Ryan Coisson: Finding The Most Profitable Opportunities In An Ever-Changing World

Foreign.

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. Today I'm going to reintroduce you to my friend and my mentor, Ryan Quason. Ryan is my mentor when it comes to options trading. I pay him for advice on trading options. It's something I do on the side. But I had Ryan come into the 1% to do a live call with our community to specifically talk about identifying profitable opportunities. The reason why we did this is because Ryan has a knack for finding the right long term stocks to buy, the right cryptos to buy the right businesses to go into. He buys a bunch of businesses and websites. He has a thousand different things going on and I have no idea how he manages it all. And I have no idea how he picks what's going to be a winner and what is to be avoided. And his winning record is really fricking impressive. So I wanted him to come in and talk about his mindset about investing, about finding profitable opportunities and where he sees people. Get this wrong. Spoiler alert. What I took away from this interview and I felt like this was, like this impacted me was Ryan went deep into talking about risk management and managing your emotions when it comes to making decisions. So with the mindset and the winning track record that Ryan has, you're gonna benefit a lot by seeing where you can see the next big thing and the next opportunity. I had a bunch of ahas from this and I think you will as well. Again, this was recorded inside of the 1% and I wanna give you one heads up. The audio is a little off here at the beginning cause we were dealing with a technical mishap. But it gets better after a few minutes. So if you'll stick with me for that, you'll really enjoy this chat with Ryan Quassan.

Good to see you, my friend. Thank you for coming over. I have a smorgasbord of things that I want to ask you.

All right.

Now, we marketed this live tonight as being about trading options.

Okay.

We might talk about that. Like we. We might get there.

Okay.

So full disclosure for anybody who doesn't know. Ryan and I have known each other.

We.

We first met at Jason Drones event in San Diego in 2011, I think.

Yeah, that was a long time ago.

That would make us 10 years ago. Yes. Yeah, make 10 years ago. But we didn't. We only like really regularly starting communicating when I hired you as my options trading mentor.

Right.

Which is not quite a year ago. Yeah. Right. So that was what I came to you for as customer. But along the way, I've learned some things about you that are just fascinating and we're going to, we're going to go into that tonight. We'll get, we'll get there in a second. Ryan makes money in approximately seven dozen ways.

He trades options, he's a long term investor. He does E commerce extremely well. Like millions and millions of dollars in E commerce companies give him equity for advising them and helping them grow. He sells courses, he does search engine optimization. He recruits affiliates for offers. He does sales letters and webinars. Am I missing any of them?

Quite a few, but.

Tell me a few of them that I missed.

Well, I've been buying and acquiring media sites for a long time and with that.

I forgot about that.

Yeah, with that email, you know, lists included in that, and then kind of basically utilizing that data to make new offers, bought intellectual property and rebrand that property.

Wait, wait, wait. What?

I didn't know this part.

Give me an example. Can you give me an example of.

So in the finance space, for example, I bought intellectual Property for about 15 courses and rebranded some of those.

Really, that. Wait, so you repackaged them and then sold them?

Yeah, under a pseudonym.

Are you allowed to say what it was? No, they're still being sold now. Oh, you're selling them right now. Okay, so. All right, so that's a, that's a flip just happening right now.

Okay.

Anything else? And by the way, he's good at all of them. Like really good at SEO. Millions of dollars on Amazon, millions of dollars. Setting cold traffic to E commerce websites, like, I think lots of money. Doing search engine optimization. He's good at all of it.

So this is.

But, I mean, but so.

Well, I mean, we'll get to this. But like, I, I genuinely want to find like, what the, what the, the nut of this is, because there's, there's something about you. Every time I meet with you, you have some other weird, random thing going on that's, that's absolutely crushing it. Don't worry, I'll, I'll find it. But, but to echo your point, I had coffee this morning with someone here in Austin. His name is John Durant and he has a fund for, for health brands. And one of his contacts is, is Mark Sisson. Mark Sisson started this part of Primal Kitchen, but he didn't start Primal Kitchen until he was in his 50s and, you know, sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars when he was in his 60s. And I said, you know, Mark, Mark Sisson gives me hope for myself because, like, I'm like, you can peak in your 60s. The person that does it is Cathie Wood. Like, Cathie Wood. Like, she peaked at 65.

Like, you know what?

If I peak at 65, that's fine. I got Colonel Sanders.

So, like, to your point, there is something to just stacking those talents and those experiences and waiting for your pitch. The thing that annoys me so much about you, though, is you seem to.

Hit every pitch, like, know where the strike zone is, you know?

Okay, so I. I think that your superpower, like this domain that you've mastered with all these different talent stacks is. Is finding opportunities. That's what I perceive about you. You just seem to have this now for being able to see the opportunity, seeing what's worth pursuing. Do you think that that's close?

100%. Like, I mean, but I think part of it is I have leverage because I've been exposed to so many things that. Where someone might look at an E commerce business and think, I need to grow this and I need to do it this way, where they're playing checkers, in my opinion, where I'm looking at the board, 30 moves ahead. Because I've seen the variety. Right. Like, not just in my own businesses, but I've had other friends grow massively successful businesses, and I've seen the inner workings, and I know what was the tipping point for them. And so when I look at it, I just look at it with the different color glass, and I think that is the difference, you know, whether you want to say it's like, oh, I can see that opportunity. It's just, I have a much different perspective.

So when you're evaluating, like, I think you're kind of in transition right now, like, looking for your next big. Next main focus, but you still trade options, you still invest. Yes. Like, you still have a bunch of things going on. So how are you evaluating what is worth your time in the next kind of chapter of your career?

Yeah, I think for me, it's. I want to really have something that I can sink my teeth into. You know, I want something that excites me, that, you know, I love trading. You know, I. I started teaching, trading back in January of 2018, and. And it was on a whim. Like, I didn't really know if anybody would be interested. I didn't really know.

Started teaching it. You started doing it.

Teaching it, Teaching it. Okay. Yeah. I didn't know if anybody would be interested in anything like that. And, you know, I. For me, again, like, I sort of see the matrix when I'M trading and it, to me.

It just was interesting to teach it because it was, it's some, It's. You learn something about yourself when you're trying to teach someone else the same skill and you start to have to peel back all these little layers and you have to think about, like, how are they thinking about it or how did I think about it? Because I started trading originally back in the early 2000s, 2003, when I first kind of discovered it really cut my teeth. 2004, you know, the world was a very different place. Right. So it's like trying to think like I, I was a very different person. You know, I was quite young and just trying to think about that perspective. So for me.

Have you been doing it consistently for that long?

Yeah. So, I mean, there were some times where I took breaks from trading, but yeah, it's always kind of been there in the background.

I'm glad, I'm actually glad you said this because you seem so naturally good at it.

Yeah.

And I hadn't factored in like I've been doing this for.

Nine months.

Yeah.

And you. Maybe a year.

Yeah.

It's like first went through your course.

Yeah.

And you've been doing it for, I think that was 18 years you just spat off. So I actually feel better about myself now.

Yeah. And you know, the funny thing about that is like some people think I. I don't day trade. Right. So I could never do that. Where you're kind of dialed in, you're like plugged into the matrix for the whole time the market's open, maybe even after hours or pre market. But for me, like, yeah, there might have been times where I took off, but maybe I only did like two trades that year. But that to me, it's okay. Right. I'm not, I'm not. I'm a position trader where if I'm trading with larger sums of money, I might have a handful of trades and I make plenty of money for the entire year. You know, I mean, I. This last month, basically, I made almost the entire amount of money that I made for the first eight months or seven months of the year in, in August. Yeah.

You made as about as much money just.

Just, just over.

Just, Just over.

Yeah.

As you did all of the previous.

Months combined this year.

Yeah. Trading options.

Yeah. Yeah. So I try to explain this to people there. This has happened to me actually in December, before, in 2017. I made, I made a lot of money going up to December, but then I made more money in December than I did the entire Year. So to me.

And is that because of market trends? Because opportunity.

So the thing. That's it.

Okay. Spotting opportunities.

Yeah. So the thing that people often forget is volatility in everything. Volatility in someone's life. Someone's going through a divorce, someone's going through bad business partnership. There's. There's opportunity or life change. There's opportunity to buy businesses there. Right. There's opportunities to help that person out, create something new as they transition. Right. And get equity and help them grow a company. There's volatility in the marketplace, say Amazon, when things started to get really hard. And then all of a sudden all of these competitors who were maybe buying reviews or had sort of systems that were maybe gray and Amazon whacked all these people. Massive opportunity for other people, if you know how to position it. Stock market, same thing as a trader. You want volatility, you need volatility to find opportunity to trade. So everyone always thinks about, like, ah, the market's going like this, or I don't know if the market's going to pull back or do this sort of stuff. It's like, I'm happy. Like, I'm happy in July when the market sold up. I'm happy in July when the market sold off or in August when the market sold off as well, because it's opening up the door for new opportunity.

I just got a big aha. While you were saying that, I just, I just had such a big click based on what you were just saying. You, you spend a long time getting good at a craft and getting paid to be good at a craft, and then you kind of wait for your moment and that moment happens when there is blood in the streets or when other. Actually, it's when other people panic. So based on what I know about some of your options trading strategy, and I'm actually going to pull one up here. I know that one of the things that you look for is stocks that have had long trajectories of growth. And you look for when you have indicators that say they're oversold.

Yeah.

And that's when you're like, you look, you tune in on that. And I think that's why August was such a profitable month for you, was you had several of those trend continuations.

The broad market delivered that same thing. So when the market was continually going high, there's naturally it's going to happen. There's going to be selling, there's going to be profit taking. This is what makes the market go round. Right. And as that occurred it moved into an extreme scenario, meaning that sort of one way of looking at it behind the scenes is that as some people started to sell, other people started to see the market go down and go, oh crap, I better take some of my profits too. Because again, think back March of last year at the bottom, the S P is up over a hundred percent from that point, right? Think about that for a moment. That is insanity, given everything that's still going on at the time. You know, it's just so classic. And there's a third Ryan that we know, a friend of ours, where I remember when he and I did, we recorded like an hour long video for some mutual friends and then my audience as well, and we were talking about this mega sell off in March of last year, which I started to alert my students about in February, right? And I saw that again, Huge opportunity, right? Huge, huge opportunity. Anytime you see not only market correction, but the market dropping 30 plus percent. Yeah. And other stocks, some of them dropping way higher, 50, 60, 70%. You have to think as a long term investor, I'm, I was 35 at the time, now I'm 36. Like if I can buy some of these things now, where do I see them in 20 years or 30 years or even just if I want to buy the S and P, I look at it as collapsing the time, right? Because if I'm buying it and then by the end of the year I'm up 70%, which was roughly the case on the S, like VTI or just spy. And many of these indexes, right, they're up roughly like 70% by the end of that same year. You think about the market averages 8%, 10%, depending what you're looking at. How much time did you just save yourself? You did that in nine months, right? You did that in nine months. And so to me.

It'S not even just seeing that opportunity because everyone sees opportunity every day in a lot of ways, especially entrepreneurs, we're very good at seeing opportunity. But I think part of it is having the courage to take what often is the no brainer opportunity, but the hard one to do. Yes. But then having also the courage to say no to that other opportunity. And for me, I've been good and bad at that over the years where there's been instances where I've maybe said yes to an opportunity. And that was a business partnership. And it worked well for a while, but then it sort of had an implosion. Right. But for me, I don't like dwell on that thing. I always have believed in doing the right thing, trying to help that thing phase out and do the best it can, help the individual, if I can, and move forward on my own. Because I've always believed that I know no matter what, I'll be able to start something new. No matter what, I'll be able to have success no matter what. I've got these other businesses, you know, and that's a very powerful place to be when you don't need money. The decisions that you make are a lot easier and a lot clearer.

I have learned so much about you in the last five minutes. We could end this now, and I'm satisfied. But what I'm realizing about you as we're talking is that this applies to all. All these different things that you have your hands in totally, which is you wait for your pitch on the right.

Stock options to buy. Science of hitting. Ted Williams. You read that book?

You what? You wait for your pitch when it comes to, like, what business you're going to start, but you're building your skill set along the way, and you're not romantic about where you are in the process. Right.

It's like one of the things I.

Was so mad when we were working together for a while that.

I was so upset that it was such an internal game. Right. Trading options as the longer we work together, the more I realized it was like, all about managing yourself. Like, you could teach me the principles in like 20 minutes, and the rest was like training your brain. I hate that. I hate it. But you.

I realize about you that you will look at like nine opportunities and pick two or three of them. Where in my brain I was like, I must make every single one of these opportunities work. I'll look at a chart and I'll super analyze it and I'll try to find the opportunity, which is the exact wrong thing to do. And I had to ask myself, like, where else is this showing up in life? Like, as. As terrible as it is that I hate the quote, how you do anything is how you do everything because it's so convicting. But does that show up in relationships, like, every time you're in a relationship, is it like, have to make this one work every time you're in a business, have to make this one work. And how, like, how paralyzing that is right where you are looking at it, like, not the right one, nothing. It's coming. The right trade's on its way. The right opportunities right around the corner. Don't need to worry about where I am right now. Strike.

Yeah, I think you Know, one way of looking at it is investing, particularly trading like this. Position size, trading with options, which I do. It's one of the greatest personal development courses anyone can ever do because it's going to shine a light immediately on all of your flaws and all of your thinking. I've learned this and the biggest thing that people start to realize is it will crush your ego faster than anything that you can possibly imagine, right? And the reason why that's so good is because you have to learn to become indifferent. The stock market does not care about you. It literally, I promise you, it doesn't care. So why do you care so much about it, right? Like it's, it's almost as like as you're trying to chase after this white rabbit. The stock market is just like it's running around, you know, and it doesn't matter, right? It literally doesn't matter. As a short term trader, you have to think from this perspective because if you don't, what's going to happen is you're going to be drawn into it. You're going to be dealing with emotion, fear, greed, you're going to be dealing with anxiety. Like you're talking about, like, which ones of these do I do? I got to trade all of them? I don't really know. And at the end of the day, like, you get a winning trade, you get a losing trade, okay? It's normal, right? Did you maximize the winner? Did you minimize the loser? Did you learn something? Can you apply that again? Did you pick up a nuance that made sense, that now, oh, I mean, again, I'm, I gave you the playbook, right? Like this is the playbook that I learned taking the punches along the way, you know, and there's a difference. And having, I think sort of, there's a benefit and a con to it, someone showing you the way, it's, it's great, it's a little bit easier. You're not sitting there like laying in bed thinking about things with the market and trying to figure out like, wait, why is that happening? Or what does that mean, okay, if that happens, how does this occur? Like, and you're trying to think, and I'm trying to think not just from myself, I'm trying to think of the psychology of the other investors, right? Because that's who's helping move the market. And so what is the normal person doing? What is, what is when they're trading? Why do I wait after the first hour? I remember my mentor taught me that 20 years ago as I, I contemplated that over and over and over again. And you know, his answer was, was so general and. But specific to that. Well, that's when the basic dumb money is moving. Right. All the normal people invest in the first hour. There's increased volatility. We want the dust to settle. Right. But I would think about that over and over and over again. And is there opportunity there? Can you, can you see stuff in pre market and volume and all this sort of stuff? And over the years, I just sort of evolved how I did things and what is important and what's not important. Right. I'm not. You could ask me about a lot of different, even other options trading strategies and I will know nothing about them. Right. But I know this incredibly well. And I'm totally content doing that. And I'm just gonna do it today. I'm gonna do it 10 years from now, 20 years from now, you know? Yeah.

It, it is really amazing how process oriented you seem to make business.

Yeah.

But the contrast of that is it's interesting how emotional we make money as human beings. And you seem totally comfortable just.

Waiting for your pitch.

Yeah, I think, I mean, you have to be content. Like, if you're not content with where you are right now, I promise you, you're not gonna be content with a million dollars sitting in the bank. I was just as happy when I was sleeping in my car, going rock climbing on trips, and literally my friend and I would lay down a mattress topper in the back of his Toyota 4Runner and go climbing for a week. And as I am now, right. Like, you know, I mean, you have to understand that money doesn't change too much. It makes a lot of things easier. And, you know, it's nice to have the stability and all this sort of stuff. And I used to hate when people would say that sort of thing when I didn't have money. But what I mean is, for me as, like, who I am as a person, I still want to go rock climbing. I still want to go play Frisbee golf. I still want to just go to the music festival and have a drink with the friend. Like, I still want to do all those things that make me happy and make me feel content. I look at business as the same way. I'm now fortunately in a position where I don't ever have to make the decisions on what business I do or what promotion I run or if I run a promotion or whatever it might be for money, I don't need it. Right. Like, so it's like I have that ability to kind of what you're saying is wait for that pitch. But it's more like I have the ability to be more like to contemplate on it more to think about it, to, you know, start something and say, ah, you know what, I don't need to move that forward. Right.

I, I wanted to ask you about.

Investing and the markets, like where we are right now.

Sure.

Because we, like you keep hitting these all time highs and inflation, isn't it nice? And inflation is through the roof. And there is like on one hand, there's fomo. I don't want to miss out on everything that's growing. And then there's fear over the economy slowing or buying at all time highs. You don't seem emotionally attached to any of that.

Why would I?

So I don't, I don't know why you're not. Okay.

Why are you.

Because I, Because I could lose it.

Ah, fear. Yes.

Yes, Ryan.

Okay, so does that mean that you're maybe trading with money, that you are investing money, you should be, or does that mean that you need to shift kind of your, your thinking about, do you need this money tomorrow? No, I mean this, we're in this beautiful home. You'll be able to cover the mortgage if you lose the money.

You know, it should be okay there. Yes.

Yeah. Okay, so that's good. That's good. Can buy more of this delicious wine.

It is actually pretty good wine.

It's not bad.

Yeah, yeah.

So I mean, think about why you're, why you're afraid, right? Like, oh, okay. Were you afraid?

I often call Ryan the Jordan Peterson of options trading.

I still don't even really know what that means.

Well, you said you gave me one of the best insights ever. We'll come back to this like this. But this is such a good point that I don't want to miss. This was literally a moment I'll never forget in my life. Ryan sent me a video response to a trade that I don't remember what the trade was. I don't think it had gone well. But he, he said to me, I can tell that you are taking these trades personally.

And I just paused and I was like, how, how am I taking this personally? And in, inside I noticed that if a trade went well, my thoughts around that was, I'm a genius.

Right?

And if it did not go well, my thought process was, I'm an idiot, I'll never be good at this. I'm a big failure. And it would just like compound. And that thought train would continue to go, yeah, how interesting. And you Put a spotlight on that.

And it made me pause and think.

About where that shows up elsewhere in my life. A business goes well. A partnership goes well. I'm a genius. Everything I touch turns to gold. And if it doesn't go well, I'm an idiot. I'm a failure. I'm behind. And that thought train continues going. Neither one is true, because there's other factors. There's luck and there's timing, and there's your partner, and there's the markets, and there's all these other things. So that was such a click for me.

Yeah.

Where I finally got a glimpse of how you're able to be less attached to the result of something I am not there yet. Well, you know, a huge moment for me.

You know how I learned that, Right?

By making the mistake.

Yeah. I took a beating. You know.

I. I mean, when I started trading, I tripled my entire account in 90 days. And then I proceeded to make every mistake that I've taught you not to make in the field, like, on the field of play, as Todd Herman would say. Right. Like, I was out there and sitting in my dorm room taking a beating and looking at myself going. And I had to literally step back and go, what is happening here? And this is how it all started to come together. You know, the beginning part was, yeah, I had the fundamentals, but I got partially lucky.

Okay.

So.

So. So let me say this differently. You knew how.

And you applied it and got lucky, and then you got whacked.

Yeah. Because what happened was I did the opposite. Right. My ego was saying I was a genius. And then so I started to bend the rules, and I would go, oh, okay, yeah. Normally I would only trade with 10% into one trade. I'm gonna go 30 in this one. I feel really good about it. So, you know, I made all of these, like, now what I look at is, like, not habits of winning trader. Like, you know, these basically practices that losing traders implement. And I just fell into those traps. Right. But that is the seduction of being 19 years old. And, like, you think you found your thing. And I really. To truly believe that, like, trading is, like, one of the things that I'm naturally gifted at. And I just have a really easy ability to now remove emotion and be indifferent about things, which gives me a very big advantage. But, yeah, I mean, I learned that making the mistakes. I learned that sitting there, dealing with the pain, you know, being like, holy crap, you know, And I have other experiences that have been that way with business. Right. I learned by, you know, taking Those.

Beatings and the opposite, by following the process, sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes you get lucky.

Yeah. I mean, Dick's Sporting Goods. The other day, I mean, I traded Dick's Sporting Goods like I. Very similar to Adobe. Two days into the trade, it went up 16 the stock. Right. It was like I made so much money, you know, it was insanity. Like it was just. But, but I got out of the trade because now it was unreasonable for me to still be in the trade.

Yeah.

What happened with Dick Sporting Goods? It went up for like another week or week and a half and then prices pulled way back.

Yeah.

Right. Like I didn't know that price. Yeah. I could have made instead of over 200, 300, maybe 400 if I would have been lucky, but I couldn't have never known that. So I can't think that way. But I let that luck help me not distract me. Right. Like I want it to, to serve me and I have to know it for what it is. You know, it's like, okay, how could I know? You know, I could pat myself and look how smart I am. But really it's just, you know, fortunate circumstances.

Yeah. It was such a realization for me just having you point that out because so often, like we take our results in business personally.

Yeah.

Right. I'm an idiot for starting this business or selling this product or partnering with this person. Of course it's going to be like that on the next one.

Yeah.

Or this relationship sucked. Of course the next one is going to be just like it. And, and we develop this, these patterns of thought around it that are not true. And, and trading options highlight like it was some of the best personal development I ever did.

It truly is.

It just, it just highlighted all of that.

Like I, I really think like if someone just started trading, even if they weren't really making a ton of money, it would be incredibly worth it to them because they're going to learn so much about themselves and it's so applicable and everything else. And you know, going back to, I mean, that could be part of the reason I have the ability to spot opportunity so well, because I've been focusing on looking at opportunity in the market for almost two decades.

You know, could, could you extrapolate how looking at opportunities in the markets fits into finding a product to sell on Amazon, or running traffic to E commerce site, or buying up a content site or investing in a business? How does, how does that apply?

I think sometimes it's just when you look at something, it either makes sense or it doesn't make sense. And for me, people ask me, students ask me, you know, how long does it take you to look at your watch list? Or you know, I'm like going through the watch list, it's 60 companies and it's taking me like 20 gajillion hours. And it never makes sense to me because it's like I looked at it the day before and I looked at it the day before that, and I looked at it the week before that. Right. This is the same companies, basically. And so I know what's going on. It's like, hey, did Adobe, for example, in my notes, is Adobe going to go up today? And it's the Nasdaq gonna go up today? That's it. Like, that's all I'm looking for. Right. Then I could potentially enter a position as you did. Right. There's other companies that had that exact same setup today. Right. So I'm not really taking in so much information. I'm stacking information.

Yeah.

And so it's the same thing like if I know affiliate marketing and if I know, let's take it different. If I know a skill, Google AdWords, I started running Google Ads back in 2006, 2007 maybe, I think it's CS7. And if I know that skill as well as I do for me and my style of running Google Ads, which there's a lot of styles, I can look at an E commerce business through that lens. Can I make that work? Yes or no? Right. And there was one that I partnered with last end of 2019, basically 2020. And I knew based on what they were doing with AdWords and the product and the profit numbers, that I could scale that business with AdWords. Right. And I could use AdWords machine learning to scale that business. Right. And I did. And then all of the other avenues, Walmart, you know, Amazon, benefited from that. Right. So now that I have the skill, I can drop it on all these businesses and I could say, okay, is that work for here? No. Does that work for here?

No.

Does that work for here? Yes. Okay, that's interesting. Let me know more about that. Dig into it. Okay, pass. Next. You know, and so that's how I look at it. And the same thing with media sites or content sites or whatever. Like what do I look? What am I looking for? I'm looking for a site that has opportunities. So that looks like a myriad of things. Like if I'm looking at buying sites, well, how does the person get traffic if it's just SEO? Ding, ding, Ding, ding, sign me up, because I can quickly figure out what are the keywords generating actual sales, and then buy traffic from those exact keywords. Okay. Now I'm probably making more than double that business in a matter of 60 days, if that. You know, I remember one of the first sites me and a partner at the time bought, he funded it. I ran them. And so basically what happened was he was running. He wanted to run these, like, media properties and generate more cash flow. And so we bought these AdSense sites and literally these things were making barely anything. Combined, we spent about $70,000. But I had a good AdSense rep who I knew could help us. Right. So basically I went to them and said, hey, if. What do you think? Like, what would we need to do? And it was, oh, we'll kill off these 10 people that are advertising because then they're bidding really low. We'll switch to just image ads and we're going to move this unit off the page. So it's going to give you the just the highest clickers. And immediately those sites went from basically making a few, like $2,000 a month to 8,000. And those sites, I have no part in them anymore, but they're still around to this day, still cranking that money away. And literally this individual, we were all in, paid for the whole business with less than a year and in profit and still earning cash flow for them for almost 10 years.

Oh, my goodness. The beauty of that is you had the skill set or that you had the secret advantage.

Totally.

That you earned.

Yeah.

And you earned by learning the skill, applying it, taking your licks, learning the process. And that gave you one piece of the talent stack, which was AdWords.

Yeah.

And then you take that and you apply it to a content site where it's the.

It's the same.

You're applying that process and now you are learning the next skill, which is the content site and SEO. Now you know two things.

Yeah.

I've learned so much about you.

Yeah. So it's kind of like you're bundling all these things together. So then eventually you get to a point where it's like, you know, this last E commerce business, for example, was like, I knew, okay, if we get affiliates, we're going to make a lot more money. That's going to help SEO, that's going to help paid ads, because they're going to build reviews, that's going to help Amazon, it's going to help everything.

Right.

If we get people on YouTube, that's going to help brand presence is Very like visible product. Right. If we could build that up, like all of these little things feed the whole machine. Right. So you start thinking. Like, I felt like a lot of times I find people will think and they're thinking will be so siloed that it's not wrong. Right. But like, people will be like, oh, I'm selling on Amazon.

Right.

I'm building an audience and I'm focused on Amazon and I'm doing all these things for Amazon.

That's great.

If you're making say a million dollars a year on Amazon and you don't have a website, you're probably missing out on a free hundred thousand dollars a year.

This is why I cringe when people say, I have an Amazon business.

Yes. So it's like, then if you don't have a business, if you're making that much money on Amazon and then you do have a site, but you're not running brand search or you're not running, you know, Google shopping or something like that, you're missing out on easy money. Right. Like if you're not all these little simple things, but they bundle and stack together and instead of thinking in this sort of silo, like, I expand out wide and I think about all those different opportunities and then it's a process of going, well, if I think about all these, which ones are the biggest needle movers and some of them will stack, right. So if I grow AdWords, that's going to naturally help Amazon, that's going to naturally drive more brand search because more people are going to go see the site. If I get affiliates promoting, that's naturally going to drive more traffic, which is going to increase retargeting, which is going to build our email list, which is going to increase sale promotions, which is going to increase this. And you think about it that way, you're just like, okay, what is the right order? And you have to think about that prioritization.

I really want your brain. All right, so here's what's going on in my mind right now, Ryan. Yeah, in my mind, I, I'm literally having this thought is like, I, I actually don't know what my talent stack is. Right. So, like, I, I could tell you a few things I'm good at.

Yeah.

But you seem to have this Swiss army knife that is very well sharpened where you can.

MacGyver was my favorite TV show where.

You can like, look at a business and say, oh, I'm good at this leverage. Yeah, I'm good at this lever. And, and I don't think I'm that clear yet.

Well, I think there's a few ways to think about it. Right. Like for you, you could be good at hiring people to put in position to think that way. For me, the way that I always looked at it is I believe in having team and having like building a company. Like if I want to build a big company, like my job really is to. I need to bring in the right people. I need to maybe handle very high level things, like maybe some of the logistics and there has to be money to obviously pay the staff. Like, I need to do those things. I don't need to go in there and set up AdWords. Right. But by working through a long spectrum of businesses over the years, I've always believed that to hire and to really teach someone to build a system and the product process, that I needed to have at least some working knowledge. But I've also always been like, okay, you're doing that. Talk to me about that. Why are we doing it this way? Like, how are you setting it up? Let's build that sop. Okay, that and I would always want to know the structure, why this is happening, why that person's thinking that way, what. And so I can maybe help, but also so that I could learn. Right. So I've always approached that way. But you know, for me it's helped me and it's enabled me to. Now it's like every day or every year, I feel like it's easier to see the opportunity or to just live in a world where no matter what's going on in the news or anything like that, like, I'm never fearful of, like, I always know there's opportunity, I always know there's businesses I don't know, there's products to sell. I always know, you know, there's companies that need my help if I wanted to. And I'll never want for anything, you.

Know, and that's true all the time.

Yeah.

And like that is, that is such a. That's true all the time. And it's completely in your control to become valuable and skillful to help somebody else. Totally. As long as you can spot the opportunity.

Yeah. And I mean, I do that all the time with, I mean, I have friends here in Austin that, you know, they're working on stuff and it's just fun. Like, oh, like you're doing that thing and like, have you thought of licensing that? Right? Like, have you thought of creating a deal with this person where it's like, hey, you're going to license that? And literally I Had a, a text message the other day from a friend. They had set up this, their very first licensing deal. And they literally had this person. Day one, they sold, I think it was $12,500 worth the product, and they get 40%. And he was like, this is, this is real. Like this. He didn't believe that. Literally, he basically didn't do anything. And now he's getting, you know, whatever that is, five grand roughly. Right. Like, he was just so blown away that's even possible. Right. But he didn't see it before, you know, and so I think it's cool to kind of be able to see that you never have. You don't have to get something all the time from it that you can give just to do that and help somebody else out. But it's homes, the craft sharpens things. Like, he's in a niche I don't know anything about, but I know the framework. Right. Like, why wouldn't you, instead of just saying, hey, pay me $10,000, why wouldn't you just license that to them? Because now you will make money into perpetuity.

How do you think someone can get good at spotting opportunities?

Well, one on their own.

Yeah. One way is to look at a lot of opportunity, but you have to know through what lens to look. So you.

And you said something earlier. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Something earlier that was so important to that, which was like being willing to say no.

Yeah.

Because, like, I know I like, I invest in companies. Right. I have a fund that invests money into e commerce companies and I invest in the stock market and I see a lot of deal flow.

Yeah.

And I have friends that will look at it and think, here's how this could work. Well, I'm managing other. Some other people's capital in my fund. And I'm like, no, because this is how it could go wrong. I have to be willing to say no to that deal in order to find. I actually had it out with my partner about, about two months ago because he had basically negotiated a no risk deal, which he's very good at. He's very good at like, finding the no risk deal, and I wouldn't do it. And he's like, I don't understand why you don't want to do this deal. And I was like, because it takes up capacity from us finding the home run deal. This is like, at best, it's a single. And he's like, but we don't have any deals in the pipeline right now. Why wouldn't you take a no risk deal. It's like, because we're not going to find great ones if we're saying yes and we like had it out like.

We were buying heads and stop for a second. That exactly applies to your trading. Why would you take a mediocre trade that you think you just need to trade because you're anxious because you haven't traded in a week or two weeks when there is going to be a home run down the road. You just have to be patient.

I love that.

Like put the chips in the table when you got the bullets, not when you got two seven off suit.

Right. I mean sometimes you get too lucky with the 27 off suit. It pays out, but the bullets are much better bet every time.

And isn't that true with everything?

Yeah, like it's true with everything.

That again, true with relationships. Sure is true with business opportunities. It's true with investments. Like there's always another one coming. I like, I like the quote that the, the, the opportunity of a lifetime comes every six months.

Yeah. Maybe even sooner. You know, I mean the thing that you have to think about too is sometimes ones that you think are going to be a single turn into a grand slam, you know, and there's factors outside of your control. And the same note, sometimes you think you got a grand slam and it turns out to be a strike. Yeah. Right. So it works on both sides. But the thing that you always have to think about and I mean, I guess my advice to other people is if you're brand new, you have to think about a skill set. Right. Like how, like what skill set do you want to be good at to if you want to doing this, what I'm sort of talking about here. And you want to like silo that onto other things. Right. Like you want to say like, oh, I'm really good at email marketing. Right. Well, there's a lot of e commerce businesses that never email their customers and they never email people. Just get on their list, ding, ding, ding.

I keep waiting for somebody to start an email marketing agency for E commerce brands. So hit me up ryanapitalism.com yeah, you.

Can make a lot of money just doing that. And honestly, it could be very simple promotions and you wouldn't need that big of a team to do that. Right. You know, you could have a really, really successful business. But if you think about the email side of things, part of that benefit is it, it's not like in E commerce, for example, most people will say, I want to do email in that business. Great, cool. You're going to promote your products. Say you've got 10 products. You could have all kinds of sequences, cross sells, upsells, down sells. But where the real money is is then also going, okay, what other products would these people buy? Let's set up some joint venture partnerships because you can be an affiliate. But where does that also lead you? It leads you to, well, maybe I can get featured on their site, maybe I can buy traffic from their email list. Maybe they can push a product or I can white label one of their products to my customers. There's all these other benefits that can come from it. As you grow that affiliate partnership, maybe they want to buy you eventually, right? Depending on what the business is. But then a lot of people don't think about in E commerce space. Well, what is a lead worth in your space? Right? So for example, could you do direct mail, like where basically you sell the buyer data to other companies so they could send direct mail letters to. Right. Or if you're in say, for example, the maternity type space, think how much a lead in the maternity space is worth to Johnson and Johnson or P and G, like whoever, right? You know, like our diapers company, right. Think about what that's worth to them. And if you had a process in your system that generated those leads and provided value to that customer, they're maybe getting free product or whatever it. And then you got paid for all those leads. Next thing you know, you have something where, oh, this business, like my AOV was 100 bucks, but, oh, okay, like I get this lead now, that's $50 per lead. Or I get this thing that's $30 permission, that's $50 for that commission. Next thing you know, like you can buy more traffic, you can do all these other things more, right. Affiliates, you're willing to pay them. Like some people might go, oh, well, all my competitors pay my affiliates 10% on the physical product. What if you pay 20, 20, who would they promote? Right? Probably you, because you're paying them more. Hint, hint, ding, ding. That's what I did. Right. That's why we were able to make so much from affiliates because some of them were paying 2%, some of them were paying 5. We started at 10. Right. So they were immediately interested, you know. So if you think in these slight variations, you can make a lot of that, just one little skill. Does that make sense?

It totally makes sense, right? I want to close by asking you about fun, fun, fun. Okay, so you travel, you go to UFC fights, you rock climb, you have a very full social life. Yeah, I asked you, I think the last time we had dinner, I asked you about your work time, you were talking about your work times, and you're like, you carve out, like, a couple hours here. You had, like, three hours of work time per day, and I asked you what your work time was like, and you're like, I'm usually reading like that, not work time, right? So you, you're, like, the one person I know who, who actually has, like, a full, fun life, and you're an entrepreneur who's in all these things. So I was.

I mean, I think there's other people that you know.

No, just you. You're the only one.

So I, I, I want to hear about, like, how you prioritize things in life.

Well, I mean, every week, I, I like to basically sit down on Sundays and look at the next week ahead, right? And figure out what I want to do. And, and this isn't work, right. I plan work every quarter, and then basically, I worked the plan for that, right? So that's like, okay, next 90 days, this is gonna be the theme. It's what I'm working on, gonna execute. But, like, I sit down Sunday and I'm like, oh, okay. Like, I basically have, like, a running list. Like, oh, I want to grab coffee with these people, hit some people up, schedule, like, two little coffees. Okay, let's grab dinner one night or have someone over to grill or whatever. I just put these things in, you know? And so, I don't know, it just seems common sense. Like, if I'm gonna schedule a workout, like, why wouldn't I schedule a date? Or why wouldn't I schedule a trip or whatever that might be. And so, for me, like, I'm a big UFC fan, so it's like, I mean, they're pretty good, the big events, like, having those, like, I know, basically to the end of the year, like, the dates, right? So it's like, oh, okay, this one's happening in September. This one's happening here. This one's happening here. Like, I'm going to block that off. Like, I want to go to basically almost all of the pay per view events because I love it, right? So, yeah. And then, I don't know, it's just. It's pretty simple. But.

But do you prioritize fun over work?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's you.

I think that's rare.

I don't know. I mean, like, I think work, like, I enjoy everything that I do for the most part. Sure. Like, I'm such a direct person that Oftentimes I can come off like a bit of a jerk, like, via email sometimes because I'm pretty darn direct. But it's always, like, from a good place. And. But for me, like, I want to go to the park and play fetch with my dog. Like, I want to.

Go play Frisbee golf, I want to go rock climb. I want to do those things. I want to plan trips with my friends. Like, I don't know why people wouldn't want to prioritize that.

Well, I think most people get into the trap of, I will do that when I have time, when I have money.

I fell for that trap that doesn't work.

Tell me about that. What do you mean you fell for that?

Yeah, I mean, like, early in my career, I. I would say, oh, you know what? I can't do that because I've got to do this right? And then I realized that unless I made time, if, unless I prioritize that I would always have that excuse. Because as an entrepreneur, I mean, I could, I could go online today and dig through all these broker sites or email all these brokers and say, hey, I have, you know, I want to buy a new site. Send me everything, right? Like, and with these parameters, and I could work for the next three weeks just on that. Never, like, no social life, nothing. And figure that out. It doesn't really make sense to me. Like, if something comes about, cool, I'll do it. But I'm not going to, like, live my life that way. I want to prioritize the things that I'm doing. The things that I told myself, hey, when I was 17 years old in high school, realizing, I don't want to get a job, I don't want to even go to college, I don't want to work for somebody else. All many of my friends, their parents, both of their parents got laid off from this big company in our area. And they were scrambling, you know, I was like, this isn't not how I want to live my life. And I told myself, man, if I could just make two, three grand a month, I would never have to worry about anything. Like, so simple thinking. But it was true. Like, and then all of a sudden people think that, oh, well, I need to make 10 grand. Like, if I'm making 10, I mean, everyone else is making a million, I gotta make a million. Like, what a loser am I. Like, I make a million dollars a year. I'm such a loser. Why am I not making 10 million? You know, and everyone. You're always trying to do that. I got out of that. I, like, I just stopped thinking that way. And, and for me, like, I, I don't really look at someone and say, like, oh, like, you're, you're better. Or you're, you're, you're whatever, because you have more money. Like, I've always looked at time like, and personality. Like, I want some. If I'm going to be friends with someone, I want to be able to hang out with them. Right. Like, if you're busy all the time, every time I talk to you, like, can't. Because you got to go to work. Can't. Gotta do this. You know, you, you always joke, like when we. I text you about something, like, oh, I swear, it's my kids. We'll hang out, you know, whatever. And this is different circumstance. Right. But, like, you have to figure out where those priorities.

You do tend to hit me up only on the weekends that I have my kids. But I forgive you.

It happens, you know? But does that make sense?

Like, it totally does. It's just like. But, but I, but I think it goes back to the same consistent point of you're happy waiting for the next opportunity. Like, you know, internally, there's always going to be another trade. There's always going to be another opportunity. There's always going to be another business. There's always going to be another relationship. There's going to be always going to be another partner. And I think most entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs because it starts with a seed of fear of I might run out of money, I might go broke. And so we're driven by, gotta make this opportunity work because there's scarce opportunity in the world. And, and you've seen through that matrix, which I think allows you to slow down and say, of course I'm gonna go camping.

Of course.

Of course I'm gonna go on that RV trip. Of course I'm gonna go fly to Vegas with my friends and go to ufc. Like, I don't care that I might miss a trade this Friday. I'm gonna close all mine on Thursday, and there's gonna be more on Monday, and there's gonna be another. I might meet someone in Vegas that opens up a relationship. So I, I think you have this deep underlying abundance mentality about opportunities, thus allowing you to have your pick of which one you want to go after.

Yeah, I think also part of it is, like, systems and processes, like, where, like, if I'm going on vacation, I don't need to close any trades. Like, that's going to be all automated. Like, I don't have to really think about that. Also, like, if I'm going to go, if I'm thinking about like, okay, I mean, only work three hours today. You know, I had to write an email today for this little promotion that I'm doing to like a very small portion of my list that it was like, okay, this may make money, this may not make money, you know, and it is so it's like, okay, I'm going to run through this, but if I were to say, like, okay, I'm going to write this email and I'm going to do that from 11 to 1, I'm going to give myself two hours to do that. That's sort of silly. I'll probably take me two hours. Or I can sit down and say, okay, you have 20 minutes to write this email. And then I write the email, no distractions in 20 minutes and hit send. I don't really care if there's typos, right? Like, or like it's going to like literally say a thousand people, right. If I'm doing this for a big E Com brand or something like that, it's a different story, right? But you have to understand how do you put constraints on the things that you do within your business so that you can actually enjoy your life? And part of that could be hiring a team, part of that could be, I mean one of the most miserable times though of my life was when I had, we had like almost 60 staff in the Philippines. We had four full time people in China. We had, you know, office in China, office in the Philippines. I was living in Asia, you know, was weird time zone changes with other stuff that I was doing. We had work in the night shift, you know, all of these other things and outside factors where it's like the things I want to do are during the day, but our office is open 8 to 8, you know, so 8pm to 8am so then I was like, I was trying to sleep during these times and we had to revert everything because I couldn't live that way. Right. And then we had to shift things around and then I finally was like, I can't live here, I need to leave. Right?

Like.

And so understanding those constraints and changing them and how that's going to apply to you is super important.

Ryan, you're one of the most fascinating people I know.

Thank you very much.

For the record, I don't think you have anything available right now trading wise. Right. Okay. So I, I, I think in the last five years I counted, right? So Ryan, actually I did a video once endorsing Ryan and I. I went and in the video I said I think I've only ever promoted two people in the last five years. And I wanted to make sure that was true. So I went back and fact checked it and it was three. I've only ever promoted three people in the last five years. Whenever Ryan opens his next thing, we'll promote it. He's one. He's on the list of three people and I actually don't promote the other two anymore. So you're actually the only affiliate promotion that I do as of right now ever. So Ryan does anything available right now, but when he opens his stuff, we'll promote it. You, my friend, are the Jordan Peterson of entrepreneurship. Thank you for being with us tonight. Give Ryan some hashtags in the comments please if you found benefit out of tonight. It's good to see all of you. Thanks for hanging out with us tonight. We'll see you next time. Take care.

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