Your Mind Is Programmed To Stay Poor (Here’s How To Rewire It) | Chris Koerner

People are masters at playing business and not doing business. They go get an LLC, they make a business plan, a logo, they start talking to their friends about, I'm making moves. You don't do any of that. Go find a customer. I don't care if it's your mom, your best friend, I don't care. You gotta start somewhere. I don't care if it's an unpaying customer and you do it for free just to get a 5-star review. Go find a customer and then figure everything else out after that. Sell it before you have it.

He is a serial entrepreneur who has launched 75 businesses with multiple of them becoming 7 and 8-figure brands, and he's here to teach you the fastest way to add $10,000+ a month to your life. You have the inspiring Chris Kerner in the house.

It's the fear of the perception of failure from others. That's the only thing we're afraid of. It's not one of the things, it's not the fear of failure. It's what will people think about me if I fail? The thing is, if you do fail, they're probably not going to think anything about you.

How does someone develop a more resilient mindset when they launch something, they get laughed at, and they lose money and they fail? How do they not let that insecurity or that self-doubt stop them from trying again?

It's overly simplistic answer, but we—

I've always heard people say that it takes money to make money. Is that something you believe?

Maybe 30 years ago that was true, but that's no longer true.

Why is that?

We have more resources, tools, everything at our disposal today that we've never had before. We could use an AI tool on a free trial to launch a service business and sell something to a business owner that pays us $2,500 a month, right? Um, you don't need money to start a business, period.

What do you need?

You need to shed your ego. You need to stop thinking that people care about what you're doing or saying on the internet. You need to just let go. Like, as cliché as that is, you need to just do your own thing and stop worrying about other people.

But what if someone spends a lot of time, energy, and money launching something and they get zero results and they lose their money?

Well, how much money did they spend and why did they spend it? Right? What business did they pick is what I would ask them. I can think of very few exceptions where you need over $100 or $1,000 to start a business. Even if I were to start a restaurant that costs half a million dollars to open, I could still largely de-risk that idea by going to farmers markets and having people taste my recipe or a pop-up or, you know, renting a food truck for a weekend just to see if people come or people come back or if they care. There's, 1,000 creative ways to launch a business without money.

And testing it first to make sure the model works, then scaling it, then getting the half a million dollar investment in a storefront or whatever it might be. Once you know you have customers, once you know that there's product market fit or whatever it might be, right?

Correct.

And you told me beforehand that you can't be prideful and broke at the same time. Why is that?

Because we are most likely to get our first customers from our friends and family. Or from social media, from our Facebook page that has 300 followers or Instagram page that has 262 followers. The people that trust us, like us, know us, know our background, they are most likely to want to support us. Right. But so many of us are too concerned about what that guy from high school 20 years ago will think about me if I post a selfie video talking about my new service business. He doesn't care. He doesn't know. And if he cares, he's not a person that you should care about. So we just, we just have to let go and realize that people have more distractions than they've ever had. We're swiping so many things. They're not thinking about you. They don't care about you. Just do your own thing. Let go of the ego and you will win.

Were you always good with money?

I grew up poor, so I've had to be good with money. I, I've, I've had to have a kind of a scarcity mindset around money because I grew up poor.

Do you still have a scarcity mindset around money?

Sometimes. Yeah. Depends on the thing. Not around food. I'm a foodie, so you'll spend it all. That's where I ball out.

Yeah, yeah.

Around a lot of other things I do because those habits are hard to break.

Yeah. So you don't want to go back to being poor, right? So would you say you have a scarcity mindset or a frugal mindset or a live beneath your means mindset?

I think I'm a walking contradiction.

Yeah. Yeah.

I could point to like I built a house more expensive than what I could afford in my 20s. But at the same time, there are other decisions I make that show my frugality mindset.

Yeah, it just—

I'm just— I don't know, I guess I'm a hypocrite. I'm inconsistent when it comes to money. It just depends. But I will say this, I like to say constraints equal creativity, and building a house more expensive than I could afford in my 20s was one of the best things I could have done because it was a motivating factor to just to work harder. And I don't want people to misinterpret that, misunderstand and say, well, I can go buy that $13 avocado toast because it'll just motivate me to grind more. Like, I think that's kind of a weird quirk of mine, but for me it worked. Like, I, I also had my first kid when I was 23. Wow. And my fourth when I was 29. Right. And so that's always been the forefront of my mind is providing for my family. And so if I did make a poor money decision, I always knew that, A, I could think of a creative way to start a business and make it back. Or B, I would just have to work harder to be able to afford my lifestyle.

So interesting because in my 20s, my first apartment was $250 a month and I thought it was a lot of money. Then it was $450 a month. That was a stretch. Then I went from that to, in Ohio, to New York City and it was $2,600 a month for a rental for one month. And I go, this is like 6 months of rent in Ohio. And I was like, this is insanity that I'm spending this. To sleep. And then the next month after that, I went to $3,600 a month. And I go, this is too— this is way too much. And it was like $6,000 a few years later. And I was just like, are you kidding me? My younger self would be saying that you're just wasting your money. But for whatever reason, every time I stepped into a new environment in my living space that cost more, it's like I unlocked financial abundance. Like, it's like I got creative. Yes, maybe it was a certain level of constraints by that framing where it made me think in a different way. I was like, I need to go earn way more to be able to pay for this so that my bank account doesn't go down.

Yeah.

And again, like you, it doesn't mean go spend as much money as you can next month's rent. But that pressure caused me to figure out how to provide at a different level of thinking than the lower level of financial pressure.

Yeah.

And maybe not Maybe there's limits to how much pressure I can handle before it's like, "Oh, I actually break down." But incrementally going into that new level supported me in being creative financially and taking risks and not worrying about looking silly and just being risking like failure. Because I was like, "I need a yes. I need people to consume or buy or whatever it might be." And is that something that you've experienced as well?

I think we don't put enough pressure on ourselves. We need, like, we hear a lot of people like, just let, you know, just don't be so hard on yourself. I think we need to be a little harder on ourselves. We need to put a little pressure on ourselves. Uh, you're familiar with Parkinson's Law?

Uh-huh.

So for those watching, Parkinson's Law is the, is the theory that time and/or resources expand or contract to fit the space allotted to it. Right? So in high school, if my chemistry teacher said, we've got this project due in 2 months, it's a third of your grade, we were going to take 2 months to do it. What I normally did— I have ADHD— is I would completely forget about it till last night, till the last night. And he would tell us, this isn't the type of thing that you can procrastinate. I'm telling you, I'm like, okay, we'll see. And last night I would forget. I'm like, oh crap, I have that project. I would stay up all night and I would submit something amazing. Like objectively, he wouldn't have never known. And that's Parkinson's Law and that's pressure, whether artificial or natural, that is pressure. And what you're describing is the same thing. It's just not in a time format. It's in a monetary format.

Yes.

So there, there are pressures that are outside of our control. Like if I took out an SBA loan to buy a business and then it turns out like the business was all a sham or fraud and I could declare bankruptcy, like that might be way too much pressure for me. But for what you're describing, it would motivate you to go do a little more, try a little harder, do this, you know, stay clocked in a few more hours. And when that pressure is applied is when you unlock these amazing things. And a lot of pressure over a long period of time compounds to an insane amount to where at the end of 10, 20 years of doing that, you're like, you're insanely productive and efficient and you have all these revenue streams and these beautiful things have happened because you've, you've allowed that pressure to affect your life.

Yeah, they say if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person.

That's Parkinson's Law.

That's Parkinson's Law. It's like, it's so funny because I've had the, you know, the honor of interviewing a lot of people on this show and, you know, stay in touch and stay friends with a lot of them over time. And it's the people that you wouldn't expect to get back to you the fastest, the people that are the most successful, the busiest, that have the most on their plate. I text them, I call them, they text back within minutes.

Yeah.

So people that are not doing as much that take days.

Yeah.

And I'm like, really? It makes no sense to me. Yep. I'm like, you can't reply within a day, or at least just a thumbs up, an acknowledgment, you know? So it's so funny that the most successful people usually are the fastest to reply, or if they see it, they're going to give you some acknowledgment or say, I'll get back to you tomorrow. They give you something where they're saying, I want to take action now.

Yeah.

And that action snowballs into more results. Yeah, typically you are a master at showing the world the easiest ways to launch a business and make $5,000 to $10,000 a month pretty quickly with a little amount or no money at all. Which types of businesses are the easiest to scale to $10,000 a month right now?

I like to think of it like a barbell when it comes to businesses. Very— on one side of the barbell you have No AI, no tech, no internet, sweaty, hands-on, difficult. I love those businesses 'cause people don't want to play there.

Manual labor.

Yes.

Plumbing, the lawn mowing, the freaking tree removal, the dirty work, right?

Yes.

Which you can charge a premium for, I feel like right now.

Oh yeah. Yeah. AI isn't about to disrupt that.

No.

On the other end of that barbell, you have AI heavy, right? All online content, AI heavy. That's where I like to be. I don't want to be in the messy middle where either side of that can be disrupted by the other side. So I really like reselling right now, reselling anything. I don't know when that's going to go out of business. I talked to guys just yesterday that are reselling VCRs. They're paying $5 to $10 for VCRs and selling for $100 to $150.

They might be getting for free some of these, probably, right? It's like some of these things you just like find donations.

Yeah.

And then fix it up, right?

These guys are in like the middle of nowhere Virginia. And so when we were talking, I pulled up Facebook Marketplace, and I live in Dallas-Fort Worth, there's 9 million people, and I typed in VCR, and I just watched their eyes lit up because there were hundreds of VCRs for $5 to $10, and they were like, that one's worth $200, that one's worth $75, that one's worth $150. And I crunched the numbers and I'm like, you can make six figures a year if you lived in Dallas-Fort Worth buying VCRs on Facebook Marketplace where people don't know the value and selling them on eBay where there's a fair price, a fair market value for it.

Wow.

VCRs, right? Yeah. And you could, you could rinse and repeat that category with hundreds of others. These guys were selling camcorders, all types of stuff. So that is a business where if you're reselling, reselling anything, it could be clothes, it could be games, it could be toys, it could be whatever. I know a guy that makes 6 figures picking up free or close to free couches on Facebook Marketplace and selling them on Facebook Marketplace. Like people that only buy on Facebook Marketplace and then sell on the same platform to the same people for a profit.

Yeah, I think I've seen a lot of people on Instagram. I love people documenting their journeys of like reselling. Oh yeah. And picking up whatever, $50 furniture and selling it for $1,000.

Yeah.

Now maybe they put a couple days of like labor and paint and sanding it, but if you have that skill Yeah. To refurbish something and then resell and make it look nice.

Yeah.

That's like $800 right there in profit with just a couple days of work.

But if you're willing to hit record on the camera, put your phone on a tripod, and you like, you're not embarrassed, then you can grow an audience who's cheering for you and rooting for you. And then eventually you're going to have an audience that won't necessitate you to go buy dressers anymore. You can do whatever you want with that.

Exactly. It's almost like if you can create content showing the launch of an idea.

Yes.

Is more valuable than the idea itself.

Yeah. And that's okay. That's okay because people are good. They want to support people. They want to support the underdog. And if you're the underdog and they're watching your come up from zero to something, they're going to support you.

Yeah. Okay. So reselling is one. What other couple of ideas you got?

I mean, I had a couple come to my house just last week. They wash windows. That's it. I paid them $500 and it was a husband-wife. They're like early mid-20s. And they washed my windows. And like, this isn't how it worked, but this is how it could have worked. They could have said, Chris, can we wash your windows? And I'm like, sure, I want to support young entrepreneurs. So, okay, we need to, uh, require a deposit. No problem. How much? Half. Here's $250. Okay. They could have had $0 to their name. No car, no LLC, no insurance, anything. They could have Ubered to Home Depot. Used that $2.50 to buy all the equipment for $50, come back to my house, spent 5 hours. We're like, it's hard work. I'm not saying it's easy. And put hundreds of dollars of profit in there. They could have been paid to start a business, right? That's a business where you would need money to start. You get paid up front. It's not unreasonable to ask for a deposit. That didn't happen. I just paid them. But I'm saying like, back to our, you don't need money to start a business. That's one. So any, any service business that you start with your hands, that's unsexy, that's physical, We're missing like 3 million plumbers, HVAC, and electricians in America right now. We have a shortage of like 3 million. And those are just the big 3 that home services that everyone talks about. But there's thousands of home service niches. If you look at just gutters, you have gutter repair, gutter replacement, gutter cleaning. Like there's thousands of home service businesses. So anything you do with your hands that, you know, robots aren't about to take over because the smart people developing robots are making robots that can package orders and do things at scale, not replace a toilet.

A few years ago, we bought a home and I was trying to hang stuff and curtains and TVs and all this stuff. And I was like, "I don't have time to do this right now." And I— what is it, TaskRabbit? I went on there and it's like, I think I paid someone like $400 or $500 to hang a TV. You know what I mean? And it took them maybe an hour and a half. And there was probably 50 people on there that this is all they did full-time and they're making making bank. I know, like, this is insanity. Yeah, but I was also like, uh, I don't want to spend 3 hours doing this right now and I need to get it done. Uh, let's go to the top person ranked on, you know, TaskRabbit. And okay, they have 100 reviews, good enough for me, let's do it. And it's like, you know, I'm sure I paid a tip probably or something. It's like, you're making bank doing service work. That is good money.

And they own their— they own a business.

They own it. And literally all they have is like a little tool belt with maybe some nails and a hammer. Yeah, it's, it's not expensive to start that and put up a profile on TaskRabbit. Right. And I was just thinking of like window washing. They probably— these guys or gals could have said, hey, we're going to come once a quarter. Can you give us a deposit for the next one and have these— this clientele and then just go around the neighborhood and have a full schedule cleaning windows? You could do that with cars, boats, anything.

Well, it's funny you bring up the TV hanging because I tweeted— I had the same experience like a year ago and I tweeted about it. And every time I have a contractor come over, I always pick their brain. I'm like, how much do you make?

What do you— I said the same thing. I'm like, dude, I love it. $80 grand a year hanging TVs.

So this guy comes over, I paid him like $275 to hang a TV and I was like, Texas is a little cheaper. Yeah. I was like, how many of these do you do a day? He's like, 8 to 12. And I'm like, holy cow. I was like, you're making $300 grand a year. He's like, yeah. It's like, it varies. Some months are $10 grand, some months are $40,000. And I was like, okay, where do you find customers? Are you good at like SEO and ads? He goes, no ads. He says, I have a profile on Google LSA, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, TaskRabbit. They feed me all my leads. I do good work. I ask for 5-star reviews. They take, some of them take a cut, some of them don't. Some of them he boosts his profile to get more jobs. Six figures a year. And he doesn't, he's not a marketing, he just, lists himself on these free platforms.

Crazy. And the skill is not that hard. I mean, it's like if you're— if you spend a week or two to learn the skill, yeah, of that type of skill, and you master it, yep, you could get really good at that skill.

Yeah.

And people are always going to need that.

Yep.

Well, what is the thing most people do first that immediately puts them behind before they even start when they're trying to launch a new side hustle or project or business?

Yeah. People are masters at playing business and not doing business.

What does that mean?

It means they go get an LLC, they make a business plan, a logo, they start talking to their friends about, I've got some making moves. You don't do any of that. Go find a customer. I don't care if it's your mom, your best friend. I don't care. You got to start somewhere. I don't care if it's an unpaying customer and you do it for free just to get a 5-star review. Go find a customer and then figure else— figure everything else out after that. Sell it before you have it.

I call that the bootcamp method or the Kickstarter method. Like, launch the sale of something first before you launch the business. And this is something I did early on. I would do a free webinar if I ever wanted to launch a new course, product offering, event. I would do a free webinar and then ask for a sale before having anything to give people. It's like 15 years ago. And then I would do a bootcamp around this. I would teach and train and I'd say, all right, we're gonna do a 6-week bootcamp training on this thing that you wanna learn. I would record that and then I'd sell that as the course.

I've done the same thing. Yeah.

So I just called it the bootcamp method. It was like, do people really want this? Before I build a whole site and landing page and this and that and run a— let me just see if I can get a few sales. And if it's exciting enough that people really want it, Yeah. Then I'll record it live, repackage it, and sell it over and over again now that people want it.

Yeah.

And try to go the least amount of— well, maybe not the least amount of effort, but the least amount of work building the business and just create the sale first.

Yes.

And then do the service.

Yes.

First.

Yes. And have very generous like refund policies.

Yeah, 100%, whatever.

Yeah.

You don't get the results. All right, we'll refund your money.

I got a story that perfectly exemplifies What about that I did right and what about that I did wrong? My first, like, real business was an iPhone repair store, and I had it in my head that I needed to open a retail store. I was a student at the University of Alabama. I met a guy that was doing it out of his dorm room, making good money, and I was like, that's my business. I don't know why. I was just like, the iPhone was a year old. These are going to start breaking. And I read an article about some guys at LSU that were making like $20,000 a month from a retail store. So I need a retail store. So I had no money. I got a credit card advance, I got some of my Pell Grant, and I got this retail store. And this was the dumb thing to do. I was playing business, right? It worked out. So that's what you shouldn't do. But I did it and it ended up working out. But another thing I did is I never even learned how to fix iPhones. When I signed a 5-year lease with a personal guarantee, $2,300 a month, my mortgage was $500 a month. Okay? I had a $90,000 house. This was 2008.

Oh my gosh.

$2,300 a month, 5-year lease, personal guarantee. And people would come in with their iPhone and they say, I was like, oh, okay. Yep. Yeah. $90. Okay, cool. Come back in 3 hours. Okay. They'd leave and I go to YouTube and I would just type in what they tell me and I would learn how to repair iPhones on their phone.

Wow.

And this was the thing that I would suggest people do. Now, a couple of times I screwed up and I remember I put a screwdriver through someone's screen. I broke their screen. I was fixing the battery, but I broke the screen and it was a $700 brand new iPhone 4. And I had to go to the Verizon store and spend like a week's worth of sales revenue on a new iPhone. And she was okay. But like, had I waited 6 months to learn and perfect, A, I'm going to lose momentum. Probably. I'm probably going to lose steam. I never even open. Who knows where I am?

Never.

Right. Or B, if I do end up opening, I miss out on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sales waiting waiting 6 months to open. So net of net, the $2,000 I had to spend in broken iPhones made me an extra 6 figures because I opened that much sooner and I didn't lose the momentum.

Yeah.

So that's one example of doing it right and wrong.

It's like learning on the fly instead of waiting till you feel like you're perfectly mastered the skill.

Yes.

A lot of people wait until they feel like, I need to get more degrees, more education, more training until I can launch.

Yes.

They play the perfection game and they never make any money or they never launch something 'cause they need it to be perfect first before just launching. Whereas you launched, made mistakes, lost money, but learned through the mistakes and then kept earning on the way. And that is the difference between someone who's a perfectionist and someone who's an entrepreneur willing to get dirty and messy right away.

I'm the opposite of a perfectionist. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You could use more of that in your life probably. Like, okay, let's try to optimize this.

Sure, but look, I look at it as tuition.

Yes, of course.

We'll go to university and spend $8,000 a semester, but we won't like be willing to lose a couple hundred bucks on a couch on Facebook Marketplace. But we're— if we make a couple hundred bucks, we're being paid to learn. It's like going to a state school and they're paying you to go there. That doesn't happen. But in business, if we're willing to learn as we do the thing, worst case we lose a little money, but we learn. It's just tuition, or we get paid to learn and we have a little extra stress along the way.

Why do so many people lack the mindset to learn and make money rather than pay to learn?

Hmm.

You know what I mean? So many people feel like they have to spend 200 grand on a degree until they can start making money. Whereas you started saying, even though you went to school and, and paid tuition, but you said, all right, I'm gonna, not go to business school. I'm just going to start running a business and learn while I get paid. And I might make mistakes and lose money along the way, but that's my price of admission to learning.

Yeah. I think people create artificial stakes for themselves because they think, if I pay to learn this thing, I'm going to be more likely to do it. Because they look back on their life in a negative way. They're like, you didn't do this, Chris. You were supposed to do this. You didn't follow through. So if I pay $2,000 for this thing, I'm actually going to do it. It's going to kick my butt into gear. What I've noticed is there is zero correlation between how much you pay to learn the thing or to learn the skill and you actually following through and doing it. There's no correlation. So just do it. Just go watch YouTube.

Right. But why are people afraid of launching something? Why are they afraid to start the business? Is it the fear of failing and it not working out? Is it the fear of what other people say about them when it doesn't work out? Is it the fear of success? What if it does work out and I make all this money and now I have all this people and team and taxes and problems that, you know, come with that as well? What is the greatest fear about being able to launch something and make money around it?

I don't think that fear of failure is real. I don't think that exists. I don't think anyone has an actual fear of failure. Here's my analogy. You're stranded on a desert island and you know that the mainland is like 30 miles away, but you got to get there. So are you going to be too afraid to fail at building your boat to not even build your boat? No, you're going to try to build a boat. If you fail, you know, you get a mile out and it fails, you have to swim back and build a better version. Fine. Who cares? You have to do it. But if you were, if someone was live streaming you to the whole world or to your 300, you know, Facebook friends or to the 6 people that you played high school football with, you would approach that completely differently. You would like really want to perfect that raft because you're embarrassed. You don't want to be put on the spot. So what you said is the absolute truth. It's the fear of the perception of failure from others. That's what— that's the only thing we're afraid of. It's not one of the things, it's not the fear of failure. It's what will people think about me if I fail? The thing is, if you do fail, they're probably not going to think anything about you.

Maybe for a moment and then they move on.

It doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter at all.

Which business did you think, this is going to be a home run? And when I launched this, that you're like, man, these other people are doing this, it's working. Like, this is going to be a home run, it's going to be easy. That was actually kind of like a dud or a failure for you?

Which one did I not think that? I am the most delusional optimist ever. I got tested for ADHD in college and she said, you don't have ADHD, you have delusions of grandeur. I was like, wow, I paid $1,800 as a poor college student to learn that. Thank you so much. So I'm just, I'm just an optimist. Unashamed optimist, right? So I launch businesses because I believe they'll be successful. And I truly believe that any business could be successful with the right distribution. I could tell you the dumbest idea in the world right now, objectively dumb, right? And if Elon Musk tweeted about it, he'd sell thousands of units.

Distribution.

Distribution. So there, with the internet, that's the asterisk. 4 billion people are on the internet with that. If you can find the right message, the right offer, the right pricing, the right audience, the right channel, is it Facebook ads, is it Google ads, whatever, if you can find it, you can sell anything. And I firmly believe that. So with that framework in mind, I love every business idea.

Even with a horrible product, you can sell, you can sell it well online, you think?

Yeah, because you could position as a meme or as like a— I mean, this guy makes a million bucks shipping potatoes to people. Really? Like, it's like a prank potato or like vulgar things to people or glitter bombs. Like, if you can make it a meme, like, if you can make someone like sell farts in a bottle or something, it's like Yeah, crazy, right? Cat Rock made millions of dollars.

That's true.

That was like one of the first meme products.

That's true.

So I think anything I start, uh, will be successful because I know that it can be.

What thing hasn't been successful? Most of them, really.

Like, I'm— I forget, I, I forget all negativity. Like, I just, I just—

you're like, on to the next, on to the next. How long will you, you create, launch, and try to market something until you say, oh, it's either not working And is it because it's not working or you haven't found the right distribution yet?

It always comes down to distribution. So if I pivot it all to a different business, it comes down to opportunity cost for me.

You want to keep working on this one until you find it. That might be months, it might be years. Who knows? It might cost a lot more money for the distribution.

There's a lot of people out there saying that you should focus, focus, focus. And there's a lot of truth to that. But no one's talking about opportunity cost. I was trying back in 2016, I was really trying to focus on my business. I had a good business. It was doing millions of dollars a year. I had no reason to be distracted. Then I started learning about Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin. And I was just like, and my business started to slip because you were putting more time and energy and focus on Bitcoin. Like, what is this?

Why?

And I bought a bunch of Bitcoin and I still own it today. And net of net, I did much better being distracted by Bitcoin.—

but it could have been worse. You could have lost it all.

But you either win or you learn, right? I would have, you know, learnings compound just like money does. So if I would have lost it all, then those learnings would have compounded for the better in some other weird random way that might seem uncorrelated on the surface. So I don't launch something that I'm not excited about, but I don't launch everything I'm excited about. Because I'm excited about everything.

So you're excited about everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What is the thing that launched in the last 3 years that was the easiest to make money with that you did?

It always comes down to like product market fit, the right pricing, the right offer to the right person and the right time. And that doesn't usually last forever.

It might be a 6-month window or something, right?

Yes. So a few years ago, 4 or 5 years ago, I went to this gas station called Buc-ee's and there's only 50 locations. It's a huge gas station. They're as big as grocery stores and they did not sell any of their products online. And that seemed like a missed opportunity to me. So this is one of those business ideas. I'm like, these guys, they're a billion-dollar company. They don't sell anything online. They have shirts. They have— they're like the redneck Disney.

It's like a cult following. It's mostly Texas or where is this?

Yeah, they started there, but now they're everywhere. They're in Utah. They're going to Washington. DC, they're all over. And so my business partner and I launched a store to get their attention, and it worked. And it was just—

what do you mean, like an online store? We launched a Shopify store to get their attention with their stuff and sold it.

I went to their store with my 4 kids and wife. We bought one of everything. I hired a photographer.

One of everything?

One of everything. And I just started cold emailing reporters. I just did what anyone in the world could do. I used my Gmail account. I went to Southern Living, Eater, Texas Monthly, And I just found, oh, who wrote this? So-and-so at texanlily.com. I started emailing, hey, I like Buc-ee's. I launched a store for them. I thought you would find this interesting. And they need stuff to write about. So they did. And it went mega viral. We did hundreds of thousands of dollars our first 30 days.

Selling their products.

Their products, just marking it up.

Did they sue you for this or no?

No, they just wanted us to make sure it wasn't confusing to the customer. They didn't want us to look like them. It's called first sale doctrine. Any— like, I can go sell a Nike t-shirt, I just can't pretend to be Nike. Sure, right? Yeah, yeah, it's no different. So we did that, we started that 6 years ago, and it does millions of dollars a year today.

Still?

Still, yeah.

And then we have a ton of competitors too, and you're selling their gear and you don't have a partnership with them, you just do it on their own?

Correct.

Wow.

Yeah, that's interesting.

And it's still doing millions in sales a year?

Yeah. And I think it's important to talk about opportunity costs and distraction and all that. Because the backstory behind that was my partner and I had a fulfillment company, and part of the reason for us launching this e-commerce brand was to generate attention to get more customers for our fulfillment brand.

Uh-huh.

At the end of the day, you know, that fulfillment company was doing $300,000 a month in revenue, wasn't very profitable. We ended up shutting it down to focus on this full-time. So at the time, we had every justification in the world to say, Okay, cute. We're gonna, you know, viral marketing stunt, cool. But like, we've got, we're doing $300,000 a month. Let's keep our eye on the prize. You don't realize that business is gonna fail a year later. Wow. Even though we kept staying focused on it. So had I not been distracted, this business today would never exist. It would be someone else's story to tell.

That's interesting. In the last year, I feel like I've seen so many different individuals launch side hustles, businesses online specifically, that are bringing them 6 figures a month or 7 figures a year. Mm-hmm. What are a couple of things that you've seen that anyone with a small audience has been able to be successful with if they really focus their attention on that?

I'm gonna say small audience is like 400 followers.

Okay.

So anyone, this could apply to anyone. AI consulting. That's it.

Everyone needs it.

Everyone needs AI. It's so, AI is not like, the mobile wave or the internet or crypto or NFTs or Web3, a large percentage of people on all of those things thought that they were fads, right? Nobody rational thinks AI is a fad. Nobody thinks like AI is just gonna go away and fizzle out. Nobody. It's here to stay. They've done surveys of small business owners and 85% of them know they need to use AI and like 12% of them are in any meaningful way. And of those 12%, they're like getting ChatGPT's help with emails. So there's this massive disconnect between what, it's like cognitive dissonance. Like we know we should be doing something and we're not. And so all we need are individuals with a ChatGPT account, a Claude account, Groq, whatever it is, to just learn some skills, learn how to prompt. 10% of all adults are business owners, okay? So there's 350 million Americans. 35 million business owners, which means that if you have 400 Facebook friends, 40 of them are business owners. You sit down with your friend, go to Starbucks with them, open the voice memos app on your phone, hit record, and just say, tell me about your business. Oh, well, you know, okay, what sucks about your business? Oh man, hiring is— I can't find customers. And then just keep peeling back the layers.

Why?

Like, why is it hard? Like, just get to the heart of what they're struggling with in their business. And the framework for having this meeting is like, I'm trying to learn AI, but I need something to learn with. Like, I need something to hold onto that I can learn AI with. I'm not gonna charge you anything. I just want to like learn AI skills around your business. You go back to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, upload the transcript of that conversation and just simply say, my friend needs AI in their business. They want to make more money or save more money. What suggestions do you have? Here's 13 suggestions. Okay, number 6 sounds really interesting. Tell me step by step, how can I do that for them? Because I don't know what any of those words mean. Hey, start here, download this tool, do this. Then have another meeting at Starbucks with them and say, dude, look at what I learned. You could be doing this. This guy over here has the same type of business and he's doing this. And they're going to look at you now as like the AI god. You now know more about AI than anyone in their life. And they're going to say, take my money. Like, how do we do this? And you don't have to go learn how to find customers. You just have to let go of your pride and your ego and be willing to talk to a friend about things that they're struggling with. Be willing to serve your friend, be willing to help them, because that's— we're not talking about like, you know, a multi-level marketing scheme here. We're talking about helping our loved ones by solving problems with them for AI.

But how does someone develop a more resilient mindset when they launch something, they get laughed at and they lose money and they fail?

Yeah.

How do they not let that insecurity or that self-doubt stop them from trying again?

Post and ghost.

What does that mean?

Post something to social media, don't look at the comments. Like, hey, DM me if you want to learn more. Go stay in the DMs. What they'll find is if they do look in the comments, there's not going to be much there.

Yeah, right.

Anyway, but just psychologically, sometimes it's just ignorance can be bliss. It's an overly simplistic answer, but we just have to get over it, and we have to get— we, we have to get to our own personal rock bottom with regards to anything, right? If I'm an alcoholic, I've got to get to my rock bottom before I start going to AA and turning my life around. If I want to start a business and I'm just not able to get it together, I need to hit my rock bottom in that area of my life. And, and so if I'm not willing to get over that mental block, then I'm just not— I'm not ready to start a business. But maybe something happens, I— heaven forbid, I lose my job or something, or this bill comes up, an unexpected emergency. That's going to be my rock bottom. And then I post about it, and it doesn't have to be on social media, but I just start talking about it. I'm willing to open myself up and put myself out there. Sometimes that's what it takes for us to step out of our shell like that.

What would you say then is the number one skill that successful entrepreneurs have over those that aren't successful?

Bias for action. They just have to be impatient with action, but patient with results. Both of those at the same time.

How does that look?

So we're all curious to an extent. We all have questions about the world. The question is, what do we do with that curiosity? So if I'm, I was on a walk with my daughter, we were walking down these railroad tracks and I see that some of the railroad ties are wood and some are concrete. I'm like, what? Railroad ties? It's 2026. Why are we using these? Why not? Why not? They all concrete. So it's like I pull out ChatGPT and I just start talking, what are the wood? Why the concrete? What are the cost differences? And at the end of it, it's like, oh, that's really interesting.

Okay, cool.

Something that simple. We, when we have a question about anything, not just business or money related, we got to get an answer to it as soon as possible. Even if we're mid-conversation and it's rude, it's like, hold on, I gotta figure this out, right? The more we train that bias for action muscle and we, we start answering these questions about the world and about ourselves immediately, the more we do it, the more it snowballs and it compounds. And then the, the answer to the question turns into Action. If I'm at a restaurant and I love making tacos and I'm at a taco restaurant and I see this place has a line out the door and everyone is there for these birria tacos and it's like, I love, I make really good birria tacos. I wonder how much money this place makes. Well, don't just go on to the conversation. Go outside. Look at the line. Okay. 86 people in line. Look at the menu. $7 for 2 tacos. 86 times 7. Oh my gosh. Okay, let me— throughout the rest of this hour, I'm going to see how many people— wow, the line got even longer. Okay, this is a Tuesday. If they're this busy on a Tuesday, they're going to be way busier on a Friday. Okay, wow, they're doing $3.6 million a year just in birria tacos. That's not including drinks. And you're just doing all this mid-conversation. It's like, if their margins are this and— okay, what? Oh, okay, then go home and like make tacos and give them out to your friends like that night.

Yeah.

Do like—

Take action now.

Now, like compress the timeframe. Because we talk a lot about focus, we don't talk about momentum. We are human. And if we're gonna lose excitement, we're gonna lose momentum over a thing. So we need to be impatient with action.

See, there's something you do that I don't know if I could ever do because I also like to think about the time, the attention I put on certain things. And I feel like I did a lot of different businesses, products, programs, things like that to make a lot of money and revenue streams for many years. And then I felt like my time was stretched thin. I felt a little burnt out. I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I, I was putting lower energy in lots of places and nothing really was building exponentially. Where does making money, making a profit, and using your time, energy, talents with your purpose tie into building a business versus here's an opportunity that I see you can make tacos, $1 million a year with tacos or selling toothbrushes., but is that the best use of my time and talent and purpose towards launching that business for a profit? What are your thoughts on that?

Is it kind of like the passion versus profit question?

Like, I guess it's just merging both of them, you know. Just because I can launch a shoe company doesn't mean I should launch a shoe company. Just because I can make money in an iPhone repair shop doesn't mean it's the best use of my time. Yeah, for me personally. Yeah, but Sure, there's $1 million to be made there. There's $100 grand to be made here. There's— and there's time managing people and starting the business and taxes and breakdowns that you have to manage of those things as well. So how do you navigate that?

Yeah, that's a great question. I like to say chase the profit until you can afford to chase the passion. So I'm in love with business. So it's iPhone screens, you know, Texas snacks, whatever.

I just love it.

It doesn't matter to me. Most people won't have the luxury of loving business that much to where they're agnostic about what they go after. But to answer your question, people should chase the energy. They should go to where the energy is.

The excitement, the joy, the rush.

Yes, because that's what's going to be sustainable for them. So let's say they love watercolors, but The market is telling them that people want these tacos. You don't have to choose one or the other. Number one, your passion doesn't have to be your profession. They can be two separate things. Number two, there's enough time in the day to do both and to even test both as a business concept. Have you ever seen a taco shop where you can paint watercolor at the same time?

No.

Might be because it's a bad idea. It might be because it's a great idea that no one's thought to put together yet, right? So What are you trying to optimize for in that moment of your life? If it's making more money, then you should put the passion on the back burner for now. Because if you can develop first principle skills around making money, then you can direct that at whatever you want in the future.

On your passion later, right? On your hobbies or your side projects that you like really love.

Yes. But if you have a full-time job and you're making good money, then you might have the luxury of being able to chase your passion right now and then finding out later could or should you even monetize that?

Yeah. What do you think is the biggest problem that people make once they start making a lot more money?

It's almost like the same problem of playing business. They play the role of someone who makes more money, and lifestyle creep creeps in. It's happened to me.

Just spending more and—

yeah, because they have it. Um, and I don't want to contradict myself because I do think that can be a good thing, but if it keeps you away from your kids or your family more because you want that second or third home, then I don't think that's a good thing. People, they contribute less and less as a percentage of their income to charitable causes, which I don't like. Um, like let's say you're used to giving $1,000 a month to charity and you make, you know, $10,000 a month. You start making $50,000 a month and you give $2,000 to charity. If you give $5,000, it's the same percentage, but You have $45,000 to work with. You're able to afford much, much more. You're able to do much more good with that money. It doesn't have to be a percentage or a real dollar value. So I think that's a mistake on how much people give. I don't, like, at the end of the day, we're not going to bring any of it with us anyway. I don't want my kids to be hyper wealthy from stuff they inherit from me when they're 50 or 60. So I don't think at all about my second or third generation and how much money they'll have. I don't care. I want them to work for it too, right? So I think that's a mistake people make. And I think that people are likely to get prideful and to treat people on a lower socioeconomic status than them as lesser than them. And I think it should, I think it should go the opposite direction. I think they should get even more empathetic because they've been there before as well. Yeah.

What's your thoughts on the more you give, the more you are able to earn? Of your money, time, resources. Have you experienced that personally as someone who gives?

Oh yeah.

And what's your philosophy on how much you give every year?

Yeah. So this is a quote. I'm going to try to remember it. He who gives his money gives some. He who gives his time gives all. Right. Something like that. I try to give even more. I pay tithing to my church. 10% as like a baseline. And then I look for other charitable causes on top of that to donate as well. But more importantly, I try to give of my time to younger people trying to start businesses in ways that don't necessarily scale. And yeah, mission trips. Our kids are going to go on mission trips. I went on a mission trip. I plan to go on more.

You went for 2 years, right? Where'd you go, Hungary?

Hungary, yeah. Very good, yeah. Yep.

Well, you were 18, 20. How old are you?

19 to 21.

Did you learn the language too?

Mm-hmm.

What did that mission trip teach you about life, business, relationships?

Every year that goes by, I realize that it was everything to me. When I got home, it was just like, you know, first of all, I got home with a ton of confidence. I got rejected tens of thousands of times. I felt like I was able to run through a wall and do anything. Which is huge because I was not much at all in high school. I was very average and I was not like the valedictorian type, the freak athlete type. I was playing video games, delivering pizzas, waiting tables. I was very average. The mission fundamentally changed. It rewired me at my core.

Really?

Yeah.

What shifted about your identity after 2 years of being rejected over and over and over again in a language that you didn't know? How did your identity shift afterwards?

Just resilience. Like, I don't talk about this much, but I knocked on tens of thousands of doors and I flew all the way there to teach people about the gospel. Even so, I'm an introvert. I don't like talking to people. I don't. And so I would knock on a door, and even though I flew there to do that, I would silently hope that they would never open the door.

Mm. Of course, who wants to be rejected? Who wants to deal with that fear?

Yeah, but it's like I felt guilty too, because I also genuinely wanted to teach them. If they did open the door, it's not like I was bummed. It's like, all right, let's do this. But if they didn't, I kind of had to skip my step to the next one.

Next one. Yeah. No rejection.

Right. But then shortly after my mission, I got a job, a calling, an unpaid calling in my church to teach early morning seminary to high schoolers at 6 in the morning. Every single day. And I'm not a teacher. I don't like teaching. I don't— that's not my thing. I don't like waking up early. And it was the calling that I always dreaded. Hmm. Always dreaded.

That's why you had it.

Yeah. So I got it. And every single night I would just dread having to plan my lesson. And then every morning my alarm would go off at 5:25 and I would just dread— I've got to stand in front of 30 kids who are like exhausted, exhausted. They're like looking at their phone. Some of them would have their phones sideways with headphones in, like playing games, and I would dread it every day, right?

How old were you?

28. Yeah, I did it for 4 years.

Oh, every day? Yeah, every school day. Oh wow, 5 days a week?

Yeah, 4 years. 4 years. Holy crap. But what I've realized is those moments in our lives where we're just like, I don't want to do this, but I will. Right? That's what I would summarize it as. I don't want to do this, but I will. I'm dreading this, but I'm doing this anyway. Some people, you know, they'll do that hundreds of times in their life, or tens of times, maybe low thousands of times. Like, we go run a 5K, we go to the gym. But if you do that tens of thousands of times— I don't want to do this, but I will. I'm dreading this, but I will— it changes you. You can do anything. And to this day, if I got that calling again, I would still dread it. I enjoyed— like, I loved it. It's like this very weird thing. Like, my mission was the best ever. I loved it. My calling with those youth, I loved it. Like, I look back and I don't think of the negative. I think of the positive. And at the end of the lesson, I would be like uplifted. So I don't want to say it was all negative, but I would still dread it. Just like you might dread going to the gym.

Yeah, it's like you don't want to get on there, but afterwards you're like, I feel better.

Right. And that's a more practical way of approaching this. Running at 5 in the morning, like those things change you. It's cliché, we've all heard it, it's nothing new. But if you do that thousands, tens of thousands of times, you can do anything. Anything.

Did I also read that you had a kidney transplant?

Mm-hmm.

How did that come about?

My daughter was born with a rare lung disease, pulmonary hypertension. It's high blood pressure in the lungs, which is very dangerous because it forces your heart to pump really fast and really hard to get the blood through your arteries. Right. There's no cure for it. So we had her on medication from 3 to 9.

3 years old or 3 months?

From 3 years old to 9. And she was just constantly worsening. She had an oxygen tank. She had blue lips. Oh, it was mostly an invisible disease other than the blue lips. People thought she wore purple lipstick. So it was tough because she had this disability, but people couldn't see it, you know. And so she was 9, and the doctor's like, you— she, she's going to be gone within a year unless you get her double lung transplant.

Really?

Yeah. And double lung transplants happen.

That is intense. Yeah, invasive.

It's as invasive of a transplant as you get. So lungs are the only transplantable organ that are exposed to the outside air. Everything else is protected— liver, kidney, all that, bone marrow— but the lungs get all of this air 24/7, and so they're, they're fragile.

Oh, so he's like, open up your chest.

Yep, yep.

So they did, they did the surgery.

Yeah, so they said basically you don't have a choice, you got to move to Houston. We were in Dallas, 4 hours away, because it's the best pediatric hospital for lung transplants. To keep in mind, there's only like I might get this wrong, but I think there's only like 8 to 15 lung transplants a month nationwide or worldwide. They're very rare.

Wow.

Very rare. So we moved to Houston as a family with no notice right before Christmas, and we got her on the transplant list. We rented a house and we got a call at 10 p.m. one night and they said, hey, we got— we got some lungs. We think they're going to work. The doctor's on a private jet flying to Nebraska. He's going to inspect them personally, but it sounds like they're good. So we need you we need to hospital? Like, no. So that was the call we were waiting for.

And there's no guarantee she wakes up afterwards, right? No, it's like, it doesn't mean it's gonna work.

No, no.

But they were, but they were saying, hey, if you don't do this next year, we didn't have a choice.

She's like, yeah, she's gonna die. Yeah. So we went to hospital and I had to sign these papers, and it was like, the chance of death is low double-digit percent.

Wow.

But what do you do? So they took her back. We said goodbye and—

Holy cow. What was that like for your daughter goes into surgery?

Oh, man.

It was like, did you think this might be the last time I heard her? Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, that is rough. It was rough.

And you had 3 other kids at the same time or 3 other kids? Wow.

Yep.

3 boys. 3 boys and 1 girl. Yep. She the oldest?

Second oldest.

Holy cow, that must have been emotional.

Yeah.

And then what happens? She goes into the operating room.

So then she goes back there. My wife and I are in the waiting room and it was like a 12-hour procedure. So we're sitting there and I had my MacBook out and someone on Facebook, a stranger, shared a post of me in my DMs. And the doctor had told me the lungs were coming from Nebraska. Keep in mind there's like 10 a month of these nationwide. Okay. And I see this Facebook post. This stranger messages me and says, you know, our boy Sam woke up unresponsive. We think he had a seizure in his sleep and he didn't make it. And so we're donating all of his organs.

This was not his lungs.

Yeah, it was his. And I learned that as she was under the knife, which is like not normal. Like there's HIPAA laws, like you're not supposed to know. I didn't go looking for it. It was— this was sent to me.

Wow.

And so I'm like, either this is a weird coincidence, but I think they even said in the post his lungs are going to a girl in Texas or something.

Oh my gosh. That's just giving me the chills. That's crazy.

Yeah. So I just— I remember where I was and I was like, I showed my wife and like, we just start crying and like, and I just start like looking through pictures of Sam, this boy. Oh, oh my gosh. I felt like he was my son that I never met. Oh my gosh. Like my, my long lost son. And so I just had like this profound gratitude for him, even though, like, he didn't choose, you know, like his parents did. But like, surely he would have chosen to give up his lungs. So I'm like, man, that kid, I love that kid. Immediately. Never heard of him. You know, an hour before I was at home, you know, watching Netflix and I'm like, oh, how do I pay that kid back? So long story short, she gets out of surgery.. And, um, it was amazing. They were like, his lungs were perfect. Everything went perfectly. She's great. The freaky one, freaky side note was, you know, her chest had swollen so much from the incision that was like this long.

Yeah.

Yeah. That they couldn't sew it all the way back together. So I could literally see her heart beating. It was open.

Yeah.

Still, they put like, like a plastic sheathing over it.

Oh my gosh.

But I could see her heart.

Oh my gosh, man. Yeah. That is intense. Yeah, but she woke up and she was fine. Like, yeah, I mean, I mean, it sure is a recovery period, a long period, like a year probably, almost like 6 months to a year of like full recovery, right?

Or—

but now she's fine.

Yeah, so she woke up and she's supposed to be in the hospital 6 weeks, it was like 4. So we came home, they wanted us to stay in Houston for a couple months for like almost daily appointments. Everything went great. And so the chest finally closed and stapled it or whatever. Yeah.

Holy cow.

And so we had always said, if, if this surgery goes well, we want to see all 50 states as a family in 60 days. So this is 2022. So in the summer of 2022, we bought an RV, we saw all 48, lower 48, and we parked it in Seattle, flew to Alaska, flew to Hawaii. In 60 days, we saw all—

oh my God, that's cool.

But throughout this process, you know, I was thinking about Sam, Sam, Sam, and I learned about living kidney donation. Where— or altruistic kidney donation, where you can, you can donate your kidney to a stranger. And that's not me. I've never been admitted to a hospital. I'm afraid of needles. I'm afraid of blood. And in fact, my brother-in-law needed a kidney a couple of years prior, and I was too afraid to get tested for him like I would have.

You're like, I don't want to know that I could work, right?

I was waiting to be the very last to be tested. Thankfully, my other brother-in-law, who's braver than me, got tested and he donated his kidney to my other brother-in-law. And so that just kind of bothered me that I wouldn't— that I wasn't like first to raise my hand. But I started doing research and A, like, I don't want to sacrifice— like, I don't want to— I got to be there for my kids. I didn't want to go through a surgery that was going to be a serious risk.

Yeah.

Even to say thanks, it seemed like too much. But the chance of death is 3 in 10,000, which is about the same as childbirth for a mom. Wow. And increasingly safer than childbirth. So I'm like, okay, half of the humans that have ever lived have taken even more risk than this to give birth, to, to create a life, but I can't do it to save a life. Wow. And I kept researching, I'm like, all right, what about like long-term complications? Almost zero. Any pills I have to take for the rest of my life? None. Dietary changes? No, just be like generally healthy. Already planning on that. All these things. What about like, how painful is it? How risky is it? Okay, well, what if my kids need a kidney? What if I give away my kidney and my kids— well, there's a program called the, uh, it's the National Kidney Foundation. They have a voucher program where you give one, you get one. You get to the top of the list. Wow. You or 5 people. So I have 5 people in my family, so I put them all on the list. So now I have an insurance policy if they need a kidney. So I'm even better off, right? So I keep researching, and then it's like, well, what if I need a kidney for myself?

Then what?

Kidneys rarely go bad alone. They always go bad together. Really? So it's like, it's— I'm not— I'm no worse off if I only have one kidney and it goes bad, because the other one would have gone bad anyway. So I'm just doing all this learning, and I'm a very logical person, and I'm like, there's no reason for me to not donate my kidney other than being like a little sissy. And that's not a good reason. So I just, I just did. I donated my kidney to a stranger.

Do you know who got it?

I found out.

Shut up.

Yeah. So I donated on the— I donated my kidney on the anniversary of Sam's death. Oh, the next year when he would have turned 9, I think. And then my wife, I was telling her all this. I'm like, dude, there's 3 in 10,000 chance of death. Like, yeah, this and this. And like, you can get your Hosp— like, there's— you don't have to pay anything. Like, if I had a job, they would pay for my time off work because it saves insurance companies a lot of money, right?

Yeah.

So my wife's like, hmm, maybe I should look into this. So 3 months later, she donated her kidney.

Holy cow.

Uh, to a stranger. She never found out who they were. On the anniversary of— on his birthday, what would have been his birthday, May 10th. Wow. So we both donated our kidneys to a stranger recently. Yeah, yeah., and I've run ultramarathons since, before and since.

Wow.

I almost never think about it. I have the same energy. There's been zero changes. I would do it all over again. And it was, it was the best decision I could have made.

Wow, man. That's crazy.

I found out who got my kidney the morning that my wife did hers.

Wow.

Because I went to the hospital and they're like, Chris, we have a letter from your donor.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Was it, who was it?

Like, was it, it was a, it was a, the young person, old person? It was an older person in San Francisco.

Wow.

Yeah.

And they wrote a letter saying thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah, man.

Here's the stat. If 1 in 10,000 healthy adults donated their kidney to a stranger, no one would die waiting for a kidney. But today, like 5,000 people a year die waiting for a kidney. But it's needless. Like, it's literally needless. That number could go to zero. 1 in 10,000 people.

Where's the kidney business that you need to start? That's telling you that's the next thing. That is launch a Kizzy business.

That is— I mean, that is kind of one thing I would like to do as a nonprofit, advocate for that.

Yeah, that's cool.

There's a couple other countries that allow the government to pay people to donate their kidney, and I think that should make a business.

You think it should be legal or illegal?

I think that should— it should be legal for people to be paid to donate their kidney, assuming safeguards were in place, like in other countries where they do it. They they interview them like, are you addicted to drugs, gambling? Like, is this like just to pay off a debt? If they pass all these things and it's not like exploiting the poor, it's a beautiful thing. And their kidney deaths went to zero.

That's cool.

Yeah, but there needs to be an incentive. It's not enough to just like say you'll feel really good, you know, because most people don't have my story.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But wow, like how much is— I don't know, how much is someone willing to pay for a kidney? Yeah. How much is that?

You know, tens of thousands. Really? Yeah. 30, 50,000 something.

But it's like what insurance pays for this through the hospitals or how does that even work?

Insurance companies come out of pocket like 1 to 2 million bucks for a kidney. Yeah. Like for all of that procedure and process aftercare. So if they can pay someone 50 grand, they would gladly do it. Everyone wins. Wow. This is wild, man. Wow.

What did, what did donating your kidney to a stranger you didn't know teach you about life and money?

I don't know if it taught me anything about money, but about life, it told me that we're here for others. We're here to serve other people. And serving other people is one of the most selfish things you can do because it serves us so much. Like, if you're miserable, go serve someone else and you'll be happy, period. It doesn't have to look like a kidney. But thinking about others is the best thing we could do for ourselves. When we have two kidneys and we only need one of them, what are we doing? I mean, come on, that's for a reason.

How has life shifted for you around making money since donating your kidney?

Well, I don't know if, you know, correlation is causation, but I mean, it's funny you ask that because I've never really correlated it to the time frame, but My financial life has never been better.

Really?

Yeah, ever since donating. So call it what you want. I believe in God, but I don't know if it's correlated, but I'm not complaining.

Yeah. What is the— what does the Bible teach us about making money that you apply to your daily life?

Well, the verse is not, you know, money is the root of all evil. It's the love of money is the root of all evil. So in the Bible, they worship golden calves and idols, false idols. Um, today we worship other idols— technology, money. So it, it, it has to be the fuel that helps us to do more good and not the fuel to help us consume more. And that's hard. It's something you have to be cognizant of every day.

What is the biggest money trap you find yourself getting into? Lifestyle creep, buying more things or toys or cars or. Oh yeah, whatever.

I find it every day. My wife's a lot better at it than me. I want to fly first class and she's like, why? Like, it's an extra $1,000 for that ticket. We could donate that. I'm like, yeah, but like, we have it. We work hard.

We work hard for it.

She's better than I am, but I fight that every day.

But is that— I mean, if you work hard for it and you earn it and you do it with integrity and you make a you make a great product that serves people, why not spend it on yourself? Why not spend it on something new for yourself that you want? Why not spend it on first class or a nice hotel? Why not spend it on a trip for your family to enjoy memories? Why be poor when you're creating wealth?

Yeah. Yeah. I think it just has to come with balance. And I think a lot of it has to do with raising your children. I would love a private chef. We can afford a private chef. We will not have one until my kids are out of the house, um, period, end of story. Like, my kids need to do the dishes themselves. They have a chore chart. They need to help us cook food. They need to go mow the lawn. Like, I could hire a lawn guy. We do it ourselves. So I'm, I'm more concerned about our approach to money with regards to raising our kids in a normal environment that teaches them healthy habits about money and teaches them that we live in a bubble that is not representative of the real world. So we send them on, on mission trips, humanitarian trips, and we'll go on them with them. And we try to teach them that stuff. But it just has to be something that you're always aware of.

What is the one skill, if mastered, that makes every other business skill unnecessary?

Like resilience, which comes from being rejected. Sales, bias for action.

Before you were financially successful, what was the thing you were hiding or struggling through that most people didn't see?

I would call it income consistency.

A lack of it?

Yeah. Income volatility. It's like I've had for the majority of my career.

Yeah. Even still?

No.

Oh yeah. But for some months big and some months nothing.

Yeah. I mean, until my mid-30s.

Really?

Yeah. And I'm in my late 30s now.

Yeah.

But just like feast or famine, I've had more $0 income years than I've had positive income. Really?

Why is that?

It comes with the territory. Nature of just being an entrepreneur. It's unpredictable. There's been a dozen times where I've told my wife, babe, this is it. This thing, this is it. This— I know I've said this every time. She's like, okay, babe, this is the thing that's going to make us—

this is it.

This is the last thing we'll have to do. Okay.

All right. I believe you. How many times you said that?

So many times and genuinely believing it. But the fat years have more than made up for the lean years or the zero years. Right. So we've lived in our dream house since our late 20s. Right. But like, there's been a lot of times that we've had to sell assets to pay the mortgage. Yeah. Not recently. But in 20s and early 30s, we had some rental homes we had to sell. Like, we were forced to sell. And I'm not making, like, big risky decisions. It's just things always take longer than you think and they're harder than you think and it costs more money than you think. Always. And I'm learning that still. But so from the outside looking in, we've been in our dream house since our 20s. Everything's awesome, but it's been very volatile.

Really?

Yeah.

What do you think is going to be the thing that actually makes it for you? When you say to your wife, no, this is the thing. What is going to be that thing, do you think? Is it going to be the sexy new AI thing or is it going to be something more like basic and consistent that just serves a need over and over that people don't want to do?

Yeah. I don't know.

Or a combination of like 50 businesses all doing it together.

Maybe a combination. Like, I could retire now if I wanted. Like, I could just stop doing anything and have enough money. So in that sense, it's different than that conversation has been in the past. Like, this is the thing. It's probably something that I have just no idea about because I've been in so many industries. I just— I never know what I'm going to get my hands into. I don't know. But I love— I genuinely love what I do. Yeah, I can be honest about that.

That's cool. If you could only teach your kids 3 things about money, what would it be?

First would be to be generous with it, especially to— I try to teach them to treat service workers as if they're volunteers, right? Like if I had someone that was my servant, like serving just me all day unpaid, I would be so grateful for them. But like, if you get an Uber, like, hey, thank you for picking me up. Yeah, thank you for getting here so fast. Like, they're getting paid, but like, they've got a hard life. So I would— I do, I teach them that, like, specifically service workers, treat them as if they're unpaid volunteers and be more generous with them than you think you should be. The second thing I would teach them is no one's coming to save you. Like, you— nothing is guaranteed. I don't care if you have a job, a pension, a you know, you work for a great company. Nothing is guaranteed. No one is coming to save you. You have to be self-sufficient. You— I look at entrepreneurial skills like food storage. In our church, the LDS Church, we're encouraged to have a year's worth of food storage. Okay. And we do. Well, we used to before we had as many kids. We need to stock up. I don't want to be dishonest here, but I look at like reselling stuff like that. I think people, everyone should have those skills. Just in case the crap hits the fan and they can sell some old iPhones or something just to make ends meet. So I'm not like pushing my kids toward entrepreneurship, but I want them to develop those skills in case they need them. So treat entrepreneurial skills like, like food storage so you can use it in emergency. And the third one is to, to convert your liabilities to assets. Right. It's, which is kind of like a derivative of number 2. So if you have a car, have the skill to make income from that car. If it's DoorDash or Turo or whatever.

Yeah.

If you have a, a house, learn how to rent out a room on Airbnb because any liability could be turned into an asset with the right skills. So I'm actively, I guess passively trying to teach them how to do that in just the way that we live. I, I went and drove for DoorDash last week. Really? Yeah, just to see.

Just to try it out?

Yeah, because I delivered pizzas for Pizza Hut in high school and I loved it. And I just wanted to see how much money I could make. And it was a lot of fun.

Did you try it for like a few hours or something?

Yeah, yeah, it was a lot of fun actually.

Really?

Yeah.

Just picking up orders, dropping them off.

I would like send goofy pictures to them, like dropping it off, like just like I was like praying over it and it got me extra tips. Like I learned I was actually able to influence my tips more than you might think.

Wow.

More than just going through the motions, so.

I read some like article online years ago about how if you're a service person, how you can like 10x your tips just by saying the person's order or their name back to them.

Interesting.

Like if you are a waiter and someone gives you the order and you say it back to them and say, that's a great order. And you ask them their name and you say their name like, you know, Chris, that's a great order. That's a great choice you made.

Yeah.

Just doing that, making them feel good about their order.

Yeah.

And saying their name, like, gets you 10x the tips or something crazy, like 10% more the tips. And like, there's all these different strategies of being a good service worker to increase tips. And it's not always about being the best at what you do, it's being best with people in how you do it.

Yeah.

And it sounds like the way you just added joy for a moment of like taking a photo, praying over the food, or like the smiley face. You brought joy to the service. Yeah. Which then they said, oh, I'm going to give 20% rather than 10.

Yeah.

Or maybe I'll give 40%.

Yeah. Well, when you stand out because no one else is doing it, but it's so simple, so easy. Like the, the, the ROI, the hourly rate on taking an extra 20 seconds to do that is immeasurable.

Yeah, you made a lot. You can make 10 extra bucks just like that.

Yeah.

By taking one little different photo.

Yeah. And I actually brought my kids with me to do DoorDash.

That's cool.

Just to teach them.

That's cool. A couple final questions for you before we get to them. I want people to check out your podcast, The Kerner Office, tkopod.com, @TheKernerOffice on social media, K-O-E-R-N-E-R on social media as well, where every day you're just sharing new side hustle business ideas that people could launch with little or no money and start making money right away. A lot of great ideas. So if people are looking for side hustle ideas or business ideas, they can go check it out there. This is a question I ask everyone at the end called the 3 truths. So hypothetical scenario, imagine you get to live as long as you want to live in this earth and create everything you want to create, do whatever you want to do. But in the last day, you have to take all of your work with you. This content, your podcast, whatever you make in the future, it's gone from this world. But you get to leave behind 3 truths, 3 lessons that you would leave with the world. You just shared kind of 3 money truths, but what would be your 3 life principles that you would leave behind?

Impatience with action, patience with results. That's one. In anything you do, people are much more likely to be not bold enough. It's very rare that someone is too bold, right? So be more bold. Like with what you believe, like just, just don't, don't care about what people think. Like, just stop. People don't think about you. And that's not a, that's not a pessimistic or negative thing. They're thinking about their family, their loved ones, their wife. Like, just do your own thing. And the third one, do things for the story.

Mm-hmm.

For sure. Like when you do things, if for no other reason, just to have a good story out of it, you will be wealthy and happy and you'll be interesting and rich. Yes.

Rich in heart.

Yes.

Yes.

That's what— with the Bucky story, it was like, this is going to be a great story.

And you're still telling it today.

Still telling it. But it's just that one thing has made me wealthy. Wow.

That's cool. Chris, I want to acknowledge you, man, for being of service to so many people, not only with your intellect and your skills around entrepreneurship and business, but also your service around giving an organ to a stranger and saving a life, literally. So what you're doing is making a difference, and I appreciate it, man. It's really inspiring.

Thank you.

Of course. Final question: what's your definition of greatness?

Greatness is simply being a net positive to the world.

Mm-hmm.

Net positive.

My man. Thanks, Chris.

Thank you. Gotta learn how to sell.

Gotta learn how to build. You learn how to lead.

So you got to learn how to get people to give you money for stuff, got to have the stuff to sell them, and then you got to have people that work on your side to help deliver on those other two. If you can do those three things, you're unstoppable. And if you do one of those three things, you can make as much— like, you can still make a ton of money. But if you can do all three