RECESSION: The 3 Ways To BUILD WEALTH In A Once In A Lifetime OPPORTUNITY!

do you think that we're living through a unique moment right now or are people just confused by something and really it's all the same uh it's definitely a different situation if you think about where we were in 1999 2000 with the tech boom 2008 2009 with the housing bubble and now people will look back at this time as well so we have super low interest rates we have a bunch of people on reddit moving markets literally they shut uh an investment firm down yep we have uh crypto making huge news up and down and we also have a lot of people with changing jobs um so what does it mean for the average person most good advice doesn't change over time so should you be saving and automatically investing yes should you be thinking about the long term and choosing low cost investments yes of course low cost means low fees low fees yeah yeah so for example a lot of people don't know this um but anybody watching if you go ask your parents this you're going to have a very shocking conversation if you pay one percent in fees like to a financial advisor a lot of people think one percent no big deal over the course of your lifetime guess what percentage of your gains go to the person you're paying the fees guess i actually don't know i know the answer is high it's not one percent people think oh one percent one percent compounding correct if you're paying one percent in fees 28 of your returns are going to that advisor's pocket over what period of time it's about over like 30 plus years it's a long term if you pay two percent in fees that's over 50 of your gains going straight into their pocket so this math is really counter-intuitive a lot of people really counterintuitive i know it's true and i still get tripped up by that i'll give you a a quick story of a young woman who wrote me on instagram and she's read my book and she goes ramit i think i'm overpaying for this financial advisor but i'm not sure i said okay tell me your information she's 31 she makes about 80k a year and she was paying 1 i said cool how much do you think over the course of your lifetime you will pay in fees and she had no idea i said just take a guess she goes 30 grand i said okay how do you feel about that she said 30 grand over the next 30 years i feel okay about it sounds fair i said great let's do a couple quick calculations so we run the numbers and i told her you know your income will probably increase a bit your investments it turns out she thought she was paying 30k in fees she would actually pay 315 000 in fees so i tell her this and on instagram she's like no no way this cannot be real i go it's real and so this is one of those things that sounds really boring oh fees i'm you know who really cares one percent but you could take 300 000 and use it to go out and have a blast buy a house invest more spend it on the things you love and so we want even in a time like this where everything seems so crazy it's actually not that crazy we know what to do when there are low interest rates we know that what do we do well i actually don't know like i am horrendous at investing money yeah and i always i'm good at making money yeah i'm not good at investing money well you don't have to be that good are you good at like breathing oxygen yes okay i practiced anyway exactly because you've done it a ton of times you don't think about it great investing is not sitting there looking at some bloomberg terminal and and choosing the right stock it's actually quite boring it is setting up automated investing it's having the money flow where it needs to go automatically and if you do it right you don't even think about it you spend less than one hour per month on your investments so here's what i find interesting about you and this is the reason that i always love spending time with you you're very practical it's the advice that people should do you also have a psychology background so you know why people don't end up doing it yeah the theme that i find most interesting right now is how much things have changed so it's interesting to hear you echo that they really have changed from the things that i get involved in it may seem even more sort of dramatically different than it really is but i'll walk you through some of the things that i think you're up against with this very sage advice yeah but we're living in a moment now where investing is attracting younger and younger people they have a sense the system is broken they don't know what that means but that something doesn't work and so people are trying to find that like quick flip that quick buck you get crypto coming which i heard you say you may have changed or you may have doubled down that people that invest in crypto are crazy i think crypto is [ __ ] interesting yeah as the self-professed guy that is not good at investing so take that worth um but there's something happening now between crypto between gamestop wall street bets the way that like the collective of people can [ __ ] up hedge funds like there's something going on right now where there's a casino mechanic and people are getting really into this casino mechanic even nfts which i don't think of as an investment vehicle but i am very excited about as a technology but that's drawn me into this world where i see just a gaggle of people treating it like a casino essentially yeah and now that it's sort of high risk high reward lots of fun ding ding ding flashing lights how many people do you think are getting pulled in in a way that's exciting like hey now you've got 17 year olds creating youtube content around investments which is real and i am utterly shocked by that and how much of this is like oh my god we're heading towards a cliff um that's a great question okay let me start off with what happened with my first investments so here it is it's around 1999 2000 everybody thinks they're a tech genius you put money in any stock it goes up 26 the next day so what do i do i take my college scholarship money and i put some of it in the stock market thinking this is easy guaranteed 20 yeah guarantee and every day it's going up and down but mostly up was there a massive euphoria i wasn't focused yet at all yes everybody was um everybody believed they're a genius so in a bull market everybody believes they're a genius and um they all say the same phrase this time it's different it's so funny it's such a funny phrase that in the investment world people make fun of it it's a they're mocked because it's never different it's actually the same thing bubbles expand uh but over time they mathematically cannot continue so here we have people making millions of dollars who would otherwise be working in a parking garage and they are giving stock tips out and telling everybody you got to get into this jdsu this you know all kinds of stuff so i take my college scholarship money put it in the market and i very quickly lose half the money because of the crash yeah or because of the crash and so what happens is i realize oh my god i'm not as smart as i thought it's not easy to become a millionaire through investing in two weeks and so here is where there was a pivotal moment one i could have doubled down and said i just picked the wrong stock let me pick another stock this is very similar to what you hear with people in the crypto world well my investment quote investment dropped 50 but you know i got to do this coin or that coin et cetera what i chose to do is go different and say you know what i don't think i'm that smart about investing and i actually want to learn how fundamental basic investing works so things like low-cost long-term things like reading about john bogle's philosophy etc and i started to learn about it and i realized you could spend your entire life trying to trade but traders hardly ever make money over the long term and if we were going to define trade timing the market yeah it's like i understand this stock yeah it's undervalued yeah i'm going to buy because i know it's going and i'm going to do it short term right so i'm going to create this narrative that oh this stock look at the trading look at the chart and i'm gonna try to make quick money in in four weeks everybody now knows somebody who trades those people almost all lose money you'll notice they're your best friend when they're making tons of money hey bro i made uh 600 in this stock when it goes down you don't really hear from them okay that's called survivorship bias those people simply disappear but they're really loud when they're making money and you learn that mathematically even top wall street investors over 80 percent of them don't even beat the market what does that mean it means that you watching this show right now can pick a simple vanguard fund and you can beat over 80 of these fancy wall street suits these guys were paid over a million dollars a year this stuff is really hard to believe it's really hard to believe because it's counterintuitive like one percent fees can be 28 out the door um people also don't understand compound growth so for example people a lot of people right now are really dissatisfied hey i don't have enough money i'm not going to ever be able to afford a house and so therefore i'm going to have to invest in these high risk investments that are pure speculation what what's really happening there is they don't understand how compound interest works in one year than the last 20 years combined because of the because of compound interest yeah because of how it works so is it really as simple as one doubling to two isn't very interesting two doubling to four is not very interesting but when you start getting to a thousand doubling that becomes real interesting real fast and it happens and we know the math if you plug in your numbers to a compound interest calculator you can predict essentially down to the month and year when you will become a millionaire and the does that calculate a doubling every seven years or is that a made-up thing no that's you can choose change your assumptions i generally choose a seven percent return rate seven to eight percent because historically that's what we know happens and that factors inflation in so at roughly seven to eight percent your money's doubling approximately every ten years and people are going to get that by putting in the stock market and letting it and just contributing to it every single month yeah 50 bucks 500 bucks 5 000 bucks whatever works for you that's how it works that's simple boring so a lot of people watching this going oh this old guy this luddite i prefer crypto it's really exciting listen investing is not about excitement you want excitement get a dog get watch a tnt drama investing is boring it's like watching concrete dry and it should be the real fun is what you do with your money how you live a rich life all right before we get to that yeah i want to like really drill down so i'm currently not taking your advice okay and you can legitimately just point out all the things that are stupid okay this is my fantasy all right go ahead i'll give you my sort of thesis the way that i think about it so um the because we're printing so much money that scares the life out of me i'm super ignorant when it comes to economics and money so now i'm just operating on emotion and i'm like okay people are printing just like metrics [ __ ] tons of money that does not seem like a sustainable thing so i tell my money manager hey i want to be as close to my money buried in the backyard as humanly possible she's like this is a terrible strategy because of inflation like you don't understand your money's going to get cut but i was thinking sort of that same thing one to two percent a year whatever like i have plenty of time to figure this out then i start listening to michael saylor who's like hey that might not be the real inflation rate it might be substantially higher and when you get to i forget the exact number of inflation but if it's like at 15 you cut your money in half in like seven years or something ridiculous and i was like what so then i was like okay now i'm paranoid about that but when i look at the stock market and it's and i don't know where we are today but it's like it was at the time that my money manager was like you need more exposure to the stock market i just kept thinking i've made a lot of money i believe i will make a lot more i just want to protect my downside i'm not trying to grow my money i'm just trying to like maintain my money and the idea of buying into the stock market even dollar cost averaging when it seemed so clear to me this has to be a bubble like you said it just cannot go up forever so there has to be some sort of correction and the economy shut down so i was like how the [ __ ] could this possibly but of course now because i didn't have much exposure to the stock market i had some but yeah i didn't have much exposure to the stock market it's like up 28 yeah you missed that on millions 100 okay let's talk about this so but am i about to like be the one who's laughing when this finally all corrects well nobody knows first of all nobody knows and if you bring anyone on the show who tells you what's going to happen in the stock market they're an idiot and and or they're lying so i'm not going to do that nobody knows and you'll find this in politics and money a lot of people want to be comforted by essentially a parental figure somebody who comes in here and tells you it's all going to be okay or conversely it's all going to [ __ ] and they prey on people's weaknesses as to what's going on the best investors are humble they know that nobody knows anything what do we know we know that over time the market continues to return approximately seven to eight percent and that's over a hundred plus years we know that there are always people on reddit and twitter who've got these fanciful narrations of what's going on in the world and they all disappear once the narrative is proved incorrect so people have been talking about inflation forever this is very low inflation and in fact even the recent inflation numbers are i think over 30 percent of his due to used car prices okay if you try to peg your investments to macro economics you will be potentially losing out on lots of money now let's talk about your situation your situation is different than the people watching this you already have a lot of capital so if you're somebody who's 25 30 35 and you're trying to grow your wealth that strategy is going to be different than your strategy tom so let's break them both down for the person who's in the wealth accumulation phase right they have a job they want to make some more money great the best strategy for them is low-cost long-term investing take some percentage i'd recommend at least 10 preferably 20 of your gross income if if you can gross free tax well i like to be aggressive if you can't do 20 go ahead and do 10. we're going to point them to a vanguard just something real simple really no i've got feelings no individual investors should be using rob is that how robinhood works like their day trading on your behalf or they're encouraging you to day trade like they are encouraging you to trade um and you can see this through a variety of the design principles that you use they give you free shares we don't want to be engineered into trading trading is the enemy for real investment returns we want boring simple that's where the real money's made so when i talk to my friends who are high income earners and i ask them you know we talk about their investment strategy and they go yeah i just have it all in vanguard i'm like these are the people who have serious money because the others have a lot of earnings but they're trading at all and as we know even one percent fees can reduce it trading taxes those dramatically reduce your returns so back to our 35 year old friend they want to accumulate some money they say okay i'm going to automatically contribute 10 15 20 whatever they can do aggressively and at first it seems really boring oh i'm putting like 100 bucks a month or a thousand bucks a month that's not that much but what they forget is that not only do you keep adding that but over time the market tends to go up and we know what happens so your money isn't just doubling every 10 years it's actually much faster than that because you're contributing more and suddenly they wake up and they go oh my god that's a lot of money and in three years i'm gonna have more money from that than i get from my job wow now you have some serious opportunity you can choose whether to work there start a business go part-time are there different vanguard account types so the thing that i really like for simple investment is called a target date fund if you're 35 you know that you can just assume you're going to retire at 65. you might retire earlier later but just assume and so you would pick a vanguard fund like a 2050 fund what is that imagine you have a pie chart in that pie chart you have basically two different kinds of investments equities or stocks and fixed income or bonds equities are more aggressive they tend to outperform uh bonds what a target date fund does is you just pick one fund that's it just one put all your money in there and it automatically um reallocates over how did i pick that fund is it just like just by ap no no it's just by age so they do it yeah so youtube i just say hey i want to retire by 65 i'm currently this age bingo and then no no no they say i'm going to put you in the vanguard 2050 fund so 2050 means you're going to retire in 2015. but how are they thinking about that is this like the world's most diversified portfolio is that sort of their basic automatically diversified so it has uh internationally automatically diversified there's a human in this somewhere even if it's just a human programming ai well they have chosen to diversify in these target date funds based on this criteria what they do is they include model yeah yeah so they include value investing no it's not it's not necessarily value investing it is a 30-second breakdown so when you invest a lot of people will pick some stock that's like me going over to your house for dinner and you go getting some specific stuff yeah they'll pick like this stock yeah they'll pick tesla that's like me going over to your house and you go tonight we're eating salt what that's not a meal a meal includes your proteins and all kinds of other things in your investment portfolio if you just have tesla you might feel really good you might say hey ramit nice investment strategy but my investment's up 400 percent cool i'm glad but over time that cannot sustain itself and so when that goes down you want to have other investments that that are going up and diversify and again yes you may lose out on a little bit of gains like if you had picked apple or amazon that would have been nice but you have to remember most people don't pick apple they don't pick amazon and so the people who pick it you're usually too lazy something dumb yeah they were hyped on it for some reason that's why they're called mom and pop investors that's an insult ma and pa are the dumb money the dumb money are random retail investors who are sitting in their basement using e-trade or robin hood the sophisticated people are on wall street and even they can't pick the winners more than 20 of the time so a target date fund automatically diversifies internationally what is up my friend tom bill you here and i have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a ten i've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact i will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline right i've just released a class from impact theory university called how to build ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work i will see you inside this workshop from impact theory university until then my friends be legendary peace out so follow the incentives this is very good advice for people if i'm the guy on wall street like i'll let this person remain nameless but there's somebody in my life that i know and love care about i think they're amazing and they like to day trade it gives them a sense of purpose they do a lot of research and all this and i remember one day i just thought are you up or down all time you're like down and i was like what are you doing like if and they had been in it for 15 years yeah so it wasn't even like a a brief period of time and i just thought that's so interesting it's like adult baseball cards yeah you know what gives me a sense of purpose having a huge investment portfolio what does that mean i want a portfolio that takes basically no time huge from a dollar perspective yeah huge so i put it in something really simple target date fund or a series of index funds what percentage of your net worth is in a target date fund uh i would say not a target day fund now i have index funds a series of index funds as well as i've had a target index meaning people don't [ __ ] day it yeah just it's like a group of companies and grouped in some way 500 or whatever yeah it's basically what's inside of a target date fund but just taken outside of it um simple low cost etc over 90 of my net worth is in index funds so many different ballpark index funds are you in um less than 10. now is that because ramit is more clever than other people and you know it's because it's because i have a larger net worth so at home so you don't want to cram it all into one thing that's correct because at for 99 of people a target date fund is a fantastic investment why it's one place that you invest you do not have to choose all kinds of crazy stuff two and this is really important it automatically gets more conservative as you get older now if you're watching this right now you're like i don't care about that down the road but think about it when grandma and grandpa were in 2008 and we all heard these stories of people losing 50 of their net worth overnight those older folks should have never been invested that aggressively a target date fund will protect high risk things into equities they should have had more conservative investment bonds yeah and so you would you do not like the kiss of death right now no there's a big debate about whether or not people should even buy bonds or have cash or whatever but you have to remember the average person watching this right now is not reading all the intricacies of bonds versus cash and yields they're like i just want my money to go where it should go so we have to be humble enough to recognize you do not want to be a professional money manager you even said you have somebody you call most people just want their money to grow they want it to be relatively safe they're willing to take a little up and down but they don't want to think about it they spend more time looking at a yelp review for dinner on sunset than they do picking their investments that is terrifyingly true yeah and so instead of fighting that let's just acknowledge it hey i am never gonna sit here and read all this stuff and by the way even if i did that doesn't predict better returns so i'm gonna pick a simple investment strategy i'm gonna automate it and i'll spend one hour per month on my money done and over time i'm going to accumulate a very very substantial portfolio and i can take amazing vacations i can provide for my family i can have fun that's a rich life okay this stuff gets really interesting but i think there is a layer of complexity that it's wise for people to begin to pull back so um all right low cost means low fees so that's an important thing vanguard funds are the place to start vanguard is great i don't want to i'm not pitching vanguard it's where i have a lot of my money why not pitch vanguard i like them i just don't i want everybody to know i don't have to deal with them fair no there are other companies that are also great you can choose you know fidelity has a lot of great low-cost funds um makes them great that they have the same theory as the vanguard fund um no vanguard in my opinion the reason i have my money there is that the firm is built on low cost so the entire dna of the firm is low cost there are other firms like fidelity that did not start off like that they started off charging high net worth investors a lot of money now because of vanguard they had to lower their fees because they were getting eaten alive and so they did add these things but they always have this dna of let's charge higher fees for high net worth people now if you want to pay let's talk about fees for a second because i think this is interesting i have no problem if you want to hire an advisor and pay a premium price 500 bucks an hour 5 000 bucks for a review i have no problem pay it for for if you have a specific complex situation or your high net worth you want a second set of eyes great most people would rather pay 250 000 in hidden fees than pay 10 000 out of their pocket do you realize how insane that is yeah they would rather pay 250 grand in hidden fees and even when i tell them hey look at that one percent let's do a little bit of math and i'll show you how much it adds up to it's on paper it's math they go ah one percent he's a nice guy i go you know i'm sure he's a nice guy take him out to a baseball game and save 240 thousand dollars and go out with your husband or wife that's how crazy our psychology is around fees so i was fortunate god bless me um i wind up getting found not guilty because it's called fruit of a poisonous treat so they kicked in my door but they didn't have probable cause because they stopped me in my truck they didn't find nothing on me so they went to my house kicked the door with no search warrant so now everything you find is null and void that's purpose man because that's not supposed to happen right i'm thinking for it all the time and then um but that put me in a situation because now even though it costs it cost me 60 to beat that charge i don't have no money so now i get into the robbing game so now i start robbing doe dealers right because og told me that a person who works a job every day they not a part of this game so they not fair game they you don't mess with them but somebody who sells a nickel bag he fell again a shark don't care if it's a tuna or whatever if you're in the ocean swimming you fail game and so i started robbing dope dealers at the times i was like yo if you want you can't call the police if you want to see me see me i'm with it and i got in a situation where um i was good at it me and my partner god blesses so and then one day i almost got killed and i go to my pot and i say bro i'm out like i said done deal but when they kicked my door in something happened so they took my truck they took my money but they didn't mess with my stock account it didn't freeze it didn't i said hold up they don't think i'm smart enough for this in the book 48 laws of power it says uh never underestimate your opponent and at that point i realized that america underestimates us and it's not it's from a class issue because we've never said we're capable of doing this it's a game we just didn't play so i said okay god what do you want me to do all i know how to do is be a hustler and the voice from 1999 comes in my head and says you're just playing the wrong game i said oh okay start working as an iron worker building stadiums building power plants it's crazy because i was making good money two thousand dollars a week that's good money that's something like yo two thousand dollars a week yo that's it two thousand twenty five hundred like it was amazing i started saving and investing seventy percent of my money god damn i was living bare minimum i was like if i'm a change i got to make like the hard choices it's hard for people to make sacrifice because you got to now go go against and do without some of the things that gives you that momentary gratification that simple that ah that's what keeps you alive that's what keeps you going just to go on vacation one time a year to get these pair of shoes that may cost me a thousand dollars no i can't afford them but i've worked so hard i need that just to keep giving me something and so i was like okay and once i started doing it man and i started showing my homies in the street that it was a game changer it changed my life you showing him your portfolio no i was showing yeah i was like yo look i'm about to end this before robin hood even existed right so i'm on e-trade at the time and i'm like bro check this out man we go get we go to the club bruh and we buy bottles hennessy we buy wet we buy louis vuitton we buy fendi yo we can own that it was like what like yo there's a stock called lvmh louis vuitton wet hennessy but you can get it on the market it's lvmu why because it's in france and it was like what i'm like man look i'm like listen bro we upgrade our iphones every year we can own apple and so now we own app we own ipad probably at timberlands every day and so that was like they got it but it was like i see it but i don't know and i was like all right and so then i had an idea i said check this out we know the end result of being in prison i've been shot you've been shot you've been shot we've did some shooting we've all been to jail who suffers like your kids your mom's your girl i said at least what we gotta do is if we gonna play the game we gotta at least reward them for us playing the game i was like so what we gotta do is invest our money for them so we making ten five thousand dollars a week if we can do that if we can make twenty thousand dollars but we gotta give them something if it ain't cash we gotta at least put something up for them because if we gone for 10 years what they gonna do we can at least have that for them and then i was telling one of our problems i was like listen bro you need to invest the money cause he was making more money than me i said what happens when you get knocked off because one thing you know your time is coming so you live the game until it's your time you understand that what happens when you go do a 5-10 year bed and you come home and nobody can't give you money at least if you got it in the stock market when you come home you up your money been working for you for ten years five years you gotta ask nobody for nothing you go to the real man what you got he was like damn that's smart right and so my idea was like how do we get how do we start changing the mindset and some people might be like why would you tell them that because what happens is you got to start somewhere you got to make the game runnable in the language that we can understand and so once you learn english now you say you know i want to learn spanish i want to learn french i want to learn that because now you understand the power of words and so once they started understanding the power of the game it was like okay i can play this game and so it was powerful for me when my home is in the street started investing any money that was a game changer for me when my homies in the street who didn't finish school who didn't go to college started telling me man i bought some apple bruh i bought some microsoft bruh i bought some nike brothers i'm about to get them new js so i might like that was powerful for me yeah we made the game winnable dude you have a phrase wall street looks like us oh she looks like us now there's another phrase you say but you should like put that same like [ __ ] stamp on it is i own that i own that because you talk about stocks in a way that sounds so rad where it's like you refer to yourself as an owner of the company yes and and the thing is it actually is true like you're not playing a linguistic game it is true but people don't think about it like that but it's so much more powerful than having a cool pair of kicks is to say i own the company that makes those kicks or i own the company that makes that phone or you know tim cook the ceo of apple works for me i'm a shareholder right it's uh it's really really powerful explain that basic idea of ownership for people that might not quite put it together that stocks really are owning that company so i actually got that term from warren buffett um in one of his meetings i want to say it was a 1995 shareholder meeting and he said that um he owned great owning a stock is like is owning a percentage of a great business and so once i understood that concept i understood that the key to wealth is through ownership like that's what that was one of the things that made it click because i studied the wealthy people like i studied them um and i was like damn even when you go back to black wall street o.w gurley the reason why he bought he has the 40 acres and those acreages one of the things he did was he said i'm going to sell these pieces to my people so they can have ownership i was like damn when you study reginald white one of the first black man to make a billion dollars on wall street it was about he wanted it to have ownership so i said the key to building wealth is not how much you can work you can't work your way to wealth you got to investigator in all wealthy people black white asian chinese they own a whole bunch of [ __ ] the people who aren't wealthy is because they don't own nothing you only have your money sitting in cash if your money is just sitting in cash realistically you're becoming poorer every day right or they own depreciating assets and that's what cash is it's a depreciating asset because the more money they print the more money that money loses value so if it's just sitting it's the reason why the bank wants you to have your money there so they can take it and use it and invest it so much and be like hey is this sitting i'm gonna give you 50 cents on whatever you had in it and so the idea of ownership was yo we can just start owning everything that we no matter if it just a stock like that's powerful because if you can start owning the businesses that you now consume every day you turn a one-time transaction to a lifetime of profit and that was major for me because if i go to the store and buy a pair of nikes that's a one-time transaction in order for me to get something from them again i got to come back and buy another pair of nikes but if i own the nike stock long as i own it it's a profitable um vehicle for me so that one time transaction can become a lifetime of profit if i own that business if i'm gonna buy apple if i know i'm an apple user if i know i got the phone i got the error pods i got the macbook i got the pc i got i excited when apple's about to drop something why wouldn't i own it as much of it as i can right like if i if i understand that concept if i know people gonna america has one of the biggest trash problems in the world right so if i know that waste management is a company that's going to be here forever because we aren't going to stop throwing things away why don't i own that company because i know everybody throws things away and so now instead of me getting excited about apple lime being around the corner because it's a new phone i'm like yo y'all have to make me some money right so when i hear something like waste management has bought 40 acres of disposable land for another landfill i'm excited about that and another great thing about the stock market is for me it now makes me pay attention to the world and so now i understand what's going on in the world i started learning business cycles market cycles you know i'm like because now i can understand yo this is okay things are going out of business it's okay we're in this cycle okay people are hiring okay we're an expansion cycle and so now i started to take i took an economic class on my own without just understanding the world and so you start understanding when something is happening in china okay something happened in china so i own apple apple has 20 percent of revenue in china okay they might take a little hit right now you know what i'm saying so the stock market helped me start understanding how the world moves the fundamentals right right and so that's important i really hope people i don't know i really hope people pay close attention to you because even in this interview they're not going to understand how much you know and i've listened to hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of your footage and i'm just like [ __ ] so one thing i want to i want to be on record is saying and you can play this on a loop on your [ __ ] website whatever is that i can afford any money manager i want and you are as knowledgeable as the money manager that i have i'm very impressed with your ability to explain these concepts and so that's important to me for a couple of reasons one there there are certain people that are only going to listen to you so it's great so they now have access to i'm telling you world-class information and then number two is the journey that you've been on you started on the streets were homeless in prison like really caught up in the lifestyle and through knowledge you have transformed your life and your family's life and if they can believe that you can do it they have what i call the only belief that matters the only belief that matters is this if you put time and energy into getting better at something you will actually get better at that and that is true for every human now why is that the only belief that matters because your behaviors follow your beliefs and only behaviors matter so if you invest in the stock market even if you don't believe in it your investment could still go up if you believe in the stock market and know it's the surest path to wealth but don't invest in the stock market you'll never reap the games so getting people to believe that they can get better because what you've done is just read and study and research and spend time watching cnbc and then you look like i heard you once explained oh i'll see a ticker symbol go by that i don't know it i don't sit there and waste time that i don't know it i just go look it up yeah and so now that's another ticker symbol and for anybody that just heard ticker symbols like what the [ __ ] is the ticker symbol go look it up yeah right so you're such a powerful example of the power of knowledge i think that's really really interesting so yeah i i hope that this is for people that didn't know you before coming into this interview hopefully they'll spend more time because they'll see just how much you know man thank you for that and that's i understand that uh knowledge is what gives us leverage in life it's not about how strong you are it's about what you can learn and then how can you actively apply that i have this acronym called fear um finally exiting average reality right and what happens is until we can overcome the fear some people actually fear success success comes with a lot right but until you can overcome that average reality that you're living it no matter what you're on once you become comfortable there it becomes average anyone can live in average everyone can live in mediocrity right then there's those outliers who consistently push themselves to go to the next level lebron spends one million dollars on his body working out eating right agility mobility because he will never be average and the thing about the human mind and the human body it will go as far as you push it right there is there's science that says that gandhi levitated before the power of the mind so you may look at it like man nobody can't levitate get out of your mind but there's a level of meditation concentration that you can lock into that can take you there as long as you believe in it like you said the only belief that matters is what do you believe you can do i personally believe that there is nothing i cannot do and for me it's all about impact purpose fulfillment like the money is a byproduct of everything else that isn't my focus my focus is i have a knowledge and information that i know that can change lives not just one life not just like lives and so the way that you change lives is by consistently learning finding new ways to put that information out there being able to open up being able to be vulnerable because people need to connect people connect to knowledge in the way that they can see two things that help people imagery and vocabulary what they see and what they hear right so most people won't connect to a certain knowledge because the people who speak it don't relate into can't speak the knowledge in the way that they can eat it so for me it's always about how do i attain as much it's always a challenge for me how can i attain as much knowledge as i can because i love learning like i love learning but then how do i take that and be able to now reciprocate it or give it to somebody who may not understand calculus a trigonometry but if i can give it to them in this way they can say oh yeah i got it and there's more people that struggled in the world that has become successful so struggle has to become a language that i'm i struggle so that's the language i'm great at so if i can break down things into a struggle language now i make it the game winnable for everybody and that's the goal to make the game winnable for everybody who's bold enough to step into the batting cage if you bold enough to do that i was bold enough to jump in the goddamn 152 foot tank with sharks in dubai if you're bold enough to do it there's an experience that comes from that and that experience is so exhilarating it will take you to the next level because now you keep chasing the next level of you and that is when you start understanding life at a whole nother concept when you start understanding that yo for the longest i was just low-level living i was low-level thinking now that i've been exposed to something and i say this often whatever you haven't been exposed to isn't your fault once you get exposed to it you now are accountable for it and so once i've become exposed to so much knowledge and information once i expose you to it you accountable because now you can no longer say i didn't know what do you say to people that don't think they have enough money to invest so the important thing for me to tell them is start where you are you build a house break by brick i mean of course you can get a house put together all at once we live in there i get the idea right but you build the mansion you build an empire you build it brick by brick like you start with 25 and we have to understand think uh r.i.p to nip man a great he says something that's phenomenal he said we're in a marathon we didn't get into our situation overnight right we looking back at our situation you see that was you inherited that whatever it is that poverty you inherited that that mindset that idea scarcity that idea that you don't have enough money you inherited that building wealth becomes a revolutionary act because now you start saying i'm going to go against what i was taught right and so i see it by starting with 25 if you can do 25 a month that's cool if you can do 25 a week that's cool because what happens is once you start understanding the power of how your money works you start saying yo i don't need to do that because that's taken away from this let me that 25 will now become 50 what is up my friend you and i are living in a golden era of self-improvement we have books platforms like youtube courses seminars virtual events workshops the list really is endless the internet has been so good for people like you and me who want to accomplish greater and greater things in life and now my friend it is about to get even better i've been spending most of this year working on the single most entertaining tool that you're ever going to have around self-improvement and it is called project kaizen it's a web 3 based game experience that will be unlike anything else you've ever engaged with in your life partly because the technology is new and it's amazing if you're not familiar with blockchain nfts and all of that kaizen is going to be the perfect introduction for you as it is an excellent intersection of entertainment and learning all backed by the blockchain we're getting closer and closer to launching this project for you every single day we are working our faces to the bone to get this thing out there and my friend i want you to experience it so click the link on your screen and head on over to my discord channel to stay up to date and be one of the first to join me inside of project kaizen which by the way gets its name from the japanese term of never ending improvement all right back to today's episode this is something i see a lot you look at arnold schwarzenegger and all the success he had in bodybuilding he was able to translate into other areas of his life the success that you had early in wrestling you've obviously been able to translate what what's sort of the secret for you to to the level of success you've had you know it's it's interesting how similar uh my wrestling mindset and business is and it's not the same as a lot of people in fact i've had a lot of uh people in last few years i've kind of rubbed rubbed the wrong way because of it but i look at it as a sport so like when i started my business i was looking around the first thing i looked at i was like who do i have to be i remember when we came in there was a software company that was like okay that's our competitor and it was like i wasn't quite about i made known to myself to my team to my entire community like we're going to beat them and then we went after them aggressively and aggressively and and uh just like i would if i was going to be wrestling or competing against them and i like i reverse injured everything they did i figured out what they were doing why they're doing listen to every podcast interview the founder was on and understand his mindset what he was doing and we we just like relentlessly pursued them until we caught them and then we passed them and after we passed them then i was like it's funny because i was like i need something new to go after and then there was another company that was bigger than them i was like that's the next company we started going after them and the same thing i pursued them and like looked at and reverse engineered what they're doing and how they're doing why they were doing and trying to figure it out and i remember as we started getting closer and closer to them uh the ceo of that company called me one day and uh he was like he's like why are you so upset at like why do you hate me and i hate our company so much uh i it kind of caught me off guard i was like what do you mean he's like he's like you are out there always like trying to like you know do all these things to to beat us and i was like oh i don't hate you guys at all i got so much respect like i know more about you than i think you do like i understand you do and why you do it level i don't believe you do i gotta i don't hate you at all but but you're my competitor like you're who i chose and i have to beat you like that's that's how it works and he was like i remember he came back and he was like he's like i wasn't really an athlete so i'm not used to that like he's like it's interesting i thought you mad you're mad at us you hated us and i was like no like it remind me of the scene in uh my favorite movies uh the dark knight where at the very end when the joker's falling off the the the cliff and batman asking is like he's why are you trying to kill me and the joker starts laughing he's like i'm not trying to kill you he's like he's like without you like there's no me like i can't do what i do without you and i feel like that that's been such my mindset in fact you know that we passed that company it's like hey who's the next people we found who they are and i'm studying them and understanding them in a deeper level like and so for me it's i don't think i could be in business where it's just a business just to to grow or i don't know without a without a goal or purpose or something to to strive towards and and to move move move forward i was remembering um i think there's a pulling bone apart it said something about um what man will do for a first scrap of ribbon i feel like maybe that's like in wrestling that's what it was for me like i had like i had to go and i went to a state champ there was no american like i kept going for the whatever the next scrap of ribbon i had to get it and i feel like in business it's the same thing for me it's just like it's a game there's competitors and we're trying to figure out the landscape where we fit in and how we how we pursue and how we go after them dude i think that is genius so as somebody i didn't like being competitive when i was younger because i was afraid i was going to lose and of course i didn't want to say that so i was just saying or i may not even have understood it if i'm completely honest there was just it triggered some something in me which i would now recognize as insecurity which i can now articulate as i had this fear of having proof empirical data that i wasn't good enough which of course was my biggest fear when i was a kid and now getting into business and realizing yo [ __ ] like you've got to be going hard and this is like look i like you i would be shocked if somebody was was interpreting my competitiveness my desire to win as hate but it it is what i call the dark side it is a dark energy right there's the light side which is the beautiful things i want to create and the gratitude i have for what i have in my life and all of that and it's amazing but then there's also the competitive side of wanting to win of saying look i'm going after that person and the people who so i'm not a sports guy but like because of my mentality i constantly find myself drawn to athletes so i'll use that that language but please don't mistake me for an athlete um but you know when you talk to the guys that are really really great and you look at the amount of tape they watch like how they study their competitors they study themselves they stare nakedly at their inadequacies it it dude there's something there and the fact that people don't put in that time and energy to learn what is going on is crazy the the amount of insights you'll get are extraordinary and that to me is is the power so as we go into um this which probably is going to be a recession might be a depression um how do you think about overcoming the obstacles that are going to come your way how do you avoid falling into the trap of thinking that you know everything already like how do you stay nimble um that's a good question especially when you know at this point our company's so big that you have a lot of friends who are solar entrepreneurs and they're able to be nimble because like it's just them and they can you know but now we've got 400 plus employees and it's a it's harder to be to be nimble i think it's been interesting because i've been trying to trying to figure that out and um you know one of our our mutual friends dean gracious i talked to him about this a lot as everything started hitting things started shifting and uh and i remember watching him because i again i'm i'm kind of a marketing nerd so i remember when i was in high school i used to sit back and i would watch info like i remember i watched dean on infomercials back when i was a kid like i would take notes i'm like whoa like the way he said things um i remember watching um as it came up to like the last big recession watching all dean's infomercials and at the time there was probably i don't know 30 different get rich and real estate infomercials on tv like anyone who ever flipped a house in their life for like i'm an infomercial guru and teaching people how to do it right and uh and then the recession hit and the housing market crashed and went from like 50 infomercial gurus to like three down to one and then there was just dean and dean continued running for marshalls the entire thing and then uh and then and then beyond and i remember i didn't know him at the time i remember watching and just being interested how like he he was the only one still on and so i asked him later how in the world did you did you survive when everyone else got got crushed and he said something super profound he's like i didn't shift i didn't shift um my product i mean my product was still the same he's like i shifted i marketed my product he said everyone else is speaking very aspirational like how do we how do we create this thing you know how do we how do we get rich how do we make money like things like that he's like i shifted from being aspirational to looking at my business more as like a life preserver like like how do you how do you protect yourself and how this product can can protect you and uh and so as we started coming in this thing i realized the same thing like um in fact i talked a little about in traffic secrets i talk about um the fact that when any customer's coming to you they're either moving towards you they're moving towards you in one or two directions either they're moving towards pleasure or they're moving away from pain right it's like they're coming to me because they want to start a business when i get rich or they want to make money or they want to whatever or they're coming to me because like i hate my boss i need to get out of this pain like it's just a miserable i need to need to get out of pain and if you look at the economy over the last you know seven or eight years most because for most people it's been pretty good most people are buying any product or service whether it be fitness health you know business uh anything for that matter it's like they're buying it because they're trying to move towards pleasure but you know a couple weeks ago everything shifted where people are all in pain now i think the companies are going to survive and be nimble or ones understand how to shift their messaging where it's like how can how can the product or service i sell how does it get somebody out of pain and that's the marketing the messaging people need and they want right now and it's funny because like as i was launching the the traffic i literally we launched the book the same day that president trump told everyone to go home and if you look like my marketing campaign ahead of time it was like you know how we built this 100 100 million a year company and how traffic how much traffic would get all these things and then i was like that is the wrong message right now and so we we literally like my team i'm like all right everything every ad we've written every pre-sale every video like just delete them all we're redoing everything and like this is the messaging the messaging is and we start talking about uh i got a buddy down the street who owns a local waffle place the best waffles in the world if you ever come to boise i'll take you there and uh and uh he opened the same day that the whole recession happened and it was crazy because you look at like he's got his business he opens the doors and it's the same day that literally traffic you know usually restaurants you have you have cars like physical traffic driving by and people come and they they come and they eat he's like the traffic stopped and what happens all companies they just they die like traffic is the lifeblood of a company and so the whole messaging shifted to like look like if you want to survive during these times then thrive on the other side of this like you have to master traffic and customers and getting people in like this is literally your company's life preserver during these uncertain times so all the messaging shifted the ads shifted the like the like everything shifted and uh and you know the book launch has done insanely well and everything's kind of come from that but but it all came from like shifting the message from towards pleasure to understanding that we're in a time of moving people away from pain i think that the companies understand that and understand that shift in messaging are the ones that are gonna that are gonna really win during this this time yeah one thing that um i think people need to be very aware of is where they're at in their life are you moving towards something or away from something so i've always said that people fall into two categories and i think you're right it changes actually depending on where you're at in your life what's going on in the world but by nature i would say that people are motivated by one of two things either they're moving towards a goal or they're moving away from a problem i don't want to be broke i don't want to be homeless i um and then there's other people that are like i want to achieve this goal i want to win this i want to be the best and knowing where you come from will help you navigate the world in a much more um sane inducing way because if you're being sort of true to what aligns with you like for me moving away from something is never very interesting it takes me into like a very uncertain a very uneasy place whereas even if i'm in the middle of massive uncertainty and i have fears for me to shift my energy i need to pick a goal something that i'm excited about so that when i'm pursuing it even though the outcome is going to be that i outrun this thing right i've been broke i've had crazy debt i've been in a place emotionally where i'm laying on my carpet and i just [ __ ] i don't have any idea how i'm going to create momentum in my life so i know what that's like but the things that got me up and moving were to believe that i could change to believe that i could grow to set a goal to to set a goal that i was excited about and then wake up every day and pursue that and that was the thing that it i think a big thing people have to do is like what where are you at as a baseline reference point if you're in looking at seeing all the problems and all the things that are wrong you're not in problem solving mode if you can shift over into problem solving mode so i've heard you talk about that waffle restaurant before and you gave the guys some brilliant ideas about what to do like hey are you sending people text messages and it's like yeah to be top of mind to remind people um you know to incept them but you have to be in that problem-solving mode yeah is that something that you think about intentionally is that something you try to train your team to do is that that to me seems like going back to what you were saying at the very beginning with your dad of like all right you can look at you at the fact that you lost or you can solve this problem yeah i think it's interesting too because i look at most business owners and like i and i know for me i did i did it backwards the first way like a lot of times we come up with our products or our services like we have an idea like i want to create this thing we create it and then after it's done like now we've got to figure out how to sell it and you figure out like a cell's message and create that and then it's like now i gotta go find people to sell to and then we're trying to find people and it's like it's like backwards like if you look at the way the the most successful businesses grow i look at the way that we grew click funnels was when i had this realization of like i don't want to go and like create something and find somebody to sell to i want to go find the people that that um that i'm passionate about serving and then just listen really really carefully right and i always tell people like the the um the more money you make is uh will be like the money you make will be in direct relation to how simple you make uh somebody else's process right so for me it's like i hope people build funnels to sell their products and services and so you know when i when i taught people the strategies here's how you do it i made good money we made software that made it simpler i made more money when we had like done for you things making simpler and make more money and it's always like how do i simplify this process for whoever the customers how do i make it easier and and so like the mindset that we're always having in our here at clickfunnels and me and my team is like we're sitting there and listening to our audience like what is it they're looking for what do they want what are they struggling and it's like okay how do we make this process simpler and every good product every good idea everything that's that's been a winner came from that like listening and then like figuring out how to solve the problem all the ones where it was like russell has this great idea at two in the morning let me go let's go create it my whole team gets together and we like try to give it to people those those are the ones that don't typically do very well um no matter how much like you know how much push force and money we put into it to try to get adoption it's always harder than the opposite way we're just listening to what people want and figure out how is the best way to solve that for them and um anyway that's like the the simplest thing is just listening and how do we simplify this form how do we simplify and you'll get paid more the better you become simplifying processes and and things for people i love that idea of simplification that's something so do you know noah kagan yes yeah i do all right super interesting guy and i think one of the things that makes him so effective he said his superpower is making money um and what but what he means by that is his super power isn't simplifying it's in breaking the process down into immediate action and those two things simplifying it and then taking immediate action to me are the exact things people need to be obsessively focused with right now because right now like first and foremost if you're in a dire situation take care of your basic needs man like don't worry about launching the next facebook like make sure that you've got a roof over your head you can put food on the table right and that's where a lot of people are going to crash and burn is yo maslow's hierarchy of needs has stood the test of time for a reason like there are just certain things safety security like get those taken care of and you may have to do a job that you didn't want to do or you may have to call people up and be banging the phones if you're trying if you've got a product that really has value and [ __ ] like you don't know how to get it out like you've got to think like a direct marketer and this is like where i think my own story confuses people because like i'm so intense and you know i've got like that raw raw spirit but the reality is i'm not a burn the ships of the shore guy like i'm a yo keep your day job man like when we launched quest we had a software company so during the day i was running a software company and nights and weekends i was making protein bars because i wanted to see if this would work like you're saying make sure there's an audience before you go like we didn't get a warehouse and start buying equipment until we were selling protein bars i i don't even think we bought the equipment until we were already profitable so we were making the bars by hand which was pure insanity making the bars by hand ourselves nights and weekends to make sure that there was something real there so what advice do you have for somebody who's like yo i just lost my job and i feel totally out of control what can they do as a solopreneur to get like that first audience to get that first sale yeah and i want to first off agree with you people message me all the time like like oh i read your book i'm going to quit my job and do this thing i'm like no like no don't quit your job and do the thing like keep your job because you know as well as i do that like when you have that like the uncertainty and like it makes the pressure so much higher and makes it so much harder to like get creative and get figure things out when when those needs are met it's so much easier to to go figure things out um but someone like it's funny because uh i've had this conversation with some close friends who've lost their jobs who are freaking out right now and and i and i tried to explain them like you have to understand that like the money didn't just disappear right like we're in like this great wealth transfer things are shifting around like um i don't know if you know perry belcher but he's one of my friends who owns survivallife.com and you look at survival life in the last 30 days has made more money than the last like 10 years combined right like money is shifting over there and you look at you know like it's not this disappeared like people still have money they're not going to the movie theaters and the restaurants they're spending in other places and like it's understanding that and so if if your whole world just got pulled away from you it's not that the money just just evaporated it's got transferred somewhere so the first thing i'm doing is looking like where like where is this getting transferred what are the companies and the businesses that are making more money right now like they can't handle it that they're looking for more help because because man also because of this new circumstances everything is just just growing like crazy so that's the first thing the second thing i look at is like what is the skill set that is the most valuable inside of a company and i've got a friend who's a dentist i tease them all the time because you know most dentists like there's a dentist they like that's the most important person in the business i'm the person who who does the thing on people's teeth and i had this little conversation i'm like you're not the most important person in your business yeah without me they can't clean teeth i was like i was like the most important person in your business is the person who can get customers to come in the front door because that person can't bring customers in the front door you have no teeth to clean therefore your skill set is useless like the most valuable person in any company is the person who we call them rainmakers who can make it rain who can bring people in and so that's what comes down to like this book traffic secrets it's like the person who can drive traffic who can bring the customers in becomes the most valuable person in any company i have friends who are so good at driving traffic that they literally will find a company that's struggling or maybe on the downside they'll come in and say hey look i can bring you the thing that you're missing it's the holy grail for your business and all businesses it's customers and i can bring you as many as you want as often as you want the only thing is like i don't work for money i work for equity so if you want me to do this i want 30 of your company and people are like just handing them the company here you go because you can bring you can make it rain you can bring me customers you can bring leads and so i start shifting like if i got to figure out a skill set in this market it's like the most valuable thing i can learn is how do i make it rain for a company and then i can go plug into companies i like find a cut like whatever that is but now you're so valuable that like when when you know things start going down like i figure like the dental office the two last people standing is the dentist the dude who brings in customers like they'll fire the receptionist to fire the the the girl that does your teeth like all that stuff gone except for the person who brings the customer in and the person doing the actual fulfillment of the service and so like it makes you so valuable i think that i'd be aligning with that figuring out the the markets the industries the businesses that are like booming right now and how can i go plug into those and become the rainmaker because then you can write your own paycheck from this point forward and that's uh that's really the stability i think that all of us want is to be able to have that and if you have a skill set like that you become invaluable all right so let's talk about making it rain so one of the cool things about traffic secrets is you took an evergreen approach anybody else writes this book and i promise you it's going to be something that goes out of vogue i mean honestly with the with what just happened it would have gone out of vogue before it even hit shelves um so the fact that you stopped you said one of the key things you did here was you spent the beginning just stopping and thinking about how do i make sure that this is something that lasts no matter what the season no matter what's going on no matter what you said tick tock didn't even exist when you started writing this and by the time it came out obviously ticker is huge but the principles all apply regardless of the platform so what are some evergreen principles to being a rainmaker so the first step is really identifying who your dream customer is at a deep level like most people are like oh like especially people that that only have one traffic like one traffic stop maybe they drive facebook ads like they know like oh here's my interest and my targeting and that's who their customer is i'm like no you have to you have to go deeper that like really understand them at a deep level like know their likes and their fears and like what they're interested in where they hang out and like the the better you understand that person um the more powerful step two is step number one is identifying who they are and step number two is understanding that like the power of the internet is the fact that it gives us all all these crazy humans with the things we're passionate about the ability to like group together online in different spots right say we pick health and fitness or biohacking for example so this is biohacking everyone who's passionate about biohacking like they are hanging out together on certain blogs right there's there's maybe a dozen or so blogs that all the biohackers go they read every single day they're part of the they're in the communities and they're on these blogs and then you go to podcasts like what are all the podcasts that the biohackers listen to and there's a passionate you know super passionate audience and they're listening to all these you know 50 different podcasts and then what are all the facebook groups they're in what are all the email newsletters that they subscribe to and so we start looking at traffic instead of like targeting on facebook we start looking at like where are all these pockets of customers where are they at and we start looking at like oh my gosh there's 300 000 on this blog right here and there's you know 2.3 million to listen to this podcast every single and you start finding these pockets of customers and then our job as as rainmakers as traffic people is to come back and say okay here's all these pockets of customers how do i get access to them like what's the best way to to get and infiltrate these groups and uh one of the strategies that we talk about in the book is the strategy called the dream 100. and basically what the dream 100 is is not figuring out like how do i get 100 customers it's figuring out who are the 100 people that already have access to my dream customers so who's the person who owns that blog that's 300 000 readers who's the who are the the podcast hosts that that have that have the the followings and the people that they're they're listening to right and so one of the exercises i do inside i think it's page 41 in the book i have a little graph in there says okay here's facebook and make a list of all the people on facebook who have your dream customers already congregated like what are all the facebook groups who are the fan pages what are the people that already have like your dream customers hanging out there and then you go to instagram who are the influencers that already have congregated your dream customers we've listed all the influencers then go to podcasts and who's all the podcasters and so you make this list and eventually you've got 100 200 300 people that have all of your dream customers on it and now it's like understanding that i can go and i can i can buy ads to the followings of these people and you should but if i can like if i can get to know and build a relationship with one of these people like a gatekeeper of this community they can click a button and open up the access to the entire community right like for example right now i'm lucky enough to have you interviewing me on your on your podcast and you've got a huge following of people who are going to hear about the book and hopefully someone come by the book and it's like it's giving me access to this huge thing um and uh it's it's interesting like we spend millions of dollars a month on on ads but so much we do in the businesses is building relationships with the people who have access to these huge audiences and then um what's nice is i can i can spend more time in energy networking and marketing and building relationships and spending money because if i get one of those people to say yes it can sell a hundred or thousand or more of my products in fact i don't know if you've gotten this far in the book yet but i actually quote you in the book um uh from an interview you did where you were talking about when you guys built quest initially the first thing you did is you found here's all the influencers and you send them out uh quest bars with handwritten letters and you're like hey if you hate him let us know if you like them let us know but just want to send you some of our stuff and you did the same thing you went to all these influencers send them your bars handwritten letters and then from that how much people loved it start sharing with their audiences and boom it it i'm assuming that's kind of the the ground fire that initially launched launch quest but i'm right yeah 100 and that is one of the most powerful strategies the both of those things so one are you able to identify your audience and then two are you able to um put together uh a relationship like are you able to bring value to that person find some way to connect over time um and that's where i say like you people have to take care of their needs first because to play this game right it's not about the short-term dollars and i've heard you tell similar stories to my own story which is in the beginning of your journey it was or i'll speak for myself though i've heard you say similar things since the language i'm going to use is maybe derogatory i'll speak for myself so uh i did every get rich quick scheme you could imagine so when i was young dude i was about it i was like there was this thing for a while was typing for money and i was like yo they were talking about how much money you can make like you know transcribing things i was like i'm about it let's do it and i just tried i tried selling insurance door-to-door i did um pyramid schemes it didn't i really believed in the product i was selling but still uh not necessarily a good look um and i just i wanted it to happen fast and once i broke away from that and i just started thinking about okay um i didn't obviously say dream 100 but really identifying like where is my customer base like the the people that would i would really be able to serve with this product where are they right which is something you wrote about the book niche out like you got to pick a niche once you're niched out then it becomes a lot easier to win in that in that space right you're not competing against everybody in their dog they're easy to find online uh you can deliver a crushing amount of value so doing that and then playing the long game and building relationships not trying to get anything in the short term look i'm not a fool i get that acting in that way and adding value to somebody else it ultimately does come back to you some percentage not all of it but like when it feels good in the moment and then two you'll you'll be able to weather a storm because they're going to be other people there for you and it goes back to the story you told about arsenio hall which um i think is really powerful tell people that story it's it one i because i have a follow-up question about it which is building a platform isn't the only way and i'm super curiou tell the story because the people need to understand the punch line before i can really ask you a question for sure so one of the i uh we'll talk about the book is one of the most uh powerful ways to infiltrate your dream 100 and get to know these people is by having your own platform um because like what like what do i have to offer tony robbins what i have to offer you know these these people that i've loved to be you know on my dream 100 like a lot of times they have everything i'm not going to pay them i'm not going to it's what i have to offer the thing you have to offer is your platform and i think there's a lot of ways to infiltrate your dream 100 and get to know people but one of the most powerful ways for sure is that like like the reason why i met tony robbins initially in it and i did a whole youtube video it's like 10 minutes long showing a 10-year uh journey i went on with tony of helping him serving him and doing all these things for him before eventually he promoted something for me 10 you know decade later but it was like the only way the door even opened is because i had a platform i was able to help promote him on top of my platform and open the doors and so many other people i've had a chance to meet all came because i had a platform to to be able to offer them and it opens up opens up doors you can't get otherwise so i'm a huge believer that people should start their own show it could be a youtube show it could be a podcast could be a blog it doesn't really matter what but something we can create a platform that you can leverage to to get to know people that that own your your your customers all right well then let's talk about that so i think we're going to see the death of an influencer class as advertising revenues dry up so a lot of people that have been making it their livelihood it's going to i think stop being their livelihood but any time where there's massive disruption there is massive opportunity and i think there is going to be a whole new crop of influencers that actually figure out how to crack this nut so what what are some of the uh as the king of something was secret in the title what are the secrets to building a platform yeah um a couple things like number one is like you have to realize that first you're you are not going to be good um when i i remember i started my first podcast it was called the marketing your car podcast and i called it that because um i had a five-minute commute from my house to the office and i was like at least i know i'll be consistent so i'm just getting my phone out and click record and i'm just gonna talk while i drive and i did a five minute podcast every single day for i don't know five or six seven years now i mean absolutely it's been it's been a long long time and what's crazy is my first set up i didn't know how to track stats in the first three years i had i just didn't know um i just set it up i started recording and my brother published him and i'd ask him that people were listening he's like i don't even know how to check so we didn't even know i'm so grateful no i didn't know because because i just kept publishing i'm like i'm driving anyway i might as well do these things and um it was about 300 episodes in when we shifted it from the marketing uh in your car to marketing secrets and that time we switched the platform we set up the analytics and my brother's like oh my gosh we're getting like a camera like ten thousand people perhaps are listening right now it's like oh i gotta have no idea this is amazing and we started looking back at the stats you look at like how how little it was for so long and then um i remember one of my this guy that came into my world who's one of our hyper successful students now he was like when i came in you know i started i came in on the episode 300 i was like i'm going to binge listen to everything so i started number one he's like man the first like 40 or 50 episodes were so bad he's like you were the worst ever he's like but about 45 46 you started like getting in in the rhythm and then like it started getting good now like i love it and so the first lesson is like you have to publish long enough to find your voice like most people do like two episodes like oh no one's coming but it's like no you have to like make this a commitment you got to do this for a long time because at first no one's going to be listening and that's okay because you're going to be really bad but it's going to give you the ability to like find your voice that's number one number two is um and i have an article here that from one of my friends nathan barry he wrote a blog post called endure long enough to get noticed he talked about he said like if you look at most good tv shows like usually you don't find out the good tv shows so it's like in season five or season six right or or uh movies that are like you know the third movie then you're like oh and we'll go back and watch all now because they've survived and he said that you know so because there's so much content being created all the time that us as consumers we wait for the best stuff to rise to the top and so the first reason why you're publishing all the time is because you're trying to find your voice that's step number one step number two is you're doing it long enough that your dream customers can find you and so it's coming down saying i'm going to be consistent i'm going to do this i always tell my people like publish something like at least 100 episodes and by the time you've done 100 episodes and i recommend at least like in a year window so you're doing multiple times a week within a year you'll found your voice your people have found you and you'll be financially free and so far anybody who's taking me on that challenge by the end of the year they have done exactly that they found their voice the people found them they've been financially free and so it's just like one of those things that just it's it's scary it's weird and it feels painful at first because it's not fun when you're really bad but then you get in your stride and then it just it gets really good yeah i will echo that sentiment so when i first started this was back at quest i started a show called inside quest which would be very recognizable to fans of impact theory but when we first started it um even though i would say that if we all have some element of talent where we get just disproportionate wins mine is for sure verbal ability so the more i have practice the more energy i put into being able to articulate a message to be able to speak extemporaneously i just got disproportionate returns from that so somebody else might do the same thing if i'm getting a 1.3 x return on my time maybe they're getting a 0.7 right so for me like that's a that's a pretty big gap when i started i was so frustrated no one was listening i didn't think i was good at it um and i went to my producer who i also happened to be married to and i said yo i look i'm i'm running uh a billion dollar business over here like this doesn't make sense i'm wasting my [ __ ] time like what are we doing and she said over my dead body and ironically what the exact amount of time she said was you're gonna do this for a year and she said if at the end of the year it's still not delivering like you don't feel that it's delivering enough value to be worth doing it then we'll stop but she was like i really believe in this i really think that you can add value to people's lives so just take the time to figure it out take the time to let the audience find you and of course now at the time it was just like one thing that we were doing to try honestly started as a way to add value to my employees and now it's become my entire business model is predicated on creating content so the the platform as you're saying um i think that's really really powerful um one thing i would just kick myself in the face if i didn't ask you about that you brought up earlier um you've gone through cycles before you've been in business for a very long time you've dealt with downturns i want to know emotionally you said you know you're coming in and you're laying off half your people you've got to convince the other half to stay and you've got to be tied to the mission and all of that how have you stayed passionate about what you do how much do you think about the why of what you're doing um how do you survive those down times emotionally oh um yeah it's uh i think anyone who's created something amazing has felt this before um it's funny because when i got into business like most people i think i i did a lot of the type from home and the selling door so like i get it like we get into like we want the money and you start going after that that's what the initial draw a lot of times is is like i need to make some money and after making money really quickly uh you realize how unfulfilling that is and you're like huh that was not that cool and then uh and then you start seeing the success of the people that you're whatever you're selling to the people and then like that becomes this next level of win where you're like oh my gosh like because i did something cool like that person had this big win and that becomes this drug that's like like at least for me like it's unquenchable like i just keep i keep wanting i desire like the more it happens the more i want it and the more um and so for me like that's the thing and so when when things would struggle um i remember uh i remember i like i used voxers like my my mode of communication with most of the world so it's just a little walkie talkie app and in in voxer you can uh if the message is really cool you put a little star next to it so my kids said a cute thing i'll put a star next to it when people my friends or clients or customers send testimonials i put a little star next to it so then you can go listen to all the stars you want and so like when times were down i'd go back and i would just go listen i click on the star section and listen i just listened to like 30 40 minutes of people tell me how i changed the life what happened how it worked it was just like all right and like listening to that got me back the spot of like okay i got to do this and then uh my favorite my favorite quote of all time is uh churchill however long and hard the road and he's talking you know to the to parliament about this this war they have to go on and it's going to be brutal all these things are how hard it's going to be in and then the variance says like we're going to you know victory victory at all costs victory however long and hard the road and so whenever i i listen to that i rigged re-center myself like this is where we got to go and then it's like all right we're going victory however long and hard the road whatever it's got to go whatever we got to do we're just going to go and we're going to go and we're going to go and uh that that phrase like however long and hard the road like rings to my head all the time every time i'm tired or i'm frustrated i think about the people i hear about success and then and then we go after it and that's kind of the draw for me the pool everybody in america should be a business owner however not everybody should be in the business of starting a company and not everybody should be in the business of operating a company