Rich Schefren - The Michael Sartain Podcast

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Welcome back guys. My guest this week, Rich Sheffern. He is the founder and president of Strategic Profits and the coach to Internet Gurus. He's also the author of Internet Business Manifesto and several other books. And he's also the man who invented the automated webinar in 2007. Please welcome to the program. Rich, how you doing today, man?

Really good. Thanks for having me.

For sure. Rich, where are you right now?

Delray Beach, Florida.

Nice. Nice. That's a, that sounds like a nice place to be, man, especially this time of year. Beautiful. Rich, I want to go over this. So we, we met at Cole Gordon's event in Mexico, which he's doing another one here I believe, coming up in August. I learned a ton from watching you, especially the, the Mystery box. We're going to steal that idea and probably make something about that. I thought that was a great idea. But I wanted to go over how you originally got into this whole space because a lot of my audience are very much, a lot of them are starting their own businesses, growing their own businesses. How did you, you said you are the first person to do the automated webinar in 2007. How did you get into this space and how did you come come to that realization?

Well, yeah, it precedes that. So I was the first online business coach. Started coaching back in early 2000s and started, started working with a lot of people that many people might have heard of, like Ryan Dice who owns Digital Marketer, or Russell Brunson who owns Clickfunnels, Mike Filsane who owns Groove and many, many other well known people in the space. And so I was the coach to those people and I got them really good results and their businesses were growing. But at that time business coaching wasn't as popular as it is today. And so I first I had finished working with this group of clients and I had this project that I was doing for Agora Publishing. I've worked with agora for about 20 some odd years and I had a big project with them three months later. And so I had this three month window where I wanted to bring in some sales before this project was starting. And my coaching program was generally I worked with someone for over a year but I decided to do like a compressed version, see if I could get some clients for like an 11 week program. And so I created a PDF that I put on my blog and had people opt in for it. It was kind of the first lead magnet and that went viral and that was the Internet Business Manifesto. And so that's what really put me on the map. Instead of getting just like a dozen clients of what I was hoping for, I got thousands and thousands of clients. And that's really what started my business. Strategic profits. And for the next two years, all I did as far as to grow my business was to write other free reports. And so I wrote about eight of those. And during that time, my business grew and grew and grew. And then we were the first company to do live streams, and we were the first to live stream from a live event. And so that went well in 2007. And then at the end of 2007 when we were looking for a new model, that's when we created the automated webinars. And I wrote a report on it that I thought it would be, you know, a primary way that people would market going forward. And so I wrote a report on that sometime in 2007 and shared it with Frank Kern and Jeff Walker and Russell Brunson, Mike, Phil San and a bunch of others. And I guess that started the automated webinar kind of craze or popularity or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, and also during that time I also, because it might be relevant to stuff that we talk about later, I brought the vsl, the video sales letter.

That was my next question.

Yeah, okay, so I brought John Benson invented it in the beginning of 2000, end of 2005, beginning of 2006, he shared it with me. In 2007, I brought it to Agora Publishing, which at that time was about a 150 to 200 million dollars business. And within a year they had grown to about 1.2 billion. So I got $1 billion testimonial from Agora and, and these kinds of experiences, you know, whether it was the free reports for me or live streaming or the VSL with Agora or the automated webinars with us, each of these times that these marketing strategies, slash tactics were injected either into my business or my clients businesses, we. We saw a very large step increase in the results. And so that's always stuck with me about the power of leveraging a strategy or tactic early in its life cycle and the power that that can give a business to scale, grow, and really gain momentum.

So can you go over this real quick? Because I think a lot of people who may be new in this space who are just using Facebook ads or trying to market on TikTok or trying to do YouTube ads or Google Ads or whatever, that didn't exist back. And also Zoom didn't exist back then. So can you talk about the assets that you had back then in order to sell your e book. Right. That's what Agora was, was publishing that. And how, how you got the word out back then.

Well, you know, it's, it's evolved over time. Right. So that's one of the benefits I guess of having been online for as long as I've been on that I've gotten a chance to learn different platforms as they kind of were rolled out, as opposed to trying to learn everything at once one time, which might be a little bit absurd and ridiculous. So yeah, there was, there was Web one, which was really a one way communication. There was no social media sites of any sort. Right. And back then there were forums and that was about the only two way communication that there was. But you had websites and forums. And then soon thereafter blogs came into existence. But primarily there were destination sites. Like, you know, Warrior Forum was something very popular in the Internet marketing space a long time ago. And so back then it was really through email marketing, through SEO, through banners and through blogs. There used to be Google Video which was replaced by YouTube video.

Still got some videos up there on Google Video and they got, they went up into YouTube.

Yep, yep. And, and so that was really all that there really was back then. And social media started to really kind of gain some momentum back in 2007, 2008. I actually, you know, I, I've written about 30 reports for clients and I've written about seven or eight that were free reports that were, you know, more legion than anything else. The Internet Business Manifesto was one of those free reports. That was my first one. I wrote a series of three manifestos. And then I wrote in 2007 the attention age doctrine one, which was all about how attention was going to become the scarcest commodity online and what were the implications to an entrepreneur and their prospects and their team and everything else. And then I followed that up in the beginning of 2008 with another free report called the Attention Age Doctrine 2, which was all about how my belief that prospects attention was going to go more and more to this new thing, Web 2.0 social media. And what were the implications of that now that prospects had a voice and that it was going to be more of a two way communicating kind of deal. And so with that came the rise, not because I published it, but you know, I was publishing what I thought I was seeing and I saw the rise of Twitter and then, you know, Facebook and then Instagram, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So you know, nowadays we have a Ridiculous number of platforms to choose from. But it hasn't always been that case. And what most people probably are not that familiar with is that in every platform, and I would say maybe YouTube is the exception, but in every other platform, I would say that there are in its infancy, it's really easy to gain momentum, get a following, and then over time it becomes increasingly difficult. Right. So to blow up on Facebook today is infinitely more difficult than it was eight years ago. And so if, you know, someone is thinking about should they be involved in Facebook or not, yeah, they probably should, but they shouldn't think that they're going to blow up on it. And if they're looking for a place to blow up, probably the best opportunity right now is on TikTok just because of its younger. And not younger as far as demographic, just the company's younger and it hasn't gotten fully saturated.

They're still in the organic phase. They're not in the paid pay to play phase yet. Just. Just to give you an idea, yeah, I was growing pretty quickly on Instagra and then it just stopped. It just stopped for everyone, probably after 2017. And now in order for me to get. I get maybe three or four thousand new followers a month. And in order for me to maintain that pace, I have to post maybe ten real. No, I'm sorry, we have to post maybe ten stories a day and at least two to three reels a day just to get enough interaction to do that. And that's for me, I get about. I got about 700,000 accounts that I interact with per. Per month.

But.

But like, in order for me to do that, like, I have to constantly be posting and then the guests I have on when they collab, then some things can go viral on YouTube. I have to post five times a day. I probably two shorts and three clips per day just to. To maintain a growth of maybe a thousand new subs a week. So the amount of work, what I've seen is this is just for me externally. What I saw was Instagram would, would reward you for just posting things on the grid frequently. Then when Tik Tok came out, Instagram was now rewarding you for doing things to compete with Tik Tok. Which reels are a competition. They're the answer to Tik Tok. Just like stories are the answer to Snapchat. And then so if you post more, then they would just reward you more with more engagement. And that was the only thing that I saw working recently. You know, from. Because I follow Bradley and Wes Watson Those are two buddies of mine and that's the, that's where Bradley just hit a million followers on Instagram organically. Like not. He didn't. And, and he's paying 40,000amonth for his, his, in his Internet content. He has a team that's doing that and that's how much engagement or that's how much content he has to produce in order to maintain that level of growth. Because you're right, the organic phase for Instagram is over. And on YouTube. I actually think it's hard. I think it's easier to start on Instagram than YouTube. YouTube is really hard to get momentum on. I, the way I've seen it now. And the thing again that I've seen work the best is something we're trying. So like Rolo and I will do a show together and we'll live stream it. That's been the, the new thing on YouTube that's worked really well for us. And at the end of the live stream, so we'll go a three hour live stream. At the end of hour two, we say, hey guys, we're jumping off our streams and everyone's moving to the new Access Vegas channel. And we, and we stay there and we watch as all the streamers like, they almost like raid the new channel. And once everyone's moved over there, then we cut our feeds and everything's on the new channel. That's the only thing that we've seen work really well as far as YouTube is concerned. Also, I've seen people that have big YouTube channels or Instagram channels, they'll do that for their rumble. They'll move all their platform over to Rumble. Because if anybody has any kind of dissenting political opinion, you know, YouTube will take your content down. YouTube will take your content down. Instagram will take your content down. I'm debating a guy on, on Monday and he's got some really, really heinous opinions on stuff. And, and he's been, he's been banned on every single platform. So I have to pre record the recording. If he says crazy words, I have to blank out the words. And then, and, but, but like it's one of these situations where they're, they're very. He, he's, he's big on rumble, but he's been banned on every other platform. So there's just a, like, it's a new space like what you're talking about before. Whereas before, you know, you, during the organic growth. I remember a time where I could organically gain followers on Instagram. And now it really doesn't work that well unless I post a bunch of reels. Then I get very much rewarded for posting a bunch of reels. We, we'll get to that because I actually want to compare and contrast how things were in 07 to how things are now and what you think about the current environment. But you had three things that I was really interested in. You said you've had three really profitable ideas. You said you stole one. You said, you said the, the three ones I believe were, and this is what I caught was giving out a bunch of free stuff, the automated webinars and VSLs. Can you go over those three really profitable ideas that you had?

Yeah, well, the, I'd say that the, the first one was the free reports, right? Just like.

But just free stuff in general. Was that, was that the idea or is just specifically free reports?

Well, you know, it came first in reports, then videos and other things. But the idea was, is that when the Internet first kind of came alive and people started commerce was being conducted on the Internet. One of the things that shifted for the average consumer was going from making their decisions based on proximity, like who's close to me, where can I go get this, to relevancy, what's most relevant to me. And so one of the ways that people can kind of determine who's relevant and not is by going online looking for information, which is what most people do when they're online. They are either entertaining themselves or looking for information. And so by putting out free content that was relevant to my target audience, not necessarily like solving all their problems, but giving really good content as far as giving them a different perspective about the challenges that they were experiencing. And therefore when they saw their problems in a different way, my solution seemed a lot more appealing. That certainly has been one of the game changing things that happened in my overall career. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. It was. Eben Pagan had a program called Get Altitude where he talked about moving the free line. And that's essentially like I, I do, like as soon as I get done with this, I got a four hour call. I'm doing with just clients. Not, not clients, but people, prospective clients. And they get to ask me questions for four hours until every single one of them is done. And then I do this podcast. I, and then I just gave out a, I have a 10 hour course I just released. It's totally free, you can look at, on my school server. And I got on school because of, because of Cole Gordon and, and, and now we're just giving away as Much free stuff as we can to get guys in the funnel. And then eventually, my setters, that's. They're outbound to those guys, and then that those leads become my clients for the high ticket program. But, yeah, the free stuff was a kind of a big thing. A lot of people have a hard time with that because they're like, no, I want to save my. For. It was. I think it was Seth Goen, who I heard this from. I want to save my best stuff. And I'm like, if your best stuff is something that you can hide in a video, in a YouTube video, then your best stuff is not that good. That means somebody's going to see it and just copy it. And so the best thing you can sell is you. Your brand. And again, I learned that from my buddy Tai Lopez.

You.

Your. The best stuff you can do is to build this brand. Nobody can fire Tai lopez from Tai Lopez.com. and so that's. That's where I kind of learned that whole idea. And then the other thing is a. Cole told me this was. He came on my podcast, he told me he got a bunch of leads, and that was him giving away free content. Just coming on and talking with me for three hours. So that the idea of, did we lose him?

He still in there? No, I think we lost him.

Okay, we got you back.

Yeah, sorry about that.

Yeah, no problem.

Yeah. So last thing I heard, you was talking about mentioning Evan Pagan and moving the free line.

Yeah, moving the free line. But again, Tai Lopez also all the free content that he was doing. And then lastly, I had Bradley on a couple days ago, and he was talking about his conversation with Grant Cardone. He was like, dude, every day you just post so much stuff. So Brad had invested in one of Grant's projects, and he was like, you're advertising every day. I see your free stuff every day. I'm constantly looking at your ads. You got to stop posting so much. I'm gonna have to unfollow you. And Grant goes, you don't even buy this anyway. And just hangs up on him. And it was one of these things where Grant ended up being right. The more content he produced, the more free stuff he put out there, the better it worked out for him. So definitely the free stuff was definitely helpful. And the automated webinars. Do you see an. An allegory now to zoom the way people are using Zoom as how you were using free webinars before the.

Just back to moving the free line. Like, Evan came up with that, like, two years after I had started publishing reports. Yeah, right. So he just put a name to the, like what I've been doing and what I've been teaching on the, on the automated webinars. It was really just capitalizing on the idea that at that time webinars had an insanely high show up rate, not like it does today. And it was easy to get people to register for them because people were used to them being live. So that's how we truly benefited from it. Um, what. I'm not sure I fully understand your question though, as far as the correlation to Zoom.

So, so now what I'm doing is I'm hosting Zoom calls with a hundred guys on there and we live stream them and we'll promise like a debate in the beginning and it, it draws hundreds of people. I'll somehow get 3, 4, 100 people on for like a free call and, and then at the end put them down a sales funnel so they'll go to my free school server. And that's worked out magnificently for us recently. But it's, it's, it's kind of like the webinar thing before, but because I include free like live streaming on YouTube that gets a bunch of people down the funnel. And so I feel like it's a correlation to what you guys were doing back then with the, with the webinars.

Yeah, I guess the. I think what you're doing is really interesting. I think it's a total. Something different than, you know, with the, with the webinars. It was really just capitalizing on the fact that at that time, you know, we didn't publish and broadcast, that it was automated so people could register for them, you know, at different times, but we were playing them every hour. The, it sounds like to me the, you know, having a debate at the beginning of a Zoom call or something like that, broadcasting it onto multiple platforms, kind of ensures that it's live and real. And so that always has a greater draw than anything recorded just the way it is. And so by having that at the beginning is kind of like having an attention getting vehicle at, you know, embedded into the overall promotion almost.

Yeah, yeah. What we did was we start off with some kind of draw. So it's basically we're going to talk about a topic, right? So, you know, and then the day, the biggest thing on YouTube, the day Andrew Tate got arrested is we just posted Andrew Tate update, right? Because we, we, some. A friend of mine talked to one of his lawyers and got, you know, 40, 50,000 people just to watch it. Just because of that, then that was on YouTube. And then we had the guys who were coming in live on the zoom call. When we did that with, the rule I made was, if you're a current client, ask questions after the first hour, and if you're an advanced client, ask questions after the second hour. Because they were going to get six hours with me for the rest of the week and in private calls. And then when guys would ask questions, then the guys who were already in the program, I made them co hosts so they could unmute themselves. And a lot of times they would answer the question for me whenever somebody who wasn't part of my program would come in. So it would start off. We'd start off with the draw, then we'd go directly into Q and as. And we do Q and as for three and a half hours. And we always try to invite the skeptics near the beginning. That was another thing. I know Berkshire Hathaway. During their yearly shareholder meeting, one of the things they do is. Is they have. They have a guy come in there and explain why you should short Bursh. Burkshire Hathway. I don't know if you heard about this. They have one, at least one guy per year comes in there and explains everything that's wrong with Berkshire Hathway, right? And he gets. He gets a full hour to, like, explain that whole situation. So I do that. I try to invite skeptics to come on first. I debate them. Those usually go really viral. We usually end up making clips of those and posting them as reels and tik toks. And then afterwards, we go. We do Q and as until they're done. And like, if it's four, we've done seven hours before. For I will go seven hours until every single question is answered. And from that, then. Then all I ask is, hey, you guys just join the free school server. Once they're in our environment, then afterwards, after a while, they continually post. They've got a book list, they've got podcast episodes, they got Instagram testimonials, yada, yada, yada, and they've got a free course. Then eventually that's where we get some of our warmest leads from. From doing that. But a lot of it comes from what I've learned from watching again. You, Evan Pagan, Tai Lopez, those kind of things. Those were like, the original ideas. Those still, even though we're not. You weren't using Instagram back then. The. The same ideas of consistently getting a guy in your ecosystem for a long period of time and Developing a level of trust because after a while of seeing you talk for hours, that's another thing I found. If a guy stays in for a four hour live stream, he's. And he has the ability to buy. He's gonna buy if he stays in for four, four hours. That's a pound of flesh, man. That's a, that's a big investment. So that's another thing that I found is that like while the short form content catches people's attention, I try to make something catchy in the first three seconds of either my clips or my reels if I can get them to stay for four hours, which a lot of people with short attention spans of course won't do. But at the end of that, this is the one you're buying. Does that make sense? So that's that those are the things I found is that short firm will help in this way keeping people's attention help you go viral. But long form will actually get them to invest in what you're doing a little bit more.

Yeah, I love it. Actually I'd love to interview you on my platform about that energy because that's, that's a new strategy that I haven't heard of before. But it sounds very sharp and effective.

Well, a lot of people don't like to do it because most people don't want to get into debates with their enemies on, live on a YouTube stream. Right. But that, those are the things that go viral. Those are the things that end up that I'm going viral. Can I talk to you, ask you about the cells? So VSL is something that I was mildly understood. We made one that worked out really well for us for my Men of Action mentoring program. And do you, were you the originator or of it or did you, how did you use VSLs, you know, back in like 06 07?

No. John Benson was the creator of it.

Okay.

And he shared it with me, but he was the original creator.

And what can you describe for the audience? Let's just say people who don't understand what is a VSL as opposed to an advertisement. Like why. What is the thing that works? The. The first one for me that I found to me most effective was Alex Becker. His was the one that, that caught my attention the most. And then also the most famous, maybe not video sales letter but advertisement that led to a VSL was that I remember is the one for 67 steps with Tai Lopez where he ends up spending like $19 million on an advertisement was like, hey, here we are in my garage. You know, what you need is this Lamborghini. What you actually need is knowledge. Which led to a, a VSL, a 90 minute VSL that he had on his website.

Yeah, so the, the when video sales letters first were like kind of came on the scenes. They were just black text on a white PowerPoint with that was narrated by, you know, whomever. Right. So you had audio and you had video and that was kind of it. And it worked and it worked well. When we first started using it, we saw like a 400 increase in conversion in the US, 300% increase in France, 250% in Germany and pretty much 250% worldwide. And that, that format really was the reason it worked was that you were taking back kind of control of the sales presentation. People couldn't like, you know, skip forward. And it was novel and new so it got attention. So people, you know, if you had like a good hook up front, you could suck people in. And over time of course VSLs have gotten more difficult, more complicated, more resources to produce them. So nowadays, like, you know, to take it to the nth degree, you have companies like mindvalley who, who've used video sales letters written by Peter Kell that are shot not just a black text on white PowerPoint but shot like a documentary. And instead of getting people to go off a platform and watch it, the whole thing just sits on YouTube. And so they're paying to run eyeballs to it, but they don't have to have anyone leave the platform so they watch the whole documentary. It still ends with a pitch and an offer. And the, the order form can be found in the description link. And so that works really well. But it's been an evolution over time as far as what has been effective. But the one that I remember probably the most successful campaign with a video sales letter that I've been involved with was one called the End of America. It was for Agora that sold a $97 a year newsletter. And it was so effective. I mean the whole campaign was probably worth about $1 billion when you include back ends into it. And it was so effective that we were running at break even, running 30 second ads on Fox News and bringing people over to a 70 minute VSL. And it was still break even or better even selling just a 97 product.

Can you, can you go over this? So one of the things I noticed, at least this is what I saw with Alex Becker and this is what I did with mine is you can't skip forward in the sales letter. That doesn't for a lot of people, they might not grasp why that's so such a big deal. Even with people with short attention spans. I find myself watching a 10 minute YouTube video and still skipping forward, right? And you see people will put chapters in the YouTube video and people will still skip forward. In your VSL, do you not allow the user the ability to skip Forward? And is 70 minutes kind of a key point? Because ours is 90, I've seen or not ours is not 90, ours is like 27 minutes. But I've seen different links. Is there a, a best link for a vsl? Do you get. What I'm saying is, do you get more investment the longer it goes? And that is there a trick to like not letting people skip forward?

Well, yeah, so it really I think depends on the niche, right? Like as far as length of time and how long can you be interesting. But because it's not just about like extending time, but you know, there used to be something that a lot of us used and they're called, it's called video analytics, but it's not analytics about a video. It's actually video analytics on a web page. And there are companies like Lucky Orange and back in the old days, like a company called clicktail and what it allowed you to do was like look at videos of people on your pages, right? So there was a little JavaScript that you'd put on the pages and then it would actually create screen videos of people like you know, surfing your website. And when you did that, you would see very quickly that when someone hit like a sales page, they very often would read the headline, scroll down, maybe stop at a testimonial or two, but generally scroll all the way down, look at price, look at like what's included, then scroll back up. And so you weren't really in control of the sales message. And so what a video sales letter allowed you to do was take back control of the sales sales message by putting in the proper sequence and exposing what you wanted to be exposed to the consumer each step as opposed to them taking control, looking at the price, going backwards and stuff. And so in general, no, we don't allow people to, we don't allow like user control on a vsl. The only time we might is if we're cooking people. We can have it where there are sliders and controllers when they come back a second time so they don't have to watch, you know, they don't have to watch the whole thing over again or we might have it pick up where they left off. Or giving them the option of that.

Yeah, just the option to pause. I've seen that before. But yeah, it's just a really interesting idea because that's what got me. It was. I was watching a vsl and I remember thinking, like, no, I want to skip forward. I want to see, like, what the thing is. And because I couldn't, I sat there for 45 minutes watching this whole thing and became more and more interested. And I was like, man, this is a really. Like, this is. It's kind of a high risk, high reward, but if you get to the end, I think the likelihood of somebody buying is much higher. You mentioned your first sales letter made $287,000. I think a lot of people be interested in that. Can you go over what happened there?

Well, that was actually. So, you know, my first business was in the fashion and music business. And then after that, I took like about a year and a half off, two years off, kind of semi retired. Not that I had made all the money I was planning on making. I was in my 20s, but I had made enough so that I could take time off and figure out what was next. And I then read an article in timeout magazine, and in timeout magazine, there was an article about a hypnotist in New York. That's where I used to live in New York City. And so I was curious. Never been hypnotized before. And so I decided to make an appointment, got hypnotized, and turns out I'm highly hypnotizable. So it was pretty profound for me. And then I started studying hypnosis and then very quickly decided that that was going to be my next business. So I opened up a hypnosis center in Manhattan that grew to a chain of hypnosis centers ultimately. But that was what really kind of turned me on to direct response advertising. Because back in the fashion and music business, it was much more slick and much more image style than it was direct response. And so in the hypnosis business, can.

You explain to the audience real quick.

What you mean by direct response advertising? That is designed to elicit a response, like right then and there, push a.

Button, swipe up something like that, or.

Make a phone call or do something. Right. As opposed to just like reminding people that your brand exists and that you exist. Right. And so I was very familiar with the latter, but not so much the former until I got into the business of the hypnosis business, where we were running ads and we were trying to get the phone to ring. And what I Found was is that the more I like the ad, the worse it did. The cheesier the ad, the better it did.

That funny. And that's funny how that work because I'm finding the same. Exact same thing.

Yeah, yeah. And so that's what really turned me on to direct response. And so while I had my hypnosis centers because like, you know, within a period of like four years, we grew from like zero to about 13 and a half million. We had 60 full time hypnotists on staff. I ended up hiring a lot of the direct response legends, you could call them, like people like Gary Halpert and Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy. And then after 9 11, my hypnosis business kind of took a hit and I decided that I wanted to get out of the hypnosis business and potentially go online because I had now kind of gotten the direct response bug. And the best place for direct response is online because pretty much it's, you know, most of the advertising you see online is direct response. And so when I was leaving the hypnosis world, I decided that I would sell to other hypnosis centers everything that I had learned over the four years of building the most successful hypnosis business that ever existed. And so I went to a copywriting seminar by Dan Kennedy. And that was interesting to me because of all the advertising that we were doing at the hypnosis centers. And at that event I met John Carlton and bought his course. Later on, became friends with him, et cetera. But during that time I read his course and used his course to help me write my very first sales letter. And my very first sales letter was for this $10,000 information product on all the secrets that I had learned that had helped me go from 0 to 13 and a half million in my hypnosis centers over a four year period of time. There were only 35 hypnosis centers in the world at that time. I sent each of them a FedEx of the sales letter and gave them one week to respond. And we sold 28 of the 35. So that was my very first experience in writing a sales letter. Nice.

What, what do you think? Were you ahead of your time? Was there something specific? What can people take from this? Because I know a lot of copywriters. Watch this. What is something that you can, people can take? What was the reason why that one did so well?

Well, you know, it did really well because the people that received the letter knew that I was the most successful person in hypnosis. So, you know, anyone can kind of Think about like, if the most successful person in your industry decides to leave the industry and is going to like, create a set of like manuals, instructions, et cetera, of everything that they learned over that period of time to let them be the most successful. You know, that's kind of what it was. The, you know, as a. I was very happy, obviously that I sold like, you know, 87% of the people or whatever the number would be. But what I would say now as someone much older and wiser, is that all that tells me is that I didn't charge enough, that I probably been much more expensive because you don't really want an 87% conversion rate. But it was much more the dynamics of what my rep was and what I had achieved in that industry. It was a good sales letter too. I think it was kind of hyperbolic, but. But it was much more who I was than what the letter was, if that makes sense.

How. What year was this? And then how again, how were you distributing the letter? Is this all just email blast? What were you doing back then?

No, no, this was, this was in 2001 and it was sent by FedEx. So it's like a 35 page.

Oh, this is. We're talking IRL, like an actual letter.

Okay.

I didn't understand that.

And the return Reply was a FedEx or they could fax back the order page. And I wasn't going to create it unless I got enough orders. And I only got one order the first six days. And on the seventh day, I got 27 more people faxing me back orders.

Incredible. Can you talk about. You also had a program, the Copywriting Secrets with Dan Kennedy. Can you talk about what are again, a lot of people? We, we had a Dave Parada on here and he made a living for a longest time before he became a dating coach as a copywriter. Also, what are the secrets to copywriting? And also the emails not getting into a spam folder. What. What are some of the things that you learned from that program?

Oh, well, you know, when it comes to copywriting, it's a lifelong endeavor. Right. There are lots of little tricks that we could kind of talk about, but at the end of the day, it's about understanding why people buy and being able to write like you talk as a one on one conversation, kind of moving the sale forward. And I think that's kind of the start of it. Obviously, there's a lot to learn when it comes to copy, and it would be hard for me to know what to focus on right now. That would provide the most amount of value for people. Except that if you understand who you're writing to, it becomes a lot easier. And all copywriting should be thought of as a one to one conversation, even if it's one to many. What was the second part that you asked me?

You were talking about emails, not getting into spam folders. And like, what were some of the. Because I'm gonna get, I'm getting later into, like, what inspires you? But like, what, what were some of the tricks? What were some of the things, the keys that came out of that program.

Oh, so there's many different ways that you can do that. You know, the. I have a program that I. A subscription service that I have that's kind of our core product. It's called Steal Our Winners, which is we publish twice a week strategies and tactics that are currently crushing it that most people don't know about yet. And we've done a couple on email deliverability. Probably the most effective strategy that I've seen is one that was shared with me by Fernando Cruz, who was one of the best marketers at Agora. And he ran a division, he ran marketing of a division called Legacy, which is a division of Stansberry. And he helped that division go from about 100 million to 400 million in a period of about two and a half years, and credited this email delivery ability strategy as being primary to his ability to achieve that kind of liftoff in the company. And what they did was they segmented by behavior. So anyone that opened the email in the last 10 days was in segment one. Anyone who opened an email within 10 to 20 days was segment two. Anybody that opened an email 20 to 30 days was segment three. Anyone third? 30 to 40 days, segment four. Right. And every day, the people that were the most responsive, the people that had opened in the last 10 days, they would get their emails first, then segment two would get their emails, segment three would get their emails, et cetera. And the frequency was different for each segment. So segment one might get two emails a day, segment two might get one email a day, segment three might get one email every three days, and so on and so forth. And what the whole logic behind that is understanding that every email that you send through an isp, you know, an Internet service provider and an esp, anytime it's not opened is kind of a ding against you.

Ah, okay.

And that you have a reputation. And so it's like, you know, if you and I are friends and I'm emailing you, I can put and you open my emails. I could send every spam word on the planet in an email to you and it would still get delivered because I have a reputation with your ESP about you and it knows that you open my emails. So the segmenting by behavior whether someone has opened or not and recognizing that each day you get a chance to reset your like reputation each day and then acting accordingly makes a big difference over time.

I'm just curious, I'm gonna skip around here. Do you do anything with Instagram DMs or Facebook DMs or do you do any kind idea marketing like that Twitter and TikTok. You can't really do that unless both people are following each other. But the reason I'm just bringing up Facebook and Instagram because you can.

I'm very familiar with the business models that use that. I don't personally use it because like we don't have like a high ticket coaching program that we're trying to sell people to. So like I coach but you know, people generally find me and you know, it's the opposite. There's no high pitch or anything like that. I have to be actually sold on coaching the person. But we. I'm very familiar with the models, if you had a question about it.

Yeah. So one of the things.

Go ahead.

One of the things I've noticed is so like whenever we want to. That is one of the things I teach in my program not only to like get clients but also for like we. I have the guest list for the Maxim parties. I used to have one for the Playboy Mansion and I do one. I do several big events in Los Angeles. So we have to invite influencers and these are females who get thousands of messages every day. And so how do we get so in in on Instagram it's primary general and, and request, there's what's called the request folder. And then inside the request folder there's also hidden requests. And those have to do with like certain spammy words like you said before. Right. The majority of messages I'll get that are in that spam folder are here's for $10,000 you can buy X number of followers and X number of engagement. It's these clips, click farm scams that are usually out in either Indonesia, India, Brazil, places like that or people that have like Cyrillic or Arabic names on there. Those are the people where the click farms come from. You'll see a bunch of those and those get into the hidden request folder. And I teach guys how to get out of the request folder. So What I do is if you build an Instagram that's just cool enough, you don't have to have a ton of followers. But if you build one, that's where when people, they'll see your message in their quest folder, then they'll go look at your Instagram and see whether or not you're verifiable, like you sell the thing you actually selling. So for me, I host the two biggest bikini competitions in the world. When I recruit girls, one of the first things that they're going to go and see is that there's photos of the previous competitions and the girls in those photos liked those photos. That's a huge. Again, the fact that say, Dan Bian, Tai Lopez, Paris Hilton, you know those guys, those people follow me, they'll see that on my Instagram, they'll see that those people follow me and then they're more likely to follow me. That's something that's been huge as far as our marketing on Instagram is concerned. And then the other thing is, if two people follow each other, then it does, it skips the request folder. Also, if I can get those people to follow me initially and I message them, it doesn't go into the request or it'll go into the request folder, but it won't go into the hidden request folder. And so the, the thing is, what we want initially on our IG DMS is just one response because once it's seen, it says the word seen, then it's out of the request folder and it's in into primary. And that's all we want is to get into primary. And what we found is because a lot of the people we're competing against are either scam click farm people or like club promoters who are just mass messaging people. We, they can't mass text people because it goes into the request folder. And what we want is just one open thread. That's what we teach people on on Facebook and what we teach people on Instagram. We just want one open thread. So what we'll do is we'll offer them something like girls like, do you want to walk the red carpet for the Maxim party? Which is something I could do because I have the guest list for that. Or do you want to come walk the red carpet for babies in Toyland? Or do you want to come to this animal rescue charity or something like that? We just want one open thread so that when we go back later we can message a th000 or 2000 people and we don't get Instagram will Stop you, for those of you don't know, if you start messaging people once you get, you'll get 50 free the first hour and then afterwards it'll drop down to like eight an hour. These are people who are not following you. Once you message more than eight an hour, it stops. So this is the reason why you'll see these click farms will have multiple different accounts, thousands of accounts messaging thousands of people. And you'll look at the account and it's got like four followers. That's where you're, that's where those things are coming from. And so what we do instead is what I teach my clients is you have an Instagram where all your photos are flawless. Like they have to look. We go over exactly how they're supposed to look. You have stories with highlights up at the top. And then certain, it doesn't matter that a lot of people are following you, but certain influential people are following you. Does that make sense? Like, I'll give you an example. Andrew Tate has an account up right now. I'm not going to say which one it is, but I know it's his real account because certain influential people are following the account and so I know this is his burner. Does that make sense? So like for me, I know. And then for me, people know that my account is real because like I said, certain influencers follow me on the account. So that when I message you and you go and you see that message, oh, this is the real rich chef, okay? And I know this because Cole Gordon's following him and then all these other people that he mentioned before, Dan Kennedy's accounts following, etc, I'm just throwing out different examples that social proof now allows me to get away from the email spam folder. This would be the analogy for the email spam folder. And so it's a similar technique where is if I can build enough credibility with my Instagram account and Instagram sees that I'm consistently getting responses back that I'm not sending out spam, then I'm less likely to get put in in the hidden request folder. This is something we teach that we kind of learn from the email spam. Avoiding email spam marketing.

I'm talking to, I spoke to a company last week, I'm talking to the CEO next week. But it might be somewhat game changer for even for what you do. The name of the company is Wisp IO W H I S P IO and what they have is QR codes that will, when someone takes a picture of it instead of it, just like Going to a web page. Right. It, you can set it up so that it opens up either text message and actually like populates a text message like please send me xxx or into a dm. So like in other words, they are direct messaging you automatically just from, you know, taking a picture of that QR code. So it's an intelligent QR code as opposed to the current, which are kind of dumb.

Yeah.

And instead of that, if they're using their phone to take the picture, you get their name, their email address, their, you know, their home mailing address and everything else.

I want to ask you about the, the three different pillars that I'm working with with my company, which is organic, paid and affiliate. Do you have any experience? I haven't heard you talk really about affiliate marketing. Is, is that anything? I know you've had Russell Brunson, obviously with click funnels. I haven't heard you specifically talk about it. What is, what is, do you have a current strategy when it comes to affiliates?

Well, we, you know, we've done affiliate marketing for 20 years. You know, what I try and do in general is give my, you know, it kind of depends on the type of affiliates you're working with and things like that. But the, our primary affiliate base are not just full time affiliate marketers, but generally people that have a brand themselves and have a following. And when it comes to working with people like that, and we work with a lot of people like that, the goal is to give them something that they can give their people that's high value, that helps their relationship with their followers, that brings people to us where we can take care of most of the selling. And so early on it was my free reports. Those reports were very high quality. There was no pitch in the reports. And it was like, look, if you put this report in someone's hand and they become a customer of mine, then you will make thousands of dollars. And so that helped populate it. And one of the reasons why it was downloaded millions and millions of times. The, you know, even in my current like Steal our Winners. The contributors to Steal our Winners. And we have over 200 of them. When they want to share an episode with their followers, there are many different ways that they can do it. They could share for free, they can charge for it, they can do all these different things and it's all about what's going to make the affiliate happy, what's going to make the contributor happy. So it's recognizing that they have something of value traffic and that they might have spent a lot of time kind of pulling together a, you know, a group of people and we want them to be able to make money from that group through us. But we also want to enhance their relationship with those people if we can, as opposed to just asking them to sell our shit. Yeah.

So we have people that we, that, that do shout outs for us, like influencers that'll do something like that. And there's companies that literally go and find people that do shout outs. What we do, the, the affiliated marketing that I'm seeing that's working, that's a little different. And it's not necessarily just affiliate marketing, but it's this concept of you create a bunch of content through YouTube, on podcasts, etc, and then there's other channels out there and the channel. So I have probably 20 or 30 of them doing them right now. One of them's like MOA Podcast one's Perspective Cassidy. Now another one's like Michael Sartain fans etc and what they'll do is they'll clip my content. We give them. So they sign up to be an affiliate. When they sign up to be an affiliate, it's first name, last name, email and then It's a, a PayPal code so we can pay them immediately. Then it goes, it goes. They get access to a hard drive. The hard drive is the hard copies of every single one of my podcast episodes and a bunch of previous clips. Then they get to make those clips and put them on Tick Tock. They put them on YouTube and they put them on Instagram and then they make their own. So you'll see Moa podcast will be on YouTube, it'll be on Instagram and it'll be on Tick Tock. And what they'll do is the affiliate code that they have goes in the link in bio and then when they sell one of my courses then they get paid 10, 20, whatever the affiliate code is. The only problem that we've come up against is that we don't have a low ticket offer. And that works better with a low ticket offer. But in the interim what happens is I went from 600000 views on tick Tock to the last month I got 39 million views views because of all the different people that are using that hashtag Michael Sartain. And they're, they're also creating different affiliate accounts for me. And the same thing happened with me on, on YouTube where it was initially, you know, it was, it went from like 2 million to 6 million impressions where people. So two things are happening. They're making money from selling my product and they're actually building the brand and they're being commissioned, they're paid a commission to help me build my brand on those different platforms. And so what'll happen is there'll be 15 different rich chef, you know, accounts. So one of them is Rich Chef Podcast, you know, next one is Steal our Winners. That'll be like, it'll just be a bunch of different ones. And they're. And it's. By the way, it's not only your content. They'll like one person. Now the reason why I love it is because it's. They'll show Adam Sosnik's content and Patrick B. David's content and Lex Friedman's content, all this kind of stuff. And then they'll throw mine in as like one out of every six ones. But the affiliate code goes back to my program and then they'll make money off that. So they're getting paid to post content on there. Here's the other thing. Here's the other reason why it works. So this is. We stole this idea obviously from Andrew Tate, Hustle University. And the, what they were doing with, with their whole thing was not only would you build, would you build his brand by doing that and actually make money selling? I think they were giving away 50% commissions if you sold one of his subscriptions to Hustle University. And right now they're doing it with another program called Real World IO. But the other thing you get is in the end you'd have a tick tock channel with a hundred thousand followers on it. You'd have a YouTube page with a hundred thou. Then they'd sell the page. They'd go on the market and now because they got paid for the affiliate stuff, then they'd go sell the page and start a new page and then they'd sell that page because that content was so viral. Where a lot of people getting started on YouTube is hard. If you got on YouTube and you just. All you did was post my. And I give people permission to do this. All you do is post my most viral content on your YouTube page. Your YouTube page. You're going to get a thousand subs pretty quickly. That's hard to do for a lot of people starting off. So a lot of people do that. Another strategy I've seen is people do that with meme pages is too. They'll make a meme page, they'll get it up to 10, 20,000 followers and then they'll sell it to somebody, something like that. So that's what we've seen work as far as affiliates instead of shoutouts is we having a thousand different affiliates. And a lot of these people, real talk, they're just guys from who live in Romania, live in Ukraine, people who live in Nigeria, people who live in Nepal. They will sit there, they have just Internet access and all they do is just post clips and they'll do their own editing. They'll post clips, clips after clips. And the clips, a couple of them will get 100 views, 100 views, 100 views. Then they'll get one with a 500,000. It's crazy. They'll get one that'll just go viral. The channel will grow and then they'll start making money off that. So that's what we've seen as far as affiliates have worked for us. Most recently using social media as affiliates.

I'm familiar with that strategy but I didn't know anyone that was using it. So that's fascinating to me.

Yeah, a lot of guys on what they'll do is on YouTube just to grow their channel is they'll hire, they won't be affiliates. It's a similar concept. But you'll get one guy in Nigeria and he'll make 10 other YouTube channels and all the YouTube channels feedback to the main one. That's what Pearl Davis did, how she got to a million 5 subs. And then you'll see that also with people who have coaching programs again, Justin Waller is another example. Sterling Cooper's another example. I do this, there's a couple other people that are doing this. So you build a brand online and then you have a bunch of of these other smaller accounts feed into your brand and also get paid at the same time. But what's helpful to do that is a 50 to 100 program that'll work because you want to be able to sell to the guy in Brazil and the guy in India. You can't just, it can't just be upper middle class North Americans and Europeans. That's great for a high ticket program, but it doesn't necessarily work when you're selling to somebody in Rio or somebody who lives in Mexico City. So that, that's the issue that we've seen there. I want to ask you about building a brand. Is that something you've seen recently become helpful? Think about David d' Angelo and Evan Pagan. Think about Tai Lopez. Think about what Alex Hero has done recently, which is one of the best stories I've seen is what Alex Horosi's done where he's written an incredible book and now he's become a social media influencer. Is that a strategy that you've seen work really well recently?

I've seen it work well for the last 20, 30 years, yeah. You know, it's, it's nothing that new, but it certainly is something that has worked, continues to work, and will continue to work. Did you have a specific question?

Yeah. Do you have, do you have any strategies right now as far as doing that? I know after Cole did my podcast, now he's getting into more of like a brand building for Cole Gordon for his thing. And you mentioned before about doing a bunch of other people's podcasts in order to build a brand. Do you have any current strategies that you see now for people if they want to build a brand, become a subject matter, expertise and, and have their face all over the Internet?

Yeah, well, I, you know, so after I wrote the attention age doctrine 1 and 2, the next report I wrote was called the Maven Manifesto, which I co wrote with Jay Abraham. And in that report, Jay and I kind of compared notes because I've been behind more successful online gurus than anyone else, and Jay's been behind more offline gurus than anyone else. And so we recognize that based on social media and based on conversations becoming two way, that there was going to be more and more information in every niche and field and that in every market they were going to be looking for authorities, and that through authorities, it's generally easier to build a brand off of a personality than build a brand just clean and so lots of advice, information and strategies in there and it's free and people can still find it. The Maven Manifesto that about what's required to build a personality that you can then build a brand off of.

It just seems so much easier, like, because you have like this embedded trust if people just watch your stuff on a regular basis or there's this fame economy, there's this weird authority that you give to people who might not have any idea what they're talking about, but because you've seen their face so many times, it just seems way easier to sell a brand. I have a couple of friends of mine are huge social media influencers. They're doing it the opposite way. They've already built a brand and now they're getting into coaching, right? They're already, they've, they've already built a brand. I have a buddy of mine's got 30 million followers on Instagram now. He's doing a coaching program. And so, and I think what the reason why a lot of those big Influencers are getting into this again. I'm going to bring him up again is because what you saw with Hustle University and in the war room, they're above, they're. They were doing 20 million a month in revenue at one point and that, that because when they saw there was so much out there, basically you're using your fame in order to go into a high ticket offer. There's just so much money to be made in that whole situation. Whereas what you'll see a lot of times is you see YouTubers and TikTokers and people, people like that, they're just getting paid off AdSense and that's not enough money. AdSense is. It is really hard to make a living doing that.

Sure, yeah. And the, Yeah, I mean certainly as the Internet's grown the numbers have gotten even bigger and bigger. What I would say also though is that I've seen a lot of people come and go over the last 20 some odd years. And you know, there are people that play the longer game and then there are people that play the shorter game. So you know, you can kind of get a sense of who's still around and who's not.

Yeah, I've definitely seen this also as people who've become very successful in some industry. So let's say real estate or solar or made it big in NFTs or crypto or something like that. And then they try to buy a brand and then I can tell very quickly because what'll happen is they'll, they'll have a million followers on Instagram and then I'll go check their social blade and I can, I can see the day they bought them all. And then they'll have like 10 comments with four 40,000 likes, something like that. You'll see that on YouTube or they'll do an interview on YouTube on someone else's channel and get 22 views, something like that where you can just tell that they bought their, their thing. I've seen this happen a lot where, because building a brand like you have again going back to my friend who has a huge following, he wants to sell a coaching program and one of the things I explained to him was it's not just going to be your fame. You're going to have to do like you said before, free reports, ebooks, you're going to have to do tons of, of interviews and move the free line in order for you to, to make that whole thing work. We talked about affiliate, we talked about organic. Building a brand paid is the other thing I want to Ask you about specifically, you had made some inferences before how things were getting more difficult on Facebook and easier on YouTube. Is that still the way you, you see things.

For paid? Yeah, like. Well, I would say that I know people that are crushing it on, on every platform and it's just about the strategies that you use on those platforms.

And the strategies that the platforms will allow you to use. That's another thing we found out the hard way.

Yeah, yeah. But like you know, for Facebook in general, which a lot of people don't do, but the people that I know that do do this tend to have superior results is high production value like for the top of the funnel, which is really not designed to make a sale at all. It's just to get like 40% of the people to stop scrolling and watch 25% of a three to five minute video and then they get put into a, a segment and then in that segment is where all the ads are actually running. And I've seen it done in bigger companies and in small companies and that generally is the, the strategy that works best for Facebook right now for most companies and for YouTube it all depends on what your goals are. But the best that I know like really to get going is to do in feed ads first and then when you get something working then go to in stream ads because it's much more scalable with in stream and you know, but every platform has its own, own kind of nuances. Long term the platforms are trying to get rid of those so that at the end of the day like you don't really have a strong advantage by having a media buyer. But right now you still do. And I would say it's within a period of a couple more years. The platforms will be so good that you'll be very limited in the options, but they'll be much better at figuring out where your audience is.

What I, what I saw was with Facebook marketing, you, I think you brought this up before there were rules before and after Zuckerberg went in front of the senate and before you could be very specific. I remember at one point I could, I could market to like a one square mile area.

Right.

Just men that made over this amount of money and it was unbelievable. Like the way that would work now, it's not quite as good. There's also certain words you have to stay away from. Facebook's actually a little bit more lax than YouTube. We. So for instance, you can't say the word if you say the word crypto and any kind of ad you're doing On Facebook you're going to get taken down. Also dating is another big one. So you'll notice with my ads it's, there's a bunch of, there's always me at parties, there's a bunch of beautiful women in the ads, but the women are touching me. I never touch them. There's never the word dating or relationship anywhere in it. It's called high status networking. And those ads, we've been doing 26 to 1 ROI on those, those have been absolutely phenomenal. That's one of the reasons why Cole Gordon had me out there was he, he loved the ad that we did. We try to do the same ad on YouTube. Doesn't even get approved. No. You can't have attractive women running around there. Nothing, anything like that. Much, much more sanitized version of the same ad we have to do on YouTube. We get 30% ROI on YouTube. So. And also the, the niche that we can niche down on YouTube is much less than we can on using Facebook ads. The other thing is I have a friend of mine, Mike Rashid, who was just on here recently. He sells what's it called, meal prep product. And so it's not, not high ticket, right. Medium ticket, the 80 shopping cart kind of thing. And so for him, he was what he, it was working for him on, on Tick Tock. I have found Tick Tock leads to be horrific, like terrible. Like it is absolutely the most unqualified leads we've ever seen. Whenever we spend money on there, we're still doing it. But I think the, the issue is you have to have the right offer, it has to appeal to a very young, low attention span audience and it cannot be a high ticket offer. That's what we've seen as far as Tick Tock ads are concerned. So it's, it's like it's. Whereas one Tick Tock you're going to get the most growth, you're going to have like the least qualified leads and then is Facebook. You're going to have the hardest time growing, but you're going to have the most qualified leads. That's, that's just what I've seen so far in, in doing this for like.

The last couple years I've seen quite a few people make High Ticket work well on TikTok.

Yeah.

Primarily on the organic side, more so than on the paid side, you mean.

So, so they just have a brand that's built up, they have a ton of followers and they're selling a program that way or a product.

They're building a brand and yeah, you know. Yeah, but not you brand to start. Not at all.

Yeah. Also, have you, have you had any experience with like live streaming versus recorded content? Live streaming?

Sure.

Yeah. Can you, can you go into that?

Well, I mean I think I mentioned earlier, like we were the first to live stream from a live event and the first to live stream we used at and T back then. And like to live stream from a live event we had to snake ISDM lines throughout the hotel and had satellite trucks out front. That was in 2007 and that was fun. Then in 2008 in September, I did a 24 hour live stream and it was the most attended live stream on that day. Beat John McCain, beat Vaynerchuk, beat everyone else that day. And that was fun. And it was me sitting at my desk for 24 hours answering people's questions. We used USTREAM back then. I then in 2008 taught a course on theory of constraints and that was live streamed. It was 30 days and I taught it live. And then in 2019 to launch or 2020 to launch the Steal our winners, the one of our core programs today I did another 24 hour live stream. Where from? From Delray beach where everyone flew here. So Wes Watson flew in, Russell flew in, Ryan flew, Ryan Dice flew in, Roland Frazier flew in. You know, lots of big names from the Internet space and I did a half an hour with each person. We had 48 total guests and we did a 24 hour live stream. And and so I love doing live streams. You know, I'm taking a break from doing them right now because my team just didn't want me being as accessible publicly. But I'm a huge fan of them and I would love to do them more frequently because I find that I'm better at doing them than pre recorded and it's more easily attended. And when Covid first began, I did a lot of Facebook lives because Facebook was pushing it at that moment. And so it gave us a much larger audience than what it would normally give. And then that segment became our best performing segment to advertise to.

You know what I found is that when one social media platform is threatened by something, then they're going to do something to respond. And if you go with that flow, they will reward you.

So Twitch, where they're pushing. Yes, Then you're always going to do better.

Twitch. Now if you notice there's a bunch of streamers that have moved from Twitch over to Facebook because Facebook lets you say cuss words. Twitch will remove you for any kind of content that's lascivious. Or any kind of like extreme like profanity or if you say anything that's crazy, this is the reason why you'll see Sneako Zirka. Like guys like that, they've been kicked off of Twitch and now they go to different platforms. Kick. I can't remember what some of the other ones were called, but one of the things was because Twitch was a threat to Facebook, you'll see that if you started streaming on Facebook that they would give you more attention. Additionally, Rumble has now come out as a counter for live streams on YouTube. And so now what I found is that my live streams will consistently, let's just say a regular video gets 3k views live. My live streams will get 30k and it's just, it's very clear to me that I'm being rewarded for doing the thing that YouTube wants me to do, which is do live streams as opposed to to do recorded content. Additionally, the other thing that I've seen is that like say, let's say Casey Neistat or Mr. Beast, right? The biggest Mr. Beast, right. I have 126 million views. A video, something crazy like that spends 50, 60 grand. 100 grand producing a single video. For him to produce a 10 minute video may cost $60,000, but for you and I to do a four hour live stream, even though it's four hours, it's so much less work because there's no editing at the end. One of the things I hated at the end was the editing, taking out a bunch of words, whatever. And it seems like YouTube understands if you blur it out, you say something weird, they're not going to punish you as much on the live stream. So I found the live stream is not only more effective, you get more engagement, but it's also easier in the end to produce. So that's why I've been trying to do more and more. And then you have like channels like Fresh and Fit where they do three three hour live streams at night, Monday, Wednesday, Friday and then they do two live hour. They do, they do Money Mondays and then they do this other one on Friday. They do two ones during the day and then they live stream this thing called Fed it which is where he goes over like serial killers and stuff like that and these. So he's doing six two to three hour live streams a week. And the channel grew to 1.5 million subs just doing that. They almost do no, no pre recorded stuff. And then they have several clips channels. The clips channels are 10 minute clips and the clip channels feeds, all feeds back into the main channel. That's what I've seen work so far.

Yeah, that's very interesting and, and sounds smart. And I wasn't aware that YouTube was pushing live stream. So that gives me another reason to start doing more live streams again.

Yeah, that's again. So I love doing Zoom calls and I love doing live streams and I've never seen anybody do both together. So I started doing. It's very risky. I will tell you. When you have a free password, like a free code to jump on a Zoom call, you're going to get guys coming on there screaming crazy words and like trying to show like adult content on your thing. So that's why you have to always control. Either you do webinar form or you control the mute. A lot of times I let my guys unmute themselves. You can't do that when you do on YouTube because you're responsible for whatever you post. So that's something we found. The only limitation I will tell you is that Zoom does not zoom will go to one YouTube channel. Whereas if you just do Restream or you do Streamyard, you can do multiple YouTube channels and you can do Tick Tock and you can do Facebook and you can do Rumble at the same time. Whereas you can't really do that with YouTube. YouTube is only going to let you choose Facebook or it's going to let you choose YouTube and that's it. So that's something we're trying to work around. Whenever we try to work around it, we get frame loss. So that's the only reason why we we've been limited in that capacity. But my plan in the later on is to do zooms with 100 guys in the zoom. Everyone who is the excess Overflow goes into YouTube and they can do super chats and then we do multiple YouTube channels and we'll do Facebook and we'll do Tik Tok. I'm sorry, do Facebook and we'll do Rumble at the same time. That's the plan in the future, but we haven't been able to get to there yet.

Got it. That's fast.

Books, can you talk about books? So for me, the book that expired inspired me the most. In order to improve my offer was was 100 million dollar offer by Alex and Rosie. Can you talk about books that have inspired you? You've mentioned something and I hadn't heard of most of them and I read a ton so I was curious like what are some of the the books that have inspired you in the last 20 years. Wow.

I'm a voracious reader, so that's quite a bit, I'd say when it comes to. When it comes to marketing, I would say probably Breakthrough Advertising, which is kind of a classic, but definitely one of the best books I've ever read on marketing. A book that I really enjoyed philosophically, like, about how to live your life, the courage to be disliked, which is all based on the psychology of Alfred Adler. And for those that don't know who Alfred Adler was, he was a peer of Freud and Jung. In fact, he was the first president of the psychoanalytic community. Then Young took over. But Adler disagreed with Freud. As far as how much the past impacted your present versus how much the future impacts your present. And yeah, I'm just a huge fan of Alfred Adler. Um, let's see, there's of course, like, poor Charlie's Almanac, Seeking Wisdom. You probably heard of that.

Not the Seeking Wisdom one. The Almanac by. By Benjamin Graham. I'm sorry, by Charlie Munger.

Yeah, by Charlie Munger. But Speaking Wisdom, I think you'd really enjoy. Let me look at. For people that are interested in AI, I would say they have a new book now, and I don't remember their new book, but the previous book was Prediction Machines, which is all about how really, when you boil down computing technology, computing technology is just better arithmetic, it's more accurate, faster arithmetic. That's what computing power is. And look at all the stuff that happened based on just computing power, faster arithmetic, and really artificial intelligence, which is really kind of a misnomer. It's really machine learning at this point. Machine learning is all about prediction. So at the end of the day, it's cheaper, faster, more accurate prediction. And what's going to happen as prediction becomes cheaper, faster and more certain. More. More accurate? What are the complements of that which will raise in price, what are the similarities that will go down in price, et cetera. So that would be a good book. And let me just pull up my book notes, because that would probably be the best way to give you some other books that made a difference. For those that are into coaching, that do coaching, my favorite area of coaching is ontological coaching. And the books that really are seminal in that field, I would say, are Coaching to the Human Soul, Volume 1, 2, 3, and 4 by Alan Sealer. And let me just look at my book notes here. Hold on, let's see. I'd say since we're talking about everything that we're talking about and what your podcast is about, I Don't know if you've ever read anything about the transition that a man goes through through life. Kind of like passages but for men. There's a good book called the Seasons of a Man's Life by Daniel Levinson, which is all about like, what will you normally experience in your 20s versus your 30s, in your 30s versus your 20s, 40s, 50s, 60s, et cetera. And generally what comes up is shit that you didn't take care of in the previous decade. Let's see. I thought $100 million offers was great. I thought it was a really good book. Let's see. Yeah, it all depends on what someone's interested in because I read on a vast array of topics. Any area that's.

I do have a question. Do you consume usually PDFs, Kindle or audiobooks? Is there a way you like to read? I'm always interested in. And when people are voracious readers, like how they go through them.

Yeah. Well, so I speed read. So I read pretty fast. And so I'll read a book pretty fast, then I will read it a second time if it's worthy of it. And I will highlight. And generally when I highlight, I over highlight. Basically I am not highlighting the fat, so but I am highlighting a lot of it. And then from there those highlights will go into my Evernote. And then from there I will do something that I learned from Tiago Fort, which is called progressive summarization. And so the first time I go through a note of my Evernote, anything that I feel is important. Now the only thing that made it in there is everything I highlighted from the book. So I'm already working with, you know, a less than what I started with. When I read the note in Evernote, I will bold whatever I think is important. And then next time I come across that note, if I want to take it further, then I will look at everything I bolded and I will highlight what I feel is most important of the bolded. Now I'm left with some parts that I feel are much more important. And then generally I'll take everything that I highlighted that had been bolded and that actually goes to the top as bullet points. And if there's a lot of them, I might go through it again and bold what I think is important, then highlight what I think is most important of the bolded. And so it's this progressive. Every time I touch a note, it becomes worth more to me. And I know how many times I've touched it based on how much processing has been done on it. Then I also take the notes and that goes back as an epub into my, my iPad and it goes into two different apps. One is Quick Reader where I speed read my notes and so that I can read at 20003000 words a minute. And it goes into another app called Voice Dream D R E A M and that can read to you a PDF or ePub at about. I think the height is 700 words a minute, which you can understand if you have earphones in, but it also paces. So it's. Those are the. I have like a pretty built out process for reading just because I've been doing it for a long time. I actually did a video on it on my YouTube channel, which has always been not a like serious focus of mine, but like probably the one I have the most views on, which is still nothing crazy. I think it's like 50,000 views or something. Was my reading process before the Kindle and everything else, because I just used to actually read the book, highlight it. Then we had a guillotine in my office where we would chop the book and then scan the whole book and then everything I highlighted would be cut and pasted out by someone in the Philippines.

That's incredible.

A little bit easier now.

I've asked this question several times. That is definitely the most detailed answer I've ever gotten to that. That's brilliant. That's really great. Have you, have you. We did this one time I had an interview with Richard Reeves, who is. Richard Reeves wrote a book called Of Boys and Men and he used to be assistant for the deputy director of the Prime Minister of the UK and he, he works at, he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. And I was super excited because I'm a big fan of his, but I wasn't able to finish a book because I had like 36 hours. So artificial. We had artificial intelligence, sorry, machine learning. Go in there, read his book very quickly and give me 50 notes on his book. And it was phenomenal. Have you seen anything like this where they're going? You, you can have AI go in there and read books. The other thing is, I want, I'm gonna say it wrong. Opus, I believe is the name of the, the AI platform that basically goes, it goes into my YouTube videos. Now my YouTube videos will be two, three, four hours long and it will find 60 second clips that, that, that are most likely to go viral. And then give me those 60 second clips. Have you seen how artificial intelligence is now used to go over thousands and thousands of words or, or Hundreds and hundreds of hours of video content to get you the best stuff.

I have seen a little bit of it. But what you're saying so far sounds even better than what I've come across. I'd be really interested in finding that Opus. What is it? Do you know what their domain is?

I don't. It's actually. I learned it from Cole Gordon. Cole Gordon did a training one time. He had a conference in Scottsdale. This was the week of. What's it called? Waste Management Open. I have the Super Bowl. And he had a meeting there. And that was the first time I saw Opus. We've tried it. It's not perfect. I will tell you. They'll have, like, weird edits in there and you have to go it in and fix it after the fact. But Opus has been one help. There's another one. Otter. Otter does. I forgot what. Exactly what it does. It does something where it. Like, it'll. It'll take transcripts of everything that you say and write it down. But there's a couple of them that are pretty awesome. What. What's happened is if you. After this. When we post this video, if you go down in. In the description at the very bottom, it'll say show transcript. And you can actually copy and paste that entire transcript and put it into an AI bot. It's pretty amazing that's going on now. So YouTube is actually doing their own transcripts for every video. So it's really easy for you to search stuff now.

Yeah. The. You know, I've used a few tools like video. Video AI that.

I think that was one of the ones I heard from Cole Gordon's team also. Yeah.

Yeah. But I haven't seen any that are that great yet that do as good of a job as I'd like to see. Not as good as an editor could actually do as far as picking the right pieces. So. But it's getting better all the time.

Yeah.

And, you know, so it's. I think it's just a matter of time. We also use a tool. Hey Gen. That creates a digital avatar of me and my team can just actually create videos on the fly, which is kind of cool. And, well, you talk about like a.

Deep fake thing where it's like it's a. It's a digital avatar. Like it's actually you that looks like you talking. Because I know Hormozi was talking about this.

Yeah.

Yeah. I would love. I would love to see someone. So we're talking about doing that with my team. So what happens is whenever we have my closers will hit me. Up they go, Michael, I need you to make a video for this guy. His name is Kyle. He's having problems with this and he's. He lives here and he wants to do this. And I just take out my camera and I just make the videos on loom as fast as I can. And, and, and people are telling me that they're actually. We're getting to the point where my sales guys can actually just write a script and it's my face saying the. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah. Yeah.

You've been able to do that? That sounds like. I haven't seen those yet. I've. I've seen the deep fake, the funny deep fakes of like Tucker Carlson and. And Donald Trump. I've seen those. But. But I haven't seen it where individuals are doing this yet.

Yeah, let me. I'll show you a few things. Actually. The. We. So we did a deep fake. It's actually, it's on my YouTube channel. But we did it years ago. Right. And I think. But we used. What do you call it? Let's see. Hold on. We used. We created it ourselves. You know, we didn't use software back then. Let's see. Let me just pull it up.

George, you gave him co host. Okay, cool. So you can screen share now.

All right, cool. Let me see. Okay, let's see. I think this should do it. Looking for. Let's see. No. Well done. I'll show you first. I'll show you the. So this is a promo that my team just made right now with the digital avatars. It's only so good. Like you can tell that it's digital. Right.

The lower jaw and the face don't match up sometimes. That's what I've seen with. With some of these.

Yeah. So this is. Let's see, like, that's not me. That's actually a digital avatar. I'll let it play for a minute and then while I find this other video. Hi, Rich Sheffrin here. Today I want to give you this box with more than 10, 500. George, you see this worth of chat? Look at this in it for free. This isn't any kind of joke, gimmick or exaggeration either. See, a few years ago, I tried something a little different to make a point about the state of online marketing at the time. The campaign was called CSIB and it featured a little box with a question mark on it, the one you can see in this video clip. It was really just an experiment, but it Worked. Thousands of people decided to trust me enough to pay for it when they had absolutely no clue what was inside of it. So, like a lot of the weird or completely counterintuitive marketing ideas I've had had over the years, people started copying it and calling it the Mystery box. But a lot of people who borrowed the mystery box idea missed the point of it. See, the CSIB campaign that this first mystery box was a part of was all about the dangerous effects of algorithms and AI if entrepreneurs didn't become knowledgeable. Wow. And start using.

This is great, man. So obviously, so a little lack of head movement, but other than that, I think this is really, like, I can. I can see that's an easy fix. But, yeah, that's pretty amazing.

I mean, we also have this. Right. Which is more standard right now, which actually, we use this on a campaign that's doing pretty well. So let me. I'll show that, you know, that's where it's really more of a cartoon character. Right. So that's. This. Let's see here. Right? Like, if you're a digital marketer or entrepreneur working online, you need to pay close attention to what this AI version of me is about to tell you, my friend. Right? So that's just more. That's taking a photo, right. And nothing more than that and then creating it as opposed to a video. And then the last one, this was. Yeah, so this was a promo campaign that was anti big tech. This was about three years ago. And I'll show you just really quickly this one, because I think you'll just get a kick out of it. Share. Oh, whoops. No whoops. I didn't share the right thing here. So hold on, let me stop that. Let me stop that chair for a second and then go here. Share. All right, cool. All right, so let's. Artificial intelligence algorithms are one of the most important, incredible things that human beings have created so far. I mean, they enable us to do amazing things like become anyone we want to be. Like Robert De Niro, for instance, a famous actor I've always admired. Taxi. The Godfather classics. Right. Or Brad Pitt. He played some really interesting roles. Fight Club, Benjamin Button. Oh, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I just watched that one. And this face. I mean, who wouldn't want to be But Brad Pitt for a day. Of course, there's Joe Rogan. So, yeah, AI and digital algorithms filter your content so that even the people that asked to see your content don't get to. I mean, check out this chart. In a nutshell, what it Amounts to is the time and energy, then I don't even have to tell you about it.

It's incredible, man. I'm, I'm actually worried, George, we're gonna get copyright strikes for these people looking like, like we have Joe Rogan and, and Robert De Niro on here. That's amazing, man. That's mind blowing.

Yeah, we did that a few years ago, so I'm sure the technology is even better now. But we used real machine learning and experts to kind of create it for us for that 24 hour live stream that I was telling you about. Yeah, it's fun. It's fun to do these kinds of things. I mean we certainly try to keep pushing the envelope. What we're doing right now is trying to automate as many things internally in the business as possible. Leveraging ChatGPT and things like workflowy to kind of set up multiple sets of actions that happen all automatically from very limited inputs. And each day we're capable of doing more and more. So it's only a matter of time until it gets to the nth degree where basically it's something called the liquid funnel, where the funnel is being built on the fly based on whatever it knows about the user creating the videos specifically for that user as they go through the funnel.

That's super impressive. I'm curious, what are your future plans here? Because you did. I was, you know, going through YouTube channel. You went 10 years with like not much content and recently you started doing more. What was the 10 year hiatus for? And then what is, what is there a new strategy that you have now? Now?

No, you know, I just was like, I just go in kind of spurts more than anything else. I, you know, I'm very fortunate I guess in the sense that I have achieved a lot of success when I was younger, more success than I thought I would. I still coach, but I only coach clients that I'm excited about. I do this product called Steal our Winners which kind of keeps my finger on the pulse of what's working in online marketing across the board because we have about 250 contributors to that. And recently I did an interview with a someone who has a course on YouTube called Subscriber to Sales. And in the interview with her she mentioned how important a channel manager was and that was news to me. So we just recently hired a channel manager about this past week. The goal is to ramp her up and then if she does a good job, I'll do a lot more videos as long as there's a reason to do it, I will. But there really hasn't been, it's never been integral to my success. You know, I've never been someone that really was well known by the masses. I've always been much more of a behind the scenes guy. So, you know, in general, most people that play at the higher levels in Internet marketing know who I am and that's good enough for me. It's worked well for me as far as my reputation and being able to get people on a phone call or be able to do deals. And so I've never had the need to or desire really to be overly front facing as much as like many others, I guess primarily because I just, I'm kind of an introvert and a private person for the most part. So yeah, it's just never been. My big focus is to be better known. And I guess if I was trying to build a bigger brand or a bigger business, that would probably become more important to me. But I have strategic profits here in the United States. But we also license throughout the world. So there's a strategic profits Japan, there's a strategic profits Italy, there's a strategic profit Spain, et cetera.

And.

And you know, it's just worked out well, I guess over the last 20 years.

I have some questions about just like lifestyle stuff for you doing this as long as you have. I've seen before you are heavier and you've definitely gotten in much, much better shape. You have a wife and I believe two daughters. Can you talk about. And I do you work for? So I do this show at my studio, but I also have a home studio that I work from and I do so specifically I also have a gym built into my. Where I live. I want to spend as little time with the, you know, making these decisions, going from one place to another. I'm curious from your standpoint. For me, work, life balances. I want as many things automated as possible so I can be as productive as I can and I don't have to go back and forth to work. I'm curious, do you work from home? How do you split your time with your family? Recreational time, sleep schedule, workout schedule, counting macros? Any of that stuff that, that you found to be beneficial for you for the last couple of decades?

Yeah, well, so I do as many things from home as possible. I'm trying to see if I can pull up just a picture so you can kind of get a sense of what life is like. I have a separate building where I'm in right now. Hold on, let's see and so I have like kind of the best of both worlds. I have a separate office, but I, but I'm also, basically, I can walk there. Right. So that's the, that's the beauty of it. And yeah, like I can show you. I don't know if you'll be able to see it, but let's see. Yeah. All right, share. Right, so hopefully you see this screen. So this is my house.

Wow.

Right now, like I'm, I'm up here right above the three car garage. So this is my office where I'm talking to you from now. In this three car garage is half a biohacking gym and half a library. And then this is my home. Home, but so I don't ever have to, I never have to leave my house. My assistant works right next to me here and I have three, three daughters in total. I've been with my girlfriend for the last 12 years. I got divorced about 12 years ago and so I have two daughters from my original marriage and my girlfriend had one from her original marriage. And so we have three girls together. Unfortunately or fortunately, more unfortunately. They are 22, 21 and soon to be 19. So they're all in college. So we now have like an empty nest. I, you know, I don't, I have really pretty amazing genetics. I'm very fortunate. I really don't lift weights very much, if at all. I jump rope a lot. You know, I have friends who lift weights and who work out really hard to get in muscles and I never had to work hard to gain muscles. Just like I didn't have to eat much to get fat. Like my body just wants to be bigger. So I jump rope like a motherfucker. Generally anywhere from like 5,000 jumps to 10,000 jumps a day. I do a lot of different biohacking stuff. So, you know, I start my day with something called the Superhuman Protocol, which is pemf, then it's ewat, which is exercise with oxygen and then red light. I, after I jump rope, I will generally hop in the sauna and then we have a cold plunge and then I'll go in there and I'm always playing with different biohacking tools. And generally what works best for me is very low carbs. So not completely, like, I'm not a carnivore strictly, but I've, I've just always found that my body just thrives better on fat, protein and limited carbs from, you know, unprocessed foods, you know, vegetables, fruit, etc, but not very much processed.

Sleep schedule.

I wish it was More. I wish it was more regimented. Yeah. You know, and it goes in peaks and valleys. Sometimes I'm very regimented and then I kind of break out of it. I try to be in bed before midnight and get up at six each morning. So generally I'm sleeping about six hours a day.

Yeah, I'm 45 and I six, six hours of 45 minutes is about the most. My body just like naturally wakes up after that. But for me the main rules are like I watch what I eat the last two hours before I go to bed. Like try to eat as little as possible just because I end up talking my sleep or, or the other thing is no caffeine because I, I have, I, I work in nightlife here, you know, that's about half the things I do out here in Vegas. And so I go to bed at 5am and so the, the last time I'll have caffeine is about 12:15 in the morning. That's about the last time. And I usually hit the gym around 10:30 or 11pm so my schedule is like way pushed over to the right. I also used to fly special ops in the military and we would, we would get to the airplane at 10pm so let's. I'm more of a night owl living out here in Vegas. But yeah, that's, that's, those are the things have been really helpful. I'm curious, any tr, HRT or peptides or anything like that?

Huh. Yeah, I do a ridiculous number of nootropics. Just in General. I've taken TRT for like over 20 years. I, my testosterone has been low ever since I was 20 years old. And they told me in my early 20s that I had low testosterone. It wasn't until like my 30s that I actually started, you know, HRT. And then I first started with the cream and then I tried pellets and all different types of stuff. And then eventually I went to injections on the peptide side. I take Ipamorelin, so I take that every night and yeah, so just testosterone and ipamorelin at least, you know, as far as injections. But I do take a lot of different nootropics and things like that. It's pretty, pretty comprehensive. I probably take about 150 to 200 pills a day. And my system like has a spreadsheet that she puts together every day for me.

I have a buddy of mine, we both know him, I won't say it is, but it's similar. It's 150. Like I go into his kitchen and it's like, this is insane, man. It's just so much stuff in here. Yeah, for me, man, I'm just, I'm just doing the kisspeptin, gonadal rillin and the, the TRT and then a blocker. Sometimes that's it. Those are the only things I take. But yeah, it's really interesting. I'm 45.

Yeah. So you might look into starting to take a combination of glycine and N acetylcysteine. I started taking it about three years ago because that's when the research first came out. But the research is pretty insane. My doctor shared it with me and told me I should get on it. And I, so I take, I take high dosages. I take 12 grams a day of glycine and 12 grams a day of nlcysteine. I. It's broken up into two doses over the course of the day. So six and six and six and six. But when you take that amount of those two, those two are both precursors to glutathione. And when and when you reach your mid-40s, Glutathione generally starts to plummet. But you don't want to necessarily just supplement with glutathione because your body keeps glutathione at a very specific ratio. So what you want to do is you want to give your body all the precursors for glutathione. And when you read the research, it's pretty mind boggling what it has the power to do. And so glycine and N acetylcysteine is something like if you type it in, type in glynac, and if you go to look at some of the research studies that have been on it, you'll be pretty blown away. And then just recently, what was the other one that now has all of a sudden gotten a bunch of.

Have you, have you, have you tried the BPC 15750?

I haven't. Only because I don't have any. I don't have any injuries. Yeah, I have zero injuries. Taurine is the other one. Now that they are equating with longevity. Anywhere from three to six grams a day.

Nice. Very nice. I'm gonna have to go back and watch this again and write all that down. But that's awesome. Yeah. I want to go back to the, the whole thing when we go back to marketing, because there was a couple of things. There's one thing that we do, and I was wondering, like, where you came to this same realization. Never give a price over the phone. This was something interesting. It's something I get very consistently where I get guys will message me and they'll just, they'll be like, they, they want like a two sentence summary of my product and then they want the price. And we don't give a price over the phone. And something you mentioned also. Where does that come from?

Well, you know, it's like people think they can put you in a box when, when they're asking you the price.

Yes.

And the, you know, when it's something important, generally you don't ask price. Like if you had a tumor and you needed it taken out, you wouldn't be like, well, how much is that going to cost?

Yeah.

And so, you know, we did this in our hypnosis centers. I guess that's where it became familiar. People would want to know the price and we'd be like, the price for what? The price for recession. Well, we don't do individual. That's like saying what's the price of a surgery?

Just happened, like just had that happen this week. We're like, my, they're asking my guy. I want, I want dinner with Michael Sartain. And I'm like, that's not on the menu, dude. Like, what's going on here?

Yeah, so like, you know, we can't quote you a price until we know what you want to do. What we need to do in order for you to get that result and what we're comfortable guaranteeing and based on all of that, then we'll be able to give you a price. But there is no one price fits all because everybody's different. And yeah, it's just, you know, for the same reason. Right. Like we were talking about earlier with video sales letters that we were taking back control of the sales conversation because we didn't want people to scroll all the way to the bottom, know the price and then scroll back up and now like be reading, filtering through price. Right. Same reason we don't want to give the price at the beginning either. And so that we can actually probe needs like figure out what's going to be the ideal solution. And when it's all like on the table, then we can quote price. And so the same reason a VSL works better than a sales letter is the same reason why you don't want to give price up front because then you're only appealing to people who shop price and that's generally not the best buyers.

I love that. I love that. And also you, you talked at one point about people buying multiple courses. We had, we call them Doug that's just the name we have in our. In our program. And Doug is the guy who has bought. Who can literally quote every word of Tai Lopez. Every quote that any Zig Ziglar knows Tony Robbins quotes back and forward and still lives on his mother's couch. That's Doug. And. And we meet a lot of Dougs. We have Doug. Doug has bought, you know, 50 courses before mine. And I have to stop Doug frequently. And I'm like, Doug, I don't care about these previous courses. And we're not. I'm not even going to unlock the next module until you do this, this, and this. And I try to get Doug off his ass. Have you had a situ. Similar. Similar situation because you were talking about people who just keep buying multiple courses.

Yeah. They're over educated underachievers. Right?

Yes.

The. Unfortunately right. That it. It's just a pattern that a lot of people fall into and not realizing that at least when it comes to online marketing, learning something and not using it is like buying milk and not drinking it and thinking that you can have it in a year from now. It will be ruined by a year from now. And what you learn in online marketing today will not work as good a year from now. As far as tactics now, principles never change. So there's a benefit to learning that. But you really learn by doing. And, and people who avoid the doing part never really learn. Yeah, they can quote a bunch of things, but when it's time for, you know, action, they. They really don't know what to do. And so the. What I've just tried to do is get people when I'm working with someone like that is not necessarily to fail fast, but be willing to do it wrong quickly so that we can make it an iterative process. And you know, for most of my stuff, I still do that. You know, if I'm working, it's not very often that I'm working on a webinar, but if I am working on a webinar and it's an important webinar to me, I will pick a date to do it. That is a little bit unrealistic for me. I will have the team only send it out to maybe a thousand people on our list. And that pressure will force me to get a first draft done that I can present. And we won't do a replay. We won't do anything because it's really just about forcing me into action. And, and that's always worked best for me. And I guess, like, that reminds me of like something I Learned about myself, which might be useful here. I'd say, like, yeah, these are two things. So one is that when I went through my midlife crisis, because I went through a midlife crisis when I hit 40, I'm in my mid-50s now. And, you know, I was like, I pursued these things in life and thought when I had achieved all these things, I'd be happy. But I had achieved all those things and found I wasn't really very happy. And so that left me at a little bit of a loss, because achieving more I didn't believe was going to make me any happier at that point. And so that's what kind of sparked off a midlife crisis for me. And one of the things I looked at were my goals. And for a little while I thought, well, what's the purpose of having a goal if when you achieve it, you're happy for a week or two? It seems kind of. And then you go back to normal. Maybe, like, having goals is kind of pointless. So I had no goals for a while. That didn't really work out well either. But when I thought about when I felt most alive, it really was when I was in pursuit of things. And for me, the only purpose of a goal is not necessarily the achievement of it. The only purpose of a goal is whether it gets me out of bed in the morning and gets me into action, excited about being in action, because I've got my needs already kind of covered, right? So for me, the only reason to have a goal is that it gets me going. And if it gets me going and I'm excited about it, then it's good enough. And. And if, you know. So like, when someone comes to me and says, like, I'm not really making progress towards my goals, it just sounds to me like you have the wrong goals. Because the whole purpose of a goal is to get into action, at least from my perspective. And that was something that changed for me after coming out of my midlife crisis of realizing that who I want to be is someone in pursuit. And I am most happy when I'm in pursuit. And so that's what a goal is supposed to set up for me, just a pursuit. And then I would say that I. A lot of the stuff that I taught, you know, since I was, like, the first online business coach, a lot of the stuff I taught is, like, out there all over the place in other people's programs. It's not stuff that I invented. I mean, just stuff that nobody was talking about that I started talking about. Now, a lot of people talk about. But one area that I think never really, that never really took off and other people talked about much but very important, at least in the success that I have seen, is that a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of designing their business around some mythical version of themselves, like a version of themselves that does not have the problems that they really have. And so then they're kind of forcing that they need to change in order for their business to succeed. And I think that's always problematic. The really what should be done is that if an entrepreneur has self awareness and they know what their flaws are, they should design a business where their flaws are irrelevant. Right. So you know, I tend to be kind of a procrastinator slash perfectionist and I can't like create a program like in some hotel room and be left alone. It will never be finished. But as a company that sells programs early on, like in the early 2000s, that's a problem for if we're going to run the business the way that, you know, me going and trying to create courses. So we had to figure out a different way for that business to be successful. And that's one of the reasons why I wrote the reports because the reports would always lead to a live coaching program that I was going to teach and then from there that would create a program and then from that program we would sell it ongoingly. Right. Or I've never been that money motivated. So I've always had aggressive profit sharing so that my team would be extremely money motivated. So my business would be money motivated even though the guy in charge wasn't. And so, you know, I kind of consider that like out foxing your flaws, like being very clear about what it is that would hold your business back based on your personality, based on your predilections, etc, and then designing the business so that those are irrelevant. And I think if more entrepreneurs did that, there'd probably be more successful entrepreneurs.

Incredible. Pretty generic question here. But the one I want to leave us with is the idea in 2023, if somebody's watching this and they want to get an idea, what is. Because these things change very frequently. What is working right now? What are the things that are working that maybe some people are missing is.

The. Well right now. Right. I would say that if you're in the information business, having some component piece of AI associated with whatever you're offering certainly works better than not. Right. Like I happens to be the hot topic of the moment. So I certainly would say that it the world is moving more and more. I think to people. And I don't think this is new. I think this has been going on for the last couple of years, but more and more authenticity and people. And I think that you're seeing a rise of personalities over brands personally. Other people might see it differently than that, but I think we're more and more and in an age of personalities than we are brands. Right. And you can see that by a single personality taking out a whole brand. Right. Like, right. Or something like that. It was an individual that like made a whole brand disappear or have problems. So I think we're more in an era of personality than brand personally. But you know, that's the way I look at it. And it'll be very interesting to see what kind of transpires with machine learning getting better and better and because like that is going to be quite eye opening as far as unexpected consequences. Right. But as far as like on a marketing side, you know, there's never been a better time. I mean, you know, you can, you can, there are ways of making almost any platform work. There are more people still coming online every year and more money is being spent online. And so I don't see that necessarily ending, especially with what we've seen as far as a big migration out of cities now ever since COVID You know, there's this looming commercial real estate crisis that's going to happen in the US because so many office buildings now are, you know, at 50% occupancy because more people are working virtually. And what I would say is, is that if you look at history, which is always a good thing to look at as far as understanding what the future has, you know, there have been these big shifts in and kind of what drives innovation, right. And there was the industrial age, there was the computer age, there was the Internet age, et cetera. We're now moving into this new age, right, of AI. And it wasn't in all those previous ages, it wasn't the master of the technology that made the most money. So in the industrial age, right, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, et cetera, they were not the machine builders, they were entrepreneurs who knew how to leverage the change in industry. The best that made the most money during the industrial age. And in computing technology, you can look at Gates and Jobs and these weren't the best computer builders per se, but they knew how to build companies that leverage computing technology. And when you look at the Internet, right, you could say that Zuckerberg, right. That Bezos, et cetera were the, you know, the people that made the most, the Google guys as well. And they weren't the guys that built the Internet. They built companies that could leverage what the Internet was now providing. And so it's going to be the same with AI. It's not going to be necessarily, necessarily the AI company that makes the most. It's going to be the people that know how to leverage it in a business to either create more value or to do something other than what's currently being done. And so it's, you know, very often I see entrepreneurs make the mistake of diving too deeply into the, into the forest so that all they see are trees and they don't really see the bigger picture. And, and I would imagine that, you know, there's going to be lots of amazing things on the horizon. And it's really not about necessarily mastering the technology of it. It's about mastering the application of it. And I think that if entrepreneurs kind of stay thinking about that, then they're going to spot the next big opportunity that will drive their business forward.

I love it, man. Rich, where can people find you.

Best is probably my website, strategic profits.com that's probably the best. I'm on all social media channels but like I said earlier, that's not my big push. So maybe I'll have a little bit more of a footprint on, on YouTube or Instagram or Facebook but. Or TikTok. But it's just generally not my cup of tea are my primary focus these days is the product that I mentioned a couple times, steal our winners, which people can find out about@strategicprofits.com and yeah, and just that's probably the best place to find me.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Rich. I really appreciate this. There's a lot of great stuff. I was literally texting my partners right now. I was like, you guys are not going to believe these deep fake videos. How awesome this looks, man. This is really, really cool. Look forward to it, man. I really appreciate you coming on. Guys, for those of you who have, who are watching, man, I really appreciate all of you tuning in every week and doing this and also the plethora of different subjects that we go over. Obviously we have one person on here talk about dating, another person talking about fitness. We had Rich on here talking about all kinds of incredible stuff giving a ton of value, especially when it comes to sales, sales funnels, marketing, stuff like that. So I really appreciate Rich. Guys, I will see you all next next weekend.