McCullagh Interview with Casey and Marty Stewart

From CaseyPedia

Declan McCullagh managed to record a historic interview with Casey Serin and publisher Marty Stewart. The MP3 is available to download from McCullagh's CNET article.^[1]

[edit] Transcript of recording

DECLAN

This is Declan McCullagh from CNET News.com. Joining me in a few moments will be Casey Serin, the world's most hated blogger, telling us why he fled to Australia and what's going on with his blog, publishing career,and his personal life. Also joining us will be Marty Stewart, one of Casey's business partners. First up, Marty.

(Begin Call)

DECLAN

So you said that the content was being, um, pirated?

MARTY

Uh, yeah, heh, again, I'm Marty Stewart with PageDaddy.com. Um, actually, I have the publishing deal with Casey, or, my company does and, um, uh, yeah I... I never wanted to get sucked into, uh, Casey's story, per se, I just wanted to kinda report on it, you know, in book and info product form just as you are, with articles! And, um, basically, our content, er, actually, a chunk of our content and creation [phone] calls were actually on a hidden web page on our site, as well as other client proposals and other client-sensitive material and somehow, I don't know how yet, these people-- call 'em Casey's Haterz™-- found out about our... somehow found these hidden pages. I don't know if one of our servers was hacked or what, but basically--

DECLAN

Basically wasn't it just indexed by the Alexa search engine? Maybe they... if it was on the search engine, it had to be on there for some reason, maybe there was a link to it from a public website that was crawled, what do you think?

MARTY

Yeah I think what may have happened... just because, obviously we're marketers, so we have Alexa toolbars on even our assistants, our virtual assistants, everybody who works for our company has Alexa toolbars installed. So the only thing I can surmise is that somehow just by surfing with Alexa... because there was no index, no follow tags, you know, there was the word "private" written all over, there's copyright notices all over and it's more for our content grouping, so apparently yeah, some of those pages got indexed on Alexa, which again I still don't know how they indexed them, there was no index, no follow tags, but um, the point is is that, this one blog, exurbannation.blogspot.com, they seem to be the enablers and tehre was links to our actual raw content, just kinda like you're recording this call right now. So, now it's being uploaded and blasted all over the place, and now me personally and my company, you know, is being blasted and smeared all over the Internet, so uh, now I'm, to be frank I'm very pissed (laughs)

DECLAN

Are you taking any action, like, uh, Casey apparently said that he was going to file a DMCA take down notice with Exurban Nation, are you going to do a similar type of thing with any of the sites that have mirrored your content?

MARTY

Oh yes, actually, I mean, unfortunately, I had to set up a full-time assistant until all this is taken care of, through Google, through, um, I don't even know what other sites, my assistant just keeps sending me emails, they just keep researching and finding more links everywhere, so basically we're just kinda following the grapevine of anywhere and everywhere the links are leading and there's a lot of various websites...

CASEY

Okay, good thing I made it on, hey guys.

DECLAN

Hi Casey.

MARTY

Hello?

CASEY

Hey.

MARTY

Hey. So basically, Declan to answer your question, yes, aggressively pre-pursuing any website that has our private content posted on it. You know, obviously it's copyrighted content and it's being smeared all over, and also, whatever procedure... that's what we're still trying to figure out today, is that through Google? Anybody's screen name, as far as people that are leaving certain posts, and are actually screen names for people that are uploading onto various websites, we're going to aggressively pursue finding out who these people actually are and, again, now it's a principle thing in my mind. Just as a question to you Declan, did anyone actually hunt you down just as they're doing with my business right now, just because we're reporting on Casey's story?

DECLAN

I don't think it's happened to me, at least, not the same way-- I've received death threats and that kind of thing, I've been doing this for over a decade and it happens-- but... not exactly what you're talking about. Okay, so what, why not just leave this alone? It seems like the more you try to make a stink about this, and file legal threats or lawsuits, the more people are going to mirror the content maybe in other countries, put it up on freenet, that sort of thing. Maybe if you just ignore it, it'll just go away.

MARTY

Yeah, no, I totally understand, again it's all... we're obviously going to do the filing thing, "this is our copyrighted content, please remove it", I just want to do data collection because if we need to go further we will, but in essence it's a complete waste of time and that's all they're trying to do is, whoever these people are, they're just trying to waste people's time... like they have nothing better to do with their lives.

CASEY

Well the reason you don't want to let it go is because, we've been letting this go for so long that people just think they can do this without penalties. So at least we need to do this for the first time to show people that there's consequences.

DECLAN

Casey, when did you arrive in Australia?

CASEY

Um, when was it, Friday? No, actually it was Thursday, Pacific coast time.

DECLAN

So what have you been doing since then, have you been able to catch a glimpse of the country at all, playing tourist?

CASEY

No, not really, because that wasn't really the purpose. I'll probably do some of that later on, but right now I've just been trying to focus on getting things done.

DECLAN

And so how is this affecting your family life? I mean, it sounds like, maybe you can set the record straight, but from what... it sounds like you didn't give your wife very much notice.

CASEY

Correct, I didn't give my wife much notice. I knew that if I did give a lot of notice, like a day, and by the way, I didn't even know I was going until like the night before, so I myself didn't have a lot of notice but I probably could have planned it out a little better. She would have probably tried to stop me and um, so I needed to do what I had to do. By going here I was able to bring the blog back on because the guy that gave me the $1000 bucks for the flight, really he was giving it to me not for the flight, per se, but to bring the blog back on, and I thought, "hey, maybe I can use that"... and plus, you know, the whole thing with Marty and the publishing deal we have is, you know, I couldn't just take the blog down without facing consequences and there really wasn't any way around it and... and plus personally I was making money for it, so to me, it was, I needed to be able to continue doing that, and I think my wife just didn't understand that we had an asset that was actually producing income... and it's not so easy for me to just go out there and get a job overnight and so, um, all those factors combined, I decided to bring the blog back on... and being here allows me to have a distraction-free environment to work in because at home, there's so much drama going around this blog and everything... and plus you never know when my laptop and my phone can get taken away without me having any control over it... so I just needed a quiet place to work.

DECLAN

Was your wife confiscating your laptop and your phone application?

CASEY

Well, at one point, she did, and that was the point when she's had enough, so you never know what she's gonna do. And it could've been anywhere, it didn't have to be Australia, I've been wanting to get away and kinda focus on business for a while and just really make a difference and she knew about that and we'd been talking about it but there was nothing concrete until this opoportunity came up... and hey if it's in Australia it's all good. (snickers)

DECLAN

And you've left enough money for her to pay the rent for the duration of time you're going to be gone, the next few months, that type of thing?

CASEY

Well... (nervous wheezing) the Haterz™ out there think I drained the bank account, that's not true, I only used about a hundred dollars to pay for the flight, and some extra money for, like, food while I was traveling, so I spent, like, only a $150 bucks so far on this trip, and while I'm staying here I'm not spending any money. There was, like, $500 in the checking account when I was leaving, but then while, in the days I was traveling, there were some other expenses in the account that were not related to my traveling, so it looked like I'm taking all this money out, and I think she didn't realize it was other stuff... and I haven't had a chance to really talk to her yet, I'm trying to get ahold of her... but I am putting some money back into the account today because I have a $500 payment coming in, so it's not like I'm trying to leave her with no money. I have full intention to continue supporting her and making sure she's not stranded.

DECLAN

So... you have or have not paid rent for a few months for her?

CASEY

(slight pause) Wellllll... we pre-paid rent for like two months and so... I forget if if the rent's due yet, or if it's next months it's due, but one way or another she'll... I'll get her money for rent.

DECLAN

Ooookay. Um. And so how are you going to pay for your trip back by the way?

CASEY

(pause) (mutters) Gonna have to make some money.

DECLAN

OH. So what's your best chance of doing that right now? Last time we talked, you were talking something about "casinos", now you have a publishing deal, what.... what's your best bet do you think?

CASEY

A combination of different things. My immediate income stream obviously is the advertising on the blog which I didn't realize I had until I was forced to make some money from it. So that whole contract idea with my wife where I needed to make a $1000 a week, that served it's purpose. It forced me to monetize the blog in a major way, enough to where it would be a full-time income, and unfortunately, because I had to took it down for a week I had to return the money to the advertiser, or most of it, you know, some of them allowed me to do a pro-rated refund and some of them allowed me to keep all of the money, but I returned probably, about, the money I took in, I probably ended up returning about 80-90% of it. So now I have, I'm gonna try to mend all those relationships with my advertisers and see how many of them are gonna want to stick around, but that's what I'm going to do this week.

DECLAN

... So that's your short term idea...

CASEY

I was on track to be making about 3-4000 dollars a month just from advertisers that signed up... plus that didn't include the Yahoo! and the Google AdSense and all that... and plus I had more advertisers interested that I was talking with, and negotiating pricing and all that stuff, so I don't see any problems with getting back to about 4 grand a month... which is a thousand dollars a week. It might just take a little bit of time to get everyone back on board.

DECLAN

It strikes me... and maybe I'm wrong here and you can correct me (veiled sarcasm)... but people are coming to your site as much as anything else as for the soap opera component-- what's happening with your wife and the lenders and CashCall and the IRS-- and so they're not really looking for foreclosure advice, they're looking for the soap opera and so soap operas sell money, sorry, soap operas are profitable, maybe you can make money off of that, can you translate that into some sort of foreclosure advice site, you think?

CASEY

(long pause) Well, yeah, I gotta get to all my different audiences, but you're right, one of my audiences is trainwreck watchers, as they like to be called, and I call them the same. Um, I'm not sure how I can monetize them aside from having some interesting info products for them to download or just some merchandise with my sayings on it or whatever, but in terms of taking advantage of the foreclosure website idea, I'm still going to do that and I feel like there's definitely a market for it. Just, there are a lot of people who look at the comments, and they assume there's nobody looking for help, but the people looking for help, they're not gonna be vocal about it, they still email me. So I'm still getting a steady stream of emails, people are asking for advice, and right now I'm not really monetizing those leads per se because I don't have a really trustworthy partner to send these leads to... but I'm gonna start working on bringing people on board to help people out.

DECLAN

That makes sense. There's--

CASEY

(interrupts) And the thing is with those leads, for example, I have one of my advertisers is American Foreclosure Services, and we've been talking about something where I have a form that captures people's information. Remember I was telling you I was going to have that form? Well I wasn't quite ready because I want, before I have that form, I want to make sure I have you know somebody who's realloy going to help those people out, so I was dealing with this guy LossMitPro, whose name is actually Mark Villaseñor, and things didn't work out between us, so now I'm going to go to the next person which is actually that advertiser I have, and actually they have the ability to service people nationally and they're looking for people who are looking for foreclosure help. They offered to give me like 30-40% referral fee for any business they end up doing so that's, that could be a nice income stream.

DECLAN

So what does that mean in reality, like a $100 per, $500 bucks?

CASEY

(pause) Well, it's going to be 30-40% of whatever they end up making of the customer and they don't work with everybody, they only work with people they can genuinely help, and they normally charge a one month mortgage payment, so we're talking like $1200 is what they're gonna be charging... and I'll get like $300 of that. So it's not a bad income stream, if I can get a few leads a mon--, few leads a week, then end up converting, then that's just extra money to live on.

DECLAN

What about the IRS? You said you filed an extension; will you pay estimated taxes, how much will you owe?

CASEY

(long pause) Not sure, uh, but based on our initial meeting with our accountant and based on some initial numbers, he doesn't think we're gonna owe anything, so it's just a matter of getting the paperwork in and filing those taxes.

DECLAN

Where in Australia are you? Maybe you don't want to give me your exact address, but where, what area, what region, what city...

CASEY

Well, I'm in Queensland. That's as far as I can say.

DECLAN

You can't even say what county you're in?

CASEY

Uh..

DECLAN

Let's say you're in California..

CASEY

It's either Queensland or New South Wales. Or, it might be, like...

DECLAN

That's almost half of the country, though!

CASEY

Well, it's basically like the East Coast of the country, I can't go into... because, because... I want to respect the privacy of the person I'm living with, he didn't even want to mention the city name, so...

DECLAN

Okay, so I guess, let's move on. Say, do your parents and your brother support your move out, um, to the other end of the world?

CASEY

Uhm... I haven't had the chance to talk to either one of them in detail but um, you know, they're just... hey if that's what you gotta do, that's what you gotta do. I believe that's... what their attitude... I need to talk with all of them still. (long pause) And by the way, I didn't move, I'm just... here... temporarily... to get some stuff done. (muttering) It's not like I fled the country.

DECLAN

How long do you think you can stay on a tourist visa?

CASEY

I think it's like up to 3 months and then you have to talk to them again about staying longer, but I'm not sure. I know I initially have up to 3 months here.

DECLAN

Some of your fans, your Haterz™, whatever you want to call them, sometimes I guess they can be both, are asking for an update of financial disclosure statement, are you gonna post one?

CASEY

(pause) I'm thinking about that... 'cause I need to have everything updated anyway, so I might as well post something about it... so we'll see. Then I need to talk with my wife about that, and my account, make sure everything's okay with me continuing to post all those numbers on the internet and all that.

DECLAN

It seems as though what makes a personal finance blog compelling is posting that kind of information: here's how much I owe, here's what I'm doing to pay it off, and so on. How can you maintain that kind of compelling disclosure without details?

CASEY

(pause) Yup. Well, I'm always the one to provide as much detail as possible, you know that, so... I've also seen the downside of going too far without talking with everybody who might be affected so I gotta keep that balance.

DECLANE

So the folks at Exurban Nation are saying something that you're going to be sending a DMCA complaint to Google first thing tomorrow, I guess that's over some of the posts, pod MP3s, and so on, that were mirrored on their blog. Are you going, did you do that?

CASEY

I'm gonna... it's in the works, yeah.

DECLAN

But you're still planning on it.

CASEY

Well yeah! Because some of that is... enforcing that stuff, it's just not right for them to continue ripping my posts and, and putting them in their comments, and encouraging people to read it there. At least if they would've given me a link, I can see that, but they don't do any of that stuff. And then they take down my podcasts and host them offsite in order to not give me any traffic to TalkShoe, 'cuz TalkShoe pays you for downloads, it's not a lot of money but it's a little extra revenue that can help with, with my goals.

DECLAN

It seems as though you might have lost control of the Casey Serin story to some extent. Everyone used to go to iamfacingforeclosure.com, but now they're going to other sites including the Exurban Nation, and Caseypedia, and what not, is that true?

CASEY

I wouldn't say that's true. (gasps, wheezes for breath) Imagine... What if... They have all these spin-offs... what does that tell you about the main site? I mean, there's enough people reading about it that there's room for, in that main space, there's room for other people to come on board and put in their own commentary... Just because people are going elsewhere doesn't mean they're not going to go to the main source to see the latest and greatest, so that's just an indication of the popularity of my blog, for one, and two, those guys add to the story so they're actually helping me by keeping things interesting. It's just when it crosses the line that I get upset. It's kind of a... like when one hand washes the other, it's all good in the end.

DECLAN

I haven't heard you use many of your Caseyisms, like itsallgood, and, uh, organic, and that kind of thing, in this call or even in recently in your posts, are you feeling more down than you were when we last talked?

CASEY

Uh, maybe, a lot of things have been happening and people focus in on my Caseyisms, I don't use them that often, otherwise it'd be over used, so you know, you gotta, gotta use them just enough to where people will hear it so they'll say oh it's that, but if you overuse it, it loses its appeal I believe. And in my everyday speech, I definitely use itsallgood, I use the word sweet quite a bit, but at the same time, the subject's gotta be worthy of that word. If it's not sweet, then I'm not gonna say it. And lately things haven't been completely all good and things haven't been supersweet either, so that's why they probably haven't been hearing a lot of it.

DECLAN

And so you had a lot of your readers or Haterz™ or whatever say I'm gonna be contacting the FBI, DOJ, or the Sacramento state attorney general's office, and all of these types of law enforcement agencies; are you worried about that?

CASEY

Well, there's nothing I can do about it, so I don't really worry about it too much, if there's anything I can do I'll do it, the only thing I can do is is continue selling my story, continue working on paying off my debt or doing the best thing I can do, and that's it, I can't just live in fear and go hide under a rock somewhere.

DECLAN

When do you plan to come back?

CASEY

Not sure yet.

DECLAN

A week, months?

CASEY

(pause) Well it'll definitely be under three months...... unless I can extend my stay.... but I'm really not sure, everything's up in the air, just living day by day.

DECLAN

You said earlier that you don't like, in fact, you were quite upset, when posts on the Exurban Nation and other Haterz™ sites "cross the line" especially when regarding your family. What exactly is "crossing the line", since you brought them into this by posting their names in the first place?

CASEY

(long pause) Well, first, for the record, I didn't bring nobody into it. They are the ones that dug up my old blog which I took down when I realized I had all these people digging up dirt on me, so, the majority of the people they are talking about that I don't think they should be talking about I didn't even mention on my main blog, they just researched it. So I feel like they're crossing the line by violating people's privacy that have nothing to do with anything to do with me right now.... they just happened to be mentioned in the past by me in my personal blog which was supposed to stay private to begin with but they found a back door into it, and the few people that I do mention on my main blog, I mention them in a very limited capacity, but what do the Haterz do, they take it to the extreme, and get into, I think, a defamation and libel, cause it's just , they get to a point where they're digging up all this dirt without verifying, they put up a very negative spin on everything, and so now, anybody's who's associated with me, if they Google their name, they might find some stuff that they'd rather not have on there. And I'm in a really tough predicament 'cuz sometimes people don't even want to associate with me. It hasn't been a big issue, but it's definitely an issue I"m gonna have to deal with for a long time.

DECLAN

So what's crossing the line? Is it speculating about the state of your marriage, is it speculating about whether your wife will leave you, what, what's crossing the line exactly?

CASEY

Well I told y--, I made it very clear that my family does not want to be talked about, and they continue doing that. and I removed everything regarding my wife from my blog recently to show my wife that I take her privacy seriously, she doesn't want to be mentioned anywhere, and they know that, but they keep talking about her! The only reason I mention her in this last post is because they're putting a very very negative spin on the whole thing and some stuff is just plain wrong and so I had to respond with that to protect the integrity of everything and the reputation and so that's definitely crossing the line when you know people don't want to be talked about and and posting about copyrighted material? There's no question about it, not only is it wrong, it's illegal to do that! and and also just spreading rumors without checking the facts and talking about people when you know that they're not really... there's really no reason to be talking about them aside from the fact that they're just trying to get at me or dig up dirt on me...

DECLAN

Are you going---

CASEY

(interrupting angrily) Meaning people that are not directly involved with what I'm doing, to begin with.

DECLAN

Are you going to---

CASEY

(interrupting again) Like they're digging up crap on my family members, they, they have nothing to do with this whole story!

DECLAN

Ah, sorry. Are you going to host your your Foreclosure Friday conference call this week?

CASEY

Well it's not scheduled, I'm probably not going to do it this week, we'll see. I may or may not go back to it, right now there's so much up in the air that I'm not sure when I'm going to bring that back on.

DECLAN

Then how do you plan on interacting with folks? You're not approving comments, at least, not very quickly on your blog, uh, and you're not doing the foreclosure cast so... how are you going to do it? Email?

CASEY

We'll see, we'll see. Again, it's all up in the air. I am looking for possible moderators to replace Nigel who used to moderate, but again, I'm gonna have to be very careful about who I trust, obviously I found that it's very hard to trust anybody nowadays. So it's, again, we'll see how things develop in the next few days to a week.

DECLAN

Any regrets in terms of heading to Australia?

CASEY

So far no.

DECLAN

Do you think Galina's still gonna be there waiting for you when you come back?

CASEY

(long pause) Hopefully.

DECLAN

You feeling okay?

CASEY

(longer pause) Yeah. It's a little early here, so... hah, it's 5:16 AM right now. But aside from that I'm feeling fine.

DECLAN

Anything else either of you want to mention, I think I've asked the questions I wanted to.

CASEY

Uh, that's pretty much it--

MARTY

Just, uh, earlier comment, to what you said, seems like a huge, what you call it, fan base of the blog is, uh, kinda follows the soap opera mentality, and basically, what it seems like is there is a soap opera mentality that is broken up into three sections: real estate investors, people facing foreclosure, and then, you know, as Casey mentioned, you guys get a lot of email, you know, because people actually need help, because it's the blog, it's the blog component, and they see how, all this crap and the comments, and that's why they contact him personally. But from the calls on the book series, our initial plans were to do the first book, which is basically just telling everything that had happened to him up to this point, the second and/or third one would focus on, one was specifically for real estate investors, one was specifically for people that were in foreclosure or that had gone on through foreclosure sharing their stories or are facing foreclosure, and the fourth one, ultimately, would be Casey's success story, at least, everything that happened in between. So the way we looked at it, this was like a 12 month process, and so yeah, knowing that you've been a reporter for 10 years and had death threats, obviously this probably just seems like a little matter, fruit fly flying around, (chuckling) but some of these people that get all worked up, I guess the question for you is, what is your take on the actual people that are truly, that are passionate, and they just try to disrupt Casey's life in any way possible?

DECLAN

You have some people-- and this is what I said in the article that I wrote for News.com a few weeks ago-- you have some people who honestly are trying to give advice and support for what they view as a young kid who messed up and be set back on the right path, and others who are frustrated that Casey, in their view, hasn't taken advice and have turned into the so-called Haterz™. And by now, the second category is probably larger than the first, but they also might be more vocal, so I don't really know... a question for you, are you paying Casey, or is he paying you for this publishing deal?

MARTY

Uh, we have a strategic publishing deal, with what both parties are bringing to the table. Um, obviously our original agreement is plastered all over the Internet right now, so we have to, we're going to be revising that so that you know obviously, it's not going to be put out there anywhere, but basically, the way everything was going to be structured was that, we're an Internet marketing company, and we're a publishing company, we put out info products and basically we were just going to be reporting on Casey's story, taking that information, packaging it, and marketing it, and um you know, without going into exact exact detail, he has basically a huge-- call it a revenue share, um, simply for the fact that it will help him obviously again you know as he calls it pay back every dirty penny. The only way he's going to be able to do that is to set up different revenue and profit streams. And so doing an info product with books, audios, DVDs, everything surrounding that again with breaking that into four different parts over a 12 month period, obviously we don't know what the success of that's going to be yet, but this was a dedicated effort on our end to get started with the whole process. So... I hope that answers your question.

DECLAN

Uh, thank you. So. What's your biggest success story? You describe yourself as an Internet marketing, traffic driving expert, a consultant, visionary and so on, what's the biggest success story in terms of a company that all those might recognize that you've worked with?

MARTY

Yeah. And, and again, a lot of the clients that I do work for, or other joint venture partners, um, they're big name people, big names in different industries, and I don't want to comment on any of that... I have non disclosures on every single one of my clients and joint ventures. I mean, and, and when I say my company, that's not just me, I'm obviously the forefront of the company.

DECLAN

But even law firms that do incredibly confidential work involving mergers and acquisitions post a list of representative clients on their web site, you can go to Wilson Sonsini, probably the biggest law firm in Northern California, and see that list of representative clients, Apple and HP and so on. Can you even give us any hints?

MARTY

(chuckles) Well, I'd rather not say simply because I do have non disclosure agreements with (mumbles) every single client and joint venture I have... again, you know, I, from our perspective, I, fact is, we don't like to be in the limelight, simply because we don't need to be in the limelight, we're behind the scenes with a lot of people and you know to make them look better and position and brand them. So uh again, we have enough clients and enough high level clients and joint ventures that we don't (nervous chuckle) that we don't need to be a high level, uh, uh, firm, as you put it like... like a law firm... maybe in some point in the future there'll be benefits to that, but we have more than enough business with a variety of different things, so that's why...

DECLAN

(interrupts) How many people, sorry, how many people work at your company?

MARTY

(long pause) Again, I don't.. Declan, I don't mean to be really hush-hush and tight-lipped, it's just, um.. more than ten, I'll just say that, and again, we're an Internet company! We're very virtual. So we have virtual assistants that work...

DECLAN

(interrupts again) These are ten full-time W-2 employees, or ten free-lancers or consultants?

MARTY

No, we have... our whole company is set up on free-lancers and independent contractors. But basically, everyone is, I mean, again, we're a key... we're a key, is... we're a key, uh, vendor slash joint venture partner slash, uh, company, for other people so are we for a lot of people who are independent contractors with us.

DECLAN

Okaaaaaaay. I didn't mean to press, uh, toooo much... are you happy about being dragged into the Casey Serin saga? You have your own entry on Caseypedia.com and so on.

MARTY

Yeah, exactly, and uh, and again, Declan, I'm not trying to be evasive or anything, I just... I've dealt, with, uh... enough... (voice dying out) uh... media, in the past... Again I'm not trying to be evasive, I'm just being cautious with my answers. Um, I just don't want any of my high level clients, you know, calling me, and saying, 'cause I'm the person they're gonna call, they're not gonna call anybody else in the company (laughing sickly because there isn't anyone else) so, just please understand that point. But yes! As far as the Caseypedia website, uh, that photo of me, that's a copyrighted photo, that was taken off, uh, copyrighted back-end web pages, so that's another, um, you know (mumbles) there's gonna be complaints filed against their ISP and the registrar...

DECLAN

Yeah... you think that using a small image for purpose of a criticism or commentary falls into the category of legal fair use?

MARTY

You mean, how the people can just, just swipe the content and just use it, in other words, just drag me into it as a public figure, is that what you mean, or... ?

DECLAN

Well, I'm just wondering if using a small image for an encyclopedia entry that doesn't have any advertising would be considered fair use.

MARTY

I wouldn't consider it fair use because that's a photo of me that was uploaded on our company website on the backend of the site that has, every one of our web pages prominently have copyright notices, and especially the audio content grouping page, it had, you know, prominent copyright notices on it, so... I mean, is it a big deal, does it bother me, maybe not, maybe so, it's just the fact that... yeah, I'm amazed at just how much time in the day some of these loosers have to uh (laugh) dig up all this stuff I mean what does it have to do, I mean, they hate Casey, they just despise Casey in any way, shape, or form, um, it just amazes me that these people waste all their time and their lives doing this kind of stuff. (laugh)

DECLAN

Casey has created some movement, I'm not sure how better to describe it. Do you think that's enough to make money off of his foreclosure products that you two are working on?

MARTY

Well again Declan, we looked at this as a, at least a 12 month process with a variety of info products, tele-seminars, audio DVD products, and again breaking it down to what's, how he started through the first product, to where he is now, and then a second and third product targetting, again, people facing foreclosure or in foreclosure, getting case studies of other people that actually went through it, and then you know targetting real estate investors, and also you know, the fourth one, which would be about a year later, would be actually be his success story, or, hopefully his success story, by that point, as obviously Casey said, he has a lot of other stuff that he's doing; to the general public, he's you know, they're just making assumptions, and they just don't know a fraction of the stuff that he has going on, and again, with larger stuff that he shared with me, um, you know, maybe the casino thing is, ah, maybe way too large, but uh, call it other substantial stuff that can actually earn him and his family and his wife you know a substantial chunk of money, I mean, he's pursuing the right avenue as far as, he's pursuing revenue-producing things that will give him money potentially in chunks, so he's able to have not only the cash flow but also the chunks of money to start making arrangements with his creditors. I mean, I don't want to deviate and talk in for Casey, so Casey, interrupt me, if you...

DECLAN

No, well let me ask you, either or both of you this, maybe this is an uninformed view, I don't know enough about the situation perhaps, but everyone that Casey has linked up with, the Kiyosaki rendez-vous, PrLinkBiz, um, all of the uh, Nigel, the Salt Lake City fellow, all of these people have promised Casey something or other but none of them ever happened, you know, you didn't get $15,000 in the bank for instance. So what makes either of you think this will be any different?

MARTY

I'll let Casey answer first.

CASEY

(sighing deeply) We'll have to wait and see.

DECLAN

Casey, you're really sounding down... I'm not just saying that, I mean, you were pretty much full of life when we were Jamba Juicing in West Sacramento, and now you sound, uh... sound out [of it] even if it is 5:30 in the morning.

CASEY (sounding completely dead) Well, why do you think I sound down, I don't understand.

DECLAN

Oh, you just don't sound very happy. Maybe I'm reading too much into that.

CASEY

(half-gasping laugh) Well, a lot of crazy stuff has been happening, you know, more of my emails and my personal stuff have been violated again, and you know, I haven't been too happy with that. My meeting with Duane, I, I finally decided... well, I won't say finally... but when he asked me to come meet with him in San Francisco, might as well, put the face to the name, that kind of thing, and here he goes, sharing all the details from that meeting too, I mean, how do you trust people any more, I mean, I'm definitely upset with that, um, and then, of course, I still have to get a hold of my wife and talk with her about everything that's been going on, there's been leaking of information and whether it's my wife or somebody else in my family or whether they're just able to find a lot of this stuff on their own I don't know, there's just a lot of crap going on, that I'm not super happy about, so this is one of those times that I'm not quick to say itsallgood because, well, it's mostly all good, but... now, to your question, you know, am I able to form a successful partnership, or am I able to find somebody to work with who's not going to take advantage of me, again, we're going to have to wait and see, but every time I deal with people and it doesn't work out, I'm learning something from it, 'cause if I don't, it'd be really stupid, nobody wants to get hurt over and over and over again, so I'm making changes in how I deal with people from now on.

DECLAN

Now what information did your wife leak?

CASEY

Well I don't know for sure, again I'm investigating to see what exactly was leaked, but I mean, the whole Australia thing, nobody was supposed to know that! And so... I really don't know how everything got out. I'm still in the process of finding that out. 'Cause I wasn't even gonna talk about it, I mean, as tempted as I was to talk about it, I mean, it makes some great drama, as tempted as I was, I really wanted to respect my wife's desire to stay private, 'cause she didn't want me talking about the whole thing, and because, for whatever reason, there are several reasons, but, so I was going to respect that unless I was maybe able to do it in a future... one way or another, in the future, people would've found out, but not right away. But now, basically, they got all this stuff out there, and I'm forced to talk about it now. I mean, it's not necessarily a bad thing, because it adds extra drama to the blog and extra story and it's not drama for the sake of drama, it's really what I'm doing, so I see it as organic to talk about what I'm really doing in real-time, but I didn't want it to be like this. Again, I was sorta forced to make that last post and defend myself, so people don't think I'm some guy who's leaving his wife penniless and running away to another country.

DECLAN

Oookay, Casey, I think I'll give you the last word, I'll post this recording in the next 24 hours on News.com and write an article accompanying it. Thank you both for joining me.

CASEY

Sounds good, Declan.

MARTY

Uh, hey, Declan?

DECLAN

Yes?

MARTY

Oh, if, uh, if I may interject, this is way premature, but, uh, if you want to get a sneak peek at the actual book, and the reason, I'm not using this as a shameless plug, but the only reason I'm divulging this to you know is simply the fact that there's a 12 or 14 hours of our raw content creation where I was interviewing Casey and those audios are obviously being plastered all over and everything so, um, uh, we're on an expedited path now to wrap up the actual book, but, um, the actual um, I just uploaded, just got an IM from my webmaster, he just uploaded, it's on ForeclosureCode.com, ForeclosureCode.com, again, this may not even be the final cover, final graphics from the branding standpoint, but, uh, basically, um, if you want to take a look at that, I'd ask that, uh, we're probably gonna have to, uh, expect to put a Flash page up, but uh---

(End Call)

[edit] Reference

1. ↑ MP3 of McCullagh, Serin, and Stewart, CNET News.com, June 12 2007