The Power of Network Marketing: Building Wealth and Wellness Together with Richard Brooke

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone, Dr. Stillman here. I'm delighted to be joined by my friend and mentor, Richard Brooke. Richard, thank you for joining me today.

My honor. I'm excited.

Me too. So I want to start by telling briefly my story on network marketing, something many people have not considered and have many misconceptions about that we'd like to clear up today. So when I was starting my practice 6 or 7 years ago now, a mentor of mine told me I needed to buy this great product that shall remain nameless. And that would allow me to build a significant income and my patients would love it and I would sell it and they would get them better and I would sell it forever. And he would show me the ropes and it would help me succeed in my practice and help my patients. And so I went out and I bought the largest. Package of product available. And I got zero follow-up. And I sold zero product. And I ended up throwing all that product out when I moved unexpectedly a few months later when the business venture I'd been recruited for did not pan out the way I'd hoped it would. And it left a very bad taste in my mouth. And I swore I would never do network marketing again because of that experience. And here I am, 6 or 7 years later, I was introduced to Richard by someone who I introduced another network marketing product to, LifeWave patches. And Richard explained really the power and the promise of network marketing and opened my eyes to really the different side or another side of network marketing that I had not considered before. And since coming around to network marketing again, I've been met with a lot of resistance by friends, family, colleagues, patients, everyone, because there's such bias and misconception about what network marketing is, what it isn't. And what Richard successfully did with me is he cast a vision for me of what was possible with network marketing. And it was so wonderful and altruistic and gloriously full of promise that I said, well, how can I not do that? And if that doesn't get your attention and intrigue your— intrigue you, then I don't know what will. So Richard, thank you for joining me, and I'd love to ask you, you know, what's your story with network marketing?

Maybe a kind of a similar experience. When I was maybe 16 or something, my dad came back from a weekend that he spent in the big city. We lived about 2 hours east of San Francisco. He actually went to San Jose for the weekend. I didn't know anything about it. You know, he came back and, where you been? I went to this meeting in San Jose. And, you know, about a week later, this truck pulls up to the house and it has literally a truckload of soap, and they moved it all into the spare bedroom, and it was floor to ceiling, took up the entire spare bedroom. The bed came out, everything came out. It was just Best Line soap. And yeah, it was 5, 6 different products— laundry detergent, dishwashing soap, whatever. And Course, my dad signed me up, and I didn't, I didn't know what I was signing up. He said, hey, you can make money selling this. I don't— oh, okay. I never sold not even a bottle or a box of it. He never signed up anybody else. For the next 30 years, one box or bottle at a time, we consumed his network marketing venture. I still am coveting and holding on to the final box of Best Line dishwashing soap. The label is rubbed off. It's never been opened, but the product is actually expanded. So the box is like blown up like this. And I didn't even know it was network marketing. All I knew it was soap selling makes the money. That's— I'd never heard of Amway. I'd never heard of network marketing. And so I, you know, went on to pursue my lovely career in life, which was to become a chicken processing person. Now, I was raised in an agricultural community. I was raised on a big farm and ranch. And in that kind of community, um, you either end up back on the big farm or ranch or dairy, or maybe you break out and get a good college education and you go somewhere and have a career. But if you have if you don't go to college and you can't go back on the ranch or farm, in my case we couldn't 'cause my parents or grandparents sold it, you end up working in food processing 'cause it's an ag community. And so I did horrible in school. I never went to college. Wasn't stupid, I just wasn't interested. And so I ended up working at Foster Farmers, the largest single poultry processing plant in the world. And I loved it. And oddly enough, I, I had my whole next 40 years mapped out. I was gonna rise up. My idol, uh, Mike Hoyt at the chicken plant, he had a company car, a 1976 Mustang II, which is like perhaps the worst Mustang ever made, right? But that was my vision. I was going to run the chicken plant someday, and I was going to have a company car. And you're about 4 years into it, actually, the guy that got me the job at the chicken plant, one of my very best friends, uh, he'd already left the chicken plant. He went to Ragù Spaghetti Sauce Factory, and he called me up one day and he said, hey, uh, you got to come to this meeting, I'm gonna show you how to make a lot of money. I said, "No, I'm not interested." And he started kind of yelling at me and like, you know, berating me and, "No, no, no, you need to come. We're going to make a lot of money. Just forget whatever you're doing. Just come." And I said, "No." Like, Kenny called me back like 2 or 3 times, and every time he like upped the volume and upped the intensity, and I dug in, "No, no, no." And you know, the great irony was I would work an extra 10 or 20 hours a week and do everything possible to impress my bosses so that maybe I could get a $100 a month raise. And he was talking about making an extra $5,000 a month, which is like 4 times as much money as I made full-time. But I still said no, and I meant it. And so, you know, in hindsight, I'd like, why is that? How could that possibly be? Well, simple. One, he said, uh, we want you to come to a meeting. And I, I didn't go to meetings with people I didn't know. I, that was just very uncomfortable for me. The whole idea of going to a meeting and I don't know anybody there, very uncomfortable. I just said no. And even the idea of making a lot of money, to me, making money was working an extra 20 hours a week, impressing my bosses and getting a $100 a month raise. And all the rest of it just sounded bizarre. But then, hey, if you wait long enough, you're patient, things change. Our lives change. And my life changed with a guy named Earl Tucker. So the Fosters, who owned Foster Farms, they hired Earl Tucker to run the plant. Paul Foster died early of a heart attack, and so the family was looking for somebody else to run the business, and they hired Earl. And Earl had a master's degree in poultry husbandry, which is the most bizarre thing in the world. But because he was so smart and so educated, he decided everybody at Foster Farms needed to be educated. So you can't go any further than I already was unless you have a 4-year college degree. That was the new HR policy. And so all of a sudden, my buddy Steve and his, hey, let me show you how to make a lot of money. I looked and I looked again and I looked again and I looked again and I looked again. And finally I got in and I failed miserably for a couple of years because I was an introvert and I didn't like salespeople. I had a chip on my shoulder and I was kind of angry. I didn't have any network. I didn't have any credibility. But I figured it out. And 4 years after I figured it out, I was making $40,000 a month. That was like 1980. I had 30,000 people working for me. The rest is easy.

And that's why you wrote the book, The Four-Year Career. I just got in the mail yesterday the new edition of this, and I was reading it again in the hyperbaric oxygen tank with my son. And yeah, basically you just summed up the whole story of the first few pages there. But what I found very interesting in rereading it is that you, you commented that there was something about network marketing that you almost missed in those early days. What was that thing?

Yeah, it's this weird rule that a company called California Vitamins in 1946, a direct selling company selling vitamins just decided to implement in their company strategically. I'd give anything to be there and listen to their logic, the creativity, their break-the-mold paradigm-shifting, throw mud against the wall whiteboard and see what sticks. They came up with this rule that any customer could recruit other customers. Okay, so we just tend— our minds are so linear that we just tend to think, okay, if I'm a customer, I can recruit other customers. Well, yes, but you missed the point. Because that's the rule, those customers can recruit other customers. And because that's the rule, those customers can recruit other customers. Uh, weird. What does that mean? It means you just entered the math of compounding into the potential growth of your customer community, expressed simply in, well, if I get 4 customers and they each get 4 customers, I just got 16 new customers. And of course, California Vitamins recognizing that people would grow exponentially their business, they offered to pay people on all the generations of their customers, or at least many generations depending, you know. So, it kind of ushered in this example of how your customer community can grow. If I get 4 and they each get 4, I got 16 new customers on which I get paid, but I didn't get those customers. I might not even know them. I might live in Hawaii, those customers might live in Bangkok. Those 16 customers can also get 4 customers. Now I have 64 new ones. I have a total of 80. Those 64 can get 4. Now I have 256. 256 can get 1,024. 1,024 can get 4,096. I have clients, coaching clients, that had a million people in their customer community, a million on which they get paid. I know people that have 2 million. I know people whose sales organization— I'm not talking about the company, the personal sales organization does $2 billion a year in sales. Why? Well, because they have like 2 million people buying $100 a month of product. So I almost missed that because I missed economics. I missed personal finance. I missed wealth building. I missed compounding in school. I went skiing. I had no idea what that math was all about. So that math is how the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. It's what Einstein called the 8th wonder of the world. It's compound. And of course, in the example, we use a finite compounding number so that it's easy to show it. But in reality, it's humans and humans' motivation that is doing the compounding. So it's what I call random compounding. So I may get 4 customers and 3 of those 4 customers may get no customers. But one of my 4 may go get 10 or 100 or 100 or 1,000, right? If a chicken cutter with no network— I had no database. I had, I had like a couple of high school friends. That's, that's it. I had people at the chicken plant, but I had no self-esteem. I had no credibility. I had no platform. And one of the things I learned within 5, 6 years of building a network marketing organization is, hmm, how could we accelerate this? What if I recruited somebody into the business model that already had a substantial database over which they had massive influence? Now it's not, you know, let's work really hard for a year to get 4 people. It's more like just flip a switch and get 400. And then what if those influencers, people like you that have a database, they have massive influence, they have traffic even, because I did all this before the internet, right? So wasn't with influencers or anybody online. It was with a doctor or a healthcare professional that had an office and had people walking through the front door every day saying to the doctor, tell me what to do. So, I just suggested to the doctor, why don't you subtly put a little product display over here? You don't even need to talk about it. Because I mean, every patient in every practice, it, you could, it could be a massage therapy practice, a chiropractor, a naturopath, a dentist, whatever, right? They walk in the office, they're always looking around, you know, like they're looking for a solution to their problem. Yeah. And so you see a little product display or maybe a poster over here or something. They're going to say, what's that?

Indeed. And so you did very well with that. And for practitioners listening, particularly, I commented to Richard a few weeks ago that I perceive because of the changing nature of information technology, people have never had more information at their fingertips. What I foresee happening, because this has been happening slowly, and it used to be you would go to a good bookstore, you'd get a bunch of books, they would help you solve a problem. Now, particularly that you have practitioners like me who have access to all that information and have been monitoring it for 20 years or so, or more, we're able to show you all the products, we're able to record videos explaining how to use them, and we're able to create roadmaps for you to follow without us ever seeing you as a patient. And so what I foresee happening is the practitioners who do not accept that patients want you to subsidize their care with the proceeds from products are going to be very hungry very soon. Because the reality is more and more people are coming to me and saying, well, I solved essentially all of my problems, medical problems, with online courses and products I purchased through them, and less and less with lots of consultations. And we're indeed following that model and using me for fewer and fewer consultations and more more of what we do is about online courses. What I think patients need to know about that, or consumers need to know about that, is that, you know, there's that saying, when you get something for free, you are the product. All of the content I see going out in the health and wellness space is, you know, free education promoting products. But the reality is that that is what patients are demanding. You know, the number of people who pay for my services is a tiny, tiny proportion of the number of people who want to consume my content for free. So this is very much a strong market force that's working to cause products to be, I think, more and more the future of health and wellness and probably more any, any service-based industry. And, but, but all that being said, Richard, why it's a great business opportunity and model— people have a number of hang-ups and concerns about network marketing, and I'm very curious, what are the number, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, let's say, objections people have, you know, sure, Richard, it's a great opportunity, but isn't it like a pyramid scheme? I think that's probably the number one.

It's not actually the number one I ever hear, but it's there. Well, addressing that, is, is that a pyramid scheme? I'll, here's, here's how I'll tell you how I address it with people. If somebody says, well, isn't that a pyramid scheme? I'd say instead of answering it, I would just ask them, what do you mean by a pyramid scheme? And you want to watch a perception unravel, ask that question because they had no idea what they're talking about. Pyramid scheme is just slang, right? There's some state laws that specifically mention pyramid scheme, but there are no federal laws that define a pyramid scheme. Why? It's a very gray area. It really is kind of slang for, well, I pay you money. For the right to recruit people to pay money. It's a Ponzi pyramid, same thing. There's no product of value being exchanged. It's just a money game. That's a pyramid scheme. So now let's say you introduce a product. Well, smart pyramid schemers— and there are still pyramid schemers out there What they do is they mask their money game with an inconsequential product. Product has no value. The product is not worth anywhere near what they're charging for it. It's just a ruse to say, well, we're not a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme. We're actually selling a product. Well, a test of that was if there was no income option, If there was no financial opportunity, would anybody keep buying that product? So how you— one of the ways you can test whether something's a pyramid scheme or not is take away the money and see, does anybody keep buying that product? Well, of course you can't do that or you kill the patient, right? So when you ask somebody, what do you mean by pyramid scheme? What you're going to get is a lot of gobbledygook because they don't have the legal definition of pyramid scheme because there isn't really one. But basically what they mean by it is that it's something illegal. They don't know what about it is illegal, or it's immoral, or it's dysfunctional. Like, they don't care that it's immoral. They care that it works or not. And they think pyramid schemes don't work, like they collapse on themselves or something. Or they think it's illegal. They don't care if it's immoral. They don't care if it works or not. They just don't want to go to jail. So what I look to do is find out, well, what do you mean by that? Is it a legal issue? Is it a moral issue? Is it a functional issue? And so if it's a legal issue, I'd, you know, I'd listen to people. I ask a lot of questions. I listen. And at some point I'll ask for an opportunity to show them how It is actually legal, and I can prove it. I can show you Federal Trade Commission rulings that network marketing is legal. Been legal for about 70 years, and it's been tested over and over and over again. It's legal. Are there ways to do it that are illegal? Yeah, but they're not pyramid schemes, they're fraud. It's a different thing, right? You know, but the, the bottom line answer, Leland Stillman, is if somebody wants to take the position that network marketing is a pyramid scheme, I actually just allow because I'm not out looking to recruit everyone. One of the, one of the psychological paradigm shifts that is required to be successful in what we do is change your story about you need to recruit everyone, because you don't. In fact, you only need to recruit about 4 people that really, like, do something with this, right? So the other 96, let them have whatever objective— objection they have. I don't want to sell to my friends. I don't want to look desperate. To my friends or my colleagues. I don't want to do something illegal. I don't want to do something— I don't want to prey on my friends to earn money. You know, one of the reasons I like healthcare professionals or people that have a following is they don't have any issue about offering a product for money. That's what they do for a living. And they don't have to ask their neighbors or people at church or, you know, their best friend, because they have 2,000 people that are coming through their door virtually or physically every month. All they have to do is recommend. Oh, by the way, this is what we recommend for this. This is what we recommend for this. And you can pick it up right here on our website or our link or in our store. Those, those are the objections. Pyramid scheme. I don't want to use my friends. I don't want to peddle a product. I don't want to look desperate. All that kind of stuff. And the real answer to it, Leland Stillman, is let them have it. Because, you know, it's kind of like Somebody's saying to you, well, you know, that's a liberal policy and I'm a conservative. And you're saying, oh, well, you're wrong about that. Let me convince you otherwise. It's a waste of time. So if you understand that you only need about 4 people and you can make all the money you ever dreamed of making, in residual cash flow. I mean, you know, the people that I know that have a million people on their team, they might have 10 people they personally enrolled that are doing something. One, very often, one of the 10 makes up over 50% of the million. You don't need everyone. And as soon as you change your attitude about, oh, I got to get you, I got to convince you, everybody has to say yes or there's something wrong with what I'm doing, it won't work. No, actually, almost everybody's supposed to say no because they got a different agenda. They have a different vision, different priorities, different thing going on in their life right now. Just let them. Let them have their life. It's their life. It's their money. It's their time. It's not yours. It's not for us to tell people what they should be doing. You just offer it. Here it is. Here's how it works. Here's how you can make it work. Here's how you can make a killing because of who you are and how you're set up in life. Um, oh, I don't know. I don't know. Okay, cuz I only need 4.

So Richard, if that's all true, why does network marketing have such a negative reputation in society at large.

The people who come into the opportunity, the distributors, they come in with this paradigm, this belief that unless everybody says yes, there's something wrong with what I'm doing. Unless I'm popular, there's something wrong with what I'm doing. Unless I get a consensus from everybody, unless everybody greenlights me, Unless everybody says yes, unless everybody buys, there's something wrong with what I'm doing. So I am desperate for everyone to say yes. So when people say no, what I do is argue with them. So there's, you know, people say, and I used to do this, right? People said, oh, oh, I don't have time. Right. And I, you know, I was very creative and very astute and I had the best answers for everybody. So somebody said, well, I don't have time. And I say, well, do you work about 8 hours a day? Yeah. You sleep about 8 hours a day?

Yeah.

We have 72 hours a week free time. People would say, well, I don't have the money to get started. It might be $500 or something. I say, oh, really? If you got arrested unfairly, Tonight, like you actually didn't do anything wrong and you got arrested and you were in jail with all the drunks and you needed $500 to get out. How would you get out? Oh, I would. Oh, let's just do that then. I had all the creative answers. And guess what? When somebody says they don't have time, we know it's not that they don't have time, it's that they're overwhelmed. And my smartass answer did not change their overwhelm, whether it's financial overwhelm, time overwhelm, priorities overwhelm, whatever. So what has ruined our profession is everybody desperate for everybody to say yes and do what we think they should do. And so we've run around as a bunch of obnoxious, righteous warriors abusing people when all we needed to do instead of selling was sorting. Sort through people and find out who's your tribe. Who are the people like you in this moment? Meaning what the opportunity and the product have to offer is a fit in this moment. And just shuck food to people until you find people that are aligned, and then everything's beautiful, everything works, right? That's the number one reason why we have a bad reputation, is obnoxious, desperate, misinformed distributors.

And that, of course, is the liability of allowing every customer to be a distributor. It would be like allowing everyone who walked into your business to be an employee. And any employer or business owner contemplating that, quite anxiety-provoking. The other thing I've observed, Richard, is that there are some factors, and I know this for now from having spoken with network marketers who've worked at multiple companies, where there's a certain threshold for the product has to be good. You cannot make a bad— you can't give a bad product legs in network marketing with— because of the way it works. And this is actually one of the things that's caused me to fall in love with it, is that I've seen— I cannot even tell you how much bad product repped over the years by men and women in, you know, professional clothing coming to the office, knocking on the door, saying, would you like these free samples? This is what it does.

This is how it works.

I've seen it done with fancy digital marketing, big beautiful funnels and sales letters and copy and, you know, multimillion-dollar sales engines behind these things. And what's remarkable to me is the amount of product out there that I just can't endorse because either the quality is not there or we can't prove, um, in some capacity that it's worth what they say it's worth when there's competitors out there that are available for so much less. And so what I found is that— and part of what drew me to LifeWave is that— and then of course, you know, being mentored by you is the opportunity to represent a product where, because it's on patent, we don't have any real competition. Because of the quality, even the devices that are in the same therapeutic class of phototherapy can't give me the same results. They're not as convenient And that's why, you know, many of my friends in LifeWave say this is it, this is the opportunity, this is the easiest network marketing opportunity we've ever seen, ever had. It's unbelievable, it's unreal. I can't tell you how excited we are to be here, but it really comes back to that product quality issue. And it's funny because I, I think there's a lot of people who've been burned by network marketing where the product was just knockoff You know, they took bottom-shelf ingredients, slapped a label on it, created some margin, and then basically got people hyped up and amped up enough to sell it to their friends and family for long enough for the company to survive. But I'm curious, your history in the, in the industry, you know, being a multi-decade veteran at this point, what do you see happening to those companies?

They don't ever last. I mean, if you, you know, the thing to look at, if somebody was coming to me and say, hey, I'm thinking about start joining network marketing, what company should I join? Yeah, I of course would ask them about their values and about what kind of products they could get passionate about. But the companies that I would recommend were— would be companies that are 20 years old or older. Why is that? Well, because you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. So if you have a trumped-up product That is, you know, all hat, no cap. It doesn't last. So if you want to know high value, value proposition that really works, though, you know, a product doesn't have to be a miracle cure, but it has to perform commensurate with what you're charging for it. So if you're charging $10 for it, it probably doesn't have to change lives. You're charging, you know, $1,000 for it. It better perform at a very high level, right? So it's just value proposition. So if you look at the companies that are 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years old, and look at their products, look at what their products do, because that's all that matters, right? We can talk about quality and we can talk about ingredients and, you know, all that kind of— bottom line is, what's the stuff do? What does it do in my body? What does it do on my body? And if the value proposition's there, if it does what it says it's going to do and the price is fair, then what happens is people that fall in love with the product, they love the product. They're a customer. They're an authentic customer. They'll recommend the product mildly. That won't grow the company. The product doesn't sell itself that way. But when you put an economic incentive on recommending the product, and not a mild one but a serious one, you get people that take that extra step, which is they not only recommend the product, but at the same time they say, and here's my link where you can order it today. Dr. Stillman, whether that's done online or physically, you know, they take the next step, which is consummate the sale, and that's what causes things to grow. So in a legitimate long-term network marketing company, product is king, always king. Money is not. You know, some companies pay off 50%, some companies pay out 35% of revenue back in commissions, and it's irrelevant what the payout is. The only thing that matters is the stickiness or the retention and the viralness of the product. Because what would you rather have, a product that had your sales organization grow at a compounded rate of 20% a year and the payout is 20%, or a payout of 50% and the compounded rate is 3% a year. Uh, I'll take the 20% payout and 20% growth rate. Duh. Product is king. Product is everything. And you can mask a mediocre product with a hyped-up compensation plan. Now, is that a pyramid scheme? Nobody knows. And the only way you're ever going to know is if the company goes out of business Doesn't mean it was a pyramid scheme, but if it goes out of business, is there still a demand for that product? And if there is, may not have been a pyramid scheme. But if something happens, you know, people figure out the product is just all air and they go do something else, right? And it's because the product was just nothingness, then yeah. Could be defined as a pyramid scheme, but that's a very subjective call and requires forensic accounting post mortality.

What I've been amazed by with LifeWave is the degree to which the product does create what you call virality. People are so impressed with their results that they wind up telling their friends, telling their family. Their friends and family are easily It's an easy sale, to be honest.

It's the number one viral product in our profession right now. Fastest growing company, number one product people are telling stories about because of what they believe it's doing for them. Patents, science aside, you know, that helps maybe people justify it, but what makes it go viral is I put a patch on. What do I feel like happened? If I feel like something happened, if I can describe it, if there's a contrast between before and after and I can credibly attribute it to the patch, whoa, Katie bar the door.

And people have said to me, how do you know it's not the placebo effect? I work with placebos every day because I'm in integrative medicine. Everything we do, from talking to the patient, supplements, let alone medications when we use them. Everything from light therapy to massage therapy to acupuncture, all of it accesses the placebo effect. I do not get effects from other things like I get from the patches.

I know you've heard this before, Leland Stillman, but what if it is a placebo effect? If I feel better, will I pay $100 to feel better? Is it the placebo effect, or am I actually better? You know what, people pay money all day long to feel better.

Yes, but what I would say, Richard, to that is that— and I— some of what I'm going to say here, I can't be candid because of the way the FTC polices our speech. That's another reason it's a network marketing company, to be honest with you, is that the government— you know, you can say something is safe and effective and sell billions or trillions of dollars of it specifically to the government And then it can be wildly ineffective and remarkably unsafe and get away with it so long as you've got deep enough pockets to own enough congresspeople. But when you've got an integrative natural health product that's really amazing and it does incredible things for people, even though you've got case studies of people overcoming illnesses for which they might have been out hundreds of thousands of dollars in drugs and surgery and lost years of life, you still I can't share the testimonials candidly. And the point I'm making here is that the strongest placebo effects in medicine come from surgery— somebody going into the human body, putting you under general anesthesia, cutting you open, reattaching things, rearranging things, cutting things out. And what people don't get about surgery is a huge proportion of the benefit clinically, in terms of your pain relief, your improvement in function, is the placebo effect. Hard as that may be to believe, it's true. The thing is, the placebo effect is commensurate to the amount of pain, inconvenience, and cost the patient perceives. So if I can get results with a patch that costs $3 a day that outperform a surgery with, let's say, a $5,000 deductible and maybe a $20,000 bill that goes to your insurance company and maybe $50,000 in rehab and supplements and drugs and whatever else you took to recover from from the surgery. If I can do that with $3 a day, you really mean to tell me that this is the placebo effect? I have a bridge to sell you in a lovely little village called Brooklyn. So last thing I want to ask you, Richard, is for practitioners, uh, and also for laypeople who are in a position to talk to a lot of people about health and wellness. I mean, you know, there's people out there listening to this who are not practitioners, but the funny thing is they talk to more people in a position to benefit from the patches every day than some practitioners do. Even if it's just their bridge club or their bocce club or their golf buddies, what is your single best summary to them? And I'm thinking of your secret formula if you want to go through it for just what it's worth to them to get involved with network marketing and how that stacks up against the other asset classes that they could put their money and time towards.

The, the reality is, if you look at the math You can build a substantial income with 4 people. Now, those are 4 people that love the product, but they also have a vision and they're motivated to build their own income. So they are what you might call sales leader. So they're going to build their own team. You're building a team. They're building their own team. How do they build their own team? Well, they enroll some people who decide they're going to build their own team. So it's like team upon team upon team upon team is how your team grows. So how do you do that? How do you find more people? Well, you might have to actually enroll as a sales leader in LifeWave 40 people. 40 people who say, yeah, sure, I'll try this. Try being the operative word. And you get 1 out of 10 that actually does it. Or I don't know, maybe you have to enroll 80. Whatever, doesn't matter, right? Because that's really the process, is it's a sorting process. If you go through the selling approach like I talked about earlier, you will burn yourself out and you'll burn out everybody around you. You'll get grind— ground to a pulp by everybody's pyramid scheme. I don't have time, I don't sell to my friend, whatever it is, right? You'll just get ground to a pulp. You'll be out in 2 or 3 months. But if you take the sorting approach, you can be doing this forever because you don't burn out people around you, you don't alienate them, you don't burn yourself out, you're not arguing with people. You're just consistently asking people to take a look, and that's it. Just asking people, hey, you want to look at this? Just look. I got a little video, I got, you know, throw a patch on, try it yourself. That, that's all it is. And when you think about, okay, well, what does it take to end up with 4 people? Okay, let's say you have to enroll, you know, 80 people to get 1 out of 20 to actually do this. Well, how many people do you have to talk to, to enroll 80 people? Let's say you enroll 80 people over the next 2 or 3 years, right? Doesn't have to happen right away, of course. And so, you know, I kind of boil it down to, well, actually, if you ask 2, 3, 4 people a day, which I've proven over and over again takes less than 3 minutes. How do you do that? Let me send somebody a little text message, attach a video. Hey, would you check this out? Something I'm doing. Leland Stillman, you'd, would you honor me by watching this 2-minute video? Something I'm doing, something I'm real excited about. And there's a video and you know, most people won't even open it. Most people won't watch the video, but if I send out 2 or 3 or 4 of those a day and I do it every day, Just follow the numbers. In 2 years, I've enrolled 80 people, and that's not, not arguing with anybody. That's just sorting. That's just looking for people who are looking for me. I've enrolled 80 people. They sort themselves down to 4 people like me. Who are the 4 like me? They could be all walks of life. They could live anywhere in the world. And they just get it. Oh, I'm going to do, I'm going to build my own empire. Now, what's that worth? Well, this formula that I've created, I created from interviewing hundreds and hundreds of people that completed the 4-year career based on this book. And the 4-year career is arbitrary. It could take 2, it could take 10, it could take 20. It's just a model. Right? But I interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people that in their 5th year of building were earning $10,000 a month or more. One of them was earning $400,000. And these were not in flim-flam, fly-by-night companies, junkie products, startups. These were all legacy companies, companies over 20 years old. And The formula basically for completing the 4-year career was enroll 80 people in 2 years, which is a pace of about asking 3 or 4 people a day to take a look. Simple as that. Takes 3 minutes. But then if you've— if you figure out, if you reverse engineer, what does that all work? Even if you take the lowest income number of $10,000 a month. And the cool thing about income in network marketing with the right products and the right company is if I'm earning $10,000 a month, that is coming from about 1,000 people in many generations, each ordering maybe $100 a month worth of product, and maybe I'm getting 5, 6, or 7% on their order. Add all that up, I make about 10 grand a month, but it's coming from 1,000 different lights out there in the universe, kind of like owning 1,000 franchises and I get a 5% royalty on each one of them. It doesn't matter what happens to one of them. One of them cannot order this month. One of them can quit. Doesn't matter actually what I do, right? The income comes from 1,000 other people. Doesn't matter what I'm doing. And so that's an asset. When you have income that is that secure, And how do you make it secure? The right product and spread the income out over as many people as possible, which is what network marketing does. When you do it that way, that $10,000 a month should actually virally grow every month. And in LifeWave, it has been exponentially, like 100% a year. Yes, at least the last 6, 7 years, right?

Gross revenue for the company is doubling every couple of years, which is— for people who don't realize, that's one of— I mean, it's the fastest growing network marketing company, but for any company in any industry, that rate of growth is incredible.

Yeah, if it was a public stock, it would be like Tesla. Like, it would be valued 10 times what it's really worth, 20 times what it's really worth. It— there'd be that much hysteria on it if it was public with that kind of growth rate. But even if it never grew, even if your $10,000 a month was static income coming from that kind of asset, the asset is worth what I call the rule of 200. The asset is worth 200 times the monthly income, which is what? What's a million dollars? So make $10,000, 200 times $10,000, that's actually $2 million. Um, that's what the asset is worth. And now where's the rule of 200 come from? Well, it's, it's kind of anecdotal a little bit, but the question is, what would other assets have to be worth to spin you off $10,000 a month? How much real estate would you have to own free and clear to net, after management fees, maintenance, to net $10,000 a month? It's over $2 million.

And you have to deal with the toilets, tenants, termites, and property management firms, right?

All of it. How much— what kind of equities would you have to own to earn in income which you could improve— you could include even appreciation as income. $2 million at least. So now let's talk about wealth building. What does a person have to do to accumulate $2 million worth of real estate equity or $2 million worth of equity equity? I'm telling you what it takes: an entire lifetime of saving and investing all your discretionary income. Or spend 5 minutes a day asking a few people to watch a little video about a product you authentically love and argue with them.

And so when you laid out this plan to me, I did not understand the compounding nature of the compensation plans. I had no concept of the kind of return on investment in terms of time. And for people listening to this who follow me, read my newsletter, etc., I want to understand— I want you to understand exactly why I'm doing this the way that I'm doing it. I would like to have a profound impact, and I will, on the health of the world in a very altruistic way. My whole brand has been built around integrity, taking a stand on values, doing the right thing even if it costs me you know, we don't upcharge, we don't overcharge for supplements, medications, labs. We give people good, reasonable prices. We treat them well. And the reality is, when you conduct business that way as a physician, it is very difficult to grow something significant that you can then have a huge impact. And I also became increasingly aware as a doctor that the gap for many people between their illness and their current state of health and their wellness is actually more a matter of personal development and changing their mindset and their beliefs about themselves and the world, forgiving other people, creating a positive mindset, having an empowered vision of themselves rather than a disempowered vision. That was actually more impactful in many respects than whatever pills, supplements, surgeries, whatever we could order for them that comes in a box, a bottle, or a bag. And so for me, my passion for this is that not only does the product transform lives in a profound way, it also creates the momentum through which I can then create huge, massive change for people and the world. And that's why I'm spending so much time building my team and teaching them and training them. And more and more of my time is spent that way because I don't see the potential, uh, similar potential in being a one-on-one doc. There I'm limited to helping maybe 150 patients if we do this the way I'm going to do it. We can have an impact of millions and millions of people, billions maybe by the time we're wrapped up, because I'm only 36 and that means I've got at least another 30, 40, 50 years to go. And that's why I'm doing it this way. And that's why I want people to join my team, try the product experience, the incredible benefits of it. There will be links below the show, wherever you're listening to it, to learn more about joining the team, to learn more about trying the product. If you're a practitioner, if you're anyone, we'd love to talk to you. We'd love to have you learn more about what we're doing and why we're doing it. Richard, did I miss anything? Did I forget anything I should mention?

You nailed it.

Thank you. Thank you everyone for tuning in. I hope you've enjoyed Consider Network Marketing. Certainly turned what I thought about network marketing on its head the first time I spoke to, uh, to Richard. And I've really enjoyed his books, which I strongly encourage anyone, particularly if you're serious about network marketing, you should read his books. So thanks everyone for tuning in. And again, thank you, Richard, for joining me.