Perry Marshall — How 80/20 Thinking Applies To Absolutely Everything In Life

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy. My boy, Matt Wolf.

Hey, hey, hey. We're back again.

We are back with vengeance.

Are we?

No, there's no vengeance. Actually. It's pretty peaceful here.

Yeah. I didn't think there was vengeance in the air here. No, it's actually been a pretty sweet day. It's been solid podcast.

Although there was some vengeance. I saw that picture you posted on Facebook where I was about to punch you in the back.

That was a couple weeks ago. There was vengeance then there was a lot of. We were in a very tiny boxing ring. A wrestling ring. Lucha libre.

Yeah.

Type ring that we call Luchador. Luchador. There you go. Yeah, it was. It was cool. It was one of the booths from our buddy Chris Martinez's company.

Yeah.

Good stuff. Good stuff.

Good.

What are we doing today, Mr. Wolf?

Well, I'm really excited about this interview because this is somebody that we went and saw Speak last year and it had a fairly big impact on our business. It actually led to us investing in other businesses.

Who could it be?

His name is Perry Marshall and he's a fairly well known figure in the marketing world, in the entrepreneurship world, and well known for his book about AdWords, I believe it was called the AdWords Code, which he did with Mike Rhodes, who is also a past guest.

He's got his 820 sales and marketing.

We're not very good at the sinking our.

And we're looking at each other so close in the.

Yeah, let's try this again.

His book, 8020 Sales and Marketing. That was amazing.

Perfect.

And there's a cool little free link in there if you have that book or if you. You should get it, if you don't have it. To his marketing DNA test, which we'll. We'll get into. I'll just leave it at that. But I definitely recommend it. I've taken it.

And he's got a conference coming up.

Here in May called the Truth Seminar.

The Truth Seminar, and we'll link it.

Up in the show notes.

He said it's very similar to the event that we were at. We were at an event called the Rosetta St. A about a yearish ago. I can't remember exactly when it was.

Yeah, we went out with Brad Castanzo and met a whole bunch of, you know, Joe Kalis and Dan Kalis. We met them both. They were on the show recently. Yep. And a whole ton of other smart, very smart business entrepreneurs and. Business entrepreneurs.

Yeah, business entrepreneurs.

Do I have to specify that yeah, you do.

I. I think. I think people can be confused if you didn't say. But, I mean, that event for us was very, very impactful. It actually led us to making a fairly significant investment in a business that we're in. We learned the strategy to actually raise the capital without out of money pocket, which.

How cool is that?

We'll save that for the show because that's a pretty killer moment where we explained to Perry, here's how this event impacted us and how we ended up buying it, like getting capital with no money out of our own pocket within like five minutes, investing in a company. And then it was all kind of from what we learned at this Rosetta Stone seminar. And we told that to Perry, and Perry just kind of told us multiple stories along those same lines of people that have done similar things. Just it's. It's crazy. I mean, like movie producers that have access to a billion dollars now that went through some of Perry's stuff. Just really cool stuff.

That's the stuff, man. So, yeah, Perry is an amazing storyteller, and we. I think that's what I love the most about just any of his training, is that you go on this journey and it's not just tactic, tactic, tactic, but you actually understand at a deep level what's happening in the world, what's happening in marketing, sales, all that stuff, and what's happening in you. So that's why that marketing test is so important as well.

Yep. His website is@perrymarshall.com. check that out. And also our traffic book.

Yeah, so actually, this was pretty cool. A couple weeks ago, we were invited to speak to Perry's group, the Renaissance group he has there. So it's his private group. And we talked about our traffic system, the perpetual audience growth system, and actually the book, of course, the Evergreen Traffic Playbook was something that we actually gave those folks as well to dive deeper with, and they loved it. Perry thought it was amazing, and it was awesome because that's why he came on the show, kind of because of that. So, you know, you probably heard us talk about it. But our traffic system, we do all sorts of fun stuff, but it all kind of works together. And we outline that in the book with very, you know, you understand the strategy and then you also understand the tactics, and then also what our guests, you know, our friends and other folks that have been on the podcast do with traffic, and we outline some of their best things in the book as well. So where do they get that?

Mr. Matt, if you go to evergreenprofits,.com trafficbook no spaces, no dashes. Just evergreenprofits.com trafficbook Again, one more time.

Evergreenprofits.com trafficbook Matt needs to pay off his backyard shed.

No, right now I'm trying to. Conan o' Brien My shed's paid off. I'm trying to build a new fence on my side yard. So go buy our free book so I can pay build my fence. How does this make sense at all?

I don't know. They'll learn.

Conan O' Brien reference there in his podcast.

Yeah. Evergreenprofits.com trafficbook go check it out. Let's go talk to Perry because this is just like an awesome conversation that I'm really pumped to share with you guys.

Let's do it. Hey, Perry, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on your show. It's an honor. It's good to talk to you guys. Hey, it's two against one here, so it'll probably be completely unfair.

No fisticuffs for it.

It's pretty interesting because we have two different brains. I'm like a very tactical, almost borderline engine type brain where I tend to dig into the tactics. Joe is very mindset, philosophy, bigger picture kind of thinker. So we come at things from different directions. So it's a pretty interesting dynamic, shared.

Goal, but different approaches. Yeah. So it kind of works out.

Joe and Matt stir fry.

I like that. That's a first right there. Hey, it was cool to be on your to your group, the Renaissance Club as well to do our training with the whole traffic thing a couple weeks ago.

Yes. That was fun. That was great. You guys did a great job too. So, yeah, very happy to be talking.

To you folks for sure. Well, let's get into the folks that should know you but might not know you. Where did Perry Marshall come from back in the day? Got you into this whole space. And I know it's a long. Don't worry about the great details there.

Pastor's kid. My dad grew up on a farm. Didn't have an entrepreneurial bone in his body, but.

I became an entrepreneur by necessity. Two different ways. The first was I started building stereo equipment as a hobby. And the only way that I could build my next fascinating new amazing, interesting project was to sell the last one.

And so I sold my first pair of speakers from an ad in the newspaper when I was 14 and a guy came and wrote a check for 60 bucks and walked off with a pair of speakers. I thought I could rinse and repeat that and so that was Mostly my business into high school. Well, through high school.

Well, I didn't really think I could make a living with that. Got an engineering degree.

And I got into Amway. And.

The Amway thing, like, I tell all kinds of stories about that. And mostly it was a big, long, drinking pink Kool Aid kind of an experience. But I have to say that, you know, they cleaned me up, they put me in a suit and a tie. They taught me how to do a lot of things.

I think the biggest thing I got out of that experience was I seriously learned how to tell stories, because that's a storytelling culture, if there ever was such a thing.

And so.

You get into these things and you take on these things in life, and then you find out they're immensely more complicated than you ever imagined. But then you have to figure it out. So when my wife got pregnant with our first child, I'd go, oh, okay, I'm just going to redouble my efforts. I'm going to work harder, harder, harder. I was already pressing the needle into the red. And then. And then I got laid off from my job.

About three months into the pregnancy. And so, like, I had to scramble around fast. And I ended up going into sales.

And so out of the frying pan.

Into the fire. And so, well, baloney sandwiches and ramen soup and cold calls and manufacturers directories and pounding pavement and driving all over the place and being annoying.

It's all the stuff you love to do, right?

Oh, yeah, totally.

And so about two thirds of the way through this job, which I was eventually fired from, I stumbled into a seminar where Dan Kennedy was selling his magnetic marketing kit. And, man, he had my attention, like, really fast. I mean.

It was the first seminar where anybody ever admitted that cold calling is probably somewhere in the vicinity of being slaves. Building the pyramids.

Definitely grunt work, right?

Yeah.

And it was like, wow, what a breath of fresh air. And so he levitated money out of my wallet, which is a small miracle. I mean, I was not accustomed to buying a $300 information product, but he did it, you know, it was a masterful job of salesmanship. And I. The next day I went and I told my boss about it. He just looked at it at me like, oh, you gullible sucker. He was nicer than that. Okay. I mean, he was too nice to say you're a gullible schmuck. But I could tell that's what he was thinking. And like, well, I'm not going to get anywhere with this.

No.

But, like, I was actually quite desperate And I had to make something work. And I would take. I would go home and I would read through that thing, and I. And I started actually doing the stuff. I started doing lead generation for my Amway stuff, and I even did some lead generation for my manufacturing rep job, which actually did kind of work. Both of those worked to a degree. Okay? And so I get fired from this job. And I managed to get a new job. And the interview was before I got fired, but the offer came after I got fired. So they didn't really find out that I got fired. And so I managed to segue into this new job. And so this was a little software hardware company with a skeleton crew, and they didn't really have very much money. They hired me because they said, so what would you do if we didn't have a budget to fly you all over the country? And I said, well, I'll talk to him on the phone. I'll use email. And like, that was the answer. Figured out the job.

And so while they had a website, and this was 1997, and most people aren't using the web that much, but engineers are, and engineers are researching their stuff online.

And.

I figured out, hey, wait a minute. You know all this stuff in Dan's newsletter about sales letters and everything, all this applies to a webpage. Like, a webpage and a direct mail letter are almost the same thing, right? And I could do stuff like, we could offer free cheat sheets, and we can exchange information for people's contact details. And.

Within a couple months, a, I'm actually getting commission checks without pounding the pavement. Imagine that. Yeah, right? And people, like, it's all inbound. Like, people are calling me. People are emailing me. The leads are every day I come to work, and there'd be 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 leads in my email box, which, after that, horrifying. Like, I mean, I was not only bologna sandwiches, ramen soups, spiraling credit card debt, but on top of that, nobody wants to talk to me.

Every pretty much day is humble pie, really. I remember one time we were in this meeting with one of our manufacturers. So when you're a manufacturer's rep, the manufacturer, whoever they are, however dysfunctional they are, they're still God, right?

Because they control.

They can fire you, right? And so you have to suck up to him and you have to impress them. And I go in this meeting, and I go, hi, I'm Perry, and I'm an electrical engineer. And Wally goes. Perry is a sales guy. Sometimes he kind of forgets what his title is.

You're like, you know, like, you know, bonk this guy. Get this kid back in line. You know, like, I'm trying to be useful. Like, I'm trying to say, you know, I actually know something. It's like, no, no, he doesn't know anything. He doesn't even know what his title is. So, you know, like, now all these. I'm at this new job, and people want to talk to me. And I was also. I was selling something that required an engineer to sell it.

Sure. Technical.

And I just want to pause on that point. There's.

Innumerable ways that people get themselves into situations where their strength actually is a weakness. Okay?

And like, in the previous job, they regarded my engineering background as a weakness. It was like, well, Perry always wants to be deep in the weeds about all these technological questions of how they're going to apply the product. And we just want to go to the purchasing agent and get an order.

Just get it done.

We just want to schmooze with these people and talk about the fish on their wall. And I just thought that was, like, so shallow. Like, no, I've got an education. I understand how things work. I want to solve your problem. And my boss would. Sometimes it's like, perry, stop solving problems and just sell something.

Literally. We had that conversation, okay? And so, like, obviously, most people listening are not engineers, and that isn't the point. Okay? But, like.

Are you in a situation where you're consistently cutting against the grain of who you are? If so, get out. Okay? Like, face the music. Face up to it. Figure out, like, honey, you know what? We just gotta get. We gotta get rid of this product line or we gotta get rid of this particular set of customers, or we gotta get rid of this vendor or whatever.

Distraction, noise. It's all life is.

Like, life is gonna go by and you're gonna be on a deathbed. And, like, how. How much time did you spend, like, not even doing what you're gifted to do or dealing with people who don't know who you are or don't want a person like you, right? And when you. Man, it was like, the best form of therapy. Like, okay, like, these people, these engineers, like, talking to a marketing and sales guy that actually knows what he's talking about was like, oxygen.

Oh, yeah. Okay. My people. My people here, right?

Like, at my engineering job before all of this, we would have, like, lunch and learns. Like, you all know what those are, right?

Do those.

And, you know, some vendor would come in and they would show all their stuff and they'd buy everybody pizza. And the question that would always get asked before the vendor showed up was, so is it a marketing guy or is it an engineer? If it was a marketing guy, it meant you had to be nice and ask softball questions. He knew he wouldn't really know anything. And if it was an engineer, they could actually, like, get down to the real stuff, right? You know, and, and so, like, whoever you are out there, there is some.

Playing field on which you are super competent, right? And your job, and you might be in some foreign.

World where partly you're a fish out of water, but can you bring this competent part into it? Can you hybrid it together somehow? And that's really what I was doing in that job, and that's why it worked. And, and it did work out. And four years later, the company got sold for $18 million and I got a nice check from the stock options and like, my life had completely done a 180.

And I remember thinking, man, I'm sort of good at this direct marketing stuff. What if I got really good and I just totally committed myself to it? I'm going to be the most insanely devout student of this stuff, and I'm going to learn everything that I possibly can. I'm going to know how to maneuver my way out of any situation. I think that would be valuable. And it was. It was a hugely valuable skill, and it was the right time. And so.

You know, there's just a wonderful thing about committing yourself to a discipline in mastering it or mastering part of it really well.

How would you recommend someone who might not be so aware as you were, or maybe you were more or less put into a role that you figured out what was best for you? Is there something that you recommend folks to do or an assessment, something to figure out what is that thing that's in them that they might not notice?

One thing, I created it because it didn't exist and it needed to exist. I created a. Let's call it a Myers Briggs for how people sell, and it's called the marketing DNA test. Myers Briggs is pretty good. If you're trying to figure out is somebody an introvert or an extrovert or some of those other things, it's actually quite useful.

Type people in certain ways. Well, we needed that for marketing because, you know, after. So looking back at that sales job and seeing how very poorly matched it was to the way that I actually sell, okay, and then. And then the next job actually worked really well. And then working with 300 industries, literally, and every kind of Sales and marketing person you can imagine. I really started noticing some patterns. I saw lots of people.

So here's an example. So let's just pick two kinds of people. There's a lot of other ones, but the copywriter and the hostage negotiator. Okay, so the copywriter is the guy, he sits in his cave with his RC and his week old pizza and his computer and he'll. He just grinds away and you know, and he writes 87 emails and he builds a whole product launch out and then finally you press send and the whole thing, like in a million dollars shows up, right? That's a copywriter. And if, you know copywriters, they have a certain personality type and you know, they're very eclectic and they're into all these weird things, right? Okay, so that's a copyright. Well, then there's a hostage negotiator. And that's the guy who, you could just throw him in a situation and he talks a million miles an hour and he somehow dukes it out with this person and he works it all out and they arrive at a deal and he walks out. You go, so what did you say to those guys anyway? He's like, I don't remember.

It's how and what. It's asking questions.

The hostage negotiator, when he sends you an email, it says no subject because he forgot, he forgot to put a subject line. The copywriter would never ever forget that. Right?

Yeah.

Okay. I have watched hostage negotiators try really hard to be copywriters.

Doesn't go well, it doesn't work.

Okay. And I have watched copywriters try to be hostage negotiators. That would be me. I'm not a hostage negotiator. And that doesn't work either. And I looked at this and I go, we gotta help people figure out how they sell. And I actually, I said, I think there are eight.

Axes of how people sell. I reduced it to eight things. I said, all salespeople are some combination of liking two or three of these and not liking two or three of these. And that actually defines the entire personality of the salesperson. And we came up with something that accurately types people. In fact.

One third of the people that take it.

Say that it nailed them and the other two thirds say that it was really close. And only 5% of people who take this test go, no, that was kind of off. It's very accurate. And like, we had a guy, Joshua Earl was a computer programmer. The marketing DNA test said you would be a great copywriter. Eighteen months later, he was a freelance copywriter making $100,000 a year.

That's cool.

Living on his own terms.

And I think it's really important that. So there's a stereotype that there are like sales type people and there's marketing type people. Okay, that's a little bit true, certainly. But the real truth is, is that everybody has.

A certain way that they typically persuade other people. Right. You could be a computer programmer, you could be a total introvert. You could be a geek, whatever. You still have people in your life that you cooperate with, you work things out with. If you work in a warehouse, you have coworkers, you're constantly negotiating who's going to do what. You have a way that you sell, and if you figure out how that you sell, then a. And you just restrict it like not a hostage negotiator or I'm not a. Whatever, I'm going to do this. It's probably going to work reasonably well. And then furthermore, if you spend money and time going to seminars or reading books or taking courses and you focus on what you're good at, it produces an exponential greater return. Right. You could go from being an like, with no practice, you might be an okay copywriter. Well, you go spend $10,000 and read a bunch of books and get some mentors and stuff, you might be a remarkably good copywriter after six months or nine months. Right. And so I think it's incredibly important. Marketingdnatest.com there's also. It costs money. It's 37 bucks. There's a free link inside 8020 sales and marketing.

And I think you should take the results very seriously and you should actually go well, in what ways am I trained to sell that aren't really compatible with the way I naturally like to sell? And your life will make an immediate improvement.

And that's amazing. We'll link those in the show notes for folks to go get the book, of course, and then wait, even just buy the assessment. I'm kicking myself right now because I know we both took this right after your Rosetta Stone seminar because I think it was wrapped up in there. And I'm going to pull it up again because last year was this phase for Matt and I just assessments like crazy to really understand who we are, let ourself off the hook for stuff that we shouldn't be putting mental load into. And I mean, I would assume this is part of your 8020 thinking is an even exponential 8020 thinking. Because who else is thinking about Once you hone in on A skill, then go deep.

Yeah.

Now you're in a whole different class.

Now I'm right. How. How much of a factor is like how, how much you enjoy it versus how good you are at it. Because I feel like there's a distinction there because for me, I feel like I'm fairly good at selling people in person. If I was to kind of pitch Joe on something, I could probably have him sold on it. But I hate doing like one to one sales and phone sales. It just, I get anxious. It's not really something I enjoy doing. Where my sweet spot is. I love the technical stuff. I love building web pages, I love problem solving technical things we want to happen on the site. That's kind of where I like to operate. But I actually feel I'm a good salesperson. I just hate it.

Well, I think we all have to do things that we're not particularly fond of that we might. And there could also be a person who doesn't particularly like the technical stuff, but they're actually really good at it.

Right.

So that, I mean, that's always true. But I mean, as best you can, we all need to try to find a nice intersection between what we like and what we are good at.

But.

One thing that's usually the case is that.

If you're not very good at a way of selling, you're probably not going to like it either. Right. And you know.

I'm an alchemist.

One of the axes in marketing DNA test is are you a person who wants to sell the new, the innovative, the cutting edge, the bleeding edge and all of that, or are you the person that likes to sell the tried, the true, the reliable, the, the validated and the standard? Right, right. Well.

They needed somebody who sells the standard reliable day in, day out stuff. And I, my personality is, I'm always pushing the envelope and the edge. Well, if you have a push the edge person in a, in a situation that's clearly designed for a plotter who just like puts one foot in front of the other, you're gonna have like a starving salesman.

Yeah.

Like, yeah, like you're, you're always trying to sell stuff that they're not even ready to ship yet. Right. And you get really skinny commission checks because.

You'Re on the bleeding edge of the early adopter curve, which I mean, I spent about a year and a half. I found this really cool technology that I latched onto and I understood but basically it was two years too early. And man, that was a.

I didn't even know how to go Sell the other stuff. I mean. I mean, I had all kinds of problems and it's not all their fault, but like, wow, talk about school. Hard knocks, man.

Well, you're just shortcutting it with the marketing DNA assessment. And you have the 80:20 power curve, all that. So if you can hone in on the right side of that curve, the exponential growth, know what the heck to sell or how to sell using your personality or your team, then you're setting yourself up for probably a lot more fun and just easier sell, selling. So it's super cool. Yeah. 8020 sales and marketing. Get the book if you don't have it. And that's just a prerequisite, I would say. All right, so we. Rosetta Stone was amazing. That was a seminar you did last year, probably May ish in Chicago.

Yes.

And Right.

It was super impactful for us. There was actually one. I'm drawing a blank on the person's name, but somebody came up and you, I think you kind of Fireside chatted on stage with him. Who he made, like, a payment processor that was bought out by PayPal. I think it was called Swift Pay.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we actually, we came back and we used Swift Pay, and we actually, I think, got approved for like $80,000. And we actually borrowed money through Swift Pay and invested in a business and actually bought out a business using the money from the PayPal Swift Pay. And that's how we actually got an investment. And that was like something we did immediately after Rosetta Stone. So cool little story.

It's worked out.

Yeah, it's super cool.

Well, that's great. Well, I should tell what happened to Ed, because.

This is very illustrative of what's really state of the art in business right now.

Ed had this company called Swift Capital, and they went through several evolutions, but basically they ended up in the.

Business. Loans backed by and paid off by your merchant account business.

So if you're a business.

So it's incredibly hard for small businesses to borrow money. The banks are not interested in any of that. Right. And there's nowhere to go except credit cards. Right.

So.

So.

They set up this thing where, okay, we'll loan you $80,000 and then we're going to take 10% of your merchant account.

Volume is just going to get diverted. It's a little bit like garnishing a paycheck each transaction. Right. And then when it's all paid off, you're done. So that was a basic concept. Now, I've been talking to Ed about this since probably 2011 or 12 or somewhere in there. And so he was buying Google Ads and we were doing the stuff. And.

Ed came to my seminar with Richard Koch, the Star seminar, in 2014. And one of the things that Richard talked about was that.

Really successful companies dramatically simplify things.

In a revolutionary way. Ed went home and he said, okay, I'm going to proposition simplify this merchant loan business. And instead of taking a day or a week to get approved, we need to find some algorithm that can improve you and give you a quote in minutes. So, like, you're not making all these phone calls and give me a rate and like, all this kind of stuff. We want to get this down to an online wizard where.

You can apply and with maybe either live real time online, or within minutes, you're going to get an email and say, okay, so here's your interest rate. Here's the amount. You're approved for all the terms. Now, this is hard, okay? You're making an instantaneous credit judgment on somebody, but, you know, they're like, all right, well, there's all these signals that we can go out and find related to these businesses. And if we, if we 80, 20, if you get the right 20%, these signals that tell us 80%, if we really polish this process, we can get this down. And so he relentlessly did this. And I just really need to say, whenever you do this, it's a bear, okay? It is a major innovation effort with. You're on roads that are not paved by definition.

And you're going to have to gather all this information or put things together that have never been put together. And so he really had his work cut out for him, but he just started going after it. Well.

By the time he was done, he had the fastest, most efficient way to get a small business loan for like, John Doe anybody, basically.

Tiniest amount, too, right?

And you go, wow, it's like the fastest way to get a small business loan in the world. Well, yeah.

Of course. I've kind of told you the story, right? And PayPal came along and bought him out for. Well, you know, it's not public information, but it's reasonably safe to say it was over $100 million.

I believe it.

Okay. I mean, it was a lot of money. Okay. And, you know, when I was new and, you know, Google AdWords was brand new, you know, my typical customer was like a guy with a computer in a spare bedroom and like, he's trying to swat his toddler from pushing the reset button on the computer.

He's gonna break everything.

He's. He just joined an affiliate program and his wife is like standing there with her arms crossed and she's like, well, you know, if we lose money on one more thing, like, you're not gonna get laid for eight weeks.

You're going back to your crappy job.

And I mean, I'm being, I mean, I'm being really straight, but I mean, like, this was my customer in 2005 for. Okay. And more and more and more my customers are doing things like selling their companies to PayPal for $100 million or. Or 10 million or, you know, like they're getting acquired, you know, way bigger than the mom and pop little part time income website guy, you know, and. Which I like. You know, I mean, I'm glad I've kind of evolved past that. Of course, I have the whole spectrum. I mean, I have that guy too. And that guy needs to read 8020 sales and marketing yesterday and probably memorize chapters.

So that his wife isn't mad at him all the time. I mean, you joke about it, but I mean, it is kind of true.

It's 100% true. Yeah.

If you're making your spouse miserable and you're not paying your bills, life is not fun.

No, yeah, we've been there. Yeah, we've all. I'm sure we've all had our courses through that, that journey, but yeah, that, that just that technology right there, we could see that revolutionizing things even further. The fact that PayPal has a hold of it now is amazing.

Oh, yeah, yeah. You log into PayPal and if they think you're any sizable business man, like, they're putting loan builder right in front of you all.

Yes, they are.

It almost felt like we were like cheating or doing something wrong because it was like, it was like a 10 minute process to sign up. And then they were like. And then, no joke. Within 20 minutes of going through the process, there was $80,000 more.

It was more like five.

Yeah, just. And we're just like, this can't be real. And then the payoff portion of it, it just pulls from your PayPal so it never feels like your money in the first place. It's kind of pooling their money and then paying you what's left after it. And so there's very low friction. It was really cool process, but it's.

Allowed us to leverage. Yeah.

This is a, it's a quintessential example of what real innovators do in the world and how we make. I mean, there's billions of dollars of economic growth in something like that. Now, I'm not, you know, I'm not advocating people getting themselves all strung out with too much credit or anything. That's not the point. But, like, you know, can you make, you know, the distance between a desire and the fulfillment of a desire? You know.

Half as long, one fourth as long, one tenth as long? Like, can you shave days down, two minutes? I mean, this is what they did, right? And a lot, you know, a lot of times it's like somebody's just got to doggedly devote themselves to figuring this out and just not take no for an answer until they finally get there, right? There's gotta be. There's got to be some set of reliable credit signals. Even if I don't pull a credit report on this guy, there's all this data we can buy out there. There's got to be something, right? And that's what he did. So now he's off on his next adventure.

I'm doing another seminar in May, and I've got a guy who. Two and a half years ago.

He was.

He was at one of my seminars. And he'd been a customer for a long time. Very typical customer. Like, okay, so he's doing some consulting. He's got this other company. He's got this other partner, serial entrepreneur, like, doing just kind of hustling, right? And he was doing okay, you know.

He now has a movie studio with a billion dollars backing, and he's playing in the same sandbox as Universal and Disney. And this stemmed from.

He's had his hand in film as a hobby and as a passion for 20, 30 years. But he had this idea of how to align the investors behind a movie with the producers of the movie with the distributors of a movie. He had a different financial model to get all these people lined up. And he went to Hong Kong and raised $136 million last year.

And then another entity, which people will hear about at the seminar, came along, and they're like, oh, we like what you're doing. And they had a billion dollars of capital.

That'S available to make movies. And so, like, this guy is now has access to everybody in Hollywood. Wow, okay. And, I mean, this guy was, I would say, not particularly any different than you guys or me two and a half years ago. And it just shows you that when you can solve a really, really fundamental problem in the world that is causing a lot of people a lot of pain, you can be propelled to altitudes that you never imagined. I mean, I don't Think this guy ever imagined managing a billion dollars of movie capital, but here he is. Yeah, he's just a regular guy. Okay. He's not, you know, he doesn't have, I don't know, antennas growing out of his head maybe.

He doesn't. Yeah, it's kind of like what? And I know Elon Musk is completely different. Different wavelength, but the fact that you can combine different facets, different things that you learn. I'm looking at the bookshelf behind you. You can combine things from totally different industries, make them something unique. And it sounds kind of like what this guy did through his experience, his network, all these things that he's done over the years.

Yeah. And I've really become a student of this because people talk about disrupting industries, but I've really looked very deeply at how this is done. And.

I've been going through all the different projects that I've been working on, looking a lot of other my students and things. And.

There'S really a formula to disrupting industries, to questioning assumptions, to challenging existing paradigms. There's almost no rule that can't be broken. But you have to, like, you have to break them in the right ways. Like, yeah, we all know anarchists. Okay, this is not. I'm not talking about that. Right. You know, Ed Hariki is most definitely not an anarchist. He's like a 50 year old guy from Connecticut who clearly knows how to talk to a corporate guy and not sound like an idiot.

Right.

But look, this is, I believe that we are in a transitional phase of history. That's as big of a deal as Copernicus. Like, really? Okay. I don't think we're just merely in a world of change. I think we're literally standing between an old set of rules and a new set of rules, and nobody knows what the new set of rules actually is. And you know, just as an analogy.

If you have a friend and you have some kind of a moral or political disagreement, it's probably not possible for you to completely change their mind. But there's usually one or two points on which you can influence their thinking significantly. You could get them to consider like, it could be like a Democrat, Republican debate and you may never win them over to the other side, but you could definitely score a couple of talking points and get like, well, you know, dang, dude, you know, you're right.

Yeah. Like a policy type thing, potentially.

Yeah, yeah, right, right. Okay. And in that same. So that's an analogy for saying.

None of us are going to get to set the Rules of the future. But we can probably influence them significantly in a few areas if we have the right disruption mindset. But only a very few people are even going to be able to do that. What I've been saying to my audience is that's what you want to be. Because there's tons of industries where there's a wrecking ball just ready to come in and it might be six months from now, it might be six years from now. There's no telling. But a wrecking ball, sooner or later is going to show up. The taxi eventually is going to get replaced by the Uber.

And you can already see the writing on the wall. Look, we were all getting in taxis going, you know, I really hate sitting behind bulletproof glass and I really hate arguing with the guy about whether he takes credit cards or not because it's like extra 7% merchant fee and like, I don't care, dude. Like, that's your problem. That's not my problem. Like, drop me off and let me. Right, right. Like the whole thing was ripe. Yeah. And there's so many industries that are right and they're, there are customers that are unhappy and they're like, there's got to be a better way to do this. Somebody's going to figure it out. So who's it be?

Yeah. What are some industries that are just top of mind that, that you're like, oh man, these are the next ones.

That we definitely seeing it in. The hotel industry with Airbnb and rental.

Cars are a big one now.

You know, I'm involved in accounting and taxes. I think, I think, you know, that's, that's rife with all kinds of complexity that although the IRS is figuring this out because for rank and file, $50,000 a year taxpayers, they do have it down to a postcard. Okay. And that is putting a bunch of accountants out of business actually. Okay.

The real low end ones.

You know, I would, I would just go, I would say every listener is either working in or a stone's throw away from an industry that's just begging to be disruptive.

You know, any industry that's just basically been doing the same thing for 30 years, I think the high end audio industry is waiting to get disrupted. I could name all kinds of areas in science that are ripe for disruption and that's like a whole.

That's what's interesting. And these indicators, like you said, 30 years, maybe it hasn't really evolved in that span of time or it's very marginally. I mean, podcasting is one that we Went all in in terms of our content development. Podcasts been around for what, 15ish years maybe, and now it's starting to pick up mainstream. You know, you see everybody kind of flocking the celebrities. There's a reason for that. Eyeballs, earballs are moving there.

The podcasting is taking away all the sponsorships from radio, too. Geico is, I think, the biggest radio sponsor on the planet. I think they have a bigger spend for radio than anybody else. They're shifting their money to podcasting instead of radio.

Spotify getting acquired, acquiring stuff for 350mil. I mean, that's just the beginning of things to come in this space alone. So that's. Yeah, we feel pretty bullish on this medium as a whole.

I want to touch on the 8020 principle real quick. I think, you know, most people, I think, get the sort of the basic concept of it, right? Like 20% of your efforts create 80% of the results. That's kind of like the basic sort of fundamentals of it. But where I think it gets really, really interesting is when you talk about the sort of fractal nature of it. And there's actually an 8020 of that 20 and an 8020 of that 20. And I was wondering if you could speak into that a little bit and give that overview of your philosophy around 80 20.

So this is super, super powerful, super important.

I thought I understood 80 20, 20 years ago. Okay? 20% of the people have 80% of the wealth. 20% of the customers spend 80% of the money and generate sales. Okay? Right. That's just like the scratch on the surface. Okay? So.

There'S two things about 8020 that I did not understand until I went deep. And then all of a sudden I was like, oh, my goodness, this is a whole nother world is number one. 80:20 isn't just this business rule of thumb. It's a law of nature. Okay? 80 20. 20% of the rabbits have 80% of the rabbit babies, and 20% of the roads have 80% of the cars. And 20% of your carpet has 80% of the dirt on the carpet, because 80% of the traffic is on that one part of the carpet, okay? And it's in almost every spreadsheet and Google campaign and Facebook campaign and Google Analytics. And it's in your product defects, and it's in your employee problems and support tickets. It's everywhere. Okay?

Secondly.

It'S fractal. What does that mean? Fractal means pattern inside a pattern inside a pattern inside a pattern. Okay? And so.

For example.

If I say to you, how long is the coast of California? Well, I don't know. Give me a guess.

I would probably call it about 600, 700 miles. Actually, it's more than that.

It's probably more like a couple thousand miles. I don't know.

Okay, so as the crow flies, let's say it might be a thousand miles.

Call it a thousand. Yeah.

But.

It really depends on what you mean. So it's like, well, how far is it for an airplane to fly from San Diego to Oregon? Okay, so that's an answer. Okay, but if you drive the roads, it's actually a lot longer than that. And if you walked on the sidewalks, it would even be longer than that.

Right.

And if you walked along the seashore, like all the way, it would be like three times longer than that. If, if, if a mouse walked, you know, the size of the mouse squiggles, it would be even longer. Okay. And if a bacteria, you know, it might be 100,000 miles for bacteria. Okay, now this is not just like.

A trippy little.

Like head trip thing, okay? This is actually the way sales and marketing and business actually works. Okay. Because.

In the coast of California, you know, there's an inlet in an inlet in an inlet in an inlet. Okay, now back to 80 20. So the coast of California is fractal. It's actually almost infinitely long if you get granular enough.

Even though it's only 1,000 miles in an airplane. Right. So 8020 is the same way. So 80% of the cars drive on 20% of the roads, but 80% of the 80% of the cars Drive on 20% of the 20% of the roads. So that's 4% of the roads carry 64% of the cars. Well, then we can do 8020 again. And 1% of the roads have half the cars, and we can do 8020 a few more times. And Interstate 80 has like 5% of all the cars. Okay. Like, one road has rates. So, you know, if you were a terrorist and you wanted to screw up some roads, all you got to do is like, if you blew up 10 interstates, you could like screw up the whole United States.

Yeah.

There's immense leverage. Okay, so this is true. In a Google account.

In Google, 5% of the keywords get 95% of the traffic. So if you're trying to optimize 100% of your Google account, you're wasting 95% of your time.

That right there is an aha right there for a lot of folks.

So 8020 tells you the Cost of perfectionism if it's directed the wrong way. 80:20 also tells you the upside of perfectionism. If it's directed the right way. That actually goes back to whole marketing DNA conversation. Right. Like if. If you're a bad copywriter, then you could go to classes for 10 years and you could be a not so bad copywriter at the end of 10 years. Right, yeah. Whereas if you're a Great copywriter, in 10 years, you could be a 9th degree black belt copywriter commanding $100,000 for a project.

Right.

Okay. So there's enormous leverage. And so 8020 is one of these things where you can go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. It's sort of like saying, well, how much is there really to know about playing the guitar? Well, I don't know. Ask Eric Clapton. You know, I bet Eric Clapton is still learning new licks on the guitar.

Probably. Yeah.

However old he is or whatever. Right, sure. Like. Well, a guitar is just a piece of wood with six strings on it. Right. It's like, well, not real, a little.

Bit more to it.

Right, right. 8020 is like that. So if you go down the 8020 sales and marketing rabbit hole, you'll find really fascinating little caverns and tunnels and.

Graphs and visuals and. Yeah, I think when the road Visual. I don't know if I saw a visual from you or if it was just the analogy. And I started thinking, that is kind of amazing. You just summed it all up in one interstate. Good thing the terrorists don't listen to our podcast. We ban them somehow.

Of course, a lot of times I think people might also make the mistake of, like, you know, they figure out the 8020 of something and so they completely discard the 80.

Right.

Isn't there something to be said for, like, still paying attention to the 80%? So one example I heard from somebody one time is like, when you're trying to get healthy, you look at the 8020 of diet and exercise, it's kind of like 80%. Or the diet is the bigger factor there. But because exercise is like the 80, not the 20, you don't really want to throw the exercise out. Right. So, you know, how do you know which pieces of the 80? I don't know if I'm explaining this well, but how do you know? Like, you don't want to throw everything out just because you figured out the 80 20.

Right?

Yeah. So here's an example of where you would harness the 80. Okay, so one time I went to a Rush concert with my friend Paul, and Paul Said he goes, you know what would be really awesome would be a deep cut tour, like where they like, they just play the songs that the super fans like. They're not going to play Tom Sawyer and YYZ because we already know those songs we're going to. They're going to play like the Camera Eye or Between the Wheels or, you know, some. Okay. Now.

The super fans absolutely would go to that show, okay? And in fact, they could if they wanted to do small shows for super fans. They charge $500 a ticket and they would say, we're not gonna play.

The hits, we're gonna play all of the other ones, okay? And there could be a place for that. Okay? So like.

1% of the fans want to hear 100% of the songs, even the songs that aren't quite as good. And so remember this, there always is.

A place for the weak levers.

There's the high leverage stuff. There is always a place for the low leverage stuff. And it has to be done somewhere. That's probably actually the biggest lesson. Well, just because it's the 80%, it still has to exist somewhere. Right? Somebody has to do. Doesn't necessarily need to be you.

That makes sense. That makes sense. And I assume like, you know, from the fractal nature of 80 20, there's 8020 inside of the 80 as well. Just like there is inside of the 20. So yeah, that totally makes sense.

So what's a. We know the 8020 sales and marketing book is definitely the. Gotta get. What's another one on that big old bookshelf behind you that you often recommend to folks when you talk to me just like, you gotta go read this thing.

Well, okay. I think the book of Proverbs in the Bible is the best business book ever written. And.

I'll give you a just quick.

Second.

By the way, while you're looking that up. The Truth Seminar is coming up in May, so we're going to link that up. That's Perry's next seminar, similar to the one we did last year. Rosetta Stone. Just want to give you a little shout out.

Yes, the Truth seminar will be amazing. And it's going to be about disruptive businesses. And we're going to have the guy with the movie company, he's going to explain how this all happened. I got a number of people with stories like that and it's a really breakthrough seminar. So everybody remembers Enron, okay? And you know, there's all kinds of failures that have happened in the world, but I'd say there's Two kinds of failure, okay? There are tactical and strategic failures, and then there are errors of basically moral judgment and character, okay? And if you. If you have a error of strategy or tactic.

You could go bankrupt, and all your investors will hate you and they'll be angry at you, but they'll get over it, okay? Five years from now, it's like, yeah, well, yeah, we lost all that money on that apartment building and we got hosed. But whatever, okay? Nobody's gonna forgive Ken Lay at Enron, okay? It's like, no, you guys egregiously, arrogantly screwed over a whole bunch of people and drank your own pink Kool Aid to this ridiculous degree. And we can watch documentaries about it, okay? They will never live that down, okay? The book of Proverbs is. It's not about strategies and tactics. It's about morals and judgment, which is the real bedrock of business, okay? Because that is actually how the world will eventually judge you. If you go to any funeral, they're never talking about the guy's revenue. They're always talking about the guy's character. Right? Right. Okay. That guy made some really hard decisions. You know, that guy decided to pay back the people that he owed money instead of going bankrupt. And, man, you know, like, those are the kind of stories that you hear at a funeral. And that's what Proverbs is about. And I will say there is a distinct lack of that kind of education in most business books, but it's really the biggest lever, right? It's 80, 20. So the book of Proverbs, that would be a very high mark on my list.

Thank you. Yeah, appreciate that. I know you got a boogie out of here. So what's the URL for the truth seminar, so people can check it out there?

Perrymarshall.com truthseminar really? That's really hard to find. Perrymarshall.com Truthseminar.

And get on the stream, even just the emails we're sending out and we've got some videos, they will really get you thinking about disrupting industries and changing the game.

And, you know, my seminars, I don't do seminars the way everybody else does. The way most seminars work is there's a big dog and pony show and they have it every year, and they're gonna sell you a whole bunch of stuff, and it's a pitch fest. I don't do that. I do very meaty content. I do very little pitching. I mean, yeah, we do sell a little bit of stuff, but it is not the point. The point is.

Like, I have High expectations of my audience. I want you to think, I want you to tear things apart, put things back together. Your brain is going to hurt.

I can attest to a little bit of that. But you marinate and it all seeps in the subconscious, all that.

And it will change the way that you. It will transform the way that you do your business, and you'll be doing things that nobody else would even think of. Yeah.

And you curate an amazing group of people, too, that a lot of those folks, I see them commenting on this thread, the way we said, we're going to talk to you. So Dan Kalis, he was one of them.

Luis Gonzalez was there, too.

Luis Gonzalez Meacham. We actually, Robert, we became really good friends with him. I know you work with him, but that's where he's an awesome guy. He's a good friend of ours now.

Great group, great event. I can't recommend it enough that everybody listening, go and check it out and figure out how to get there. Because, I mean, it was life changing for us. I mean, we made an investment in a new company that we're now involved in as a result of that event.

So, yeah, multiple investments.

That's fabulous.

Well, thank you.

Send me that video and I'll use it.

Stories like that that we can get. And yeah, it's really. I admire and appreciate people who reciprocate. I mean, I demand a lot of my audience and I. I respect and appreciate people that like being in that demanding atmosphere. Right. And like, when you sit down and you talk to other people, it's like, wow, there's a lot of really amazing people here, you know, and it's just so I. There's more brain, believe me, there's more brains in the audience than there is on the stage. You know, I kind of feel like the bulldog on a Mack truck, you.

Know, you're bringing them together. So that's props to you there. So love it. Thank you for your time, Perry. And yeah, we'll follow.

Thanks for having me. It was a. It was a joy and a pleasure. Thank you.

Have a good one. See ya.

All right.

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