Richer Every Day: How To WIN The War on Your Money (Mike Dillard)

To exit the Matrix, you have to have financial wellness.

You have to have a plan for the money. If you don't have a plan for your money, it will fall into the hands of somebody else who does have a plan for your money. Apple has a plan for your money.

Yeah.

Right. Porsche has a plan for your money. Yeah. Gucci, Prada, all of them have not only plans for your money, they have some of the smartest people on the planet whose full time job is to figure out how to extract your money from your hands and put it into theirs. And they have some of the most sophisticated equipment in the form of AI on the planet to do that as well. And so there's literally a war on with an unprecedented level of sophistication that is being waged against you and I as consumers every single day to extract our money from our bank account and to put it into somebody else's. The key to making money, in my personal opinion, is forget everything outside of you. What skill do you have that you can master that will solve somebody's problem? And then how do you solve that problem for a lot of people at scale?

This is the ticket. This is the key for all of us here in the matrix. Mike, we are here. Yeah, dude, thank you so much. I've gotten to know you since I moved to Austin. It has been an absolute gift. And I think about, like, what is this wellness, this wisdom that I myself am chasing at 42? You have created such a beautiful life for yourself.

You look Damn Good for 42, man. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

Well, it might be my Sicilian. Half Sicilian, half English, but, dude, like, it's been incredible to get to know you, like, truly have a relationship with people. I love podcasting with my friends. I got the gift of being on your show. I think it's still the title's being figured out. Right? Okay. And the beautiful thing about that is, like, I get to see you and feel you probably in ways that most people that have followed you for, like almost 20 years now don't. When people see you and they. And they feel your energy and they think about richer every day and just all this stuff that you're into, man, what do people tend to get wrong at, like, first glance, first audible? If they just come across you and they, like, don't know the Mike Dillard I know, what do they tend to project onto you? We're going to talk about the subconscious today and my experience with Rewire and everything else, but what do people tend to unfortunately project onto you when they don't know the core, the heart of Mike Dillard.

It's a good question because I don't know if I've ever gotten feedback in that way. All of the feedback I've ever gotten was if I meet people at an event and they followed me for years, they're like, you're exactly how you are and your podcasts and your videos and everything else you do. And I'm like, well, yeah. So I don't know if I've ever had that reflected back to me in any significant way. I've certainly changed over the years. So I'm quite different than I was 10 years ago.

I hope so.

Yeah. So that's an interesting, interesting question. I'll have to start asking people that.

Right. The reason I ask is because I remember I was thinking about this myself, where I've gotten feedback, where people say, like, Josh, you try to dominate the room and you ask a bunch of questions. And I'm like, well, I'm a podcast host. I've been doing it for almost 10 years. I just love it. Like I, I love the art of conversation. And something that rocked my world. I was actually going in and out of the conversation you had with Kyle down at the ranch and you had talked about the bullying you went through and just the torment. And I shared that. And we've never talked about that. Being really overweight as a kid, you yourself getting picked on. Sometimes you even stayed up to like three in the morning. Just hyper, hyper vigilance. And I reflect on that for so many people that they use that energy or that vigilance to create like how many buildings downtown Austin are created by potentially not always wounded men who are like trying to prove to life or their fathers or themselves that like they can do this.

95% of entrepreneurs, 95%.

Okay.

You don't. I mean, that's something I've noticed a long time ago. A healthy, balanced person does not pursue an unbalanced life that's required to succeed at an ultra high level. Because that's especially when you're in your 20s and 30s. Any high achieving entrepreneur doesn't have a balanced life. And I think that that unbalance is usually caused by, you know, a story when they're young of I'm not good enough, whether it came from their parents or kids at school or whatever it may be. I've been in the entrepreneur space teaching entrepreneurs for 20 plus years now. Nine, 90% plus have that story. Yeah.

So I feel like that's the common thread. But you can still, you can be an entrepreneur without that contrast, like, you don't have to come. Not all of us have to come from pain. A lot of the focus that we're putting into the podcast this year is around wealth and money, because without that, we can't buy the good subs, we can't go to the wellness retreats, we can't do the things and nourish ourselves in the way that maybe the Native Americans did. We're not in their time and they're not in ours. So is it true that even though 90% of entrepreneurs need that contrast or that pain to create from a lot of what I feel like you do, man, especially going through Rewire, people use different substrates of fuel to drive them forward. It doesn't always have to come from pain. It can also come from joy and love. But there's a bridge between the two. So let's unpack that bridge. There's one substrate, there's the other.

Well, I think there's an evolution that happens, Right. So for me, I left the point of being motivated by pain probably four years ago after the mold stuff and the healing that I was forced to do. Yeah. And so now I get. Now I get to create and be motivated by a desire to help humanity and, you know, out of love and just the joy of creation, rather than having to prove myself. And the having to prove myself, I don't think was conscious for a good while. It certainly was when I first started, because being picked on and all of that shit in middle school and high school, I made a conscious decision that I remember that success was going to be my revenge. Basically. It's like, oh, I'll go show you that I'm good enough. And I fulfilled that.

Yeah.

Filled that promise to myself. But it's corrosive. It's a very corrosive fuel. Right? So ages you, stresses you out, burns you out. And eventually, when you do achieve all that you've ever set out to achieve and more, if you haven't healed that you're still not healed, right? So now you have all the stuff and you have the Ferrari, but you're still feeling like the little kid that was still picked on and beat up. So at the end of the day, it didn't. It worked in one hand, but it didn't work to achieve the ultimate result that I wanted, which was to just be accepted and loved.

So a lot of people, they might see, like, oh, Mike Dillard on the top of the mountain. They don't know that you've lost a complete fortune and had to build it all the way back, literally paying for doctor, paying for doctor appointments. And we'll, you know, respectfully go through your story at some point, I'm sure, but like the man that you are now. I've heard many people talk about this. If I lost all my money, I love myself. I believe in myself enough that I could bring it all the way back. And plus, because it's not just the quest of money that you're looking for or that you're wanting now, you're doing it for some other reason. Like you said, now you're doing it of service to the world and from a place of love and good. That shift happened four years ago. Was it directly related to, to the health or was it something outside of you, more spiritual?

Maybe both, A little bit of both. You know, I think it's age, age. And this was directly related to the health. This is a year and a half after the brain injury in the mold. So couldn't sleep for. Couldn't sleep at all for almost a year. So literally was dying. Living on my couch 12 hours a day, moving to my bed for 12 hours a day, no brain function or cognition. And just the most brutal experience I've easily ever gone through for sure. And couldn't work because I use my brain to work. Right. And so I'm living by myself in a house that I'm renting. And my burn rate has traditionally been quite expensive. Around 50 grand a month for personal and business expenses. A lot of that's alimony and child support. But then there's staff and then there's tech infrastructure and then there's car payments and all of the things. Right. Taxes on top of that. And so the timing was really interesting. Right before the brain injury happened, I put all of my savings, a couple million bucks, into the hydroponic system that I was designing years ago. And while we were developing that and we had the prototype in my house is when the brain injury happened. I didn't quite know it yet or understand what was happening, but that's when I was being exposed to mold in that environment. I had to make a decision to end that project. I won't get into the details now, but we can circle back around to it. I started another project which was the self made man elearning platform. At that time my goal for that was to basically create skillshare for entrepreneurs. So put another couple million bucks into that, flew everybody in, did giant video production shoots with 360 VR cameras and everything. Cause I wanted you to be able to put on a helmet one day and sit in the audience and be there with the instructor and have that kind of experience. That's the level that we did it at. And so all of my chips went in on both of those projects and then felt a click in my head one day and then boom, that was it. Non functional for the next few years. With that kind of burn rate, you know, the savings went down quick, the medical bills went through the roof, and I got to a point where I had literally millions of dollars in the bank account, down to five grand. And I have a screenshot of that from my bank account, so down to 5K. And I hadn't been in that position since 21 years old, you know, 22 years old. And the interesting part is that for most of my career I'd spent it teaching people how to market, how to generate leads online, how to build an audience, how to build a list, how to build an online business, how to monetize your business and generate revenue. And so now here I am, I can't really use my brain anymore to teach and I don't have any money. And that was like, what purpose do I have here now? Like that, you know, the amount of money that I made was the credibility that I used to demonstrate my area of expertise and to demonstrate that I know how to do what I'm now teaching someone else how to do, right? And now that was gone. And I realized at that moment that my entire self worth was tied to the amount of money I made and that I was completely unaware of my entire life, especially as an entrepreneur. But when that became clear, then that was a really dark moment, like suicide thoughts for the first time. Don't know if this is ever going to get resolved. Don't know if I'm ever going to get better and can't really do what I love to do anymore. And so it just got really dark pretty quick. But you know, in the, in the weeks after that, in the months after that, the friends that I had were still my friends and we'd still go out and have, we'd have fun and we'd have great conversations and my kids still love me and you know, all of this other stuff and it's like, oh, okay, then my self worth doesn't really depend upon the amount of money that's in the bank account. Right.

So were you always the guy that would pay for your friends or. Money was never an issue? Like when you thought about money, it wouldn't. Cause you stress up until that point 100% did you get supported in any way by friends financially? Like, did somebody buy you a dinner? Did you. I mean, because it's such a contrast of where you are now.

I had had a lunch with. With a good friend of mine here in town, and it was just a breaking point for me and I. We hadn't caught up in a while, and I didn't know that I was dealing with mold yet at this point in time. So it was still undiagnosed. And that lunch changed everything for me. I literally broke down in tears in that meeting, and I just said, I don't know what's wrong with me, and I don't know how to fix it. And here's my situation. And, you know, luckily I had. I'd brought them millions of dollars in business a decade before, and. And, you know, they were always super grateful for that. And I never asked for anything in return for it. There was no commission or affiliate around that. It was just me sending business to somebody that I loved and that treated people well. Right. So. So they wrote me a check for 50k to help cover the bills for a few months. And they just said, you can't ever pay this back. It's a gift. All you can ever do is pay it forward to somebody else if that time ever arises. But the next thing that happened at that meeting was he said, hey, have you gotten checked for mold yet? Because he went through a very similar experience four years prior. He says, go talk to my doc. And so I did. And that's when I found out it was toxic mold.

And the craziest part about that is that I've actually interviewed. Was it Ann Shippey? Who?

It was Dr. Shippey.

Yeah, Dr. Ann Shippey. So we'll link that in the show notes. And I remember when she was explaining to us, it was two years ago, that so many people have it. It grows in AC vents. It grows in places that you would never think. Like, some people will tear apart walls on demos and they'll just find it. And it's been there for freaking years. Like two years. A little drip from a faucet, like, I'm really motivated to have. There's a business called Home Cleanse, so shout out to Michael at Home Cleanse. And I've been wanting to get him on the podcast to go into this, because from what I've heard, Mike Austin, and specifically, like, South Texas, all the south, it's mold everywhere, the whole south, and people just simply don't know it. And it could be the cause of so many people being pulled way out of homeostasis, lots of other diseases. When you had the click, and I've heard you tell me this story as a friend, like at houses before, was it. Was it an audible click? And did you know in that moment was some. Something was wrong or. From what I remember, you. You went on a trip afterwards, and then that's when you really started to feel it.

For, I would say for about three to four months leading up to the click, my ability to handle stress declined tremendously. I'm always super grounded and super. Just even keel. But things started to affect me in ways that I would have a short temper or things that shouldn't affect me would affect me. And I'd start to get emotional, which was very uncommon for me. And my sleep started to go downhill. I started to get insomnia. I had to start taking supplements to sleep at night. And I just started to feel unstable and anxious all the time. And then, yeah, I'm literally sitting on the couch playing a video game, taking a break from work, and just felt a little. It almost felt like a little tap like that, but inside the skull, which was interesting. And subsequently, during all of the medical tests that I did, there's actually when people do EEG map, I believe it is.

Yeah.

And you can see concussions on there. That's the exact spot where it showed that I had a similar experience to a concussion where I felt that. And so when at that moment I was just like, huh, doesn't seem right. Doesn't. You know, it didn't. It didn't hurt. There wasn't any pain, but it's just like, huh, that was weird. But I was still okay. The scary part was that night when I couldn't fall asleep at all. And I've had a couple of days like that throughout my life. So I was like, okay, fine. I had to get up the next morning and was flying with friends out to Aspen. Food and wine and shitty flight the next morning, obviously getting up early with no sleep and then drank a bunch of wine, ate a bunch of food for two or three days and still didn't get any sleep. And that's when it started to get scary. And it started to get really scary when I got home. And then it continued. So I went for six or seven days straight without a single minute of sleep. Just adrenaline running through the body nonstop. By day six, seven, I could start to feel my organs shutting down. I was like, I'm going to die if this keeps going. Another couple of days. Called my doc And I'm not a pharmaceuticals guy. Don't do pharmaceuticals. But he's like, let me get you on Ambien and some Valium and just see if this helps. So I took that, and that night I got a normal night of sleep, and I was like, hallelujah, I feel back to normal. But the next night, it was back to again. And even with a double dose of Ambien and Valium, I got maybe 90 minutes. And that's not 90 minutes of deep restorative sleep. That's 90 minute of disassociation, basically. And then I just would take that about 9:30 or 10, and I'd pop up at midnight, and I'd be up for the next 22 hours.

It's so wild because in. In your body there was like this literally, almost like an orange or an apple being eaten by moss, which is mold.

My brain.

Mold. Go Your. Your brain. Not. Not to laugh, but, like, you know, thank God you're through the weeds now. Mold goes and attacks the most alive parts of an organism because that's what it feeds on.

Demyelinate. Your. Your. Your.

Your brain, it demyelinates. And you use your brain. We all do. But you, especially with, you know, direct marketing and email copy and the art of communication, like, you literally had to come to God, come to Jesus moment. And honestly, the man that I know you now, I actually feel that it made you stronger. I know that it made you stronger. But when we're going through the lesson, it's like we can't skip the pain of it. Like, I'm sure I remember when I first met you, we came out to Austin, we all took a boat ride together, and you were sharing some of the story with me, and I was like, wow, I would never know that. Just talking to you, you know, your calmness and your presence, there's something about that I did. Well, I mean, there's something about that that your soul called in. And I don't know if you believe in soul contracts, Mike, or Dharma and karma mixed together, how much you've studied about the esoteric arts from India and whatnot. There's something about that maybe, you know, through your ceremony work, through just being a man of many spiritual avenues, there's some kind of gift that came from this that really probably has allowed you to be grateful.

Yeah, it was the hardest thing I've ever been through and the best thing I've ever been through because forced change upon me. And there's, you know, people don't. You can go through change Voluntarily, which a lot of people won't do, especially if it's really hard. And then there's. There's forced change. And, you know, let's just say Covid was forced change for a lot of people. Wasn't fun because it was forced upon them.

Yeah. So.

And for me, this was very much forced upon me. And I lost everything. And the hardest part was losing my identity. And so you go from a high achiever racing cars on the weekend, building a successful business, going out and hanging out with friends and doing all of these things to losing all of that in a matter of a week. One day I'm Mike Dillard, and everything that I've been and known, and literally the next week, all of that is gone. The ability to sleep is gone. The ability to think is gone. I can't eat the foods that I like to eat. I can't socialize with my friends. I can't drink alcohol. I can't race anymore. I can barely drive a car. I can't do anything. So it was every part of my identity that made me me was stripped away. And that was not fun. Yeah, that was not fun.

At the bottom of that, though, you actually had to reclaim who you were, maybe in a way that you hadn't ever touched. Even with the bullying and all the stories that the subconscious mind created to keep you protected from pain, There was some kind of, like, at the bottom of the well. We all have it, Mike. The residue down there of, like, the last remnants maybe of something spiritually that's still eating away at us. Was there something way down at the bottom of that well that you were like, ah, I'm glad that this happened?

No, 100%. Because what it did is it forced me to start going down the path of healing all of those emotional wounds and to rediscover spirituality and God and all of those things. And so without that experience, I would not have Michelle and the family that I have today. I wouldn't have the life that I have today. Because the best parts that came about it, I'll never forget during the year when this was going on, when we didn't know it was mold, I would try anything and everything that anyone suggested. You could say, mike, go try this. I'd be like, okay, I'm in.

Ketamine mixed with lsd.

Pretty darn close. So I'm at Aubrey's house one night. Paul Selig is speaking there. I've never heard of Paul, and I've never given any credibility to someone who was a channel before. In my life. And so that was a unique experience. But when I was there, I was still in that point of extreme confusion and suffering. And I met a friend named Christina that night who had gone through something very similar a year or two prior. And she's the only person I've still ever met to this point who had the same click in the head and then couldn't sleep for years. And that was a godsend to meet her, because without that, what I didn't have was hope of any kind. And the worst thing that you can do is be going through a medical crisis and not know what it is that you're experiencing or why. I kind of. I kind of say, you know, people are. You have symptoms, and they get on Google and they start typing into symptoms, and they say, never do that, because it comes up with all the shit that you then focus on and might be afraid about. There's something scarier than that, Josh, which is to go on Google and type your symptoms in and find that not a single other person has mentioned what you've talked about, because then there's no hope.

That's a recipe for feeling alone.

Yeah. Yeah, 100%. And there's no game plan, and there's. You don't know what's going on or how to fix it. And you tell an A type entrepreneur, like, hey, we know what it is, and go fix it. We'll go fucking do it. But without that, it is total, you know, totally being alone and hopelessness. And that's where I was until I met Christina. And the moment I met her, I was just like, oh, my God, you get it? And it was the same for her. She'd never met anyone either who'd gone through that. And so that was definitely a fortuitous night. And it was really the beginning of the healing process for me, I would say. A month or two later after that, I was given the opportunity to do my first MDMA session. And I had never done anything drugs in my entire life. I've never done weed, other than alcohol, so never done MDMA or anything related to. To that. But I had an opportunity to. To experience that. And I remember the amount of suffering at that point was so bad, but the amount of the blessing that came from that session, I just remember saying, if I had to go through what I've been through for the last year, just to experience the last five hours, that was worth it to me. It was. It was that pivotal of a. Of an experience that completely changed my life in every single way. And so that began the healing process from, I would say an emotional and spiritual level, not necessarily a physical one, but that led to me becoming, I guess, quite well versed in psychedelics and ceremony and, and then nine ketamine IVs, which is a whole other, a whole other different experience.

So what was the thing that arose during your very first, I guess you could say, ultra neuroplastic event, you know, like you, your first time mdma, Was it, was it your son? Was it your parents? Was it life? Was it God's love? Like some, some kind of deep heart based wisdom started to bubble up in that ceremony?

It was, it was love for sure. It was heart of opening for sure. In my entire life that had been closed off right since I was little, lots of armor. And so that got to, got to melt away. But I'll never forget I had the mask on, I'm on the table and I pull off the headphones and I just remember reaching up to the ceiling and just saying, holy. I can see everything, meaning why everything happened in my life, the reason behind it, what the purpose was, and all of it. And it was literally seen through the matrix. It was like X ray vision into the real meaning of what I experienced. And that started to turn into a, you know, a very healing experience, obviously. So for me, that's what it was, is I got to experience love. And I also got to experience understanding of why I went through the pain that I went through. And that was profound.

I mean, I think about the people on the wall here, especially like Martin Luther King or Betty White, like all the people that have real deep wisdom to share, people like yourself that can impact hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people by their spoken word and the art of marketing. They were marketers too. All of us have this deep wisdom inside, but it only comes through experience. It only comes through experiential learning. Like if I, if I could sit here with you at 20 something years old, it would be a way different conversation pre kids, pre fatherhood, pre entrepreneurship, like we wouldn't have much to talk about. That would really make others wiser. And I think your experience of going through the pain and being in that first ceremony and then looking up and maybe in your own words you can put it feeling God for the first time. Feeling what? Love, like the essence of what love actually is, is something you cannot explain. You have to feel it for yourself.

Yeah, 100%. And empathy too. You know, again, people with hard driving personality types don't have a lot of empathy for people's excuses. Or circumstances. Yeah, it's like, cool, man. All right, get your shit together and.

Let'S, you know, TPS reports do.

Yeah. You know, and that's how I'd been my entire life. And for the first time I. I had real empathy for people who were dealing with severe medical stuff.

Yeah.

You know, no one wants to think about that. And most people will just block that off if somebody close to them is experiencing something like that. They'll let it in on a surface level, but you're not going to like, let that shit in. But I actually got to feel that for the first time through my. My own suffering and, you know, understand other people's.

So there's no way I could ever love Carrie or love Nova or have a friendship with you that was fun and connection based if I didn't have some type of tether to the darkest fucking parts of myself. I have to learn in those spaces. And, you know, maybe there's part of my ego that's like, I wish it wasn't hard, you know, I wish I didn't have to do that. But not really, because when I think about what's even afforded me to be here with you, it's. It has been the bullying and the issues with weight and the issues with depression and the anxiety and then me finding breath work and like, it is this navigatory power we have where we go through an ocean of sorts. And I think it's even. I forget the name of it, but it's like the captain of our ship, you know, being the captain of your own ship. There's a quote, a very famous quote, somebody's typing it right now. And being the captain of your own ship, like, it only comes when you answer the call to get on the boat. Like some people can maybe get sick and they just believe the stories that they see or don't see. On Google, there was some part of you being that hard charger and finding the answer. One of the key components of an entrepreneur is they. They're always figuring it out, whatever the obstacle is. So in a way, like, your hard charge of ness allowed you to get through the most gnarly time in your life. So there was a beautiful gift that you showed up being such a hard charger. Yes.

Yeah. No, I wouldn't have made it otherwise. Yeah, I mean, there was my. My nights consisted of days, consisted of being on the couch, nights consisted of laying on my bathroom floor with a amuse headset, meditating first for five minutes, then up to an hour just trying to not go insane. Like, that's how I spent my nights for a year. And nobody knows that. So. Yeah, yeah, it's.

It reminds me of. Of the fable of the Count of Monte Cristo, where he had all the scars on his back and he. He got the castle, but nobody knew his story. And then when they found out his story, they were, like, trying to almost strip him of what he had. And it's like Joseph Campbell talks about in the Hero's Journey, where we're kind of ripped away, we're initiated, and then we return back to tell the story. And when I saw you on stage and I went to Rewire, everybody knows that, you know, my partner Carrie and I went to your program Rewire with Scott and Joni and Michelle. You. You have such a emotional hook to the people that follow you and such a connection with them. Have you ever even considered doing, like, a coaching program? Not necessarily around the pure, I guess you could say money aspect, but a lot of what's maybe enricher every day and in your community now, do people bring trauma into that space? Because I assume that's probably what blocks them from getting the money that they deserve.

No. Money is the hook. Money is the marketing hook. Hey, we're going to help you uncover your limiting beliefs when it comes to money and that have been holding you back financially. The work we do has nothing to do with money. I mean, you were there. We don't talk about money at the event. Maybe 2% of the time you were there. No, it's on uncovering the subconscious programs and limiting beliefs that are then, you know, manifesting in a physical result or lack of results in your life. But none of that ever really has to do with money. Goes back to stories like I'm not good enough or I don't deserve this or whatever it may be. So, yeah, yeah.

The part of my life that is still present. I remember at the event, I was like, sharing with the group and I said, wow, there's something that's in my subconscious that I had no idea was there. And it was that I'll never actually be happy unless I make more, more money than my father. And that was a deep one. I thought to myself when I left that night, I'm like, I didn't even know that was in there. You know, this unconscious incompetence model that y' all talk about in the program. And I think about most entrepreneurs, is there a common thread, like, when it comes to the. I guess you could say energy of money, because now I'm in the space Where I actually know, regardless of the Leela that's sitting right there with the $100 bill in it, money truly is energy. It's the ability to give value or love to someone else. People abuse that. You know, the Fed punches a number on a keyboard and all of a sudden the computer screen is updated with zeros. So that law of money is disrespected. But in order to respect the law of money and to respect and love money, is there a common thread that most people, either entrepreneurs or wantrepreneurs, have to honestly take a look at?

Yeah. It's directly tied to their self worth and what they tell themselves, the thoughts that they have. Right. There are unbelievably brilliant people. Therapists, doctors, healers, engineers, you name it. Most of them have books that they've written, Right. That nobody's ever read that contain some incredibly world changing knowledge, life changing knowledge. And they're broken. And the reason they're broke, it's. It's not because of what they don't know or what they're not putting out in the world, it's just what they think about themselves or money, what they think is possible or what's not possible. Right. So Michelle's big evolution for the past 12 months is getting over her fear of being seen. Right. So she's unbelievably brilliant and smarter than me in many ways.

Yeah.

And yet her challenge around money is that she was still scared to be seen. Is she good enough in front of an audience? Is she good enough to stand on stage and teach people? People? And again, the last one to two years for her is going through and working through those thoughts and those beliefs and overcoming those one step at a time, one stage at a time, one event at a time. And, and she went from being, you know, the typical single mom and you know, a nice middle class little townhome, townhouse, you know, here in town or whatever it may be, but very budget minded, you know, buying not the highest quality food, but the least expensive food and you know, coupons and going to the discount stores and all of those things to literally within 24 months becoming a millionaire on her own. Not, not through any effort by me, but, but from her evolution because of.

The subconscious exploration, not because you just gifted her some capital.

Correct. Yeah, I, I supported her in changing her beliefs about what was possible and what she was capable of.

See, that makes it real. That makes it real for anyone.

Yeah.

Because we all have that barrier that you teach in the program and that barrier sometimes can be super thick.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my gosh. And honestly, that's what's most monetizable by Instagram and the technocrats that be is that they almost suss out or smell out people's thickness, their barrier thickness, and that's what gets punched into media that then eventually turns into clicks, which eventually, eventually turns into money. Can you talk about that a little bit? The capitalization of people's insecurity, especially with your direct marketing background, there's a good side to that and then there's a dark side if you allow yourself to go into it.

Yeah, I don't have a lot of experience in that because my formula for success in business and therefore making money as a byproduct of that was how do I help people grow, get what they want at scale? And that was it. So I never, when I, even from the very first time I became an entrepreneur, it wasn't how do I make a million dollars? It was, hey, I figured out something from a marketing perspective that's working for me that I've spent the last two years trying to figure out, that I then typed into a 54 page book at the time in 2005, that just said, here was my problem. I'm really shy. I don't like selling, I don't like talking to people. And yet I want to be an entrepreneur and I want to, I want to build a successful business. And I've come to terms after five years of failure that I need to figure out how to sell stuff. But that's hard if you don't want to talk to people. Yeah, you know, if that's where your biggest insecurity was. And that was for me as a very shy, introverted person at that age. And yet I finally figured out a solution through direct response marketing. I was like, hey, actually there's a bunch of people out here who are talking to people through the written word instead of in person. Whether it was through a long format in a newspaper or magazine or an infomercial on television. These people are selling millions of dollars worth of stuff without having to talk to anybody. And so I learned that skill. I taught myself that skill over the next year and a half, and lo and behold, it started to work. I started to generate leads online, I started to write a sales letter online to sell whatever I was selling, and I was making money without having to talk to anybody. And then I put that into that little book and I started to sell that book online, which was the first product of my own that I ever sold. And I was probably within three months selling 50 grand a month worth of that book.

That's a, what year was that?

2005, 2006.

Wow.

So this was physical. Like I would literally go to Kinko's. Never spell, check this, this, this was a Word document that I went to Kinko's in and I got it in that little cheap spiral plastic binding. Right. The graphic I made myself in Microsoft paint or whatever it was back then.

Yeah.

And I would sell it for $39 a copy online through Google Ads. And every single night I would go into my shopping cart and I would stuff it in a US envelope, postal service envelope. But I would write out the address by hand, put it in a bin and I would take two or three bins a day to the post office the next day. Every single day. That was my routine for months until I hired a customer service agent and then found somebody else to do that for me. But that's, that's how I approached business. And it was just sharing what I had learned with other people. And so, you know, if you wanted to take advantage of someone from a money perspective in that regard, you know, selling the home business dream, then I think that's what a lot of people certainly did, at least back in my day was selling the, the work at home scam, if you will, or making it sound easier than it was.

Yeah.

Make money without any effort. Make money without doing whatever.

Maybe Tim Ferriss did a good job. The four hour work week. It's like, well, you need to be a little more honest than that.

Yes. And he, but, but credit to Tim, he didn't. That was the reality that he could create. So he was being honest in that regard. And he, that book resonated with so many people because it's like, oh no, hey, you have to go do this and you have to start a business. You have to do all this other stuff rather than, you know, join this network marketing business and all you have to do is share it with three people and you're going to be a millionaire a year from now, you know. Yeah. So I mean I spent my first five years in, out of college in that industry. So I saw that firsthand and what I realized is that if you sell a person on a dream and that it's going to be easier than they think it is. You're just setting yourself up for failure and them up for failure and it's a very short lived relationship.

Yeah.

And it just all falls apart anyway. So for me it was more about telling people the truth of what it actually takes to be successful in business, which you would get fewer customers or fewer students, but they would stick with you forever because you were honest with them.

I remember I heard Kevin Kelly, he said it on the show about. We were talking about technology. In the middle of it, I was like, so be honest about this thousand true fans thing. Because that was. Kevin Kelly's ode to fame, was like, all you need is a thousand true fans to pay you 100 bucks for a product, and you're in six figures. And at the time, in like, 2016, I believe I interviewed him, it didn't make any sense to me. I thought, how could it be that simple? But it actually is.

That's accurate.

And I wonder how. And even for people that want to reach seven figures, you know, the math on seven figures is just another zero or another multiple. The concept of, like the pie in the sky dream of somebody who right now, it's probably been never sexier to be an entrepreneur, but they don't realize that you have to sweat and bleed. And there's a lot that goes into it. On the other side of that, though, what if it was so simple? A lot of what I experienced in the rewire training was like, well, what if I just, like, released my grip on how hard the problem is of getting to the thousand true fans? Or in my experience, it's 5,000. That's the number. 5,000 true fans. What have you seen for many people in these past 20 years that you could offer as wisdom for them to, I guess, reorganize their mind around? What if it was easier?

Yeah. I think the single biggest misconception that gets in people's way is they think success is found in something outside of them. Meaning it's found in the idea, or it's found in the opportunity, or it's found in the timing, or it's found in the mentor. It's found in the course of the program you go through or whatever, and it's not. And I spent again five or six years making zero money pursuing all of the things outside of myself until I realized I was the common denominator. So I would go to all the big conferences, and I would see all the people go across the stage. And I probably went through 12 to 15 different business opportunities or companies from the time I was a freshman in College to, like, 22, 23. And in every single one of those, I failed. And in every single one of those, I went to the business event, and there's people making millions of dollars. And after you see that enough times, you're like, okay, I'm the only, again, common denominator in this equation. The problem's with me. It's not with the business or the product or the timing or whatever. And then I asked myself, well, what do the people who are successful, what do they have in common? And it became very apparent to me that every single one of them had become a professional and incredibly good and proficient at least one specific skill. They were either phenomenal at speaking on stage, or they were phenomenal at holding events, or they were phenomenal at selling over the phone, or they were phenomenal at training and building leaders and organizations, whatever it may be. But every single one of them was world class at something. And I was like, well, I'm not world class at anything. And in fact, I've wasted the last five or six years chasing these get rich quick things. And I have not improved myself in any form or fashion. And that was the big pivotal moment for me. And so at that point is around the time I discovered direct response marketing. I quit all of the opportunity stuff. And I'm going to say I'm going to dedicate the next, however long it takes to mastering, let's just call it the skill of copywriting, selling through the written word. And so I did that. For the next 18 months, I would print out and transcribe all of the most successful sales letters I could find, either from magazines or newspapers or the Internet or infomercials. I would print them out and then I would transcribe them by hand every night for one to two hours a night, every day for over a year, year and a half. Wow. And what that did is it. It's like learning a new language at a subconscious level. You learn the language patterns, you learn the structure of storytelling, you learn the words to use and the rhythm, if you will, of a sales presentation that's effective. And that became native and embedded in me. And over that course of time, and I just got really good at it. But I essentially became what a lot of people will say is one of the best copywriters out there. And as soon as I acquired that skill, okay, now I know how to sell well. Now I need to get other. A lot of other people to see what I have to sell. Right. If you're a great salesperson, like, there was lots of great mentors that I had, were phenomenal salespeople, but they sold over the phone. My dad was one of the best salespeople in the world. He sold in person.

What did he sell?

My dad was office supplies to large, like school districts and hospitals and things like that. So he had large contract based clients, but he was phenomenal at selling in person. And at the same time, between him and my other mentors, I'm like, they're capped at whatever they can make because it is a one to one experience relationship. Right. There's no leverage in that.

Yeah.

And so thankfully this is around the time Google AdWords comes out. And so I buy Perry Marshall's book on Google AdWords around that same year, which is kind of the definitive guide to that. And I taught myself how to do Google AdWords, but I didn't have any money, right. So I'm learning skills, but I'm still broke. And so now I go to the people that were mentors of mine who know how to sell, but they don't know how to do anything online. They're old school. And I'm like, hey, can I generate leads for you? And we'll do like a split, right? So you pay for the ad costs and I'll charge three bucks for every lead that I generate for you and you get the lead and I get the lead and we'll do that. And guys said yes. So now all of a sudden I go from zero money for an ad campaign to spending 300, 400, $500 a day on Google Ads from other people's money. I'm getting paid to master this skill set and execute for them. They're getting their leads and within 90 days, I don't need their money anymore because I know exactly what I'm doing and how to do it. And that's when the rest took place. The book that I talked about earlier. And so the key to making money in my personal opinion is again, forget everything outside of you. What skill do you have that you can master that will solve somebody's problem? And then how do you solve that problem? For a lot of people at scale.

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Yeah.

So there's, there's got to have been some point in your journey where things started to come together. And maybe it was at that point when you had gone to the old schoolers and helped them with the sales and the copy. Everyone needs to generate momentum.

Yeah.

So if there's, if there's somebody watching or with us right now that they have that dream and that desire, it sounds to me like you were just really hella resourceful. You found where the opportunities were by taking an honest 30,000 foot look at the world. Apply that to now because that was 2005 ish. If you were to look at it at the, at the scene now, maybe it's chat CBT3, maybe it's some other tech platform. What are the, what are the, the gaps now for us like they were in 2005.

It's all the exact same thing. The tools are different, but the equation's the same. So the equation is to be successful and, or quote, make a lot of money, you have to master a skill set. Specifically, you have to master two skill sets. In most cases, that primary skill set is whatever you do that's going to contribute value to other people. And the secondary skill set is, how do you get that value proposition in front of a lot of people? Right. So you could be someone who. Gosh. What's a good example about podcasting cooks? Okay, let's say cook, right? Your chef. There's not a lot of leverage in being a normal chef. 99.9% of chefs don't have any leverage. They go up and they work brutal hours every single day.

That industry is gnarly 100%.

And yet, if you're good at what you do, you have this skill set of creating amazing food. Right? The piece that you're missing is leverage, because right now, you're only affecting the people that walk into your restaurant. Well, you look at Emeril Lagasse or the. The British guy that my son loves so much.

Oh, yeah, Jamie. Chef Jamie.

Jamie. There's Jamie. Bobby Flag in a Hell's Kitchen, right?

Oh, the guy that always yells at people, The British guy. What is this?

I can't think of his name right now. Somebody typed today, but. But they bridged that gap. They added the second skill of then taking the skill and mastery of food and getting it out into a large scale in front of a lot of people. Right? And so there's those two skills you can apply to any career. Therapy, plant medicine, whatever you want. Being an artist, if you can do those two things, then the world is your oyster at that point. And until you do those things, then you're kind of stuck in a box. But I think the most important part of that is as soon as you start to get that first result, then it builds confidence. Oh, it worked. And then that leads to more confidence. And that confidence is the key to having this very deep inner knowing that you can do this. And then it just goes kaboom. There's no more limitation on you.

But it starts, like you said, by you cultivating that really deep skill set. And, I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of unique skill sets. Gordon Ramsay's the guy. There's hundreds of thousands of unique skill sets in the world. So, like, for me, in 2015, when I had, you know, I guess you could say probably one of the lowest points of my life, my promise was to myself and to God was that I was gonna go an inch wide and a mile deep so far into podcasting that I was actually just willing to die or live on the home, homeless on the street, and that's required as well.

I had the same thing.

You literally have to. Maybe you can talk about that. And please combine that with this other aspect of like generating and cultivating that one thing, like holding it in your hands, not being pulled away by shiny stuff, not being pulled away by people that may distract you, unconsciously distract you, because they want to sabotage you. There's got to be a vigilance to holding on to the dream and to keeping that dream alive. How do we do that without making our health at cost?

Well, that's where I say the imbalance is. A normal, healthy, rational, balanced person doesn't do this. So for me, it was as soon as I graduated college. I had already been playing around with being an entrepreneur by then, and I knew that's what I was going to do no matter what. And so I moved out to California to work with a mentor. This was on September 10, 2001. So I woke up the next morning in a new apartment with no phone. Oh yeah, A phone call from my mom at, you know, eight in the morning.

I remember that day.

And, and that changed everything. But you know, for me, I. I was prepared to do anything that was necessary. So I was living in a $300 a month apartment. I was probably the only person that spoke English in it. And I had to get a job because 911 changed everything from a business context and a market context. So I got a job at Best Buy selling computer stuff in the computer department. And that was barely enough to make the bills. And yet I was still at a point where there was no compromise. I was there to build a business and pursue it no matter what. And so my backup plan was, if I get kicked out of the apartment, I will get an air conditioned storage unit somewhere and I'll get a gym membership and I'll live in the storage unit and I'll shower at the gym. And that was, I mean, literally the plan. Yeah. And there was no, there was no other alternative.

Yeah.

To that. And everything I did after that, every job that I took was strategically designed to help me either overcome a fear or acquire a skill set that would then allow me to take the next step that I needed in my business evolution. But there was zero time wasted. There was zero thought of ever doing anything else. And it was, I will die trying to do this or I will die if I don't do it.

That's it. That's the essence of what I'm asking you right there. Like whatever that is in you, I share that. And anybody that, anybody that's committed to being successful in any endeavor that has to be there. And if it's not there, it's far too easy for the universe or dark energies in this world to come in and just tantalizingly pull someone. Someone out of that dream.

Yeah, yeah. And now with the context that I have now after the last four years, you know, I think a lot of that was, if I don't succeed, then I'm not worthy of love and I'm not good enough. And that most humans will do anything. They'll. They'll suffer anything. You. You look at abusive relationships, people will stay in just for the perception of being loved. Right. And so I'm sure that was probably at the core of my motivation for that level of obsession.

Yeah, I think we've all been. Well, definitely, if you're in your 40s or 50s, you've definitely been in relationships. And I look back on my life and. And maybe you can attest to this with the. The mother of your child. I look back at my life, the women that were different than Carrie, that I was getting learnings and lessons from them. I've heard before, maybe it was Harvo Hendricks, like, there's teaching relationships and then there's loving spiritual relationships where you're still teaching each other. But it's not solely about the teaching. There was something that you gleaned from the mother of your child that, looking back now, you can maybe have that be identified in all relationships. A quality that she imbued or just a way of being. And it's not to slight your ex or disrespect her. It's like, we've got to be very cautious as entrepreneurs or just people that have dreams in general. Because the core of my question is the. The fastest way to see the fuel removed from your dream is to choose the wrong partner. They could actually be the reason why someone's dream does not live anymore.

100%, that's the single most important investment or decision you will ever make is your relationship. Yeah. A thousand percent.

Make or break. What was the wisdom you got from. From your son's mother?

Boundaries. They need to have boundaries. And this is not said with any. Any disrespect. She's on her own journey, and she's a wonderful mother to him. And yet she has her own trauma that she went through that, you know, led to some personality traits that were not compatible with being in a relationship with somebody else. So, you know, Tony Robbins says, givers tend to find takers, and takers tend to find givers. And I've been a giver my entire life. And so I found the other half of that because I didn't have the self confidence, self worth or experience to identify what that looks like in another person and what that, what that dynamic turns into.

So, and it was through that, I guess you could say, deepest level of pain. It was a fairly quick relationship, right? It was a couple years or two.

And a half years, three years.

So. And because it sounds like when you do stuff like you just, you go for it, is it still that way in your life or have, has the pain of that relationship or just life in general taken, taken away your, your ability to dive right in?

No, no, that's another, you know, high, quick start on the Colby test, right? Most entrepreneurs are high, high in the quick start. Yeah, Bar, which I am. I'm 5, 4, 8, I think 5,484. Anyway, I'm an A, I think an 8 out of 10 on a quick start. So really high on that. And so I will make decisions and jump in very easily. So that has not changed because with my wife Michelle now, you know, we met and knew immediately by day three or four that we were, this was going to be a long term thing. And, and, and we went in deep, fast. Like I think on our fifth or sixth date, maybe, maybe a little longer, that within two months, I'll put it that way, I was holding space for her in her first MDMA session. And so by that time I'd probably done three or four myself. And, and doing that kind of work was now a very big part of my life. And, and that kind of deep personal growth. And I was like, hey, are you up for going deep and kind of going through your shadow stuff? And she said, yeah, but that was within our first two months of dating. So. And then we, I think, moved in together within three months, moved in, moved the kids in together, you know, all of that stuff.

So, yeah, it had been a couple years since you were together before Richer Every Day came through. Was that an idea that you, you both had? Was that your idea or Scott and Joni's? Like, how did that all come to fruition? The richer everyday.

It was the root of it came from that moment of realizing my personal value was tied to money previously. And so all of the medicine and therapy work that I'd done during the, during the two to three year period, I could see how it directly applied to money in my life and then I could see how it was directly applying to smart, specifically entrepreneurs in their life. And so I could See, in my career I've cycled three or four times, meaning I've made a shit ton of money and I've lost it and I've made it and I've lost it. And at this point, going through the medical stuff and losing it again, I'm like, fuck, why am I in this situation where I'm in a place where I can't work and I need money and I've made tens of millions of dollars and I don't have that anymore. And what is the reason behind that now? Because this has now happened three or four times. It's clearly a pattern. But going through the, the medicine work that I've done, I could see what the pattern was. And for me it was again the, the story of not being good enough. But it really comes down to two things. Subconscious programs and neurochemical addictions habits. And the subconscious program for me was not good enough. The neurochemical addiction was addiction to adrenaline. And most entrepreneurs have an addiction to adrenaline. It's a very high risk way to make a living. You can't be an entrepreneur and not, not have some kind of affinity and comfort level with having a high adrenaline life and a high risk situation. Because every single day you wake up, it's a high risk, high adrenaline situation.

People are always coming for you.

It seems like, well, you've just got to go kill what you eat. No one's going to send you a paycheck. You want to pay your bills, you got to go do it right. That's a stressful situation to be in on a day to day basis.

When you bring back the bison, you also need to know how to store.

It and protect it 100%.

You got to keep it.

And that's the harder part. But for what I have found in my personal experience is when I got my business to a really great place and it's making a lot of money and I've achieved the goal or birthed the idea that I wanted to give birth to and that was kind of done. I would find a way to blow it up subconsciously. I would either have another idea for another business or I'd have another idea to like, hey, we need to go build this thing or I want to get into hydroponics and build the world's first hydroponic robot for your home, or build this platform with 3D360VR and do all of this other stuff right? When I've got a business that's already doing really well and kind of on autopilot, but it was that boredom. So when the boredom sets in, you lose that cortisol. And without that cortisol, that cortisol is what makes you feel alive for most people who are in this hydrenalized state. I've had that my entire life, since I was a little kid being bullied. I'm used to cortisol running through my system. So that's how I feel energized and what for me is normal. And when that's not there, then you get depressed and you get bored. And so you will automatically, without even knowing what you're doing, go and find a way to add the cortisol back, either by blowing up what you're doing or by going and starting something else. And that's why most entrepreneurs go through this up and down cycle. Almost every entrepreneur I know has cycled at least once. And that's where the, the thing of keeping the money that you make is hard. Because the same thing then applies to investing. And that's where rich every day came. Came through this as well, which is how was I then applying that addiction to adrenaline to investing? And same thing, I would, I would invest in things that didn't have a lot of knowledge about. I'd write a check for $250,000. Here you go into a startup, right? And sometimes it worked out with crypto, it worked out with other things it didn't. But that's why I was putting money into Bitcoin in 2013 when most people wouldn't have done that, right? It's not saying that was a responsible decision. I got lucky with that, to be clear, right? So, but I realized that that's if. If you have an addiction to adrenaline and you like taking risk and how you make your money is through taking those risks as an entrepreneur. And then you apply it to what you do with that money, which is all you know. So that's what you're going to do. High risk investing, because that's exciting, right? Who wants to go put their money in a name an entrepreneur that wants to put their money in a mutual fund that earns 5% a year. I don't fucking know any, right? We want to go make 100 a year, 50% a year, put it in your buddy's new startup. And again, that tends to not work out. It's like going to Vegas, right? You might win once or twice, but in the long run, the house is going to win. You're going to lose. And so going through the work that I did, I could finally see these patterns in Me. And that's when I was like, holy shit. I know 90% of my entrepreneur friends are dealing with the same shit. And I can see it in their lives playing out. And that's how rich every day was born.

No matter if they're starting or if they're six figures, seven figures, eight figures, it's the same neurochemistry. It's the exact same model. So it applies literally to everyone. I wonder what you'd say about procrastination. Because I think about procrastination, and I've heard of it, like, oh, if you have procrastination, then it means you don't care enough about the thing. But I don't think that's always the case. I think on the other side of it is the vacuum that's needed to create this kind of adrenaline roller coaster of which you speak. Sometimes it can be one or the other.

I would say procrastination is the sign that you're running into a limiting belief. You've run into a limiting belief that now has you frozen. An inability to move forward, and so you feel stuck, but you don't know why. And so people call that procrastination. It's not. It's. You're running into a subconscious program.

And that program is below the filter that we've talked about. And that filter is where you have to get through in order to access subconscious.

You're not aware of it. Okay.

At the rewire, and I talked about this a few times. I already shared one gem about my father and money. I'll let Carrie. Whenever Carrie comes on the podcast, I'll let her share this. But it was around men, and it was so profound and it was so healing that I wondered, huh? We came to an event around money and wealth, but what came out of it was something completely unrelated directly to money. That was when I really started to understand that, truly, the phrase of, you know, the adage of how you do one thing is how you do everything. I used to say bullshit on that, but it's actually not true. Because if I were to, like, when I was young, I would, like, steal from gas stations and stuff. And I wonder, like, should I go back and clean that up? You know, should I. Should I go to the gas station and, like, repay the candy bar that I stole? Because truly, like, how I. Any debts that I leave unpaid, either energetic or personal or business, they're still there. There has to be, like, this cleanup of debt or, you know, and rewire the flushing out of the emotional debt that we Carry. Whether it's emotional debt or financial debt, it's still debt. I wonder if you can share any experiences that you've had from students or people that are in the program or just something that comes to mind right now about emotion and financial debt being really almost the same.

I don't know, because I've never thought about it before.

Me neither. This is why I love podcasting. We just bounce these ideas off each other.

So how are emotional debt and financial debt related?

Yeah, like if someone has. Well, to quote my own life, when I have unprocessed resentment towards people that have more money than me, or when I have unprocessed resentment towards my father who made a bunch of money that in a way, subconsciously drives my decisions to sabotage myself in accumulating wealth.

Yeah, it's like a magnet. Energetic. Energetically. You can't attract something to you if you resented it. And I think the easiest filter to observe money through is through the context of relationship. So if, you know, we're guys, if we think of money as a woman, almost every single example or scenario that you can think of around how we interact with women, and you just replace the woman with money in that context perfectly. Makes sense. If. If you secretly resent women, are you going to attract women to you into your life? No. Right. And same thing if you're a woman when it comes to men.

Yeah.

And so that's. If you want to kind of take an inventory of your relationship with money, just, you know, ask yourself, as a guy, do I. How do I treat women? And if that woman was actual cash, would I have her in abundance? Right. Do I respect her? Do I pay attention to her? Do I look over her? Do I treat her with respect to all of these things? Right. And do you do that same thing with your money? And if you don't do that with your money, well, then you're not gonna have money.

So this is what you unpack in the program. And by the way, you guys, like, I'm in Mike's program myself. The phase number two is you need to have a system that distributes and allocates your money for you automatically as it comes in. That's a big one. I've heard of profit first, and you've shared this with me too. Like having different bank accounts. So the very first thing, regardless of strategy, is like, take care of the physiology, take care of the mind and the neurochemicals, and nourish that. Like, that's. Actually, without that, it doesn't matter if you accumulate it Right. Because you. You essentially would subconsciously make yourself lose it.

I've accumulated a shit ton of money and I've lost it many times.

Yes.

For that reason.

So start with the physiological.

Yeah, well, you got to. You got to do both. You got to start with the subconscious programs. And then you have to address the physiology. And ideally, you're doing those at the same time.

Yeah.

And the physiology piece is just. It gets down to literally, neurochemistry, which you're an expert in. So we're talking about dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, cortisol, endorphin. And so an example of this would be when we feel stress or anxiety, that is our body dumping cortisol into our system to say we don't like what's going on, we want to make you uncomfortable so that you will go to a different place or stop doing what it is that you're doing. And then when we do that, it gives us dopamine and serotonin. Right. To extinguish that cortisol in our system. And what most people don't understand here in the west is that the media and corporations have basically weaponized this knowledge, their knowledge of our biology against us, which has made it very difficult for people to amass wealth here in. In our country. And I'll explain why. So what happens when we get on social media or turn on the news or read a newspaper or magazine or whatever it is? Right. Or inundated with things that cause us anxiety and cause us cortisol to course through our system, Whether it's Covid or Russia or political stuff, whatever it may be, you turn it on and you're just inundated with that. And then what do you see? You immediately see ads for beer, ice cream, pharmaceuticals, purses, shoes, cars, whatever it is that's going to give us dopamine and serotonin that's going to make us feel good, so they get the cortisol rise and they give us something to boost buy. In order to extinguish that, all of us have our go to default mode for how we extinguish that cortisol. Based in a western society, which usually 99% of the time requires us to spend money. It could be as simple as going into a refrigerator and getting a pint of ice cream, getting a glass of wine, cracking open a beer, or going onto Amazon or going onto Instagram and window shopping on Instagram or going down to best buyer me sportsman's finest in buying a gun. Right. So in the Past for me, it was cars. And so if you've got this adrenaline and this cortisol going through your system, and now you want to extinguish it, in order to extinguish it, you have to go spend money, even if it's five bucks on a pint. And after doing that for years, that neural pathway just becomes the default highway. And before you know it, every one of us has been there. If you're stressed out, you've got a pint of ice cream or a glass of wine in your hand, and you didn't even know how it got there. Right. It's just like what you do by default. And so what this has done in my personal construction of this is it's created what I call an inverted dopamine response, meaning how we get dopamine is basically upside down when it comes to our relationship with money. And so if you look at, let's say, Warren Buffett, on the other hand, Warren Buffett does not get dopamine by spending money. He gets dopamine by making and saving money. Spending money stresses him out, which is why he's still in the same house after 50 years.

The dude eats McDonald's to save money.

Right. And we all have a couple of friends like this. Not a lot, but one or two friends that the idea of spending money or buying a sports car to them stresses them out. It. They just get frazzled, Right? Yeah. And spending money stresses them out. Buying a designer purse search pair of shoes stresses them out. And saving that money, though, gives them pleasure. And so if you look at those two groups of people, which one of them becomes rich automatically and which one of them becomes broke automatically? It happens by default with the path you're on is you're on it whether you like it or not. And I'm going to say again, 99% of Americans are on the default path to being broken because their addiction is to spending money and to extinguish the stress that they have in their life. And so that was certainly the case for me as well. I'll say everybody watching this can judge for themselves which path they're on. And so once you become aware of that, well, now that's the key to all of this, is awareness. Now I can see it when I'm exhibiting this behavior. I can interrupt the pattern, and then I can retrain a new pattern. And so for me, there's just two very simple ways that we. We share with folks on how to do this. The first is using the breath.

Yeah.

Key to the nervous system, right? So if you're in this agitated high cortisol state and you're wanting to go buy something, it's stop what you're doing, pull over, do box breathing for six cycles, wait until you feel your saliva glands click in, wait until you feel your body get a little heavy and relax. And by the time that happens, that automated behavior and path you were on has stopped and it's been interrupted. And now you can make a decision to go do something else. Go to the gym, turn around and go back home. Close the, close the window on Instagram, whatever it may be. And you've interrupted that pattern. But then we need to establish a new pattern. And that's where the system comes in in the program, which is we want to put a little bit of money, it could be a dollar a day, it could be whatever you want, into a richer everyday account. But more importantly, not just make that transfer, celebrate it. So getting your emotions involved, getting your neurochemistry involved, feel the dopamine, celebrate it. And retrain your brain to associate saving money with reward. The other kind of, I guess, tool or strategy that is really useful for people especially, I'm just going to say guys, because I haven't been in the place of a woman, obviously, but we have a natural tendency to hunt shit that we want, right? And the modern day version of hunting is buying stuff. For the most part, we're hunting the car that we want, the computer that we want, the new microphone that we want for the podcast studio, whatever it may be. And I don't know about you, but I'll get in research mode for days or weeks on something. The more expensive it is, the longer I'm going to research it.

I did that for my truck.

And I'm studying my prey, right? I'm studying my prey. And the longer you do that, the more committed you are, the more brain power you're spending on this, the more neurochemistry is being invested into buying this thing. And you know that the longer you spend it on, the more likely you are you're going to end up buying this, this whatever it is. But at the end of the day, all that your brain wants is the dopamine or serotonin that it would get from making that purchase. It doesn't give a shit about you actually buying the computer or the car. All it wants is the chemical. And the neat part about it is that you can generate this chemical on your own with your imagination, right? So whenever this is happening, I'll go into, just lay down on the couch and go through an imagination process where I'm going to envision me going out and buying this new car, and I'm going to envision going into the dealership and picking it up. I'm going to envision opening the door and smelling it for the first time. I'm going to envision sitting at the down and feeling the wheel. I'm going to vision firing it up and hearing the engine come to life. And what it's going to feel like with me driving down to the road, back to the house, and what it's going to feel like every single time I walk out of the garage or out into the driveway and see it there. And all of these amazing, really good things that I'm going to feel. Right. Joy, satisfaction, accomplishment, whatever it may be. I'm going to feel those things in as much detail as I can, and then I'm going to re. I'm going to say, okay, cool. That was really nice. I'm going to go forward a couple of weeks, and then now I come out into the garage, and it's rained and the car's dirty. It's got, you know, I open it up, there's dirt on the floor, on the floor mats, fire it up. Okay, cool. I've got to go get gas. It's. It's on empty. Oh, it's 120 bucks to fill up the tank. And. And. But it's still fun. Cool. I still get some enjoyment for it. And then I'm going to go forward six months. And now how do I feel about the car when I come out? You know, the newness is certainly gone. I. I understand what the experience was, and that initial thrill is dissipating. It's gone. And now it's just kind of the car I drive every day. And at that point, you can then imagine yourself with, you know, a pile of money on one hand, let's say $250,000, or the car, the dirty car that's in your garage on the other hand, and say, which do I want? And at least my case, 100% of the time, it's the money, because my brain got what it wanted in the span of 10 minutes without having to spend 250 grand to do it. And that's such a powerful tool. Yeah.

Like. And do you. So you always do it laying down, or can you do it sitting up with eyes open wherever you want?

It's. It's literally just how athletes. It's the same process, Right. You're just going out and Envisioning what.

You want, because I would assume that the reason why it's so powerful is because if you can put yourself there at, you know, 10 days, six months, one year of having the thing that your brain is hungry for, the. The square to feel good, then that might be a barometer. If you could see yourself at a year and you would feel that excited about, like, for my truck, I. I know I'll be excited about it in a year because I love it. I love. I'm like, okay, we're gonna go to the beach, we're gonna take it on the trails, and we're gonna do things that brings me joy. But if. And I. And I fell into this trap in 2012, I remember at the time, it was like I was working in corporate America and I bought like this brand new Acura and I was, like, stoked. And that looking back, was such the emotional choice based on the consumer mind, the 99.9% of people. And I'm like, never again. I'll never do that again. I sold the car in like a year. It was like an empty feeling. The emptiness I knew wasn't fulfilled by the thing that my brain was hungry for, because it really was just my ego trying to ignore some other stuff in my life that it didn't want to change. That was the real wisdom of that. So be careful, y'. All. If you're. I mean, that. That right there. If people got one thing from money mindset, that right there could change someone's life if they actually put that into practice.

And. And that. That. That is. Those are just two tools that you can use to now interrupt and start to create a new neural pathway so that you can create a new habit that is required for you to build wealth over the long term. Because if you don't do that, then you're auto. It's like going to the gym, right?

Yeah.

If it takes you willpower to save your money and to put it aside, that willpower, just like it takes to go to the gym, it takes willpower. It will lose. The default program is going to win. It'll take a month, two months, six months, whatever it may be. The default program requires zero effort energy. It's just going to be sitting there hanging out, waiting for you to like. Cool, man. You can put all this effort in. Let me know when you're tired, and I'll take over again. And the same thing's going to happen with your money if you don't interrupt that and completely rewire it and that becomes the New default.

Yes. It's so good. And then the last one is have the clear understanding of the cash flow investment strategies that you wish to use. That's like the three core components of the program. Obviously, I'm just giving you guys like the tip of the iceberg the of the program. There's so much more in there. So rich, richer every day. The investment strategy is interesting because I do DCA for. I just put my stuff in swan and I just don't look at it. Maybe every couple months I'll take a look, but I'll never touch it. Cool. And every time I see it growing, I get, like you said, the inverse pattern of the serotonin. And I learned that from the program. I've never been able to save money my whole life. I've never been a saver. Yeah, I've just been like, money comes in, money comes out, you know, and I'm like, well, you know, more.

So this comes to the third part, right? And the third part is basically you have to have a plan for the money. If you don't have a plan for your money, it will fall into the hands of somebody else who does have a plan for your money. Apple has a plan for your money.

Yeah.

Right. Porsche has a plan for your money.

Yeah.

Gucci, Prada, all of them have not only plans for your money, they have some of the smartest people on the planet whose full time job is to figure out how to extract your money from your hands and put it into theirs. And they have some of the most sophisticated equipment in the form of AI on the planet to do that as well. And so there's literally a war on with an unprecedented level of sophistication that is being waged against you and I as consumers every single day to extract our money from our bank account and to put it into somebody else's. And so if you do not have a conscious plan for your money, that means it's not being appreciated, it's not being respected, it's not being looked after. It will go find somebody else who does appreciate it, respect it, desire it and want it. Right. The same context, example of having a relationship. Most people don't have a plan for the money. They don't. And it's sitting in their bank account, it's waiting for somebody else's plan to come extract it. And so that's the third part, which is there is no best plan. The best plan is the one that you're congruent with, that you believe in and that you have knowledge and Expertise around. And for some people, that plan is real estate. For some, it's crypto. For some, it's stocks. And there's all different. There's a thousand different variations you can have. I don't care what it is. As long as you have a plan, you're going to do great. It could be investing in an index etf. If that's your plan, awesome. You're going to do better than 90% of the other people on the planet.

You make it sound so simple. But I think what people really have to understand is what when they try to go through that process of flipping the serotonin pyramid, there's going to be some serious pushback. Cause if you've walked a trail in the forest a thousand times, that trail's pretty worn. It's the same way in our neuroplastic. So when I go and I look at the account and I think, oh, I can either go buy something or save it. There's a science that you teach in the program. And this is what really excites me about this is like, this is the ticket. This is the key for all of us here in the fucking matrix. To exit the matrix, you have to have financial wellness. You have to.

This was the piece that has been missing from every financial book that's ever been written. Because I've read most of them, right, Studying money, just growing up. All of Robert Kiyosaki stuff, all of Dave Ramsey's stuff, all of it. They all have really good stuff. But they're addressing the conscious part of money management. None of them have ever addressed the subconscious work or the neurochemistry piece, which is the single most important part of it. It is. They're talking about the tip of the iceberg. I'm Talking about the 90% under the water iceberg. And that was the big epiphany for me of. I wouldn't have known or come across any of this without doing the really deep inner mind work that I've done the last few years. But it was just a massive light bulb moment for me. That's like, well, of course, this is why everybody keeps running into issues about money and why these books don't necessarily work for very many people. Because it's not addressing the core issue.

When something comes into your life and it's opposed to your values, like how you identify yourself as Mike Dillard or how I feel about myself as Josh Trent. That's actually a process, too. I wonder if, before I let you go, dude, we've got to talk about this, the way that I identify myself. Who am I in the world beyond just the podcasting element or the entrepreneur element or even the father element, like we're both fathers. Beyond all of that, there's a part of you that has always been there your entire life, and it's never changed. That awareness of who you are. Some people might call it a soul, some people might call it a divination of God. That part of us has to be in alignment with our choices. Otherwise there's disharmony, and then that manifests as physical issues and disease. Can you riff on that a little bit in your world?

I just think more than anything, in my experience, it comes down to your beliefs about yourself. People might. We call them limiting beliefs. There's empowering beliefs, there's limiting beliefs. And I think whatever. I just know, for me, everybody kind of has their comfort zone if we're just talking about it further through the context of money. I have my comfort zone. My comfort zone is making a couple million bucks a year. If I'm not doing that, I'm really uncomfortable with that. At some point in my past, when I was in my 20s, I made a conscious and or subconscious decision that I was worth this amount of money every year. And you'll find that when people get above that zone, they'll also come back down into it, right? You might make 20, 30, 40 million bucks one year and have a really great year. You'll find a way to F it up if you feel like you're only worth five to ten. And you'll seem to other people. A more common scenario is people who want to become entrepreneurs and who want to change their income. They're used to making, let's say, five to six, $7,000 a month. They start a business, all of a sudden, they start to have success. They have a month where they make 15 or 20 grand a month, and then all of a sudden, it just crashes back down again to five to seven, and they'll just keep riding the cycle. And I watched thousands of people do this in the entrepreneur space for decades, and they just keep running into the ceiling, right? Ceiling, ceiling, ceiling, and back down. For me, my ceiling has always been around building a large team and a large business just because in my past, a lot of distrust of people, you know, from what I went through. So, yeah, I'd want to. As soon as I'd start to build a team, shit would start to go wrong. And then I would crash back down to the solo entrepreneur thing, which I'm very. That's My comfort zone. So, yeah, at the core of that, that's just a subconscious program that's playing out, and that. That can be changed. It can be updated. Right. I think if I wanted to build a business these days where there was a lot of people involved or team involved, I'd be infinitely more empowered to do that now than I was five years ago. I don't know if that answers your question or not, but it does.

Because really, what you're talking about is like. And this is a fairly esoteric question, follow up. So get ready for this one. With the work that you've done and even the ceremony, work. As you yourself, Mike Dillard, the soul has continued to evolve. You have probably gathered a lot more wisdom and knowledge and information that you've really done your best to make sense of within yourself. But those pieces of information and knowledge and wisdom, when they come in, they go up against your own barrier. No matter who we are, we all have a little bit, I'm sure, of unconscious incompetence before we get unconsciously competent, that pathway. Do you ever wonder, like, all right, with all the success I've had and with everything that I know I want to create in life, is there also just a point where it's okay to be comfortable, or is that a blind spot? Like, at what point is comfort not killing us? At what point is. Is comfort?

Well, I think. Well, I think. I think that's what's. What's the. The driver behind you? Is it toxic or not? Right. Is the. Is the. Is the driver or the source of your motivation, Is it unhealthy or healthy? For me, I would say at this point, it's balanced. In the past, it's not. It wasn't balanced. Yeah, right. So now I don't. I don't. I work maybe 10% now compared to what I used to work years ago. And I'm totally at peace with that. You know, I don't have to go prove anything to anybody at this point. I just do it because I enjoy doing it. Or we have goals that we set, and we want to go achieve those, but if we don't, we're grateful for everything that we have every single day. And going through that experience of losing everything taught me that I don't need anything. And so there's no striving for at this point anymore. It's just, hey, let's do something cool and have fun doing it and do it to the best of our ability. And it is what it is, you know, so this is so good.

Man, this is why I've been leaning into money finance, understanding the energy of money. Because, you know, honestly, my life has been very different since Rewire in a super cool way, because I've really gotten to see all the ways that I was faking it before. Like, I might have said things before, but they weren't embodied. And now I can honestly sit here and say I like saving. Like, it feels good to. It feeling feels good. And so that inversion flip, like, I wonder what, as parting guidance you might offer to somebody that is probably having the biggest, darkest wound around money. And it may not even be honestly their fault. It's their responsibility. Like, I was raised on welfare. A large majority of the population is economically depressed. And so there is this radical wound around, rich people are bad, people that make money are evil. That's real, man. I don't want to sugarcoat that. I have felt that sometimes that nausea, but definitely depth in my life, this anger towards money or anger towards people that have it.

It feels real.

It feels real. So can you speak to the person who's like, whatever, I don't want to make money. I don't want to be like rich people. That kind of mindset. Can you speak to that?

That's not a reality. That's a choice. That's an illusion. That's a story. Right. Everything, everything we experience and tell ourselves is a story that we've adopted that was either given to us by somebody else, maybe our parents, maybe our pastor, maybe whomever our neighbors or friends that we adopted as real and it's not. And just having awareness right around that is step number one. Like, there is any limitation you have in front of you is an illusion. And there's plenty of people you can look at that will show you that that is actually the case. All of the. The people who grew up in harsh, harsh circumstances that are, you know, have made billions of dollars. Right?

Yeah.

So just, you have to understand that the way you see the world is an illusion based on your own past, previous experiences. And your subconscious is projecting this out into the world and it's how you're experiencing it, but it can be changed. It's certainly not the way things are. It's the way you perceive them to be. Right. So I think that's kind of step number one is understanding that that's. That is not how things are. That is how things are for you based on your past experience. And you can give those decision points in time new meaning. And so that's a large part of what we do with People, when we take them through this process is we go back to those critical inflection points in life when these decisions were made and we give them new meaning. And when you can give it a new meaning, then it loses its power over you. And then the resistance that was there is now gone. Right.

That's why Neo threw up when he was on the Nebuchadnezzar.

Yeah.

When he first got on board, he threw up. He had to throw up all the bullshit.

Yeah.

That he had been fed from his society, from. It's so funny. Like that story. You know, people, people tend to, to glamorize parts of the Matrix. And I, I think it's a wonderful movie. It's why Tom Bilyeu loves it. I mean, he thinks the Matrix is real, which I think, I agree. I think aspects of it, truly. I don't know if somewhere there's a field of babies growing and freaking incubators. But, but the archetype or the, the, the metaphor of the Matrix is so real. Real. And one thing, I really, I really respect this about you, man. You, you help people exit this fabrication of the mind. I really, really love that. And I've got the chance to know you over time. So, you know, thank you, man, for the impact on myself and my family and, and my son and my future child that's coming this year. Like, it's been an absolute pleasure. Like, no, it hasn't been easy. I mean, there's, there's parts of the training where I was like, this sucks. You know, like going through timelines and stuff like that. But, but truly, thank you, man. I really appreciate the work you do in the world.

Thanks for what you do and sharing the message. You're welcome. Yeah, it's awesome.

Thanks, you guys. Go and check out richer everyday.com. it's on the screen right now. And Mike, as we say goodbye, man, the question, the biggest question that I've been trying to answer myself my whole life actually, but especially since this podcast went through the beginning of its death and rebirth in 2015. And the question is when you really feel and when you know in that part of you that, that part of you that's never changed, not from your mind, but from your heart and from your life experience. How do you define being well? Like, like true. Well, being true wellness. What is your expression of that? How do you make meaning of that? You know, from your heart, from your soul, your life experience? What is wellness?

I would say happiness, joy, joy, happiness. I think that's the state that God wants us to be in and having experienced both sides of the coin, being, enjoying happiness is about as good as it gets. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot to be learned in the struggle, right? But it's important to. To not get addicted to the struggle or to not let the struggle become an identity. And, and that can happen as well. Even, even going through an illness. There's, you know, I recognized going through the mold stuff that it can very easily become an identity of. Of being a sick person. Right. And I saw that going through the healing process and, and seeing everybody that I read online or studied or whatever. There's. There's people who will take on being ill as an identity because they start. They get a story out of it. Now all of a sudden, they get. They're getting attention from it, they're getting sympathy from it, they're getting health benefits from it, they're getting potentially employment income benefits from it. And then they get attached to that new identity, and it keeps them trapped in that. And so I would sit down and kind of decide, what do you want your identity to be when it comes to joy, happiness, finances, money, abundance, all of that? Right.

I'll never forget this. I was in a sweat lodge and my mentor was like, be careful what you pray for. If you keep praying over and over again for strength, God Universe is going to bring you shit to make you stronger. So, like, be careful how you pray. I mean, that's really what I got from your share right now. So, dude, this has been great. Thank you again for coming to the show. You guys go to all the links and go to JoshTrend.com podcast. That's where we're talking more about Mike and the program. And by the way, I'm in the program, so join me in the program. I think it would be epic and fun and honestly meaningful for us to make sense of this world and get the resources that we deserve and that we're trying to all figure out how to get. So until we see you again, until Mike and I see you again, we're both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon.

Amen.

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