Rich Schefren - Big Tech Will Crush Your Online Business (What To Do About It)

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey, yo.

Hi there.

How's it going?

I'm doing swell.

This was a fun one.

Hell, yeah, it was.

This one we actually did in person and we have video footage to prove that we actually did it.

Yes. We actually met in person. Yeah, it's a rarity. Yeah, we don't do a lot of in person setups, but this one we did. Right. Like, we had multi camera setups.

Yep.

Um, actually technically three. Even. Even one of the guys, Justin, who is on our buddy Mars's team, who was happened to be there. We had a whole crew. It was quite the production. Yeah, it was really cool.

No, this. This one was fun. And the.

The.

The person that we interviewed today is actually somebody that, you know, was. Was fairly instrumental in our business journey. He was. He was one of the first sort of online marketers that we came across and learned a lot from early, early on in our careers.

And he was kind of coaching and advising the quote unquote gurus at the time and beyond and still. But yeah, like, when we were starting out, we picked up his ebook that had now since sold probably plus 5 million.

Well, it was free, but given away.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, it was free, but it's gnarly. It's millions and millions and millions of copies. He said, Rich said on this interview. And that's where we first heard of Rich. And did we even say Rich?

No, this is Rich.

Okay. It's Rich Sheffern chatting with. But yeah, that was. That was one of the very first E books I read back when we were first starting out.

And I think. Didn't Rich come and speak when we. I think we went to, like, one of Alex Jeffries masterminds in Vegas, and there was like 30 people in the room. And I'm pretty sure Rich spoke at that mastermind.

He was wearing the same black shirt there too.

Yeah, I think. I think Rich might actually be one of those people that, like, he wears, like, the same color shirt every day just so he doesn't have to think about it, because every time I've seen him, he's wearing the black shirt.

I know. I was actually out at the store the other night, and I was like, I should pick up just a stack of same colored shirts. Save the thought process on dressing a little bit.

Well, I was actually having a conversation with Josh Bartlett the other day, and we were actually really, really diving deep on the concept of Decision fatigue and how it's a real thing, and the more decisions you have to make throughout the day, the more, you know, the less sort of mental ability you have to make other decisions later in the day. And so cutting out as many decisions as possible helps you make better decisions on things that actually matter. For sure.

Yeah. No, yeah. That's why I'm trying to go more plain shirts now. It's no clashing with things. It's easy to just go, yeah, I.

Just don't wear clothes anymore because I'm just like, if I have to think about what clothes I'm going to wear, like, let's just not wear any.

Put it away. Put it away. But luckily, he did wear clothes for this interview, and it's proven with the videos. Check out for the videos, too. Like, we'll. We'll try to post them on the show notes. Hopefully we can get that done in time. We should be able to, but either way, yeah, this is, like, it was an honor for one to meet up with Rich in this capacity. We had a couple hours with him prior to this. We've been having a lot of calls with him, which is really cool. We're. We're helping him on all sorts of different ways with podcasting things and getting him on shows and actually launching his own show, which is coming pretty soon. It's not live yet, but. All right, we're gonna drop the name.

Are we gonna drop the name?

Are we not?

I don't know. You said we don't have to drop the name, but maybe we will.

He says it in the interview, so that'll be an open loop.

Yeah, it was called Secrets of Being Rich.

Yeah, Secrets of Being Rich. That is a TBD name, but that may change.

But if we're doing our jobs right, you should start to see Rich Sheffrin everywhere.

Right.

So that's really what we're helping him do, is we're helping him get a podcast set up, and then we're also doing our part to get them on as many other podcasts as we can. And so hopefully when this comes out over the next couple weeks, you're just gonna see Rich everywhere. And if you do see Rich everywhere, then, sweet.

We've done our jobs.

It's working.

Yeah. Yeah. And Rich, I mean, it's easy to help a guy like him because he a. Is just brilliant, but he's a great guy. He's very generous. He's a fun dude, too.

He's a guy that I could see us hanging out with for an extended Period of time and just talking about whatever. Very similar in that regard. And he was just doing some great things. So in this interview you'll notice how he's always had this, but now he's basically presenting these brand new thoughts to a lot of folks. He is a master researcher and reader. He has processes for all this that he's actually shared with us in depth. Speed reading process, his logging of all of his notes and stuff. We actually don't share that on this episode.

But I think the live stream, we're going to mention it a bit. If you register for that. I think there's some ways that you can get a lot of that information.

Good. Yeah. So we'll put a link in there. We'll tell a link how to get there in a sec. Yeah. So the fact that Rich is so methodical around how he consumes content and then digests content into a format that he can actually find patterns and see trends for the future and then that's basically what he's amazing at. And then he comes up with a strategy around that. A lot of that is noted in this podcast. And like you said, Matt, there's a live stream that we're actually going to be a part of, which is really cool. And it's put on. It's actually going to be at Mark Ford's Cigar Bar, Michael Masterson, that's out in Florida. So part of Agora Financial and that great company. Pretty crazy. And it's a 24 hour long live stream.

So we got to talk about some of the names that are on this live. Are we allowed to talk about the names that are on the live stream? I think by the time this comes out, we would have been allowed to talk about the names.

I just don't know who's confirmed and who's not. So that's the thing. I don't want to say names that might not be there.

Well, we know for sure Rich Sheffrin's going to be there.

He will be there.

We know for sure Mark Ford's going to be there.

We will be there. Molly Mahoney.

We can confirm Molly is going to be out there.

Phil, same. Mike.

Phil same Mike. Phil, same. Roland Frazier.

Roland Frazier. Ryan Dice.

Mike Dillard.

Dillard, I believe. Yeah. They're also chatting with Neil Patel. Neil Patel. I think they're chatting with Russell Brunson. I'm not sure he's confirmed.

I'm not sure if Russell's confirmed, but they're trying to get Russell out there.

They're basically like the Big, big wigs of the biz, if you've heard of.

Them in the marketing space, they're probably going to be a part of this livestream. Yeah, let's just put it that way.

Yeah. And just a. So what's the URL really?

All right, so the US. The US the URL is csib2020.com so the letter C, S, I, B and then the numbers2020.com and then there's a little like password that you have to enter when you get there. You enter the password hustle. Right. So there's like a little, you'll land on the page, it'll be like a vault looking image and it'll say like enter your code, you're going to enter the word hustle and then you'll see the vault door unlock and let you in. And that's where you have all the details about the people that are speaking on this 24 hour live stream.

So what CSIB2020.com basically stands for is Coalition to save Internet Businesses. So that's. And what they're doing basically and what Rich talks about like in this episode, and we'll get into some of the points that we thought were awesome is, you know, there's trends and things happening online right now that a lot of us, maybe we hear little things here and there like the Google pixels going away in a couple of years or Facebook's tightening down certain restrictions, Google's doing that or this or that. But really we're not noticing these big things. Or maybe they seem small, but they're amounting to potentially a massive change in how we're able to actually market ourselves online. And there are these big companies out there like Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon and whoever else who are, they have monster control over distribution of, of how you get clients and leads and all that stuff. Basically your livelihood of your business. So a Rich lines out on this podcast is a lot of that. But also on the, the live stream that that will be on and that URL right there, it's totally free, is bringing in, I think it's like 30 experts or something like that, or maybe more. It's gnarly. It's 24 hours and each one is going to have their own perspective of their expertise and some trends that you should be aware of not only in 2020, but in beyond of how to make sure you're not going to get screwed by some of these trends that might just blindside you and be like.

Oh, we're already seeing Some of them too.

They happen every day. Something.

Yeah, like there's a lot of stuff happening in like Google where the featured snippets are causing what they call Google or zero click searches. Right. Where people do a search for something and they don't click because the answer is just right there on Google. They don't need to click into the content to see it. You're seeing it with Amazon and Amazon Basics where they're looking at what products are doing really, really well and they're just making Amazon Basics versions of them so that they don't have to rely on their vendors. They're selling them directly and getting the profit themselves.

Right.

That's. Those are these walled gardens that these companies are creating and you're already seeing it. It is already impacting your business whether you realize it or not. And so what we talk about on this episode is really how to protect yourself and sort of counteract that.

Yeah, yeah. So, so yeah, that's the live stream. Definitely go there if you're at about your business in the future. I think that's like everyone, yeah.

Go to sib2020.com use the code HUSTLE. You're going to want to be on this live stream. It's literally the.

This is probably going to go down as a historic event.

I feel kind of weird saying that, but just knowing the names that are going to all be in one location at one time, all working together to create this massive amount of value in content. I, I don't know of another time that I've ever seen like this kind of grouping of people all together in one place.

I've never seen it. Yeah. And, and I know once you, you know, once you register, it's not just the live stream, but immediately there are some cool videos. I think Rich, he might aligned out these out on the podcast here, but either way he lines out, you'll get a bunch of free stuff prior to then as well that really kind of get you going down this rabbit hole.

Cool.

So this show, this episode is a lot of that talk and Rich really diving into a lot into like you said, the walled gardens kind of thing. And there's a big thing that, a push that basically has a concept that, where it goes back to community and controlling your own systems and ecosystem and having the power of kind of your own closed loop system if you will, you know, so just like Google and Facebook, there's ways that you can actually extract a lot of that data or users and all that stuff that you might not always be able to do. And that's what Rich and us were all talking about that on this episode and his perspectives. You'll definitely. I'm sure a lot of light bulbs will be going off for sure. And any other things that.

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You're going to need the notes on this one. We talk about a lot of. You can get the notes by texting the word comp to 384-703-8470 comp. 38470 comp. Yeah, so go text the word comp to 38470. We'll give you the notes that we took on this. You can Also go to hustleandflowchart.com comp if you're at a computer, and that's easier for you. Either way, you'll end up with them notes in your inbox. But you gotta be quick because these notes are only available for two weeks from the time this episode goes live. After that, they get locked down in our vault and only available to Evergreen Profits customers. So if you're not an Evergreen Profits customer yet, it's 15 bucks a month. EGP letter, EPIC membership, all that good stuff. 15 bucks a month.

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There you go.

That is it.

Let's go have a little chatty chat with Mitchell. Mr. Mr. Rich. Sheffrin.

Rich.

I was struggling to say his name. Let's go have a conversation with Rich Sheffrin.

Rich, how you doing, man?

I'm doing well and happy to be here.

Yeah. Throw that microphone somewhat.

Sunny San Diego.

Yeah. You came at a weird time. It's been winter.

It actually rained this morning, which is weird bipolar weather.

Yeah.

But yeah, thanks for making the trip out, too, because you came from the East Coast. I mean, where were you in New York or Baltimore?

I went from New York.

Yeah. Okay. So that's where you live in now.

Mainly where I'm spending a couple days a week and sometimes in Baltimore, sometimes in Florida, but bouncing around.

Okay, sweet. Well, thanks for making the time. I know you brought your old crew here, too. Yeah.

We won't mention them. So. Yeah, I mean, you're doing a whole bunch of stuff. I know you have a big launch coming up as well, so, I mean, there's lots of interesting things that feel like there's just a lot of cool angles that you've been holding to yourself for some time. You know, you should took some time away from being public, I guess, with a lot of your knowledge. So I think this is really fascinating. It's a cool like time to bring it all back and, you know, just really share what you've been doing for a long time. Because you and I have had some calls last week and you kind of showed us the vast amount of stuff just in your Evernote alone. Right. We're just blowing our minds. We're like, dear God. Yeah. So I guess let's go back. Unless you want to know.

That's where I was going to go. I was going to say let's go back to your story and let's, let's chat a little bit about how you got into the marketing world. We don't. I know you're going on a lot of podcasts and you've talked about a lot, but let's kind of, let's talk about a few of the sort of bigger points along your career trajectory that led you to here and how you got started in this.

Yeah, the short of it, I guess we could say my pre Internet life was kind of varied. I owned a clothing store that then turned into a music label and did well with that and it became like the hot store in Manhattan. So I kind of got a different side of marketing from that more image style type marketing, public relations, that kind of thing. Then I opened up a hypnosis center that grew into a chain of hypnosis centers. And so from that I learned a lot about direct response marketing. Actually found that the marketing I was doing in my music and clothing businesses was not the same and that there was a science to the direct response as far as getting the phone to ring for our hypnosis centers. And then 911 happened and all my centers were in Manhattan and. Well, they weren't all in Manhattan. They were in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens. But we kind of got royally screwed in that situation. And then I made some bad decisions on top of that. So I had to get out of the hypnosis business, sold that business, and.

Then decided what am I going to do next really? And moved down to Florida because I wanted to get out of New York City after 9 11. And that's when I started to explore with online marketing and started actually with ebooks early on.

Is that the manifesto days and all that pre.

That this is like 2001, 2002. And started publishing a lot of different ebooks in? Well, first jumping around lots of different areas.

Then starting just in the parenting niche, and then when I was struggling because I wasn't really making the kind of money that I was used to making.

And I was looking at my journal as to why, I kind of figured out I was treating the online business differently than how I treated my offline businesses. And that is what led to the manifesto. So when I kind of made that realization, I drew that diagram in my journal. I then started treating my ebook business differently and started to actually build it for scalability and leverage and things of that nature.

Was that kind of the big piece that was different from offline?

Yeah, well. And I guess it was just a perfect storm of badness.

I had towards the end of hypnosis centers, we had 60 hypnotists full time on staff, and our staff was over 100. And so towards the end of that business, the pain of making payroll every two weeks.

Was very fresh in my mind when I was deciding what next to do. And at the same time, a lot of stuff that was selling the online entrepreneurial experience was selling it by checking your stats, an hour a day at the beach kind of thing. And I had learned marketing and direct response well enough from the hypnosis centers that I was like, wow, maybe I could just design some marketing stuff online and then make money passively and not have employees and not have all this kind of stuff. What that defaulted to was me trying to do everything. And I'm not very good at many things. So it wasn't until later on when I had the realization that I've never tried to do everything in any of my other businesses. There's lots of stuff I never did and that needed to be the same in this business. And then just approaching things more from that perspective, more from a long term business standpoint was kind of the catalyst of first me doing very well online, then me teaching others how to do well online.

That makes sense. Yeah. That's crazy. I mean, it's probably a blessing that you had the brick and mortar thing first in big overhead in an expensive.

City in the world.

I'm curious, was there any universal truths that you learned that apply to both the offline business and the online business? That maybe when you started the online business you kind of threw out because you thought maybe it was only for the offline stuff.

I would say that everything pretty much applies. There's really not very much different at all. You know.

In Manhattan you're paying a lot of money for rent, right. And you're Paying rent, which would be the same as paying a lot of money for advertising or pay per click or something like that. But a lot of the same principles, even like how I compete and how I've run my businesses are the same. They weren't when I first started, and then I realized how important it was afterwards. So like the store, for example.

It was on Broadway and so every other major retailer is there and I had to compete with them. And so it's like, what do I have that they don't have? And it's not very much, but what.

They scrappy, they have bingos.

What they don't have is me. And that's about it. They can hire everyone else. So the. So I built the store based on what I liked and made it a store where you would always remember that you had walked into that store whether you liked it or didn't like it. And so very early on, I realized it was better to be different than just better. And that's always been something consistent in a lot of the stuff that I do.

But managing biometrics and all that kind of stuff, we did that in the store and we did that in the hypnosis center. So I wouldn't say it was any different. It was just. Actually, I thought it was different. And then I realized how much of the same. And yeah, I would say pretty much.

I can't think of anything that's that different from online to offline. What is interesting to me, and it still.

Is pronounced to me, is that there's that famous Steve Jobs speech he gave at the commencement of Stanford. And he talks about trusting your gut and how you can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect the dots looking backwards. And that speech, and then looking at how many people I've worked with that over, it took them a long time to figure out what their thing was.

And just that it took me years to realize that I had something to teach other marketers and other people who were trying to build online businesses. Even though I had those offline experiences and were successful with those, I didn't see the correlation until after the fact.

Well, that makes sense when there's a load of stuff that just got thrown on you and the rest of the world at 9 11.

Yeah, there's that, but it's also. I don't know if you have this tendency. I know I certainly do. And I would imagine maybe a lot of other people do too. Kind of devaluing what we know and valuing more what we don't know or what others know. And so I think that as long as I was doing that when I first got online, I was buying everything, studying everything, and not really taking a step back and thinking about, well, what is it that I already know? What has that produced? As opposed to just ditching everything I know and going into a new field.

And it sounds like that, I guess that kind of white space, more or less you had after everything kind of fell apart a little bit more or less in New York allowed you to see that.

Yeah, yeah, I would say that. And then also, I guess it's an add thing, but just wanting to be different helps.

So if you had a storefront on Broadway, I'm sure there's some element of you get some foot traffic and there's some just discoverability. How was that transitioning from that kind of business to online where you've got to basically bring people to you?

Well, yeah, so.

The offline world is great and I would have other businesses in it today, but. But yeah, there's. It's a night and day difference as far as like right now. Right. I sell, for lack of a better way of explaining it. Air. Right. Just, you know, my voice captured, my image captured whatever.

Ones and zeros, right?

Yes. There's no inventory, as opposed to carrying millions of dollars of inventory and having to worry about that inventory going bad, like just because, you know, it becomes out of, out of style or someone steals some of it or it gets damaged or, you know, whatever. So it's such a better business from that standpoint. Right. The overhead is way less and the cost of goods sold is insignificant. What is different is that there is no inherent demand. Right. That's the difference.

And so you have to generate your own demand.

And that's a function of being in touch with the market as well as.

Being in touch with the market as far as where they're at so that you know where their next step is to go. And I think that, yeah, unfortunately, I don't know that most business owners probably don't spend enough time on that.

We actually realized that recently with a lot of our affiliate promotions. We're like, you know, something that most affiliate marketers don't do is actually study who they're selling to. And the avatar that that product really wants to attract. And that's been our number one focus lately is that.

But it's. To me, it's. And we were talking about this earlier, to me, it's more than that. And it kind of dovetails into what I was saying before. And maybe that's the theme of what I have to say today, although I don't think it is, but is just really appreciating your own knowledge, like your own experience and making sure that that doesn't get lost. So whether it was the fact that, oh, I knew things about growing a business and maybe I should have held onto those things when I first got online, or.

If you're looking at any kind of affiliate experience or something like that, well, what was the best affiliate experience you had using that as first a barometer? And it goes to something that. This was part of the conversation earlier, not with you guys, just earlier on, that I've taught this one thing for the longest time and it's from a quote that I can't say who said it because it's been attributed to too many people.

That means it's good then.

Yeah. And the quote is that which is most personal is most general. And I've always used that when I wrote my reports to kind of be willing to share experiences that I didn't think most people would be willing to share, whether I attributed it to myself or to someone else. And that what was consistently a lot of the feedback I would consistently get from my reports was people would tell me, it felt like you were sitting over my shoulder, like, you knew my experience. And it wasn't that I knew their experience. I knew my experience, but no one was talking about it. Right. Because everyone thought that they were alone with that thing. And I'm reminded of all this, and at least this morning I was reminded of all this because there was a fight this past weekend, Conor McGregor and Cowboy Cerrone. And I'm a big fight fan, and Cowboy Cerrone is known for having problems in the big fights or getting nervous. And so then he. They did an interview, like a 10 or 15 minute interview where he actually walked people through, like, the entire experience of, like, what a fight is for him.

And what was really interesting is that they then cut back to like ESPN and they had like two different former champions on and they both said, I can't believe that he goes through that. I go through the same exact thing. Right. And they just both had never shared that because they all thought that they were alone with that. Right. So that's a little bit different of a slant of like appreciating your own information, but it's still the same, you know, from a standpoint that you. There's more good things in each and every one of us than we kind of give credit to. Right.

So much of the things that we see as vulnerabilities that we don't feel like sharing. Almost everybody sees those as vulnerabilities, but nobody's talking about it.

Right. And the hardest thing in marketing at least is, or at least one of the hardest things in marketing is to make it clear to the prospect that you're talking to them. To them, like specific. Right. That there are one of the easiest ways for a prospect to opt out mentally of a sales message is to say, this doesn't apply to me. Right. Just like if we're sitting in a room and four people are talking marketing, one of the easiest ways to not pay attention to that conversation is be like, this doesn't apply to me or my business or whatever. So yeah, it's.

That makes sense. Yeah. And maybe cowboy shouldn't have given all that away.

Well, no, no, I think it was fine. I think it was fine giving it away. But it's really just that.

Since most people walk around feeling misunderstood, your prospects too, and most marketing messages do not make them feel understood. If you have a marketing message that makes them feel understood, you resonate at a very different level. Right.

Much deeper, much quicker.

Yeah. Because we all suffer from certain problems or conflicts that we would the solution to, but we don't necessarily know who really has the answer.

Right.

I think in our own heads, we're really bad at creating our own filters and deciding which stuff is important to share and which stuff should we just hold back because it's not relevant? I'm kind of curious, do you have any. How do I determine, okay, this is worth sharing, this will be valuable to others, versus this is probably too personal. Don't put it out there or.

Well, what I would say is to get micro on that for a second. I would say that it's. I'd say that the more vulnerable the better. But you don't always have to ascribe it to yourself. You could be talking about a client. You could talk about like many clients in the past have voiced a similar concern or whatever, and you'll still see that it resonates. Right. But what I would also say, and it is a. It's specific, actually it's kind of random, but it's specific to.

Where I think the future's going. That most people don't spend enough time really kind of dialing in the right sources for themselves. So whether it's their own experience being one source that should actually be given a greater priority or figuring out which sources of information are the best sources for them for their outcome, for their Goal, et cetera. Because.

I tend to teach entrepreneurs, business owners, how to be more strategic and grow their businesses. And part of being strategic as it relates to the amount of information that's out there is.

Recognizing that every single piece of information takes your attention away from another piece. Right. So you have to be very selective in the source. Think about how you process your email. You probably look at the from before you look at the subject line or look at how you look at text messages. It's sorted by who, not by what was said. And people should kind of take a note from their email and from their messages and start thinking about which sources. One being my own for sure. Right. But then in addition to that, what sources are immediately greenlit, like, into consumption for me, because that's a source that's proven out over and over and over again versus something that's not. Right.

It's more or less creating filters for ourselves, starting with us.

Right.

And then because right now, with the changing, you know, everything, it's just so many bleep blops, notifications, content, content, content. And a lot of folks, even podcasts alike, it's like, I got to consume this, this, this, this. Oh, he said this. But they said it's conflicting. And that's where I think a lot of confusion is in the market as well.

Right, Exactly. So it's like, I'll give you a good example or a quick example of this.

I love reading blog posts and things like that, and I love blog posts that are like the top 20 books to read for this or the top 10 books for that and blah, blah, blah. But I don't feel any.

I don't feel any inner conflict not reading any of those. I save them quite a bit. And every once in a while I'll read one or two because I have a different strategy for books. And that strategy for books keeps me up to date, at least on anything new. And so that's an area of noise that I can take out of my life, if that makes sense.

Totally.

And the strategy, just in case someone's like, well, what is that strategy? I tend to look at the books I read that I really like, look at who reviewed it first.

One of the longer reviews that kind of breaks down the book, see if they're a top 1000 reviewer, and if they are, I start following them. And so I end up having a ton of people who get the books early, who write comprehensive reviews, quote, unquote, kind of working for me. Because you can follow them on Amazon.

You can follow reviewers where Are some places to find those types of folks on Amazon?

No, you follow them like you go to the Ramon.

Oh, got it.

Read the book reviews.

Got it. Straight up, right on there.

So Amazon is alerting me to what these people who are great readers. And so it's. So that's another source. Right, but that's a filtered source. But anyway, I guess a long tangent to this idea though, that especially nowadays with there being so much info out there, so many people who claim to be experts in every different area, you got to kind of nail down your sources first before you nail down strategy or anything else that you're planning on doing online.

Or in your life.

I guess how do you discover new sources? Because I guess my fear would be if we sort of filter and create these filters, you essentially create an echo chamber and you know, then new stuff.

Yeah, I'm not saying, I'm not saying like ignore the world. Right, Right. But there are, you know, it's kind of like there are different levels of priority that you place on pretty much everything. Right. You know.

Depending on how you feel about your mom. Like if she were to call right now, you'd either take that call or not take that call. Some people would interrupt the podcast and take the call, some people wouldn't. Right. So it's some level of information needs to go right in. Right. Not even be evaluated. Others need to be slow walked. So partly that, but I think at least my experience has always been that if I read a really good book.

Oftentimes I will then buy every other book that that person has written.

Especially if I really liked it. And so, and I read a lot of bibliographies too, of every book. So I'm always looking for which books consistently come up in a field, what have you. But yeah, look, there's always some amount of time for discovery and I think that's like probably 20 or 30%. But then checking sources is probably, I don't want to say. I just want to say it's much more important than people realize that there should be some people that are at the top of the list that have always proven to provide useful, profitable, really good information. Those are the people that, you know, you don't want to wait until you get to the end of your email box to clean it up to get to that person's email.

Right, Right. Yeah. So going back to your story. So yeah, went all the way back there. You know, you did a lot, obviously you started coaching a lot of the big players that are around nowadays, talk a little bit about that. And then you, you basically, you were like the strategic almost guy. You were forward facing, but you're also behind the scenes a lot, it sounds like.

Yeah. So I started coaching well, so I started going to Internet marketing seminars I guess at around 2001. By 2003, ish. I guess somewhere around there I was starting to do well because I kind of had that. It was either 2003 or 2004. Sometime around there I started doing well because I had that epiphany about the U diagram and all that. And so a lot of the friends that I had made earlier on at some of these events, I just started helping because they needed it and they didn't have the same experience that I had come online with as far as all that offline experience. So what I found was, is that it wasn't as easy for them to just switch to that mode because they didn't know that mode. But I found I really enjoyed it. And so I decided I wanted to try it, see coaching and see if I liked it because I never really thought of myself as a coach.

And so, yeah, so.

I did a program with Jay Abraham and at the end of the program we had an event and so I made it open for 25 people to apply for that. And I worked with them for a year and a half. I didn't know how long it was going to take, but the guarantee was that you would cut the amount of time you work in half and you would double the amount you make. So like a 4x kind of thing.

Sexy.

Or they'd get all their money back. And I was personally coaching them. And so.

The goal was for me to figure out could I coach everyone to that outcome. And it was by application. So that I wasn't going to spend. I think I spoke to each person twice a month personally. I wasn't going to spend time talking to someone I didn't like or I didn't feel could Filter, filter, filter, yeah, get to the outcome, especially since I was going to be dedicating a lot of personal time to each person. But that was the start of it.

And yeah, so in that group was Mike Vsane, who I think went from 10,000amonth or 15,000amonth to 380,000amonth. Or Danny Johnson and her husband Hans, who went from a half a million to six million. It was one after another.

So then after working with them and kind of being like, okay, this is, this is solid and this gets people great results and looking out into the marketplace and realizing that no one really cared about business at that time. There were no online business coaches at that time.

For sure. I know because I was the first one. So there was no one there before me and no one was really interested in it. And that was the thing. No one was really interested in it. And so I had this issue where it's like I have this cartoon from my, like in my presentation where the guy that like invented the wheel and he's like showing it to these guys who were like trying to push a card on squares and they're just too busy to take the wheel. And I felt like I had the wheel for a lot of these people. I'd consistently shown every single person I'd worked with their business had grown tremendously. But no one was interested in business information online. And I had this project with Agora Publishing three months later. So I had this three month window where I'd ended the coaching program. There wasn't a lot of demand for what I had to offer. And. And then this big project with this company that I do a lot of work with then and even more now. And so I decided that I would try and do like an 11 week coaching program because I had three months, so that would be 12 weeks. And decided to write a report to Hope to get like 10, 12 clients just to work with over those three months. And what I put in the report was based on kind of two things. One, I was listening to a Dan Kennedy.

Product on coaching and someone asked the question that I would have asked and said, how do I create front end products? I'm afraid of cannibalizing my coaching program and this and that, which was my fear. And Dan Kennedy just laughed and said, bubba, you don't get it. You put your best stuff in those products. And I was like, wow. And so me always wanted to be different. I figured I'd give them away free, not even put them in my low priced products. And then the other idea was, why do I believe business is a solution versus my prospects who don't believe that's the solution? How can I bring them to my. What were the realizations that I had that brought me to this conclusion? Can I bring my prospects to the same revelations?

And so I wrote this report, the Internet Business Manifesto, and put it on my blog. And then I guess you could say the rest is history. Because I had no idea when I wrote those 30 pages that my life was going to change. But it changed.

Blew up.

Yeah.

Yeah, it spread like wildfire. And what year was that?

That was 2006. And I know in like, I don't even remember now. I think in 2008 we were, we were celebrating over a million downloads and I think in 2012 or so, 2 million downloads. And I don't think we count anymore. So I don't have any idea.

So rare that an ebook last longer than six months in the Internet marketing world.

Well, and so like I wrote more reports like in the next 17 months after that because it worked so well, I might as well write some more. And so those reports are really the backbone of my entire business.

Yeah, I think we got our hands on the Internet business manifesto in 2010. I didn't realize that was like four years after you wrote it.

Three, five million. Probably already downloaded late to the scene. But yeah. And you mentioned Agora. I know you've done some amazing things to grow that business as well. So it's, it's really interesting because lately at least you haven't really been so public.

I've been very. I took five years off and then per year and a half, I was just behind the scenes at Agora for a while.

So what were you doing during that time? Were you doing just a lot of research? Because I know you've always been kind of a trendsetter. Looking at what time, which time?

The five years off or the.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that time off, basically that was.

Well, I'd say.

The five years off. I think.

I unplugged a little bit from online stuff. I'd say I kind of kept the view of it, but not really. I couldn't tell you what were the big shifts or anything at that time. It really was reflecting a lot more internally on myself because I thought it was really strange that by the time I was 38, I had already. Or early 30s, actually. I had already achieved what I had wanted to achieve by the time I was 40. And by the time I was 38, I started really thinking a lot about that. By the time I was 40, I was recognizing that I wasn't that happy and I had achieved everything that I thought was going to make me happy. So then that kind of opened up a door. Pandora's box to keep that shut for now. So I'd say I spent a couple years on transformational type stuff.

But I would say that maybe it's a belief I have.

Or maybe it's just an ADD brain thing, but no matter what I do, I see relationships between what I'm doing and what I've done and what I will do.

So even the transformational type Stuff that I did, and I did a lot of that.

I came away with a lot of takeaways that are useful in an entrepreneurial context. So I would say that it was very useful. It was very necessary for me, but.

It also gave me, sure, all of us needed it in some way, gave.

Me a better perspective.

But then as I started to, I always had a small number of private clients, and as I heard, certain things from certain product lines got my attention. And then from there, I started investigating some AI stuff. And that's when I sold half my business to Agora and then came into Agora with the idea that we were going to launch pretty quickly. But I got tied into a bunch of projects inside of Agora.

With AI and data and really looking at how could they best perform, especially in a time when they've been fighting with a lot of the platforms. And that is what led to then me finally coming out of the doors of Agora, I guess you could say. Still, you know, still the businesses there.

Foot in, foot in.

But. But doing what we're doing for Gore, for the world, I guess.

Right, right. So let's talk about some of those key things that are the forefront of your mind now that you've, you know, you've seen work inside of Agora, but also for others, your private guilds.

Well, even before we go there, what I would say is, is that like, you know, one of the big things, and I'm sure we'll get to the. The live stream in a bit, but one of the big things about the live stream that I think, not specifically to the live stream, but just to anyone who's marketing or trying to grow a business online today, is to recognize that the platforms are really in control of way too much and they will continue to infringe upon those things that help small businesses succeed. So Google, Facebook, Google, Facebook, Amazon, really are the three. I mean, Instagram is part of Facebook.

Right.

You have Apple, which. Which controls a lot of podcasts and apps.

Yeah. And Apple has more control than they should, too. I would say they're the least.

Bad. Least bad as far as the selling and.

Sharing of data.

And also just dominance.

We were talking to somebody on the podcast the other day who kept saying, gaffa, G A F A Gaffa, Gaffa. At one point, we're like, what is gafa?

There's a whole bunch of different acronyms.

Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.

Right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, and also, anytime you have the word big in front of an industry, it generally starts relating to the downfall of the industry. So whether it's big oil, big pharma, big tech. Right. It's never something positive. Right. Interesting.

And so, yeah, so it's just that we've passed a couple thresholds recently that are.

Just really alarming, you could say. Right. That one stat that came out a couple months ago is that Google. Less than 50% of the people that search on Google leave the page. Which is insane, because Google. Why do people go to that search engine? They go to that search engine because of scraped content of all the different websites in the world. If people aren't leaving to go to those websites, then Google seems to be profiting from our scraped information.

Sure.

Yeah. Now with the featured snippets, they're putting the answer right there before you have to click anywhere.

Doing that with podcasts, too. Starting to transcribe all that now.

And now Facebook and Facebook did the same thing. If you guys Remember back in 2010, 12, 13, where every brand in the world was like us on Facebook, McDonald's, Burger King, everybody was sending their prospects because there was, at least the way the platform worked at that time was that the fans of your page would see your announcements. So after they got everyone, then they were like, okay, then we're done with that. Now you have to pay. Right. And so the first thing I would say is just recognize the fact that the platforms aren't your friends. Right.

Even Amazon's got the Amazon Basics thing where they're seeing what's selling well and they're just knocking it off themselves.

Yeah. I mean, these companies have way too much power and control. And unfortunately, part of their growth strategy is to cannibalize a lot of other.

Industries that built the supply that they deliver. Now they're bringing it into what the walled garden is what they're calling it. So that's what the platforms are, essentially.

Yeah. So I would start with that. Right. And recognizing that. And recognizing that there is a continual. Like, it didn't. Like Google's not stopping at 51% staying on the page. It's gonna go higher. Right.

That's what they want.

And it's not gonna get easier to get people off of Facebook onto your site. It's going to get more. Right. So I think what any entrepreneur or marketer has to recognize is that probably.

I had this friend that he used to listen to evangelical.

Music preachers.

Okay. Yeah.

And this one guy preached wealth.

But he had this one sentence that is very applicable here, just a little bit different, but he used to say, today is the poorest day of the rest of your life. Right. Because today is the poorest day of the rest of your life. Well, today is the easiest it's ever going to be to profit and work with Google, Facebook and Amazon today. Tomorrow's gonna be more difficult, the next day's gonna be more difficult. The next day after that's gonna be more difficult. Right, right. Because talk to anyone who was advertising on Facebook in 2012 and 13, they can tell you how much easier it was. Right. Even today, YouTube is easier than Facebook and Google.

Not for long.

But not for long. So it's understanding also.

The life cycle of any of these platforms and when is the right time to be on them. And focus versus not. But. But just that basic understanding that you can't be.

Obviously, people come to someone like me in one of two scenarios. Generally, everything is going great and they just want to grow, grow, grow. Or everything is horrible and they've tried everything and nothing.

They have nowhere to turn now.

Yeah. So a lot of those horrible scenarios are when someone was very platform dependent. Right. Like they were totally relying on Facebook and now Facebook kicked them out. Or they were totally reliant on Google and now Google's just decided they're not interested in that industry anymore.

You're playing by their rules.

Right. So understanding that and understanding that.

You really do want to.

Make sure that you're not overly reliant on any individual platform and that you're doing everything that you can to extract what you can from the platform, but at the same time, not make your business reliant on that platform.

Makes sense.

Yeah. Now, what are some of the ways that when people are asking about this, what are some of the recommendations you're making to sort of release some reliance on those platforms?

Well, it's interesting because when I left the market, the market was very joint venture and affiliate focused to a detriment. Too much so. Right, right. And.

In the time of my absence. Right. Most people really started to nail down acquisition better.

So low price point. Whether it's like the invention of the tripwire. Right. Or the ease of just creating these types of funnels. That's become.

A very.

Common strategy that everyone's using. Right.

The barrier to entry has just gotten lower and lower and lower.

And actually I wrote about this in the third report I wrote, which was called the final Chapter. It was like I thought I was done writing a report.

Never done.

And that was more all about Agora. And it was about the concept of front end and back end and using front end to acquire. And it was also about how why did all the big direct response players, why were they all in the US and nowhere else in the world? And part of the reason was that in the US Lists were rented and in the rest of the world they weren't. And so anytime you had a player join the market and get a new customer, the whole market grew, not just that little business. And so all those businesses were growing the market, as opposed to, you could say they were in Europe or everywhere else. They were growing the market too, but they'd never got put together as a market. Right.

And so I think that going. And so.

When I used to be much more active back in 2012 or 2011, like strategic profits, we worked with a bunch of partners. And those partners that we worked with were all doing what we were doing, getting a certain amount of new blood through organic or paid channels, so that each of us was contributing equally.

As far as balance, kind of from.

An affiliate standpoint, you were bringing in new customers, but then you were being an affiliate of other products and kind of helping pass along the customers.

Yeah. And not where you're trying to control a market or anything like that, but having a few partners who either sell complimentary type products or talk to the same market.

Having that is at least step number one. I think people have gotten way too away from it to a fault, and there's really no reason for that, even if it's part of a sequence. The other thing that we used to do at strategic profits was.

We would hold people and at different times of our life cycle, it changed. But anywhere from 90 days to 120 days, where when we got a new prospect, they didn't see any offers for anybody's stuff until they've gone through our entire process, which we had designed to maximize our sales. Right. However, I can tell you that it's much more common than I would have ever thought it was. As I dove back into Agora, how many co reg deals are being done? And that might change over time based on legality and stuff. But it's interesting because I have a peer that I work well. Katie Vogel is one of the top marketers at Agora Financial. And it's funny.

Her way of doing things is often like that, which was a culture shock to me. It's like someone brought me a funnel and it's like this is underperforming on acquisition on the front end. We need to get another $2 per visitor out of this thing for it to work. And I'm like, okay, well, I'll have to study it tonight and stuff like that. And I'll make some recommendations. And Katie was like, I can sell the lead to these three other places. Right. So we'll just get one of them to tag along. We'll share the lead with them, and then we'll be. We'll be ready to go.

You're right there.

And I was like, oh, that's a much better solution than mine.

So, you know, Agora does that quite a bit. Like, you know.

They'Ll go in partners with someone just for the lead, and now they're two are breaking the cost of the lead in half. Right. So there are different kinds of strategies, but the idea to not be an island when you're competing, and you really got to almost think about, like, the big platforms, you're competing with them.

You know. Yeah. You want to make sure you're creating.

A network for yourself if you can get.

Yeah. And it's never gonna be as good as, you know, them. As them. I mean, you know, as much as I could say, Amazon is doing horrible things, I still go to Amazon first when I want something, and it's just too convenient. And I, you know, and I can just press a button and I have it and I'm happy. Right.

Sure.

Yeah. But because it's so easy, that's probably. And this might be a big leap, but probably something that I. Well, something I'd love to share with anyone listening is really.

One of the best. Not that you need to think about this frequently, but every once in a while. One of the best ways to think about your business is your business is a system to get your customers an outcome, period. It's either the best system or it's not. And at the end of the day, it's like, why didn't railroads, like, take over the car industry, the airline industry, and everything else? Because they saw they were part of. They were in the railroad industry. They weren't a system to deliver a solution to a customer, which was just to get to another place. Right.

And so why did Netflix beat Blockbuster? Because Netflix was a better system than Blockbuster for the consumer to watch a video at home.

And so.

Where we have to look as entrepreneurs is looking at our businesses as a system to get an outcome. And how do we make that system.

Have less friction? Frictionless for our customers to get that outcome? And sometimes that's not easy to do, but in certain industries, it's very easy to do. And. And that's where I think. And that's where platforms end up being able to kind of do things better than we can. Right. But thinking about it that way is like a good starting point to kind of understand where you fit in the world of your customers and what responsibility you have if you want to keep that business.

Right. So it almost sounds like you better create your own system that you can, you know, and then have partners around there to, you know, similar and have a, have a good benefit for each side. So you can all symbiotic kind of way to lift each other up, but also use the platforms as you can now because as that quote said, you know, get in there now and almost extract as much as you can into your own system that you can control.

Right. And that means downloading whatever data you can get from inside, you know, Facebook's platform, its advertising platform, because, you know, if you lose the account, you lose access to that platform. Yeah. You know, downloading as frequently as you can, whatever lists you can, you know, those kinds of things.

Yeah.

I remember it was probably four or five years ago, there was a big push in the Internet marketing world to, you know, stop getting affiliates. I remember that. Like there was, I don't want to name any names, but there were specific, like big name marketers at the time that were talking about why do you have affiliates? You're giving them 40, 50% of the sale. You can go buy Facebook ads or Google Ads and It'll cost you 20% per sale.

Right.

And now it seems like almost all those same marketers that were saying that are sort of reversing.

Yeah. And that's because primarily, at least from my perspective, and I could be wrong on this, but I believe that the primary reason is Facebook because there were businesses like mine and a lot of my clients, a lot of people who are at the top of the game today, whose businesses really had a very difficult time advertising on AdWords because there is no keyword match for what it is I offer. Right. So, you know, make money online way too early, way too believing in BS for me to even spend time on. And by the time they're looking for something specific now they're looking for that specific thing. They're not interested in my message at that time.

They're going.

So Facebook was a huge game changer. But if you can't rely on Facebook forever, then all of a sudden affiliates become more important because they already have those same people that Facebook can put you in touch with. Because Facebook is using psychographic and demographic and that's how those people on those affiliates and joint venture partners lists are. They're a psychographic and a demographic match at least somewhat, or they wouldn't be in the same niche.

That's true. Yeah. And there's so much data that you can leverage right now. And slowly but surely it seems like those are being stripped away as they know the control and the power of that data that they want to use for themselves.

We'll see. I mean, something will happen because at the end that the current scenario.

Will not last forever. Because right now these companies are making so much money off of our data and they own our data. We don't own it. They own it and they're profiting from it at the detriment of everyone else. There's something inherently wrong there.

Something there. Yeah.

And I want to talk about the live stream coming up as well, because I think there's just amazing things and you guys are deep diving on a lot of this stuff off. Even on What, a whole 24 hour?

24 hours.

Kind of a dude. Yeah. You can't cover it all here. What are some other things that we could touch on before transitioning that way? So I know you're big in AI, right? There's some stuff that small business owner can use for AI, but a lot of that is still kind of out of reach.

Well, what I would say is, and this does tie into the live stream, but I can talk about it in a very general way, three.

Fundamental.

Principles, or you could say foundational of how to operate going forward. And I'd say the first is to really look at, I'd say the strategy that you're following and recognize that in today's day and age, strategy is a lot more emergent than it is. It's not plan and execute as much as it is to interact with the world and kind of then from what is happening in the world to have that define what your next steps are based on, where you want to end up and where you want to end up. That's where the idea of see your business as a system that gets a solution for your customers is where you want to end up. If you stay true to that, then you never really get off track. So part of strategy is that understanding that it's emergent. It's a lot less plan and execute. It's also part of your strategy then, is to align yourself with certain partners.

Part of that strategy is to recognize the sources that you learn from or get information from or model or follow or whatever. Right. So that understanding of the strategy element, like what's your overall strategy to win in an environment that's going to become increasingly hostile to small businesses as these platforms kind of eat more and more of our, you know, more and more of our lunch money. You know, the amount of spending online from.

2000, I think in a 13 year period, I think it was like 2004 to 2017, like went up 75 times from like some number of, you know, double digit billions to trillions.

And like 80% of that money is probably too. Yeah.

And that's my point. A lot more money is coming online. But is it in your pocket? Is it in my pocket? Probably not. And so that's what I mean by hostile environment. There's a lot. Maybe your business has grown, maybe it's double what it was. But you know, but it's a fraction of the amount of money that's coming in online and being taken by these big platforms. Right.

The second thing would be to really drill down a little bit more on source because things change so frequently that if you can have a strategy where you do have a few key sources like kind of leading you to what's next, I think that's really important. One of those sources for sure should be about what big tech is doing online. Right. So that you're not taken totally off guard.

At least keep up with the trends, keep up.

And I'm not saying spend a lot of time on it, but if you. I would venture to guess that most entrepreneurs haven't spent any time. Right.

Like too busy.

They're a thing. Right. So there's that. And also so understanding that even though there's a tremendous amount of proclaimed expertise out there, there are true experts out there where you can shortcut tremendously.

The learning curve to get any kind of outcome. And then I'd say last would be speed. That the understanding that, yeah, today's the easiest day to grow your business, tomorrow's going to be a little bit harder, the next day it's going to be a little bit harder. And that every platform in their infancy, general welcomes small business and direct response marketers with open arms. And we get to.

Do whatever we want in the beginning and make lots of money doing it. Speed is important in regards to quickly executing, letting the execution guide your understanding. So action creates clarity. Right. Which then feeds an emergent strategy. Sure, it all develops from there.

They support each other. But speed in every area, but more and more now in execution is probably vital.

And two questions, I want to go back to your second point really quick and don't want to belabor this too much, but what are a handful of sources of Resources or where do you look for trends that people can stay on top of?

Well, I think I have a feedly RSS feeder. I have a feedly tab that has every futurist so that I can go look at what's top of mind for them.

That's one place that I consistently look. I'm trying to think of where do I go.

Peter Diamandis puts out a good weekly newsletter with his.

Yes, I'm on his thing. He's projecting out further.

He's way out there.

You know, it's like I want to know what I need to do tomorrow. Right. And to make tomorrow the most profitable day that I can make it, you know, looking backwards. And so, yeah, for that you have to kind of look at what the futurists are saying. Look at what I just, I have. I just. I guess I go through a ton of stuff. You do. I know we do.

You cover the way that you do that.

Yeah. And it's not only the covering stuff, though.

It's covering a lot of stuff and then being able to see the connections in them. And that's where the last time we spoke, I was mentioning this guy, Diego Fort, because I went through a course of his called Build you'd second Brain, which was all about that, about storing information in a way to provoke serendipitous experiences with the same information so that you can draw more connections.

So I would say that, yeah, going vast until you find a few people that really resonate more than others who you seem to.

Just doing your homework.

Yeah. And so there are a few that I've found, but I'll keep the individual sources.

Quiet primarily just because I don't want to send them lots of business. Sure, if I was friendly with the name of it, I would say it, but a couple of them I'm not friendly with, so it would bother me to send them traffic. But it really is. Yeah. Who are the students?

Who are the ones? Who are the people? And this might also just be a default. So if it is, I would just say I might be biased here. Who are the people? I just read this great article this morning and it was really funny because it was the same point I've made a bunch of times, but made in a totally different way. I was so not even expecting that the article was about that the article was about what the best content producers whose content has gone most viral. What mental map, mental model are they using? I was like, oh, that should be interesting. The mental model that he talked about in the article and it was A good article was winner take all. Yeah, right. I've often had a similar message, which is make time for greatness. In other words.

Every piece of content that's ever made a difference in my life as far as that I created and made a difference, was something that I spent a bunch of time on. It wasn't. I didn't bang something out in an hour and be done with it. Right. And that most people, that's what they do. It's like a blog post a day, but it's a shitty blog post each day, or it's a moderate one, but it's not great. They don't allow time for greatness. And that's what this guy was saying who wrote this article. He spends over $1,000 on research on every article he writes. He spends at least a minimum of 50 hours because he's trying to make every article he writes the best article in that field on that topic. And he's gotten a tremendous amount of viral stuff. So that's something I've taught people, but it's the same of what I like to consume. Right. So a famous one is, wait, but why.

People who spend a lot of time thinking, so that they've kind of spent some of the time that you're going to need to think, and then.

It kind of clearly states how that looks.

Yeah, I mean, there are great synthesizers out there, and those are the people that are some of the sources. And then people who have developed models, I would say. Right. So people who are. Have figured out a way to get an outcome or do something that no one else had figured out. Those are the people.

Yeah, that's good. Cool. And the other thing I was just going to mention, your third point was all about platforms guarding more and more. That's why we're doing a lot of stuff on Reddit, for instance, Reddit ads, super cheap. It can be very effective. And targeted Twitter ads as well. Quora. So there's other platforms out there that are probably easier to leverage.

And it's about then keeping that bond with whoever is a listener or getting their, you know, their physical mailing address, like becoming much more present in their lives so that if you were to lose a platform, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Perfect. Yeah. Cool. Now let's talk about that live stream.

Okay, let's do it.

Give us the scoop. I know you're bringing all your buddies over there. We're actually going to be there as well, which is really cool. Stoked on that. Give us the high level and Then we can.

In order for me to help Agora the way I wanted to, at the end of the day, I'm a strategist and I'm a generalist. You wouldn't want me managing your Facebook ad campaign or really managing anything singular, because it's not my sweet spot. And so in order to help Agora the maximum I can, I broke out the Rolodex and thought of, like, who are the people that I most respect? Whether I know them or not, it didn't really matter. Who are the people I most respect in the industry who have either developed different tactics that everyone kind of takes for granted now, or people that are on the cutting edge of today? Or who I would go to if I had $100 left in my pocket and I needed something to work, who would I go to? And created a list of about 40 to 50 people. And where. I don't think I haven't invited all 40 or 50 of those people yet, but I'm slowly doing that. I think I'm about 30. Inviting them to a live stream that we're going to do out of Delray Beach, Florida, out of Mark Ford's Cigar bar. He's also known as Michael Masterson.

And we are going to be broadcasting for 24 hours straight. Strategies, tactics.

And different ways of operating online that will win in 2020 based on what's happening with the platforms. Right. So these are the people that I think are the best in every different area of online marketing and giving you, or giving the people that are on the live stream their best advice on what they need to do in 2020 based on what's happening with the platforms, what's happening just elsewhere economically and what they see in their particular area of expertise. What should people focus on? And so, yes, we're Gonna Broadcast for 24 hours to start at.

7Pm Eastern on February 19th. I've done this before. The last I did was a lot more boring. Cause it was just me sitting at a desk answering questions for 24 hours. 26 hours.

Jesus.

And we beat John McCain that day. It was October 2008. So it was during the election.

Yeah.

But, yeah, that was just me at a desk answering questions for 26 hours straight. So it was a little boring this time. We've got a lot of wonderful people flying in. Yeah. So everyone from.

Ryan Deiss to Roland Frazier to Russell Brunson to Todd Brown to Neil Patel to James Von elswick and about 25 other people right now, I'm drawing a blank on. But. But basically, anyone who has created something that you probably take for granted as a marketer or an entrepreneur today is probably gonna be in the room.

That's cool. There's so many different perspectives.

The URL for it is csib2020.com and then when you get there, it's gonna ask for a code or a password kind of thing to be able to get access. And you're gonna use the code hustle to get in.

I mean you should just check out the page anyway. Cause it just looks fricking cool. I haven't seen an opt in page like that or a registration. And it's just, just that enough. You should go there to study that.

Yeah. And it's actually pretty cool because that's just a way to kind of keep it private. But then behind that, if people opt in, what they're going to get are three presentations that I did for Agora in France at Bill Bonner's castle. So this was in France this past summer, teaching all the publishers, all the international publishers of all the different Agora divisions. I did a two day workshop. These are the first three presentations from the workshop. So the first one is like 13 sneaky ways to increase conversion rates without changing a word of copy. The Next one is 11 Ways to Increase cart value without changing the product cost or something. And then the third one is stealth VSLs and webinars and other methods of stealth selling. And so those three presentations that I gave to just the publishers, like that's what people get for free when they register for the live stream.

Right on, man. Yeah. Let's just say it one more time. CSIB2020.com and you put the code word Hustle right there when you get there.

Now are there any topics or people or what are you most excited to hear about from this live stream? Is there any specific topics that you're really sort of pumped to go down the rabbit hole?

I'm not sure. I think, I think I'm excited to hear what everyone has to share and I'm excited about how that kind of comes together after the fact. So in general, I think there are gonna be a lot of really great ideas and a lot of really great stuff being shared. But I think what'll be really interesting for me is.

What are the patterns of that? In other words.

Is there a common thing that most people are recommending? Cause that's how I tend to think. Right.

I'm the most important for that.

Yeah. And so I'm interested in that.

But then this kind of environment also Kind of sets up something that's really great for the viewers, and that is that it ends up being a little bit of an ego play and everyone wants to deliver something of higher value than everyone else. Right. And so the. The people at home watching are the beneficiaries of this competition that is going on in this cigar bar that we're live streaming out of of who can deliver the best stuff that will make the biggest difference in the most amount of people's lives in 2020.

So this is going to be crazy.

It'll be fine.

Yeah. Are you going to be up for the whole 24 hours?

I will be up for the whole 24 hours. I could probably go 48 hours when we're talking about marketing and business growth.

Well, that's true.

So are you like MC in it? Is that kind of your role or.

I'm definitely on camera most of the time. I don't know if we're going to have an emcee or not. I'm generally not the most entertaining individual, so I'm sure that there would be some reservation of me being the mc, but maybe an MC sidekick or something like that.

Gotcha. Should we. I don't know if we're allowed to mention your future podcast or if that's.

I don't see why not.

You want to talk a little bit about that or quickly mention it?

You could probably talk more intelligently about it than I could at this moment.

What's the name of the podcast?

Oh, I know that. I know that. No, I know that.

What is it?

Well, this is the one we're playing with because I own the domains and everything and it kind of is a pun on words. Secrets of being Rich.

That's it. Yeah. So play on your name. Yeah. Secrets of Being Rich. I mean, I think it's going to be. Yeah, so we're helping you on that, and I think it's going to be awesome because that is you and bringing in. I'm sure you're going to have some solo episodes, but you also have your friends, like the folks coming on the live stream. It's just going to be deep dives, kind of like the live stream itself. So I'm personally stoked on listening to it, but even better, working closely on that and to make that thing, because I think you're gonna do a great job, even though I don't think you've had a podcast before.

No, I haven't.

So it'll be a new venture. But just talking with you, I know you're gonna Just have all these different concepts that a lot of people are gonna light up about.

No, I love the way your brain works. I'm looking forward to sort of hearing how it works with other people constantly.

For sure. Yeah.

It'll be fun. For sure.

Secret to being Rich. So that's coming out soon? Probably after the launch or something.

Yeah, sometime after the launch.

Got it.

All right, cool.

When I come out from, like my little cubby hole after I've hit him for like two weeks after the live stream.

I don't blame you.

I look like an outcast from what was the. Where you had the Wilson. You had the volleyball Wilson. Was it Outkast?

I think so.

Shipwrecked or whatever. Tom Hanks movie. Shipwrecked where?

Castaway.

There it is.

We're going to cast it somewhere.

Yeah, man. All right, so we'll say csib2020.com, use hustle. It's in the Show Notes. So anyone driving or whatever, just go to the show notes. Evergreenprofits.com we always ask about your favorite book.

Okay.

I know you read like 20 a week. You have a whole speed reading process. What's the first? Maybe two or three that just have impacted you that come to mind right now?

Okay. One would be I saw this person reading this book on the train from Baltimore and It was said 3 million copies sold, bestseller in Japan. And it was the Courage to Be Disliked. And I love that book. It's based on the psychology of Alfred Adler. And for those who don't know, and I knew Alfred Adler only because of the transformational stuff I had gone through. But Alfred Adler was a peer.

Of Freud and Jung and had some very different thoughts of what caused us to do what we do. And the book itself was great. It's told in a parable, so it's kind of repetitive at times, but the information was really good. And I think. And it aligns very well with the way I like to think about things. So I think there's also that part of it. I just read Attention Merchants, which I really liked. I found that fascinating. Merchants, because that covers where we are today as far as Facebook, Google, Amazon, really being in charge of our attention, kind of dominating it all the way back in time to John Caples and the people who wrote the classics of direct response. So it's actually pretty good. He wrote another book, the guy that wrote that, and I'm forgetting the name of the book off the top of my head.

We'll find it.

Let me get up and Then the last book I read pretty quickly, and I'm actually taking notes on now, but Jay Abraham called me, and he was like, they wrote a book about us. You got to read it. So that book is called Driven, and it's got a red cover. I don't remember, because there's a bunch of books. I've read three books named Driven, but this one was all about ADD. The ADD brain. It, the subhead is what top CEOs, Navy SEALs, and blah, blah, blah have in common. And maybe you do, too. And, yeah, it was very interesting. It actually taught me stuff about my own brain that I didn't even know.

And, yeah, if you have ADD at all, it's a fascinating read.

Awesome.

I'll pick it up.

All three, of course, no brainer. And they'll be linked up in the show notes, too. Rich, it's been awesome, man. Thank you very much. Yeah, appreciate it. Hey, hey, hey. Thank you for listening to that episode. This is Joe Fear. I'm sure you probably already knew that. And Matt is not here right now, but I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the episode just as much as you and I did, because, you know, he went into the production of kind of making that thing right along with me. So thank you very much. And I want to give a quick shout out to our buddies over at Easy Webinar. These guys have been supporting us for a while, a long time. And Casey Zieman is just a super good guy all around. He's actually been on the show before. He's the found of Easy Webinars. So if you look up Casey Zman on any podcast platform you're listening to, go check him out. Go check out his backstory, what he's all about. You can learn a lot about webinars as well. And right now, Easy Webinar, these guys are actually hooking you up with a great trial. It's a completely free trial to test out their software, Soup to nuts. Check it all out and see if it's a good fit for you. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle, that's H U S T L E. If you didn't know how to spell hustle, there you go. So if you go to easywebinar.com hustle, you can go grab a free trial. And Easy Webinar literally lives up to its name. It's super simple. I mean, super easy. And it does all the stuff that you're looking for in any kind of thing with webinars. I mean, they literally cover every single type of webinar you possibly can do. So from live to automated to scheduled at specific times and all these crazy features in between, I can't even list them all out. I'll be here way too long. They give you a ton of advanced analytics. What's working, what's not. During your webinar, based off all these actions, you'll see who attended, how long they stayed, if they clicked the offer or if they didn't. Basically, you're gonna make more money and you're gonna work less with this thing and you're gonna create better relationships with the folks that are listening. That's the good experience. You wanna give that good experience along with some great content, of course, in a. A killer offer if that's what you got for him. So go try it out yourself. Go check out easywebinar.com hustle. That's easywebinar.com hustole. Alrighty. So that is the end of this episode. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, enjoying it. Hopefully you did. I'm pretty sure you did if you lasted this long. And go check out easy Webinar when you get the chance. And we will talk to you next time.

Bye bye.

Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listen to and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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