Achieve Your Money Goals Faster | Moola Smart Tools | Jason Schappert

My wife and I, we just figured this out the hard way, unfortunately. And I don't want that for other people. So I said, what can we take these gifts that we have of teaching, of taking a very complex subject and breaking it down into plain conversational English, what can we do that in? Wow. I'd love to teach personal finance, but I just don't want to teach personal finance. I want to give people the technology to empower them to do something with it.

Our guest today is Jason shepherd is a serial entrepreneur and financial technology visionary. Now, he's dedicated to empowering individuals to achieve financial freedom, something him and I both share. He's the co founder of Moolah. It's an AI driven investment platform that simplifies very complex financial concepts and it provides personalized insights, super important to help users make informed investment decisions. Now, he almost gave up on his last business. We're going to hear a little bit about that. Jason, welcome to the program today, Richard.

Really excited to be here and start diving into that now.

You know, we're going to talk a lot about Moolah today. We're going to get to that a little bit later. I want to hear all about the genesis of this incredible idea and how it's helping people and that's going to take us into the future. But before we do that, we're going to go rewind the tape and go back into the past. Now, you were telling me before we hit record that you're an aviator. You spent a lot of time in that and I believe that ties into your last business. So walk us through what transpired, where you almost hung up the towel and said, you know, first forget about it, I'm going to go back and get a job.

What happened? Right, well, to give the listeners just some perspective, we were on the largest providers of FAA test preparation, which is a fancy way of saying we made the books, the curriculum, the videos for pilots to pass their different, their various exams and everything else. We're an online ground school essentially. And I'll tell you, 16 years ago when I told people, I said, richard, guess what? I'm going to teach people to fly on the Internet. Like they thought I was a bit far out there. I was a little bit crazy as far as that goes. So this was always an idea and kind of a passion project for me. I was trying to build this online ground school by night, yet I was still an active flight instructor. Meaning, Richard, you would come to me, I'd take a, you'd sit in the left seat. I'D sit in the right seat, and we'd go take a flight lesson. And I was always kind of just working this. This balance between this and. What I really realized is I was only putting about half my effort into each of those things. And then a particular month. I don't remember the month exactly. I'm sure I could look it up. But it came into my life where I went to leave to go to work again. It was, you know, flight instruction, teaching a student. And there was a tow truck sitting in the end of my driveway. I thought, huh, I know exactly why you're here. That's never a good thing, right? So I snuck out the backyard, Walked a few miles down the road to my mom's house. Mom's always save you, right? She let me borrow her car so I could go to work to make money to pay that car loan. That same week, I got a foreclosure notice on the front door from the sheriff. I thought, okay, as if things couldn't get any worse. And about this time, I went to go fly that same little training airplane that I had. 1975 cloth seats. Bought it for $10,000. Okay, so picture a $10,000 airplane in your mind. Even 16 years ago, it's not a good looking airplane. It's a little rough around the edges. Is.

That's the one with the duct tape hanging off the wing when you see.

It go by and like, rattle can paint and everything else. You're exactly right. But. But I was proud of it and it served its purpose. I went to take off in that plane one day to locate the plane to another airport for a lesson. And about 400ft, I lost a cylinder. You only have four cylinders in this little airplane. They're horizontally opposed. So the engine, the whole airplane shaken back and forth. I was able to nurse the airplane back around. And I landed. And Richard, I remember just crying. I'm 18 years old, 19 years old at this point. My plane is covered in oil. Obviously, I can't make my car payment. I can't make my mortgage. How on earth am I going to pay for all this stuff? I'm behind on so many bills. I've got this dream of making this online thing. And everything just seems so far out there right now. But we, we know the story of, like you hear crossing the Rubicon, right? When Julius Caesar crossed the rubicon, this was my Rubicon crossing moment here. I ended up selling that airplane to a mechanic for basically the parts that it was. I was able to catch up on my bills and Catch up on my payments. Except I had one big problem. I'm a flight instructor with no airplane. I had no choice but to make this online flight instruction business work. I had a camera. I had a computer. I need to start making some more videos, some more content. Napoleon Hill says in Think and Grow Rich, a book I know you've read and I know many of the listeners have read. In every adversity, there's the seed of a greater advantage. But it's just a seed. I've got to water it. I've got to nurse it. I got to bring it in for those cold, you know, those cold Canadian winters. I got to put it back out for the spring. I have to nurture that seed. So why I could have been down and out and bummed about myself and my circumstances. I burned the boats and said, I have to go all in on this thing. And it really. That was the moment. And for anybody out there that's listening, that's maybe kind of like that weird in between, like, I've got the job and I'm trying this thing, and I'm just. I've got a foot on either side of the chasm. When you can devote your energy, I was thrown into mine. I wish I could have chosen it, but would I have ever chosen it? Right. But when you can devote the time to pursue that vision and commit all your time to it, you can't help but find success.

I love it. And the fact that it worked out for you is evidenced by the fact that you were able to build such a large organization. What really is interesting, I can picture the smoke billowing out of this airplane as you're trying to land it. And reflecting even on my own journey and seeing some of these similar challenges that I've had almost in the past, it's really inspiring that you were able to pursue and push through it. Now, obviously, you had some people helping you along the way, and some of those people weren't. Weren't necessarily, you know, family members, but it was even, like, inspirational characters. You mentioned Napoleon Hill kind of reminds me of the book the Obstacle is the Way. Yes, to some degree. And so, you know, who were some of those. Those people that were a hero to you in that time to help you stay motivated, get through, stay the course, be able to pursue this vision, this dream that you had.

So it's really twofold on the family aspect. I did grow up in an entrepreneurial family. Mom and dad still to this day have a pest control business, and they do it together. So I got to grow up 12 years old, my first job was killing bugs with dad. In fact, that's why we actually moved to Florida. We used to live in Maryland, but dad wouldn't work in the winter and he was so smart, he said, where can I move that I can kill bugs year round. And that's literally like, that's how we end up. Most people are like, oh, I retire in Florida. No, we came to Florida for the bugs and there's plenty of them if you ever visited. So that's how we even ended up here. But I got to see them struggle, I got to see them succeed. And you know, one thing that really stuck out for me is my father. Although we were less than middle class growing up, my father had some very wealthy clients. And I remember walking into these just as a 12 year old kid, 13 year old kid mansions and I'm going to, I want this one day. Like what do wealthy people do differently that the other clients that are, you know, living not the best circumstances with roach infestations and else what, what, what is different between them? And I would go in the offices and they'd be covered with books and go, okay, rich people read books like that. That's my 12 year old mind thinking. So I went to the library and to your point, this is now back on like Sony Walkman, cassette player kind of stuff, Mowing the lawn, listening to Napoleon Hill, listening to Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn, like these classics of personal development. And I was kind of the weird kid. Can you imagine the 13 year old kid listening to Jim Rohn? Like that's a little odd. But even though those people were long deceased, it still resonates on and the message is still so true. The thing is, the fundamentals of, of business growth and of marketing and of mindset do not change. There's so many people out there chasing the next AI tool, the next AI things, That's, that's the buzzword, right? And during COVID it was all remote this and remote that. There's always something to chase here. But at the end of the day, good business practices and mindset. Everything else, whether it was written in 1937 or written 2025, it doesn't matter, are timeless. So those are really some of the early mentors. I never, I did have the privilege to see Zig Ziglar speak when he was quite old, but obviously Jim Rohn was since passed and I did follow some of Tony Robbins work and everything else too. Who did get to spend time with Jim Rohn. He just It's. It's amazing the impact these people can have by creating leverage in their business. And here we are still talking about them, you know, how many years later.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's incredible. And, and perhaps when enough people start using your new platform of moolah, they'll be talking about you hundreds of years from now because of all the success they'll have. Now, circling back to this, this, this business you pursued, you were able to, you know, get things going at some point in time. You needed to get clients, you started with the content. Where did you start to actually begin seeing traction? Because, you know, we kind of glazed over, like, all the hard times of actually, you know, the first thing is making the decision. The second thing was all the work that you had to do following the decision.

Right. Traction is the right word to use. And I, I was on ice for a long time there at the beginning, because at the same time, you have to be mindful of who you listen to. It's also easy to jump on the Internet and see these gurus and influencers now and go, everything must be so easy. I remember following one that I will not name to a T in particular, I went to bed and, Richard, I thought, I'm going to wake up and I'm going to be a millionaire. I pressed launch, I sent the emails, like, this is all going to be amazing. I woke up, I signed up one person for our first version of our online ground. So I thought, you know what? I probably broke the Internet. That's probably what happened. There's no way I followed what this guy said to a T. It had to have worked and didn't work. And that was my first realization of this business thing. Like, this is a lot harder than I thought. But as you and I both know, one becomes two and two becomes four. And I learned very early on, I don't remember who taught me this, but it was, again, a business audiobook or even podcasts back then. Someone told me, you don't have to get it right, you just have to get it going. And, boy, as someone who's a pilot by trade, like, picture, I love my checklists. I love perfection. I want everything to be flawless. And by the way, I'm teaching people to take a hunk of metal through the sky at a hundred knots, right? Like, it seems a little crazy to say you don't. You don't have to get it right. You just have to get it going. But even so, I thought, I need this perfect course. My first private pilot course was eight lessons. It really needed to be about 20 lessons, but I didn't have to get right. I just had to get it going. Let's get eight lessons out there. Let's prove my concept. And once people get in there, I've got an eight lesson Runway, which is about four or five weeks where I can go, okay, now I can start making the next lessons. I'm proving my concept and being forced to build the rest as I go. And I think that's a business principle in itself. Get to market early test, early test often. Right. Even 16 years in that business, we were still always tweaking and testing. And even back then, I know you can relate to this because you have the same kind of servant heart. I called every single new customer. I mean, personally, they had my cell phone. It didn't matter. I didn't know them. They kind of knew me. I called every single one of them.

I want to know, okay, Richard, I keep hearing about this thing called the Colby A index. You talk about it all the time on the show.

What is it?

How do I get information about this thing and why is it so important? When I first got my Colby done, it totally revolutionized everything for me. I finally felt like, oh, man, this is what I was looking for. All the things I've been doing that have been working for me and, and all the frustrations I'd had, if I just understood this at an earlier age, boy, oh, boy, would my life be different. You can take that step if you want to learn and understand how it can change things for you and the way you communicate with others. You can go to coachcanfield.com and download your free report.

Why were they learning from Farm? What was their mission? And I thought I was going to attract people that say, I want to go fly for Air Canada one day. I want to be a Delta captain. I want to be. But what I learned was shocking. It was, no. My daughter just had a grandson, and now I have this grandson and I want to take him flying one day. Or the grandkids live 500 miles away and it's just such a long drive. And that's why I'm learning to fly.

And I went.

It totally changed my mindset. I'm thinking I'm building airline captains. In reality, this guy just wants to see his grandson. Like, that changes your marketing, that changes your pitch, that changes how you teach in your courses. And I know you've had those conversations after seminars where someone comes up to you and tells you why they're doing this, and you go wow. That just hits home because I have a family, because I have these things. It's just so different when you think you know your customers until you really start talking to them.

That's interesting. Actually, my wife got me a birthday gift this year, which was a flight with a local pilot, a guy that we knew who actually runs a local business, a karate school. Amazing individual. And he. He got his license during COVID because it was the only way he could have that control back to be able to travel and do the things he wanted to do with his family. And again, people are inspired by all these reasons. So it's really interesting to hear how you started to understand your customer and the people that wanted. Wanted to learn that training. Everyone's a voracious learner if they're given the right place and focus and energy to do it. What I also took away, Jason, from your story is that you were. You're really a ready, fire, aim kind of guy. I like that much like myself. And it reminded me of the very first Infinite Banking Bootcamp course that we taught, which we did very much the same way. We were building the session before the week that we would deliver it, and I was printing out the workbook like, 10 minutes before everyone showed up to the venue.

So good. So good. Well, and then even that, like, you know, we went that route as well, and we'd get on some of these live calls with people, and I would have, like you said, this perfect presentation plan, but then someone would come up and say, hey, I want to buy an airplane one day. Like, well, and we just. We steer the whole conversation that way. And sometimes when you. When you let your. Again, you kind of run it as democracy when you let your customers kind of dictate some of this, you learn so much. I guarantee your first, you know, Infinite Banking Bootcamp is nothing like what you're doing today because you have so many reps in and you have so much feedback. You know exactly who your customer avatar is.

Yeah, absolutely. And more importantly, we just know how to serve them better. And we've. Because we've had that experience, we've had those questions. You know, we have material and additional content and thing that really, they're able to go through that learning experience and answer that question almost on their own before they even get a chance to speak to someone. Not because they have to, but because they can.

Yes.

Right. And the online content world is really powerful for that now. You know, I can see it from my perspective, and I can. I can see the challenge. Even the industry Would give them like, how can you teach people how to fly an airplane? Which is, yeah, let's be clear, a little bit dangerous. Requires some very high level knowledge. Always check the checklist. And there's a lot of things that could go wrong in an airplane and that could go wrong outside the airplane. So how would you even in your mind this vision was so clear that you could do it. How did you know it was even possible to go about doing this? What do you think it was about you thinking differently than what the industry said needed to be done?

Yeah, they said it couldn't be done. And it is very interesting being like a trailblazer sometimes. Jim Rohn used to say, sometimes pioneers get arrows. And I had plenty of arrows from blazing a new trail. And even what we're doing with Moolah, like trying to tell people, hey, we've got some artificial intelligence models that can invest better than humans. And explaining that to them is. Seems far fetched to some people. So when we came to people and said we're going to teach you how to fly on the Internet, we had to create the data to really back that up. And obviously you've got your early adopters. And I was tracking every stat. I knew that the average student pilot takes X amount of hours before they solo, before they actually pass their, what's called their check ride, their big final exam, everything else. And I know they spend about this much on average and the FAA publishes all those things, so it's great public. I said, okay, internally, how can I prove that sitting in front of your computer watching the lessons on regulations, radio communications, airspace emergencies, decision makings, yes, they still had to get in the airplane and fly with an instructor anywhere in the world. But I was just teaching the ground theory to them. How can I prove that it's more efficient to learn in the comfort of your home on your schedule than every Wednesday night at your local airport? Which is how we typically did ground school. So what we found was, hey, our students, not only did they solo sooner, which means they save more money. Right. They also did their checkride with fewer hours, yet met the same standard, which also means they saved more money. So we were able to kind of put the data behind it for the early adopters were great, but then you got these late bloomers and these laggards that come in who want to see that data. You can say, listen, this is the data. This works. And you know, we went from having no competitors. Now we have about seven competitors that are actually in the space and I welcome it all, by the way, it's. It's great, right? It forces everybody to level up and certainly get better. But this industry didn't even exist 16 years ago. It was just all taught in a physical classroom, limited by the fire Marshal says only 30 people allowed in this room. Right. Like, talk about not being able to create leverage in a business. We just use the power of the Internet to expedite that.

Yeah. Incredible. And I think so many businesses have had a similar tale around using the power of the Internet to expedite or to create that leverage aspect. But it does take someone who's got a vision to say it can be done. And like you say, the arrows in the back now going from almost giving up on it to turning into a massive success. I'm sure there were a number of challenges over the way with scaling and growing it, of course, but, you know, looking back now, as you're forging ahead into a new area, a new area of interest, a new area of focus for yourself, what are some of the things that really stand out for you as important to let our listeners know about what the end result of that effort, that 16 years of effort, what did it really produce, not just for the people flying safely now in the air, but for you and your family personally?

Wow. Well, to the first point there, I want to be very mindful. Oftentimes what you see on stage is the perfect performance. Our oldest daughter is 10 years old, and I just took her up to New York for her first Broadway play. Loves singing, dancing. And I was explaining to her as we're sitting there, hey, what you see on stage is beautiful, it's perfect, it's refined. But what you don't see is behind the stage, it's absolute chaos. There's people running around, they're half dressed, they're yelling at each other, they're bumping into each other. It's chaos. And they come out on stage and smile and everything's just so perfect. And business is exactly like that. Unfortunately, especially in this influencer type society we live in, you only see what's on stage and you forget about the chaos behind the scenes. And what I would encourage other founders is to really embrace that chaos sometimes, because everybody has it. If they don't, they're lying to you. And the fruit of that labor really does come out. We first noticed that for the longest time. I just ran our business with the idea of Richard, I'm teaching people to learn to fly on the Internet. And okay, that's. That's interesting. Would be a typical Reaction. And then one day, again, this is thousands of customers into it. 30 employees, great business that's plugging along. Somebody sent in an email and one of my support agents brought it to me and said, jason, I think you need to see this. Now, for someone to send in a ticket and for it to make it all the way up to my desk, usually it's like a really angry customer or something like that for it to make all the way to like, oh, great, what is it today? They said, no, you really need to see this. And the subject line was, you saved my life. I thought, okay, this is interesting. And he shared a story. He said, jason, I was taking off at my home airport. I got up to about 800ft. I had a total catastrophic engine failure. Prop stop spinning, engine seized, dead quiet. And there I am. He said, all I heard was your voice from your emergency lessons series. Push the nose forward, manage your airspeed, look for the best feed field, manage your best glide speed. He recited it to a T. He goes, you talked me from the moment the engine quit. You talked to me all the way till I made this perfect landing in this farmer's field. I didn't even hit the guy's cows like it, because it was just this perfect landing. And I thought I have mistakenly said what business we're really in. I thought we were just in the business of teaching people to fly, but at the end of the day, we're saving people's lives. And do you want to real like, our business changed exponentially when I got the whole team together and I said, you know what? Every day when you make your to do list, and every day when you look at that, you have to look at, say, is everything on this list, is this going to help me achieve the goal of today, making people a safer, smarter pilot with the goal of saving someone's life? Today, the whole team change. When you look at everything through the lens, like, you take your work way more seriously, whether you're taking out the trash and scrubbing the toilets or whether you're writing the curricul, it does not matter. Everybody played a part in that success. And boy, when we found that battle cry to rally around, and everybody has that right, I don't care if you're a plumber, I don't care what it is like, everybody can have that to rally around. In your case, I'm sure your mind's spinning. You are in the business of helping people not only create the financial freedom that they deserve and that they desire, but you're enabling People to spend more time with their children when their son says, hey, dad, come throw the football with me. Richard created that moment. Right. That's the kind of like when you build that rally cry around what you're doing, it changes the way you look at your business.

Yes. Well, and coincidentally, we had a large team conversation today, and we're dealing with. We call a 911 in our business, which is when someone passes away. And we're dealing with helping adjudicate and can get the process going for it for a death claim to support their family. And at the time of our recording, you know, Jason, this will air into 2025, but we're around the Christmas holidays, so everyone can imagine the impact of that taking place. And. And the fact that we're able to show up with a check when it's all said and done.

Yes.

Really is an unbelievable feature that I get the privilege to be a part of in the nature of the work that I do day in and day.

Out and to be there for that family. This isn't some faceless organization or whatever it is. Like, it's Richard hopping on these calls and offering condolences and going above and beyond in every measure possible. Like, when you look at your business that way, like, what a. It's a huge responsibility. Right. But. But you are perfectly equipped for it. And again, we could come up with a million analogies. I don't care if you're a plumber. Listening to this. Like, everybody has that bigger purpose that you're really accomplishing to serve your members, your customers, whatever you call them.

Well, and speaking of a bigger purpose, we're going to talk more about what's the bigger purpose for Jason and his team and his family with the advent of Moolah. And we'll be doing that when we come back after this important break. Are you looking for a great book to read? Turns out I have one for you. It's called Cash Follows the Leader. It's available anywhere books are sold, but if you want to get a free copy and you can download it right to your inbox, you can go to coachcanfield.com cash follows. We're back here with Jason talking about his incredible business that he's built around teaching people to fly on the Internet. And now time has shifted. There's a pivot point, and he's going in a different direction. We're using artificial intelligence to help people invest better. It's a pretty big difference. Jason, what's happening here? How did you go from getting people up in the Air to now getting their investments up in the air. Where's the difference?

I like the analogy. I like the analogy. So after 16 years of labor and work, we were approached by private equity and had the privilege to sell, which is probably a whole nother podcast topic for another day because we lost the first deal. Like, again, talk about, in every adversity, there's a seat of a greater advantage, right? Again, we'll save that for a future episode, perhaps, but you're exactly right. My wife and I, we. I'm 36, she's 34. We're sitting there looking at each other going, okay, this is great. There's money in the bank. What are we going to do next? We can't just, I don't play golf. What are we going to do all day? And I have always had a heart, not only for teaching, because I was a flight instructor, but for personal finance. I think when you have a tow truck at the end of your driveway at one point in your life and a foreclosure notice on your door, like you have that school of hard knocks kind of real training in personal finance when you've been behind on taxes, whatever it may be. Like, I have been all of those things and was able to really crawl my way out of those. And unfortunately, I didn't have that finance mentor to kind of take me by the hand along the way. Like, my wife and I, we just figured this out the hard way, unfortunately. And I don't want that for other people. So I said, what can we take These gifts that we have of teaching, of taking a very complex subject and breaking it down into plain conversational English, what can we do that in? Say, wow, I'd love to teach personal finance, but I just don't want to teach personal finance. I want to give people the technology to empower them to do something with it. Because as Jim Rohn says, knowledge isn't power, it's potential power. I can tell you all about budgeting and, you know, envelope style, savings and paying yourself first, and all of that sounds so great, but if you don't do it or don't know how to do it, what good is it? We can talk about retirement accounts, but, but, but what good is it if you're not willing to put yourself out there and actually do it? So we began to build the technology around that. And of course, with artificial intelligence coming up, I began to think, wow, we were using sounds crazy. Even our aviation business, using large language models, thinking, there's so much data. And by the way, I Can back test, you know, 30 years of the S&P 500 against my algorithms and everything else. So I set out, I hired the quants, the really, really smart, you know, math people and everything else. I said there, there's something out here. I'm not trying to create a bunch of day traders. I'm going after the 30 year old firefighter who is making $60,000 a year. But he doesn't understand why do I have more month than I have money. Well, I can use artificial intelligence because I'm your bank account as well, to tell you, you know, you have Netflix and Hulu and Paramount plus and HBO Max and Peacock and YouTube TV and all six of those subscriptions and your shows aren't even streaming right now because they're out of season right now. But you're paying 40 bucks a month for all of those things, right? Show people where they have holes in their pockets and give them that geographical, even intelligence. Hey, I live here in Florida where the Average rent is $2,200 for a two bedroom AP. I know how much your rent is because I'm again, I'm your bank account. You're paying too much because in your zip code the average median rent is actually 1700. And help people. And really the right word to use is steward them along in their journey because people believe the system, and you know this so well, they believe the system is rigged against them. In reality, they need to understand the rules of the game. Money and health are two things that everyone is thrown into. It is a game. You are thrown into the arena whether you like it or not. So do you stand there and get booed at because you don't know the rules? It's like the first time you play Monopoly, you're like, I hate this game. Like I don't even understand the rules. And then by the second time around you're like, all right, I'm starting to get some strategy. And the third time around, my seven year old's figuring it out, right? Like that is we just have to understand the rules of the game we're playing. And most importantly, I know, I know you resonate with the statement is you have to put the power back into the people. I don't want to be your, your investment advisor. It's your money, you earned it. Like, here's the tools, you can choose to use my guardrails that I've put up there for you. But if you want to go crazy, I used to use the analogy go crazy and put it all in Bitcoin. I mean, they'd be really smart if they did that. Right? Now that's my speculation money. Right. But you can use my guardrails or you, you don't have to use them. Right. It's your choice. It's your money. You earned it. It's just one more fact, and then I'll let us segue to the next kind of avenue. But I just read it the other day, 70% of mutual fund managers don't invest in their own funds. It's like these startling stats. So I want to empower people to be in charge of their money that they earned, to grow it and to plant these seeds to grow into big things.

I'm glad you identified that because we've long said in our practice and what we do is that banks don't invest in their own products. They create products. They're creating those products for consumers.

Yeah, you are the product. You're that product.

Right.

Isn't that crazy?

If a bank isn't willing to invest in the thing that they created for you, that should be some kind of an indicator that you should start questioning. Doesn't mean it's not good, bad or otherwise. But it's an important question to start asking. It changes the way that we think about these things. And what I think I hear you saying, Jason, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that you're building and creating moolah in such a way where it, it's going to do some of the thinking effort for consumers to do some of that look back activity and a little bit of the look around activity. It's kind of like you're taking the financial airplane up to 5,000ft so you can get a really good look at what's on around you, what, what's behind, what's going forward. You can see where the landing strip is. You can start to, to make intentional decisions about what direction you need to throttle the airplane at. And that's kind of what I think you're trying to build. And so, you know, as an example, I've had clients who, you know, software, softwares are a big thing these days. Everyone's got some kind of software that they're paying for or subscriptions to some degree. Right. And often with many subscriptions, you can get a pretty vast discount by paying for the manual, which on the surface looks really, really good, and for some people, phenomenal. I know many people who've had drastic impact by doing that. But if we don't have the behavior or the habit in place to make sure. That you know that that's coming up again. If you're not, if you're not already in a place where you understand how to pay yourself first in some effective way. You went from a, you know, $10 a month expense that you now cut down to $5 a month, but you're not making the $10 payment to yourself to make sure the money's there. You're going to go backwards instead of forwards. And, and that's the type of thing that I think people can compute kind of very immediately. Oh, wow, 30% savings. That sounds like a great deal. But then they don't realize that it's only a good deal if their behavior matches the deal.

You are spot on. You are spot on. And to continue your aviation analogy, moolah is your instrument panel. My instrument panel in my airplane can tell me what just happened 30 seconds ago, what's happening right now, and what's likely to happen in the next 30 seconds. If I keep doing what I'm doing. I'm climbing, I'm descending, I'm turning. Whatever it is, is. Where is that same thing in our finances? Why do people have more month than they have money? Well, dummy, you went to Best Buy and bought a flat screen TV back on the 12th when you got your tax refund and you probably shouldn't have. We don't call anybody dummy, by the way. It's just sometimes I get passionate about this sort of stuff. Right? That's the kind of intel they need and then empowering them to pay themselves first. So my mother still to this day uses the envelope budgeting system with physical envelopes. I said, I said, I can digitize this very easily. So we call them pockets, and our members go and they create their dining pocket, their grocery shopping pocket, their education pocket for themselves or for their children's private school education, whatever that may be. And they're able to save in these individual pockets. And from a user experience standpoint, it could look like you have 50 different little bank accounts. It's all just, you know, we use our technology to kind of divide the money up, to display it that way. And really so they can see their saving progress, their pocket goals. We've got it like an Apple watch style, like you want to close your rings kind of thing. Like, we kind of gamify this idea of saving savings. Hard to say, like, like, Richard, you need to start saving. You're like, okay, what do I do? Well, I need to save for private school. I need to save for the groceries next week. And by the Way you know, the car needs four new tires. So let's, let's divide those up in little micro goals and begin saving for those. That's what Moolah is. It is the beautiful technology over what you're already doing to really show you. Yes, we provide you with a debit card so you can really track your spending and everything else. But the end of the day, this is for people who really want it. Like, I'm not. And this is just a basic business principle. You know this. I'm not trying to be all things to all people. I'm not trying to compete with bank of America. I'm not trying to compete with Chase. That doesn't matter to me. I'm going after the person who is the nurse, the firefighter. They're working 12 hour shifts. They don't have time to manage their finances, but they know they need something. I'm the tool for them to help take them to the next level as they start their family, as they, as they grow, and, and then eventually into retirement accounts and investing and everything else.

Well, I love how you separated those two differences because, you know, saving and investing are two different things. And not only the act, but the, the activities that go in. And I'll share this with you, Jason, doing events with people all over Canada for a number of years, we had groups anywhere from six people to 50 people, and we would do that twice a month for six years straight. We met a lot of Canadians, and I would ask these types of questions. What does savings mean to you? And then write it down on the whiteboard, get everyone's responses. What does investing mean to you? We capture all these things, and the common themes were always the same. Savings meant security, liquidity, peace of mind, accessibility, you know, core elements, these types of things. Whereas investing would always come up with risk, growth, potential, loss, you know, so, yeah, so. So there's different characteristics for these things, but the modern world has taken the two words and they've smashed them together into some weird hybrid. And so the brain hear savings and it thinks investing, or it hears investing and it thinks savings, and. And so this hodgepodge, I think, is a real danger to modern society. And it sounds to me like your tool's gonna help clear that up a little bit and make it so that people can really understand what they're doing. Now, when we come back after these messages, I'm excited to unpack a little bit more of how Moolah is helping people actively take control of their financial life in the year 2009. My life completely and totally changed. Something momentous and incredible happened to me. That thing was this incredible book, becoming your own banker. It was written by my mentor, an amazing friend of mine, R. Nelson Nash. It completely revolutionized and changed my entire life. You can learn all about it by registering for a free on demand webinar@learn ibc.com Take the initiative. You won't regret it. We are back with Jason talking about Moolah, how AI and behavioral thinking with the way he's got it set up is really going to start turning the dial for, for North Americans using this incredible platform. But I'm curious about Jason is, you know, you had 16 years in the previous business. You did the grind, you had a bunch of employees, you helped a bunch of people. Everyone's flying in the skies, they've all done some Jason training somewhere along the line, right, but now it's only been one year since you launched this new platform. You decided to build this app, do something really new and innovative. How did you go take the 16 year road and now you're able to condense that timeframe into 12 months. Walk us through what changed there.

Yeah, so that's the interesting thing. It was from conception to launch was actually 10 months. And then obviously the first business I shared, you know, we ran through, we got the one customer, everything else like, but it goes back to that school of hard knocks knowledge, like the things that they just can't take away from you, which is your mind. All the things I learned in that previous business over 16 years to be able to condense all that knowledge, to go faster, to develop quicker, to, you know, follow that lean startup mentality, to quote Eric Reese, right, To go back to iterate quickly, get it in beta, get it in testflight, get it in the hands of the people to get that feedback. And we literally have new versions coming out every Friday. Like if you were to download the app, I may bug you a little bit, but you're going to get an app update about every Friday right now. Because that is the level of not just commitment from the development team, but the iterations and the things we are testing and everything else just to get that out there, to see what works, what's broken. Right? Not everything's sunshine and rainbows all the time, but about every Friday we're pushing a new version out there, which is something I lacked in the old business. I was afraid of change. We moved too slow. It was Jason, the one man band. Now we're able to have that team around us and get everybody on this Sprint type mentality to get the iterations out there and to listen to our customers that much faster.

Yeah, that's fantastic. And obviously in the timeframe of this just in general, AI is becoming more prevalent and everything it's infusing into things we do, we're having lots of conversations about it on this program, of course. And what I think I see happening here is you're using AI to be almost like a silent business partner in the financial life of the everyday household. And it's there to find what's missing. And it's always looking 247 for what could be and keeping awareness of what's already been. Am I on track?

You're absolutely right. Think of it from both investing and the personal finance side. It is so data driven, a feature we just rolled out with last Friday. Actually, on the investing side of things, we're now looking at market sediment about each of these. If they are trading individual stocks, we mostly push people towards a low cost, no cost etf. But if they are looking at Tesla or whatever that may be, we're grabbing all the articles across the Internet, having AI read those to say, hey, is this good for the stock? Is this bad for the stock? Is this neutral? So you can very quickly say what are the good things about it, what are the negative things about it? To see what is. Because we know how the market works, right? Yes, companies with good fundamentals shine, but at the end of the day, there's a lot of emotion in it and the news really drives things. So what is the current market sentiment about this? So rather than you having to get the Wall Street Journal every single day, we're doing the work for you, saying thumbs up, thumbs down, hey, this is kind of neutral so you can scan the head deadline so you can still be informed. And we're giving you again, that is artificial intelligence opinion. Richard may have a totally different opinion on that. And that's fine. Back to the fact that it's your money, you earned it, you do what you want with it. I'm just trying to give you the tech, I'm trying to give you the guardrails. I'm trying to hold your hand along the way like you said, to be your coach. And when you're in the game, sometimes they follow the coach's play and sometimes they don't. That's totally up to them. It's back to putting the power not to the people, but also the intelligence of the people. This is the stuff that used to just be available to the Wall street giants. And stuff. And now it's in the palm of the everyday person's hand that's out there serving our community.

Yeah, amazing. It reminds me of a lesson that my mentor, Nelson Nash, the creator of the infinite banking concept, said. He would say that, you know, an investment should only be in something that you know a great deal about everything else. Everything else is speculation. And for him, you know, he, he invested in real estate and land. He, under timberland. He was a forester by trade. He knew that wow. Land in the path of development and he understood how that was growing. He knew what that land could be used for in multiple formats. He understood that market and he had, he had patience. He was willing to wait a long time. That created a lot of really positive exits for him. And so, but he really felt that everything else was some kind of speculation. And that doesn't mean that there's not some value for some speculation in your life. But how much of your capital do you want residing there and where do you want that stability? So it sounds like you have the potential where as an example, a lot of people will talk about, they call them dividend champions or companies that have a long history and they pay dividends a long time, et cetera. But you know, people investing in things that they use on a daily basis, products and services that you know and, or you're a user of and understanding that. So, you know, I think about certain services you sign up for and you check a bunch of boxes on, oh, what's the news that I want to learn about as an example.

Right.

Well, what are the products that I use already? What are the, what are the things that are related to me? And then, and now you can have a tool almost be able to serve you what is, what is news on those things presently that's going on. So you can almost connect your utilization of day to day services and products somewhat to your thought process on considerations, not the actual act of investing, but the thinking and the considerations on whether or not you might or should.

You're very, very well said. And, and some people would be amazed. Like they, well, I drive a Tesla, so it must be a great stock. And you and I both know Tesla's kind of a good run, but my money's not in it right now. Right. So you have to look at these different things, but at the same time, the beautiful thing about Moolah and this, you have to find a way to do this in each and every business for, to have that level of personalization for your members, for your clients, your Customers. If you download the Moolah app today, the recommendations it's going to make, Richard, and the recommendations it's going to make, Jason, are very different. We are perhaps different ages. We live in different, different countries. Right. I have three children that I'm saving for that, whatever that may be. My risk tolerance may be different. So the stocks, the savings, the goals, the guardrails it recommends for me are going to be different than for someone that's in their 60s versus someone in their 20s that can afford to take a little bit more risk and speculation and everything else. And that's the big difference here too. There's no one size fits all. Like, hey, this just works for everybody. Every little concept has to be tweaked and adjusted for the various clientele. Just like you do such a good job of that. I know you have that concierge kind of just love and touch on all your, all your clients and that's what it really takes to succeed in business.

Well, I love how the tool is going to help people from a behavioral standpoint. And I really do think that that is fundamentally we're all financial effort and energy needs to go. And that's a huge component of what we teach in regards to the infinite banking concept, how we help people, we serve them there. We talk really about family banking and operating as a family in a unit to keep more money flowing through the hands of the people you know, like and trust so that you can, you know, fundamentally recycle it as many times as possible. But it doesn't mean that person's not going to be doing investing. But if we don't get these behavioral aspects done, there's not gonna be a lot of money left over for the investing component. So if we can break down to these core fundamentals, it creates opportunities. And another thing I learned from Nelson Nash is that opportunities will come to those who are well capitalized. In fact, they will hunt you down, he would say they will track you down. Well, actually, they'll hunt you down. Oh yeah, they will. So the more you create more capital, resources and liquidity, the types of deals that start to show up for you, they change. They're not, not, they're not the ones that are crossing by everyone else's desk. And because there's enough of them, you sometimes, you know, there's a story saying that cream rises to the top. Well, that's what begins to happen with the opportunities you see. And it could be to reinvest in your own business, to reinvest in a relationship, whatever that is, you start to see these things differently as you become well capitalized. And it sounds to me like moolah is going to help people rebalance and reset how they can become capitalized in their life by taking care of some of the back end things. And you mentioned the front stage backstage. Again, love that analogy. Great strategic coach analogy with Dan Sullivan. They talk a lot about running your business in a front stage backstage. Model the world. And so knowing that there's a tool like Moolah that can be in the backstage of your financial life so you can focus on the front stage things which is generating the revenue and, and being with your family and doing the things you need to do on a daily basis and a little bit less of that brain power on all the other stuff, you're just able to become more efficient as a human being, fundamentally, finally.

Well said. No, you are, you're exactly right. At the end of the day. Right. We're helping and empowering people to achieve the financial freedom, the retire, the early retirement, whatever that is. And that's the thing wealth. People think, oh, I need a million dollars, I need this. I'd argue your, your freedom number is much less than that. And what is really wealth? You know, for us, I believe wealth is the ability to do what I want, when I want, with whom I want. If my son comes and says, hey dad, let's go play hide and go seek, I want to be able to say, yep, let's go do it, leave my desk, let's go play hide and go seek. Like that is wealth to me. And it's going to be different for every single person. But that is the level of detail we want to get at, to learn about our clientele, to say, what does wealth really mean to you? And here's the steps to get you there.

Now, you talked a lot about, you know, compartmentalization, kind of the envelope system as well, and those different ideas and being more specific on things like savings targets. But you've also put a lot of R and D into, you know, some algorithmic type things on how to approach investing. And I'm just curious, you know, Jason, where are, what are some of the core pillars or elements of that that you guys have tried to bring into the Moolah platform?

Yeah. So we call it the Moolah meter. And it is 57 different fundamentals of every stock of all 6,000 traded securities out there. We look at all fundamentals and we give it one simple score. But again, the score I see and the score you see are totally different. We're different ages, we have different goals, we have different risk tolerances, et cetera, et cetera. So even the scoring system on is this a buy a sell a hold for you? And by the way, everything we encourage is always growth. We do not want day traders. I don't want someone that's just going to hop in and out of these stocks and everything else. Yes, we're commission free on the investing side, certainly. But at the end of the day, it is the buy and hold strategy that works time and time again. Whether you go back to Ben Graham's security analysis or Burton Maciel and talk modern portfolio theory and everything else, it is this buy and hold strategy and in particular buy and hold a great ETF like Warren Buffett recommends. And you're betting on the US Economy, whatever that may be, depending on where you're investing.

Amazing. Well, I appreciate you sharing not only what you're working on, your journey, your story, the amazing way that you're going to be helping people with this new platform. And Jason, it was just such a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for innovating in a space that needs it to help people get clearer on their financial behavior. And speaking of great behavior, some really good behavior for everyone watching is to make sure you tune in next week where we have another incredible show lined up for you and we look forward to seeing you back as we continue to innovate and overcome and take us forward into a bigger and brighter future.