The RICH Habits You Need To Become A MILLIONAIRE In 2025 | Lewis Howes

You're going to find that the majority of very wealthy people are extremely conservative in how they invest. They don't need to beat the market. They've already done that. They just need to preserve their capital. Wealth means different things to different people. But when you are fortunate and you become wealthy, what you'll find is most.

Of those people... What do you think are three things that rich people do differently than the poor people? Or people that aren't thinking about building wealth in that way?

Number one, and you'll be surprised to hear me say this, they don't take inordinate risk. You're going to find that the majority of very wealthy people are extremely conservative in how they invest. They don't need to beat the market. They've already done that. They just need to preserve their capital. So what you find them doing, and I don't know what that number is for you, wealth means different things to different people, but when you are fortunate and you become wealthy, what you'll find is most of those people do not take a lot of risk. And they invest in things that are very long term. They don't use a lot of debt, in most cases. They don't use leverage when they're investing. They don't take very speculative positions on. You hear that they might buy Bitcoin or they may buy a speculative stock, but if you look at it as a percentage of what they're worth, It's nothing. And so they're willing, when they're making that investment, they're saying, I'm willing to lose it. It's entertainment almost for me. It's not something I think that I'm going to have to live off. And the other thing I found, because I advise a lot of wealthy people, because my companies that I invest in, of which I have over 30, at any one time 10% of them are being acquired by a private equity firm or being bought by a strategic and I've known the entrepreneur and maybe it's their first liquidity event, I try and help them on that journey. And some of them, you know, get $100 million or $80 million, we've got plenty of the situations like that and they're young. And what happens is you find out later that entrepreneurs are actually really bad investors. They're very good at running a business and they focus myopically on that their whole lives, but when they actually get liquidity, it's usually their husband or wife that was the person that was taking care of the family and mitigating the risk. and they're the ones that are the better investor. And that's why I say in a family you have to have a team approach. But I've learned this that you really... you'll find that what's successful about families is they know what they're good at or wealthy people and they know what they're not good at. And they don't try and do things they don't understand. And this is... it's important because you have to say I have limits on my skills. I know what I'm good at but I've been very fortunate and I'm not going to go risk anything now doing something I don't know. I see that characteristic a lot and the other thing that I would say is different and this may have a lot to do with the concept of karma. Another lesson I learned from my mother. If you're successful and you talk to wealthy people you'll always find that there's something that motivates them to be philanthropic, to give money to something that matters to them.

And.

That'S the whole idea of giving back. You've been successful and you have to find the cause that motivates you, you're willing to spend your time and money supporting. That is a big difference because if you believe in karma, and I do, when you do that it kind of protects you against the horrific downside of something bad happening to you because you're just so greedy. You can't, when you have success and you're a wealthy person, if you show me a greedy wealthy person, just wait 10 years, then you'll just show me a person. Somehow karma will separate their money from them. That's what I find.

Or they'll get sick or something will happen where.

I really believe this. I really believe it and you've got to find those things that you can give back on that means something to you. But if you abuse karma, it's got a special gift coming for you.

So, finding ways to give back, are you giving back in a lot of other ways philanthropically right now as well?

Yeah, I like to have a concentrated approach. I call it five and five. I prefer to pick five. charities or in our case we support a dance company, we support some hospitals, some educational institutions and give enough that it's a material gift and that I have a say in how it's spent very often. And above all I like to see expense ratios reported. I generally don't support charities that can't provide just like an investment, some kind of a statement on where my money went.

Right.

And that is actually something I think Bill Gates is famous for early on saying, why can't I treat my charitable investments as I do my private ones and ask for some performance metrics? And I kind of believe that he's right.

Yeah, it's something smart. And what would you say is one other thing that rich people do differently that poor people don't do?

This may have a lot to do with you know, the access to, but in the last five years I've realized how important food is and how if you're, you know, you say poor, how you should be, or even you should focus on what you put in your body. Because in our society we do two things very badly. We eat too much sodium and we eat too much sugar, white cane sugar. We have been trained to do that since the 40s by a whole industrial complex that wants to sell us that shit. And we eat it and I'm guilty of it and so is everybody else. Salt and sugar feel good. They're comfort foods, snacks and all that. It's the worst thing you can put in your body. And I have learned, it's kind of weird but the older I get and the more I experience this because I'm actually a classically trained chef in French fusion I have a job on QVC as Chef Wonderful. I sell millions of dollars of food and wine each year there. It's because I grew up for a few years in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. And that's a place where it was a French colonized place. My dad was with the United Nations, and the two women that were the housekeepers and the cook used to go to the market, it was on the Mekong River in Phnom Penh, and take me with them at four in the morning. and it's very hot there. And so they were classically trained French chefs. So in French cooking, particularly if you're a sous chef, which is really hard to get that designation, and I'm pretty proud of what I can do in that area, is you work with a lot of heavy butter and cream. But you can't do that in an environment where it's 110 degrees, 100% humidity every day. You can't eat like that. What those chefs taught me was how to replace the butter and the cream with things like a mango puree or lime and lemon juice or guava crushed. I mean, all kinds of different flavors. So they would take a classic dish like crpe flambe, which is one of my specialties, or escargot. And those are classic French dishes. They're very time consuming to make, particularly Escargot if it's made properly, with real shells and real snails. But you don't have to put all that butter in it. You can have a different flavor set based on using a fusion of citrus. Anyways, the whole idea of eating better for me is part of my DNA and growing up. So now I look at what I eat every day. I used to, when I was young, I eat three steaks a week. I used to love that. I don't think I've had a piece of red meat in months. I eat fish, I eat fruit and vegetables and it really helps you feel better. So if you're asking me what's different, but I'm proud to see that many people are exploring plant-based and regardless of their financial income, meat is actually very expensive and very inefficient. And there's ways to get protein. You don't have to become a vegan. I'm just saying you have to choose to focus on the things that are better for you regardless of your income and you will get more energy, you'll feel better, that kind of thing. That's a difference as well.

That's powerful. I love that. I'm curious, do you think the middle class is financially stuck? And if so, what can they do to start achieving more financial freedom?

No, they're not stuck. And one thing that's democratized, and we learned it since this whole pandemic started, You can create a new opportunity for yourself online with virtually no barrier to entry. Many, many people did it as a side hustle and it's now producing more income than their first job. The whole idea of trying to solve for customer acquisition using creativity, using video, using music, using photography, using storytelling, animatics, graphics, to actually sell a service or product starting locally and then expanding. There's millions of new businesses that have been started during the pandemic. We see them every day on Shark Tank, but they are basically taking middle class people out of middle class. They're, and I'd say if you look at Shark Tank, we have plenty of people that have been working in the middle class for years and all of a sudden exploded to the upside with a great service or idea that they did online. And that's why I really think people should empower themselves You can try things online, you can see what works, you don't have to get the first one right. But those tools are there for you. And most of this is done on Facebook in geo-locked advertising. 80 cents on the dollar of what my company spends is on Facebook. So I always find it very funny to see people bashing Facebook saying how evil it is when really it's running small business in America because they have that unique geo-locked advertising feature. So, we shouldn't shut it down until we find something better.

Yeah.

And what would you say are a couple of qualities that you really look for when you're looking to invest in someone or when someone has an idea and whether you invest them or not, you're like, this person is going to be successful, whether it's in this thing or something else. What are those two or three qualities that all of them seem to have in your mind, whether it be a leadership skill or clarity, what would that be?

I prefer to invest in entrepreneurs that have failed once or twice before, that have felt the sting of failure and have gone down the road and not had success the first time because their motivations are completely different than a more arrogant first timer that thinks everything they do is going to make $100 million. It just doesn't work that way. And so that's one thing. I love there's three things you have to have the ability to do and know if you're going to be successful in business. Number one is you have to be able to articulate your idea 90 seconds or less explaining to me why anybody would want that product or service. And if you take more than a minute and a half, you're never going to be successful. You're just not. And number two is you have to be able to explain why you're the right person to execute on that idea. In other words, what is it about you that knows how to take this idea, which good ideas are dime a dozen, executional skills are really hard to find. So what is it about you that can execute on this business and make it work? I mean those two together start to be really interesting because then as an investor looks at it and says, well, I'm going to mitigate my risk. I've got a great executional, you know, expert here and I've got a great idea. And then lastly, the one that I think you have to have a good command of, you have to know your numbers. You have to be able to explain gross margins, market share, break even analysis, How many competitors? How fast can you grow? And I think, you know, that's who I want to invest in someone who has the command of all three of those. That's probably got more than a 50% chance of being successful if they can do that.

Right.

Yeah.

Um.

I love your take on things. Uh, I wanted to know for those that are in their late teens, early 20s, what conversations should they be having with friends or mentors around money? I feel like a lot of people are afraid to talk about it. or they don't share how much they make or how much a home costs or whatever. It's just like this hush-hush mentality. What should we be talking about in our late teens, early 20s or even 30s? But what types of conversations should we be having to shift the narrative around money so we can start attracting it in our favor as opposed to rejecting it?

Well, first of all, we need to teach it in high school. Luckily here in Florida, it's been put into the curriculum. and I'm very proud of that. I used to be in the educational software business. There's 110,000 school buildings in America, majority of them in New York, Florida, Texas, and California, and abysmally most of them don't teach even debt. They don't even teach how to use a credit card, which is ridiculous. We've got to change that, and luckily we are. We're starting to see it creep into the curriculums in all the major states, which is good. But I think parents have a responsibility to talk about money, which is always sitting at the table every day. It always is. And getting their kids to understand how a credit card works is very important. And again, I talked about not entitling. That's important too. But within your friends, don't be embarrassed to talk about money. You're going to be talking about money for the rest of your life. It's always going to be part. You can't live without it. You have to deal with it. It can cause great joy and give you personal freedom or it can be catastrophic in your life, destroy your happiness completely. Your choice is where does it fit? Do you want it to destroy your life or would you prefer that you understand how it works and respect it for what it is and deal with it? That's a personal choice people have to make. And I would say the best way to do that is learn more, talk more about it and don't be afraid to discuss it. I don't care what age you're at, but certainly at the age of 16, you should be discussing that. And above all, taking 10% of whatever anybody gives you, your grandmother, your birthday gift, whatever it is, and set it aside and start investing it. The earlier you start, the less pressure you have when you're in your 60s because you've got to have at least a million and a half bucks in the bank and you can if you just save $100 a week. That's what Bean Stocks is all about. That's why I got involved in Bean Stocks. That's the whole idea.

And do you think someone in their late 40s and 50s, do you think it's too late for them to start learning about financial literacy if they've struggled in their 20s and 30s and 40s? Do you think it's too late to start investing and saving? What should people do in their 40s? early 50s?

No, they should at any age. I mean, the truth is changing your spending behavior in your 40s is difficult, but you can do it. And at that age, you should start saving 20 to 25% of what you're taking in, which sounds hard to do, but it isn't. You just stop buying those $5 coffees and you stop buying stuff you don't use. Anybody can go look in their closet and see all the crap they bought that they never used. And basically, you killed that money. when you did that. You bought something that you could have had invested and it could have grown 6% to 8% a year for you, but instead you bought some piece of junk that you're throwing out now. Everybody's guilty of that. I actually think my mother was right. She's always said that people can save 20%, they just don't have the backbone to do it. And she did. And she died a very wealthy woman. She had a secret account she kept from both of her husbands. And I was the older brother and was executor for the state. And I remember the lawyers calling me up saying, you, got to come down here. Your mother had a lot of money and I always wondered how she did it. She basically bought dividend paying stocks in her 20s and a whole bunch of Telco bonds, 50/50 portfolio. She loved Telco bonds. They used to yield 6% in those days and she loved dividend paying stocks, S&P stocks. And over the 50 years that she had this account, it just provided massive appreciation.

Should people die wealthy or should they die broke because they spent their wealth on charity or giving back or whatever, living your life and going on trips and adventures. What's your philosophy there?

You know, the trouble these days is you don't know when you're going to die. You make certain assumptions and then you live an extra 10 years or 20 years and you live at a time in your life when you really needed that money for your comfort. You know, it's probably better to not make an assumption, oh, I think I'm gonna die when I'm 88, because you don't know what technology is gonna provide or what your genes really have in store for you. I would prefer to die with a good chunk of dough in the bank and then gift it to a cat.

A cat?

Yeah.

You know, cats only last 14 years. It'd be a great 14 years for them. I'm just kidding. I probably give it to a combination of, you know, In my case, I feel safe because I can roll it into a trust that doesn't provide for you after you finish college. So I don't feel I'm entitling anybody or cursing anybody's future. So I'll just probably roll it into one of my family trusts and say, I don't need it anymore. The only thing I'm taking with me to the afterlife is my watch collection, all of them. And I'm going to eternity, I got a lot. I don't even say anymore how many I've got. I really am very proud of my watch collection and it's a it's got some amazing pieces in it. It's taken me years to build this collection. And I'm going to need it to tell time in eternity, so I'm taking it all with me.

What do you think is the best investment you've ever made in yourself?

Well, the best investment I ever made in myself was myself. You know, you often doubt yourself, but you know, it was, you know, I went through some very tough times right from when my mother cut me off through several business ventures I failed in and then you just don't know, serendipity knocks on the door. The thing is, it's not for you, you just got to keep getting up every day. You have to stay in the game, you have to stay in the race. It's very, very hard. It's like that story of the guy with his fiance, you know, you just have to focus and you have to find somebody that's willing to focus with you. But I'm glad I did what I did. I wouldn't change a thing. I've made plenty of mistakes but it is who I am today and I'm I'm very proud to be able to offer the things I do to my family and to support different initiatives and charities and support the arts and collect watches and guitars and cook and all these things are made available because I've been able to focus on being successful in business. And that is the great American dream. It's going to remain that way forever. It's the essence of why Shark Tank works. I'm very proud to be part of the platform. I can guarantee you 13 years ago when we started this thing we had no idea what was going to happen. I mean it's just who knew. But now nine-year-old girls to 99-year-old men come up to me saying, Look, let's talk about that deal last week on Shark Tank. And I'm happy to do it. I mean I think it's a wonderful outcome and we're proud of it. And as we start to work on season 13, I mean, it's, you know, no television show lasts 13 years, practically none, less than 5% of them. It's amazing. So it's great and we're proud to do it and I don't know, that's the whole idea that I encourage people, don't pursue entrepreneurship out of greed of money. You will fail for sure. Because every time I talk to anybody that's had a big liquidity event, I say, you know, did you see it coming and how did it happen? They said, we never saw it coming. We were just working one day and then boom, I was poor, now I'm rich. That's always the way it is. It's not that you're saying you're counting your dollars. You don't have any until one day boom, something happens and then the funny thing is you find yourself right back to work.

Before the interview continues, if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of, I've written a new book called the Greatness Mindset. And I think you're gonna love this. Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies, and step-by-step guidance, the Greatness Mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today. Okay, let's get back to this video. What would you say are the top three to five rules on money if you could boil it down to three to five?

It's a game. The number one rule is it's a game, you're playing a game, it's that simple. If you look at it as a game, just like anything, you can get better at it. Like whatever game you play, if you play Uno, if you play Monopoly, if you play Clue, if you play Fortnite, if you play anything you play, you're gonna get good. I remember in my time, I was playing Fester's Quest, I played Zelda, I used to play Final Fantasy 1, and I would play, Obviously Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, but it was also, what was the Mario Kart? Is it Super Mario Kart? And you know how you would do the three jumps and then bam, it's going fast. And I would beat this time 32 seconds. I was so proud of it, but I played it 50,000 times, right? So the game with money, it's exactly what it is. Once you learn how to play the game with money, then it has to do with timing, then it has to do with different kind of things. Like, you know, a year ago I.

Get a call from a guy who needs cash.

It's okay.

So, he needs an investment.

He has something he has to sell immediately to get cash in return, okay, because he needs the money right away. So it's okay. So what are you selling? He says it's the two greatest Wayne Gretzky cards. I said, okay.

Signed or unsigned?

No, this is a PSA 10 1979 OPG time. Signature? No sign. But it's the Holy Grail. So, the OPG one sold in 2016 for $453,000. Okay. Wow. And just five years prior to that, it sold for $92,000. So from $92,000 to $451,000 in 2016, and he calls me. And the top sold in 2016 for $205,000. So two cars combined sold in 2016 for $600,000.

He has them both.

He has them both. And he wants to sell it to me. And I said, okay, what do you want to sell it for?

He's like, $600,000.

Yeah, of course he wants to. I said, I'm not going to pay you that. I mean, you know, he wants $650,000. I said, I'm not going to pay you that. talked about it, and eventually he gave me a number, right? And it was still a number. I had to still come up with a half a million dollar check to the guy, but we met at the PSA headquarters, classy guy, total gentleman. We sat down, transaction happened, the CEO of PSA came, showed us the poster on the PSA headquarters. I think it's a new port of the card is on the wall. It's the most expensive hockey card in the world, right? Okay, no problem. So, you're a hockey fan? I'm not a hockey fan. I'm an investment guy with hockey. But I've interviewed Wayne Gretzky six years ago.

Wow.

So I like greatness. I like anybody that just goes and crushes it with their game, right? So I buy this card. So I buy the card. I don't think much of it. One card, not two. Two cards, it's both of them. I bought both of them, yeah.

Wow.

So the other guy who owns the card wouldn't sell his card for a million dollars if you paid it to him. So here's what I do now. Two guys own the card. Me and the other guy, there's only two of us. Okay. Okay. You paid a million, he won't sell it to you. So that means there's only one in the market, 'cause it's me, 'cause I'm willing to sell it, right? So it's on eBay, right? If you go on eBay right now, you type in Wayne Gretzky OPG, it's on market right now for a million dollars, right? Wow. One of them is on the market for a million, the other one's on the market for 400,000. So you asked me for rule of money, I had cash. If I don't have cash like that, I can't double my money that quickly. So we just talked about three of them. Money's a game. You need cash, because opportunity is going to come up and it's a doubles game. So if I put- It's a doubles game. Everything about money is a doubles game. What's that mean? The doubles game to me is I pay you $1,000, can we double it in six months?

No.

How long in 12 months? Okay, no problem. I'll do a double in a year. Here's $1,000, I get a double back, right? So, if you take $1,000 and you double it every year, what happens? $1,000 goes into 2-4-8-16-32-64-256-512 million. $1,000 is nine doubles away from a million. Now, you take a million and see what happens if we double it nine times. 1 million goes into 2 million, 4 million, 8 million, 16 million, 32 million, 64 million, 128 million, 256 million, 512 million. A million is 10 doubles away from a billion.

How do you find the doubles?

Well, that's the game. That's the part of the game. That's what I'm trying to tell you. So the doubles now becomes investment opportunities. You know what you buy into. Do you start a company where has a high value, you know, you can really scale it and finding something that can scale. Do you invest into things that are going to give you 6, 8, 10% or are you going to go play ball and take the risk? That's the game that you're going to start learning. you know, part of my money is going to be hedge and I'm going to buy some gold because I'm not going to become a billionaire off gold, but I'm buying it because gold is money and something happens to the economy, I'm protected with the gold. But you know what? I'm going to put some of this money in mutual funds because I know long term I'm going to make 8 to 12% on this, I'm fine with that. I might do a real estate deal because long term I may do some money, although right now, commercial real estate may be an interesting dynamic because I think Zoom crushed commercial real estate.

The commercial real estate model has it's been crushed.

And by the way, It may never come back the same way ever again. Commercial real estate, 20 years from now or something.

I don't even think, I think it's gone.

Here's what I mean. Look, we have this space, right? Okay, you got this space. Did you get in the last four months? How long have you got it?

Before COVID Okay, so six months before.

But if you get this today, if you get this today, right now, office space in Dallas, office space nationwide, companies are looking at their business models and they're just saying, Why do I need 100,000 square feet of office space? Why do I need it? But if you go out there and you look at the numbers, you're like, okay, I don't know if I'm going to do commercial real estate. But if I find some small, if I team up with an investment bank or if I team up with a guy that's managing money and I go with a VC team and this is a guy that's flipping opportunities fairly quickly and I dump a million dollars with him and within five years he turns a million dollars into five million, That's 5x in 5 years. That may not be a bad idea. So you got to find those. And they're out there, by the way. They're out there. So Ray Dalio plays a game of doubles.

Warren Buffett's a doubles game.

All these guys are doubles game. And no one is investing in businesses. Yes. I'm a business guy. I'm not a real estate guy. There are people that, by the way, that doesn't mean real estate doesn't work. I mean, it wouldn't make any sense for me to say there's real estate billionaires everywhere. Our president is a real estate billionaire. So for me to knock real estate would have no value to it. But for me, I'm more about I have an idea. What are you guys doing? Me and Tiffany are thinking about starting a marketing company. Okay, how can this thing scale? Well, let me tell you what we got. We got three packages, boom, boom, boom. We're going to be target audience. We're going to be targeting people in this world. Okay, interesting. How much are they going to pay? We foresee us doing $6 million in revenue within 24 months. What have you done to be able to earn this? I'm a Columbia guy. I'm in this, I'm in this. How much money do you need? I need $2 million. I can't give you $2 million. Can I come in for $100,000? I put $100,000. The next thing this thing sells for $200 million, that $100,000 all of a sudden became $2.2 million. That's a victory. So those opportunities are out there. You just gotta focus. And then the last one, I would tell you with the money. So we talked about what? We talked about games.

Money is a game, you need cash. It's a doubles game.

Doubles game?

Yep.

And I'll tell you one more would be, you have to be maniacally maniacal about being patient. I mean, you have to be patiently aggressive. You know, patiently aggressive. It's so tough to do.

Because you want your money to double now.

Exactly.

It might take 10 years.

Yeah, but if you are willing to do the 10 years, it may double 40 times. It may double 30 times. You know, like when Bezos said, Just hang tight. I'm not going to give you dividends. Just trust me on this. Trust me on this, right? And at the beginning, if you've heard the story where he goes and raises $2 million, he gets $50,000 from 40 people. That's what, $2 million? And he gives them 20%.

Wow. 20% of that $2 million?

Gives them 20% just for $2 million. You know what that 20% is worth today? $200 billion.

Oh my God.

That's the point.

So can you imagine 1994, Amazon gets started. Forget about you put $2 million. Just say you put 50 million. You put 50,000. What is a half a percent of a trillion dollar company right now? A half a percent, you're still a half a billionaire. Your 50,000 is worth $500 million, give or take whatever the numbers were doing right. The point is that is a massive victory. The guy who put $10,000 and he gave it to Berkshire Hathaway in 1974, I don't know if you've heard this story. Warren Buffett is starting. He says, I'll give you $10,000. Never touches the money. Goes back to his regular job, makes a hundred grand a year. You know how much I tend to--.

Have you read this article?

No, tell me. The $10,000, if you go on business inside and you pull it up, is worth 780 today.

780 million.

Million.

Wow.

Never did anything to it. So that's the part about patiently aggressive.

Yeah.

It's very hard to do. But the doubles get bigger later on, not early on. The doubles are bigger your 15, 20, 25.

That's what Buffett talks about. Just like his success, he's lived longer. You know, he's stayed around longer to let the money compound. And that compounded interest is where it's at. What's the three greatest investments you've made in yourself? And would you recommend those same investments in other people or what should they be doing in their life right now?

So, you know, I will tell you I went to a Harvard OPM program one time and I spent OPM. OPM is owner president management program. So, if you run a business that does 10 million or more, you get to go to it and it's three years of three weeks living on campus, right? I went there, but I didn't go afterwards for different reasons. But I went there when I spent that $50,000. and I was on campus for three weeks. You spent three weeks with 144 people from 64 different countries. So watch what happens. I'm sitting there, and at this point in the game, I have no idea what it is to be a CEO. I've gone from being an employee to a salesperson to a sales leader to a good manager, but I don't know what it is to be a CEO. I have no idea what it is to be a CEO. So I sit next to this guy. He becomes my teammate, my partner.

He.

Owns the Victoria Secret of New Zealand and Australia. The reason why I'm laughing is because the last day Eight of us were chosen to go present a business opportunity. So he keeps telling me, Patrick, I'm going to kill it. Just watch what I'm going to do. I'm going to scare the hell out of Lynette. I think the lady's name is Linda because she's the main person that does it. Watch what I'm about to do. So he goes up on stage. Louis, he's a very simple guy. I mean, good-looking guy, but he's not a charismatic anything. He just goes up on stage. He says, Let me tell you why you ought to invest a million dollars into my new lingerie line. He says, Here's a PowerPoint. Here's the PowerPoint. You see all the sexy women here? You know what? I think it's more important for you.

To see this face to face. Ladies?

No way. Bring them in. Seven models come in half naked wearing the lingerie. The entire place, all the entrepreneurs are going crazy. But the teachers are furious with them. The ladies are running around, takes her jacket off, is trying to cover all these women. It was phenomenal, right, to see this here. But the point is... On Harvard stuff. On Harvard's campus, right?

Think about it.

Here's the part. Five years goes by. I'm talking to you about it.

That's called marketing, right?

You remember it. I remember it. But when I was sitting next to him, I said, Listen, man, I'm trying to learn how to be a good CEO. What do you suggest about being a good CEO? He says, Man, I got 7,000 employees and I have seven CEOs that report directly to me. I spent three weeks with this guy telling me stuff that he does with his CEO. He's not a motivational speaker. I don't even think he's got a thousand people following on Instagram. He's worth a couple billion. He's not an influencer. But those three weeks of talking to I was like a kid in a candy store trying to pull information out of this guy, and it was all technical stuff. It wasn't motivational stuff. What time do you wake up? What's your daily routine? None of that stuff. What do you do when you're trying to hire a person and you know you got to give him equity, but you're afraid to give him too much equity and he leaves early and you protect yourself that if you fire him, does he still get the other two-thirds? How do you do this? Well, you set it up this way. What do you do to make sure you're that attorney that you have, that attorney that you have who is negotiating with the other attorney and he doesn't really want to go to court. So behind closed doors, they're settling and he's not really working on your side. He's working on the other side to kind of speed it up. And he, how do you get him to, well you got another attorney who holds him accountable. I'm like, these are the things that he said to me that you can't read about in places. So you said three investments, that's one of them. Vistage was 100% a great investment because we met once a month. for three, four years with a man named John Morris. John Morris is a local guy, Santa Monica, a guy it'd be great for you to get connected with him. We're sitting in a meeting one time with John Morris and one of the entrepreneurs going out of business and he says, Guys, I got bad news because you would start the meeting and he would say, Here's my personal life, here's my health, here's my marriage, here's my business, here's my kids and we would all talk amongst each other and everybody had to sign an NDA so you don't tell your story. But one guy gets up and he says, Guys, I got bad news. I'm about to go out of business. Why? If I don't get a half a million by this Friday, we're shutting down. If I get it, I'll last another year and a half, and I think we'll make it, but I'm shutting down. This is what John does. Tell me, what do you need for half a million? What are you willing to give up.

For the half a million?

What are you willing to do this? He says, Give me a second. In front of all of us, why are the marketers? Calls a guy, no, calls a guy who is in his business, same industry, says, Take this call, go talk to him. Terms, boom. Guy comes back ecstatic. By Friday, half a million was in his account.

Wow.

This is the kind of guy John Morris is, right? So, Vistage to me was watching people from different industries every month for nine hours for one day, nine hours, and everybody would share their problems. It was 1,500 bucks a month, some number like that, 100% well worth if you get qualified to go in because Vistage you have to do.

Is this like Tiger 30-- if you ever heard of this thing called Tiger 33, I think it's called, it's kind.

Of like you've got to have 50 million plus.

Yeah, there's things like that everywhere.

This is one of them. We got to reveal kind of your financial, and your one hour a year, you know who you are, all that stuff. There's a lot of that happening right now, and I think it's great. I think it's great if it's by real business people, not social media influencers. And let me explain to you what I mean by this. What social, like for example, if somebody wants to learn how to create a podcast, I want to go learn from somebody that's run a six, like I remember, I think you taught a bunch of people how to monetize webinars and podcasts. Like you were the guy that taught people how to do the webinars. And you made people millions, by the way, you made a lot of people a lot of money with what you were doing with webinars. A time that people didn't think webinars had money. Yeah, five, six, seven years ago. Yeah, I mean, at a time that nobody was thinking about it, Right? So, I go on, you do webinars, why are you doing webinars? Oh, Lewis taught me how to do this. Lewis, Lewis, yeah, Lewis House. Oh, no shit, webinars, yeah. Okay. But this is not webinars. This is not, this is about these guys, how did you go from?

Bigger strategy on how to make money.

This is stuff that you sit there and you're like, wow, you guys are doing how much per year? $820 million. How many employees you got? 922. How many people on your board? seven of them. How do you handle conflicts? And like, this is the stuff that you talk with these guys, right? At Vistage. So, I recommend the OPM program. I recommend the Vistage program. And then I'm a obsessive reader, man. I mean, I don't know how many articles and stuff I read. So, I would recommend subscribing to when there's like Business Insider that you can pay $99 per year, pay for it. If there's a Wall Street Journal that you pay $600 per year, pay for it. If there are these handful of stuff that you can get that's not just the general news, if you spend $1,000, $2,000 on these new sites that are sending the elite articles that's different than the main ones, don't hesitate, pay for it. Because everybody's going to talk about the general stuff, but that additional stuff is written by-- Advanced stuff. Yeah, it's advanced stuff. So imagine like-- Insider. It's the insider stuff written by the CFO of Snapchat that's telling you nine ways to protect yourself against cyber security. that will be boring to other people. But you're looking and you're saying, this was freaky. This was legit. So, yeah, those kinds of investments is what I would say to you.

And if you lost your job right now, what investment should you make in yourself?

If I lost my job right now and I don't have a job lined up within four weeks, that means I have a very weak contact list. So the problem is a long-term problem. So you are the long-term, if you cannot replace yourself with a job within four weeks, you have a terrible contact list.

Relationship contact.

Exactly. Because you should be able to replace your job within four weeks if you got a solid contact list. Why shouldn't you be? You should like, you know, a person gets like, we fired a guy named Mark and he was with AIG for 22 years and I love this guy, but he just wasn't a fit. So I talked to Mark, I said, Mark, this is not going to work out, but I'm telling you right now, I got a job for you lined up at Columbus. He said, Seriously? I said, Interview set up. CEO of Columbus calls me for a review. I said, no question, this guy's a phenomenal guy for you. He gets harder like this within two. You should, if you have the contacts like this, you ought to be. So if you don't, it means the problem is you either don't have enough value in the marketplace or your contacts are weak. When you think about someone you want.

To connect with, what goes through your mind of the sequencing of how do I reach out to this person? What's the strategy? Do a lot of research on the person.

I do a lot of research on the person. You're really good at that, yeah.

A lot of research on the person. I think people don't know how valuable understanding who someone is and what their history is and what makes them tick. I agree. How meaningful that is when you do that. And I think you did this when you first interviewed me, you just knew a lot about me and you did research. And I'm like, man, it takes so much time and energy. And when you're running a business with a thousand employees or doing 10 sales calls a day, you're, you know, a husband, your dad, how do you manage building relationships when you have so much going on, though? You have no free time.

Yeah, so this goes into at what level you want to go to in life. Meaning, there is levels in this game, right? Like, listen, Gary Payton is alpha, but he's not alpha when Michael's in the room. When Michael's in the room, Michael's the alpha. Yeah, he's a little. Kobe's an alpha, but now when Michael's in the room. But anybody else in the room, Kobe's the alpha, including Magic Johnson, including Shaq.

Yeah.

But when Barkley's in the room with Shaq, who's the alpha? Shaq's the alpha. Okay, but when Barclay's in the room with a Carmello Anthony, Barclay's the alpha. Everything's about levels, right? So what level do you want to go to? So if you want to go at the next levels, it's going to require you to be a little bit more meticulous and detailed about your strategy, about the kind of help you're going to need, the kind of research you're going to need, the kind of relationships you're going to need, you know, and then figuring out like your schedule. And sometimes people want to have the four-hour work week. I'm not a four-hour workweek guy, but some people want that lifestyle. And you have to give credit to Tim Ferriss because Tim Ferriss started a movement with a bunch of laptop entrepreneurs all over the world. And guess what? They love it. When I talk to these people that.

Read four-hour workweek, and I'm in Malaysia, and look at my life.

I'm making a few hundred grand a year or a few million a year, whatever it may be.

Yeah.

So you could never, I'm a terrible vacation guy after three days. I'm a three-day guy.

Yeah.

But I know myself. If I go, to Bora Bora. If I go to Greece and we have to go after three days, my wife will say, babe, you good? Like, babe, it's three days, babe. She says, I get it, babe. Just kind of... And we're typically go because we're entertaining people. We're not going, it's like we're taking 500 people, 400 people. So we're entertaining people. It's not like, you know, you're going because it's when we go, we go, we get our stuff done and we come back and we have a great time together because now we have a system. When you have kids, it's different because you can go longer with kids. Yeah. Because you're vicariously living through them. I like going to Universal Studios. I can go with my kids to Universal Studios. because I see how he looks at Harry Potter and you know these spiders and this stuff. It's beautiful when you see their imagination, right? But going back to the question you're asking, so how do you find time to do research? How do you find time to do all this other stuff? If you want to compete in the top 1% of 1% of 1% of 1%, the price is a bigger price. And Lewis, there's no way to describe how to do it. There isn't a formula for it. You just have to figure out a way how to do it. If it means I come home and I have to watch a person's interview from 11 o'clock to 2 o'clock in the morning, and I come to the office at 8 a.m. to do my interview, and I have to come and go read through 20 pages of notes, I have to do that. And if I don't do that, you can tell in the interview. If I do do it, you're like, how does he know that guy's date? How does he know when this happened at this time?

How do you know when this happened? It's a lot of research. The level of detail and attention. People will remember for decades. They'll remember and always think back to, you know, that person really cared or that person was really thoughtful, that person was genuinely interested in me and they'll just continue to remember that and good things will come to you when you come from that place, when you constantly do that extra work to care about someone. So I agree there. What's the question you wish everyone asked you more that they don't ask you?

I think the understanding of knowing that if I really want to do something big, what do I do when I'm having the guilt that I get from my wife, my kids, my family? How do you manage guilt?

For example, something big. What do you mean by that?

Okay, so for example, you really aspire to have your own talk show, which you should. You look like a guy that you ought to have one day. You're that kind of a guy. You need to be on the big screen. You belong on the big screen. You need to have something like that happen with Lewis Howes. I've said this to you from the first time we sat down. You look like the guy that has something like that going for himself. Montel Williams meets Oprah Winfrey, meets Michael Strahan, meets Ellen DeGeneres, combined, those combined. Okay, Louis Houze show on TV, right? Okay. So now if we're together and it's like, oh, babe, you're working too hard, all this is research, all this other stuff, and you're not doing this with.

Your kids, and you're not spending time.

With us, you're not spending, you're like, the guilt.

The guilt, man.

So how do you handle the guilt? The guilt works in a few different ways. Ted Turner understood who he was. And Ted Turner, his personal life, he'll be the first to say it was in shambles. You know, he married Jane Fonda. Didn't work out because Jane Fonda wanted to go, and Jesus changed her life, and she became all spiritual. And Ted's like, I don't want to talk about God. I'm just. I'm playing ball, man. Let's go by the horses. Let's go to the Montana place. and Ted had so much pressure on his life when time Warner bought him out and all this other stuff, but then the guilt comes out, right? Well, you didn't do this and you didn't do that and you didn't do this and you didn't do that. Yeah, but I wanted to do this with my life. So, you know, that stuff is, can you live without finding out your full potential and not going there? Are you okay? Like, there's a story one time I read in a book written by John Maxwell. I read this like 16 years ago, one of his small books with his affirmations that he had. He said, one day a guy goes to heaven, he dies and he goes to heaven. He was meeting with St. Peter's and he was always a military guy, right? And he always wanted to be a general and he wanted to be a great general. He wanted to be a general, go in the military, be a leader, but he never did it. But he followed everybody's history. So he goes to St. Peter and says, hey, question for you, St. Peter. I've got one question for you. He says, what's that? Who's the greatest general of all time? He says, I'm sorry. He said, who's the greatest general of all time? You really gonna ask me that?

Yeah.

Was it General Patton?

No.

Was it Grant?

No.

Who was it?

You.

Is that me? Yes. When the recruiter came to you for you to join the army, and if you had the courage to go in, you would have been the greatest general. I have it right now. You would have been the greatest general the world had ever seen, but you were afraid.

Wow.

I mean, Listen, either that story makes you so nervous where you're kind of like, I can't do that to myself. Or that story gets you to be like, wow, it's okay if I don't go there.

Fine.

But you're going to have to deal with that. And whatever you decide to do that's big, there's going to be sacrifices.

A bad investment is still better than a smart spin. So wealthy people don't spend money. They invest money. Number two, they also know that money is not required. I think a lot of us, if we grew up poor, we believe it takes money to make money. Our parents told us that. Maybe a grandparent or the neighbor or somebody said that to us because that was their, how they justified not having their breakthrough and getting trapped. They're like, oh, the reason I didn't get out. And we know everybody's got an excuse in their lifetime. Everybody uses them. at some point in their lifetime to trap themselves. This idea that it takes money to make money is not true. It's a myth. It's the number one reason why I did the show, the Discovery show, to debunk that on TV, that I didn't need any money at all. They offered me a hundred bucks. I'm like, Just keep it, dude. No, no, we got to give it to you. It's part of the show. And I'm like, I don't need the hundred. They're like, no, but you got to take the hundred as part of the show. The third thing I would say about wealthy people is they're, I mean, different people have different ways they invest, but they tend to be more focused on the long-term appreciation of an asset rather than give me money this second. And I think they're not stuck in this get rich quick thing.

It's a delayed gratification.

Yeah, they're more like, yeah, I'd rather have wealth tomorrow than rich today. And they do have a distinction between the rich and the wealthy. The super wealthy are looking to create wealth beyond their own means and needs. Like they're not thinking about their kids, their boat, their plane. I know people think that, but that's not actually true. They're actually thinking about how do I create wealth for a lot of people? Amazon's got a million employees. Now most of them only earn minimum wage, but there's some people at the upper level of Amazon that are making fortunes.

Yeah, and I'm curious, you wanted to debunk this myth of that it takes money to make money, which is something I heard a lot growing up and a lot of people think, well, unless I can't make it because I can't invest it until I have it. So, what were the lessons you learned starting from essentially zero, having no money, no context, no relationships, no opportunities in a town that you went to for this show? What did you realize? were the keys to actually making money even if you didn't have any?

Well, as you see the show, you see that I actually never make any money, right? So, the two girls, they actually follow three of us. And the two girls went out and got a job in the first week. And I'm not saying that's right or wrong or my way is better or worse, but they are strategies, okay? They're different strategies. I was not there to get a job or to earn money. I was there looking for one thing, opportunity. I never spent time looking for money ever the entire 90 days, okay? I'm not looking for money. I was actually looking for contracts through the contacts. I wasn't looking for money because I knew the evaluation of the company in the last segment, an evaluator will come in and determine what my company's worth, my new company, right, that I created. And at that point, I just need to validate to him. Dude, my company's worth this based on that. The entire 90 days, I never touched the first 100 they gave me. And this was to prove to people, dude, you do not need money. Like it's just, it's not true. You need money. You do need contacts.

You need people. You need relationships.

You need people. You need people. You need the right people though. The right people that are already in play, okay? Just 'cause the guy's got money. I remember a billionaire friend of mine, you know, he could buy a jet. and I said, Hey, Bob, should I buy a jet? He said, you, should, I shouldn't. Meaning, Grant should, because, and he's way wealthier than I am. He could have bought 40 of them. He's like, I don't have a place to go in mine. You could use yours every day. So you gotta find somebody that's in place, somebody that not just has money, but somebody that wants to do more with their money. So you'll notice in the first 10 days, I don't spend any money. I don't spend money on shelter, not on food, and not on water, nothing. Then what I do is I end up accumulating assets. And it's unfortunate that the viewer doesn't see this. Within five days, I have two vehicles. One was given to me by Discovery, and the other one was a $40,000 Jeep that I basically used from Ryan, this guy I met, and told him, I'm gonna sell your Jeep, I'm gonna drive it around town, put 10 miles a day on it and I'm going to sell it. Well, that's a $43,000 asset. My truck was worth four grand. I still had my $100. I lived in a $46,000 RV that I was trying to sell. So, yeah, and what's the other thing I did? And I picked up $10,000 to do in a 15% partnership in the equity of the upside of this guy's company. So literally in 10 days, I was accumulating contacts that could get me equity. And the important part of that story is, man, go get you some equity. You know, Jay-Z talks about this. You're getting, you know, so many of you young brothers are getting in advance while I'm picking up the equity.

Ooh, yeah. They're trying to get the get rich quick. Let me give you the money now.

Give it to me now.

Where the publisher is getting the long-term residual income for decades off of your music.

Kevin Hart, look at what Kevin Hart did with this show, right? He owns that show. He owns the ticket sales. He was willing to promote it, not just be a comedian where Richard Pryor showed up and got his check, told his jokes. Kevin Hart says, yeah, I'm gonna show up, I'm gonna tell my jokes, but I'm gonna own the entire platform, the equity.

So how do you get someone to give you $10,000 when you have nothing to give them a return? Or what is it that you're selling them a greater promise in return?

So what I did was I pitched this guy. I said, look, he's a business owner. He wants traffic in his company. Every business owner wants traffic. Every entrepreneur wants traffic to their website. And I said, look, I'm going to drive traffic to your store. He owned a mattress store, big margins. And I said, I'm going to make sure you have the biggest weekend that you've ever been here. And I said, if you give me $6,000, I'll take the six grand to the store. In fact, you don't give me the money, just call it in and approve it. I didn't want to touch his money. I never asked anybody for any money. And I said, I'm gonna go run a promotion for you. I'm gonna put together the banners, the logos, I'm gonna stand out in the street, I'm gonna drive the traffic to your place. What do you want, Grant? Or, Louis, what do you want, Louis? I did that more than once, by the way. What do you want, Louis? I said, you did. Because my name was Louis, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I said, dude, I don't want anything. He tried to give me money to do this. I don't want your money. I just want the opportunity. I want to prove myself. 'Cause what I really wanted from him was I wanted him to front the bill at the print shop so that he could put me in play. Well, I went and ran the whole promotion that weekend. I said, if you send them, if you just authorize the spend, I'll conduct the promo. I'll run it and do it. We did $91,000 worth of mattress sales. We did 15,000 that weekend and then another 65,000 over the next three weeks. And he's like, dude, you're a star. Now he's like, hey, what do you want for what you did for me this weekend? That was the best weekend we've ever had. And I'm like, I don't want anything except to be your partner.

So you wanted equity?

I want to be your partner, dude. And I said, I want 15% of the upside of your company. I said, what's fair? He's like, 15%. Everything above what I'm doing now, I'll give you 15%. He's the one that made the offer. I said, that's awesome. And then that's when I said, Hey, can you give me an advance of 10,000 on the 15%? People think that I asked for 10 grand. I actually didn't get 10,000. I got an advance on a partnership.

Which is even better. Wow, that's fascinating. So you never really, you never asked for money.

You said, Give me equity with everything. Give me equity. and then once I got the equity agreement on the upside, most people are willing to give you this because it's more than they've already made.

They're already making a certain amount. They never cross past that probably in years. So they're like, okay, if you can help me 10 exit, I'll give you a 15%.

I don't want a piece of what you're already doing. That's not fair. That's an unfair deal. I mean, you know, people are like, I need to ask for more. Yeah, but you don't want to ask and be look stupid. Like, you can't ask somebody to give you something of a company they already have. Also, it's interesting because again, they didn't show this and I look forward to kind of breaking this thing down. We're gonna actually, I'm gonna create a whole platform where I go in and.

Break the show up and show people.

What they didn't see. When I left Vegas to fly to Pueblo, the production company said, hey, what's your first move? First move, I'm going to the bank to drop off the 100. Second thing, I'm going to the gym to meet people. Third thing is I'm gonna find a business for sale. and I'm gonna see if the guy that owns the company can give me a place to sleep. Those three things happened exactly the way I predicted before I got to Pueblo, before I even knew I was going to Pueblo. I mean, it happened just every one of them. And then Discovery came to me at four days and said, bro, you gotta slow down. I said, what do you mean? We don't have a TV show if you keep winning.

Right, if you make it happen in two weeks, what are we gonna do?

I'm like, okay, come out here and watch me throw up. Okay, come out here and watch, I'm sick. I was sick from altitude sickness. I'm like, what, what, what, you guys got to cover how hard this is for me. I'm terrified, I'm cold, my back hurts, I don't have a good place to sleep, I'm pissing in a bottle, and then they cut all that out of the show. So, the point of that story is quit going for some dead Benjamins and start getting you some equity. Okay, $100 bills are dead, they're from the past. Equity is the future. you're better off with a future if you believe in yourself than you are with the dead Benjamin.

What are some things people should be looking for in terms of the right people or the right products or companies to say, okay, and how to position and package themselves to make a partnership equity deal? What should they be looking for and how can they position and package the way you did?

Yeah, so like in Pueblo, there's 112,000 people that live there. the average household income there is $24,000 a year. Household income. Like it's one of the most beat up, economically beat up cities in America. They were at 8% unemployment when the country was at three. When COVID hit, it went to 22.

Wow.

Like just ridiculous, right? So now when I'm in a problem environment like that, you have to do the math. So I'm like, okay, there's 112,000 people there. I can't meet them all. and I don't want to meet them all. I only have 90 days. So then I said, okay, who's got the money in this town? The businesses have the money in the town. This is the unfair advantage I have in this show, is that I did not go there to start a new business. I went there to find a business that was already banking. A lot of people think I did.

Did you have that intention before?

100%. I said, there's no way I'm going to start a new business. There's 34 million businesses in America. America does not need a new business.

And it's so hard to launch and create momentum, especially if you don't, even with your audience, it's hard to launch a new business.

It is so ridiculous. It is so stupid what people are doing today. I'm going to start a new beauty salon. I'm going to start a new masseuse place. I'm going to start a new cosmetologist house. I'm going to start a new, you got a new idea. Nobody needs it. Like, if you were an alien looking down at the United States of America and saying, okay, what is there too much of? restaurants, bars and businesses. There's too many of them. And then, and then somebody, some kid pops up, Paul pops up and says, I'm gonna start a new business. And, and the guy from outside the planet is looking down there saying, well, that's stupid. Why don't you just go, two-thirds of.

All the businesses in America break even or lose money. So what I'm hearing you say, Grant, is a lot of people have the dream of wanting to start and launch a business. But what I'm hearing you say is it's probably a lot smarter to go find a failing business or a business that's breaking even, jump in, add value and see if you can 10x that.

Dude, that's how you get on planes. That's how you go to the hospital. You need emergency care. You don't build a hospital, you just go to the hospital. You want food, you go to Whole Foods. You want gas, you go to the gas station. It's no different in business. It's called a going concern for a reason. Find a going concern that's got a brand, go in, that's what I did, I just went in and added value. Once I added value, actually we end up splitting off another business out of that. So out of that relationship, your first question was, hey, who are you looking for? I'm looking for contacts that can actually become contracts. I'm looking for specific relationships. They have to have money, they have to have credibility, they have to have credit lines. that's the only people I was looking for in Pueblo. Out of 112,000 people, are there 50 of them? I need to meet 50 people that have money, credit and credibility.

How did you feel, because I saw in the first episode that you got rejected a few times. How did you feel from someone who is getting yeses a lot and building their business so fast to go into a place where people just say, Nah, I don't believe in you, or, Eh, you don't seem credible, or, How did you take it in security wise internally?

Well, what, what you again, pieces you don't hear is I was in this meeting and this guy starts flexing on me and he literally like I had to sit there and listen to his. Well, I did 30, I raised $30 million and I bought all this and I put this together and I'm the king and la, la, la. And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, dude, I'd like to just drop. I'd like, you want to see a flex right now? You know, the same day I had written a check for like $45 million and I'm having to bite my tongue. Like he doesn't know I could be his investor. By the way, there was a great lesson in that. Like I was nobody, shaved head, old truck, no name, no social media following, and this guy treated me just like that. Like I'm a nobody.

And you never know who you're talking to or who they're friends with or who their family is that could support you potentially.

Totally. Like the same day this guy's flexing on me about how he raised 30 million and he's the king of Pueblo, Caballo and blah, blah, blah. I mean, like what I had in my checking account that day is Grant Cardone. I just wanted to pop it out on him. Be like, shut up, dog. Treat everybody like you never know who you're dealing with. You know, and just because they're having a bad day, one, you don't know who you're dealing with and number two, more importantly, you don't know who they're gonna become.

Yeah, they may not have money yet, but in 10 years, they might have a brand or audience or something that could support you.

Every accredited investor was a non-accredited investor at one time. Every whale was a minnow.

I mean, you've been doing sales for, what, four decades now?

Yeah.

You've been selling from cars to real estate to everything in between, you know, 11 best-selling books. You've been a selling machine. How did it feel to go in? without being able to use any of that and go back to kind of the basics of like, okay, I'm a brand new car salesman just trying to figure out how to do this thing. How did you have the confidence or the courage to go in blind and try to build these relationships?

Because I had the commitment. You know, I was committed to the outcome. I always say, man, commitment comes with time and money.

The thing that you do extremely well is you're a master enroller, Grant. And I believe that we're either enrolling people in our vision or we're unenrolling them in our vision every moment, every day, with our content, our posts, our interactions. And we could be unenrolling people in our brand from one conversation or one thing that we, we do to piss someone off. Where did you learn the skill of enrollment, of getting people to buy into you and your vision?

I think what I do is, and I talk about this in seller be sold. I've been a sales guy for a long time and I just learned early on and I was terrible at sales. 17 years old, 18, 19 part time part time sales guy. I was I was awful. When I finally realized that sales was the only job I could get at 25 years old, I'm just like, dude, I just got to tell people the truth because I can't do all these tricks. The NLP the and look, if it works for you, good, whatever. But the mirroring the matching, they ask a question, you ask a question, the hot potato. I've heard all these strategies and I'm like, dude, I just can't do it. I'm just gonna be me. Hey guys, I'm moving from LA, I'm out of work, I'm looking for opportunity, I'm trying to move my family here. My name's Louis Curtis. 2008 beat me up. I gotta get my family out of LA. Real estate's impossible, I can't buy it there, it's priced out of the market. and I'm here in Pueblo because I think there's opportunity here and that's all I'm looking for. No handouts, no help. I don't, I got an old truck with me, I got no money, I left my kids with, you gotta have your story. So people enroll but you also have to be talking to the right audience. I only spent time with people that were able, capable, qualified. I spent no time, I was in a meeting once in Pueblo I walked into the meeting, assessed the situation, and bounced. I said, Guys, I'm done. I'm out of here. Boom, and I walked out. And my partner at that time, you'll see it later in the later shows. He's like, what just happened? I'm like, There's nothing here, bro. There's no money here. There's no opportunity here. And I'm on a clock. I couldn't tell him I'm on a clock. I couldn't tell anybody. So I had these little secrets going on. So, you know, how do you enroll people? It's like, you, got to get enrolled. you know, my, my, my personal Integrity and ethics is why I can sell so hard. And because I believe in my product, I believe in my investment vehicle, I believe in my company. I don't trick people, screw people. Like, 35 years I've been in business. There's not one person in 35 years that says, I owe them money.

Many of the people that I know who have tremendous amounts of money have huge fears around being poor.

Mm-.

And so it's just an interesting thought. Like a lot of people who don't have money see people who have money as thinking differently and they might in that they are more uncomfortable being poor than you are. Mm-. Like it is more painful for them.

Than it is for you.

It might be. I'm just being really real. It might be why some of them are stingy too with their money.

Of course, 100%. I'm not gonna spend this $5. I'm gonna keep it. You know, they're very stingy with all of it.

Two nights ago, I was, we were out with, to dinner with a guy who just got valued at a billion.

Right?

And it's off cash flow. It's not one of these software things. Like it's off, like he's getting, yeah, like he's making real money, crazy money. And he's like, I'm not going to that gym. He's like, for equal, I said, I'm not paying $200 a month for a gym membership. It's a different perspective. Now, I'm not saying I'm that way. You know what I mean? Like, I'm okay spending on gym membership. Like, that's fine for me. But like, everyone has their own things and like, there are these behaviors. Like, he got the other guy who had the 250, he got to that point because he lived, he squeezed everything out of his business, which made the business so valuable and then he was able to sell it. But like the, the billion dollar guy was saying, he's like, you, know what they don't tell you about when you sell your business? Because he's sitting next to the guy with the 250, right? And he's like, the moment you sell your business, he's like, you have no cash flow. And so he felt that too. He's like, what are you going to do? He's like, you,'re going to take the money and then what are you going to do? You're going to try and buy more cash flow because you got to replace the cash flow you have with the business.

You got to get real estate assets.

You got to do something. He's like, why bother? He's like, I'll just keep it. And so he doesn't have any intentions of selling. And so it was an interesting lesson for me too, because like we obviously got rid of our cash flow asset when we sold all three.

Last year.

You got a lot more money, but you don't have the money cash coming in.

Right, because then it looks like this finite asset. The business goes on forever in your mind at least, right? And so it gives you this illusion of control, this illusion of security. And me personally, most people wouldn't believe this when I hear it, but like I'm very risk averse. And so I probably need, like what's the core changes that I need to have? I probably need to be a little bit more of a risk taker than I am. Like I tend to always take the lowest risk path when I can't even the idea of like when I quit entrepreneurship or sorry when I quit my job to start entrepreneurship, it was because I knew that the path that I was on was guaranteed not to get to me where I want. So I had a zero outcome. And that so this one, even though it was lower, like I had a low chance of success, the other one at 100% failure guarantee. And so that so it felt like the lower risk option for my long-term goals to quit my job and become an entrepreneur.

For that reason.

And so, you know, people are like, I'm really risk averse. I'm like, so am I. Like, I hoard money. Like, I do.

You must spend any of the money from the exits.

No, it's not sitting in the bank. Nothing. We started working the next day. We didn't even take it. We didn't take a day off.

Yeah, we literally sold wire hit, and we started working on acquisition.com the next day. Let's say you had to put your. Start putting that cash flow every month into other things, team, resources, whatever it and that wasn't coming in. And, you know, let's call it 100 Grand a month was coming in with cash flow. I don't know how much it is, but let's say that is going into hiring team and other things to support you getting to the billion in two and a half years. What would need to shift in inside of you after three months of feeling no cash flow come in to stack your bank account in order for you to be okay with it to get to that billion quicker?

I would just have to be more secure, just realistically.

Like I use, what does that mean? Is that an internal?

I use cash flow from businesses as evidence to the fact that I'm not a failure. And so I use, I've always, like it has been easier for me to change my conditions than to change who I am. And so I have used my material success and accolades to quiet the voices of not being good enough. And so for that, like me having that, if I had that little voice that peeps up, it's like, hey, look at that. I'm like, okay, no, no, I'm okay. I'm not that bad. This money just came in. Yeah, no, I'm not that bad. Right, and so I'd really have to re-engineer the conversation I have with myself around how I value myself. Because then people are like, well, if everything disappeared, how would you feel about yourself? I like to think that I would be uncomfortable and that I would change my views, but I haven't needed to do that yet, and so my effort goes elsewhere.

But that's what probably would have to happen in order for me to make that change. Is it a, what is the thing that is you're afraid of inside of yourself? Is it a self-worth thing? Is it a self-love thing? Is it a belief that you're not good enough?

Yeah, definitely be a good enough thing for sure. Yeah, it's just like maybe, maybe, maybe I'm, maybe I'm not as good as I think I am. Maybe everything that I've been putting on media, maybe my book, maybe all these things are actually not true and I don't know what I'm talking about, right? Because clearly I don't know what I'm talking about because I'm not making any money. Like, so these things have been, that's why acquisition.com is the other half, like the actual businesses of acquisition.com compared to the media of acquisition.com, it is the other half because it's the evidence of the fact that the things that I say are true.

Because those are getting results.

100%.

And they're growing.

Right.

And so that way I feel bulletproof when I make the content, when I make the book, when I write the stuff, like, you know, there's a zillion people who are like, you suck, none of this is true, whatever. And for me, it rolls off my back because I have evidence. I'm like, no, no, it is true. And here's how. But if I didn't have that, I.

Would probably have to...

It's because I don't know what the right call is there. Because if I didn't have the evidence, it would be hard for me to say you're wrong, because I don't have.

Any proof that they're wrong. But you have evidence now. Right, and so I have this evidence. So how do you change the belief.

Inside that you're good enough with the years of evidence now? the question is like, have I built a billion dollar thing yet? You know what I mean?

And so- that'll be 10 billion.

Yeah, of course. No, but like it's a fun convo and it's great because this was wonderful, Louis, because I get to see my own limiting beliefs. And just for everyone who's listening, like everyone deals with this, you know what I mean? Like at every level you're dealing with this, like feeling of inadequacy, feeling not good enough, feeling like you're not smart, feeling like you don't work hard, whatever it is. I have that stuff all the time because you think that the external circumstance is going to solve that. And I would say that it does to a degree. It becomes a crutch. But then you have this crutch and then you just tie yourself worth to the accolade of the thing rather than still yourself. And maybe I need to do more work on that, who knows.

If you could overcome one thing or eliminate one thing internally to become a better leader to yourself, to quiet the noise or help you take a risk in a different way. Not talking about lose all your money, but take the risk to help you accelerate this.

Yeah.

And you don't have to buy in a way, but I just believe that it's possible for you to do that. Yeah, I believe you can be a billionaire in two and a half years. I appreciate if you. That's the goal. If you shift whatever inside of you is holding you back to get to that space, what would be that one thing to eliminate or overcome internally to make it happen?

It's need for external validation.

100%.

The need for external validation.

Why do you need external validation?

Why do you need external validation?

I mean, I think part of it's so ingrained in us, if you think about us as kids, right? Like, how do you orient yourself in the world? You get reinforced or punished at all phases, directly, indirectly, but you get reinforced or punished and the things that you get reinforced, you do more of the things you get punished to do less of, right? Like, that's just how we learn behavior, how we learn to function in society, right? Touch that thing, ah, it hurts. It's we got punished. Okay, you know, your parent tells you to sit down and be quiet and eat and you learn to sit down and shut up and eat and then we wonder why adults don't move because we're told to sit when we're running around, right?

We learn- Or at school, sit down and be quiet.

100% and we wonder why we eat so much when the reward for everything we did when we were a kid was food, right? We wonder these things. So the reason external validation is so hard, at least for me, is because it's how I learned everything is because external validation gave me the directional guidance of what's good and what's not. And then as you get older, it's where am I going to get that validation from? And so I would say that my external validation is still 100% there. It just comes from different sources. So I'm more selective on whose validation I want.

So how much external validation do you need in order to overcome this belief to go all in and do it in half the time?

No, I think I just, I need to be able to validate myself. And that's fundamentally, I think EpicTita said this. He said, if you need someone else's, if you need, he has this quote, it's so good, but it's basically like you need to be able to give, you don't need to swear to somebody else. You should be able to swear to yourself and bear witness to yourself because your word should be good enough.

So you need to eliminate external validation from you feeling good enough. Probably, yeah.

It's probably that link. Obviously, it's good to have feedback in life, you know what I mean? So I think that's why it's also difficult for some in general because it's not eliminate or have more of, it's to what degree and from home and about what. And so then it gets a little bit more complex. But even using those different lenses, I think it's good to unpack it for anyone who's listening, which is like, okay, Layla said this, so this is not mine. But most times when we're afraid of something, it's not actually like this amorphous crowd that we're afraid of. It's like one or two people's opinion. That's what I think. Like it's your dad or it's your whatever it is, right? and you're worried about what they're gonna think. And they're not even thinking about you, but you think they're thinking about. They're thinking about their dad.

Whatever it is, right?

And so she restated this earlier on in Mike, like when we were together five years ago. She was like, are you. And she, like, made me name the person. It wasn't my dad. It was somebody else for this particular thing. She's like, are you gonna let this guy stop us from getting what we want?

Wow.

And it was like, when I saw it, it was, like, looking in front of me. I was like, She's like, what if this guy hates you and thinks you're terrible? Is that a worthy enough reason to still keep going? And I was like, yeah. She's like, Let's go.

You know what I mean?

And so she was very good with that. What do you need to say to yourself every day to believe you're good enough? If you could say one thing to you that no one else needed to hear, but you needed to hear it from you, what would that be?

I don't know if it would be a saying thing. I don't think it'd be like an affirmation.

I think it's just a belief.

You know what I mean? What would the belief be? Yeah, I mean fundamentally the belief would just have to shift that the doing this is enough validation for me.

Not the results.

Right, and that's, I mean fundamentally that's always the goal is that you can detach the doing this from the result. I think what I've been able to do has been to extend the time horizon between the doing this and the result but not necessarily fully eliminate it. I'm patient in that I can continue to do things for very long periods of time before seeing a payoff. But if I were able to truly eliminate it, I think that would be kind of like a next step. Then again, it's that borderline on insanity, because if you never get feedback on.

Sometimes you're like, maybe I should change direction. But you'll keep getting feedback though, because you're creating and taking action. You know, the more you do that, you'll have more businesses, you'll be acquiring, you'll be creating more content, and everything will be growing at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right?

100%. I love seeing you, you know, go.

Through this process internally, because I think--.

I'm open to it. I just want to win. you know what I mean? Like, I just want to be better.

What does winning look like?

It's achieving the potential. It's taking all this raw potential.

The.

The. The. The line in the Bible that always scared me the most was to who much is given, much is expected. And so for me, I always felt like I was given a lot. You know what I mean? Like, I. I was born in America right off the bat. I was born as a guy. I have insane genetics, like, from. From that perspective, I was six back when I was 15. I have a pretty high processing load. Like, I can usually, I do okay with complex problems. I was bilingual at basically at birth because parents talked to me in different language. So that gave me good language abilities. And so it's like these are all things that were given to me, right? And I was born into, like, from a money standpoint, a decently wealthy family, right? Not ultra-billion, but never worried about food or shelter or anything like that, right?

Right?

And so these are all the things that were given to me. And so to me, I'm like, man, much is expected, right? And not necessarily that that's, you know, God, whatever. Just I expect a lot of myself because I see so much potential and I want to train. Like, by the time I die, I would like to have nothing left in my potential tank. And it just all have been transformed into. Into my reality.

Yeah.

When somebody is poor, they're a consumer. All they do is they take the, you know, I always tell people, we're all Financial Traders. I mean, I'm not a financial trader. Yes, you are. You're trading time for money. That's the worst trade you can ever make in your life. Somebody who's wealthy has made money their slave. They're no longer the slave to money. And the way they do that is they figured out how to become an owner. And the way you do that in the most simplistic way, I even taught it in my first book, was you have to decide there's a percentage of money that you're going to keep forever. You're not going to give it to Kate Spade or Ferrari or anybody else you can do that to. but there's a percentage of that income that never will be touched, that you will grow and compound and will provide income for the rest of your life so you don't have to work. Now, when I was growing up, everybody's goal was get rich enough so you never have to work. Now, like all my friends are 15, 18, 19 years my senior, people like Steve Wynn and most of Las Vegas, he's like 74. Warren Buffett's 85. Peter Guber, one of my dearest friends, the world owns the Golden State Warriors, the LA Dodgers, we're partners in the LAFC football team in LA, brilliant guy, 74 years old, and they're all working harder now than they ever were, and they don't have to work. So the goal is make enough money so you don't have to work, and then you'll do what you love, and you'll pour your time and energy into it. But you have to make that decision. It's the first, most important decision is I'm going to become an owner of American business. You don't want to have an Apple phone and not own Apple. And you don't want to just own Apple, because any company can go up and down.

Right?

You want to own the index, you want to own, you know, a variety with enough diversification. But if you can just shift, and I've taught people who've told me they couldn't, they have no money, they can't save, it's really easy once you get momentum. There's a research project I did with a gentleman who was nominated for the Nobel Prize on behavioral finance. And what he did was he said, if you can even, you know, you need to save 15% ideally. But if you could even save 3%, because anybody can do that, they took a group of blue collar workers in the Midwest and said, We're going to force you to save 3%. I think it was 3.25 or 3.5. But then everybody can go on a diet tomorrow. Everybody can save money tomorrow, right? So his tool was, all right, you're not going to save today, you're going to save tomorrow. We'll do the 3.5%, but then you go to your employer and say, the next time I get a raise, the first 5% goes to my savings account, to my investing account. And then every time you get a raise to do that, well, in 14 years, the average person was saving 15% and the top 40% were saving 20. Let me explain what that means. You and I were together before, when I'm trying to explain compounding to people, everybody understands it intellectually. But when I ask some of the richest people in the world, what are most investors failing to do? And they all say they're not tapping the power of compounding. So if you're in a situation where, as an example, let's take you're, you've got $100,000 that you've saved, you're 35 years old, and you put it in the market and just leave it there and never add anything to it. If you leave in the market and you're only being charged 1% in fees at retirement 35 years later, you got 762,000 from that 100. Never added a dime. It grew that much. But if you pay 3% in fees, which is the average most people are paying, when you ask people what they're paying, they don't know or they say 1%. Because when you hear about fees, let's say a mutual fund fee, you'll always hear 1%. That's the expense ratio. there are 17 other fees. So every 1% you overpay, you know, 1% is the average. But if you pay two or three and the average mutual fund is 3.12, it sounds like nothing, 1% or 2%. But every 1% you overpay because of compounding means you lose a decade of income. So the person who paid 1% has 762,000. The person who paid 3% has $452,000 and they own the same stocks. It's just fees. So while we compound our interest, we also compound fees. So if you could save 3% and build it to 5, 10, 15, or you start with 10 or 15 and eventually get to 20, the best example I can give your viewers is that there's a gentleman who worked for UPS who literally never made more than $14,000 a year. You heard about him in the book. And when he retired, he had $70 million. And he gave away $35 million while he was alive. And the reason was A friend of his set him aside and said, Look, I'm going to make you rich. He goes, I'm never going to be rich. I make $14,000 a year. He goes, I'm going to make you rich. I'm going to make you rich later in life, and I'm going to do it by a 20% tax to your business. And he goes, I make $14,000 a year. I can't live on 20% less. And his friend said to him, if the IRS came and said a 20% more tax, you'd scream, you'd yell, and you'd pay it. And he said, We're going to pay it for you. And that 20% compounded that generated $70 million. So for the people that are at home, the sooner you start, the better off you are because compounding does it. I've got an example in the book of a guy that starts at 19. He puts aside $300 a month. He stops at 27. So he does it for eight years. He only puts in, I think it was $35,000. But it's a million dollars by leaving in the market when he turned 65 and he stopped at 28. He has a best friend starts at 28, invests his entire life, puts in $180,000 and he has less money at the end. The sooner you start, the better you are.

Yeah.

So many questions I want to ask.

I don't know how many I want to ask.

So, is there a way to be financially free just by saying I'm going to earn more every year as opposed to investing every year? Can you do without investing at all or do you have to invest? And when you say put it in the market, you mean put it in index funds?

Well, in the book I explain you've got to have diversification.

Don't just throw it in a stock.

And just- no, and what most people do is they go to a mutual fund and they think it sounds logical. I'm no good at this. This is not my skill a person says. You go to a professional who runs a mutual fund. What do they do? They figure out a series of investments to make. They put it in the fund and they do it for you. And you think, well, gosh, you know, they're smarter than I am. They'll do well. You assume that, but the truth is they charge so much. Even if they did have an advantage, they lose it. I interviewed David Swensen, who's the head of chief investment officer at Yale. It took Yale 200 years to get a billion dollars that they saved. He turned it into 25 billion in two decades. It's unheard of. He's the greatest institutional investor of all time. And one of the things that he told me, he said, Tony, you just got to understand something. He said, you,'re never going to earn your way to wealth. He said, how many people have you seen, movie stars, actors, athletes, Weight. You know, the other day, 50 Cent just went broke, right? He made $100 million on vitamin water alone. Somebody gave him a tip, and he's, he would have had a half a billion dollars, and he's broke. Completely broke. Mike Tyson made a half a billion.

Dollars and went broke. You can understand that a little bit.

Yeah. I think it's 78 of NFL players go bankrupt two years after that's prior. And the average lifespan of an NFL player is three and a half years. So these guys work their whole life. They go through these rough injuries. and they do not invest. So, the answer is you can make a fortune. Elton John didn't go bankrupt because it's different rules in England, but he got in trouble. Who I just saw the other day is, what's his name? The Pirates of the Caribbean.

What's his name?

Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp.

Johnny Depp's going bankrupt right now.

Johnny Depp. He's making like 20-30 million a year. Johnny Depp was worth $700 million, three-quarters of a billion. He's on the verge of bankruptcy right now. Can't pay his bills. he was paying $30,000 a month on wine alone. Oh my gosh. He spent $3 million to take Hunter Thompson's body, burn it, put the dust into this giant cannon and shoot his dust into space. Three million bucks. It doesn't matter how much money you earn, you can always get rid of.

It and lose it.

Buy an island and watch how quickly it disappears. So what I show people is, what you really want to do is create an income for life. without working. The goal, if you own a business, and I would assume a lot of your viewers are business owners or getting started in business, no matter how good you are in business, think about this. The one universal rule that idiots in finance know is diversification. It's the only free lunch. You've got to diversify. Because if you put all your eggs in one basket, no matter how good the basket is, one day that real estate market, that stock market, that bond market, that collectibles market, whatever you invest in, Ray Dalio showed me statistically, it'll drop 50 to 70% on a day. Now, if you're later in life when that happens, it's over for you. So you have to diversify, and yet most people, they know real estate so they do it, or they know stocks so they do it, or they grew up with their parents flipping things, and it's the wrong thing to do. So you've got to diversify in order for you to be able to truly succeed, and that's why when you own a business, if you put all your money in your business, which is what most of us do naturally, you're taking.

A lot of risk.

You put all your eggs in one basket and there's things that can happen. I mean, you know, you're, let's say you spent 20 years and you figured out how to put together the ultimate map, you know, and you remember Garmin came out with this thing called the TomTom. I don't know if you remember, used to put on your, are you old enough to remember that? Used to put on your phone?

Yeah.

Or you put on your dash?

Cost 100 bucks. It was a breakthrough.

They were making like 100 million or something or yeah.

They were.

Yeah, yeah. Six months later, what happened? The iPhone came out with Google Maps. These little bastards, excuse my French, came out with it, put Google Maps, put their own map on here, and cost how much? Zero. What are they gonna do to your business when someone takes your product or service and gives it away for free? So I always tell people, competition happens, technology happens, what you must do is have a second business with no moving parts, no people, no time. Maybe it takes you two, three days a year for two or three hours after you've read the book, you put it in place and you measure it two or three times a year. That's it. Go on with your life. Now if there's a trouble in your business, you're financially set. I, in my life, have 31 companies now. We have, you know, what do we have? 1,200 employees, seven different industries. We do $5 billion in sales. I mean, that used to be, you know, me and my seminar business. It's grown geometrically. But with all those moving parts, the only way I've been able to succeed is because I've taken every one of those businesses and I've diversified my assets so that when things were in trouble, trouble, I still have enough economics to take care of myself and keep the business going. So everybody needs to create a money machine that works while you sleep that doesn't have moving parts and that's what this is really about.

You have a great cartoon in the book where there's a kid asking his father something about how do you invest your money or how does the stock market work? And he says, you put your money in at the peak, it starts to go down and lose money and so you get scared and you take it out and then someone smarter than you makes all the money, something like that. So how do we, and I've done that in the past where I put my money in somewhere, hi, it went down and I was like, oh, I just lost a bunch of money. Let me take it out. And then I put it back in another time and I'm like, what am I doing? So how do we invest without fear of, oh, it's going down, I need to take it out or like trying to time it. How do we do that?

Great question. It's one of the main reasons I wrote the book. I always tell people, if you just read the second chapter of the book, nothing else, it'll change your life. You can do that with multiple chapters, but that chapter is really about teaching people that winter is coming. We all know winter's coming, right? To coin a phrase. But that winter is the best time on earth. And I know that's counterintuitive. I don't mean like being a positive thinker. I mean pure facts. So in the book, I take you through 10 facts. I'll give you a couple of them right now. The first fact I give people is why do people not invest? They're afraid of failing. They, you're a millennial, right? So you grew up witnessing 2008 when you're still relatively young. How old are you now?

33.

Okay, so you were, what, 27?

2008? Yeah, 27, I guess.

27, 28 years old. So you're a young man and you're watching the world melting down in front of you. For most millennials, they are the first generation since the generation that went through the depression that is not investing at the ratio they need to even close They have more debt than everyone probably, right? With all the-- They have more college debt than everyone.

Absolutely true. I have a friend that has $400,000 of debt.

Dental school. President Obama just paid off his debt five years ago while he was still president. What?

No.

I swear to God. Oh my gosh. It's mind-boggling. And he had a bunch of scholarships, but the last bit it took him that long. So what I tell them is listen, paying off your debt's not enough. You've got to become an owner or you're always gonna be in that place. So yes, pay off your debt, but here's what you need to know.

You got to become an owner.

You got to get in the game, but you got to understand the rules of the game. You don't know the rules of the game, the old phrase is, when a person with experience meets a person with money, we know the phrase. The person with money ends up with the experience. The person with experience ends up with your money, right? So I teach people the rules of the game so they don't get screwed. But the most important thing is this. Winter's coming, but people react. So let's take last year, last January 2016. We had the worst stock market opening in the history of the stock market. Worst first, I think it was 10 days. There was a drop of $2.3 trillion with a T. Crazy. Everybody's freaking thinking the bear market's here, the market's over, the crash is here. I think the market dropped 800 points one day. And on that day, all the richest people in the world were in Davos, Switzerland, you know, for the big conference that they do every year. And they went there, MSNBC went there, and everybody's freaking, what are we going to do? And they said, let's go ask Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio. Now, your listeners may or may not know Ray Dalio as if you're not in the financial business, probably never heard of him. You probably heard of Warren Buffett, but Ray Dalio has been more. You have to have a $5 billion net worth and $100 million to give him or he wouldn't talk to you 10 years ago. Now he doesn't care how much money you have, he won't talk to you because he's got a closed fund. But they go and they put Dalio on television, CNBC, he's the king. What do we do? And he says, well, you don't need to panic. Corrections happen all the time, but you need a strategy that when markets go up and down, you don't go up and down. And he said, I spent 15 years of my life to perfect such a strategy. All of my money's in that plan. And he said, it's called All Seasons, and I've never revealed it before, but I gave it to Tony Robbins. He extracted it from me, and it's his book. So you gotta go read his book. This is what he says on national television, the data markets are crashing. And that day to give you an idea, which is the beginning of February, I think it was nine days into February, the market was down 9% in the first five weeks of the year. His strategy, which he gave me, which has made money 85% of the time for the last 75 years. It's averaged a 10% return just under, and the average loss when it 15% loss is 1.6. So if you go to Vegas and you could spend 85% of time make money, and when you made money was 10%, you lost is 1.6, you go forever. his plan made 2% while the market was down 9. So it was up 11% difference. Now, I'm not suggesting that's the only strategy to do. There's many. His is the smoothest ride with the least risk. But what it did was combination of that. And then right after that, I interviewed Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. He was the head of our economy, the most powerful man in finance for 19 years. Four presidents, he was there running. I was just with President Clinton this last week. He was the Fed Chair for him. and I interviewed him for like two hours, you know, or three hours off stage, two hours in front. And I asked him, in the very beginning of this thing, I said to him, I said, look, if you could put the Fed today, what would you do? And he looks at me and as I said, he leans forward and he says, resign. So I look at that and go, oh my God, I need to write.

A book that'll free people.

So here's what will free you. Everyone's afraid of the crash. So here's what you need to know. Two terms you should understand, correction versus crash. Anytime the market drops from its high by 10% or more up to 20, it's called a correction. If it drops 20% or more up to 80%, like in the Great Depression, then it's called a crash or called a bear market. So how often does a correction happen? How often do we have to be prepared for it? Since 1900, we've had a correction on average every year for 116 years. so when is winter coming? This year on average. It's like how often does winter come? You wouldn't be surprised if it stormed and rained. Now some winters are long, some are short, some are harsh, some are light, but winter always comes. So I wasn't panicked when this happened last year. I'm not panicked whenever it happens because I know it's supposed to be. How long does it last? Average 56 days. Okay, so just under two months. What's the average drop during that time? 14% over the last 30 years, 13.5 of the last 100 years. So I use the more recent one. 14% gets your attention, right? 14% you get a little gut check. But here's what you need to know. 80% of all corrections never become a bear market. 80%. So all this fear and what people do is what you said you did is they see it, it's freaking out, I'm losing money, I'm the hell out of here and they get out. The stock market never took a dime from anybody, only you can take it from you sold, that's why you lost. So if you look back and say, what was it like in 2008? I can remember vividly being with my platinum partners and saying, you see these $80 stocks? This is six months before the crash. I told them in April, I brought them to Dubai and I said, these stocks are going to go to eight and some are going to go to a buck. And by October, and I told them what to do, so they were able to get out. October, I go on the Today Show in October of 2008 and they go, Tony, there's been $3 trillion meltdown. Pump the country up. You got four minutes. Ready, go. That's not what I do, first of all. And I said, that'd be a lie. I'm not gonna blow it. At that point, the $80 stocks were eight. I said, some of those, I said, I'm not a market forecaster, but I worked with Paul Tudor Jones, one of the greatest investors in the history of the world. In the biggest market crash in history, you know, 1987, he made 200% when everybody else was losing their entire life. I've been coaching him continuously now for 24 years, every single day. So I said, I work with the best in the world, and they're telling me based on history in the 30s and history in the 70s, those $8 stocks, some are gonna be a buck. And I remember the day in March of 2009, Citibank, which had been, I think, $70, sold for 97 cents. You could go and take your money out of the ATM. It cost you more to take your money out than to own the bank, right? and then I told people it'll jump from 99 cents to 6, 10, 12 dollars in a month or two and it's exactly what it did, right? So what you got to know is corrections happen every year. You got another couple months, you got to know it's 14% and you won't lose because 80% of the time it doesn't go to a bear. Now, what about the bear? The bear market, it happens to give you an idea in the last 100 years, every three to five years, you've gone eight without one. were way overdue. In modern years, last 30 years is about every five years. The average length of a bear is one year. The average drop is 33%. A third of those drops go 40% or above. That, I don't care how well prepared you are, that's a scary thing. But it is the greatest opportunity in your lifetime to go from wherever you are financially to where you want to be. I hope your audience is listening right now. Hear me. If you want a leapfrog and you're a millennial and you think there's no future or you're, you know, a baby boomer and you think you're too old and it's too late, the greatest gift you have is coming. I know it doesn't sound like it. This is not positive thinking. This is the truth. Wall Street, the stock market is the only place that when things go on sale, people freak out. If I said, you like Ferraris?

Sure.

If I said to you, Ferraris go on sale for 50% off. Awesome. But when I tell you Apple's on sale for 50% off, you go, oh, what am I gonna do here? What's wrong? The whole world's coming to an end. If you think about it, how old are you?

33.

33. So let's assume if you were 35 and you lived to 85, you got 50-52 years ahead of you. That means you have 52 more corrections to live through. That means you're probably in those 50 years gonna have 10 more bear markets to live through. If you're gonna have a gut checks every time or you're gonna leave out of it, If you didn't participate because you thought, oh, the market's too volatile, I can't trust it, all that stuff, you missed 250% return in the last eight years. I mean, you missed out on everything while you're waiting for things to be better. And if you won't do it when it's like this, when it crashes, you're not going to get in. So here's the good news about the bear. Good news about the bear, average ones a year. It could be longer, but that's the average. It could be shorter. But here's what's cool. Every single bear market in the history of the United States has led to a bull market. meaning right afterwards. So 2008, this plummeting, what happened in 2009? Up 67% in a year. I can show you every single bear market and the next year when it comes out, it's this explosion. Now, that's not true in every market in the world. It's true for two centuries in the United States. So that's why Warren Buffett says, I want to be greedy when people are afraid. And I want to be afraid when people are greedy. If you remember 2008, he was telling everybody, Buy. He was having the time of his life. Buy, buy, buy, everything's on sale. So, what you have to do to become unshakable is turn, the metaphor I use is turn the snake into the rope. Meaning, we all know the story, it's the middle of the night, you're walking through the yard or someplace and you see a snake and you freak out, you pull back, you come in the morning and it's a rope.

Once you know it's a rope, you're never afraid again. What would you say is the difference between a wealthy or rich mindset versus a poor mindset? Is it a way of thinking? Is it a way of acting and being and doing? What's the difference between rich mindset and poor mindset?

I mean, in an ideal world, it would be those that are wealthy got wealthy because they did a tremendous job of helping others. You invented a cure for cancer. I mean, you say, well, we don't want anybody to be wealthy. Well, don't you want people to invent things and come up with ideas? Don't you want Thomas Edison to be successful who invented all these things that make our lives lives better. What we don't want is people to get wealthy by rigging the system, by trying to limit innovation, limit competition, all those things that we see going on in our system, which is what we call cronyism and protectionism. That's what we're against all of it, even if it makes us money. We want a system, as I said, a system of equal rights and mutual benefit where people succeed by assisting each other.

Yeah.

And.

And so ideally, that's the difference. But that potential is in everybody. So for many people today, it's because they were throwaway people. No one believed in them with this top down. Okay, we're going to tell you, we're going to come in and tell you how to live your life, and we'll give you money, and you'll be all right. So your poverty will be less painful. where it's our job. If you empower people, everybody can get out of poverty because everybody can contribute. So how do we find a way to help people contribute? And we've done this. My wife and I started an organization here in Wichita called youth entrepreneurs 30 years ago. It was in one, one school here in Wichita that was in a poor area. I mean, and these kids, well, I'll tell you a story of one named April. This was after we'd been doing it just a few years. And well, let me tell you this, the program here is what we call three-dimensional education. That is, it's hands-on, it isn't just classroom, it's doing, and it starts with helping them find their gift, turning it into value skills, and then use it to succeed by contributing. And, and they, and they started, we help them start their own small business. And then the ones that have the best business plan, then we give them some seed Capital. Not a lot, maybe a thousand dollars or even a few hundred. So they can start and they start doing it. And, and so the, then the top performers speak at graduation and this, this girl April, I'll never forget her talk. She said, I grew up in a terrible area. My mother was an addict. My brother had been shot. My sister was in prison. And I thought it was hopeless. So I was failing everything in high school. And she said, and then I heard about this class where I could get some money. She said, well, I'd like to get some money. and she said, I got in there and I found, wow, I've got to have a winning business plan and a successful business. Wow. So I've got to. To learn to read and write and present. So I better start doing that. And then if I have a business, I got to do math to know what's working and what's not. And then if I got if I want customers and employees, I've got to learn to treat them with respect. So she said it changed my whole life. And I went from failing everything to getting straight A's. And then she got a scholarship to college and, and I've kind of lost track of her, but she had a successful business of her own. So that's we, that we see that story. I can tell you dozens of stories like that. So that's The difference, these people who grow up in these areas where they have bad educational system, a bad criminal justice system, all other problems, people in the community hurting each other, drive by shootings and stuff, so everybody's scared, so they could join gangs out of self-defense. I mean, we've got to help them. We have to have, and we do, we have social entrepreneurs working this that are transforming lives.

As a former athlete, I'm a big fan of visualization, of seeing the results I want to create on the football field, the basketball court in the future. But I've always been a big fan of visualization every morning thinking about what, what do I want to create for the day? How do I want to show up when something happens? How do I want to respond and react? And for me, I find that visualization has been really powerful for my life. Is this something that you do in business, relationship or deal making when you're about to negotiate a deal, do you visualize the outcome? How is that in your life?

If it's- yeah, but I don't, not with, not, I mean, in football, it'd be the image or like a chess player, visualize, okay, the moves 10 down, what if it does, yeah, my opponent does this. So that's a different, I don't have that, but I have one, for, okay, what are the principles involved here? What are the concepts? And okay, what do we need to do to apply those concepts, apply these principles? And we, because we find when we violate these basic principles of human progress, we fail. We don't think we're doing it because we're going through the motions and we're using the right words and all stuff, but we're not really doing it. and so that's we need constantly have these checks and why we need this challenge, continued challenge culture from everybody. And so like if you're a supervisor here and your people aren't challenging you, we'll go help you. Now you're not getting their knowledge. So you cannot succeed if you're only using your knowledge. Those people out there doing the work see waste and see better ways that that I will never see. And even you as their immediate supervisor won't see. I mean, the thing to visualize is how do we better empower our people? So they come up with answers rather than me. And so those are the things I think about.

When you are in your, you know, late 20s and 30s, did you ever dream or imagine that this is where your life would be now? And this is where your business and and visions and non-profits would be at? Was that ever a dream or were you just like, I hope to make some money and have a good family?

That's why I say this philosophy, these concepts have enabled me to achieve more than I ever dreamed and totally transformed my life. And we raised our children with this philosophy, which I talk about in the book. I mean, this is so powerful. And then to have the luxury of seeing what it's done for so many other people's lives is just, I mean, as you can tell, I'm pumped up about it.

Yeah.

How do you, you talked about your kids. I know you have a great relationship with them. How do you not, for all the parents listening and watching who have generated some success or some financial abundance in their life, How do you not screw up your kids when you have wealth? How do you keep them humble and grounded and hardworking and committed to growth and self-actualization when they essentially have everything at their fingertips if they wanted it?

Well, I mean, I learned that lesson from my father. He exemplified integrity, humility, treating others with respect, hard work, lifelong learner. He would say things like, son, learn everything you can. You never know when it'll come in handy. And on every one of these issues, he would talk about and he would do it. I mean, he worked all the time just like I do. And he, boy, when we didn't treat somebody with respect or like we were waiting in line for a movie together and we'd say, okay, it's kind of crooked here. Maybe we can move up. well, he would come and grab us. You go back to the end of the line.

Wow.

I mean, he was a bear. And you, if you bragged about anything, boy, you would get smacked down. And if you talk bad about any person. Oh, man, I got the belt a few times.

So he was pretty disciplined.

No.

So we, I mean, we weren't, we weren't as tough on our kids, but we talked about this. Every day, for example, the school had the kind of the five values, love, courage, faith, honor, and loyalty. So every night at dinner, I would have each one, you could pick any one of these five, and then you would, you need to tell me how you exemplified that with a specific example. And at first they would cry, this was starting in the first grade. And so that was a little intimidating, but after they got into it, it's just like with our employees, okay, you go help others succeed, you go create value for others. And obviously our best customers are those who reciprocate and who reward us for it. So that changed them. And then every Sunday evening, I would take them in my library and play a tape for like 10 minutes, whether it's Maslow, Aristotle, Iac, all across all these disciplines that I had learned. I had tapes on them and played for about 10 minutes. And I knew that was their attention span max. And so then we'd just have a discussion. And my daughter picked up on it. I mean, she was eager. She was doing, my son was, he was more like me.

He was, let me go play, dad.

Yeah, yeah, I got important things to do. but then he's gotten it and he, and now because of this and this business of finding your gift and then developing it and using it to help a boy, they are both doing that. Like my son has started a business here called Koch Disruptive Technologies and he's now has investments in 10 companies and we do that through the philosophy of mutual benefit because there's all this money rushing in for hot technologies, but we're preferred partner, because we say we have all these businesses and some of them, it would be a good pilot area where you can apply it. And then our people will work with you to show you how to make it work better because they'll be the ones applying it. And that's what we call Coke Labs. So all our businesses, we look at laboratories, Coke Labs, and then in Stand Together, he's he's built these relationships with all these technology entrepreneurs. And so now they're working with us on stand together because they've made money and they want to have meaning in their lives so we can help them find what they're passionate about and where they can make the biggest contribution. So he's done that way beyond what I could at his age. And then our daughter well, she was frustrated for a long time like I was, couldn't find her way. Now she started an organization called Unlikely Collaborators. And they get together and she finds people who are frustrated about something, have a hang up, maybe they're bitter. So they go through these sessions. Well, she starts it with telling about all her problems and her failures. and of course then that opens them up and they talk about it and she's totally dedicated to helping people and she's working with us. She's helping show us how what she's learned on helping people in ways that we haven't used.

I'm curious about your non-negotiables on a daily basis. Do you have a list or things that are non-negotiable that you do? Maybe it's you get up at a certain time or you always take a walk or you eat a certain way? Is there anything like that you do? You always give your wife a hug and a kiss. Is there something you always do? Non-negotiable yeah.

I work my mind and body every day. Every day I'm going to learn something that I will help me contribute. I'm going to find a way to contribute and I'm going to work out because I've got to stay in shape to do all the things I'm doing.

Yeah.

So those are my primaries and that's what keeps me alive.

What do you feel is missing in your life?

The ability to move our society better in a direction of equal rights and mutual benefit where people assist each other because it's gotten so divided and these ad hominem attacks and and no one talking about, as we said, about, okay, let's find ways to work together to empower people, help people rise, particularly those who are starting to nothing rather than like an occupational licensure. Okay, well, all the business people in the community get together. We're going to make these rules so tough that these people starting out can't compete with us. I mean, that's monstrous.

Yeah.

So that's one of our key issues. We've got to get rid of these regulations like that. that these protectionist, cronyist regulations that keep people back and slow down innovation, undermine competition, undermine opportunity.

Yeah, it's hard to overcome all that and hard to make it all happen in a powerful way.

Yeah, so that's my biggest frustration. I'd like to wave a wand and bring it on.

I'll figure that out.

I'm not a utopian. I mean, we'll never be perfect. move 10% in that direction. Like reading history, this would make a massive change. Just 10% improvement in those principles of human progress.

And I'm curious, what do you think is the biggest fear you've had to overcome in the last 40 years? And what is the greatest fear you still face today?

Well, my fear is always that Tomorrow I won't be able to contribute. I lose my, which I mean as you get older, you lose some of your capacities and then I'll lose it and I won't be able to contribute because then I might as well, you might as well just throw me in the ditch and cover me up.

How do you manage that fear?

Well, the way I manage it is everyday contribute.

You.

And if I contribute and I can still offer something to help and I'm still making a difference, then okay, I'm good to go. Now I gotta work on how I do that tomorrow and maybe next year. God willing.

In the previous interview we had, we.

Talked about mindset versus toolset where most of the times we assume that the.

Reason why we can't become successful is.

Because we lack the tool set, when.

In reality, for 90% of people, it's.

Lacking the right mindset.