks, right? That's how we found our people. We could put our racks in type store A, but is that where our readers go? We had to understand where our readers were physically in order to reach them with the newspaper.

Matthew Spaur: And I think it's the same thing with any other business. Where are your consumers, whether it's physically or mentally, when you're trying to reach them, how do you determine that though? Good old know your customer market research. For the newspaper, there's two sides to the coin. What are we trying to achieve? Like why are we writing what we're writing and that's going to influence who wants to read us, but then also being able to be reflective and go out into the community and talk to people, find out where they're finding us, what makes a story interesting to them?

Matthew Spaur: What are they wanting to hear from us? And that will influence where we distribute stuff as well. So, are we gonna focus more on colleges versus families? Those are two different distribution areas basically.

Sean Weisbrot: You had said it was interesting how you discovered that stories play a role in our lives. So I'd like to ask, what roles do stories play in our lives? What did you learn from it?

Matthew Spaur: Wow. Stories play a huge number of roles in our life. I think every day when we wake up, we tell ourselves a story about what the day is gonna look like, right? I'm gonna do this, then I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this.

Matthew Spaur: And I, and I'm coming into the story feeling this way, I'm either happy or concerned or I'm exhausted from the night before or something like that. so I mean, they really influence who we are. There's even some fascinating studies right now that show some people have a constant internal monologue going on.

Matthew Spaur: That's narrating every action they do. Okay. I'm, I'm, I'm picking up my mug. I'm putting it down. I'm drinking. I don't know who those people are.

Matthew Spaur: I would go insane if that was going on in my head all the time. But that's the type of story we're telling ourselves too. It's sort of a present tense story. We tell ourselves stories about who we are as a family, as a professional. As a community, as a political person, as a financial person. Those are all stories we tell ourselves. And we tell those stories to other people too. Like, this is who I am, this is who I wanna be, this is what I wanna portray to you.

Matthew Spaur: Yeah. The story is a huge thing. Absolutely.

Sean Weisbrot: I remember telling my story for the longest time. As, yeah. I had a concussion years ago and it's, it's done this, it's done that, and I was kind of continuing to live in the past and as a victim because of how I still felt, because of the concussion, what it did to me, how it changed me.

Sean Weisbrot: And it was, I guess, a year or two ago, so the concussion was, or the accident that caused the concussion was in 2000 and. 13. So about a year or more ago, I said, I'm tired of living that story. I've played it out. It had its benefits, it had its determinants. But that story is played out and I'm tired of it.

Sean Weisbrot: And, then I started living the story of getting divorced. and, and I, I'm tired of that story. And I'm over it. So whenever, like I, I signed up for these research surveys and they always ask you, are you single? Are you married, you divorced? And I was like, I'm single, never married because, 'cause technically I am, I was married outside of the US so the marriage was never, like we didn't sign anything with the US Embassy overseas.

Sean Weisbrot: So the US technically doesn't know about it. So as far as America's concerned, I am single, never married. I. But, but that doesn't, whenever I go on a date, like if it's the first date, inevitably like, oh, tell me about your, your history. It's like, well, I was, I was married and now I'm not married anymore.

Sean Weisbrot: So like, it's hard to get past that story and it creates a stigma for certain people. Like, oh, well you were married and now divorced. What does that mean about you? Right. Oh yeah. Well, absolutely. For me it means I learned a lot. It means I'm, I'm much more mature about life and relationships and I'm willing to work hard to make it well last if I find someone right.

Sean Weisbrot: But they gotta be damn good for me to be willing to commit. 'cause I already did it once and it wasn't, it wasn't easy.

Matthew Spaur: Well, you learned once. It took me more than that. My story in my book and part of what kept me from just publishing this. For a long time, I got married once, right out of college.

Matthew Spaur: It was very brief. I shouldn't have asked, she shouldn't have said yes. and, and, and that was that, got married again. and kind of like the newspaper worked way too hard at something that maybe I shouldn't have. And it took me a long time to figure that out. So the relationship in this book was my third marriage, and I really wanted that too, I didn't want to fail yet again.

Matthew Spaur: Right? Everybody hates the feeling of failing. and yet illness had another plan for me on that. but, but you said shame. shame kept me from telling this story, which I think is a very good story and a very valuable story for people to hear, because I was ashamed of that history. At one point I realized, there are people out there who write memoirs of truly what I would think are horrible and shameful things, and they put 'em out there and they go on a book tour and whatever.

Matthew Spaur: They don't seem to have a problem with it. Why am I so freaked out about my pretty mundane life in some ways here? I should just get over myself and do what I want to do, which is step into being more of a writer. yeah. Back in, I think the late nineties, there was a woman, Katherine Harrison, who published a memoir called The Kiss, which was about her having an affair with her father, like literally full on consenting adults.

Matthew Spaur: They did that, and then she wrote a book about it, and I'm thinking if she can write that book, I can put my bookout. For God's sake, I gotta get over myself.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, just because she wrote it didn't mean she doesn't, didn't have negative repercussions as a result. I mean, that's massively taboo. Exactly.

Matthew Spaur: And that's probably why she wrote it. But, I, I'm just saying it, people who have done far more courageous things and published far more revealing stories than mine, and I was, I was being all, I don't know, scared, precious. Shameful something and I needed to just get over it, that that's my past. I can't change it. In a lot of ways, it's shaped me who I am for the better.

Matthew Spaur: So let's just embrace who I am and go forward. It's part of my story.

Sean Weisbrot: So it's funny that you mentioned shame as well, because the person I'm recording with next our episode is about shame. So she's a coach and. One of the things she recognized a lot of the people she works with have in common is that they feel deep shame.

Sean Weisbrot: And so we are gonna talk about shame as an entrepreneur and how it can basically destroy your business and yourself if you don't just get the hell over it. So that's like an hour in a nutshell.

Matthew Spaur: That's a fascinating topic. And if you look at Brene Brown, who's become this global phenomenon. Her sociological research was shameful. I mean, that's how she sees herself as a shame researcher, even though she's done all of these other things. That's who she is at her core, and it's been a powerful topic, and it's especially powerful for men. I think men are programmed to always be strong, to never fail, to always have an answer, to always be capable.

Matthew Spaur: And if you, if you fail on those things, it's shameful. You have failed as a man. and I think that's something guys need to get over. Absolutely.

Sean Weisbrot: I had said to you previously, I thought that it was, it wasn't the story that I was expecting because I know so many people that made a lot of money fast, lost a lot of money fast, and then made it back again fast.

Sean Weisbrot: But you decided to go the slow route and there's nothing wrong with that. It's, I think, unique for my generation. To hear that, looking slow and steady wins the race. It's okay. And it's true because there are probably. Thousands or tens of thousands or more people like you in America that are like the quiet millionaires next door that people don't realize you have this money, you just work, you work hard, you work smart, you spend your whole life at it, and, and you just do it.

Sean Weisbrot: and those people are more likely to keep that money because they're not flaunting it, they're not blowing it on stupid things. Like me, I met a guy, I won't say who he is, he's not a guest. I haven't interviewed him before. But he was like 25, 26. He's like, I did an e-comm business, made millions of dollars.

Sean Weisbrot: And honestly, I blew it all on the clubs, blew it on women, blew it on drugs, blew it on partying. And I woke up one day and I realized I needed to stop that. And then I started again and I made it all back again. Took a few years. Now I'm married with kids and, and made the money back, but like. I realized I had to do it differently.

Sean Weisbrot: So that's why I really like your story because it's like, it's different from how we would approach it. So at what point did you realize you needed to make a change and you needed to start over?

Matthew Spaur: Wow, so literally, so my wife passed away from this disease porphyria in June of 2003, and I kept the paper going as much as I could. Until one day. I wanna say, I'm trying to think of the actual, whether it was October or November of that year. Oh, it must have been November. It was right at the start of November. I literally woke up on a Saturday morning and the first thing in my head was, I have to stop this. It was just, there was this absolute moment of clarity of, I'm, I'm now officially done and need to be done.

Matthew Spaur: I've done everything that I know to do to try and make this situation work. And I spent the rest of the month. I said, I'm gonna have this paper sold by the end of the month. I did. It was a horrible deal and I ended up having to take it back, but that was the moment that I just knew stuff's gotta change immediately.

Matthew Spaur: but it took me another, almost another year to completely unwind that and. I ended up essentially just closing the business, selling some assets, and doing what I can and figuring out how to recharge and go forward.

Sean Weisbrot: So how did you recharge?

Matthew Spaur: Once the paper was finally closed, I literally went home and barely got out of bed or my pajamas for like six weeks. I was just completely exhausted. The pets I had at the time thought it was great. Hey, he's home all day. He's lying around, he's warm. This is great. We're gonna have a pajama party for a month. but I needed that. I was completely physically and spiritually exhausted. After that, I finally started noticing, well, I'm feeling a little better.

Matthew Spaur: I have a little more energy. and there's a whole chapter in the book about how you sort of wake up again, from being that spent. and I sort of worked my way back. I was not ready. I had no ideas, first of all, to start another business, and I was not ready to do it. So I ended up doing some contract work, which led to being an employee, and sort of went back to low risk, steady state sort of stuff.

Sean Weisbrot: One thing that wasn't clear to me the last time we talked that still isn't clear to me is after she died. What happened to the kids? Did you continue to live with them? Did they go with like their grandparents? Like what, what happened?

Matthew Spaur: She had three sons, and they were all from previous relationships. They weren't any of our biological kids. And so, the oldest one who was, when her, when his mom passed away was 17. Wanted to stay with me. His dad said, you should come live with me in Las Vegas. And, Brad was his name, said, no, A, I feel like this is my home. And I have serious medical issues from porphyria as well.

Matthew Spaur: I'm in no state to pick up and move to a whole nother community and find doctors and all that other stuff. I'm just not ready to do that. The two half brothers who were Walt and Chris who were younger, did stay with their dad, who lived in Spokane. Frankly, he lived a few blocks away. My thought at the time was, I didn't have a lot of respect for their dad after some of the stunts he had pulled.

Matthew Spaur: Everybody has stories about that sort of situation, but I felt like. What those kids needed was some peace. They didn't need any more stress from illness or parents fighting or anything else. They needed some stability in their life and could I deliver that? I don't think I was in a position then.

Matthew Spaur: I still had a very sick kid to look after. I had a business that I was still trying to run. I was pretty depleted. I had no legal claim on them, like I hadn't adopted them. I wasn't officially their parent, and so it just seemed like the right thing to do is okay. I may not have great respect for their dad, but he seems like he can at least be a passable parent.

Matthew Spaur: For them. And, that was the better choice I thought.

Sean Weisbrot: You said the name of this illness once or twice, but I've never heard of it. What is it? And, and how, and how did they both get it at the same time? What the heck is it?

Matthew Spaur: So it's called porphyria and it's actually a class of diseases. and the way it works, your body produces a chemical called heme. It's part of hemoglobin, which most people know. So heme is a molecule that transfers oxygen around the body. You need it. It's a very crucial thing when your body synthesizes. He, it's an eight step process. if you remember high school chemistry that you know this, then this, then this, right? if your body and, and at the end of each of those steps, there are byproducts that are left over from the chemical reactions.

Matthew Spaur: Your body produces enzymes to clean up those byproducts of whatever that step was. So the disease family porphyria is missing one of those enzymes from one of those eight steps. So there's eight different types of porphyria. And what happens is these porphyrins, as they're known, that can build up if they're not cleaned up by enzymes, go on to become a neurotoxin in your body.

Matthew Spaur: They can attack any. Voluntary or involuntary nervous system throughout your body, which makes porphyria a very hard disease to diagnose. 'cause it looks like everything else, you know? Because if it attacks this nervous system, it looks like a disease of that nervous system, not of the blood, basically. And because it's blood, it can go anywhere.

Matthew Spaur: So it can cause all sorts of problems and, and it, it really does look different for different people. It is a genetic thing. That's how my wife had it and then her kid had it. so it is something that can travel through families as well.

Sean Weisbrot: It's just strange how they kind of got it at the same time.

Matthew Spaur: Yeah. And, and that's sort of. Coincidental in some ways. My wife had had a very bad illness years before I had met her. I mean, just horrible stuff, that had no explanation at the time. and so looking back, once she was diagnosed with porphyria, then it's like, oh, maybe that's what that was, that, two years of being absolutely incapacitated.

Matthew Spaur: Maybe that's what that was. Rare disease is an interesting thing, and I'm gonna go off on a tangent here for a moment. I know this is not your audience, but, there are as many people in America, excuse me, suffering from a rare disease as there are people suffering from cardiac disease. Cardiac disease is the number one killer in the US but there's just as many people who are going through something that takes two to 15 years to get a diagnosis.

Matthew Spaur: That's the path of somebody with a rare disease. They go from specialist to specialist, having, either being told you don't have something, it's all in your head, or you have this other thing. That is the thing I know because it fits in my box of my daily practice. or you're gonna, let's do this surgery on you, which turns out to be horribly invasive and expensive and does nothing because it's an incorrect diagnosis.

Matthew Spaur: So finally getting an accurate diagnosis, finding a community, and getting to a new phase in their life. I mean, honestly, if they haven't died along the way, because rare diseases are often very severe diseases as well. and so that's what happened with Connie. She had been on this journey and finally got a diagnosis with porphyria specifically and her type of porphyria.

Matthew Spaur: One pattern is that it. Exhibits if you have a significant outbreak flare up, whatever you want to call it, at, at, the end of puberty. And so as her kid was 16, 17,

Sean Weisbrot: That's what happened. That's pretty rough.

Matthew Spaur: It is. It's tough. but part of the reason I wanted to, to bring this book out and talk about this is it does happen to so many people, and yet because of their specific little disease, I shouldn't call it little, but their very specific disease.

Matthew Spaur: keeps them in a very small community. They need to see that there's a much bigger community of people going through the same thing, maybe for slightly different reasons, but they're having the same experience. and as a society, we do a little bit to help these people. I mean, we do have some laws that protect what are known as orphan drugs.

Matthew Spaur: They're drugs that can't make money because they serve a very small population, but without it, people will die. And so we as a society try to make a market for those sorts of things. We have, there's organizations like the National Organization of Rare Diseases that tries to advocate for this group in general.

Matthew Spaur: And then there's organizations for each specific disease or a lot of them. But People need to know that they're not alone in this, that there's literally 8% of the US population going through this as patients, and then their families on top of that.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm sure there's a lot of people that are trying to run businesses and dealing with these illnesses themselves. I wouldn't be ashamed of, as you said, going on a tangent because, just like the episode that I'm gonna do about shame, this is stuff that we're all dealing with, I mean. I don't really talk about it on air, but my mom has dementia and she's 62, and we've been fighting for almost 10 years to figure out what it is.

Sean Weisbrot: We don't even, we, we, we don't even know what it is. There's no diagnosis whatsoever. We've tried this thing, we've tried that thing. We have no idea. All we know is it affects her prefrontal cortex. It affects her executive functioning. She struggles to plan, to strategize, to execute. To organize. She struggles to cook, to clean, to pay the bills.

Sean Weisbrot: She gets lost driving. Sometimes she gets lost in thought during conversations and like people didn't, people outside of our family didn't start to notice until two or three years ago, but it's been plaguing us. It's been extremely stressful and, and, detrimental to our wellbeing. I, I come home every year for two or three or four months just so that I can spend time with my parents and help my dad somewhat to take care of my mom, but I'm also helping to take care of his stuff because, he, he has his own issues and trying to help my grandma because my dad's working and my mom can't work.

Sean Weisbrot: And so like, I'm, I'm 36 years old, but I've been a caregiver for at least the last five years. And while I'm not here full time because I couldn't do it, I'm here for months out of the year to do the best that I can to give them the best life that they can have. And, I think a lot more people are going through these kinds of things than we think because a lot of people don't really talk about it.

Sean Weisbrot: And that's why I try to, like, I've been. I've been pretty straightforward and open about my, my weight loss and my divorce, and struggles with my startup and now stuff with my mom and, and, and all of that. And, so I look at the podcast as kind of therapy for me because, because, like for example, when I, when I came to you, it was like, I've been through that.

Sean Weisbrot: I want to know what your experience has been. And so like the shame thing is interesting 'cause Yeah. I felt ashamed. Sure. I am gonna be interviewing someone who had postpartum depression and is an entrepreneur. And so, granted I haven't had kids and I'm not a mother and I probably won't know what postpartum depression is.

Sean Weisbrot: That doesn't mean there aren't entrepreneurs out there that are struggling with it. So, Yeah, don't, don't feel ashamed about taking airtime to talk about something that's important that we're all going through. That's the whole existence of this podcast, is to talk about things that we as entrepreneurs are dealing with. It's our life. It's, it's the, the stuff that's going on that makes us who we are.

Matthew Spaur: Yeah. Wow. That's, that's a, a tough story about your mom. That's very early onset dementia. Doctors have this great word, idiopathic. I don't know if you've run into it, but it, it, it basically means for them of unknown origin.

Matthew Spaur: In other words, we don't know where the hell this illness came from. Your mom. If you read through your mom's charts, I bet you'll find the phrase idiopathic dementia. Dementia that we don't have any explanation for. And I think, I think a lot of us have things that are idiopathic to other people, right?

Matthew Spaur: It's just our stuff. However it showed up, we gotta deal with it. That, that's where I was going with that.

Sean Weisbrot: There's multiple potential reasons why this has happened. We haven't been able to pinpoint any of them. There's, there's enough evidence that, like, it might be this thing, but it's, but not enough evidence to say that it's not, or maybe it's another thing that's happened in her life, but maybe it's, it's multiple things put together. It's like so, so difficult to put it together.

Matthew Spaur: My dad went through something similar before he passed away. He had probably been having some dementia sort of symptoms that he hid pretty well, honestly. and then he had some seizures, which were completely unexplained. Like we have no idea why they showed up.

Matthew Spaur: and it was only, several years into this journey that somebody finally said, oh, now you have something that we can call Alzheimer's. But I. At that point, it's like, oh, great, you have a name for it, but that doesn't really help us. Right. It didn't really do much at that point. but I, I think the other part of this, well, I also wanted to say you're absolutely right.

Matthew Spaur: Caregiving is really tough, and I think as a society we have learned a lot more about how hard and important that is because of the pandemic. There are so many more people out there who have gone through being a caregiver or they're a caregiver now. To somebody who is, either acutely or chronically suffering from just pandemic related stuff.

Matthew Spaur: But for the audience of entrepreneurs, problems are also opportunities, right? I think we need to see things like caregiving as a place that is fully worth entrepreneurial thought as much as anything else. It's a huge area that needs to be better. And lots of entrepreneurs would look for what's a big area that needs to be better, that I could possibly improve?

Matthew Spaur: Caregiving is a great, great field of opportunity for somebody in Japan.

Sean Weisbrot: They're looking at it from the point of view of loneliness, right? Oftentimes, people who are ill also become lonely because they don't get enough facetime. With loved ones or or elderly people in the same vein, they might be otherwise healthy, but lack face time with loved ones, and that can create existential depression and loneliness.

Sean Weisbrot: So this is going on in Japan now where they've had this demographic bomb that's gone off and they just don't have enough young people to take care of the elderly while continuing to have the next generation be born and work in, in the economy in order to keep it going. They're just struggling. There's just not any, like they, there's just not enough people being born.

Sean Weisbrot: And so they've had to approach it from let's create robots that can keep the elderly company, that's like the best thing they could think of. Where, where in America we, we've said, let's create robots to keep our animals low, not lonely, while we're out of the house. Right? So, right. So yeah, I think. Robots are a potential way to handle this kind of stuff. Obviously there's a lot of other ways. I have a VR headset that I use daily. I would love for my grandma to have a VR headset, but she's 90, she can't lift her head. Like she, she can't even, she can't do this. Her shoulders are frozen. Her neck's messed up.

Sean Weisbrot: She's got pain all over. She couldn't, she's got arthritis in her hand. She couldn't even operate it. If she wanted to. And I think VR could be an amazing solution. I know I gave my dad my VR headset to try and I ended up putting him in Horizon Worlds, which is a, a meta app. And he was in some VR concert that was going on live.

Sean Weisbrot: And he said some kids came up to him in the VR world and they were giving him high fives. And he said one of the people gave him a kiss on the cheek, like all sorts of weird shit. And he loved it. He was like, it was an amazing experience and he was just sitting on his couch, you know. But I also introduced him to ping pong and mini golf and these other sports, and he liked it.

Sean Weisbrot: This is incredible. I would do this all the time if I could. Now, granted, I left my VR headset when I went to Europe for six months, and guess what? It never left the case, but that's a different story. but yeah, I think there's a lot of things that we're doing that could be helpful.

Matthew Spaur: But we got, we got on that on opportunity. So making that technology much more accessible in a medical or caregiving environment. That's a great opportunity, right?

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. There's evidence that. VR, for example, could help with symptoms of autism. But then again, there's also evidence that psychedelics could be helpful with existential depression.

Sean Weisbrot: And I mean, not, not evidence, like fact. There's a tremendous amount of research that has proven without a shadow of a doubt that psychedelics have been amazing for curing depression. Curing depression. Curing treatment is resistant depression, which is really just a fancy way of saying the drugs didn't work because the person didn't change their lifestyle to actually live a way that they wanted to live.

Sean Weisbrot: And so they're gonna continue to be depressed. and there's also stem cells like I'm, I'm really passionate about and, and excited about the future because of. Those three things in particular, virtual reality, psychedelics and, and stem cells. I think the three of them have massive potential to change the way we live on a daily basis and make people happier, healthier, and more connected.

Sean Weisbrot: Put 'em together and write your first sci-fi novel. Well, maybe not together, but, well, yeah, so I, I, I do microdose, so I actually, I'm microdosing today. I'm microdosing a few days a week, and one of the things I'm actually doing for my mom right now is helping her wean off her antidepressants for the first time in seven years. She's gonna be completely off antidepressants in the next two weeks.

Matthew Spaur: How's she doing?

Sean Weisbrot: And she seems to be doing okay. The reason why we're doing it is because we want to see her go through a psychedelic trip that she's agreed to do. Because we believe that the science will show that psychedelics can help her mental condition, and I also wanna get her into a stem cell study. But that's a lot harder because there's evidence that stem cells, that a stem cell injection directly into the brain can undo damage from a stroke six months after.

Sean Weisbrot: More than six months after. So if you have damage to your brain and stem cells can fix it, can make it so that you didn't even have it, then why can't it undo dementia?

Matthew Spaur: That's a great question. Absolutely. That's fascinating. I hadn't heard that. I know that, I mean, psychedelics have even been on 60 Minutes, right?

Matthew Spaur: They've done a segment on how psilocybin has helped people with. Serious depression and, and really quickly too, same thing with ecstasy. Those two drugs have a lot of therapeutic possibilities that have not been fully exploited yet.

Sean Weisbrot: I would put my money on psilocybin over ecstasy. Anything. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wanna talk about as we come to a close?

Matthew Spaur: I think entrepreneurs do things because they love to do things. Money is great. But at least my impression is they're not motivated solely by money. That, and I think if you want to pursue the things that, that you really want to do, doing them as an entrepreneur or doing them as a more traditional employee, it's sort of, two sides is the same coin, but I, I think it's forming the career, the portfolio, the life you want to have.

Matthew Spaur: And if it's entrepreneurial or employee or you go back and forth, or a mix of both with a side hustle. I think it's all good. I think the main thing is do what is suited for you, what makes you you. Absolutely. So how can people follow up with you? They can certainly find me on LinkedIn, under just my good old name.

Matthew Spaur: you can, is it my website, Matthew spore.com to learn more about my book, which is Making a small Fortune right there. also@matthewsport.com. There's links. I have a menu called My Day Jobs, that points to my marketing site and also my voiceover work. I am an audiobook narrator as well. So yeah, I would love to hear from people.

Matthew Spaur: I think you're probably building a really fascinating audience by focusing on, on the humanity of being an entrepreneur.