Getting Raw Ep #40 Stephen Pierce

Welcome, it's Richard Mark Turtungi and it's getting raw. And today I'm in Texas. Welcome, Stephen Pierce.

Yes, sir.

We're in Stephen Pierce's place and we're just hanging out drinking Topo Tico.

Topo Tico.

Learning about life and how things are run in Texas. We just had a hamburger. Big Texas cow.

It was no ordinary burger though.

Less cows. And Stephen Pearce is a guru when it comes to anything mind, internet, business. And so I want to get more into your mind today. And we're going to talk about, like, I guess, tell me about your story first because you've got a story. We've been— we met about 6 years ago.

Yeah.

And tell me how you got into this whole internet game in the first place.

Well, a long time ago when I was young as a kid, I was, you know, I wasn't necessarily paying attention to what I should have been paying attention to in terms of school and all that. So I found myself very distracted and following the crowd that I shouldn't follow, which was a crowd more distracted than myself. Ended up getting kicked out of high school when I was supposed to be going to the 11th grade. So I pretty much have a 10th grade education. And out of school, being kicked out of school, I had a lot of free time on my hands. I ended up hanging out with the wrong crowd of people, started getting into gang stuff, selling drugs. I kind of got pretty good at doing that. And I was—

You became an expert at

it. Yeah, yeah. I excelled at the wrong thing at the time, right? So what happened was I was in Washington, D.C. at the time, and we moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. Well, I did. And it was out in Greensboro, North Carolina that I started to have even more success, but it was out in Greensboro that I got shot. So that's a long story within itself.

And you got shot and you survived that?

Yeah, yeah, and I still have the bullet in me to this day. So that was rough.

And you get pulled up when you go through metal detectors at the airports?

No, actually because of the lead or whatever it is, it doesn't go off. When I first started to travel, that was a concern. It's like, is it gonna go off? Are they gonna be patting me down and frisking me and using it as an excuse to touch me? But it really doesn't. So there's people that, 'cause this is, I was at the Moses H. Cone Hospital, and they didn't wanna take the bullet out. And the reason why is because, well, I personally believe it's 'cause I'm this rough kid off the street. I think they patted me down for an insurance card. They didn't find an insurance card. It's like, we'll clean this bad boy up and send him along his way, right? So, and then they were like, oh, people from Vietnam still have bullets in them, right? I'm like, but I wasn't in Vietnam. It's like, well, you were close, right? Anyway. So it was at that point in time in my life that things seemed to spin out of control. I was kind of lost. I was very disoriented. I was angry. I was angry at the streets, angry at my family, angry at God. And initially I played the role of the victim, like, look at what they've done to me. Yeah. And then I eventually came to my senses and realized I wasn't a victim of my circumstances. I was really the creator of my circumstances. And while it can be a sobering thought that you created it, it can also be an empowering thought if you understand that, well, since I created this mess, I also can create something better. by understanding how did I actually get here. So I went back to the Washington, D.C. area with this new rejuvenated mind, and I gave my life to the Lord, and I'm reading the Bible, I'm quoting scriptures, and I'm thinking my entire life is going to turn around and that things were going to change. Turn around, that's, you know, it's just up to each person's own perspective. Sure. But change it did, because one of the first things that happened when I decided to turn my life around, so I ended up filing bankruptcy. Right, that's not what you ultimately expect. I'm running the streets, I'm not bankrupt, all of a sudden start going to church, start doing the right thing, and now I'm filing bankruptcy. And then I'm thinking, okay, so it can't get any worse than this.

How old were you then?

I was early teens, I mean, well, no, late teens. Late teens, yep. And what happened after that is I'm like, okay, it can't get really any worse than this. By this time I moved from D.C. over into Montgomery County, Maryland. I'm out in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and then I ended up Being homeless, I pretty much lost everything while I was out there. And now I'm literally like by myself. And I remember Rockville Pike, and I met a guy named Fred Burns who I communicated a couple times with on Facebook. He owned a mortgage company, and he let me sleep on the floor of an empty space in this mortgage company that he had. He would never let me go to his house, which I kind of understood after the fact. But back then I'm like, you know, I'm not good enough for your house? Yeah. Yeah, but now I kind of realize why, you know. Not the safest thing to let some guy, this black guy at that, sleep on your floor, come into your house where your family and kids are. Sure. Not smart, you know? If your throat get cut, then you kind of deserved it 'cause you shouldn't have let him in there, you know? So I mean, I understood, you know. I tried to pull the prejudice card on him. I was like, what, am I black? You know, good enough for the floor but not good enough for your house? You know, 'cause he was a very, very kind white guy. But anyway, it was at that point that, you know, him and I created a really good relationship. Sure. Slept on the floor. I had a lot of time on my hands, obviously. He brought this little television in with some rabbit ears And I got like 5 stations. 5, any 5. Well, I got Monday Night Football at that time, so that was a really big thing for me.

Everything was about Monday Night Football.

It was Monday Night Football that I was able to get. I would get some of the games on the weekend on Sunday, but I took that time, and during that period of time, somebody gave me a book called The Sugar Strategy by Ken Roberts, which is— he's an old-school commodities trader. And from there, I became fascinated with the futures and commodities markets, and it opened up my mind to this whole world that I didn't even know existed. Now, it's not like I had money to trade the markets back then, but man, I was completely just consumed with this information. I used this internet and computers and would go online and just find stuff that I can find on futures and commodities that went beyond this Circuit Strategy book. And next thing you know, I am so consumed with the futures and commodities markets, I became very— 'cause I looked at charts pretty much all day long. Right. So I became pretty good at being able to pick the short-term direction of the markets, and I found these newsgroups, which were the earliest forms of social media. People think social media started with like blogs and all this. No, no, no, no. Forums are a form of social media because it's where people gather and have conversations, but the earliest forms of social media were these horrendous newsgroups that you would go in and it was just completely disorganized. I mean, you would just hunt and hunt and hunt to try to find things and conversations, but it was early forms of social media.

Or the internet. On the internet?

Yeah, on the internet. So I found a newsgroup where these commodities futures and commodities traders were going. I was posting some of my trades there, and long story short, very long story short, my trades were performing better than most of the paid advisory services that these traders were subscribing to. So I developed a pretty good name for myself out there. People started saying, hey, can you email these to us? You know, can you put them on a website? I didn't know how to do all of that. That prompted me to go in to figure out, well, how do you put up a website? How do you email this stuff to people? And then next thing you know, I have— I put together this crummy-looking website. It was horrible. I had a list of just over 1,200 email addresses. I didn't have names because back then, the little free scripts you can get— Yep. They didn't even let you collect the names, just the email address. Yep. So I had just over 1,200 people. And January 1st, 2000 is when I decided I was going to actually start an official business. And the reason why is because a guy that was on the list emailed me and said, can I pay you to teach me how to pick trades the way you're picking trades? And long story short, I had all these self-esteem issues back then. But the guy eventually paid me $5,000 to learn how to pick trades the way I was doing it. And at the time, while I was keeping a record of my trades, you know, paper trades, I didn't calculate everything. But over a 12-month period of time, which gives you an idea how long I was doing this for free, I had produced on paper just over $725,000 in net profits. Whoa. In extremely volatile futures and commodities markets. That was pretty much, unheard of. I had like an 80% success rate on my trades, and this is minus all the losing trades. Yeah. All right, and I would calculate the cost of trade, so the cost of round turns as well. So I was like, well, you know what, I don't want to have a bunch of people paying me $5,000 to teach them how to do it. I wasn't really comfortable with that, but I was already putting out like 30, 35 trades a week. So I decided to turn it into a service January 1st, 2000, when most people were thinking about the Y2K bug. And the economy was tanking, and the

internet was just beginning.

It was just beginning, and the the the the the tech bubble had burst, and all these overvalued companies that had these outrageous valuations but no revenue started to just tumble. And back then, during that time, buying stocks was like trying to catch falling knives. It was like a horrible environment. But I started my business. My first two weeks, I did over thirty-five thousand dollars. In my first twelve months. I did over $500,000 in business. And at that point, I realized it was the best business in the world. And that began what even continues to this day to be a pretty interesting journey.

It's an amazing journey.

Yeah, it's an interesting journey.

And then you've been teaching this and giving this teaching and education to everybody around the world now.

Yep. I've probably spoken to in live audiences over a million people. in total over the years that I've been doing this, literally around the world. And I have tons and tons of content that I've created and given to people and helped a lot of other people become successful in their businesses and build corporations and all that. And that was a result of success I was having because I was in the futures and commodities market. I was doing extremely well. And I went to my competitors and I helped them to sell more of their product. And yeah, I helped them to sell more of their product. Yeah, and then they started selling my product and then they started giving me all these testimonials. Right. And what happened was, I was like, okay, I'm doing really well, making a lot of money, and I want to grow this. So there's stuff that I don't know. So I said, you know what, I want to start investing into other people's stuff. So I had spent over a total, like just over $50,000 into education material and learning material. But the thing was, none of it worked. And when I say none of it worked, I'm not talking about I bought it and it sat there, or I bought it and downloaded it and didn't do anything with it. Right. I mean, I'm talking about software programs that I had racked servers that I would run on, and none of this stuff was working. And I'm like, well, listen, I'm not dumb. I may not be the brightest kid, but I'm not dumb. I know what it is I'm doing. And then I realized if somebody like myself that was making a lot of money and had the money to spend on these people's programs and knew what I was doing could not get those programs to work, and these were some of the best-selling products on the market, mind you, I could only imagine the torturous mental environment people had. Buying this stuff and it not working, them thinking that it was them and not the program because they didn't know. We're talking about programs that wouldn't have worked for anybody. It was just like literally impossible to work for anybody. They were just like ideas that somebody documented and said, hey, let's sell this.

And let's sell it and get it

out. Yeah. So I came out in 2003. I wrote a book called Under Oath: The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth About Internet Marketing. It's just over 250 pages. And with that, I put a report called the Pure Safe Marketing Report, which documented, that showed the receipt of every product that I purchased so people knew that I purchased it. I gave everything a rating, 0 out of 5 stars. I can assure you there were no 5 stars in there. There were no 4 stars. I basically trashed everybody. I had no friends back then, so it's not like I had relationships to preserve. It was early days. Yeah, so I could just go hardcore, right? It's like, yeah, they all suck, and they did. They all sucked, and I was just ripping through everybody, just threw them all in the grinder together. I started to develop a reputation. Because while that was something nobody had done, to be pretty much that abrasive but yet truthful. Sure. And then have with that a book that was way ahead of its time. I mean, what is known today as squeeze pages actually came from my book when I taught Jonathan Mizell how to— and I came up with this report called the Accelerated Affiliate Sales Model, which was one of the very first times anybody was ever told to use opt-in pages and don't send any traffic directly to a to offers. Then I taught that to Jonathan Mizell, and he just went bananas over it, and then he coined it squeeze page, which is something now that's just universally spoken.

Everybody's squeeze page.

Yeah, but nobody knows that it actually started with me. Back in 2003, I was talking about continuity programs. It was one of the main things that I focused on, but continuity programs on the internet didn't really become the rave until, in terms of people like, oh, you gotta do continuity programs, until 2007.

Yeah.

Right, we were doing— we had blogging products in like 2004, but yet blogging didn't really become the rave in terms of people like, hey, we gotta get some blogs up, until like 2007, 2008. So there was a lot of stuff that we were doing.

And you found all this out by researching everybody's product and just finding a solution?

Yeah, well, the unfortunate thing is that I didn't find it in other people's stuff. I pretty much just constantly think and think and think and think and think and think and think and like, there's gotta be another way, there's gotta be another way, there's gotta be a better way, what am I missing? So I don't use this myopic approach to anything because if you use a myopic approach, then everything in your peripheral disappears and you're not able to see what you— that you're not aware of. Sure. So I'm always looking at how do I expand my level of awareness as opposed to contract it and focus on one thing. I'm talking about like there's those— this is the only way it's going to work and that's not necessarily true. There has to be another way. What are the other options? So I tend to expand those options. With that book, one of the things that really established me was a thing called Smart Pages that I came up with, which was optimizing single pages to get on page 1 of Google. Back then, we were pretty much the leaders in helping people to score number 1 rankings and page 1 rankings on Google with a thing called Smart Pages. Then I sent the SEO community upside down. People were bashing me and trashing me. People were loving me. I became very polarizing back then. as a result of that. And one thing led to another, next thing you know, somebody asked me, would you like to do an interview? I'm like, an interview? I'm nervous out of my mind. I'm like, how do I get on the phone? Nervous? Yeah, oh yeah, I was nervous. And this is the phone, nobody can see you sitting there in your underwear in your room by yourself and you sweating. You're on the phone, like nobody can see you. It's like, but I mean, it's like, and then I got invited to speak. And you know, I was scared to do that. And then next thing you know, you know, it is what it is. And now I'm a very controversial figure.

Yeah, you live with your passion.

Yeah, I love what it is I do.

And you've traveled, as you said, you've traveled everywhere around the world. We met in Australia a couple years ago, a few, 5 years ago, and again you were speaking and continually giving talks, and you continue doing it to this day, just educating, educating, educating. But you're always changing, like you're always developing. You're not bringing up the same stuff, you've continually got new stuff out there.

Right.

How do you continually get that new information across to everybody? And a lot of people relive the same content over and over again. How do you keep coming up with the new and innovative ways?

To me, the ignorance of knowledge is not having your knowledge to be tested because everything in our environment is constantly changing.

Yeah.

I mean, it's constantly changing whether we like it or not. So I tend to approach things in a way where I'm like, well, what's different? Because if you're not looking at what's different, then what you're gonna ultimately do is continuously do what it is you're doing in an environment that can no longer support that. And that's really what happens to companies that become obsolete. When you look at a Blockbuster that dominated, I mean, they were the ones that pretty much single-handedly put mom-and-pop video shops out of business. Yeah. Because mom-and-pop shops, you can go in and get your VHS tapes or whatever it is back then, and then Blockbuster had better deals. They had better margins, they had more movies. A mom-and-pop shop maybe had 1 or 2, maybe 3. 3 was exciting. But then Blockbuster would have like 1,000 of them on the shelf.

Yeah.

So they literally put them out of business. Their model was so successful, they— it became a straitjacket. And by that, what I mean is they did not try to look at, okay, what's changing in our environment? And the environment changed on them, so what they missed is what caused them to be caught in the pincers between Netflix and Redbox. And then notice they tried to do a Redflix, they tried to play catch-up, they tried to do a model like Netflix and it didn't work. And then they tried to do something like Redbox and it didn't work. And then they missed the whole move to online streaming video, so that's why they're not Hulu and they don't have the deals with iTunes. It's just like the music industry, they're now a slave to iTunes. They're a slave to Rhapsody. Yeah. They're a slave to Napster. In fact, when Napster, his name was Sean Fanning, when they came out, the music industry attacked the guy and his network saying, let's sue him, let's put him out of business, he's doing music sharing. They didn't stop and think and say, wait a second, let's not sue the guy, let's buy everything, hire him, and figure out where this whole thing is going with digital music and music sharing so that we can own that space. And they fought 'em and fought 'em and fought 'em, and while they were fighting them, the environment was changing. Changing. And now they have to make deals because look at their CD sales. Gone. But the amazing thing is, you would think that an industry like that would have seen the transitions. Think about it. 8-track tapes, reel-to-reel, cassette tapes, LPs. That market has constantly changed. So how was it they couldn't see that the CD was gonna go make a move to like the MP3, and the movie industry seeing that this stuff is gonna start streaming online. So it's all those kinds of transitions. Bookstores, they totally missed the mark. Amazon saw it coming. Amazon wasn't the first bookstore, but they were the one with the best model. Yeah. Barnes& Noble was slow to respond, but when Barnes& Noble said, we're gonna go online, all you gotta do, just do a lookup on the history of the media, They were like, it's over for Amazon, Barnes& Noble is coming in, that's it, it's gonna be over. Well, even to this day, Amazon owns 80% of all online book buying. Barnes& Noble's not even close, they're not even a footnote.

Yeah.

Because they waited too long. Think about stock trading online. Why wasn't it Charles Schwab or some of those companies that were like, you know, they had like billions of dollars, they had the market cornered, which are traditional traders, and stock investors and futures investors, but it wasn't E-Trade. It was all these other companies that came out of nowhere that did it, and the reason why is because success can cause blindness and it can cause you to get comfortable. You have a certain level of success and what you try to do is to extend what was instead of trying to create what can be.

I like that.

Now, yeah, and one thing, if you think about Microsoft, Microsoft a long time ago, they had some issues because a long time ago, Even Bill Gates said that the internet was a passing fancy, which he was wrong, and he admitted he was wrong. And then he had to take this huge behemoth called Microsoft and turn it into this internet-based company, which they did. But if you look at their model and you look at the model of the video games and you look at the model of Apple, you see basically the typical S-curve. The S-curve is a representation of the life cycle of everything, of humans, of plant life, of animal life, of businesses, of products. where everything has its birth, its introduction, its growth, its maturity, and then its decline. It happens for everybody.

Up and down.

Yeah, it's like this. It's the S-curve. Now, what happens is, is during the growth period, most people are celebrating, but companies that are mature and they understand cycles, they are already looking to cannibalize their existing product. That's why there isn't just one iPhone, and yet there's another phone coming out. There isn't just one iPad. There isn't just one iPod. There isn't just one version. Can you imagine if everybody was still trying to run Windows 97? Microsoft wouldn't be in business.

Yeah.

So it's not let's create a new product for the sake of creating new products. When you're talking about this, things are changing so much. So what they do is they make their current product obsolete and they cannibalize it because they know that if you don't cannibalize your own product, then the competitors want to cannibalize it for you.

That's good.

Right? So you always have to go and look at, okay, so what's next? What's the next level of our existing product and how do we beat it in such a way that our competitors can't? But the thing is, if you're so myopically focused on, oh, this is good, this is, we're winning, you tend to miss it. You're not asking, here's one of the most important questions anybody in business can ask, what's next? What's next?