Can AI Tell You If a Storage Deal Is Actually Good?

Howdy folks. I am in Las Vegas right now at Funnel Hacking Live. What does that have to do with storage? Absolutely nothing. But there's thousands of entrepreneurs in one building and every single one of them is being told AI can build their business for them. Here's what I see every week in storage. Somebody downloads an offering memorandum, drops it into ChatGPT and types 5 words. Is this a good deal? And AI says yes, because that's what they want to hear. 3 confident paragraphs. It never saw the rent roll though. It doesn't know what the facility down the street looks like or that it just cut rates. It told them what it wanted to hear. That's exactly the problem we set out to solve when we built storagemoguls.ai, folks. And the guy who helped us build it is sitting right here.

Who?

Right next to me.

No, no comment.

I'm Joe Downs. Welcome to the Storage Moguls Podcast. My company has acquired over 20 self-storage facilities, over $70 million in assets across multiple storage niches, and I've learned firsthand who succeeds in this business and why. That's what drove us to build storagemoguls.ai, an AI-powered community with the tools, the structure, and the guardrails to help you buy your very first storage facility. You know what I always say? It's like bowling with bumper rails. We're going to keep you out of the gutter. You still got to roll the ball. And I am fired up about today's conversation. So let me introduce my guest. And again, we are recording live here at Funnel Hacking Live, Russell Brunson's event, biggest room of online builders in the country. And today's guest is not a storage operator. He's the guy behind the curtain. So you're getting the inside story about why we built this, how it's supposed to work. supposed to work and where AI will help you or hurt you on your first deal. So with me is Peter Swain, the CEO of, wait for it, Peter Swain Inc. He helps business owners deploy AI that actually earns its keep. He's been in this business for over 25 years in digital, been involved in over 1,400 projects. Clients include Apple, Microsoft, Google, the BBC, and Jamie Oliver. Uh, he's the, when ChatGPT came out, he downloaded, I believe he said, you said on day 2.

Yep.

Uh, and has run his Momentum AI coaching community for the last 3+ years with 2,800+ founders through it. Thanks to his wife, Lizzie, of course. And he's a bestselling author, international speaker officially now.

Mm-hmm.

If you weren't before, because he was on stage with Russell Brunson. Insane at Funnel Hacking Live. He's also my co-host on the Successful Ideas Podcast, uh, and he's helping us build this AI-powered community for storage-mobiles.ai. Uh, and lastly, he's a self-described terrible golfer. True. And I actually can confirm it because I played with him. Peter, welcome to Storage Mobiles.

Thank you very much. I've got a question for you before we do anything. Oh, go ahead. Actually, it's a compliment.

Okay.

For understanding how to say the word niche. I really appreciate that.

You know, I learned that yesterday when, when, uh, when someone asked it from stage, is it niche or niche?

Niche. Niche. Niche. It's a French word. Niche.

That's, well, then you have to say the riches are in the niches.

The riches. Exactly. And then it goes wrong. So, right. So we'll go for it. Riches are in the niches.

We're, we're in the good old US of A where we say niches or niches, depending on who you're sitting next to. Uh, Peter, before we get into it, um, you wouldn't know this, but on the Storage Moguls podcast, we, uh, I like to throw some true/false questions, believe it or not.

Really?

They're a little, Different than what you're used to though.

Okay.

Do it. So Peter, you're the funnel guy. So this one's going to be in your wheelhouse here. So true or false, a storage unit usually costs less if you rent it online than if you walk in the front door.

True.

That is true. The national web rate was about $119 a month versus $133 for walking in the door. So you pay for walking in, you pay for walking in, but you got the extra steps. So works out.

But yeah, they are a little bit different.

They are a little bit different.

There was no anti-Canadian joke in there or anything.

No. Well, we'll save that for, for our next podcast. So love you, Doug.

All right.

I want to talk about why a storage guy and an AI guy ended up building something together. So you've taught hundreds of students. You've seen exactly where people stall. You witness it weekly with me. Not at the start, but But at the same few predictable kind of choke points, right? You've seen there at the—

It's growth, plateau, growth, plateau, growth, plateau. Always.

Okay. So courses give people information, but they don't give them a hand on the shoulder during that moment when they need that hand on the shoulder, where they're about to make a mistake. So you're not in storage.

Nope. Well, I am now.

When I first walked you through how people learn this business, which I had to do, I basically had to explain the whole business to you so that you could help us. All right. What jumped out at you is what was broken?

Wow. That's a great question. So when you said the courses don't help people when they, when they get about to get it wrong, I'd actually say there's another, that's not untrue, but there's a deeper truth, which is even worse, which is an industry statistic that no one wants to admit. Which is 85% of courses never get finished.

So that's a big number.

It's ridiculously huge because marketers and salespeople spend all their time going, yeah, you should. And we engineer language and we talk about NLPs and open loops, and we have all these tactics to influence the way somebody makes a decision. But most people, and it's one of the reasons I really wanted to work with you, most people stop at that point. They go, okay, I've influenced the decision. I've got the purchase. I've got their money. But I'm not interested in them actually getting results. And throughout, obviously you wanna make money, but that has never appeared as your driving force when we've been talking. It's how do I help people? Because this asset class has given you and your family financial freedom. Like, more is great, but you are able to come here, you're able to do the things you want to do. You're able to spend the time with your kids. As they journey into lacrosse and college and all these wonderful things because of this asset class. So that was the appeal for me. And that's where I think AI then becomes so powerful. It's like, okay, we now have these tools that can help us solve that problem of this 80% quick quit rate. How do we change that? And I think that was an answer to your question.

It was. And it's interesting because That is why we're building it the way we're building it and why it's powered by AI, because we have been on the stages, me and my team, the, you know, the Jacks, Chris and Rod that, that are helping us build this. And we've stood at, we've stood on those stages. It's the 85, I've heard 80, 85, those are big numbers. They're not all the guru's fault.

No.

A lot of it is you have to take action. Right? You bought the course. That was the first action. Now you got to do something with it. So a lot of people fail just out of lack of determination or grit or whatever. But you're right. When they, when you look around the industry, it's almost as if I'm not naming names and it's not just in storage, but it's almost as if the business became selling the idea of the business or the idea of the, you know, or essentially just put it simply, the course, right? Does the guru even do what the course is about anymore?

Which is sadly quite rare, but the, there is loads of words in the English language that get interused. One, one is urgent and important. They get misused all the time. Efficient and effective get misused all the time. But there's one that I think is actually a proper use. And it's ownership and leadership. And a true leader, in my opinion, takes ownership of a problem, even if it's not necessarily fixable. And even if it isn't theirs to own. Let me give you a parallel example. We take ownership of our kids' health, safety, and wellbeing and making them hopefully into good humans. It's next to impossible. They're going to screw it up in wonderfully unique, original ways, but you don't go, oh, Well, never mind. You sit with your wife and you go, how do we, how do we help them? How do we do this? How do we work through this? So to me, it's the same thing here of like, okay, that 80% stat is true, but we have a choice to take ownership of that stat and go, how do we help people progress? Can't help. You can't help everybody. But starting with, you can't, that's the way it is. So who cares?

Exactly.

This sucks.

And, and And thanks for hitting that point because that is the whole reason we built Storage Mobile First. And the .ai is a huge part of that. People think I'm just trying to be like, you know, the .com to be .com or, you know, back in the .com days, if you threw a .com on the back of it, or one point a couple of years ago, if you, if you said you were a crypto company or blockchain, right? If you just said blockchain, all of a sudden you're, you know, your stock went up.

I avoided that one for that reason.

I didn't throw .ai on at the end. Because I wanted to seem futuristic.

Yep.

I, I wanted, I think that's where we're going. So there's part of it. I, I think, I think a lot more things will be .ai going forward, but the .ai was on purpose, even though it was a little bit of a mouthful. And some people were like, why not just .com? I'm like, no, it has to be .ai because that's part of, that's the point.

Yep.

Because, and you, you hit an interesting point there. I, I didn't, I didn't set out to change the world. Not at all. Um, but I did look at this industry and, and, and came to you with, hey, how do we flip this? There's people out there spending $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 on courses. And you just said, if we go by your stats, 8 out of 10 will have wasted it. I guess call it, uh, entertainment at that point. You learn something about, if you even did it, you learn something about whatever it is you bought.

It's the underlying psychology is that they're seeking an identity. So the, the, the re— that by buying the course, they're like, I am doing something. Then they actually realize, not everyone, but then they realize they actually have to do something.

Yes. Yes.

And it, and everything, especially a subject like this, 'cause I, you know, you buying your first storage facility is probably a 7-figure commitment of some description.

Oh yeah. I mean, we're, We openly advertise it's $400,000 to $2 million is the purchase price. So that's kind of like the sweet spot that we're—

And I know you've got super cool ways of like SBA and da da da da and buyer financing and all these different ways to help with that number, but it's still a big freaking number.

Well, even when you add in the SBA and a lender, you just signed personally for that. So you're on the hook for the number.

So when you're like, yeah, I'm going to go and sell storage. Yeah, the $50K. Okay. I spent $50K. You're like, whoa, hang on a second. I've only $2 million. And I love the way that we've layered it, or you've layered it, or it's been layered. And how do we take them on that journey and exp— and, and bring them on, not slowly, methodologically, that word.

Methodically.

Methodically. Thank you. It's early here. Like methodically.

It's an American word.

It is American. What, like codify? Bringing them on board, Danny, in a way that they can go, oh, okay, I don't need to do it. I don't need to, I don't need to do all that. I need to do this. Yeah, you need to do this.

It was broken, in my opinion. You had to spend everything to find out, did you want to do this? Could you do this? Would you do this? And then I think most people fail at the would part, right? It was, so the system was broken and what you helped and what AI helped us do was break it down into pieces so that I know not everybody who buys our education course and joins our community is going to finish and buy a facility. I can't solve the 80% number.

Yep.

But I can reduce it and I can reduce the pain of it because there's a tremendous pain when you spend $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 and end up doing nothing with it. So, but let me say it this way. If you're successful, you probably will spend around $40,000, but that means You ended up with a self-storage facility, right? You spent it incrementally is maybe a better way to look at it along the way because you were reaching another plateau of success, which required a little more investment. Right. But that's, but there's a reason you're there. Not 9 months ago, I dropped $40 grand and I'm nowhere and I'm, and I'm never going to get anywhere. And I'm, and, and by the way, what happens then? Right. Especially if it's a husband and wife or, or 2 brother-in-laws or 2 friends even. What happens then? What's that relationship like now? Well, just that, that it's a $40,000 anchor.

Well, if you're, if you're $50K, if you're $50K in, and let's say you're in your early 40s when you make that kind of investment, the opportunity cost of $50K across a 30-year, like a retirement, just to like in a money Like a CD from Bank of America at 4%, that's probably a $200,000 opportunity hit to your life financially.

You went financial. I was going personal.

And I was about to say, and that fades in comparison to the divorce or the thing that comes with it as you start putting that pressure. Um, and again, as you said, it's not, this isn't to like call out every guru and say the way that they do things is wrong. It was you turning around at a pivotal point in your choice of where you went with this and going, well, what if there's a better way? And that's why this has been slower than we both wanted it to be. 'Cause we could have whacked out, excuse my language, a piece of crap in 3 months.

Yep.

And we could have just gone, oh, that's how everybody does it. Let's just copy it. Like the, the whole point behind the word funnel hacking is to hack somebody's funnel, is to take what they do and just replicate it because that's the success model. That's what works. That's how, that's the language. That's how people buy. That's the price point. So let's just copy it and paste it. But that works if your only goal for you is financial. If your goal is like, yeah, I wanna do a million bucks, um, from like people here, you've seen them, like people do a million dollars a day doing online closes. So this is huge money. Huge money. Russell did over $5 million. Huge money. But if you look at it and you don't have confidence and faith in the thing that you're actually selling, which you, which is what hacking somebody else's funnel would be, it means you just perpetuated the same thing again, instead of going, hang on a second, what does our customer actually need?

And that's what we'd be trying to do is break that down. Where are the fail points? Where are the choke points? Where, when and where do they need us? And I want to talk about that because this is where the AI piece comes in. I'm going to put you a little bit on the spot here, but you've seen how we built, because you built it. You, we have, uh, 11 modules, 82 videos. That's, that's the education piece, right? Um, we've got the community. People can go in and ask questions, you know, get help results. And there's obviously there's different levels. That's, that's how we have rolled out. So it's an incremental.

Yeah.

Ascension ladder.

And it's not overwhelming as well.

And it's not overwhelming. Yep. That's, that was a, that was actually a big, it wasn't a battle internally, but if you recall, this feels like 5 years ago, it was probably only 6 months ago, but how we recorded those videos, remember we started recording them a certain way and then stopped. So we chopped them down into bite-sized 5 to 7 minute videos instead of the 15, to 30-minute videos, I think is what we originally had. And that was even, that was because of how the human brain works, I believe, and how people consume information. We wanted to give them, we wanted to upend everything really, Peter.

Well, when you do 5-minute videos, it serves both audiences, right? Because I love you, by the way, if you ever see this, but my dad, if you send him a text, you'll get a reply with an email with an 8-page PDF. Like, because he's of that generation, he's used to a more lengthy communication. Um, he would prefer a 40-minute video, but what he can do with a 5-minute video is watch all 8 back to back.

Yes.

So he doesn't lose his experience.

Exactly.

But the person, let's say we're working with a single mom, um, or 2 single moms that have decided to do this together. Committing to a 30-minute endeavor to watch something and watch it properly, take notes, get involved in it.

Too many times, guilty as charged. I really built this because I'm my own problem. And if I could get through it, then everybody could. But when you get into a 30-minute video, there's a psychology of, uh, I, you know, let's take the kids, right? You, the mom, right? And it could be a dad, but it, um, you're watching it and, oh no, hon, I'll, I'll, I'll help you in a minute. And then they forget a minute. Right. And then next 5 minutes later, they're, they're back in your face again. And they want something. So you're listening, but you're now, your attention's over here.

Yep.

And you're not actually consuming the information that we're giving you, but you check the box, you watch the video. And that's what I, what I learned from coaching this was that the people who were success, there were 2 keys to success. I shouldn't call one a key, but there were 2 things that I noticed. One is that the people who immerse themselves the most, they watched every video, they showed up to every call we have. They watched the videos twice. They did what I accidentally did was going to the academies multiple times. Um, you know, you know, you're only supposed to go once. We, I went probably 4 or 5 times, so I consumed A simple immersion, more of the information than anybody else. And that you can't, there's no, no one will talk me out of the thought that that is what helped propel us to be better, faster.

I've heard Russell speak hundreds of times and he hasn't changed his message across those hundreds of times. And I still go, oh, it's exactly, you always pick up something you didn't get the first time.

A different environment.

You are at a different stage in your journey, so you are ready to receive in a different way. And you're like, wow. Like somebody said yesterday to me, he went, did you notice that Russell always sells a new opportunity? And this was an improvement opportunity. I'm like, huh, I didn't notice that.

Now that you say it, I didn't notice that. Now you say I did.

I'm like, I wonder why. And because I've got some proximity to him, as some of your students have to you, I can now actually ask him that question.

Why?

What in the market was it just that you wanted to, or is there a, is there a data point that you can see that I can't see that led to that thing? And I can actually get, so to me, the more you could put yourself to repetition, repetition, cuz the human brain is dumb. It, it directing it to what we wanted to pay attention to is insanely hard. And like you said about the, you know, the single mum, but let's take another example. Liz and I, committed that when we got here, we'd speak to the kids every day. And for some reason, I don't understand why, when we're on East Coast, 5 hours behind, it's easy. But when we're on Pacific and we're 8 hours behind, it's a, it's almost impossible. And just, but it's only a 2-minute call.

Mm-hmm.

But we can't fit the 2-minute call in because something else happens and something else happens and something else happens. So it ends up with a text. Because that's the smallest commitment we can make. So I think the videos and the courses and the community and the way that it's all been structured is you can invest as little as possible that we can make it economically viable for all parties. And you can get to the next point on the, on the mini ladder, not a big ladder, a mini that you can just, you can walk forwards.

And if you get interrupted in a video, watch it again. It's only 5 minutes.

You only got 5 minutes. You can just go back.

Exactly right.

Um, but the AI, that's where we were kind of leaning into it. Like, where did that come into it?

Yeah. So I, I, I wanted, I wanted to break it down into the, into the videos, but then for me, that wasn't enough because what we're not doing or what, what I was able to do was go to, um, the academies where I learned over and over again. Well, they don't exist. Right? So how do I give that experience to somebody else? Well, I can't. But, uh, I forget, I think I was reading a book or I don't remember exactly what it was, but it hit me. No, actually it was probably in your mastermind where we were talking about, well, I'm trying to associate it because, um, I think I remember now we were talking about, um, how, and you were just, you were kind of talking about some futuristic stuff with AI. Like, you know, the kid, a kid born today probably won't go to college the way we know it. Right? Because In fact, I know it was yours because now the whole conversation is coming back because they're going to, at a certain point in their life, their parents will know how that child best consumes information. Is it, is it audible? Is it by reading? Is it visual? Is it a combination of the two? Right. And that's, I believe, called adult learning theory. Right. We're all different. You might, you might like to read. I might like podcasts. Right. I might, I might Soak in more from a podcast, from listening than I could ever possibly do from reading. Because when I read, my eyes get tired and I start thinking about things or whatever.

So this is one of the problems that we have in our community. I'm an auditory learner, principally. I'm, I learn through listening and talking. So if I wanna clarify something, I have to talk it out loud.

Me too.

Other people have to draw it or write it, but the majority of people are visual learners. It's about 85% of people are visual learners, 13% are auditory learners, and a weird one, 3% are kinesthetic learners. They have to draw it. They have to, there has to be physical sensation for their brain to concentrate. And we're all a combination.

We call them architects. Yeah.

Wealthy. So I, as an auditory learner, don't like slides. I find them constraining to me. I don't like visuals. So when I want to perform, I just want to talk, but because there are so many visual learners, I have to do some form of visual for them to be able to anchor what I'm saying to a visual. So I often end up seeing this sketching on my iPad on a call because I don't want to, I don't know where I'm going to go because I'm just going to talk blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I have to draw. And when I just draw like, like something simple as 1 plus 2 equals question mark. anything, they go, oh, I get it. Because I've drawn something.

Yeah.

They now have a visual anchor so that their brain can work with it. I love this kind of stuff. I was like, how people do this.

So can I let you then roll out the, where's the AI from the education part? Right. We've got it in the community differently. I want to cover that, but from an education standpoint.

Really easy. So this is a phrase of Liz's and I love it and I think it It should be a guiding principle in everybody's deployment of AI, which is how do you care at scale? Right? How do you care at scale? So if you were sitting one-on-one with a student, you could turn around and say, you could see their face and go, you didn't get that. Let me reword it. Let me say it a different way. Or you can see when somebody gets nervous or they get anxiety and you can back off a bit and go, Let's just chat. Like humans are, we, we love saying that some people love saying that they're terrible communicators. I'm like, you're in, you're in the top 0.000001% of the planet. You might be a bad communicator in comparison to some other humans, but compared to a whale, you, you're pretty awesome. And we can read microexpressions, we can do all these things, we can change it, right? So the question is, How do you care at scale? Because if there's now 10 people, Joe could go, okay, I can do a workshop in a hotel. I can, I can do that. 30. Okay. If I get a facilitator, we can probably handle that. 100. Now we're starting to get some breakdowns. Well, what about 10,000? How many couples did we find out the other day are gonna buy, uh, invest in real estate?

380,000.

I said the address market's 38,000 at 20%. It was 400,000.

Yeah.

Yeah. 400,000 investment decisions in real estate in the next 12 months.

By husband and wife.

By husband and wife teams.

Right. That wasn't even 2 brothers.

Nope.

So brother-in-laws, father, daughter, it was just husband and wife.

So that's the audience we're going after because the fundamental belief is that residential real estate is not the right vehicle.

Mm-hmm.

Like, and I don't think we should shy away from being opinionated about that.

No.

So residential real estate is not the right vehicle. It's a vehicle and it's probably better than nothing whatsoever. It's probably better than a money market CD.

I commend anyone who starts there.

Exactly. And it's like you're in the arena. Great job. Yep. However, there's probably an elevated way to do this where you don't have to deal with cleaning toilets and evicting clients. So if we've now got 10,000 people in the community, how do you care at scale? So let me give some examples to just make this all make sense. I'll give one example so we can move on through it. What if you could say, okay, Jim just bought this course and Jim just watched the first video and the second video and the third video, and he's, he's on fire. And then we don't see him watch the fourth. AI has infinite scale. So the AI can now jump in and go, hey Jim, everything okay? We, we often, people often get a bit tripped up on the following things in, in module 3. Do you wanna explore those? So we can actually give a more personalized experience at scale that a human could never achieve. So it's not as good. I'm not saying that anyone that says that AI can replace a human is ridiculous. It can't. But what it can do is it can work at a scale to the 80th percentile, whereas Joe At scale is at zero percentile.

And so that's the proverbial hand on the shoulder through the, through the education course. And then in addition to that, and hopefully before we even get to that point, because we're all different learners, we took, I mean, it's called Gemini Notebook now, but we took every module and we created multiple forms of media from it. Not folks, not Um, to, to, uh, market and promote for Instagram for you. So inside of the education course, when you're finished with each module, you don't have to, but I highly recommend, and I didn't know 80, it was 80% are visual or 85 or whatever the number.

Yeah. Over 80% of it.

Over 80%. We've got a, a, a summary. Remember I talked about that immersion? How do you get this? How do you get more of it? We've got a whole summary of the module and I hate, and I hate calling it a summary, but that's essentially what it is. It takes all the information from that module we created in, it was originally Google Notebook LM, now called Gemini Notebook. And from that, we created more tools, more educational tools. So there's a slide deck for the visuals. There's a video for the visual learner. I guess the video covers a few, few types of learning.

Yep.

Um, mind map. Um, there's quizzes, flashcards. Um, my favorite, maybe your favorite, cuz we're audible learners, a podcast.

Yeah.

It literally creates a podcast.

Creates a podcast.

Of the module.

Yeah.

That, that attacks the information from different angles from 2 curated hosts who I swear are modeled after the guys on Acquired.

Possibly.

Um, but it, it, it's, it's mind-blowing that, and to your point about the masses, we can't, we couldn't do that before AI.

And that's just impossible.

So that's, there's so many ways we've inserted AI into this whole thing. You've just named, that's, you named one. I just named another.

Go ahead. Well, let's actually, let me just disprove and finesse the point you just made. You said without AI, we couldn't do that. That isn't true. You could have. Hired 100 people. Oh, well, no, no, I'm making the point. Technically, no, I want to make the point.

There's no way we could have done it.

You could. Then what would have happened is the price point for everybody would be back up at that $50K.

Well, that's true.

That's my, my point is it's not a—

But it would have been a Herculean effort and I don't know that we could have done it.

But I don't want to, I want to, the reason I'm leaning into this and still disagreeing is lots of people throw AI at stuff so they can say, now we've got 8 different ways of doing it. And, and it's, as you said, it's a marketing gimmick. It's just, it is like, no, how do we use this to create different ways for people to learn whilst keeping the price at a point that they can experience this? Because I know from you, and I, I, I, I don't think you're gonna be ashamed for me to say this, you actively want people to not progress if it's not right for them. And you said it at the beginning, like you'd much rather somebody invest $1,000 and go, Maybe this is for me, maybe this is not for me.

There are, there are, you, that's a very good point and 100%. So we'll keep it in.

Go ahead.

There are people, I've met them, I know them, they're now investors who realize they wanted to learn about self-storage. They want to put their money in self-storage, but they don't want to do the work that it takes to acquire, own, and operate a self-storage facility.

If you said, Pete, I've got $50,000, $100,000 open up on this deal, do you want— I'd be like, hell yeah, I'd love that. That's a great idea. And then you said, do you want to watch these modules? I'm like, I'm, I'm, I'm even with the 3 minutes, I'm busy. I've watched them because I—

You're a different character. So you, you're just operating off of, I've seen enough, I trust you, I want to invest.

Yeah.

But there are, so my other company, US Mortgage Resolution, years ago, and I'm talking 15 years ago, we used to run these meetings in Philadelphia to teach people how to buy storage or storage mortgage notes. And there was this one woman, I'll never forget her because I learned a lot in this one moment. She came to, we had monthly meetings. She came, we ran it for like 3 years. She came every meeting. And we were using those meetings also to teach people, but also when we got a mortgage note reperforming, it was a marketplace for us. Now we taught you how to buy the product and how to manage it and all this, which is really easy. So it was great. It was a win-win, right? They got to learn and then if they wanted to buy what we had, great. This woman came to everyone and was never interested in buying mortgage notes, but then invested when we launched some funds, she invested in our funds. And I said, I forget her name, but I said, um, one, one time after one of the meetings, I said, what, what, curiously, you never, you don't really do anything that's active in this space. Why do you come every Wednesday? You know, whatever, the first Wednesday, third Wednesday of the month. And she said, I want to know everything you do. I just don't want to do it myself because I don't want to chip a fingernail. And I'll never forget the chip a fingernail line. They just don't want to do it or don't have the time. Right. So there's this, there's this great book, but, but real quick, to your point, that could have cost somebody $40,000 or it might only cost them $2,000 to get all the information that they really needed. Right. $2,000 or $40,000. Because at the end of the day, they just wanted the information. They weren't going to do it. And that, that is one of the benefits of the way, the way we've broken this down and rebuilt it.

I'm gonna try and, I'm gonna do the short version of the story I normally do here, but there's a book which I recommend anybody that enjoys reading called Average by Matthew Syed. And one of the stories in it is around the US Air Force in the '50s had the worst safety record of all military and domestic air forces, airlines worldwide. And what they worked out is that the pilots, the cockpit had been designed around the average pilot, the average arm length, the average height, the average weight. But what they found out quite quickly is that the discrepancy in average was so high that nobody, and these are people that are drafted, so they're already pre-selected. Nobody was average on every data point, not one of them. And these are a drafted set of people. People would be average on 19 of the variables, but on the 20th they'd have long arms or whatever, right? His point to the whole book is that average is a useful statistical measure, but nobody is average.

Hmm.

So you look at that from a product design perspective of going, what most people do is go, oh, my ideal customer looks like this, and my ideal customer's this old. And my ideal customer does this, so I'm gonna design this product for my ideal customer, but with very little latitude for discrepancy in how a real person shows up. So how do you balance that without them feeling overwhelmed? Because you give them so much different ways of doing it at scale.

At scale.

And I think that the chipping a fingernail is a perfect example. Grant Cardone said another one where he's like, he called somebody that'd been on his list for 20 years and he finally bought something. And Grant actually called him and he does this thing on stage. He's like, dude, why have you never bought from me? And why did you buy this? And the guy, I loved your stuff. You just never had the right product for me. And this was the right product and he bought it. So I think that's what we're trying to do with storage moguls is go, okay, we understand the rough journey. We understand the avatar, the husband, the wife, the brothers. We get that. But we also understand that you've got a life and that life is complex and moving and dynamic. So how do we make this as easy as possible, both in how we create the media, but also in how the AI then infuses and comes in to help?

Pete, true or false?

A mid true or false?

Oh, oh yeah. Oh, wow. This show's different.

Okay.

Normally, normally I get 3 or 4 in.

Okay.

You're only going to get 2. True or false? When someone searches storage near me, the big national brands With the biggest ad budgets almost always show up first on Google.

True, but it doesn't need to be the way.

Tell me why.

Because Google, the Google algorithm is a, is a leveler because it is actually an equal opportunity employer. It wants to give the best answer that it can. So the Google algorithm is trying to say, if I could ask everybody what answer I should give, what answer should I give? So it's trying to emulate the human experience as best possible. So what does somebody want? It's a really easy question. Like, what does somebody looking for self-storage want? They want clean. I would imagine they want cost-effective. But when we did the research, this was real estate brokers, but I think it translates. The number one shift in the success of a real estate broker was local market knowledge. Because everybody's got the numbers. Everyone's got, I've done a billion dollars of sales and I've moved this amount of listings. Everybody can take a statistic and twist it so that they look great.

Sure.

But it takes, you know, my lean to say, did you see what happened at that cap thing yesterday? Like down the road, because, or the thing, the guy that won the thing at high school. And most people want to give their money to another human, not to a faceless entity. We have no desire to make IKEA wealthier at all. Like no one's like, oh, I feel really good about that.

My wife does.

No.

Well then tell me why I'm constantly building things from IKEA.

Because she likes seeing your torment. Because they've nailed, as with the big box brands and storage, they've nailed simplicity. They've nailed all the parts of the journey.

Okay.

They've made it easy for her to give her money.

Yeah.

So she does. But if there was somebody next to her, next to them that had figured out all of those constituent components, but was Mylene, she'd give the money to Mylene instead.

Yeah.

So when we talk about storage, the local operator can outperform the big box operator by leaning into where they're strong and going, yeah, we're gonna spend The $500 sponsoring the local soccer, uh, kit, little league.

And AI helps with all of it. We don't even have time to get into all of the things that AI can help with, with storage, even in our community. We didn't even touch on, because I have to get to my, to my last question with it. We didn't even touch on, um, the chatbot inside of the community, um, which answers—

Max Mogul.

Max Mogul.

Sits there and goes, I'm stuck. And it goes, great. How about this?

Which answers, yeah, any, any question people have, it's right there. If you want the knowledge bank of myself and Jack and Rod and Chris, it's all right there. Hey, if you was asking, um, we didn't talk about the off-market roadmap. You don't even know the CRM, the mobile model. You don't even know about, but you're, you're going to soon this week.

Okay. This is good.

About, we've enhanced the off-market roadmap and we're bringing AI into it actually. So it's, It's now going to map the market for you. You know, we talk about, you get it, you have to go to a market and understand the market.

So you put in the zip and it goes, and here's the, oh, that's good.

Here's where you're going in this market.

Okay. I like that.

This is where, this is why, this is when, this is whose hours are this, where you should even stay. I don't know. We're going to talk about that. Um, well, you know what? I was finally allowed to decompress. Um, and from a visionary standpoint and actually start to become one again. And all of a sudden these ideas were popping in my head again, all born out of necessity, all born out of, if, if I had, had pixie dust and could sprinkle some magic on this whole pieces of this process, how would I make them better?

Yep.

And that's what we're, that's, that's what you're getting in Storage Moses.

Okay.

Um, and I'm sure I forgot some other things. Pete, This is gonna be such an interesting question because, um, Lizzie is sitting just a mere few feet away.

She's amazing.

So I ask this question of every guest. You could not possibly have known this.

Oh no. This is literally dread right now.

And actually, after some of the people that have just been on stage at Funnel Hacking Live, it's kind of an appropriate question.

Okay.

So the, the book, Be Your Future Self Now, you've heard of it, you've read it.

Yep.

You have read it.

I have a signed copy. Huh. Sorry.

My question doesn't feel so awesome now.

Okay.

So, you know, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, you met him obviously.

Yeah.

Um, okay. So the beginning of the book then is about MrBeast. I don't have to explain that to you.

Yep.

Um, and the 4 videos that he recorded.

The time capsules.

Yep. Released on YouTube. You know, the last one was just released last October.

I haven't seen it. I want to go. I should go and watch it. It's amazing.

It's, that was his tenure.

Hey, future Jimmy.

Yeah, that's his tenure. He's only like 27, 28 years old. And he's the most followed human on the planet on YouTube.

Do you want a 10-second really funny story?

Go for it.

So, uh, this is my younger days when I was way more impetuous. I was chairing a talk at Mobile World Congress and one of the speakers was the CEO of Angry Birds and his job title was the Mighty Eagle. And I said, it's a good thing the company worked. And he went, why is that? And I went, well, because that, if you, if that job title, if it hadn't, you'd be a complete dick. He's like, well, I'm like, he's like, what? I'm like, well, like Tiger Woods. If Tiger Woods worked at Walmart, it would be a ridiculous name. But because he's one of the best golfers in the world, it's a cool name. Like calling yourself the Mighty Eagle is one of the worst things I've ever heard. But because it's Angry Birds, And whenever I hear MrBeast, I have that same thing. I'm like, you named yourself that? How arrogant. And then I look what he's done with it and I'm like, you know what? Fair play to you. 'Cause you are.

Reminds me of, um, Ben Kerr, 3-time state champion before he won one.

Yeah.

And he put it out there. I mean, that was, he did what MrBeast did.

I can't be allowed to follow him.

That was an incredible, he was an incredible speaker.

Amazing.

So. Here's, so here's the question.

Yep.

In, in the image and likeness of MrBeast, I ask everybody this question.

Okay.

I usually have to explain why, but you now know why I'm asking it. So in 5 years, if we got into a, uh, one of the, one of the speakers ruined this example, but if we got into our DeLorean and, and went 5 years in the future, if I did, or if you did, right, we went together. 5 years in the future, who is Peter Swain? Where is he? What is he doing? And what are you doing today to make sure that happens? Plus.

5 years from now, I'll be doing the stages that I just did twice a week. Um, that's where I'm my happiest and where I think I'm my most effective, right? Where the ripples I have the most is when I'm speaking to large audiences. I love doing it. I think I'm pretty good at it and I move people to change.

And what is Peter Swain Inc. doing?

Peter Swain Inc. doing is certified, is building digital employees. It's helping companies do this AI transformation, um, at a scale because you said that sentence and that sentence to me, I'm going to take it as a little bit of my own personal win. When you said, I finally got to decompress a bit and be a visionary and sprinkle pixie dust. Humans are freaking awesome. We're amazing. And the more we can deploy AI to remove the things that stress us and chip away at our energy and take us down so that we can elevate ourselves back to where we should be, which is doing the amazing stuff and finding that one distinction. that makes all the difference. That's kind of my life mission of like, how do I deploy enough AI ethically, morally, efficiently, effectively, not just for the sake of it, to give people back their humanity.

I love it. That is absolutely amazing. And, um, and in that same vein, that's kind of like the same inspiration or tangentially the same inspiration that We had when we set out to build storagemoguls.ai, because information was never the problem. In fact, it was getting easier to get the information, right?

100%.

Um, that having somebody in your corner at the right moment was, and it's not just the right moment. Like the, there's not one of those moments. There's the right moment that you brought up earlier. Like, hey, you need a little gentle nudge to keep going with the course. Or, um, should I send the LOI? Should I send that offer? Or is this the right deal? Or, you know, during the closing process, things do go wrong. You can't possibly have imagined what they'll be. I mean, we get hit with title issues, survey issues, this issue, that issue. There's a, you know how many times we've had a parcel that's affecting our parcel and nobody can find the owner of that parcel to get You know, or the heirs of the person that owned the land, that there's a strip of land running in between our 2 pieces of land that nobody knew about. All of those moments are moments where people say, our students, our community members that we've helped in the past, they would have walked and we're there to hold their hand and walk them through it.

I'm guessing there's also some people that pushed through that should have walked.

And that, glad you brought that up. We do more of, we do more of talking people out of deals. Than maybe anything else. That's why I say it's like bowling with bumper rails.

With bumper rails. And that's what AI should never do. AI should never be the discernment layer. That's where the human support comes in.

Yeah. So, and, and the way we built it, Pete, was so that we, we could, the humans, the 5 of us that, that built this thing could be available at the right moments. So we're not getting constantly pulled on because of the scale at the wrong moments when you don't need us, where the video and the AI is and the, and the clone and the chatbot, where that's plenty, where that's where your answer is. You don't need, or you don't need to wait for us.

Yeah. Like what is a rent roll? No, no, no, no, no.

Yeah. Here, here's the explanation. Here's a video to watch.

Here's the explanation. Here's a video. Here's a mind map. Here's a podcast. Like whatever you're going to learn best because Joe and Chris and Rod are over here. Working on this. There's a strip of land that's owned by somebody we can't find. Should we go ahead with the deal? Yes or no?

Right.

Which requires that human—

Exactly. So that's what AI has helped us deliver, not just once, but now constantly deliver at scale so we can help more people. There's 400,000 couples, just husband and wife teams. Well, that, I never got to the second one. The other thing I noticed, 2 people.

Always 2 people.

Husband and wife, father, daughter, mother, son. 2, we have 2, uh, one of my favorite testimonials will be up on our website too. 2 brothers, 22, well, now they're 22 and 25.

That's young.

Really young.

Fair play to them.

Did it themselves. Did it. Aiden and Liam. So that's what the AI has helped. It's, it's helping our, our, our student. It's helping us help more students. And the journey has been incredible and it's helping me sleep at night.

That's cool.

Because, well, it's really not, it's keeping me up late, but when I do go to sleep, I sleep like a baby.

That's like one of the worst analogies ever. If you ever bear a baby, did you have a baby? But yeah. Yeah. So you don't sleep, but when you do, it's good.

Yeah.

You sleep like a baby.

Because exactly. Because We're not helping people out of $40,000 who really only needed the $2,000 version of it.

100%.

Folks, thank you for joining us for, frankly, for me, what was an awesome kind of diversion. Usually I have guests on that are in the industry that, you know, we're getting into the nitty-gritty of this and that. I was like, you know what, we're here. Let's take advantage of this opportunity to not only talk about AI, but also just philosophically how this thing was built and why we built it that way. So thank you for joining me. I really appreciate it. Oh yeah, absolute pleasure. Folks, ratings and reviews, always appreciated. It only takes— how long does it take?

Well, if you're— I think like it's like a click. So what's that, 3 seconds?

So that amount of time.

Yeah, you could have done it already whilst we were saying it.

Like, subscribe, and share. Go check out peterswayne.com, by the way. I'm in his mastermind. I swear by it. Folks, there's a seller out there right now. Who's ready to sell. So stop watching, get off the sideline, start moving, go drive for dollars, send the LOI if they did the work. We'll see you next week.