The SECRET To Going VIRAL & Becoming SUCCESSFUL | Brian Breach

Do videos go viral just to go viral? Yes, all day, every day. If you're at a party and you throw up on your, your friend or in the lawn, it's gonna go viral. If you're in a fight video, it's gonna go viral. If you're saying racist comments on video, you're going viral. That's it. You know, but there's a million things that there's strategy behind it to go viral and that's what people don't realize. Some videos don't go viral to go viral. Some videos, there's massive marketing budgets to get those videos to the right places. So the first thing you know, the first trick to going viral is finding the right stations. Whether it be a news station, whether it be unilad online, whether it be viral motion on Facebook. There's, there's all these viral pages where if your video reaches them or you can get your video to them, that will spin it out of control and that will, that will help it go viral.

Welcome to Stuck to Unstoppable where we interview the world's foremost thought leaders to break things down in order to help you get past your hurts, habits and hangups and finally level up and move forward. I. I'm your host, Stephen Scoggins. Now let's go ahead and get into today's guest and our featured conversation. You're not going to want to miss it. Hey guys, welcome back to the journey of principles. If this is your first time here, awesome. Welcome. I'm so glad you're here. It's our goal to help you go from stuck to unstoppable in every single area of your life with life strategies that actually work now if you're already part of the family. As always, welcome back. I'm so happy you're here as well. With that in mind, I can't say enough about today's guest. Why?

Why?

Because I think you are going to be inspired by his journey from a destructive upbringing to becoming one of the foremost thought leaders in going viral in today's social media world. Now he's both performed and promoted some of the largest hip hop platforms in the world as well. And then, then took what he learned to create unstoppable momentum as a social media genius by creating, well, you guessed it, viral movements. And to add to his already long list of world renowned achievements, he also just launched a brand new show called America Gone Viral. He's an entrepreneur, he's an artist, and he's an all around awesome dude. Guys, help me welcome Brian Breach. Brian what's going on, dude? How you doing, man?

What's going on, man? How you doing today, dude?

I'm loving life, man. You know, it's funny. It's almost fall, thank God. So I'm kind of ready to experience that rather than all this heat. And I hope it doesn't bring back too much craziness with all this other Covid stuff in the world.

We're living in apocalyptic times, dude, but we're going to get through it.

We are. We are, because we're entrepreneurs, and that's what we do, right?

That's what we do. When that comes our way, we turn into a positive. That's all you can do.

That's right. Well, look, you know.

You know, I want to.

If it's right with you, I want to jump into, like, the beginning of Brian. Before we jump into the transformation of Brian, if that's cool, would you mind, like, sharing a little bit about where you come from and kind of like, you know, kind of really that backstory. Because really, the backstory, I think, is where the transformation comes from.

Absolutely. That's 100% where it comes from. And it's why I didn't realize it to later in life that that's, you know, that's where it came from. But yeah. Yeah. So, you know, to make a very long story short, I was born in New York. How I like to word it, how I said it in my TED Talk, was, you know, I come from a very busy dad and extremely abusive mom. It was really crazy around the house. And my dad, they were fighting custody battle. He was literally planning audio cassette tapes around the house to try to catch my mom's abuse so we could try to use in the custody battle. I mean, she literally cut my face open. All kinds of crazy stuff went on. Then she was arrested around that time. It's funny, I found out later and, like, she was arrested in front of me. I don't remember it specifically, but she was arrested in front of me for interstate trafficking charges. And somehow she got off on that and ended up getting probation or something to that effect. And during that period of time where they were going through the divorce, or a little bit before the divorce, she ended up cheating on my dad. She contracted HIV from.

House guest that was staying at her best friend's house in the basement. She ended up getting HIV from this guy. And then my dad and her divorce. She ends up taking us to Florida. I have no idea through the custody battle how on planet Earth with everything going on, she got custody of Me and my sister and ended up getting to Florida. But somehow my dad had a horrible lawyer. He told me when we got down here, she met a man named Jordan, who I actually found out that she ended up giving HIV as well. But that wasn't discovered till later on. He was murdered in some kind of drug deal gone wrong in West Palm beach, while just right after he moved out of my house. And my mom was in the hospital pretty much on her deathbed from having aids. I found that out because my grandmother came to me with a newspaper one day and she hands it to me. She's literally like, I want you to read this. She didn't come out and just say Jordan had been murdered in some kind of deal. She said, read the newspaper. And I read it. And that's when I found out had my bar mitzvah Shortly after, and two weeks after that, oh, no. From the day of my bar mitzvah, I actually went to the hospital, saw my mom for one last time again. Two weeks later, she passed away. And it was just like a crazy chain of events. My dad was sleeping on the floor. We lived in a small apartment at Pembroke Pines till he met my stepmom. When we moved into her house, within the first month or so, she has a grand mal seizure. They find a brain tumor in her brain, and she was out of commission forever. This was right after my mom passed. My dad had back surgery. They gave him a staph infection. He almost died. And I had like six other deaths or more in my family during a short period of time. And I was just. It was a crazy times. I was on my own. I was skateboarding the streets all day long, playing basketball, trying to stay busy. And, you know, that just led to tons of nine to five works trying to maintain, trying to make money. I was buying my own clothes, cooking my own food, doing all that stuff. And how old were you when.

When that was starting to take place? Were you already in the later. Later teens or early teens?

I was actually 13 when my mom passed away. Yeah, I was 13. And during that time, I mean, literally from the age of 11, I was a bus boy. And I was. That's when my. I don't want to say those are nine to five, but that's when. That's when my time started in the working world. Thirteen, I had 14. I had two jobs. And then I worked at Benny Gins. And then that's when I started getting in more the business mindset and actually started working as a telemarketer at some point. And I kept having that mindset to move up. I want to be a manager, I want to do better. And I started running the entire place at 21, I had like 50 employees underneath me. I was doing all the sales training, all the hiring, all the firing. It was bizarre. Then my last nine to five came. To make the very long story short, and it was from 2004 to 2008, I worked as an admissions advisor online for kaiser College. In 2006, though, while I was still working there, I got arrested twice within a short period of time. They didn't fire me because of it, but I. When they eventually fired me for, you know, focusing on music too much and I wasn't focused on the job, they told me to go work on campus. When I went to work on campus, that's when they ran my record. Which is bizarre to me because I've already been with the same company and they wouldn't hire.

They figured they trusted you by that point, you know, you know, just, you.

Know.

Your past, you know, kind of figured it out.

Yeah, I could, I couldn't believe that was like baffled. He's like, sorry, man. I was like, bro, you realize that I've worked here for four years to two years after the arrest that you're talking about, right? Anyway, so that pushed me into going out on my own. I've never had a 9 to 5 since. I went down the path of doing music to throwing shows, to making money, to starting an independent label, to starting a printing business, to starting a clothing line, to just job failure after failure after failure as a businessman that cannot go back to a 9 to 5 and trying to stay afloat. And I was doing music all that time and in 2017, I quit music. But during the time we were building pages for all our independent artists and I learned how to build social media pages and I learned how to be this Keanu Reeves of social media, seeing the Matrix. So that turned into a very low key business. But while I had that business going on, I quit music and told myself, I'm gonna start shooting these comedies, get some pranks and all this stuff, because I was incorporating funny stuff into my music. Long story short.

The end of the year, I was offered, I was given a chance to do a TEDx talk. And then five months later, something I shot went viral. The combination of these two were like that movie with George Clooney, the Perfect Storm. And it just, boom, blew everything up. I got.

I actually remember that video that you made because it was so unique, you know, you chose to Basically become a homeless person for a few minutes, right? You know, dressed apart, look the part. And you were. I think one of the things that you mentioned after that, you were like, hey, I'm just. You know, all these people went by, you know, but then one or two would stop by and, you know, be kind and do something nice. And I just had Leon Logothetis, who's the kindest guy on the show, gosh, through Instagram a few weeks ago. And, you know, his big thing is about kindness. And then you go out and do this, and then what. Basically what happened was. And I guarantee you, as I'm talking about people like, oh, I know which one that is, right? You stop and say, no, hey, look, this is it. No, I appreciate you. Here's a hundred bucks, right?

So.

So how long. I mean, how long did it take you to shoot that? How long were you out there? I mean, like, give me the. Like, give me the. Give me the skinny on how you even created that piece of content, because it was amazing.

Thank you so much. Thank you. I'll give you the. I'll give you the real behind the scenes of that. So I was shooting social experiments and skits and other things went viral. Well, semi viral, I would say, for. For quite a while. Everything that I've done, including the thing I did at the Miami Heat arena, like, proposing to my girl, dropping the ring, and it was this huge thing. Yeah, it was. Yeah, that was me. They were in, like, an uproar. It was. It was nuts. Like, it made. They came to the news, came to my house the next day over that. And this was after the same news station came to interviewed me about the. The. The homeless social experiment. So what's crazy about this one is that every social experiment I've done, I take time, and I rehearsed him, bro. The ring prank. We literally spent two weeks. I was practicing dropping the ring every day. We had seating charts printed out of all our actors. I mean, it was a serious process behind the scenes. With this one. There was no process. It was crazy. It's funny. The one I put the least effort into was the one that made it, you know, So I woke up. I woke up one morning, and every year, I like to do something to give back. I like to do something special, you know, it just. It just. It's something I need to do in my life. And I woke up and I saw a video on Facebook where it was like, a very rich guy gave money to a homeless guy to give to other homeless guy. Other homeless people. And then when he did, they gave him the money. So I saw that, and I was like, wow, that's pretty awesome. Let me see if I can kind of switch it around and do a different play on that. So I got really inspired, and I called my videographer. It was this girl Jordan, at the time. And I was like, there's no way in the history of me shooting videos. None of my videographers were able to just come like that, ever. It just doesn't work like that. I gotta schedule it out. And I was like, hey, I just gotta. I got a great idea. We gotta shoot it. And she was at some, like, engagement wedding dinner or something to that effect. I'm like, no way she's coming. She goes, I'll be there in two hours. I'm like, are you sure?

She must have been bored. She must have been bored.

So I run to the store real quick. I run to Walgreens, and I get, you know, something. The cardboard. I get the marker. I draw it out. And coincidentally, I usually don't tell this part of the story, but coincidentally, I don't know if you ever heard of Help Me Howard in Florida. Yeah. So he's standing in line in front of me, and while I'm buying all this stuff, and I'm like, you're Howard, right? And he's like, yeah. I was like, oh, it's crazy. I'm about to do something that I think might make your news station. And he looked at me like I was fucking crazy. Whatever you say, bro. He walks out, I go home. I cut up my clothes. I put fake dirt all over my face. All of my. I put ketchup, all of my shirt. Like, it was just disgusting. And we went to one shopping center, and I sat there on the ground. Not one person even looked at me. And she came up. She's like, you know what? We need to just stand right in front of Target. Right in front of Target, where everyone's coming in, we'll get some people, we do it. And she's parked across the street. She got the camera. Nobody could see her. And what was crazy about it was that I had all kinds of reactions. And one guy actually came up to me in the middle of it, and he goes, hey, man, I recognize your videos. You're Brian. And I'm like, get out of here, bro. You're ruining this whole vibe. So I had one guy came up to me when I gave him the money. He gave me a hug, and he started crying. It was the best reaction I had. Another guy that had his kid with him and he was like, thank you so much for doing this. It was such a teachable moment and it was incredible. And then they asked to interview me that night on Channel 7 and that was it. It just blew up. The next five days was calls from cnn, fox, msnbc, NBC, abc, Yahoo. It was a bizarre week to say the least. Oh my gosh.

You know, it's funny.

My wife and I have been doing something for a long time now, for about probably four years now.

Yeah.

You know, our kids are teenage. Well, they're not teenagers, they're growing teenagers. They're both in. They're now. One's going to full sail ironically and one.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah. He wants to get into graphic design and whole deal and, and whatnot. But one of the things we used to do is we. I would typically take out, you know, a few thousand bucks I put in our pocket. We used to go to Target and out cash just for fun during holidays.

What are the options?

Right, that's what I was just saying. It's not like our lives are already like this. Right.

Right now.

I went to work. I started to work at 11 years old. I technically began providing for myself at 13. I was out of my own by the time I was 16 and a half. Like literally living on my own.

Wow.

Right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's funny, but you know that those experiences, we actually enjoy that era of giving more than receiving. Like we, you know, we're at this place in life where we've been, we've been very fortunate. I've been very blessed to create, you know, some successful businesses and things like, just like you have. As a result, you typically have overflow. And I'm a big believer in over. You got to overflow. It's nice to share those who are still learning how to achieve flow. And you know, one of the things that we used to do when we'd have this money out is a lot of times people are in Target, we'll call it Target, Target, Walmart, whatever store. Yeah, Target. Right. And you. And you give out a small. I mean it was a hundred. We were doing a hundred dollar increments. So we could be there, you know, throughout the course of the day and we would, you know, go from one store to another store, at another store and no media involved in art. And our thing at all was just like, hey, this is what we do every year.

That's awesome.

You know, and one of the things that touched my heart, that taught me so much, is that Small acts of kindness and small gestures of kindness towards somebody else can literally make their entire year.

Oh, God. Even a compliment sometimes you don't realize what people are going through. I was just telling my nephew yesterday, one little compliment could change the trajectory of somebody's life.

Well, they say the last time somebody actually received applause where they actually heard a pause for most people was actually during a hot at a high school graduation.

Oh, my God.

And that's like a statistic. I don't have the exact number, but it's a really high statistic.

It sounds accurate. I mean, yeah, I mean, how often you got applause from people, you know?

Yeah, I mean, you know, and I think. I think that's actually why social media works so strongly. Because, you know, with social media, you get a like for this, you get a like for that, you get a share for this, a comment for that, and attaboy for this and attaboy for that. And I think there's a part of us that's actually starving for that affirmation, you know? You know, I was talking to David Meltzer recently and I said, you know, I believe there's like four needs we have. We got the need to be seen, need to be heard, need to be valued and need to be affirmed.

Right.

And if we feel like we've got those four, we're actually, like, living a meaningful life. But I'm curious what that experience, right, that. That target experience, the homeless experience. Like, because I was actually. I was actually homeless for probably. Probably three and a half, four months before, you know, I kind of got. Got my stuff together and figured life out a little bit.

Right?

What did that experience teach you about people in general? What it would teach you about yourself and what it teach people.

Well, so. So it's, you know, it's. It's an experience. I mean, the thing was the. The things I know about giving back, I learned long before that particular experience. So, I mean, there was one year I literally went to McDonald's and it was just the first thing I thought of when I wake up. Spent a hundred bucks, got like a. Literally a hundred hamburgers pop my trunk on, went down and did it. I used to do and pass out burgers. I used to throw. I did a show back in the day, like, probably. I mean, Jesus, 2007, called hip hop Helps. And it was raising money for homeless people and things like that. So I've always kind of been in that mode because what else are we here for? You know? I mean, do I want to get rich? Of course do we all want to do well? Do we all want to have nice outcourse? But at the end of the day, I want my name to be remembered for what I did to help people, and not just because I'm a selfish bastard, you know what I mean? So it has to be more so. But that, that particular day, it showed me, okay, if I have to come up with one thing from that, from that particular day, what it showed me was that there actually is more positive in the world than negative. And what I mean by that is you go on social media and you see everything's just so negative. Every time I log in Facebook, it's like, this happened in the political sphere and this happened and writers and this and that. You know, once stories like that hit and it spread through, it spread on the news like wildfire, you realize that people really need to hear this stuff and people rather hear the positive than the negative. We're just so inundated with the negative. So, you know, it just made me feel like the positive news is more powerful than the negative news. And during that period of time, I was feeling like negative was surely taken over because that's all I see in my newsfeed from morning till night. You almost have to tune out of it. You almost have to purposely shut off social media to get away from the negative, though. I gravitate towards all the positive news stories and the positive Instagram pages and things like that.

That's one reason why I like what you like. I really like what you've been doing for so long is because you do focus on more the optimistic side of things to have fun. Like, you know, right, let's. Let's connect. I like mentality and it's one of the things I love, you know.

Thank you.

You've had a lot. All this experience in creating viral content. Like, is there an actual formula? Is it just something gifted at you? Like, like what. What can someone like myself who actually desperately wants to change the world, Like, I desperately want to make an impact. What I refer to is what you just referred to. I just call it something different, which is having a legacy that outlives you. Like, that's what I want to do, right? How do I impact the world? Like, what's the. What's the secret sauce? What's the formula?

It's so funny. That question reminds me of that movie Limitless where Robert DeNiro is like, you have a recipe for. You have a delusions of grandeur. And Bradley Cooper's like, no, I have a recipe for grandeur.

There'S somewhat of a recipe to going viral. Now, the thing is, what's funny is that after the thing went viral and after my TEDx talk, I was contacted by someone to start speaking. And I went to the Hamptons, I started speaking around the country, and they asked me to speak about how to go viral, which is the one thing I never in a million years thought will come to fruition. Like, hey, do you want to speak around the country now about how to go viral? And I'm like, hell, yeah. Okay.

Yeah, it'll be fun.

Yeah. So there's a trick, in a sense. Okay, so do videos go viral just to go viral? Yes, all day, every day. If you're at a party and you throw up on your friend or in the lawn, it's going to go viral. If you're in a fight video, it's going to go viral. If you're saying racist comments on video, you're going viral. That's it, you know, but there's a million things that there's strategy behind it to go viral. And that's what people don't realize. Some videos don't go viral to go viral. Some videos, there's massive marketing budgets to get those videos to the right places. So the first thing, you know, the first trick to going viral is finding the right stations, whether it be a new station, whether it be unilad online, whether it be a viral motion on Facebook. There's. There's all these viral pages where if your video reaches them or you can get your video to them, that will spin it out of control and that will. That will help it go viral. Now, the main thing that I've been teaching when people ask me to teach about how to go viral, this. So I like to call it Easter eggs. Now, it's not necessarily always about going viral. It's about getting the most views out of a video, getting the most likes, getting the most engagement on a video. Now, the way to do that, and this is the example that I use one, one time that I was speaking, I think the first time I talked about it was in the Hamptons. Let's just take a quick. Let's take a real estate agent, for example, because lately I've been seeing a lot of real estate agents try to use social media to blow up a house or try to sell house. I saw one guy who was rapping and, you know, he's like, I'm here with this home you're going to be, you know, and he's like rapping about any good yeah. Video goes viral. So was the dude any good? What's that?

Was the dude any good?

Oh, it was decent. It got millions and millions of views. I mean, it's, it's, it's a smart way to do it. So what I, what I like to call, I like to call dropping Easter eggs in your videos. And Easter eggs are things that create people to comment. Now let's just take a real estate, a real estate guy, for example. He's trying to sell a house in front of a mansion, right? And the guy selling, the guy selling house. And by accident, by pure accident, a neighbor walks by and is walking a dog, and the dog takes a shit on the lawn right in the back of his video. Normally normal people would say, you know, oh, I'm watching this back. Oh, we got it. We got to redo the shot. A dog shitting in the background of my video. And I got to be a professional real estate agent. My advice to that guy would be do not in a million freaking years cut that dog shitting out the background. And the reason being is this. You want people to find things to comment about. And even if it's not your audience, that's just how social media is. You're going to have the negative come out first. That's just how people are. People want, they want to feel special. They want to be the first person to point out a dog sitting in the background of a real estate video. So over and over and over, you're going to get 50 comments about a dog crapping in the background. Then, for example, let's say you're wearing a very oddly colorful tie and you're like, you know what? I don't hate the way that tie looks. Let's change it. Now you got the dog shitting in the background. You have this weird tie. You don't like it. Should you take the tie out of your video? No. Leave the odd shape color tie in there because you're gonna have 50 people talking about the real the dog in the background. You can have another 50 people commenting in your tie. Is that what you want? Is that how you're gonna sell the house? No, but you're gonna have 50 people talking about the tie. You're gonna have 50 the other people talking about the dog. And then they're going to start arguing with each other in the comments. And those little things are going to spark comments in your video. Now let's take it a quick step further. Let's say the tie wasn't an accident. You just wasn't thinking about it. Let's say the dog wasn't an accident. What if you started planting these things in your videos very strategically, not to create negative controversy, just to create comments. Something. Let's say you're talking in a video, you're doing something funny, and all of a sudden, randomly, a baseball just flies across your face. You don't say nothing about it. You say nothing, and then all of a sudden you're going to have. Literally. Because people want to be the person to point it out. 70 comments like, yo, did anyone see that? Hey, I saw a baseball. Did anyone just see that? What just happened? Where was that come from? And then all of a sudden, it becomes this whole thing where people are arguing in the comments. Now let's say the comment. The comments get too negative. What happens is that I call it the Tekashi 69 effect or the Britney Spears effect. When Britney Spears was going through the whole thing and she shaved her head, it was a crazy debacle. Everybody was attacking her because she was doing all these crazy things in her videos. But all of a sudden, after about three weeks, people were like, leave Britney alone. And there was an actual guy saying that. And then all of a sudden, thousands of comments came to a rescue. We love Britney. Brittany's our girl. We love her. She's on Us Weekly for positivity now. So drop Easter eggs in your videos. Create little controversies and. And I'll give you one more quick example of that. I saw this artist, right? He was an awesome artist. And I'm on his social media page and he's so smart. This guy does amazing art, but for some reason he puts. I think it's a biscuit in every piece of art. A hidden biscuit somewhere in the art. Now, people would normally just go to his page to say how great his art is, but because he keeps putting this little biscuit. Or is it banana? I think it's a biscuit. He puts a biscuit in his art for people to guess, and he has thousands upon thousands upon thousands of comments trying to find the damn biscuit. It's genius. It's freaking genius. Because he went from what would have been 80 comments on a picture to thousands. So that's a big recommendation for me. It's going to increase your video views, can increase your engagements, can increase your likes, drop Easter eggs and all your videos. Even if me and you were just talking, what I used to do on podcast. She's not here anymore, but I used to have a mannequin on my pool table.

Yeah, I remember clips yeah.

Yeah. And she. She just. I used to get. I used to get no comments about me, but 80 comments about the damn mannequin on every show. Now do I want them to be about me? No, but. Yes, but some people will come to see the damn mannequin and start talking crap like, what. What is that about? Why does this guy have a mannequin? I do it purposely for people to talk about the mannequin. And that's going to boost up my views on podcasts. You know, it's. It's strategy. So that's how you're going to bring views. Yeah.

So now you're.

This.

Now you're. It's obviously now you're the entrepreneur. Actually, you've been an entrepreneur since you were probably, like, 10.

Honestly, you've got the gene, dude. It's like I was selling paper airplanes. I was. I was buying candy, flipping it. I was doing everything as a kid. Everything.

So, two things. What do you. What's your greatest entrepreneur success and your greatest entrepreneur mistake.

I'm sorry, the last part. My greatest entrepreneur fail.

Yeah, Greatest mistake.

Fail.

Whatever you want to call it.

Oh, mistake. Gotcha. So my greatest success, I would say, and then inadvertently happened, I became a social media expert. And just recently, my business has even blowing up more. I just got hired by the movie studio. They're a publicly traded company to run all their social media. It's crazy. Sometimes I hear myself talk and I'm surprised that I know that much. You ever talk to someone and you're like, why are.

You didn't exactly learn it the easy way, but you did learn, right?

Exactly. It's crazy. There were days I was telling my nephew this yesterday. There are days where I'm like, why do people care what I say sometimes? But it's because I amassed this knowledge through two decades or 15 years of social media, even before MySpace was around.

You know, and there's a name you haven't heard in a while. MySpace.

MySpace. Oh, man. Yeah, those are the good old days. But, you know, more, I think one of my greatest successes was the knowledge I learned about social media, and it really helped me make money in recent times. I mean, it really saved my butt. In recent times, especially through the pandemic, everybody started focusing on staying their asses home, growing their businesses, their online businesses, and they had no choice. And they came to me. Everybody came to me for guidance, and I loved it because they see I'm verified, they see my engagements crazy. They see that, you know, I'm always helping people out. So you know, I was the voice. Now, my biggest failure, I think I. Or my. My biggest failure learning experience. One time we had a printing business.

I said, mistake on the first go round.

Okay, yeah, yeah, gotcha. My biggest mistake. Oh, okay. I'll tell you my biggest mistake. We had a printing business and we were handed this 30,000 square foot warehouse by a old boss of my business partner. And we were. We went in there and we spent thousands to basically renovate this place. We spent. I mean, I spent more days painting than I can count. I probably died of fumes. We turned this whole place out. It was amazing. And after nine months of building out this place, the guy sold the building. We didn't have a contract with him, we had no lease. I mean, the effort and the amount of work we put in that we were like devastated to the point where we didn't even want to do it anymore. Like, we didn't even try to switch offices. We just were done. We were just so aggravated. We were just done. I think he may have continued the printing business on the side, but the whole building sold, I guess.

So his whole building was outfitted, you know.

Yeah. Oh yeah. We hooked it up and they probably redid everything, but it killed me. So, you know, little advice to get to people. Make sure you got things in writing. I mean, sometimes writing can screw you over too, but get things in writing. Do your business the right way. Make sure it's either your building, you own it, or you got something in contract that you got it for a year or two. Something legit. Don't just say, oh, some random guy handed me a. Handed me an office. This is going to be the greatest experience until nine months. And he says, screw you. He was actually making us show the property and I was telling people it was haunted as they were coming. Yeah, I didn't want anybody to buy the building.

I should have had.

Yeah.

Well, look, you know, one of the other things that I'm a firm believer in, I know we share this is, you know, most people are so like really heavily focused on having one thing. So, you know, they go to the job that in many cases that they hate every day. Only I think 30% of the population would actually say they're actually happy. Right. And joyful in what they do and passionate about what they do. The other 70% are just going through the motions.

Being an entrepreneur myself, I know this is one thing we share in common. The importance of having or in creating multiple revenue streams and making sure you create a foundation. If you actually want to have some financial freedom.

Yep.

Talk to me a little bit about. In the audience, a little bit about the importance of having a firm financial foundation with multiple revenue streams and why it's important, because I know you learned that lesson, probably.

Yeah, I learned that lesson many, many, many times. And the pandemic is the greatest lesson of all on why you need multiple revenue streams. Well, first off, they say that most millionaires have about 7. 7 streams of income. If you want to get to that level, you have that multiple source of income from all ways.

You've got me. You got me beat. I think right now, I've only got four. I need that. I need to add a couple.

Oh, I'm not at 7, but yeah.

I'm trying so hard to get there. I'm, like, inching up every day. I'm, like, finding new ways. But the pandemic is a great. Is literally the greatest example. I mean, look at. Look at everything that happened in the waiting industry. The bartender restaurants, the clubs, the nightlife, the entertainment. I mean, everything got shut down. People were relying on, you know, if they're working at a bar, they're making 150 a night, 200 night, 400, whatever it is they're making, and that gets shut down. They didn't have a side business. They didn't have their side hustle on the side. Their income stream, their revenue just got cut off, and now they have to scramble to find another stream of income. Now, like I talk about in my TED talk, 50 Cent said, Slow dough is better than no dough. Even though, you know you have one stream of revenue got cut off and you have, say, two other ones. Even if it's something small, like, you know, a woman selling makeup on the side or bracelets or whatever it is, even if it's only bringing in $200 a week, guess what? That's $800 a month that you would not have had. Now that the pandemic just cut off your job, 800amonth is going to pay half your rent or your couple bills. It's going to save you, and then you can go scramble, find another stream of income. So having multiple streams of income, the reason it's important is because one will prop you up when the other two fail, one will prop you up when one fails. And that's necessary in everybody's life, especially from what we've just seen in 2020.

Yeah, I was talking to somebody recently, was a CEO, the Fortune 500 companies that I coach from time to time.

And one of the things that he.

Mentioned he's like, man, I was caught. We were caught. Our entire organization, we're talking about a huge organization.

Right? Right.

Thousands of team members, like, huge organization. And he goes, I don't understand how your businesses are being successful right now and everything else around us is kind of falling apart. And what I refer to him as, I said, when everybody else is bragging and raving about the bull market, everything's awesome. I said that. What you have to remember is to be prepared for the bear. Right? Because you've learned this business is a set of seasons.

Oh, God, you can't think, oh, it's.

It'S home run from here, baby. You know, something's gonna get in your way. You know, we had the 2008 downturn of the housing stuff, and you know, one of the companies I own is a good sized construction company. So I made it through that. Right. And I wasn't prepared for that one. I made it through that with the very skin of my teeth.

Right, Right.

The cool thing about it was it taught me a lesson. And the lesson that it taught me is if, if you do focus on having the multiple strings of income, you do think we'll put in the sacrifice and the work to actually put that into place. Even though what you want to do is go buy the boat, go buy the car, go buy the house, go out to fancy dining and stuff like that. I'm not saying do some of that like in, you know, in moderation, but don't have one or two really successful years and take all of that liquidity, that capital and, and not reinvest it in other things that are going to make you money.

Right, right.

During this whole downturn like you were talking about, I've been very fortunate and blessed even to have businesses that, you know, one of my businesses was, you know, was one condemned. Essential.

Right.

But I had to pivot. I'm. I put, I put on live events, I do a four day seminar to help people transform lives. We had to pivot. You know, nobody could come in, come into our live event center and sit down.

Right.

You know, so that, but we already had in the, in the pipeline, an online portal that was already coming up and online school, you know what I'm saying? And that's what it taught. Because in 2008, here's, here's. So here's my biggest takeaway with the first faced. I know, I know you've got this now for sure. Right. Which is if you will be prepared for the better when, if you care for the bad seas Kind of thing. Then when everybody else falls apart and all the other customers and all the other businesses are failing and guess who's left with an open market share?

All you.

You see what I'm saying? So, you know, that's why I think it's so important to kind of double, Double down on that particular concept of multiple streams of income. The side hustle, the doordash, the Domino's Pizza. Like whatever you've got, like whatever you've got going on, like, put five years into it, right? Put five years. Put five foundational years into it. And then you can take it and actually create, Take that liquidity and do like you've got printing company, clothing line, you know, promotion services, social media, viral. Like.

Right.

It works, right?

Oh, it absolutely works. You're 100% correct. I totally agree. You just. You got to get on the grind and literally do what you got to do. I was watching the show the Peaky Blinders the other day. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but there was in the last season, the. They had all their money in the stock market and they were doing well. They were trying to get. They were kind of getting out the gangster side a little bit. Stock market crashed. So Thomas Shelby literally started doing everything. He went back to his old school ways. He's doing gambling, bookies, strong army. I'm not saying go that round, do negative things, but it's, you know, in that show, it's funny, certain shows, even shows like that kind of motivate me because I'm like, damn, he's. That's the right way to do it. He was up here. He got rid of his ego. He said, I was already up here. I was doing this and that. He went back to the nitty freakin gritty and he's making money all sorts of ways to get that money back. And sometimes you got to put your ego aside and you just got to do it. Like you said that the doordash. Even if you're making 100 grand a year, you go be an Uber. It doesn't matter. That's little money. It doesn't matter. Make. Make it happen.

Well, I'm too struggling to drive an Uber.

Yeah, there are. And you know, we actually live in a society where people shame people. I mean, I've seen it. There was a famous rapper. I forgot. I forgot who. It was just lately he was Uber dropped. He was. He was an Uber after having millions of dollars and tour around the world. And I'm sure the guy's still rich, but he just wants a trickle of money coming in. I'm sure he wasn't doing it because he was broke. I truly believe my heart he was doing it just to have another trickle of income coming in. Screw it, you know, but we live in this weird society where everyone wants to, you know, shame me, bro. Sometimes you got. You got to do what you got to do.

You know, I think that's an important thing because, you know, I think so. I would say that. I would argue that one of the things that has helped with your and my overall success in building our companies was our upbringing, was the fact that it forced us at all times to be, like, creative, like, just to survive. Right. And then all of a sudden you realize you got that. It's taught you that. So it's taught you about innovation, it's taught you about thinking out of the box. It's taught you about being creative. Right?

Right.

And I think far too many people get so focused on being complacent and in the comfort zone.

Right.

Was there a time when you. When you were in a comfort zone, or have you always been kind of a grinder? Like, I'm going to get this done somehow, some way, like, kind of thing?

Yeah, I've always been a grinder. Yeah. Ever since I was young and I used to literally play a game called flips. I take home six bucks a day or something like that. I literally sold paper airplanes. I spent all my summers making bracelets with wire and selling them always. But yes, there are. There are times in my life where I was less motivated and I got complacent and, you know, it took a little bit of time to learn how to. When you're in your home all day, every day, and you got a TV and you got computer and you got, you know, just got things around you that are distractions and you don't have a boss micromanaging you. It takes a little bit of time to adjust from the nine to five world to that world. So you have to figure out how to be your own boss and not get complacent at home and not say, hey, I'm going to watch another episode of Peaky Blinders. I can put on that work for another hour because it's happening.

Two episodes is fine.

Ten episodes sitting.

Like six episodes. So. But no, it's happening many times because my last place out of business, my business is upstairs here now. So there are days where it starts creeping in my head again and I'm just like, Stop. Back to work. Because I've already got myself inside the independent mindset of an entrepreneur. And being my own boss, I know how to manage myself. But there are people that don't know how to make that transition. And I know people that have went from nine to fives to trying to be their own boss, and they just. They couldn't figure it out. They couldn't get it together. So there are times that I was complacent. But there's ways to get yourself out of that complacency. You got to put things on a schedule. You got to keep things around your house that motivates you. Everything in my house, from every. From the posters behind me to this whole think wall I got over here, to the thing above my couch, to literally a thing above my toilet says, don't give up on your dreams. Everything I set up, even when I'm taking a piss, reminds me to keep moving forward at all times. I need those reminders. Me personally, sometimes I forget why I'm going so hard. Everybody. Every once in a while, people forget what they're going so hard for, what their original goals, why they're doing this. And I keep daily reminders. All the whiteboards in my room, the whiteboards in my office, daily reminders why I need to keep going and not get complacent.

That's awesome. You know, I wrote myself a hundred thousand dollar check on my mirror. That took me five and then five years and some change. The cash.

Oh, yeah, right. You know, you got it.

And you do have to have those reminders. You know, people. Yeah, I've heard people, you know, shame people when they're like, I'm gonna create a vision board. That'll never work. I'm telling you what. Having a picture of where you want to go in front of you consistently on a regular basis.

Yeah.

I mean, it changes the game.

I was the same guy.

Yeah.

I was saying a vision board. This was years back, like a vision board. And then he's like, trust me, this is one of my best friends. He's always. He was always ahead of his time. He's like, trust me, I do it. And that's what you're seeing every day. It keeps you focused.

Yeah. It's funny. I'm glad you actually mentioned the independent mindset, because that was one of my greatest takeaways in the TED Talk that you did, but which everybody should watch, by the way, if you haven't already done. So you gotta go watch the TED Talk for sure.

It's my first Time ever speaking like that other than hip hop performance, like speaking to an audience, it was crazy.

Well, break down what the independent mindset is because I think that that particular piece of content is very valuable today, tomorrow, the next day, that's a piece of content that's gonna be valuable for eternity kind of thing. What is an independent mindset?

So the independent mindset is breaking that nine to five routine because my whole life, up until I was 28 years old, I was micromanaged. Don't get me wrong, I always have my little side hustles going on, but I had a boss over my shoulder. And you know, there was other times I was a manager, but I always had to report to somebody, always. And when you have somebody to report to, it's different. When I know I have to open up this telemarketing place I used to work at and at nine in the morning and if I don't show up, I'm going to get fired or, or, or the I'm not going to be able to let some of the new salespeople in. I'm screwed. And I know I'm going to lose that job. When you're working from home and you don't have somebody saying get your ass up at 9 o' clock or you're going to lose everything. No, you have to get inside the independent mindset. Like not just you're going to get fired. Like bro, if you don't get your ass up and get in your office that's one room over from your bedroom at 9am you're going to be homeless. And that scares the living daylights out of me. So any moment in time I feel like I'm slacking. I just, I jump back into independent minds and say, stop it, you're going to be homeless if you don't stop. Everything's on your shoulders. You don't have a boss, there's no one micromanaging you. So people get conditioned though to the 9 to 5 life that literally the 9 to 5 and have a micro somebody managing you over your shoulder. You have to figure out how to micromanage yourself. And it's not an easy task. Telling yourself what to do is different than having a boss tell you what to do and putting the fear of God in you because you could slack off. So getting inside the independent mindset is breaking that 9 to 5, that 9 to 5 thought in your, in your brain and just doing what you got to do to get things done.

I was very fortunate. I had some mentors that kept me along the way, one of my greatest mentors and people in the podcast have been listening for a while. I've heard this before, but it bears repeating. He asked me, I was. I think I was 16 and a half, maybe 17 years old. He'd watch my father who survived Pearl harbor or my grandfather who survived Pearl Harbor.

Oh, wow, wow. Harbor.

Get ptsd, obviously, before we even knew what that was. Heavily involved in alcohol. Then my family tree got heavily involved in alcohol, you know, and whatnot. You know, so he watched my grandfather and my father struggle with alcohol. He pulled me to the side, and that time I wasn't. I wasn't. I wasn't drinking at all. You know, I wasn't. I didn't get. I didn't get the early start. Like, my dad did kind of thing. And.

Right.

I'll never forget this because he looked at what's the difference between a man and a man? Like, 16 and a half, 17 years old. I literally said this. I said, well, duh, money, dude. If he could have slapped me, he would have slapped me in the back of the head. And, like, men slapped me, giving me that eyeball look. He said, no, it's not money. It's the way they think.

Right.

He said, a rich man is always looking for a way to compound time, energy and resources, investments and all kinds of stuff a poor man looks at today and spends all he's got.

Right. Very true.

Anywhere. You know, and as I'm talking to you, I'm like, you know, I'm just. I'm hearing about grit. I'm hearing about the grind. I'm hearing about being creative. I heard about the innovation. Like, you know, and it just so happens that you become, like, what I would refer to, and maybe, maybe, maybe you won't like this word, but more of a guru of social media.

Right, Right.

You know, and that's. That's how I look at it. I mean, you've been highly successful in it, which means you have a tremendous amount of experience and whatnot. If someone's starting a business today, today's our first day in business. Right. Where do they go? Because there's like a bazillion social media channels now. It's like a new one every day.

Right.

Where do they focus? How do. How do they determine, like, where they need to be at? Because not being involved in social media, from my perspective, from what I can see outside, looking in is not an option. Where do they go? How do they get started?

It's not an option anymore. Yet. I mean, well, the first thing in Florida, I would say go to Sunbiz. You know, register your business. Get all, get all the, that stuff squared away. And what I like to tell people when it comes to this stuff is this, that because I get so many people ask me that question, like, where do you. Where do I start? And I like, I want to strangle people and ask me, because I just want to be like, don't strangle. Just. Yeah, yeah, just like, like Nike. The Nike slogan is like my favorite slogan on planet Earth. Just do it. Everybody sits there and thinks. And I used to sit there and think for hours, for days, for months with no action. Just do it. Even if you're out of order, there are some things in your business that you're going to have to do in order, right? But you want to make sure you, you want to make sure you just do it. How do I start a business? First thing is research. So if you want to start a business on how to design shoes, get your ass on YouTube and watch a million tutorials. I mean, that's literally how to do it. People don't go to school anymore. People don't go to college anymore. You want to learn how to run Facebook ads, sit on YouTube and take a, and watch a course on how to run Facebook ads. But as far as social media, first thing you want to do is, you know, you know, you got to know your platforms, you got to know which ones are going to work for your business. So obviously the big ones, you got Instagram, you got Facebook, you got, you know, LinkedIn, a lot of people still use. You have Twitter, Snap now. So you got those four major platforms. You want to, yeah, you want to make sure you, you want to make sure you get on there and start growing it. And then you got to find ways to grow it. I mean, me and my, me and my partner, he found a way to, to find this amazing program to help this. Build all our social media pages the right way. With organic following, with automatic DMs, going out, being able to like and engage with other people without even having to do anything. So, you know, starting a business, just find any aspect of it. Go on YouTube, do a tutorial, figure out what other people doing. Look up to your. Look up to the big people in the game, see how they're maneuvering, see how, see how they set up their social media pages, see how they set up their highlights, what their bio looks like, how their link looks like. Check out their engagement, see who's following them. Go follow those people. Go follow their Followers. There's so many different ways to do it, but you just have to start, get in there, get dirty, get in the muck. And when you're in the muck, you start noticing, you start digging out a tunnel, but when you're out of the muck, you're not in it. There are so many times where I get in the matrix of things when I, when I'm dedicated to something and I start learning different aspects, you start realizing, oh my God, like I'm learning things that I didn't even know that was going to be possible to learn. When you're in it, when you're, when you're really digging in so, you know, you'll find your payment systems, you'll find out if you got to use Stripe, you're going to find out if you, if you want to send PayPal invoices, you're going to find out that PayPal charges 5 bucks for every 50 bucks fee. You know, it's crazy fees. You're going to find ways around that. You're going to get in the muck and you're going to, you're going to bounce like a ping pong ball back and forth, figuring out what works. And all of a sudden you're going to be a polished egg, a nice little diamond, and you're going to know.

What'S going to be an overnight success right after you.

Oh, there's no, there's no such thing, bro. It takes 10 years at least for anyone to be a real overnight success. Even the one hit wonders in music. These people didn't just have a one hit wonder. It took them 10 years to get in a position to get in a studio with the right execs to have that one hit wonder, you know, Dude, I'm loving it.

I've loved the, love the conversation. And I can talk to you all day when.

All day, all kinds of stuff.

We have a blast with the final couple seconds we got left. I want you to tell us about your brand new show that you just launched not long ago.

Tell us all where we can find it.

Okay, so I don't want to say it's quite launched yet. I had a pandemic setback.

I mentioned in the intro.

So y' all scratch that until he says it's okay.

Oh, no, it's all good. So I came up with a show called America's Gone Viral. And right before the pandemic, the movie studio who I'm now working with, social media, one of the stipulations we were going to Shoot it. And then I was going to be able to take and pitch it to the networks that I wanted to pitch it to. We already had the influencers on board. Supreme Patty, who has millions upon millions of followers, was a judge. France Setti, who has millions of followers, and Antonio Schizo has millions of followers, was going to be another judge. I was going to host it. We're still shooting it, we're planning on the dates, it's being worked out. But it's one of the only shows that takes up and coming content creators because people on TikTok that are blowing up, they. People want to be, people want to make careers out of making content skits, social experiments. The world is changing. So we're going to take up and coming content creators with under 10,000 followers and we're going to issue them viral challenges like social experiments. Before we had to wear masks, skits, pranks, whatever it is. They're going to go out, we're going to film them with a camera crew, three different teams of people. So one could be a brother and sister team one. One could be cousins, one could be best friends. They're going to go out and then they're going to present their work the way they edited it, the way they did it, their Easter eggs they put in there. They're going to present them to the judges. The judges are going to judge, you know, who the best one is. And we're going to let the audience at home, whether it be on YouTube or whatever platform, decide whoever gets the most likes, views and comments on their particular video that week will move up and challenge the next social media content creator. And the one that goes viral will, will win the whole thing. America's going viral, so it's a unique concept that it's never been seen before. I've never seen a viral competition show for content creators that get issued viral challenges and everybody and their mother is shooting content right now. So I'm a content creator. If somebody created the show, I would sit my ass home and watch it every week to see the behind the scenes on how content is made. People want to see the noise.

I mean, there's a lot of noise and it's really hard to determine who's worthy of cutting through the noise and who isn't.

Nowadays it really is and people want to see how content is made behind the scenes. Everybody sees the polished version that went viral, but nobody sees what it took and the practice and what it went. You know how long it took five hours to shoot a viral video. We're going to show them the behind the scenes on how the stuff gets made.

Dude, I love it. I love it. We got to come back on. When? As soon as you get ready for the launch phase.

Oh, I'm ready.

We already have a piece of content nobody else knew about, but. But also, go ahead and start talking about it because it's going to blow up big. I know it will. Everything you touch was a big.

So thank you.

How does everybody else find you and can stay connected with you now? I mean, what's the best way for people to kind of stay connected to you, to hear more about what you're doing, more of your content? All that good stuff.

Definitely MySpace. No.

Mainly Instagram. Instagram, Brian Breach. I mean Facebook, Brian Breach 03, YouTube, all that stuff. But my Instagram is pretty much the one. If people really want to get a hold of me, I check my DMs all day.

That's awesome, dude. Well, dude, man, I enjoyed having you. Thank you so much for spending so much time with me. We even went over a little bit on time. Hope I didn't cause you too many problems, but love having you. Can't wait to see you again. And man, just keep cooking to keep telling us what's going on.

You keep killing it, man. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you. Take care. Later, man.

I hope you enjoyed that video with Brian Breach, Mr. Viral himself. If you did, you're really, really going to love this one right here. One of my clients came in late one day and said, josh, I wish you can come to my house. I just don't have any equipment. And I was like, wow, this is like one of those ideas where it's just so simple. Why didn't I think of it? Yeah, I'm going to get a vehicle, stock up with all the necessary equipment.