The Interview Series #48: Richard Canfield

What I might do, Jesse, I'm just— if you give me a second, I just want to run up and grab my book. It's— I thought it was here with me, it's actually not. So I'm just gonna go get my Nelson book and I'll be back in like 10 seconds or so.

Of course, of course. Yes sir.

Great, thank you.

I won't shame you.

And I'm not sure how familiar you are with Canadian geography or any of your north of me.

I remember that. Yeah, so I'll ask the question now that I should probably ask, hey, what have I not asked that I maybe should have asked? Hello and welcome to the Durham Talents Channel. My name is Jesse Durham. I'm really excited about today's interview. It's going to be with Richard Canfield, a friend, a mentor. You'll hear more about him from him in this interview, but I've been looking forward to this and I hope that you enjoy. All right, Richard, I just gave a brief introduction into who you are, but actually now that folks are tuned in, I would like to edify bit more because you are a bestselling author in our space. You're a Kolbe consultant, or I might not have the verbiage right, right there, but you've been one of the big proponents, of course, for me to pursue Kolbe. And I've recently done my assessment since Think Tank. I don't think I've been able to share that. We haven't spoken since Think Tank. So we're just getting back from Think Tank 2026. But you're a businessman, you're an IBC practitioner. You personally knew Nelson. You're a husband, you're a father, both as well. So I wanted to say some edifying things myself because I have got to meet you a couple of times at a coaching academy, at Think Tank, and you've been in on our roundtable series, which was a lot of fun when we were talking about— y'all, if y'all want to hear us talk about Austrian economics, libertarianism, infinite banking, you need to check out that particular episode of our roundtable series for sure. But I want to capture today, of course, your origin story with Infinite Banking. So just in general, I'm sure there's lots that I left off the table. What kind of background would you give folks to let them know more about who you are, how you would like?

Well, I would, I would put it like this. I'm just a small-town farm kid who grew up in a family business, worked real, real hard, ended up getting a construction trade. I'm a recovering electrician by trade. And I always knew, I always knew fundamentally there was some unshakable thing at my core that I was going to do something with my life. I was going to do something that was going to have an impact. I didn't know what it was going to be. I didn't know how it was going to materialize, but I couldn't shake the feeling. And I started getting involved in personal development, Jesse, very early on in my life. I was lucky enough to get involved in, you know, kind of, kind of some multilevel marketing type companies very early on when I was about 18, 19 years old. And I was, I was reading entrepreneurial books. I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad in August of 1999, and it had been recommended to me by actually a guy who became my landlord and a gentleman who was selling condominium properties in a concept called— they called the virtual apartment building where they would do condo conversions and they would, they would say, why don't you just buy one here and then you buy one here and you buy one here and you have them in these different geographic locations. So you're geographically diversified. And you have a— you have one in all these places. It's like you're creating your own virtual apartment building was kind of the concept. Really neat idea. And so I got Rich Dad Poor Dad and that really said, okay, I'm on to something. This is— this makes sense to me. This is kind of how I'd always felt. And I felt like this is the direction I wanted to go with my life. So I started learning about real estate. I got involved in a lot of personal development, spent a lot of money on my personal and financial development over the following decade of my life. Approximately $40,000 to $45,000. Now, that's a good amount of money, but if you go back 25 years, it's a lot more money. And when you're 18 and 19 years old and you're spending that on your Visa and your MasterCard, that kind of stuff adds up quite a bit. And so I realized that I was ready to make investments in myself at an early stage. And through some of that work and that development and the, and the people that I met and the network I started to build, I got really clear that I needed to help people understand that they could take control of their finances in a different way. I felt obligated that there was a way that I could help people somehow, that the thing that could make the biggest difference in most people's lives is if we could help them get more control more autonomy, more peace of mind over their financial life at the you and me level, at the household level. And I think what really boiled it down was when we think about stress, stress is the, you know, Nelson Nash would say stress is the number one cause of medical maladies. He told a story of doing that in a live seminar, and there's a, you know, a well-trained heart surgeon in the meeting. He says, Doctor, what, what degree does stress have on the human body and the challenges that we face? And the doctor responds, it all starts there. So the number one cause of most stress in the average household in North America is finances. It causes spouses to fight and to bicker, and it causes stress and tension in the youth and the kids as they, as they grow up. And so they, they learn things to either rebel against or do the same as their parents around these money trends. And the conversation of the topic of money becomes uncomfortable and often frustrating and painful to the point where people, they're going to be like an ostrich and they're going to shove their head in the sand, right? Or they're going to get their back up against the wall in that fight or flight kind of model when these topics come up. And so I saw this when I was young, and I realized that this, this is something that if we could figure out how to address this area, give people more confidence and, and, and find a way to make it so that conversations and ideas and, and, and thoughts about money and, and independence about money wasn't difficult or complicated, and it could be fun and engaging. If we could change that game somehow, how much less stress would families have? How much more joy could be created? How much less medical challenges could exist? What's the ripple effect? What's the downstream ripple effect? Of making this kind of a positive impact on people's lives. And so I connected with that when I was around 19 years old, roughly in that phase. And I didn't know how I was going to do it. I thought it was going to be in the real estate track. You know, I kind of, I did go down that road for quite a while, but what I realized is, yeah, here's, I'll circle back to the story. In 1999, we had sold a property that my parents and I and my siblings had purchased. It was an rundown duplex, like, you know, sweated house in Camrose, Alberta, small town Camrose where I grew up. And this was before a big oil boom happened. So we were early in the market. We, we had all the challenges. At one point in time, we had guys renting the basement that were playing floor, playing floor hockey and they were body checking each other through drywall. Okay. I, I moved more appliances, washers and dryers and fridges and stoves with my brother down the smallest awkward stairwell known to man. I must have moved 35 appliances in 6 years in that one property. Got expert level at moving appliances. I learned how to paint. I learned how to do trim. I did my first roof, re-roofing of a property at that point when I was about 15 years of age. They had a dog named Goliath at one point, and what you picture is that dog is exactly what it was like. And you would think it was digging to China the way that the holes were created. Like there was like giant tunnels. I had to reclaim that whole yard, you know? Uh, and I did all this like after school, after high school, I would go in and I would do work for several hours and come home and do homework, and then I would go to school the next day. So those are the lessons I grew up with. And when we sold that property, I was all frustrated. I said, I'm never going to do this again. This was such a hard experience and it was very stressful for me. And then I learned that we could go and buy a property that was completely managed in this rental pool, and it wouldn't matter if we had tenants or not, we would still get paid. And I didn't have to do a darn thing, move an appliance or deal with a dog. And I'm like, this is great. I can have the benefits of real estate without all the heartaches. This is fantastic. And so I got rejuvenated in that idea that this was a path to wealth. Here's what happened, Jesse. I remember that we, so we signed a contract, I believe it was in September or October of 1999. And we finally took possession of this property. It was probably February the next year. And I remember looking at the mortgage documents. We signed the contract paperwork and we signed the mortgage documents. I remember high-fiving my parents at the time. We got a mortgage at 6.97% and we were over the moon excited. We thought we had robbed the bank because the interest rates had come down and my word, This is absolutely glorious. We were just, you know, tickled pink at how great of a deal we'd scored on the interest rate. So just consider that as we're doing this recording in 2026, in 1999, we were excited about 6.97% interest rates. Okay. So I've been around the block a bit, if you kind of follow my meaning here. And what I realized is the purchase contract and all the things that we signed versus the mortgage documents and the size and stack of mortgage documents, something was out of alignment. And I was immediately suspicious. I thought, there's got to be something more here. Something ain't right. You know, you ever heard the expression, there's something rotten in the state of Denmark? Okay, so I ended up researching a little bit about this mortgage contract, and I saw there was some formulas in there about prepayment penalties and all these things. And I went and, you know, at the time, you know, this is 1999. Yeah, sure. The internet was around, but it wasn't like high speed like we know it today. It's involved in everything we do. And so I ended up going down to a bookstore. I think it was a Chapters bookstore. And I found this book, this little black book. And this book, Jesse, is 100% numbers. And all it is is a book that helps you calculate payments and amortization charts for loans. I bought this book so I could figure out and understand just how much money was disappearing in interest on this mortgage. When I saw the numbers, I was blown away, astonished. And I remember saying out loud to my parents, I said, this is a racket. We're in the wrong business. We, we, we're, we're, we're on the wrong end of this deal. We need to figure out how to be doing what these guys are doing. This is the right spot to be in. Sure, we got the real estate, but they got the hammer. They have all the, all the power and they're the ones getting all the money. And so I realized that in like 1999, and I thought, one day I'm gonna be the bank. I gotta figure out how I can become the bank. Lo and behold, couple of years later through my, my training, my research, my personal development, my financial development, going to real estate events, real estate courses, traveling to different places in Canada, week-long weekend events. Meeting people, investors all over the, all over the place, all the gurus. Many of those gurus are gone, by the way, and they've been replaced by new gurus. The gurus shift every 10 years, in case you're wondering. And what was really interesting is I learned, okay, there is a way that I could take my registered accounts. Okay, so a 401, in Canada it's an RRSP, and I could, I could lend that on first, second, and third mortgages. I wouldn't recommend those, by the way, but I could lend that money as long as the person I was lending it to was not connected to me by marriage or by blood. Okay. It had to be an arm's length transaction. Does that make sense? But I could take, I could lend on the title of that property and I could collect the principal and interest payments and I could become the lender and the bank. And I thought to myself, hallelujah, this is it. This is what I've been looking for. I've, I've, I've figured it out. I know exactly how I'm going to become the bank. And I had arrived in knowledge. Does that make sense? Nelson Nash teaches us about the arrival syndrome. And so I thought that that was the pinnacle, that was the thing. And I did a number of those lending deals. Several of them worked really well. Eventually, when I got a little bit later on, I had an issue where one property ended up foreclosing. I did figure out how to resolve that particular issue, but I can tell you it wasn't the way it was explained to me., and I was a pretty knowledgeable real estate guy. In fact, at that point in time, I had had my real estate license when this happened, and it was only because I had the right connections and I knew how to ask the right questions. I was able to resolve that deal. I could have lost all that money even though I had secured on title. Okay. So just because you have security doesn't mean you have a guarantee. And I realized that there was a lot of risk in that type of lending. It doesn't mean it's not a good deal. It doesn't mean it, it, it can't work really well., but it did mean that if you didn't have more layers of control, that you could put yourself in a really nasty position for you and your family. So all of these experiences were, were things that kind of led me up. And so shoot forward, August of 2009, this book finally lands at my door after taking about 30 days to show up from Amazon. And it costs me, so everyone will love this. We know there's a Canadian exchange differential between US and Canada. Well, at the time it was pretty crappy when I ordered this book. And so this book you can buy for like, I don't know, $22 or $24 or something. Well, for me to get it to my door, it was almost $50 Canadian. Now part of that's because after I received it, a month later, I got another bill from FedEx for customs. For like $13 more. Okay. Most valuable money I ever spent in my life. Once I read this book, I realized all the $40,000 of money I'd spent on the personal and financial development, all the gurus, all the real estate courses, not a single one of those yahoos had told me anything that was in the 92 pages of this book. In 92 pages, Jesse, I got a better financial education than everyone else I'd spent money on. All the hotel rooms, all the airline flights, all that cost. It's not that that wasn't valuable or that I didn't learn anything, but the biggest thing that I learned was that they didn't understand the characters in the play and they were focusing on the same elements of leverage that Nelson tried doing and what Nelson was told to do when he did his real estate career. And in the early '80s, he got caught with his pants around his ankles because of the interest rate, because no one explained to him what happened when the lever went the other direction. Well, the lever going the other direction is when the interest rates spiked and he was overleveraged. And then the, the value of property, because people can't buy it anymore, precipitously declines. And it's literally like you're up like this and it flips in a heartbeat. That's essentially what happened in the early '80s, and that's what happened to Nelson. Now, a lot of people don't know this. In fact, we did an episode on our podcast about this. When Nelson, he owed $500,000 in an open line of credit, like a home equity, basically the equivalent of like a home equity line of credit in like 1981. But what he doesn't say in the book, and he doesn't say it in Building Your Warehouse of Wealth, is that they had a large real estate development. And Nelson did business with partners. He says, you know, you don't want to go through life alone. You need partners in life. And so he had real estate developers, and one of these people was a big name, the biggest named lawyer in town in Birmingham at the time. And he says that guy bankrupted on them, and him and another partner had to eat his share. Nelson's share of that part of the deal was $300,000. So Nelson now owed $800,000, 1981 money, Okay. At 23.5% interest. Now that is financially crippling today. Imagine what it was like then. Now, if you put that into an inflation calculator, Jesse, you'll realize the equivalent amount of money that Nelson had owed to the snakes and dragons, as he calls them, was pretty close to $2.5 million. That's the equivalent in today's money. Now, for everyone listening, put that into perspective. Imagine you had $2.5 million worth of money owed all of a sudden, and you were paying 23.5% interest on it. How on earth would you get through that? Well, Nelson, Nelson did it through prayer. He had to reevaluate his budget and how he was spending money. He had to rethink his thinking, and he had to find a way to— he had the answer. And the result is he was able to start showing people through his background in economics the fundamental principles of long-range thinking and his background in insurance and what he already owed in whole life, he, he realized, man, I've got access to money from 3 different life insurance companies. I can get access to money at, at 8, uh, you know, 9 and 10% from 3 different companies. The problem is I don't have enough in there. I hadn't been paying enough premium to create enough value. So that I could get rid of these snakes and dragons. So I gotta reevaluate the way that I'm flowing money in my life. I gotta reprioritize and I gotta commit to increasing capitalization premium, premium deposits to grow this so that I can borrow from this system I control to get rid of this one that I don't. Now, 1999, I read that book. And I thought to myself, this is what I've been— this is the thing I was looking for since I read that mortgage contract, since 10 years ago when I got that mortgage and I read that and I thought I wanted to be the bank. This was what I was looking for. And I didn't know. So it landed there and I'm just like, holy Toledo, this is it. This is the thing. And I knew at that moment in time, this was what I was meant to do.

Okay. If I can pin you here for a moment, because goodness knows I want to let you just run. But I also have a bunch of questions. So that's what I've been, you know, furiously doing over here to the right here is writing down my questions and my thoughts. Number one, I thought it was very— real quick humor interjection here— I thought it was very brave of you to mention hockey with the Olympics being so recent. Again, at the time of this recording, 2026, some fun things have happened for the US.

A good hockey game is a good hockey game.

Right, right, right, right. And it's not even my sports. I don't have a dog in the fight really. It's like, I mean, I want us to win. Sure. Who doesn't want to win, right? But, but the men and the women did. So I got to mention it though, because I'm on here with you. Okay. If we're putting a pin in when you did get the Becoming Your Own Banker book, I want to cover. So can you give me a little background just to flesh out you, your holistic life? When did you get married along the route? When did kids show up? Because we got this trajectory of, hey, I'm 15 years old, I'm doing family business stuff, I'm hating fixing this lawn, all the way to, you know, discovering Infinite Banking through the book. What were the other life events along the way? Marriage, kids, or anything that you'd like to add?

Yeah. So I— the book was in 19— sorry, 2009. And then I proceeded to get licensed by the end of that year. And then I'll tell you a little bit about how we started teaching people about the concept in a moment. My beautiful wife Heather, I met in late 2010 and we got married in 2014. So years later, I'd already started the path of IBC, you know, when she came into my life and, you know, our firstborn was in December of 2015. So, you know, he's 10 now at the time of this recording. And, you know, we've— we practice family banking meetings, we spend You know, again, being that we have young kids, kids are very receptive to learning, but trying to figure out ways to engage them in learning is always a trick. And every kid is different, every family is different. So it's something that we're always working towards. Do I, do I think we have it nailed down? Probably not. But, you know, I like to say, hey, I might be slow, but I'm worth waiting for. So we're always working towards what I think is going to be our next best and greatest element of implementation for our family system. But the kids understand that we have a family banking system. They understand fundamental principles, which is when we access money from the family system, we have to put the money back and we have to put back more than what we took out. The reason being, if we don't, we won't have access to use it again later.

And 10-year-olds can grasp that? Yes. Yes. That's good.

That's as simple as it is. We don't need to talk about policy loans. They don't know a whole bunch about insurance policies. I'm starting to incorporate those things now, but prior to that, we haven't spent any time discussing those elements. They do know that Nelson is critically important. They see pictures come up on the TV screen of me with Nelson. I've got a picture of Nelson holding my son when he was 6 years, when he's 6 months old. Okay. My son had the pleasure to meet Nelson. He, though he doesn't remember that. I've got a great picture of it. They know this book. They know this book is important. This book shows up at our meetings and I always point to Nelson on the back. I have pictures of Nelson in my office here. So they understand and they know the importance. And my daughter, she'll ask questions, you know, she'll ask when I went to the think tank recently and she knows, oh, she doesn't want me to go, of course, but I have to go, hun. It's important. This has to do with our family business. This has to do with the legacy and supporting the Nelson Nash Institute. So she understands these things are important, but do they know the full context of it? Not necessarily. Here's the other thing they know, Jesse. Each one of my kids has a signed copy of Nelson's book. Okay? They're not going to get that copy until they prove themselves worthy. And they also know that, so they understand that it's ready to go. They know that that's a very important item. It's one of the most important items in the house and that they need to prove themselves ready to be able to receive it. So those are kind of planting seeds for a bigger future where I'm setting a press— I'm setting a clarifying precedent that they need to manage behavior in order to prove that worth. Do they have a checklist of what it's going to take to get there? Not yet. They don't know today, but there's going to be an exam I'm going to create that they're going to have to fill in an exam to prove that they understand core fundamental principles. I'm not just going to hand them the keys to something that is like a Ferrari and then say, here you go, hope you figure it out. Like, we're going to go for some driving lessons first. And that's the kind of mindset that I'm looking at. And I'm also planting seeds with them that if they don't participate in the family system, They're not gonna have the ability to keep doing that. And they don't know what that looks like yet. But I'm giving them these things to think on cuz I wanna eventually hear what they're thinking is. I wanna hear what questions they're gonna come up with, not what things I'm gonna tell them. Cuz you can tell people and tell people and tell people, but what's much more engaging is when people inquire and then you have a chance to inspire.

Very cool. All right. So I'm, I'm glad that I asked that question for a few reasons. I've written down probably 2, 3 ideas that are, I feel like, useful looking forward at more projects, say, that the Roundtable series will take on because people do come to the infinite banking concept from different come froms. You know, me and my wife were already married and we decided to adopt this process. Whereas here you are, you are a few years along the way, then you get married, then you have, so I think. When you get a group of people together like that from these different perspectives, we can really field a lot of cool and fun stuff for, for the benefit of other people that are vetting the concept for themselves, wherever they happen to be in life. Neat. And I love talking about the family banking, of course, and the idea of you creating an exam. Neat, man. Family was doing real estate. So was the family business the electric work and then that just bled into doing other real estate things? Was that the family business? Or was it just real estate in general?

Actually, no. So I grew up, I was— I like to say I was the heir to the portable toilet kingdom of Camrose, Alberta. So we had— my dad had a septic service truck, you know, working in acreage communities and servicing some commercial clients. And then we ended up getting little portable toilets and we built them. And I had an assembly line building them in, you know, pretty much by myself for the most part. In the garage. I probably built over 50 of those things in my lifespan. I used to drive around all over. As soon as I had my learner's permit, I was driving around dealing with cleaning portable toilets and moving them here and there and all the logistics. And so that, that was the environment I grew up. So you may have heard of the Honey Wagon. Well, I used to drive the Honey Wagon to school. That's what they call a septic truck, in case you're wondering, for any of the listeners who don't know that.

Oh no, you're definitely saying plenty of things, even if it's the same word, but just pronouncing it different, like garage just a second ago. But honey wagon, no, that's a new one to me too. So it probably is to other people as well. Or yeah, you mentioned Toledo earlier. I'm like, Toledo, Spain? What are we talking about here? Okay.

So, so that was the family business. And, and, you know, when I left that, I started my electrical career immediately, you know, literally within 30 days of leaving high school, essentially. And I became a journeyman electrician, I believe, I don't know, 2001, something like that. And so I did that for approximately 10 years. And when I left that career, my final day was— I was an electrician— was February 6th, 2008. And so at the time of this recording, I'm now 18 years permanently unemployable. And so I celebrated an anniversary recently, actually at Think Tank, pretty much going to Think Tank is when I celebrated my 18th anniversary being out of the trade. It was a great trade. I loved it and I met a lot of great people along the way. But what I realized is in the environment I was in, I started doing job site seminars to teach people how they could do things with their registered accounts and to help them understand, like, did you know that you could put this in real estate? Did you know that you could do this? Did you know you could do this? Did you know that you If you borrowed money from this, you could write the interest off. Like, people didn't know anything. And the stuff I was learning from all the courses and the things I'd been working on up to that point in my life, I was passing it forward. I was trying to convey it to people. And so I would literally get, you know, a bunch of job trailers together. So, okay, everybody, I'm going to do something at lunch, get everybody into this trailer. I would go print some things off because I was a foreman, so I could have the run of a printer. And I would say, hey, look, the company is gonna give you free money, you know, for your match or whatever. In this case, it wasn't a match. It was like literally they would just give it to you, but all you had to do was sign up for it. The problem is they wouldn't, they wouldn't do it automatically and it didn't kick in for 6 months. So if I had an apprentice or a new guy on, on our crew and I found out how long you been here for, oh, I've been here for this long. Well, did you get this and this set up? And they said no. I said, grab your tools, come with me, get in the truck. I would take them down to HR and we would get them set up right on the spot. Because it was literally free money. You didn't even have to match it. So, you know, why, why on earth? They're not gonna tell you to come and do it. You have to take responsibility to do it. So I would, I would kick people, you know, proverbially in the nuts and say, let's go. Like, you need to take responsibility of this. And I would literally pull them off a job site and I would take them down and get them set up to get started on those accounts immediately. That's how much I cared about getting people to move ahead financially. Gotcha.

Yeah, your God-given abilities were, were showing up. You weren't just— you said earlier, like, ostrich head, head in the sand. And, and people that are supposed to be doing whatever it is that they're supposed to be doing, and it's their passion, you know, Beethoven probably didn't have much passion for chemistry, right? He was doing what he was supposed to be doing. So that's obviously your innate God-given gifts just showing up, um, doing job site seminars. Very cool. All right, um, I, I really want to know what happened between your ears, what happened in your life. You say you were turned on to personal development, uh, you mentioned MLM. I have some network marketing background myself. I was in the travel space between being a school teacher and now being an authorized practitioner and helping folks with the IBC. So I'm very intrigued by that. So I would love to know more about what happened in your brain. What did you see? What did you hear? What provoked you? What other books maybe? I don't know, just anything from that point in time because I feel like most people are just doing whatever they're doing, Richard, their career, their family business, whatever, and they do have the blinders on, but not in a good way. There are times I feel like where it's good to have the blinders on, be focused on something, knock it out, et cetera. But in general, I think having a a wide view is helpful. But I feel like for me, 2015, when I was exposed to entrepreneurship, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Becoming Your Own Banker, that was my renaissance year. I feel like that's when my blinders came off. So I'm just really curious about what happened to your brain, what happened in your life to where you became open-minded to, oh, I should be reading books. Oh, I should be spending money on sitting somewhere and listening to other people, stuff like that.

You know, there's a couple of things. So with the book, The Rich Dad Poor Dad, but that was a key element. And the gentleman who basically told me to go get that book, he actually hosted the first Cashflow game that I attended, which was maybe 6 months later. And so I got to play the game and then I went to a few more events and played the game. At the time, if you wanted to buy that game, it was like $325. Well, I ended up getting my game by going and doing some electrical work in that guy's basement for his home office. And I said, he said, well, how do you want compensation? I said, I want a game. That's my compensation. And I picked his brain when I was there and we had a good time and I wired up a few plugs for his house, that sort of thing. Well, you know, shooting forward the game, the reason The Cashflow Game is a valuable game is because we learn best through experience and through simulation. Have you ever heard of the cone of learning before?

I have, but it's nothing that I could reframe out loud.

No problem. We, we, I used to show this in our, our live events. We would run Infinite Banking Bootcamps and a number of events. So we know speaking to small groups of people, large groups of people. And so the cone of learning is just, is just an inverted triangle. Think of it as like an upside down pyramid. And the cone of learning explains how much information you retain after a 2-week period based on different ways you can take the information in. Okay. So at the very bottom of the pyramid is reading and it's like, cool, you read something, you might retain 10% of that information 2 weeks later. And as you go up the pyramid, the more engaging you create, and the number one thing at the top is simulating the experience or actively doing it essentially gives you the highest retention, like 80% retention. Well, right below that is like participating in a discussion because there's, there's an active participation element attached to it with real conversation and other people obviously have to be involved. There's no discussion if there's no other people. Sometimes we discuss things in our own minds. Sure. That's not the type of participation we're talking about here. So the Kona Learning, and we would, we would use that at our live events, Jesse, because we want people to recognize, look, you are here, you paid to be here. You want to get the maximum value. I need your participation. Do you agree to participate so that you can get the most value out of being here? Not for me. So that's why we would use the Kona Learning. But the, the game, the Cashflow game is a simulation environment and it's designed to simulate real life, has real life types of deals. Big deals, little deals, small deals, all kinds of stuff. And the, the rat race circle for anyone that's played, you go around and every once in a while you cross paycheck and then when you cross paycheck, you, you get paid from the bank, et cetera. Well, that cycle of going around those things and rolling the dice and buying a doodad, rolling a dice and landing on baby, rolling a dice and finding an opportunity deal or a market deal, that cycle and the timeframe it would take to go around the board to do those things and collect the paychecks, that's meant to simulate real life. So if you play the game for about, I think it's 2.5 hours is the maximum time, 2 hours or 2.5 is a time limit. You're not supposed to play it longer than that. Because that timeframe rule actually simulates a cycle of your life. Does that make sense? So the amount of opportunities that come to you, the amount of challenges you're faced with, the amount of paychecks you receive, that's all built into the structure of the game. A lot of people don't realize that. Okay. It simulates maybe a, maybe a 1-year, 2-year timeframe in your life, kind of an example. Does that make sense? Okay. And then the other thing that is interesting about the game is that there are so many different cards that are there, and you're learning when you play, not just based on the cards and what you receive, you're learning based on the actions and behaviors of the other people at the table. So watching and learning what they do is just like real life because there's people doing deals and not doing deals, receiving opportunities and not doing anything with them that are sitting around you right now, probably in your house, probably in your classroom, probably in your at your, at your workplace. And so are you observing their reactions and their thought processes? Are you thinking about their thinking? Are you thinking about your thinking? That's the simulation element of this game. Well, one of the things that's in the game, there's 3 key cards and one of them is a, you know, we're coming back to the network marketing model here. There's some network marketing cards in the game and one of them is called part-time business. You start a part-time business, uh, uh, $500 investment, ROI is question mark, uh, no pay, may not do anything at all, et cetera, et cetera. And so, and then that's called card 1. And then card 2 is, hey, you invest in some sales training and I think it's $800 or $500. You take a sales course to learn some sales skills. If you have card 1, Increase passive income by $200 a month. But if you don't have Card 1, you can't do anything. However, you might not get Card 1 first. You might get Card 2 and you might say, okay, well this doesn't do anything for me. I can pay $500 for sales skills, but I don't get any passive income because I don't have Card 1. So do I do it or not do it? Does that make sense? So a lot of people wouldn't pay for that card. Well, I'm the kind of guy that would've paid for that card. Does that make sense? And so when card 1 comes along, I instantly get the $200 of cash flow because I have the skill. So it was investing in a skill. That's what the card is teaching you to do, is invest in the skill, because the skill creates revenue, not the opportunity. Does that make sense? Okay.

Yes.

And then, and then there's a third card, and the third card is I understand the power of networks. Because you realize the power of networks and you align or connect with a network, If you have card 1 and if you have card 2, increase your passive income by $5,000 a month or some ludicrous number. That one, those 3 cards alone could get you out of the rat race. Okay? And you could, you could get card 3 and keep it and have the network, but not have the other 2 cards. And so what's the teaching point? The lesson is that An opportunity is just an opportunity without the skill to do something with it. It doesn't mean have much value. And without a large group of people to do something with it, it doesn't have a lot of value. So if you don't have the opportunity yet, if you're listening to this and you don't know what your opportunity is, or you're not sure what it is, what you can do is you can create the skills, learn and understand basic sales skills. Selling is not bad and learning how to do it is not bad. Really, all it is is fundamental good communication and trying to learn and understand what other people want and need and figuring out a way to give it to them. There's no one that I've met that isn't interested in doing that in some way anyway. We all have some natural sales skill element. We're just not trying to refine it. So you should look at refining that. The third thing is grow your network. If you want to create an environment where when opportunity strikes, you have people to talk to about it, you need to have people to talk to about it. So you have to go and build that up and create the network of high trust relationships. And if you're really good at that and you're good at some basic sales skills, whenever opportunity shows up, you have a conversion opportunity that's be able to translate that into dollars or an asset very, very quickly. And that's what I learned from the cash flow game. Does that make sense?

I love it. I would encourage anybody who, like me or you, that have been maybe exposed to— and if you haven't, for sure go read Rich Dad Poor Dad. But I followed up on the Cashflow Quadrants on Rich Dad's Guide to investing, and we know that life insurance isn't investing, but he's covering a broad array of information in that third book of his. And it's really neat for me to have seen over the years him talking about cash flow, him talking about insurance, because he does talk about insurance, him talking about networking and learning how to sell and all those that I agree are very, very valuable things. So, if other folks haven't read his works, I would encourage them to it works, play the game. Terribly interesting for me.

Okay.

I think that's cool. I didn't remember, or maybe we've never had the opportunity for me to hear about your background in networking, but actually just because of my own experience, there are certain things about your demeanor. I mean, you're obviously, you know, honed in your skillset, Richard, and I've got enough experience to be able to recognize that. So that's just neat for me. All right, I'll say this because if I'm not mistaken, and maybe you could tell folks where to find this if you have this somewhere in particular. I don't know that I could say right off the top of my head, Richard, have I not heard you make examples between, just because you've talked about real estate so much as well in your background there, have I not heard you make an example, and maybe it's not available to the general public, tell me, between, and this is something I'm doing right now currently, actually, as well, is making some comparisons between the advantages that folks look for with real estate, just for example, and the potential cons to real estate in contrast with whole life insurance that's been properly structured without even necessarily taking infinite banking into, into the equation, but just properly structured whole life and its advantages and its potential cons, as it were.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. There's a number of ways of looking at it. And the reason I like to connect the two elements or asset classes is because people are much more familiar with real estate. We all know it because we can go touch the wall. We know there's a physical presence there. And when we think of real estate, we know that fundamentally it has value. Now, those values go up and down. Sometimes economic changes, local, municipal, federal, state rules can manipulate that kind of stuff. Interest rates can manipulate it. But in general, we know that people need— one of the basic human needs is shelter. So housing is a critical component of our life. And when we think about a house, we think, oh, that's a That's a structure that makes me feel safe. I can feel at home. I know I could be protected from the out— the outside elements. So it brings up these emotional feelings within people about the value of a piece of real estate because we often equate it to our own home. Does that make sense? And so there, there's a, there's a little story of a commercial that used to exist in Canada, and it was a, a mortgage commercial, and there's these two little boys and they're walking around the house late at night in their pajamas, and one of them's got a flashlight. He's looking under the couch curtain, you know, he's looking behind the couch, you know, he's looking under the kitchen table. And the other little boy says to his brother, says, what are we looking for? Equity. Dad said it's in the walls. So, so everyone understands that one of the reasons that you want to own real estate or have your own property is that you can create equity. So we have very simple equity is value goes up, mortgage balance goes down. So loan goes down, value goes up. We have this thing in the middle called the jelly in the sandwich. That's equity. Well, equity, you can't go and buy groceries with unless you can unlock equity. And there's only two ways to unlock equity. Number one is you borrow against And number 2 is you have to sell the asset. Those are the only 2 ways. Now you can build equity in other things. In the investment world, they have something called equities, which I think is kind of stupid. It's a really silly name to call investment structures that can go up and down all over the map with zero control at all, to call them equities. The core root of the word equity ties to like, you know, it just doesn't make any sense. It's an irrational word to use to describe it, in my opinion. But in theory, you can build your net worth. You're not really building equity inside of, you know, a 401 or these types of things. You're just potentially building a net worth. But if you can't unlock it or do anything with it, it doesn't really make this— it's not the same correlation. Whereas with a piece of real estate, it's very clear. And so what's similar to the asset class of whole life insurance is that you can build equity and you can, put dollars in similar to like paying down your mortgage, making a mortgage payment, premium payments, and you can pay the loan down or you can build up cash value. And the other thing that you can do is that, well, a, a house can go up in value over time. Well, a whole life insurance contract is designed by contract to go up because it has to, the insurance company is on the hook to meet the contractual features. So in the United States with most new contracts by age 121, which, you know, if you have a life to 121 contract, you can get life to 95. There's other elements. And, and if you have an older contract, maybe you have a life to 100. Well, in Canada, it's cold up here, we don't live as long, so we have life to 100 contracts. Okay. And so by contract, an insurance policy must grow cash value to equal the whole life death benefit, the original death benefit plus any paid-up additions that have been accumulated, they must equal the same by the time that you reach that contract maturity, which means you've created a forced appreciation. So if you had a house that you could take control over, not have to put a ginormous down payment on, but you could start with a monthly payment, you could have immediate access and ownership of the house. You could have all the house benefits and all the peace of mind of having control, and you could create forced appreciation regardless of any market condition or political environment, why wouldn't you want to own a house like that? So if you would want to own a house like that, that's the same reason you should want to own whole life insurance. However, it gets better. You know, when you kick the bucket, someone's got to sell your house, and sometimes they're not selling in a positive market, and then they got to pay real estate fees, they got to pay, um, payout penalties, they got to pay extra mortgage interest, they got to pay, you know, any number of other things in order to do that. All right. Legal fees. Well, when you kick the bucket and you have life insurance, you don't have to pay any of that stuff. You get the best maximum value at a tax-free basis, landing to the people you love most. And it happens in a very short timeframe. So you, you have two asset classes that have a lot of similarities, but where the differences are, the differences are exponential and understanding where the similarities live and where the differences are. To be able to look at them in a little bit of a different light, I think is really telling for the average person when they can see it through that lens.

Yes. Thank you for going through that. I don't think that I asked it well in trying to recollect what I'd heard you say about it before, but I know that it's very helpful to people. I know that me, I'd probably been doing infinite banking, Richard, for 4 or 5, 6, maybe 7 years, several years when I heard you talk about that comparison one time. And even more things clicked for me. I was like, oh yeah, appreciation, leverage, guarantees, control. Just you start seeing all these things because it's with something common that people do understand, like real estate. So you put that really well. You ran with it even though I poorly set it up for you.

I'll give— I'll give you and your listeners another— a real story of way to look at this if it's— if it's helpful. Imagine for a moment. So wherever you are listening to this, if you're driving, keep your eyes open. If you're not driving, close your eyes and use your brain to imagine. Okay. Imagine you own 45 pieces of investment real estate, 45 rental properties. Every single one of them, all 45 are 100% paid for. There's zero debt. Every single one of them, you can access 90% of every dollar of equity on the appraised value, and you can, you can request it and have it delivered to your bank account. Within about 10 business days or less. Okay. You don't need to go to a bank, seek an approval, do the line of credit. You have immediate access. 45 properties fully paid for. Okay. Now you kick the bucket. 17 of those properties are instantly sold on the market for their top maximum appraised value. It happens in a nanosecond, and within 30 to 40 days, That money is passed tax-free to the people you've pre-chosen that you love and care about the most. You still have 28 assets. You still have 28 properties that the family now owns and controls. They continue to grow in value every day. And if they need more capital, they can access 90% with no questions asked. Now, is that possible and feasible in a piece of real estate? Jesse?

No, not even close.

But this is a real-life story because this is Nelson Nash's story. Nelson Nash, at one time, he had, he had 49 policies. He had a couple of death claims. He passed a couple away. And when he, when he passed, he had 45 contracts under his control. 17 of those were on his life. 17 death benefit checks were cut when Nelson passed away. 28 remaining policies transferred to next gen, to next owners automatically. That is the power of owning and controlling an asset that can span generations. Doing that with a piece of real estate and trying to do that without a tax consequence or without capital gains or without, without Messi having to sell it. And you know, in a real estate household, there's always one person that's the the key real estate expert and the other person's maybe focused on the family or other things. And so the person that always, that usually dies is the one who's managing everything. And then they leave a giant mess for the other person to clean up who isn't emotionally capable at that time in dealing with it. Then it creates an absolute nightmare. And then all the other real estate investors show up because they see the news article or the the obituary, that's, and then, then they see the estate sale. And when they see the word estate sale, they smell an opportunity. So you have this constant cycle of flow where someone spends a lifetime building up all the wealth only to see it all come crashing down when they kick the bucket. So we can do a better job as individuals by taking ownership and control of that part of the process by having better discussions at the household level. And actually planning for the inevitable.

So good. So good. Yeah. The difference in types of private property can make a big, big difference for all those reasons. I just had a great phone call, first phone call with a couple who are grandparents in Georgia before getting on with you for our conversation today. And we got to talk on a bunch of those things, right? Because they've got a place that generation's parent is actually still alive, but they're soon expecting to be great-grandparents themselves. So, we're having big conversations about, you know, what kind of protection do we have in place or want in place? What kind of money lessons are these next generations that we're very interested in and invested in? What kind are they getting? You know, what kind of example can we still be setting? Awesome. Okay. So, that's still fresh on my mind. So, I'm saying that. All right. I'm, I was intrigued by the points in your, your life story, Richard, where things started to settle in and click. You read that book that showed about amortization schedules and you're seeing the interest that banks. All right. So, all right. We've been talking about real estate. You know who always makes out good on real estate deals? The banks. All right. Like there's the buyer, there's the seller. Maybe there's an agent involved, the contractor, the subcontractors, there's lots of people involved on every single real estate deal, no matter how big or small it is, but who, who really has control, who really has the profitability over the action that's taking place. All right. So you realize that, then it sounded to me like you were able to do something with that knowledge because of qualified plans. And how they were able to be used. There were limitations there. I think that most people will come to a point in life where they realize that they do need access to capital for either an obstacle or an opportunity. Like we were talking about the cash flow, you were describing the cash flow game just a minute ago. You know, obstacles and opportunities both present themselves. Well, there's this financial hardship or whatever, right? Or there's something's new, something's changed that, that's gonna cost more. More. There's an expense, there's something, and oh, but there's also this opportunity. People realize that at different times, and you and I have conversations with those folks. You know, they, they applied for a loan with a bank, the bank turned them down, and it fired them up, and they got open-minded, and then they started looking into what's possible out there. So, and a lot of those people as well along the way have tried different things, whether it's getting a home equity line of credit or whether it's borrowing whatever the government will allow them to do from their 401 or whatever, you know, program or plan it is that they're using. But that was still a level up in what you'd been able to do so far. So I'm just reminding everybody that you mentioned that. I think that's important because it shows your open-mindedness. And that's such an important, I mean, I would say it's a requisite for somebody to consider infinite banking again, as was having some open-mindedness. And I can't remember where it was in your journey where you actually even mentioned the word arrival syndrome. Maybe that was it. Maybe that was it when you, when you were exposed to that and you're like, oh, but I could be leveraging this and doing real estate at a higher level because of that, right?

I could be the bank. I could lend money on mortgages. This is amazing. This is everything I ever wanted and needed. Uh-huh. If all I did was this for the rest of my life, I'm set. So you, so you learned— until I almost lost it on one of those deals.

Right. Well, so that goes back to leverage, right? You learned a new way to leverage and it actually did improve things for you while things are good. But things can be bad. Things that are outside of our control, whether somebody defaults on something or we get caught in a bad deal, like you described Nelson's own personal experience. Great. Okay, I think we're up to date. Tell me about 2009 then. How did you get introduced to becoming your own baker? How did you actually have it, you know, come across your desk, as they say?

Yeah. So approximately a little over a year prior to that, I had attended a real estate event and met some people there. The result of that is I had a follow-up meeting with someone And they were showcasing a software platform that would teach people how to fundamentally, partly be due to behavioral elements, how you could make subtle changes and how, how just moderate changes in, say, a little pay increase, a little adjustment here and there, you could strategically pay off and eliminate your debts in a much faster timeframe. And it was very behavioral-oriented type of software because it had a simple dashboard. It would show you the amount of years to pay off all your debt, the total interest you were going to pay. And if you made a change where you got a $2 pay increase and you added that into the system, you could see the impact in interest saved and debt years paid off in a, in a heartbeat. It happened almost within seconds. And so you could almost run scenarios and gamify aspects of your debt repayment life based on that. And so when I learned about that program, I met with a mortgage broker friend of mine and I showed him the little, you know, printout that I got. And as soon as I opened up my binder, he pointed out, he says, oh, you're doing that. That's great. Hey, I know the guy that brought that into Canada. I'm like, oh, interesting. It's like, yeah, he lives in Leduc, Alberta, just outside of town. You want me to connect you with him? I said, absolutely I do, because I had questions that weren't being answered. I'm a very curious and inquisitive guy. And so I followed up and I called this guy, and then within a couple of days, I was in his home office with my girlfriend at the time, showing him the report and peppering him with 100,000 questions. It wasn't that many, but it was certainly a lot of questions. And that gentleman was Jason Lowe. And so that's how I met Jason. And I ended up starting working with Jason in that environment for the fall, the rest of the next year. And we got very, you know, we got close, we became good friends. And then roughly, you know, again, kind of in June of 2009, he told me and recommended I go buy Nelson's book. This is my original copy of Nelson's book. You'll see, of course, we've got a lot of highlights and things in there. This book is signed by Nelson. I have Nelson's 4 rules in here, and I've obviously had to add 2 more rules into it. So, you know, this is kind of my most prized possession. And that's kind of how it all started. And so at the time, I'll be pretty blunt, Jesse, I didn't have any interest and no desire. And in fact, to a degree, I still don't in getting an insurance license. I'm not a huge fan of the government. And if you recall from our roundtable discussion about libertarianism and that sort of thing, yeah, I'm not a huge fan of of a lot of government control. And as it sits, you know, I have a license in multiple provinces in Canada and, you know, I would be happy to not have all those licenses. The reality is I need to maintain them in order to operate my business, which I understand. That's fine. But I was really against the idea of doing it upfront. So it actually took me several months to make that decision because I was already licensed in real estate. And I didn't want to go get another license. And sometimes when you have two of them, you know, insurance carriers in Canada, they don't always like to give you a contract when you have a license with something else. So that posed some challenges as well. And the reality is I had to make the decision. I said, there's only one way that I can do this properly to help people. If I really believe that this is the path I can help people, I have no choice. I have to go and get this license. So it took me a few months to go and get all that done. I was still busy with my real estate. I, I was fairly new. I was only a year roughly into my real estate career at that time, and I was trying to build that business. And so I'm trying to build something brand new. Meanwhile, I'm getting distracted by something else brand new, you know, little shiny object syndrome. And it's like, cool, am I devoting now some of my focus to put it onto this when I just put a bunch of energy on this? You know, how am I going to pay my bills? And I'll be honest with you, it was, it was difficult. I barely made any money in this business for the first 2 years. It was a, it was a hard slog and a hard struggle. I kept the lights on by, you know, doing real estate deals and, you know, I wouldn't say I kept the lights on great. I got by, I squeaked by, but I committed to an office space right away. You know, on January 6th, 2010, As far as I'm aware, I delivered the first open-to-public presentation about the infinite banking concept specifically in Canada that I know existed. I'm sure there was lots of presentations about the power of whole life insurance, but as far as I know, I'm the only person that delivered an intentional conversation presentation about the infinite banking concept, and that happened on January 6th, 2010. 6 people showed up in our little boardroom. We was, the boardroom was so small, we had to move the table back. So, and I had a projector against the wall and I built a presentation over the Christmas holidays and I thought it would take me maybe 90 minutes. It took me over 2 hours to deliver it. Everyone stuck with me. You know, one gentleman, a young guy, 18 years old, found this online on Eventbrite, signed up, showed up, and that guy's still a client of mine today. Now, very cool. We didn't know what we didn't know, and we proceeded to do evening presentations, you know, 2-hour sessions once a month or maybe twice a month for the next year. And then we found out when we would sit down with people, the amount of questions were so high, they were so intense. We would take multiple meetings. Every meeting was, was, you know, 2 hours long. And like, by the time it was all done, I was spending somewhere between 6 and 10 hours of cumulative time with a couple or a family or a, a person in order to try and get a, a piece of insurance business closed. And we were getting small policies. Well, we were showing a $200 a month kids policy for our presentation. So I said, that's not working. So let's go show a bigger one. Let's show a $10,000 policy. We'll use this one client of mine as an example. And then we started getting bigger cases.. And, but the amount of time we would spend with people, and because you would have 2 weeks or 3 weeks or a month in between meetings to, to try to line your meetings up, and you had to go back and start over with some of that education, if that makes any sense. And so we kept beating our head against the wall and I said, look, we need to develop a course. So we came up with the idea. I did a real estate event I was invited to speak at. I had about 75 people there. I was given I thought I was given an hour. He said I only had 30 minutes. I negotiated 45 and I delivered a presentation. And then out of that, I sold a course that didn't exist. And, you know, we had 6 people attend that first course, which was in January of 2011, and it was built over 4 weeks. It was 4 Saturdays. It was really hard to get people to commit. We did that a number of times. We went through several iterations. We eventually did it, you know, 4 evening sessions on a Wednesday. Then we tried it a couple of different ways. Eventually we got down to a Friday evening, all day Saturday. Coincidentally, we were, we had got to that stage right before I met Nelson the first time. February 2012, I met Nelson for the first time and I did his, his 2-day seminar, which was a, it was generally a Friday evening, Saturday. In this case, it was right before think tank. So it was like a, I think it was like a Tuesday, Wednesday, and we got there. And what we learned is we just spent 2 years doing exactly what Nelson did. And Nelson says it, the very first paragraph in the book, this is a workbook for a 10-hour seminar. It was the very first paragraph and I didn't see it. Literally, we're spending 6 to 10 hours explaining to people what to do. Because this is a high education requirement and people need to have that method of clarity to move forward. Now, you don't need exactly 10 hours. Some people pick it up right away, but you need to make sure that you have good clarity on this concept. And we realized what we were doing wrong is we weren't selling Nelson's book. We weren't using the book as our core content, and we were trying to do it our own way. And we, all the reasons we were failing was because we had gone through the same experience that Nelson did and we were too slow. To just look at the book and figure out Nelson did all the work already. And so the moment we came back, we immediately changed everything and we restructured our whole course around Nelson's book and we made sure everyone with their ticket got a copy of the book and we spent time in the book. And guess what happened to our quality of cases and, and the quality of clients and the, and the, and the engagement? Everything went up and all got better.

Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, even that call that I just got off of with that couple in Georgia, it's a different beginning conversation when they show up and yes, they've seen a video presentation that I have on my channel and probably watched a few other videos, but when they've already gone to, you know, infinitebanking.org and they've been listening to folks' interviews there and they've got the Becoming Your Own Banker book and they've read that and then they get on my calendar, completely different conversation than, you know, mine and your probably beginning, you know, what you just described, what it was like getting started when we could have just paid more attention to what Nelson did all those years that he put into refining the process of bringing the concept to people. Okay, so it sounds like you either simultaneously or in rapid succession both decided to implement the concept personally for yourself and to professionally bring the concept to people. So if I could pinpoint you down on when you read the book, I love hearing from folks what went through your mind when you first read Becoming Your Own Baker that you loved. What maybe did you see that you questioned immediately? Oh, that part can't be right. Or what did you have to work through that you read from the book or any conversations that you had around what you read?

Well, my first reaction was actually anger. And anger was because no one had told me. No one of all that, all that money, all the gurus, all the courses I told you about, no one had given me this information. That bothered me. It frustrated me because I asked a lot of questions. I thought I knew a lot of people. I thought I knew really smart people. And I thought if someone knew this, they would have indicated to me. I was also irritated and frustrated because Prior to that, going a few years, several years before, I had a foray into the insurance realm with a, with a company. It has an acronym of 3 letters. Those 3 letters shifted when I started. But anyway, I won't get into it. I'll just say one of them starts with a W. And when I was with training with that organization, I actually went to write the insurance exam. They changed the rules since then. It's actually an easier exam to write. But that company also sold like funds, like mutual funds and things, which I didn't believe in. And a lot of the strategies they talked and promoted, there's similarities to some of the things in Nelson's book, but lacking in actual clarity and use case scenarios. And, but I like the environment. There was an environment of people who were trying to help others. They were trying to help other people with finances. They were focused on education, it seemed. What I realize now is that they weren't doing a very good job of it, but I ended up not getting that license at the time because I think I was just self-sabotaging. I didn't want to do anything with funds. And, you know, moving forward years later when I got this book and it had to do with insurance, I'd kind of written off the insurance part of my life at that point, and I was now like having to come back into it. So it was like, oh my God, not this again. You know, but here's the thing that was really interesting. I had inquired and asked about whole life insurance when I was with this other organization and I was, you know, training and learning and I got shut down. Oh, that's garbage. It's, this is bad and this is bad. And they would say things like, well, you don't, you don't get to keep the, the cash and the death benefit and all these kind of things. But it's 'cause they didn't know and didn't understand that number one, cash value and death benefit are actually connected because they're, they're the same thing. It's just a present value versus a future value. So you, you do technically get it all because it's all the same thing. It's just presented in a different way. And the types of things they were sharing, like, I just felt like they were shutting it down and they were, they weren't willing to listen. And I felt like I couldn't even ask questions in that group. And that stuck with me. So when I got Nelson's book and they were, it was talking about whole life insurance, like, you know, I knew there was something there. I remember when I was reading through the manual and I was reading through some of the stuff and I was doing my study, like, it seemed like there was something more to this. And those books didn't tell me anything, but Nelson's book did. And I'm like, all the things this other company told me I could do, I can actually do, but do much better using this mousetrap. And that makes a lot of sense to me. And I can minimize and reduce a bunch of the risk. So it, it, it just seems so logical. You know, I didn't get caught up in the weeds with, the equipment financing example. A lot of people do. And what I recognized, while I didn't understand all the elements of it, I could clearly see by going back and forth without analyzing much, okay, look, we've got this and this and this. We've got phases and the phases, all he is doing is adding little elements. Do I need to understand how all the elements go? I don't, because the end result is these numbers are bigger than these numbers. The difference is that he's con— he's got control in the process and he's adding more into the system. That much I can see. I didn't need to explore each of the numbers to figure out how I could intuitively understand that this one was better than this one. And the difference was behavior. Like that made sense to me right away. And when I got to page 85 of the book, which is a summary page, fundamentally it, it's maybe summary's not the right way to look at it. It's called Points to Consider. I'm like, yeah, these are the points to consider. And all these, the 5 points on this page really wrap the book up in a perfect summary that if all you did was read that page, it should give you enough to think about your thinking wherever you are in life, whatever you've got, whatever financial backing or background you've had. If all you did is read those 5 points and you questioned how you've been thinking about stuff in your own life financially, What conclusions would you draw? And that to me made a lot of sense. And so I knew, I knew I needed to make a change. I knew this is what I was looking for. It did take a while to get going and get implemented. And like I mentioned, I was started, I'd started a couple brand new businesses in that 1-year timeframe. And so cash flow wasn't exactly ideal. And it took me a while. It took me about 6 months to get my first policy. My first policy was $4,219 a year, including paid-up additions, and I had no term insurance, which, when I set up my own policy, I didn't know anything. No one taught me. The people guiding me, I was asking questions, didn't know anything either. So literally, I was doing everything from scratch. And if I could go back and change what I did with that policy, yeah, I probably would make some adjustments. But you can't go back in time. It was the best policy with what I knew to do. At that time. I still have it. I love it. It's a great policy. I've got lots of loans I've taken on it. And it led to more and more and more. I got another policy about a year and a half later. And then after that one, I ended up going to a course. I spent more money on my education to learn more about infinite banking. And when I came back from that course, I rethought how money was running through my life.. And although I wasn't making any more money, I thought if I change my behavior in these couple of areas, I think I could find $6,000 more a year. And so I immediately took some term insurance that I had gotten on my, my second policy, and I converted it within 6 months of getting that second policy. So I went from going like $4,200 policy to then a $200 a month policy to then with a big term rider to then a $6,000 policy added in. And I, and I just kept continuing to try to grow it from that point forward. And it was hard. It was hard to capitalize and commit money to premium because I wasn't making a lot of money, but I made adjustments to figure out. And the reality is I owed on policies a lot in the early years. And you know, there's a lot of periods in the early timeframe, Jesse, where I, you know, you could say I was stealing the piece because I was pretty crappy at loan repayments. And one of the reasons is because my cash flow wasn't superior, wasn't good enough to get it done. But I committed to premium, I committed to capitalization. And as soon as I was able, I started putting peas back on the shelf.

Well, what I would say there is, because I could relate and a lot of that has been my own experience, meaning have I experienced a lot of changes in cash flow over time? From being in different careers, sometimes having salary, sometimes deciding to launch a travel business. Cash flows have certainly changed for me, but policies have always been, since I implemented Infinite Banking, the priority. And I have at least always prioritized the premium. Say, that's where my money goes first. This private system of ours and Infinite Banking done inefficiently is still so much more superior to conventional finance. There's just so much grace because of the control. That you have, even if you're not in a position to be able to, you know, I would say that there are certainly situations where you wouldn't necessarily say it's stealing the peas. It's just, you've got a longer timeframe in your mind or in your plans and in accordance with your goals and cash flows of repaying, of restocking the shelves, right? But once you make that mental change, it's such a paradigm shift. I'll just use the word from the book. It's such a paradigm shift of, oh, well, first things first. We're paying premiums. Because I started with what was for me a significant premium. And then I did experience job changes and growing family and so many things that happened along the way. But with that still being our true north of, but we're paying premiums. That's the financial cash flow priority first. You said something that made me want to ask a question. Oh man, what was my question? I was relating so much to him. I'm like, man, I know what that's like. I know what that's like. Like. I know what that's like. I've experienced that. Um, okay, so you told me some of the things that stuck out to you when you read the book, what you got angry about, what you got right away. It'll come to me in like 5 seconds. My gracious. Oh well, I'll ask this while I think about it. What— what— and say what you want here, Richard. Um, what have you used policies for in your own life?

Oh, well, lots of things. I mean, we certainly use them for— we certainly use them for a ton of things. One example I've told a number of times has to do with artificial turf. And now we just recently had a move. I was sharing with you before we hit record, I'm about 30 days into a new house that we purchased here, and I've moved my family from one side of the Rocky Mountains to back to the other, to my homeland of Alberta, the free and hopefully soon to be free and prosperous Alberta, Canada. Maybe it will no longer be Alberta, Canada. It'll just be Alberta. To be determined anyhow. And so what's interesting about that is obviously there's a lot of costs associated with all that activity. But prior to that, our previous house, we had a south-facing backyard. It gets really hot in Chilliwack where we were living in the summer, and grass turns into straw. And it, it, it, you have to water it, but if they have water restrictions, like it, you can't maintain keeping it green. And so it gets really uncomfortable even just to walk on it if it's, if it literally, like imagine you're walking in a, a cut fresh cut straw field, that's kind of what it feels like. And so the other part is that there's a huge rain season. And so if you have a dog and you send the dog out in the rain and it's like that, well they just bring mud everywhere and you're constantly cleaning. It's a huge mess. And like literally you're, your whole life becomes wrapped around this yard that you spend a lot of time in, but then it also is creating a lot of challenges. And so, hey, we spent almost $12,000 on artificial turf, and that was all from a policy loan. And the moment it was done, our life changed drastically. We had a huge increase in our improvement of quality of life because, number one, our, our yard wasn't saturated in water and like squishy, like you would sink into it. For 4 months out of the year in the rain season, and it was green all year round. The kids could play on it. It was easier to clean up after the dog for everything all across the board. And then also what came of it is that I was able to teach a powerful lesson about like hard labor and work and value of money with my kids because I had the kids watch the crew doing all the work and it was hot and sweaty and we had to wheelbarrow everything in. They had to take out, you know, they got to take 4 or 5 inches out of everything, is all wheelbarrowed out, bringing in crush, packing it all down, like all the work. They were there for 3.5, 4 days, 12-hour days, just working like real hard labor. And I had the kids watch and we talked about it. I say, look, we could have done this ourselves and probably saved money. We might have been able to do it for half the amount of money. But if Dad was doing it all, Dad would be running the wheelbarrow. I'd have to teach you guys how to do a wheelbarrow, but you're not strong enough. You know, we don't have a truck. We'd have to go rent a truck. We'd have to like, like I walked them through all the phases and got them answering questions about it. And he says, you know, and Dad's got a bit of a bad back, so it would take us a lot longer. It might take us all summer. We wouldn't have it done, you know. And if my, my back gets hurt, I might be laid up. And if I'm doing all that work, can I be having meetings? You know, and so like I had the kids think all this stuff through and I said, look, so we paid more and we paid these guys to do the work. But that's because we're paying them for the value that they bring to us. They are creating value in our life, and that is what makes it worthwhile to pay them. And we are paying them from the family system. Now, because we're using money from the system, we have to make sure we set up an arrangement to start putting the money back in. So the next time we need to do something, we can use it from the system again. So I, I use the experience of the artificial turf to do far more than just pay for it with a policy loan. The quality of life and the, and the scenario and the memory of that, I can always bring my kids back to that memory. So if we never need to talk about hard labor and value and value creation and doing it this way versus doing it that way, investing in having someone else help us versus doing it on your own, these are things I can draw back to my kids. That to me, in that experience, which was completely unexpected, was more valuable than whether or not I used a policy loan to do it. Does that make sense? Now, here's the next thing. When my daughter was born, we had a really complicated pregnancy. It was a very challenging pregnancy. There was a lot of chances where we thought we were going to lose the baby early on. My wife was fundamentally on a modified bed rest basically for pretty much 6 months. It made a huge impact in our business. It made cash flow difficult. We had a 1-year-old, you know, at the time. 1-year-old wants to be picked up by mom, doesn't want anything to do with dad for a bit. She wasn't able to do that for a lot of it. It was a really challenging year and experience for us. And so because of that, cash flow suffered like a lot of things suffered. So what did we do? We paid a lot of our bills and things with policy loans. And we racked up a lot of policy loan debt and I paid premium and a couple of times I borrowed to pay premium. That's how bad it got. And the reality is I didn't track any of it because it was too much work to track it. I was just trying to service clients and figure things out and just make life run, to be honest. So because I didn't track it, I had to make an estimate several years later. Like 6 years later, I finally said, you know what? I gotta start putting those Ps back. I'm gonna guess at how much money we used during that timeframe and I'm gonna backfill. And I, I figured it was about $40,000 and I created an amortization for $40,000 to be repaid over, I don't remember, it was 36 months or 48 months or something. And I started making repayments on a loan even though it was It was 6 years prior. I recommitted to what I thought I had borrowed, and I set up a payment structure. So that's an example of something that we did. I didn't plan, didn't do it intentionally, but I turned around years later and I made the com— and I recommitted to the process. Does that make sense? Okay. That's one of the things you can do as the banker. Just because you didn't do something maybe properly in the past, doesn't mean you can't hit the reset button. When you're the banker, you make all the rules, all of them. And you also get to control time in a way that you can't any other way.

I love it, man. Financing for something around the house that you wanted. The banking system of policies that you had was there for the obstacles and the opportunities. So just to, just to drive it home, just to underscore one point you said right there. When you said you borrowed to pay premiums, where did you borrow from?

Yeah, I borrowed from policies.

So it's so good. Again, infinite banking done less efficiently is so much superior to conventional finance. So good. All right. So something like that. All right. Because that's within your realm of abilities as the owner of a policy. When you take a policy loan, Doesn't matter what it's for. Doesn't matter what it's for. So, do this for me then, if you would, Richard. Would you share a best practice that you maybe picked up along the way? Like, I can remember, you know, I got my first policy, we're paying off debts. That was the number one priority for us. We had student loans, we had the family car, we had credit cards. That was priority number one. We got a second policy about 8 months later in quick succession because it was working and we wanted to do more. And go faster and etc. And we want to get both me and my wife protected. So first policy on me, second policy on her. But I can remember, especially for, you know, the first several years, I would just have subsequent aha moments or revelations, or I'd glean something from somewhere, or somebody like you and Jason, you know, who, who are podcasting and put out video content. And I'd be like, oh, what? Convertible term? Amazing. Like, that's one that you mentioned a second ago was You had some term on a policy and you converted it. So would you share then a best practice, something that you picked up along your way that leveled up how you were doing infinite banking?

So I'm going to give you a number of things. Okay. So first off, you need to find a quick win right away when you get started. Don't try to go after the big kahuna, whatever the big kahuna in your mind is that you want. What is the smallest thing you can immediately knock out and get practice with. So when you are beginning this process, number one, I, I tell my clients now, one of your requirements is to take a policy loan in the first 6 months. In fact, I expect you to do it in the first 45 days. Now, why is that? You cannot learn to be good at anything if you do not practice. It goes back to the cone of learning we talked about earlier. You have to experience, you have to practice to actually get good at anything. And if you know, just 'cause just knowing you can do something is very different than actually doing something. Okay. Knowledge does not equal understanding. There's a great video, Jesse, maybe you've seen it, the backwards bicycle. Okay. Maybe you could link at it into the bottom here for anyone who wants to watch. It's a, it's like a 12-minute video from the Smarter Every Day channel. I actually sent that video to Nelson Nash. He loved it. And he said everyone should start their presentations with that.

Okay, so that's how I first saw an infinite banking presentation was somebody had taken his advice to heart and did it. I was so intrigued by it. Yes. And I use it often.

So the backwards bicycle is critical. It's all about thinking. And so you need to get that practice. You have to do it. You got to get the reps on the bicycle. And so what is a small thing? What is something you're going to be spending money on in the next 30 days, 45 days? That we can run through the program? What is a small debt that we can take care of? Everyone wants to say, well, I've got the, you know, the $10,000 credit card. Cool. Do you have a $1,000 credit card? Okay, let's pick the small one first and then let's make the commitment so that you can get the practice. And when you see and develop the practice, then you level up to the next and you level up to the next because you will start to see things you could not see before. That's the key. And so a couple of things. What's a small thing that we all have? Well, everyone's walking around with a computer in their pocket. Okay, well, if you want to go buy one of these and just pay cash for them right now, you want the newest iPhone or Android phone or whatever, it's got the fancy camera and everything. I mean, you're looking at $1,000, give or take, for one of these devices. It's a full-on computer in your, in your pocket. You use it for everything every day. Well, if you go finance that with your cell phone provider, there, it's a financing option. They don't really explain it that way because they just say, oh, it's a free upgrade. Is it really free? There is no such thing as free. Get that through your head right now. There are no free rides. There are no free deals. Everything, and I mean everything, comes at some measure of trade-off. So I would encourage people, take a policy loan to replace your next phone. But you know, when you do that, they also want to sell you the screen protection and all these other things that you get with it. Well, that's an insurance premium, and sometimes you pay the premium as a one-time charge and it just gets baked into the financing charge. Does that make sense? Well, once it's baked in there, now you're actually paying for it at the very top level. So why don't you just take, let's say that the phone is $1,000 and the screen protector premium is an extra $100, just for the sake of our example. So now you're financing $1,100. Okay, well, instead of doing that, why don't you just pay for the phone in cash and then you, you set a repayment structure on $1,400. Okay. So in other words, you're paying yourself back the cost of screen replacement, the insurance, you're self-insuring for screen replacement. Does that make sense? For damage to the phone. Now, if you're the person that wrecks your phone all the time, maybe you don't do that.. But if you're the person that it rarely ever happens to you, you're probably going to be okay. All right? And then if it does take place, if you don't wreck the screen and you need to go to a shop and get it repaired for $300, well, you take a policy loan for that repair. You, you are repaying yourself already for that endeavor and you're self-insuring for that damage. Does that make sense? Just like Nelson talks about self-insuring on page 48 and 49 of the book. You can do that in a small micro environment to practice, practice, practice. That's a good way to get started. So give yourself a 2-year repayment because that's probably what your phone company was going to charge you. Make the exact same payment that they were going to charge you, only make it a little bit more. It goes back to a system of control. The next time you need to replace the phone or upgrade the phone, everything that you need is there and your system grew and your family was protected. That is a logical, systematic way that you can get practice at a small level. Okay. Here's another thing. Yes, term insurance is important for the functionality of what it can do for you. We like to say that we're hiring term insurance to do 3 jobs. Job number 1 is to give you the proper protection your family needs. Okay. We— you usually can't solve your protection need full with whole life directly based on, um, your budget. Okay. So we're going to augment protection with term insurance, which is less expensive. Great. That's job one. Job number two is we're going to lock in your health today to create an environment for a future conversion option when you want to grow the system. Now you might do that as you might have a term rider on a whole life policy and you might have a separate standalone term policy as an example. So there's a couple of ways of doing it. You know, depending on the structure. And then the third job is, depending on the scenario, we might be able to use that term to temporarily increase the amount of flexibility you can have with the policy as well. So there's a couple of options there. All right, so term insurance and for convertibility is important for long-term strategic growth of your family system. Your income might go up, you might sell a property, you might get an inheritance, you might have a windfall, you might need to convert insurance. And if you don't have it to convert, you're going to be pretty upset that you didn't have it there in the first place. Okay. Next thing I would say, child riders or protection riders or guaranteed insurability riders. So every company has different structures. Riders vary by company, but a lot of them have similarities. They have little differences between them, but they often have a similar rider that does a similar thing. Well, one of the ones that I require If someone wants to get a policy on a child and they want to do business with me, it is a requirement that we put a guaranteed insurability rider on that child. Now, again, what the structure for every company is might be different. For one of the companies I use, we can lock in $250,000 that we can kick in at age 21, and we could do another one of those at age 25. That is critical for several reasons. Now, behavioral challenges in kids are increasing. They're up like an exponential curve, and behavioral challenges with kids can cause insurability issues. Now, you don't know when that's going to happen. Type 1 diabetes is also a problem. I've recently had another client with their 10-year-old. I just— they just found out has type 1 diabetes. Thankfully, we put a child protection rider on his policy, so we've created a guaranteed output of $250,000 for his kid at age 25 with that company. He might not be insurable if it wasn't for that. Does that make sense? So because we put the thing in place early when it wasn't a problem, now we've, we've caught the problem potentially in advance. Does that make sense? There's an expression, it's nothing's a problem until it becomes a problem. So you need to solve for things in advance of it being a problem. And these are some of the things that you can do. Last thing I would say is this. I have a tax policy. My tax policy's on my wife. It's actually a term conversion that I did. Now I got the policy on her, Policy 1, before I proposed because I like to test our relationship. And I said, well, you know, I think we're going to go the distance. I need to do some things to test this along the way. One thing is I'm going to put her through a massive house renovation to see if she can handle it. The other thing is I'm going to get insurance on her life that I own and control. To see if she'll agree to that. So all that went out well. I'm like, good, we're, we're heading the right direction here. This is perfect. So the end result is I got a large term insurance rider on that policy, and I knew at some future point when I had more cash flow, my income was better, I would make sure I could convert that. It took me almost 8 years, maybe something like that. I think it was close to 8 years before I was able to do that conversion. So the, the original policy was like $235 a month. A good chunk of that was term insurance. The next policy was $35,000 a year with the conversion. Does that make sense? Okay. Now that policy I owned corporately, 'cause corporate structures in Canada are a little bit different, and that is my tax policy. So I've set my money, I get paid and I take percentages. I use a profit-first model and I set money in different accounts. One of those is a tax account. Well, that tax account builds up for paying my taxes. Okay, now whether it's personal taxes or corporate taxes doesn't really matter. I just allotted into a big giant tax account. Okay, now rather than taking that account and just sending it to the government and saying goodbye to it forever, I now apply that account to fund premiums. And the premiums from the tax dollar that's going to disappear forever, creates a tax-free outcome for my family. My family gets paid on the tax dollar before the Canadian government does, and then I borrow from that policy to pay the tax bill. Now, over the course of the next year, I'm still setting money aside from new revenue into that account. I repay the policy loan, and eventually I need to pay premium again, right? Well, my business does more revenue, I have other money set aside Can I use a combination of that tax account and other monies I have to pay the premium?

Absolutely. Yes.

And so after cycling that through, by the way, I backdated that policy, so I was able to get almost 2 premium payments through it fairly quickly within about 6 months. And so now I'm in a position where I can literally just cycle the tax dollar through that policy every single year. Okay. That policy has increased I'm trying to think. Official start date was in 2001 with the backdating. So I just paid a premium on it and that was 2025. So I'm, I guess I'm entering year 5 in that policy. I think I'm entering year 5 of that policy. And you know, that policy I can access and borrow pretty much every dollar in premium close to it that I've put into that machine since it started. I've increased the tax-free death benefit, I think by, I don't know, $300,000, $350,000, maybe more on my wife in that timeframe. That's a hell of a lot bigger number than what I had to pay the Canadian government in taxes.

Beautiful. So many nuggets there. Backdating, child benefit riders, guaranteed insurability. I love it.

Okay.

I know two more things, at least, that I want to try to cover before the end of our conversation. One is, and you've done this elsewhere, and I'll tell everybody this. That is watching and listening for sure, if you have not seen the This Is Nelson documentary that Richard and Jason have put together, I think it's such a great insight. Richard, I will particularly use that because it tends to be like you described earlier. If somebody's interested in real estate, the spouse may not be, but they kind of get bundled into it, right? Well, I use the documentary in much the same fashion. Normally for me, normally folks that work with me, one person's doing the deep dive and the other person is at some other level of interest, right? They might be super interested as well, but they might be less interested and just be like, well, no, I'm down for the calls. We're going to do what you want to do because you're the one who's interested in doing the deep dive. And okay, we're going to— but I like them to see the documentary because if nothing else, it gives them a feel for what's behind Infinite Banking and Nelson, the man himself. So, All that to say, I know you've done this elsewhere and I would encourage everybody to check out the documentary, but would you give us a Nelson story? And then I for sure want to be able to get to, you know, anything that you feel that I might have missed. And we're going to have some rapid-fire questions, but could you give us a Nelson story?

Nelson story, man. Sometimes it's hard to think of them all.

I understand.

Well, when we were when we were doing the filming for the documentary film, it was filmed, and again, many things came after the initial set. Originally, it was designed to really— Jason's idea, again, you know, so technically the Nelson Nash Institute released and produced the film. We just kind of went down and kickstarted everything. And originally it was meant to be capturing Nelson's essence going through the book, and it was actually originally intended to be for advisors. That was the original purpose. And when we got going and got started, the person who came down to do filming with us, Jason Rink, the director, amazing guy, by the way, I met originally at a think tank. And he said, you know, you've got something much bigger here. This is not what you think it is. This is actually something much bigger. And we all realized and felt it. And, you know, when we were there with Nelson, What was wonderful is, of course, Nelson had an ability to just tell stories, but he also had an ability to, you know, he, he was the original weave in my opinion. He knew how to weave something from, from this part of the story. You know, you kind of get distracted and you circle back around and you close the loop. He was a pure genius of that. He would do it in seminars all the time, but he had some consistent jokes that he used. Everyone loves his mosquito in the nudist colony joke, you know, mosquito nudes, but I don't know what to do, you know? And he would use that in every seminar and he had a number of other ones like that. And he would always catch you with something though you didn't expect. And I really appreciated that. So what you can't tell, you don't see it in the documentary film, but there's a lot of the sense, additional backend of that filming has been released on the Nelson Nash channel. And so unfortunately you can't edit out Richard Canfield's laughter in a lot of those experiences. And so I'm in the back room like taking notes about other things we want to talk to Nelson about. And he would say something and I would just start howling in the back room. And of course, my voice carries a little bit, so it would interfere with the microphones. And I just love the whole experience. And so David and Kim letting us kind of tear apart their front living room and reorganize and have lights and cameras everywhere, it was really an incredible experience. And there was a point in time where it got a little tense because you know, who was going to own and control this film asset in Nelson was a bit of an issue. And the reality is it needed to belong and stay with the institute. And but there was also a lot of capital outlay involved in the situation. So what ended up taking place is Nelson actually took the reins and he said, here's what we're going to do. We're doing something special here and we're going to make it happen. And, you know, he had a, he had a, he had a calling everybody out moment that happened kind of in the house around the situation.. And it was both sobering but also necessary for the project to kind of continue. And the reality is he, he didn't know what we were doing either until it started to happen. And then he realized what we were doing was something more important, if that makes sense, because he would always say, this is about the message, not about the man. And when we went down, we thought we were doing something to make it about the man. Because that's where our heart was and that's what we felt needed to happen. But he was clear that that's not what needed to happen. And so the result of the film is about the message, and it's just showcasing the message through the man who created it the best way. So I'm very proud of the film. And, you know, one of the things I loved is in 2016, Jason had hosted Nelson in Kelowna, British Columbia, beautiful area in Kelowna. And Nelson, you know, he liked to drive everywhere. And of course, at the time he was trying to make 2016, he would have been 80. He would have been like 85, roughly, still driving. Nelson had a lead foot. He liked to drive fast. And so him and Mary came up together. Mary often traveled with him and they drove up. They went through a number of states and they kind of came up and they drove through. And it was funny. In one of the videos that we have, he actually mentions driving through Chilliwack, which literally years later I ended up moving to, just totally coincidentally. And Chilliwack's really known for being for a corn area, a lot of big cornfields. And Nelson, he likes vegetation, forester. He is like, oh, beautiful areas coming through Chilliwack. He said, you know, in the, in the video and, you know, driving through and coming to Kelowna, we did an advisor training event. And what was awesome about this event is that we brought another couple there, and this gentleman's name was Bob Shields, uh, not Shield with a D, but just Shields with an L. And Bob was kind of like a version of Canadian Nelson. He was originally born in Scotland, came to Canada when he was like 19, and he wrote a book called You Don't Have to Die to Win. Now the book is out of print because the publisher who released the last version had a bunch of edit issues with it, and Bob actually had to buy all the copies back. But Bob talked about creating your future operating line of credit. Same concept, same idea, using whole life insurance. And he was 1 or 2 years older than Nelson. And Bob came and attended this session, and he sat right beside me, and we engaged with Nelson, and he was there just to be a participant. And he was so excited and so amped up. And he says, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to write another book. I'm inspired by Nelson. I'm going to write another book. It's going to be, it's going to be called Plant a Tree in honor of Nelson. You know, this guy was 87 at the time, and he was just lit up and excited being with Nelson. And to have Nelson and Mary and Bob and his wife together in the same room, sharing stories, having camaraderie, creating friendship. 2 individuals with similar mindsets, similar platform, similar vehicle of whole life insurance, self-financing things throughout life. It was just so incredible to be a part of the experience. It was a small room. There was only like 20, 24 people in the room, and we recorded those sessions. However, it was never meant to be released for anything. It was, it was a single camera, no microphone setup. Poor angles, people walking in front of the camera, Nelson turning to the side. No one was manning the camera cuz everyone was focused on Nelson. And Jason and I, we had an idea. We said, you know, we need to find a way to get this available for everybody. We have to find a way to get this up. So I spent the better part of a year working with a video editor and, and a team. And I said to Jason, I said, look, I, I want to make sure we can do this. However, it's gonna be a ton of work. I have a couple of requirements. I said, number one, if we do this, we cannot promote a single advisor. We cannot promote our company on any of the videos in any way. There's only one thing we're allowed to promote, and that's Nelson's book. It's the only thing that can show up on screen as a recommendation to buy the book. Nothing else. If we do anything else, I won't be a part of the project. He agreed. Jason funded the project. I literally spent the better part of a year going through transcripts. We tried getting AI to do it. We tried paying people to get the transcripts done. Nobody could do it because the audio was poor and Nelson's Southern drawl. And I was there in the meeting and I'd seen Nelson's seminar enough times. I kind of knew what was going on. So I ended up doing most of the transcripts. And so what we have in this video is we have a bunch of B-roll where Nelson makes a book recommendation that comes up on the screen. There's quotes, there's literally like snapshot clips of Nelson's book that show up in the video on the B-roll. There's, you know, the captions are built into the video. So that's available, Jesse, for you, for any of your clients and anyone who wants to go watch it. You can basically go through 33 videos, which is the equivalent to about a 6-hour Nelson seminar, and you can go to learn LearnFromNelson.com, and you can watch them all.

So while I'm at it, then go ahead and tell us, Richard, where— well, let me say thanks. So thanks for your role in the documentary, making it happen. I think that with any worthwhile project, there's going to be friction, there's going to be struggle because it's worthwhile. And when you got that many great people together, um, I think it's a I think it's great, great work. And I said what I said. It's one of the most impactful things that I've watched personally as someone who just decided to implement the concept. And I share it with clients all the time. So I want you to hear from me. Thank you. And go ahead and tell folks where they could reach you. What's the best way for folks to get in touch with you?

Well, it's— I mean, it's pretty easy to get a hold of Richard. I mean, you can, you can find me at RichardCanfield.com. Or richardcanfield.ca. I got both of those. But what I would encourage people to do, you know, again, you're a reader, Jesse, I know that. We have written a number of books, as you said earlier on, and I'll mention a couple of them. So we have this one called Cash Follows the Leader. It's a very short, easy-to-read book. And this book has some drawings, some kind of images and stuff in it, little kind of cartoon images to help explain things a little bit. I really like this book. It really explains what makes whole life insurance grow in the way that we build it. But some of our most recent books, so if people want to get a free copy, we have our book Don't Spread the Wealth. Don't Spread the Wealth is about family banking meetings. And with this, we created a 15-page guide on how to start thinking and preparing with ideas and suggestions on a sample agenda on what to discuss and talk about for a family banking meeting. Again, we need to— my language, our language, family banking meeting. I would encourage people, when you create it, you're not actually calling it that. You're calling it the, you know, the family finance summit or something that makes it fun and interesting rather than meetings, because meetings are boring. Okay, so just all things being equal. So you can get a copy by going to dontspreadwealth.com. dontspreadwealth.com. And then we have our most recent book, which is Growing Your Own Capital. Growing Your Own Capital. This features, most of this book was written by Dan Allen, who's an amazing guy. I know you've had a chance to meet and connect with Dan, Jesse. Now this book was written primarily for the farming community. However, we've had so many people reach out to us and say, you literally just need to replace the word farm with business owner because the way this is book is built and talking about, it's really built for entrepreneurs and business owners. We're just using farm lingo in the explanation for most of the book. And we have that, a book is available if you want to download a copy for free as well. If you want the PDF and you can go to growyourowncapital.com and get a copy there as well.

All right. We're going to get to these rapid-fire questions. But is there anything that I haven't asked that you would wish I had have asked, or that you for sure would like to leave folks with?

Well, you mentioned you got your Colby done at the beginning of the call, and you didn't tell me what your Colby numbers were, Jesse.

No, I didn't. Um, let's see, from memory, 6536.

6536. Okay, so you're a hands-on guy. You like to use your hands. That's why a lot of your pictures I see out in your yard with your kids and your your wife doing things, how important it is to you that you need to get, have a, have a light in your, in your office. You need to get out and move around. What do you got around you? I see, you know, I know you got a, a, a hatchet or whatever, tomahawk back there. So tell, tell me a little bit about all the physical stuff you gotta keep near you in order to keep yourself going.

Okay. Yeah. I, I, so I like physical books. Like you said, I'm a reader. I, so I'm a physical books guy. I listen to stuff all the time as Well, yeah, if I'm taking a break in between calls, I'm going to be getting in some steps. I'm in the office today. Normally I'm working from home most of the week, so I'm going to have that tomahawk and I'm going to walk down to our tomahawk throwing station or a knife throwing station for my 5 to 10 minute walk between calls and, and whatnot. So yeah, that's, that's a thing. So I brought a little bit of home here to the office with me.

Nice. So that has to do with the 6th implementer, which is the final bar that you talked about. And you probably own a variety of tools. You're probably pretty handy. You can probably repair a lot of things. You might not be— do, do the— you might not be the absolute best at it, but if there's a problem or a challenge, you probably are a guy who knows how to fix it, or you'll figure out how to fix it. Is that a fair assessment?

That's pretty fair in, in, in a good bit of areas.

Yeah, yeah, that's pretty common. So when you have that 6 in there, that's, that's— now I'm in the same zone as you. I'm, I'm a 6 implementer also. So I got a standing treadmill, I got gadgets and things around me. I randomly have a tape measure on my desk right now. I'm never far from a tape measure for any reason. Um, and so, and then you mentioned you start with a 6, which is the Fact Finder. So, uh, it sounds to me like you, you initiate in a, in a fact-find world a little bit. And a 6 Fact Finder is a person who's designed to explain. So you take in a lot of information, you're good at doing some research, you like to explain and probably use specifics, but you have a natural knack to be able to explain information. And, and then the 5. So you said 6, 5, 3. So the 5 is around how you follow through with things. In other words, how you systemize and organize. So out of 5, you're able to take an existing system and implement it pretty easy. You would rather work with something that's already built, most likely, rather than construct something from brand new all the time. And you're probably pretty good at being able to use an existing system and you're reasonably good at following through on things. But to some degree, you don't want to overdo it, I guess, to a degree. And then the 3 is around the quick start zone, which is how you deal with risk and uncertainty. So you're the kind of guy that likes to preserve and protect things. You want to make sure that things are— if it's already working, don't screw it up. Don't mess with it if it's not broken kind of a situation. Does that sound about right?

I think so. I mean, I have recently taken the thing, right, but I've not read all the way through and continued to talk through like we're doing in real time here, which is just really neat because we're supposed to be doing rapid-fire questions, but I'm like, yeah, Richard, tell me more about where I'm at, where I'm at, because it is terribly interesting. So I don't know all the repercussions of what my assessment even means and indicates, of course. So this is terribly interesting for for me.

Yeah, you, you know, your, your Colby is about instinct. It's about, it's about action, the action world of how you do things. It's not about how you think or your personality. It's not about, um, your motivations, okay? Those are all different things. It's about literally the physical act of you doing. It's how you do. It is the way that you will go about solving problems if free to be yourself, this is the way you will start the problem-solving process. And as long as you're not being shoved into someone else's box, you will naturally go into this mode. This is where you're going to be in your zone energy. So Kolbe, what your Kolbe numbers are, identifies where your zone is. This is the zone. You ever felt like you were just in the zone? Well, when you feel that way, it's because you're operating at that high instinctual level. And it's just everything is working the way it's supposed to. You're in your natural element.

I love it. Like I said, this has been terribly interesting for me because, well, it's about me and I want to understand things and I want to fight the arrival syndrome and I want to learn more and do better and be better. So, man, that was an unexpected boon for me. All right. Also, I've got these rapid-fire questions. Are you ready to jump into those?

Lock and load.

Because I was trying to keep, keep, keep time. What is a favorite hobby of yours or pastime?

I, I like just tinkering and like building, like building random stuff. You know, I got a bunch of work to do in my garage in the new house. I'm out mounting shelves. I've, I built these tote, you know, racks and they were on wheels. Well, they don't fit in the garage anymore in order to get two cars in. So I've already mounted them on. I've mounted one of them on the ceiling, so I'm I'm building, gonna be building some stuff this weekend. Yeah.

Okay. Love it. How about, is there a hidden talent that people may or may not know that you have?

Hidden talent. That's interesting. You know, I don't know. I never, I don't think I've ever really thought about a hidden talent. I don't think I'm very good at hiding things. If I think if I've got a talent, probably it just, it just shows up. You know, I didn't realize that I would be adept at like speaking or being, you know, a front stage kind of person. I didn't know that when I was younger. And I think I came to that lesson through some of the personal development that I did. And the first opportunity to kind of showcase that would have been at an event in Vancouver I did called Train the Trainer with Peak Potentials. And that really opened me up to the opportunity that I could be that person. And that that was within me. I didn't know that was there until I was probably 21 years old.

Gotcha. Yeah, it might not be a hidden talent, but public speaking, they say, you know, is feared more than death. So for those of us willing to go to the front of a room, it is an interesting thing, especially if you're an introvert like I am.

And I did feel that way before. And then I, and then I realized that this is something not only that I can do, but I should do. And so now I lean into it instead of a lean away.

Yep, I agree. You should do it. How about a favorite book or movie?

Well, a favorite book for me would be— other than, of course, you know, Nelson's book and everything— would be Who Not How by Dan Sullivan. And 10x is easier than 2x.

Love it. What's one of the most impactful things somebody ever said to you?

Hm. Uh, grade 8 science teacher, cool shoes buyer. If there is a will, there is a way. If there is no way, you make a way.

Epic. Sunrise or sunset?

Uh, earth turn.

What?

See, Nelson said that we all live in a world of lies, Jesse. There is no sunrise and there is no sunset. There's only Earth turn.

Fair enough. Okay. I feel like I just walked in on The Matrix movie and somebody saying, well, there is no spoon. All right, beach or mountains? Mountains. Okay. Picnic or restaurant?

Picnic.

Fire pit or movie?

Fire.

Okay. What's the best piece of advice somebody ever gave you?

Learn how to use this instead of learning how to use this.

We got to talk about so much more stuff, man. There's some things that I've written down on notes. We're just going to have to talk about these other things as well. What's one of the most interesting places you've ever visited?

Uh, Rio Sendo Caverns. Caverns in Japan. It's home to some of the, the deepest underwater lakes in the world, I think, and they're crystal clear, and they have like these light strings that go down that you can see really far depth in these underwater lakes. It's this cool cavern. Yeah, it was a really neat experience. I went there with my best friend who was teaching English in Japan and met his wife there. Incredible.

What characteristic do you value most in someone else?

Ambition.

And this one's from my sons. I got it at the dinner table one night. Would you rather be able to breathe underwater or fly?

Fly.

Very cool. Richard, man, this has been an absolute pleasure. We— I've just pressed every ounce of our time, but I really, really appreciate you being here. Been looking forward to this conversation. Appreciate you very much, sir.

Yeah, thanks for having me on, Jesse. Nice. Keep up the great work.

Appreciate that. Fantastic. Well, that was an absolute pleasure for me to be able to host Richard on our interview series. Again, his contact information will be below in the show notes. Down in the show notes, there will also be that Nelson Nash documentary. It's my highest suggestion for the next thing that you watch. Of course, you can find me at DurhamTalents.com. Um, my hope is that you do live and leave a lasting legacy.