Eben Pagan - Opportunity - How To Find, Create And Thrive From Opportunities In Your Life

Full transcript: Eben Pagan on London Real

6:36 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Eben Pagan, the American entrepreneur, author and speaker known for his expertise on business management, growth and personal development, particularly through internet marketing. Back in the 2000s you discovered this business almost by accident with your massively successful Double Your Dating ebook, which I bought a copy of, using the pen name David DeAngelo, as the business screw. You started teaching people in the information marketing business how to build online products.

7:02 Today you travel the world six months a year, run your businesses virtually with no office, and have been chosen by Tony Robbins as one of his new Money Masters. You’ve also got the new book out, Opportunity. Eben, welcome to London Real. It’s great to be here. It’s great to have you here.

7:17 I was curious, first off, you know, you spent some time in London here in the past few years. I mean, as a guy who is been in marketing forever, you’re probably a black belt in marketing. Do you see weird, different things that we do here in the UK that sometimes you’re like, wow, that’s really unique to say in America or Europe, and is that necessarily maybe an opportunity, or is it just a cultural thing? I’m really curious kind of what you see. You know, my favorite thing that I’ve seen that’s different, a different way of maybe kind of marketing, is every morning I make a green shake for my whole family.

7:52 I make a big blender full of, you know, protein shake, and I have to go get greens. And so when we arrive in a new place, I have to go scope out the stores and, you know, find the organic greens or find the greens. And I walked into a, like, a Tesco’s or a Sainsbury’s, you know, a little corner store, and I go in there and I’m looking at the greens and, you know, inspecting them to try to, you know, find organic if I can, and I noticed them on the package of the spinach, it says the exact, like, the farm, like the location where they grew the spinach, where this one, the source, where that one was from.

8:25 And I thought, well, that’s really interesting. That is not going on in America. We’re not tracking, like, exactly where it came from. And I don’t know, I found that to be, I was like, oh, I trusted it more, you know. I was like, I get this must be good spinach because I can call the farmer if I want, kind of thing.

8:40 And yeah, so, and when you say is that an opportunity, yeah, when I travel around, I look at the way countries and cultures, the way they make products or the, you know, way things appeal in different places. I remember back in the day when text-messaging first came out over here in Europe, everyone was text messaging and in America no one was text messaging, and I remember when I thought, I thought that’s stupid. Why would people, you know, in back then you’d have to take the button on your phone and press it like four times to get a capital number day or something.

9:13 Hey, you know, and I thought that’s ridiculous, but then, you know, now we see what’s happened to text messaging. So yeah, traveling around you can see good opportunities. Does the innovator in you see something that looks ridiculous and then does it come back and say, hmm, maybe there’s something here? Oh yeah, text messaging in particular, you know, I could see why I really missed that one, right? Yeah, I remember I was texting my friends in the States when I was over here as 10-15 years ago, they’re like, what are you doing, this is annoying, send me an email or call me.

9:42 And it was big here. I think it started actually in Finland where Nokia started, where actually people are quite reserved there, and so they would, it’s the kind of place where someone sitting next to you, they would text you. And so I think it started there in this culture of, you know, not that social, more of an introverted thing, and then it kind of spreads. That’s kind of Sheen, you know, if I think about it, Europe, you know, if you go to one extreme, Russia is kind of based on an old socialist communist idea where there’s probably not a lot of marketing, you know, socialist communist structure, whereas, you know, America was always kind of the opposite of cutting-edge capitalism.

10:17 I’m wondering if you visit Europe and see things around here, do you see kind of sometimes a hangover to that where there’s not people out there that are necessarily being as entrepreneurial or not, or on to the marketing as much? I’m I’m more just curious. Yeah, it’s different, you know. For example, I have a friend who was an entrepreneur in France and very successful guy, and he eventually left because he felt that it was just the rules and the laws and the, you know, it was just too constraining for him to be an entrepreneur, so he moved to America.

10:52 But a lot of people moved from America over, I mean, you know, move over to Europe because they like the culture and they, you know, like the sensibilities and the style and the, you know, the values and things. I mean, the idea of taking care of your citizens is, we don’t do that as well in America as some of the countries do over here. That’s really good observation, and I must say that selling over here is definitely feels different, and then kind of a reception to necessarily someone selling something is definitely different here, I would say.

11:22 Yeah, and in America and, you know, Brits, what they said, two great countries separated by a common language, was what I think Churchill said or General Patton said, you know, they’re very different because these are two English-speaking cultures and yet when it comes to sales, marketing kind of has very different reactions initially, even though they’re humans and they want value and they want great products, but that quote unquote sell is definitely nuanced and different here, I’d say. Yeah, well, I mean, you’re dealing with a much more mature culture, you know, much older culture. It’s had a lot of time to develop, and in America we’re more of an adolescent culture, we’re a little more juvenile.

12:00 And I mean, it’s only been the last few years, maybe four or five years, that I’ve started traveling more and appreciating different cultures and different ways of looking at reality and different value systems and seeing that in some cases in America we’re kind of obnoxious, and the marketing that I do sometimes to different types of people, depending on, you know, what their style is, can be a little intense. Yeah, and you know, internet marketing, I always say look to the Yanks, they’re always four or five, three, four or five years ahead. You have anything we’re doing over here, and then you get that kind of a tone.

12:33 So I think the internet marketing typically dominated by American ideas, so maybe it feels that way, or maybe that’s just how you need to market on the internet. It’s interesting to see, but you know, you keep a low profile in general, and it was great just to get a chance to talk to you here. I know you’ve recently spent some time with Larry King, and it’s great to have you here, but you know, you pretty much wrote the book and put a lot of the outlines and structures in for so many more people to come, and so that’s why, you know, we’ve kind of had you on a radar for a long time, and you know, despite the fact that I also happen to buy one of your products back in the day, I know you did so much more after that, and I would love just to get your perspective on everything you’ve done.

13:11 They say if you don’t know your history, you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re honestly probably one of the most unique people when it comes to the space because, you know, through the Double Your Dating thing and everything you did behind the scenes, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you look back on those early days. We were talking earlier and you kind of stumbled into bits of this business, but you must have been an inquisitive guy and kind of knew where you were going, or how did this all start? I know you were born in Eugene, Oregon.

13:37 Yeah, I was actually born in Brooklyn, New York. Now, Elaine and I had hippie parents who had grown up in Brooklyn, kind of on the street almost, and they didn’t want me to grow up there, and they were hippies, so they moved with me to Oregon, to Eugene, Oregon, when I was two or three, and so I grew up in the country with these New York, you know, parents that were almost kind of aliens and so forth, and I didn’t, I mean, I grew up, you know, out in the woods. I didn’t have any role models of success.

14:04 I went to a little school and a little middle school in high school and so forth. So somehow, maybe in my late teens or something, I got a copy of Think and Grow Rich. I don’t even, I don’t even remember how this book wound up in my life, and I remember flipping through it, and like I would look at it once in a while, and it said like, to write your goals and affirm them to yourself, and I remember making a list. I was a long-haired rock and roll guitar player at the time, and I remember making a list of music equipment that I wanted, like a little reco, like a cassette recorder, and, you know, a guitar and amp and some different things that maybe were a few thousand dollars if you added all of them up.

14:47 And I looked at the list and I thought to myself, you know, it’s impossible that I’m ever going to get this stuff because a few thousand dollars, you know, was like all the money we would get in a year or something in my family. And but I wrote down the list and then I just started thinking about it and you know, here and there an opportunity would come up. We would be at a secondhand store and maybe I’d see something that, you know, I could buy, or, you know, a friend would have something, and it was on my list and I’d figure out how to do a trade with them or do some work for something.

15:17 And pretty quickly I got everything on my list, and something happened there, you know, for me, where I realized, no, there is something to this. You’ve set a goal and then you can focus on it. And then, yeah, later in life I got into the real estate industry. I was, I tried being a guitar player for about seven years. I also had a manual labor job.

15:38 I worked in a metal shop, and that didn’t go anywhere. I mean, at my height, I mean $75 a week as a guitar player. Okay, business? Well, it’s tough if you think of it as a business, right? It’s great if you just want to, you know, enjoy yourself and kind of have fun and play.

15:57 In my early 20s I got a real estate license because I reasoned that people that had a lot of money either had made it in real estate or invested it in real estate. It seemed like real estate was this common denominator, so my, you know, my math was, I’ll go learn real estate. And so back then you would go listen to tapes and then you’d go take a test and, you know, you’d get a real estate license, and I was 22 at the time. It was like one of the pre-internet ways to kind of scale, right?

16:26 There was one of the ways that, like, a common person could kind of scale up, right? Well, that was the idea, in a way. I mean, I had a ponytail ’cause I was, you know, a heavy metal guitar player during the day, or during the night, and I was driving around in my old Camaro trying to get people to buy, you know, homes, and it just wasn’t working. I sold one and a third homes my first year and, you know, made like a couple of thousand dollars, and I did the math and I was like, wait, I’m making a lot more money at my manual labor job than I’m making in this real estate thing.

16:54 And I tried, you know, calling, cold calling people, door knocking and all, and just none of it worked. And so I started realizing that I needed to figure out how to get clients, and so I started learning about sales and marketing, and eventually I went to a seminar that was done by Joe Stumpf of By Referral Only, who you and I were just talking about, from San Diego, and I was so astonished by how, you know, charismatic and what a great, like, salesperson he was on stage. I couldn’t afford to buy his tapes at the end of the thing.

17:26 Fortunately, like a few weeks later, I found a set of his tapes at the Goodwill store in my town for a dollar, and I mean, I thought I had won the lottery, and so I just would go to my job and listen to them over and over, and yeah, and that led to, gosh, I went to work for that company. I went to work as his audio-visual guy and just started reading lots of books. I realized that this knowledge, that’s the thing about knowledge, that you can go from not knowing how to do something to learning how to do it, that you can get essentially any skill that you want because so many people have figured it out.

17:58 And then, you know, back then it was, create, books, that was a big piece for me. But I, you know, I did okay for a few years. I kind of did the audio-visual thing and tried to sell some real estate. Then I lost that job. I moved to San Diego, I lost that job within a few months after moving there, unfortunately, and I had to start over.

18:15 I started doing consulting for real estate and local real estate mortgage companies, like helping them write ads and, you know, doing some coaching with their agents and so forth. I did that for a few years. And why San Diego, was it a hotbed for real estate? Well, that’s where his company was. Okay.

18:30 I was in Oregon, I moved down to San Diego, that’s where his company was, and then within a few months I lost my job. So I’m in a new town, with, don’t know anybody, right? You know, not a horrible place to live. No, it was awesome. I lived in La Jolla, but I had gotten this nice apartment and I got a BMW and they, you know, and now I’ve got, you know, thousands of dollars worth of expenses and I had never had a, you know, be any, anything like that before.

18:51 Okay, so I had to just figure out how to make it. But it can be motivating, those things. It was, yeah, it was really motivating. And so I started a little business and, you know, it was able to pay my bills for a few years, which was great, but then the next challenge was, is this, am I going to know, he’s a good, I guess this is good. And so, right, so I guess around a little bit further you finally stumbled on this concept of the book, right, and was the internet still young then?

19:15 Well, there’s one more step, which is, so here I am in La Jolla, you know, living in this great place, and I’ve got a BMW and a nice apartment, but I couldn’t get a date. I mean, I had always been, you know, socially kind of awkward, and, you know, a little bit horrified of women and, you know, didn’t know what to say and so forth. And so at this point I’m 26, 27, and I just said, okay, I got the apartment and I got the car and still no girls are talking to me, man, what’s, you know, what happened?

19:42 The promise, right? The commercials say that once you get the sonically hit the girls, right, and that wasn’t happening. And so I said, okay, I’ve got to learn this. It’s though, I started, you knew you could learn things, that’s the thing, right? Yeah, and isn’t it weird how a piece of information, a book that I’m sure as hell your parents didn’t give you, Napoleon Hill, change your life, and then another piece of information about, you know, about taking it to the next level, change your life, and now you are almost like a metal learner, like, you know how to learn, right?

20:10 Well, that’s the key. I mean, I’ve in life, give up at that, that’s a multiple problem, they won’t think, oh, this is like another problem in my life, I can learn. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is the key, is assuming that whatever you want to learn you can, and that there’s a way to kind of self educate yourself to learn all the things that you want to learn and get all the results you want to have in your life, if you just have that fundamental belief, it’ll take you a long way.

20:36 Especially now, you know, the quality of education that’s available right now online, I estimate that we’ve had a 10x, like literally a thousand percent improvement in the last 10 or 20 years in terms of education because of what’s available online. Wow. And that is gonna keep going and going and going, it’s gonna just keep going. Okay, good, I wanna talk about that later. All right, can’t get a date, 26, in San Diego, yeah, got the flashy car and the great place in La Jolla.

21:02 I know the area, I grew up around. Yeah, it’s all good, it’s a mini paradise. And so what, who do you turn to, what do you do, what year is this, is the internet up and running, kind of ’97, ’98? Not much out there, no information sites? Yeah, not much, not much.

21:19 So I start reading books about relationships and love and going to seminars and getting everything and everything I can, and I’m trying, like, pickup lines that are, you know, whatever, I’m just trying it all, and basically nothing really worked that well. But I started making friends with guys who were really diverse, guys like, what, my next door neighbor was this young guy, was a stockbroker in La Jolla, and another friend of mine was like a biker, another friend of mine was this kind of international playboy guy. So I just start making these friends and watching what they do and listening and just talking to them, and I realize that they’re on a whole different page when it comes to getting a date than I am.

21:54 They’ve got a whole different paradigm, and I start learning from them, and I pretty quickly realize they just have a different way of looking at reality. I learned what that is, I learned some new mindsets, and all of a sudden now I can get dates, and I realize, oh, it doesn’t matter that I have the car, the apartment, because that isn’t what it’s about. It’s, you know, it’s about being an interesting person. And in over a couple of years then I finally get this amazing girlfriend, and I kind of, at this point I’d moved to LA, and I kind of realized, okay, I’ve solved a problem here.

22:21 I mean, I was trying, I think in a lot of ways I was trying to make money and be successful so that I could get a girl, like, and I was trying the circuitous route, and then I learned you can just go direct, you can actually just learn how to do this thing. And, you know, everything came together. A good friend of mine, Dean Jackson, he was publishing books online and doing ebooks, and he showed me what he was up to, and, like, the marketing, and then learning about the dating, and then the online thing, they all came together in my mind, and I wrote a book of dating advice of all things.

22:51 I was just, I would never, could never see myself doing that. I wrote it in three weeks, it’s less than a hundred pages. I just locked myself in my bedroom and just wrote out everything that I had kind of learned about this. Have you written anything before? No, really.

23:04 Have you been taking notes in San Diego with, yeah, okay, so this guy does this, why this guy does this way, and again, paradigm shift, that was kind of the big realization you had, think about things too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don’t know if you want to talk dating, but we can, a little bit, glad to go into that if you want. Yeah, I’m ’cause, you know, like I said, I bought your book, and that would, there, the space was really young back then. I mean, people now know of all sorts of things.

23:27 You know, there’s lots of, you know, pickup artists and a lot of that, it’s been massively developed, that industry grew really fast, but back then there really wasn’t an industry. The book The Game hadn’t come out yet, I believe, I don’t know, and so there wasn’t much there. And yeah, I’m curious, what are the kind of things that you put into that first book, or, you know, what were some of the things that you realized right away that you thought would be game changers?

23:49 Well, the big insight that I had when I started spending time, I mean, I would take my journal and, like, go out with my guy friends to the bar and watch them interacting with women, like with my pen, and interrupt them, like, he’d, you know, make a joke and the girl would laugh and then she’d give him, you know, her phone number or something. I go, hey, wait a minute, now why did you just give him, you, you know, I mean, I was, I was, yeah, I was crazy. Market research, yeah, totally.

24:12 And you would ask the woman the questions as well? Like, oh, I’d ask him, her, everybody, I, I wanted, that’s a wig, great wingman, I’d want to know, I want to know what’s going on here, this does not make any sense to me. I mean, the thing that was, that stands out most, of us stood out most, was that I always thought that you had to be nice, that that was the, and if that wasn’t working, you have to be more nice. And these guys, and can very different, you know, one friend of mine was really good at meeting girls online, and one of them was, you know, good at going to bars, and one of them was a stage hypnotist, and, like, these were totally different, you know, stockbroker, but they all, they were completely uninterested in trying to, like, impress a woman or, like, get her approval or, like, be overly nice.

24:55 They would tease a woman or, like, make a joke, you know, they’d meet a beautiful woman and make fun of her purse being big or something right off the bat, and then she’d laugh and be in this flirting dynamic. And they were kind of like the Jedi or something, they were doing these mind things that seemed impossible. It was like, if you would have given me my own universe in a million years, I never would have tried those things, never would have occurred to me.

25:20 And so yeah, it has to do with, fascinated you? Yeah, yeah, it has to do with how you see reality, with what you think reality is and how you think that things work. You know, it’s like when Isaac Newton came along and he said, all right, you know, a body in motion stays in motion unless another body kind of interrupts that, like, he changed, like, if there’s gravity and, you know, he’s got these different forces and things, it changed our view of how reality worked, and it made the planets going around, you know, make sense, it made all these different things make sense.

25:54 When you learn a new way of seeing reality, when you learn a new way, a new set of rules, and it has more explanatory power, I mean, it’s kind of a scientific, it’s like a philosophical, scientific point of making here, which is when you see it, when you get a new way of looking at reality that makes reality make more sense and makes it work better, everything changes. You know, I’ve been reading James Burke, who’s from here, and he wrote a bunch of great books. He wrote Connections, and he’s got a great book called The Day the Universe Changed, and he writes about these changes through history when a new paradigm showed up and it just, everything changed, everyone saw things differently.

26:34 That’s what I think we’re looking for in life, is when we can get one of those. Yeah, and you can get one of those maybe three, four or five times in your life or life, right, where it’s just every, you go, oh my god, I’ve been looking at it this way, it that, that was just wrong, and maybe it was because of my wiring or my personality or my culture or my family or my religion or something got in there and it told me that reality worked this way, but it actually turns out with this little tweak everything kind of inverts or turns inside out. It’s like that scene in the movies where they, like, zoom in but widen the thing and you’re, like, in vertigo, and you’re always, oh my god, it doesn’t work that way.

27:10 It’s like The Matrix or something, you know, you wake up. And anyway, that happened for me with the dating stuff, and that’s what I tried to teach, you know, right, become the teacher frame. Well, you write this book, lock yourself in the room for three weeks, and then what happens then? I write a sales letter and put it on the internet and start buying pay-per-click advertising from these, you know, search engines. What, yours is all new stuff, 2001.

27:35 Okay, and start selling a book here and there, one or two books a day, and I mean, when this happens, so a few months later is, so I put my book online, I’m selling it for 29.95, for the 30 bucks. So I know if you name the book in your name at this point? Yes, so the name of the book is Double Your Dating. I was actually, when I launched it, it was called something like How to Be More Successful with Women and Dating, and the domain was like how to be more successful with women dating dot com with dashes in between all the words, and I had some other pen name that I had made up because, you know, whatever, I’ve just got a weird name, you know.

28:10 And anyway, then, but so a few months later, by then I had figured out to call it Double Your Dating, and I had this pen name, David DeAngelo, that I used, so I wanted to sound like a more of a normal person, you know. I have this name, Evan Bailey, is that name Evan? What is, what my name is Ebenezer. Okay. My father, his favorite story was A Christmas Carol.

28:27 All right, okay. And with Scrooge, because Ebenezer Scrooge, he starts out, you know, this curmudgeonly guy, but he turns into a good guy at the end. And so he, he and my mom had a thing where if I was a girl, you know, that my mom could name me, and if I was a boy, my dad could name, and so I came out, I was a boy, and my dad picked the name Ebenezer. Okay, so I’ve got this strange name, Ebenezer Pagan, and I did it just, you know, I needed, I felt like I needed to, it kind of better name.

28:56 In fact, you know, true story, after teaching as David DeAngelo for several years, when I went and started teaching business and entrepreneurship, now so many people knew me as David D that I was about to legally change my name, uh, because I, that, I mean, that’s kind of who I was, and it was a little more marketing friendly kind of name. But when I would teach, I did a couple of seminars, like starter kind of things, my friends, they would always call me Eben, in our, when we would talk on stage and our interviews, and I was like, this is never gonna work, you know. And so I had to make the decision, that’s why I said, all right, I’m gonna just keep my name and I’m gonna deal with it.

29:32 And so that’s what, no, I’m a person with two names. Okay, all right, gotcha. So I, and by the way, Double Your Dating is, it’s great, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s great, it just sounds great. Thank you. Getting the point, and David DeAngelo is a cool name too, so those were great choices.

29:46 So now you put it online and you’re playing with pricing and just playing with the, IndieGoGo sales, what’s that? So I started, I put this book online, it’s an e-book as a PDF, literally, and, um, many of those around back then? Yeah, it was just PDF, you know, never, it wasn’t, it never been in print, it’s just interesting, even till now, you know, 15, 16 years later. So I put it online, it was 30 bucks, 29.95, and I would sell one or two here and there, you know, maybe a few a day.

30:09 And then one day my friend, actually Dean Jackson, who showed me how to do this, I went to visit him and my other best friend Richard down in San Diego, I was living in LA. I started the day off, I said, I need to price test this, this is one of the things you do in marketing, right? So that morning I raised the price from 29.95 to 39.95. Now this is an e-book at this point, okay, so it’s 40 bucks for an e-book, and it was just a book that was about 100,100 pages, and then three little bonuses that were like ten pages each.

30:38 I put it online and I leave, and I drive from LA down to San Diego to see my two friends, and I hang out with them all day. In the afternoon we go back to one of their places and I said to one of them, hey, can I borrow your computer, I want to check my sales stats online. And I look and I had sold 10 copies of the book. It was my record day, was the most I’d ever sold, and I had raised the price. And so my brain just went, you know, ding ding ding ding ding.

31:04 Okay, 10 copies at 40 bucks, that’s $400 in sales. If I could do that every day, that’s 12 grand in a month. And I remember, I’m free. You know, like, finally I’m free, because I’ve been hanging out with my friends all day while people in different parts of the world have been buying this book. And you can do things like raise the price sometimes and people will buy more of the thing, which we repeated several times in my business, where we’ve raised the price of things, tested it, and people buy more, or we just make more because they buy the same amount.

31:34 So you learn a lot of these kinds of things in marketing as well, and that was another paradigm shift. I’m free. I mean, can you just talk a little bit about that statement, because that’s an interesting, now ’cause you’ve probably been fairly free since then, you know? Yeah, I mean, it’s been interesting, you know. I loved this idea of working from home, doing something that added a lot of value to people’s lives.

31:59 I mean, we talked about this, it’s a, you know, it’s a little dating book and, you know, I wrote it in a few weeks, but I really put a lot of heart into it. It’s changed, I mean, I, you know, we’ve sold hundreds of thousands of copies of it, so many, you know, men have come up to me and show me, like, this is my family and here’s my wife that I, you know, I met, and because it would, yeah, and it helped change a lot of people’s lives. And so it’s not just the working from home, it’s the doing something that contributes to other people that makes a big difference.

32:28 But I loved working from home, okay, that was great, being able to walk out the door anytime if I wanted to go, you know, lunch, or I was just bored or I want it, you know, I wanted something different. And around that same time, several months in, I hired my first virtual assistant, and back before Upwork was called Elance, okay, and I went on there and made a project and hired a woman named Sheila, and hey Sheila, if you’re watching, um, and she came to work with me for six dollars an hour, bless her, and she worked 20 hours a week for me, and she would handle, like, customer service, refunds, and people had trouble with downloads and answer questions and whatever. I wish a located, do you remember, she was back in the Midwest somewhere, okay, um, I can’t remember.

33:13 This is a big movie, this is a big mistake a lot of people, solopreneurs, don’t ever make, is they never hire the first person, right? They try to do it all themselves. Yeah, so you, again, you were ahead of the curve there, and you know, like, okay, I’m gonna do this. Yeah, so I hired her and she, I mean, 20 hours a week of my life just instantly freed up, and for a hundred and twenty dollars a week, you know, for six dollars an hour, and that was a huge aha for me, you know.

33:38 And then a little bit while later I heard another virtual assistant, you know, the same thing, Denise, who still works with me now, you know, to this day. And I liked the freedom of being able to do what I wanted and work when it made sense for me, and so when I built my business I hired other people, friends, whatever, and I just said we don’t have an office, you work when makes sense for you. And I wanted other people to kind of have that same thing, and it was, you know, it’s kind of my thesis that if people could choose when they worked and they could work when they were most creative, some people like to work late at night, some like to work during the day.

34:17 I mean, and there were some constraints, you know, if you were doing customer service you had to kind of be on during certain time, but there was just a lot of flexibility to the whole thing. And we grew my original company to 70, 80 people, 100% virtual, no office. And we’ve, you know, still, about five years ago I broke my company into a few different parts and took on partners, and I have a kind of different paradigm now, but still to this day no office for any of them.

34:41 Wow. And Double Your Dating soon you’re making six figures, seven figures, maybe eight figures? Yeah, we, digs in years coming, right? I mean, yeah, yeah, in, you know, in the beginning, like I said, few books at a time, toward the end of that year I did a seminar and I released an audio course and that doubled the business. We did about, I think I did a hundred and thirty three thousand in sales my first year, with most of that kind of toward the end.

35:06 So, you know, not bad, but the second year just took off, we did about a half a million in sales, and then the third year we did a million and a half, and then five million, and we just kept growing, you know, twelve million, 20 million. I just kept hiring people and creating more programs, and then got other teachers to come in and teach relationship and dating advice to women. And then I started realizing that what I had learned about building a business might even be more valuable than what I had learned about dating, because all my friends were asking me, what are you doing, you know, how are you doing this?

35:41 And I started showing them and a few of them started creating ebooks and programs and making their own businesses, and one young guy sold, you know, built a business, you know, teaching poker online of all things, sold that company and became a millionaire, and another friend of mine started one doing wedding, how to plan your own wedding, and he built that and was making good money, and then somebody came about that business and I realized, oh wait a minute, I’m, again, you know, I’m, this is unique, people are asking me, how are you doing this business? And so started teaching entrepreneurship and productivity and marketing and some of those topics, and I’ve been really doing that for about the last 10 years. Okay, and so you started doing them more actively and kind of like ’05, ’06 or ’07 or, yeah, later, 2007-2008, remember seeing some old video of you in, like, a high-rise in Manhattan with, like, some screen setup or some cameras?

36:28 Oh yeah, no, is that around that time or maybe later? Yeah, a few years later, that was probably about five years ago or so. Okay, I, seven years. And so, I mean, just talk a little, I want to finish up with the David D stuff, like, that must have changed your life a lot, and I know you changed a lot of people’s lives, like I said, I bought your books, I watched some of your DVD series where you were teaching, yeah, really high spec on that audio-visual.

36:50 I remember one time you told the audience, he told the guys to do something crazy and unexpected, and one of them ran on stage and gave you a hug and then you said, don’t anybody else do that. You remember that? No. Okay, you were producing more of these audio-visual pieces and building your brand and really doing that, but there weren’t a lot of people doing that back then. Well, you’re just going by kind of gut feel and what seemed like an obvious move to you?

37:15 Yeah, so I was interacting with my customers a lot. I mean, when it started, a lot of the way that I built that business was doing newsletters. I would write two to three long email newsletters a week and they were long, there would be 10, 15 pages long, and I would answer questions from guys and I would read all of the, you know, messages that guys were sending in, the question and the problems they were having, and I was really in touch with, like, where they were at.

37:40 And when I would see guys having a particular type of problem that was specific, I would say, oh, that’s an opportunity to create a whole course about just that one thing, and to kind of niche out these different things, and I just kind of followed the market and followed what people needed. Guys wanted to learn how to do online dating, and so I did a whole course on online dating, and guys want to learn how to go talk to a girl and, you know, start a conversation, so I did a whole course on that, and guys want to learn about body language, and so I, you know, did a course on body language. I did 10 or 12 different courses on different aspects of kind of dating and, you know, inner game, confidence and so forth, all by listening to your customers.

38:22 Yeah, which is the essence of marketing. I mean, that’s the big question I got to ask you, and everyone wants to know, like, what is marketing and why is, I mean, you did an interview with someone where they were like, okay, now, yeah, you’re the CEO, and said, okay, now, now you have to do a sales, get a sales department, and they’re like, oh man, let’s just get someone else to do that, which is the craziest thing because every CEO should be, has to be a salesperson. What is this weird disc with humans between, like, business, sales and marketing, and what is the truth from what you know?

38:55 Well, most people are what we might call good human beings. Most people are good people, and goodness in this sense is they like to put other people first and consider the needs and the feelings of other people, and what follows from this is they don’t want to make other people feel bad. Most people are good people and they don’t like to make other people feel bad. They’d rather do almost anything than make another person feel pain or feel emotional or emotional pain or feel like confused intellectually or upset or bad about themselves.

39:29 And so when you first learn about sales and marketing, you, you know, in a lot of cases you learn about it, you know, what the used-car lot, or because you’re watching infomercials, or, you know, you’re seeing people do sales and marketing and you’re like, that person is doing things to make people feel bad because they’re trying to coerce or talk the person, you know, manipulate someone into doing things. And so you kind of identify sales and marketing with manipulating and coercing people and making them feel bad, and you just say, I don’t want to do that, I’m not gonna make it, you know, as a, to be in integrity with myself, it doesn’t feel good to make another person feel bad so that I can make a sale and I can get some money. And so they just kind of get turned off to sales and marketing in general, which I think, I mean, that’s kind of right, you know, in a way that’s morally right.

40:18 And I didn’t like it. I mean, when I got into real estate and I, I mean, I remember the first time I sat down to try to do cold calls, you know, at my desk, and you know what I’m talking about, where you take a list of people and you just pick up the phone and you call them and you say, hi, you want to sell your house, you know, like that kind of thing. And I sat there in my little real estate office in Eugene, Oregon, and I looked at the list of numbers and I look at my phone and I looked at the list, I looked at my phone, I just got more and more sick and upset, and I finally just went outside, got in my car and went home and laid down and went to sleep, like, I just couldn’t do it, you know.

40:53 I couldn’t interrupt people and, you know, mess with their lives and in this way, and some people seemed cold and kind of callous and whatever. So as I started learning about say some marketing in annex that, okay, I’ve got to do this, I have to figure it out, I discovered a couple of things. Um, one was what you might call consultative selling, professional selling, where you’re, in particularly when you’re selling things that are a higher ticket, where you sit down with someone and instead of just trying to talk them into something, you first start by spending an hour to just learning everything you can about them.

41:29 Who are you, what’s your life like, what are your values, what are your challenges, what are your frustrations, specifically what’s, you know, the need that you have right here? And then once you understand them, you really get them and they get that you understand them, then you’ve earned the right to then say, kind of, do I understand you, do I get where you’re coming from, do you know, do we, are we on the same page here? And then, yes, okay, let me show you a few things that I think could help solve your problem, can help get you to the result you want.

41:57 If you come from that place, people are so happy to meet you, they’re so happy to interact with you as a salesperson because you’re professional, you’re actually doing something to help them, and you’re putting their needs before your needs, and you have to make a lot of mistakes and you have to go through ups and downs to learn this lesson, you know, but that was a game changer for me when I learned that you can sell in that way. And then in marketing also, you know, marketing, everybody thinks that it market is just promoting yourself, just talking about yourself, but I learned that in direct response marketing, when you understand your customer and when you’re offering lots and lots of value, that that can be, you know, really beneficial to other people.

42:37 And I do all kinds of marketing, I do very, very persuasive marketing, I do, you know, more subtle marketing, I do all kinds of marketing now, but I’ve found that place in myself where I feel good about what I’m doing. You know, these days there’s a lot of noise on the internet, you have to sometimes be, you know, right in someone’s face, sometimes you have to be extra persuasive, but I think that I create the best courses and the best products and services in the world. I really put everything that I can into learning all the best techniques and methods and approaches, and so I feel good about doing more kind of persuasive selling and doing some of the tricks.

43:12 But you know, when you learn about professional sales marketing, it changes how you think and how you do things. You said a great product sells itself before. Can you talk about the nuances of that, because it’s not as simple as it sounds? Yeah, well, if you’re really listening to your customers, you’re really tuned in to where they’re at and what it is that they’re trying to do. I mean, most people when they create products or services, and I’ve, you know, taught a lot of people about products and services, and most people when they start out with, okay, I’m going to create my product, they just create what they want to create, right, and they create what they think other people will want to buy, and they don’t have entrepreneurial experience in a lot of cases, they don’t know what it’s gonna take to get people to buy the thing.

43:53 If you instead start out and you get really deep into your customers’ needs and what their fears and frustrations are and what they’re trying to do, and see, like, what solutions are already available to them, what are the things that they perceive are already available, where do they think that there are gaps, and you make something that uniquely solves their problem, but does it in a way where they, when they kind of stumble upon your product, they go, yeah, this is what I, you know, if I would have known what to look for, this would have been it, then it sells itself. All you have to do is tell them what it is, just tell them about it. And so I try to design my products and services and my courses so that the marketing becomes easy.

44:36 The marketing is just telling someone what’s in it rather than trying to convince them to buy it, because if it’s designed well, then it will be exactly what they want. Yeah, and that’s because you’ve gone out and listened to all of these people and not projected your ego or your own past experiences on them, you’ve really listened to them and then solve that unique problem. Yeah, I think you had a conversation with Tony Robbins and I think you were talking about kind of great businesses being kind of innovation and kind of marketing, or innovation and delivery of that, yeah, you know, to people, I guess that’s what people need to think about.

45:11 Yeah, Peter Drucker, right, he said that it’s all marketing, innovation, and everything else is an expense. And so if you want to, if you want to succeed in business, it’s important to study marketing and innovation. Innovation is making new, better, different products that help people get the results that they’re after, and marketing, I define marketing as communication that gets customers. That’s my simplest definition of marketing. It’s because the product, you know, it, the product or service, it is what it is, the marketing is how you communicate about it.

45:44 And you know, marketing is a deep topic, you know, I’ve been a student of marketing for 20 years. Yeah, the David D years, upsides and downsides of being that guy for five or six years, like, you know, I, you seem actually like more of an introverted guy and not an extroverted guy, but David D is almost by definition kind of extroverted. There you were willing to be him to build your business and to change people’s lives, and you did, and this was the early days of this even, this space.

46:14 Yeah, you know, what were the ups and downs of that? It was kind of all good. I mean, it was pretty, it was pretty good. I mean, good things, you remember, pretty good. Well, so yeah, I am, I’m very introverted.

46:31 I had spend most of my time alone, well, until I had a wife and a daughter, that’s changed things a little bit, but, um, yeah, it’s because I was working from home, you know, I could write my newsletters or do my marketing alone, and then if I needed to teach, I could go out and, you know, teach a seminar, that kind of thing. It was also great, I mean, I mentioned I had this wonderful girlfriend for a couple of years that when I had first wrote my book and I, for the first, I don’t know, probably you’re on a year-and-a-half of teaching, then when she broke up, I had been teaching dating to men for, you know, now a year and a half or something, and so it just made me better at getting dates and, you know, I had this business that was successful, it was a good time.

47:14 I mean, it was a lot of hard work, I worked all the time, it was fun, it was very interesting as I was learning all of these new, got to learn new things. I have a short attention span, I can only really be in, pay attention to learning about one topic for a certain amount of time, even in, you know, if you look at, you know, what kind of my history there, you know, I did dating and then some of the courses I did later on, a lot of them more about more deeper inner game stuff and, like, personal development, then when I started teaching nor ship, I taught, I gotta grow a business, and then I did a productivity course, and then I taught people how to produce information products, and I did a course on money and wealth. And so I’m always kind of transitioning in what I’m learning and what I’m teaching, and I found that this format works really well because I can go learn something for myself to kind of make myself more successful and then I can go teach it.

48:08 The challenge with it though, the downside, is that I’m always moving from one thing to another. If I would have just committed the long term to dating and just teaching that and just being that guy forever, I would have been a lot more successful financially, and you know, and financially like the in layout and the business side, right? And that goes for several other things as well, but I, I don’t know, I can’t just keep doing one thing forever. That changes, which is the next question, like, what is success?

48:38 You know, because like you and the bottom line number wise you could have probably made more money there, but you would have been bored out of your mind. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I was already bored for the last probably a couple, few years of it. Right, so you’re always looking to climb your own learning curve. Speak about the, the, the pickup space, the online dating, what, how did you see it transform and then other players came in, the book The Game came out, Real Social Dynamics kind of emerged, and then they went on their own piece and they saw this whole world really kind of, you know, really fractionate and go in these really weird ways, you know.

49:12 Oh yeah, and I was there for, you know, a lot of it. Yeah, you know, Neil Strauss was at my very first little program that I did with, like, 23 attendees. You know, I met all these guys, were, I interviewed them all early on, I had them come and speak at nine different programs. This was before pickup artist was even a thing. It was like my seminars and my interviews and things was kind of like the place where all of the, you know, when one of them would show up, I’d say, oh hey, you know, come teach it, you know, it my thing, and then it turned into pickup artists and, you know, Neil wrote The Game and yeah, I turned, it did, it became, it’s like one of those movies that you go watch and, like, it all, that, like, seems happy and then the music starts turning weird and you’re like, what, what’s going on in here?

49:59 Exactly. And but I mean, by that time I think I had kind of moved on and was teaching other things and, you know, because it got weird with all of that money and attention coming in, it started getting competitive and everyone started developing their own pieces, and yeah, but I, I don’t really, I don’t, I don’t really think about competition very much. I know that isn’t really, that doesn’t concern me too much. It’s more like when you’ve got, when you’ve got guys teaching other guys how to walk up to a woman and say something that’s completely fabricated, that’s just not true, and that’s like a performance art piece that you’ve practiced over and over with, like, a logic tree, if she does this you do this and, but it’s all scripted and it’s completely, I don’t know what the, it’s not real, there’s no actual, just the woman thinks that she’s having a real conversation but the man is just, you know, doing this thing that’s just a little weird, that’s a little spooky, and yeah, by then I had kind of moved on.

51:03 And right, because you were more about mindset, cocky funny, this whole kind of become a different you and look at the paradigm different. Yeah, and then these other nuances started happening of decision trees and other stuff, and yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I guess at one point it was kind of a weird soul subculture, a bunch of guys hanging out doing it because they loved it, they found it fascinating, then I guess when it starts becoming a business, weird things happen, I guess.

51:26 Oh yeah. Do you, though, do you keep your eye on it now and just look at kind of what’s happening? No, no, I mean, it’s been ten years since I’ve, more than ten years since I’ve even really looked at what’s up, you know, in that world. Right, yeah, that’s a crazy time. All right, so you went on, you went on to teach businesses and show them how to do what they’re doing, you know, again, I said earlier we must know our history to kind of know where it’s going forward.

51:50 I mean, if you had to bump into someone, maybe some Papua New Guinea, who doesn’t know the internet exists, right, and I have to explain, well, this was marketing before 1999 and then this is what happened when this thing came into play, like, again, you saw it all happen first, thing like, what, what did you learn from 2001 to 2011 that affects us today, that’s maybe still a hangover that you see in certain things, and I don’t know, what are your takeaways from all of those years? Yeah, well, it’s very significant what technology and what the internet has done. I mean, it really has changed everything a lot more than most people even now know and think, the capabilities that it’s given us.

52:33 When I, so for example, when I first started, when I created my first audio course, right, so I had a book, I did a seminar, I recorded it, I created an audio course, that was my first thing, okay, and my book was 40 bucks, I was selling my other course for like $200. I found that when someone would buy my ebook, if I sent them an email, you know, a week later that said, hey, I hope you’re enjoying the e-book, would you like my audio course? I’ll send it to you and I’ll make you, you know, give you payments or, you know, make a good deal, I found that something like, I don’t know, one in ten or one in 20 people that I would send that email to would say, yeah, send me the audio course.

53:11 And so at that time I had my assistant, just everyone that bought the book, you know, a week later, to go back and send all of them an email, right from my email address, that said that’s just, you know, written by me from my email address, that offered them this book, and, you know, every time we’d send one of those emails we’d make ten or twenty dollars in sales. Back then there wasn’t a system that you could buy that would do that automatically, and so I found a guy that had built his own shopping cart, and, you know, I called it my shopping cart company and say, could we make something, and they were just like, you know, you’re crazy, and, you know, or one company I was using, one of them, and they said, you know, we can, we can give you the source code for, I don’t know, who knows, like a hundred thousand dollars, and then you can take it to a developer, in that, what are you talking about, I’m just trying to get some Pinos.

53:56 And so I found some guy that had built his own shopping cart, we moved over to his shopping cart, he said, yeah, I can build this thing, and so we started making stuff, and then I hired a developer myself and we started building our own technology. Our developer, for example, made a machine that, you know, a piece of software that would automatically follow up with anyone that bought the book, and it would put their name in there and, like, the city they lived in and their whatever, and it would offer them this, you know, book to buy the audio course, and now instead of having a person do it, I’ve got the computer doing it, and I mean, this thing just printed money, you know. Every time somebody bought the book, this thing a week later would send him an email, and then a week later it would send them another email, and a week later would send them another email, we, that had different messages and offer them to send this, you know, this thing at no risk.

54:44 And that stuff now is all automated. Anyone can now go and get a Ontraport or Infusionsoft, wherever you can get one of these systems for $100 a month or something that does automatic upsells and follow-up emails, and someone can get on your list and you can program, you know, 100 messages that you can have sent out to them, every person can get a sequence or a one-on-one type of an experience. This is changing everything, it’s just changing business at so many levels, and I feel like if you’re not learning how to do this, if you’re not at least learning how digital products work and how online marketing works and to communicate with customers and to sequence communications, you’re kind of falling further and further behind.

55:31 It’s a kind of literacy that we all need to have. I think it’s 2018, do you still have a hard time when you speak to a business owner convincing them that they need some type of digital product, that they need some type of customized email sequence, or do you still come up with people that look at you like, what are you talking about? Well now, coffee, I sell this, I sell shoes, it’s, we’re starting to get to the point now where everyone’s saying, yeah, I need to get a funnel, you know, or I need a funnel for off my online thing, and that you were starting to get a little bit of the, the words, but still most people don’t, don’t know what’s happening.

56:03 Okay, is email dying or dead, and will it be replaced by instant messaging and all of that, or does email still something, because back in your day you probably had 80% open rates at one point? Yeah, and it’s changed, but in your opinion is email here for a while, and is it still like the most crucial piece of information you can have when it comes to digital marketing? Basically yes, and just for the simple reason that email is considered business communication.

56:34 That’s how, that’s what it is, that’s what as it is in the mind of culture, it’s business communication, and so people read it for business communication, and if you’re communicating about business or even about personal things that are like personal business things that are important, yeah, I mean, most of our sales, I’m just think about this, yeah, most of our sales are still made by email in one way or another. email is a key piece of it. Okay, I’ve heard people say you retire on your email list, and I was wondering how important is that list?

57:07 I’m sure you’ve been building different kinds of lists for 5, 10, 15 years, and I was just wondering, is that a crucial part of the business, is it your most valuable digital asset, that list of people? Well, your prospect list and your customer list or your, I mean, these are your assets in a lot of ways in business, because those are the people that you go to to build relationship, to give them information, education, offers, to get them to buy, you know, offer the more things so they buy more things, make more investments with you, of course. And email happens to be the way that is the best way to follow up and communicate with these folks in order to make sales today.

57:49 Now of course, more and more of that is moving to social and, you know, text messages and other ways of communicating, they’re going to be more and more ways that are gonna happen into the future. So it’s not your email list, it’s your prospect and your customer list, and then knowing whatever the most appropriate way to communicate with them. I mean, some people still do live seminars and do very well with those kinds of things, some people are almost all social, or some people it’s almost all on YouTube, you know, for example, and they don’t really use email so much.

58:22 So it’s, you just want your list of prospects and your list of customers and then to have a channel to communicate with those folks on. Okay, you’re a guy who’s made some money and taught other people how to make money, but there’s a difference between money and wealth. I was wondering if you could speak on that, because I’m sure with your techniques you showed guys and women as well how they could literally reap millions of dollars in the sort of course of, you know, 12, 18 months, and yet you probably also saw people that could never keep it or didn’t know how to deal with it.

58:54 You know, can you talk about that mindset shift, and is that something you always had or did you have to retrain or get different ideas in your head when you started making that kind of money? Oh yeah, I mean, in my book there I talked about, like, money burns a hole in my pocket. I still am, you know, and I’ve worked on this for a long time in my life. I have to really focus and, you know, get myself in the zone, if money shows up in my life, to do the right thing with it.

59:20 It’s so easy to blow money on short-term things that aren’t going anywhere. My equation for wealth is first you have to learn about value, and to learn about value and values you have to learn about how people value things, what the process is that people go through physically, emotionally, conceptually to get value from something or to find value. And so you create value in some way, you produce value in the form of your product or service and your marketing, you help people get the thing that they want, and in exchange they give you money for that.

59:52 In business this is the basic business equation, right? And if you do a good job at that and you do that enough, you produce value for them, you get money in return, you get enough of it that you can then take it and go and invest it in something. All right, so first step is value, the next step is money that you get, and then if you get some of that money you need to go invest it in something for the long run. And Robert Kiyosaki has got some of the best stuff on this, right, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Cash Flow Quadrant, you know, rich people buy assets, or wealthy people buy assets, and poor people buy liabilities, and the middle class buy liabilities that they think are assets.

1:00:34 It’s such a interesting and subtle little point here, right, so you know, and I’m trying not to be critical here, this is a generalization, you know, we all make these mistakes, but you know, a, unfortunately, a typical middle-class person will go and buy something like a new car or, you know, God forbid, a new boat, and think, I’ve bought an asset. Now I just spent $50,000 on this boat, but they’re not calculating that, you know, it’s worth thirty thousand as soon as they, you know, put it in the water for the first time, and then all this upkeep and whatever. And so the type of assets that you’re after, and I’m sure you, you know, you’re very familiar with this, is the type of assets that appreciate and the type that throw off money, all right, or throw off some other type of value in some way.

1:01:18 So, and you know, at the very least you have to learn about buying things that become more valuable over time, and that is a very small subset of all of the things that are being sold out there or that are available on, you know, planet Earth. And so to understand wealth, understand money and wealth, you got to study, you’ve got to go learn about it. And yeah, there are a lot of people in the world who are brilliant, motivated, ingenious, well practiced, who their specialty is taking money from people that have it, you know, defrauding people in one way or another, and there are a lot of them, and it’s easy to fall for something if you are not educated.

1:02:07 And so, you know, like any other area, you’ve got to go learn about it. And so whether that be picking up real estate and saying, I’m going to go learn about investing in real estate, and I’m going to learn the difference between, you know, a piece of real estate that’s more valuable than, you know, I can pay for it or less valuable, one that appreciates over time, one that, got to be able to do the math and say, I’m gonna buy a piece of real estate that, you know, throws off cash flow. If you’re gonna be a real estate investor, for example, I mean, we live in a great apartment in Miami, my wife and I have lived at an apartment in Miami for several years, and they had a crash, no, huge crash in the, in the downturn, and we rent an amazing apartment in this building, and I don’t know how the owners of these apartments, we’ve lived in a few of them, and I don’t know how they buy these things and then rent them out, because they have to be losing money in a lot of ways, whereas you could go and invest in an apartment building or you could buy some single-family homes in, like, a normal city and they could cashflow, they could appreciate over time.

1:03:06 My partner James, for example, is a great real estate investor, he invests in real estate in Halifax and Nova Scotia, you know, see, the most people have never, maybe you’ve heard of it or something, but, you know, he does very well. So you have to learn, you have to learn the difference between something that’s valuable and something that’s not, and you could invest in real estate, you can invest in stocks or bonds or cryptocurrency or art or lots of things you can invest in, invest in, but you’ve got to go learn about it. And then if you accumulate enough assets, diverse assets that appreciate over time, you achieve what I would call wealth, right?

1:03:39 But you can make mistakes in each one of those asset classes, just, quote unquote, real estate, obviously if you’re in a Miami high-rise in ’08 is not gonna be necessarily a great investment. It’s interesting you said, I actually had Grant Cardone on here about a week or two ago and he’s, you know, in the real estate business, and he said a single, he said buying a house is the stupidest thing anyone can do, he said it’s been sold to us and it’s just the biggest liability, and you’re listening to a quote unquote kind of real estate guy, he’s lost era of a sales guy, and you’re like, what? Then he’s like, Brian, all I do is invest in multifamily homes, that’s it, that’s the asset classes I know, I understand the, this, the this to that.

1:04:15 And so for him, I believe he’s done the research and figured out that’s what works for him in a certain area, but it’s not like he’s saying real estate is the thing, go do it, you know, he’s kind of done this homework there, and you have to find something that works for your personality too, that works for your understanding of things. Yeah, right now, that’s an interesting me, and the quadrants really good, I’ve had Kiyosaki on here, and yeah, he’s really fascinating. That’s probably one of the greatest takeaways with that book, is looking at how different people spend their money and what becomes wealth and what becomes something that just goes out the door.

1:04:48 And some people have a weird mentality where they don’t even think they deserve money and then they’re giving these weird psychological issues. Oh yeah, that’s a rabbit hole. Most of us got horrible programming when we were young about money, us emotional associations, you know. I mean, my parents fought over money. I remember the first day, my parents were on and off government assistance growing up, and, you know, that kind of thing.

1:05:12 Remember the first day when I was, I was 16 and my dad let me drive the car to school, my first time that day, and he gave me $10, and so I drove the car to school and I got, bought myself lunch for, you know, a few dollars, and I got maybe some gas, something. I came home and I think I had $2 left or something, and he just yelled, yelled and yelled at me. He was so upset about how much money I had spent that day, and I, you know, I didn’t, did I didn’t even know what, you know, what are you talking about, like, I just, you know, I bought some lunch and I’ve had some gas, you know, for the car.

1:05:46 And I think a lot of us come from families where we didn’t get, you know, any kind of prosperity consciousness, we didn’t learn about money, we didn’t learn how it works. I mean, John Rockefeller, I don’t know if you know his story, but, you know, he was a kid, he started keeping a little book in his pocket, and every day he would write down all of the money that he took in and all of the expenditures that he that went out every day, for every single time that he got any money or he spent any money. And, you know, that’s not trivial, you know, and he taught that to his son, who then taught it to his five sons, and they created a dynasty with, and I think that this really helped, you know, with that, there’s a consciousness around how much you’re taking in and how much is going out and making sure that you’re getting something valuable in exchange for the value that you’ve worked so hard to get, right?

1:06:36 Do you have advice for people that are, because people always want to ask questions, I’m guessing that’s why, and maybe you’re helping me, Tony, with this, what, being one of his new Money Masters, and obviously he wrote a book about that, and he was a very successful book by no brick, you know, everyone from all different income levels are always really curious, like, what, what do I need to do to try to think about wealth and know more about that mindset and try to check my stories I’m telling in my head, a lot of projections from your parents, um, you know, you’ve seen people that grew up in the Depression, right, we all have that old grandpa, great grandpa, where they just have a really different relationship with money, like, don’t throw that half a potato out, and you can see how it’s scarred them, probably maybe hurt them from even generating wealth.

1:07:18 What do you usually tell people in, so tell them what, no, that’s good, different. Yeah, and they’re trying to answer basic questions about their own relationships with money, or maybe even when you learned, I mean, you learn how to sell, you have to learn, like, what to do when you generated all that money and just, you know, try to stay sane with it, and I just got, just new perspectives on people when it comes to money, their own money, and how to think of it. I mean, I think great entrepreneurs look at money as almost like energy, you know, I’m getting this energy because I’m providing value to the world, let me invest it and make more energy.

1:07:54 Well, maybe that’s the way to describe an obsessive entrepreneur, I don’t know, but you sometimes think of it that way. Yeah, no, I think I understand what you’re asking. Um, so there’s something to realize about money, and that is that money isn’t the actual value itself. If the money is the thing that we use as a way of storing up the value or exchanging it, but it isn’t actually the value itself, right? A hundred dollar bill from America, where I come from, I think costs a few cents to print, there’s no, like, intrinsic value in the bill itself.

1:08:28 But if you, you know, let’s say that once a month, or let’s say that every month you do a hundred different transactions, all right, you buy lunch, you maybe go to the dry cleaner, you buy some books online, whatever, you do a hundred transactions. Of the hundred transactions, probably the hundred of them you’re gonna use money for all of them, so there’s a hundred times of using money, but the next closest thing, you know, might be, you know, let’s say you buy a lot of books on Amazon and you buy, you know, fifteen books on Amazon, maybe you do fifteen Amazon transactions for a book, there’s nothing even close in terms of how often, when you do transactions, you do it so that your brain can get unconsciously linked to that thing being value. So we don’t think of groceries as value, we don’t think of books as value, we don’t think of gas in the car as value, but we think of money as value because we use it in every one of the transactions.

1:09:25 So we unconsciously become programmed that money is value, and then we start thinking about goals, you know, people sort of think about, and I want to become a millionaire, I want a million dollars, but that isn’t actually what we want. You want to have a nice house that you want to live in, or a nice car, you want to be able to provide for your children or you educate yourself or go on vacation, I have more time off, there are things, there were more real things that we actually want. And this glitch, this is a really big deal because if you’re always focused on money and you unconsciously think that money is value, you’re always trying to get money rather than trying to produce value and then build value and build assets in return.

1:10:10 And so it, this is a key, this is a key piece, and so we have to start watching where this is happening and then get more clear on what we want in our life and with the things we want and things we want to avoid, and then we have to self-educate ourselves. You know, if you want to make a lot of money in life you’ve got to do what it takes to make that money, and many of those things are not comfortable, many of those things are hard to do, they’re challenging to do, but they’re worth it, because if you learn to do them in a, in a good, honest, ethical, kind of forthright way, who you have to become is, you have to find a higher version of yourself, you have to become a more self actualized version of yourself to get over the fear of, you know, insulting someone if you ask them to buy something, or the fear of making people uncomfortable if you’re doing marketing, or the fear of getting someone upset when you just go and ask them, what are your needs, what are your frustrations, so you can make a better product.

1:11:08 You know, all these kinds of things, and, you know, I’ve grown in so many ways by learning these things. I mean, I, what you learn when you learn to become more successful, and particularly when you learn about business, entrepreneurship, money, wealth, these lessons translate over into the rest of your life and you can teach them to other people, you can, they become these huge kind of gifts. What you learn at one point in your life, you don’t realize it, but you’re gonna use it in other places.

1:11:39 I look back now, I mean, I’ve got a wife and a five-year-old daughter, okay, and so I now, I live with these two women in my house, which is a very different, I never, I didn’t think I was gonna get married, and I didn’t, I didn’t think that the stuff that I learned about dating and flirting and teasing, and I didn’t think that that stuff was gonna be useful as a parent, but I now realize if I hadn’t learned that stuff, my relationship with my wife would, we would have so many problems that we don’t have right now, because I know how to, you know, like, I understand the sexual, social, romantic dynamic with her, with my daughter, I couldn’t have imagined that learning how to, like, flirt and tease and that that would translate over, but I use all of these skills and the sensibility that I developed with dating with my, with my daughter, and people that have children can understand them about to say, which is you learn that there’s a romance that you have with your child, but that doesn’t have any of the, like, the sexual dynamic, it’s a, it, you, you really, you differentiate romance from sex, and you have fun and you have challenges, but if you understand that push-pull and how to keep things interesting and fun and adventure, that it just makes everything work so much so much better.

1:13:09 Same thing with money and wealth, by going through the challenges of learning about sales and helping people get in touch with their motivations and, you know, overcome their fears, and, you know, learning about how to find out what the needs of someone are and then make them a product or service that meets those needs, or do marketing or do design, or when you learn these things, you learn them and then you bring them into the rest of your life and you design a cooler-looking space or you help another person to learn something, you know, they’re all rungs on a ladder, they’re not the ultimate kind of thing. And I think when you have this lifelong learning mindset, you realize, like, you know, if you get a million dollars you might be happy, you know, for a little while, it might give you a little bit of peace of mind, but if you didn’t learn how to do that, you’re gonna lose it, you’re probably gonna lose most of it because you’re not going to know how to invest it, you’re not going to know where to put it, then you’re gonna feel even worse than before you got it because, you know, when you see the TV show with the person that won the lottery and then if years later they lost it all and they’re sitting on the porch, you know, in the rocking chair there, now they’re really bummed, you know, like it’s really, you know, a bummer of a situation, you know, you want to talk about low self-esteem.

1:14:25 And so take the time, you know, learn these lessons, go through the discomfort you know, to learn this stuff. Is that the biggest mistake you think when it comes to people who jump into online marketing and sales, is that they just think how can I make the money as opposed to how can I provide the value, and then that simple choice ends up affecting them and their businesses long-term? Yeah, as a general principle here, I’m a little more philosophical at this, you know, point in my life, as a general principle, whatever it is that you’re going to learn, you can just assume right now that it isn’t what you think.

1:14:59 It’s about the way to succeed in that area is not the way that you thought it was, and what you’re gonna get from it is not what you thought it was. It’s kind of like the hero’s journey, you know, Joseph Campbell, where he talks about you go on the adventure and, you know, you face the challenges and the mentors and the, you know, the friends show up, and then you get to the end and, like, the brass ring is there in front of you and you finally have arrived and you’ve, you can take the thing that you went for, but in that moment your eyes, oh wait a minute, this isn’t what I thought it was about, and you, it’s a destiny moment and you have to make a sacrifice, and then whatever decision you make, then you can take that and, you know, go teach other people.

1:15:34 But it just, whatever you’re trying to get involved with, whether you’re trying to learn how to get a date or whether you’re trying to get married or whether you’re trying to find a spouse or have a child or start a business or make money or get healthy or whatever it is, it is not what you think it is. The path to success is not what you think it’s going to be. You’re going to face challenges that are that are like deep ego, animal, cultural level stuff that you’re gonna have to overcome.

1:16:01 You’re gonna need a new way of looking at reality, you need new beliefs, you’re gonna need a new social group, things are going to have to change if you want to change that part of your life, like at a deep, like roots kind of level. If you know that and you’re ready for that, then when you get into that area and it becomes hard or you go through the part that’s challenging, or you have to let go of part of your identity, or you deal with ego issues, or you have to grow and become a, you know, a new person, at least there’s a part that it’s like, oh yeah, okay, I knew that, that’s what was involved here. I knew that I was gonna be getting involved at something a little deeper and it was gonna be harder than what I thought, and yeah, gives you a little more courage to go for it.

1:16:41 Right, so people should be aware that that’s gonna happen in all aspects of their life, they’re gonna go for the rest matters, yeah, and they’re actually gonna end up with something else, the new paradigm, with a new everything, and that’s true for dating, for entrepreneurship, for family, everything. And so just the more prepared you can be for the unprepared, probably the better you’re gonna be going for that thing. Yeah, they say expect the unexpected.

1:17:02 Yeah, that’s really good advice. How did you get hooked up with Tony Robbins? What’s that like? He had some, you know, amazing things to say about you, he interviewed you for, like, two hours, it was incredible. You know, you’re one of his new Money Masters, what’s that like?

1:17:16 And I mean, I know that, you know, you gave him credit for paving the way for a lot of this information sales, and, like, we all do, you know, because he was doing it back in the day on late-night television and doing those audio tapes, and I mean, you know, that was the kind of original internet marketing. What’s it like spending time with Tony, being part of his crew and that whole thing? Yeah, it was great, you know. I mean, I, as I was building all these businesses and so forth, um, yeah, he did the New Money Masters thing and he reached out and wanted to interview me.

1:17:48 Well, you know, I’ll say about Tony, I mean, he was, he was an idol. My first home was a little trailer home that was probably about as big as this room, you know, if you cut it in half and stacked it this way, that I traded a guitar and $1500 for, and I was so stoked to move into that place. I mean, you know, I really did not have a lot of success around me. I found a copy of his Personal Power audio cassettes, like, at the Goodwill for a few dollars, and I used to walk around with my little Walkman on listening to my cassettes, and I remember, you know, walking around my little trailer home with my shoulders back, imagining I was wearing a cape, because that’s what Tony said to do, you know.

1:18:29 So he was very, you know, kind of a formative aspect of my development, your mic mic by learning, and so yeah, meeting with, meeting him and being interviewed with him was surreal and it was super cool. What I will say about Tony is this: after getting to know him a little bit and hanging out with him outside of that context, he is one of the smartest, big-brained, he had some thyroid thing or something when he was young that, you know, growth hormone leaked into his body and his brain or something, do you know this? And no, I didn’t know that.

1:18:58 Yeah, yeah, he liked, he’s like a huge, he’s like a superhuman, okay, right, like he’s a like a real Marvel character, right? He’s big too, right? So huge, like these massive hands, reigns, it’s a brain, but I mean, he just, something’s going on, he got artificial intelligence, he got one of those modules, and if you sit down you teach him something or he learned something, he’s like taking notes and remembers it and just loads it up. He’s got an encyclopedic memory.

1:19:23 He really is an astounding human being, he’s an astonishing person, and, you know, go to his live programs, read his books, yeah, he’s the real deal. You’ve been to his live programs? Yeah, why yes, I’ll, you saw the documentary probably, I’m sure, I, I saw it, I forgot the name of it, was kind of one of his UPW seminars, think in Florida, but you really get to see what he does at those things. So I actually met him when I was 11 or 12 years old, it’s something called Super Camp in California, and he taught me how to break a board in 60 seconds, 60 minutes, when I was the skinny little 11 year old kid, and after Tony talked to us for an hour, I broke it with my palm.

1:19:57 I mean, that’s old-school. Yeah, he’s doing the dumb walk hassle, right? So yeah, right, don’t worry, um, though that’s incredible, and he seemed, he spoke to you for a couple hours, I mean, he was really asking you detailed questions, he was like a very curious guy as well. Yeah, yeah, he’s a great learner, um, good marketer, great marketer. Yeah, you see things that he does, it’s just like, wow, you know.

1:20:19 And I guess he was doing it before the internet as well. He’s a great marketer, and part of the reason why he’s a great marketer is because he’s got the goods, you know. If you go to a product, yeah, if you go to one of his programs, you’re gonna get a download, a summary of some of the best of personal development, psychology, spiritual development, sexual, relationship stuff, you just get this transmission. It’s like hooking a fiber optic cable up to your brain and it’s this massive download, and it’s done in this Rockstar kind of setting.

1:20:51 It’s like part kind of like rock concert, Broadway play, large group awareness seminar, you see people transforming, you’re jumping up and down and screaming, it’s, yeah, it’s a, you know, it’s one of these kind of cultural events that every human being should experience, and no one else doesn’t. Like, Tony talked to me about this book, Opportunity, and what, I know you’re kind of a futurist as well and, like, you look into technology, what’s happening in the next 10 years. Why write this now and what, what do we all need to be thinking about?

1:21:26 Yeah, so a couple of years ago, so I’ve been investing in other companies, that’s my wealth creation mechanism, right, taking what I make in my business and going and investing that in young business startups, because that’s what I’ve learned about, is, I understand, I really was fascinated with business, and so a few years ago I realized that to me, a couple years ago, it dawned on me that the self-made, like, billionaire, millionaire, billionaire, really successful people, the people that had done it many times consistently, the thing that they had in common was they were better at opportunity, they were better at finding and creating and choosing opportunities than other people. And when that struck me, when that kind of hit me that way, it, that was one of those moments where everything changed, it just made everything, makes sense in a way that it hadn’t before.

1:22:17 And so I became very curious about opportunity and I’ve studied Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and I use a lot of their ideas and, I started writing down, like, insights about this. Pretty quickly I had, like, dozens of pages of notes, and then about a little over a year ago I did a one day course where I just taught what I had learned about opportunity, and people really responded well, and I could see, I’m, you know, I’m onto something, and I took about a year and I wrote down everything that I had learned about finding and creating and choosing and scaling opportunities in business and life, and that’s this book, and it’s, I haven’t worked harder on any program that I’ve ever made as I worked on this book. This wasn’t like Double Your Dating, that was written in a few weeks, you know, this was a lot of work, you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours, and ten, you want to talk about it a little bit, just kind of dive in, hold, I, you would said on one of the talks I’ve seen you give where, you know, people have different stages in their life, kind of employee, self-employed, entrepreneur, business person, one of these higher states is kind of philanthropy.

1:23:27 Are there, is there bits of that in here as far as, like, I want to give you all a vision of your future, of what you need to be thinking about, you know, to make your life, the world better, all that stuff? Yeah, totally. Right, and that idea, that’s a Robert Kiyosaki idea, I mean, I got that from him, you know. You go from employee, self-employed, business owner or investor, and then after that, hopefully, you know, teacher, mentor, philanthropist, you know, these higher kind of levels that I hope we get to.

1:23:52 Yeah, I look at this as a manual for the future. I tried to write this to be something that every person that I know, I want them to read this so that they can navigate what’s coming, because change, we just were just not ready for what’s about to happen here in the next 10, 20 years. We’re gonna see more change than we’ve probably seen in the history in recorded history, what’s coming with artificial intelligence and robotics and virtual reality and, you know, a hundred other different types of technology.

1:24:20 Biotech is really transformational, I really believe this, and I’ve been paying attention to this stuff for 10 or 15 years myself, but the nature of opportunity is changing. Opportunity is exploding exponentially. There’s so much more opportunity than existed before. My friends that are entrepreneurs, they, when I talk to them now, they’re just, they’re consistently just saying there’s so much opportunity right now, I’m just overwhelmed by it. But if you talk to most people, they won’t, they don’t say that, they say, no, I feel like there’s less opportunity.

1:24:50 Right, and that’s weird, right? But the difference, the reason why this is happening is that the opportunity that’s emerging right now is opportunity that you have to go out and learn about and get educated about and create. Okay, so one of the points that I make inside the book is that opportunity, I believe, is mostly now a creative act. It’s something that you go and create, and you can learn the tools in order to do this. We think that opportunity and having more opportunity is a good thing, but it turns out that it can be actually very overwhelming as well, because if you only have one choice in life for something, like one choice of what to eat that night or, you know, one choice of a place to go for entertainment or something, it’s like, I’d rather have more choices.

1:25:35 If you get a second choice, that’s great, that scene is okay, you know, now this is wonderful. If you get a third choice, you know, wonderful, four or five, okay, now I have a selection of things, I feel really good. But what happens when you get ten choices or a hundred or a thousand? Well, you get overwhelmed and you get what I call opportunity shock, too many opportunities, right? Barry Schwartz wrote about The Paradox of Choice, too many choices, right?

1:25:58 That just shuts us down and we get the kind of the friction that comes from it. And so we need the tools and we need the mental models to find and create business opportunity, whether it’s in our own business or our careers or with our customers, investment opportunities. So we need the tool set and the mental models to do that, and then we need the tools to choose, to pick the best one. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have some great mindsets on this.

1:26:23 You know, what do you like slightly about those guys? Yeah, I mean, one thing, you know, Warren Buffett says is, so most people who invest in the stock market, you know this, most individual investors lose money, I think it’s over 80%, people that manage their own, okay, money lose it, something like that. And you know, it’s not much better going to, like, a stockbroker or, you know, investment advisor in a lot of cases because they’re getting paid commissions, or, you know, a lot of these hedge funds or, or yeah, I mean, hedge funds, you know, as well, a lot of those don’t do that well, but no, index funds, I’m talking about, a lot of those have big fees and they’re all these hidden places and slippage and all this stuff in there, and if we don’t know how to manage our own investments, if we’re not savvy about this stuff, it can all get eaten up in these things.

1:27:10 So Warren Buffett, he says, you know, everybody should get a punch card when you graduate from college that has 20 spots on it, and you should only be able to make 20 investments in your whole life, and every time you make one they would, you know, like a ticket at a fair or something, you punch out one of the slots, so you know how, you know how many you’ve got left. And so Warren and Charlie say that they like to make one good investment a year. They just try to make one, make one great investment for you, and some years they don’t find one.

1:27:36 And when I saw that, that’s a new way of thinking about things, and so that’s what I try to do. I try to make one investment, one serious investment per year, and I don’t find one every year, I know, and for me it’s I try to find a little startup business that’s making something that I believe in, that I understand, I believe in the entrepreneurs, where I can invest in them and then help them grow that business and, you know, and kind of take that to the next level. And so each of us, I think, needs to have a mindset like that, where we’re looking through our life to find the one best investment every year and then place a bet on it.

1:28:11 Okay, interesting. And how do you work to create opportunities, like you said, that’s kind of the new, the new way of looking at it, sounds like those things just pop into your life, you actually have to be one of those people that gets to see all these, because like you said, you ask most people on the street and be like, you know, what they would be like, I don’t see any opportunities, I have the couple job choices and I don’t have enough money in it. So yeah, yeah, one of the things I noticed as I was looking around, part of this is a mindset thing, I realized that we live in these human designed and created environments.

1:28:45 We live in layers of this, okay? So for example, we’re sitting here in the studio in a building here, everything that we see around us, there’s no nature here, right? And most people that are watching or listening to this can relate to this, they’re probably in a building or a car or home, the whole thing was created for humans by humans so we can be more comfortable, we can have the tools that we want, we can be, you know, away from the elements, we can be, you know, in the comfortable temperature, protected from, you know, danger out there, and it just keeps going.

1:29:16 I mean, we’re in layers of clothing here, so there’s, like, a layer of clothing and then there’s a layer of chair and then there’s a layer of floor. I mean, you and I are probably about ten, like, manufactured layers from actual earth, you know, underneath us here. And so some people got lots of tragedy, you know, we should all get back to nature, and, you know, I totally agree with that, but at the same time just to look at the creative ability, look at, you know, so many people have come before us and done all this work to create machines and manufacturing and things so that we can have these comfortable lay, we live in a creative reality more and more and more.

1:29:50 We’re creating the environments that we live in, and we have to realize that, and this is accelerating. So, you know, where as to, you know, get a shirt like this, you know, like a couple hundred years ago or something, you’d have to go to a tailor and they’d have to measure you and, you know, so forth. Now to get custom clothes you could go to a tailor, you could walk in there, they can measure you and maybe have custom clothes in a few weeks. The internet there, you can go get measured now, upload your measurements, you can have custom, really amazing tailor made clothes made in a few days.

1:30:20 Now it’s just getting faster and faster. With 3D printing, you know, you can have a 3D printer on your desk now and have things that would have taken millions of dollars worth of equipment and months of time, you can design and print them out right now in a few hours. So this creative power that we have is accelerating, we have more power to reorganize, rebuild, retool, redesign the environments that we live in at all levels, and I call this living in the creative verse, that we live in a universe that is friendly to creativity, to creating our own environments and recreating ourselves in certain ways.

1:30:56 And because of the internet and more knowledge being available in tools and everything, prices are going down and the power of them is going up, and the knowledge, you know, in the mindsets, that if we can get more of this it allows us to be more creative and to create more of the results that we want in our lives, and I think that we have to realize this. You know, Ray Kurzweil, the futurist, he talks about the future where, you know, we’re gonna, we’re coming to a time here where we’re gonna be able to think and have the computer understand what we’re thinking, and instead of having to go and pick a design and, you know, go through all the process to do this and then 3D print it, we’ll be able to think of a design and then have it printed out. And 3D printers are getting faster and faster and we’re gonna have nano scale manufacturing, where, you know, maybe 20 years from now we’ll be able to literally think of something and have it happen in real time.

1:31:46 They already have this, I mean, we’ve already got, you know, the brain, the brain cap that you put on where you can think and it can know what words it can type, what you’re thinking right now. This is already actually happening today, I mean, you know, it’s just the beginning of this, but we have to practice for a time when you can think something and have it happen, right? We can speak now and our phones are machine, you know, there are little mobile devices, they understand what we’re talking about.

1:32:10 You can get a little Alexa thing, you can talk to it, it can order things. We’re getting closer to the speed of thought and we need to practice creativity for that, and one of the best places to practice it is to practice it in opportunity and to learn models and tools so that you can create more opportunity for yourself. And this is, I mean, you know, the book is a huge, you know, rabbit hole, we can talk about as much of this as you want, but it’s really about learning, it’s really about learning new models and new methods and new ways of creating things out here in reality.

1:32:40 Okay, and does this mean you should spend a lot of your time in Silicon Valley and being around some of these people and technologies because you like to move, right, is that, or is that a way of creating opportunities, or is that just what you like to do with your head space and your family, ’cause you’re gonna travel six months of the year? Part of it is creating an opportunity network. A lot of, there’s a lot of fear of change, you know, and I get it, I have fear of change.

1:33:08 I worry, you know, just like everyone else, I worry about money, I worry about change, I worry, you know, is there gonna be a future for me? You know, as they’re making self-driving cars and computers that, you know, make paintings and art and music and, you know, they’re replacing, like, you know, everything, you know, because things are changing and we’re all kind of having anxiety about how things change more. I think we need to learn to manage some of the emotions there.

1:33:38 You know, in fact, in the book I’ve got a whole section on emotion management around change and opportunity, because if you don’t learn to manage your anxiety and your envy and your jealousy and your fear and your FOMO, if you don’t learn to manage that stuff, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed, you know, when you miss an opportunity and then you get bummed out and, you know, that takes you out, or someone close to you gets an opportunity that you want it and you have envy and you gotta learn to manage that thing. But I think it’s important, I mentioned the opportunity network, you have to build a network of people who are good at finding and creating opportunity, because if you don’t have a network of people that are doing this, you won’t, be the normal thing to do.

1:34:16 You kind of have to, you need some peer pressure, you know, in a way, but also I think you need a group of diverse people from different domains that are good at being creative and innovative in their domains, because it’s really now about taking something you learn in one place and using it in another place. That’s that’s where a lot of the opportunity is, and that’s what I mean when I say, you know, be creative about opportunity. You take something, you know, you mentioned when you’re traveling around the world, or, you know, you’ve learned something in one place and you take it and use it somewhere else.

1:34:47 I’m really interested in different things, like my wife and I, we go to Burning Man, you know, that’s where we met. Burning Man is this crazy place where crazy people go and do crazy stuff and make all this heart and, you know, this music, you go there, you see new ideas, new ways that people are putting things together that you wouldn’t have seen before. You mentioned Silicon Valley, I love the people that are working on the singularity, this idea that computers are gonna wake up someday and they’re gonna be conscious and talking to us and, you know, pass, surpass our level of intelligence.

1:35:16 I love going to those seminars or those, you know, summits that they have there and listening to people talk about that stuff. You know, I love going and hanging out with artists and musicians. Yeah, go, go add people to your network that are doing creative, innovative things that are way outside of what you’re up to, and an opportunity just jumps into view because you see, you know, like for example, my wife and I, we stood at, we met at Burning Man six or seven years ago, we discovered visionary art.

1:35:44 I am just in love with this art and now we’re friends with maybe six or seven, what is that? It’s they make paintings of visions, it’s very psychedelic and in nature, but it’s also highly complex, and these are, you know, these are trained people that have been studying the lineage of painting and, you know, kind of figurative and abstract art and kind of interdimensional art, and then they add the layers of psychedelics and all these other kinds of things over the top of it. But I fell in love with the art at Burning Man, we’ve been collecting it now for the past five or six years, getting to know the artists, you know, I made friends with a lot of these artists, and when I talked to these people and I listen to how they think about the world, I would have never thought, like, that’s a big opportunity in life, but it really is, you know, they think about things completely differently and it’s made me think about, like, how I design things.

1:36:39 In fact, you know, Andrew Jones, who’s kind of the, I don’t know, the leading figure in this stuff, he’s a digital visionary artist, I called him up and said, hey, you know what, you designed the cover of this book, I was wonderful, that’s, that was designed by him, and I told him about the contents of the book and, like, what I was trying to do with people, and he came up with the idea of the hand grabbing the lightning bolt because opportunity, you know, you’re kind of, you got to reach up and you’ve got to, you know, take the power, you’ve got to claim it, but it’s also a little dangerous because, you know, there are hucksters and you can make a mistake and, you know, and so, and timing, to write the lightning bolt, suddenly they’re totally, exactly, exactly.

1:37:15 And so, you know, this is a great example of hanging out with a visionary artist, you know, I wanted to make a book that was really distinctive and I went and had one of them make this cover for the book, and so yeah, it’s connecting things from different places and putting things together that haven’t been put together before. That’s where a lot of the opportunity is. Okay, and what’s Burning Man like? Tell it, tell, sell me on Burning Man, or tell some what it’s like, to not to go, and why they should check it out.

1:37:41 Yeah, so there’s 60 or 70 thousand people that go now and they go out into the desert. You go to Reno, Nevada, which is already out in the middle of nowhere in Nevada, and then you drive another hundred miles out, I mean the middle of nowhere, to a prehistoric lake bed, it’s, I think, ten or twelve miles wide, the salt flat, you ever see them, like, racing one of these cars that goes 600 miles an hour, and you need a huge, like, that’s this, there’s no life basically out there anywhere, and they set up a city that’s a couple of miles in diameter and it’s shaped like a clock, and people come from all over the world and put art and music there. It is the coolest art and music festival on the planet, like, there’s just nothing that I know I’m going on like this.

1:38:29 And people will take, you know, you’ll be out walking across the desert to the next thing and, you know, a giant pirate ship will come out of, you know, out of a dust storm and, you know, there’s supercool electronic music playing and hundreds of people on this thing, and you realize that it’s an old, like, city bus that someone took apart and made into a pirate ship mobile disco, and you hop on there and, you know, some amazing deejay is playing music and you dance for a little while and you, know, look at the psychedelic whatever, and you get off and then, you know, you walk outside and there’s a, you know, 30-foot, 40-foot sculpture with fractal lights all over it, LEDs moving in this super complex pattern, and you, you know, you learn that ten MIT students spent a year making this thing, and then you realize there’s a screen there and you can go over and, like, drive the thing with your fingers, and you do that for a little while.

1:39:19 There’s a hundreds of things like this out there. During the day there are talks by people that are interested in all different, you know, permaculture and psychedelics and, like, whatever else you could be interested in is, you know, going on there. There are a lot of other elements there, there’s a lot of sexual elements, I mean, you know, swingers and, you know, polyamory and this kind of thing, like every cultural thing has some representation there.

1:39:42 Okay, you know, you can find whatever it is that you’re looking for, but great art, great music, and it’s also an experiment in what they call the gift economy, right? You can’t use money there, it’s Center Camp if you want to go buy some ice or, like, a cup of coffee, there’s one place you can, you know, go, but everyone comes with the idea of just giving to each other and so you bring a gift, they call it, and you just give it away. And so you’re going around and people are just giving things to each other, in trying to experiment with the cultural idea of what if we all just brought our greatest gifts and gave them to each other.

1:40:20 And as you’re going around, you realize that none of the things there, that everything was a gift from someone, you know, a incredible, like, nightclub, you know, in the middle of the desert that probably cost a million dollars, with an incredible light show and multiple levels and, you know, it may be a million dollar sound system even, this was just a gift from somebody, somebody just gave this to the event, every one of these hundreds of art cars that are driving around that are shaped like, you know, octopus that breathes fire and a big chrome duck in it, you know, whatever. They’re just gifts, people made these in there and everyone’s contributing, and it, I mean, it’s a little utopian and it’s a bit crazy and, you know, a bunch of people run around naked and, you know, this kind of thing, but it, you’re never the same after you go to this.

1:41:09 Do you get a paradigm shift? They’re seeing, like, an economy that isn’t an economy, and you get, like, a thing of, wow, that’s what this world is, we’re all just giving each other gifts, and, you know, I mean, do you get some weird realizations with you? Oh yeah, I mean, you know, you go there for a week, it’s not like reality or anything. No, you’re, it’s an experimental way of living and oppressing and doing life, but yeah, when you come back you’re changed.

1:41:32 I mean, I’ve gone every single year for ten years since the first time I’ve gone, and we go every year, it’s just we organize our life around making sure we’re there. Wow, that’s pretty fascinating, wouldn’t it, wouldn’t have necessarily guess that about you, but now it makes a lot of sense. And you collect art, you know, seriously now, right? Yeah. And you buy into the artists and their story, are you learning about what it, what a good piece of art is or how it might appreciate over time?

1:41:57 Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don’t buy the art just to, like, because it appreciated, I buy it because I love it. I think some of the most beautiful, there are the most beautiful things that humans have created that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve got them on every wall in my house. But yeah, learning about artists, you know, it’s another one of these rabbit holes that you start going down and you kind of get into, in your lies, oh, these artists are really up to something interesting, they have been, they for thousands of years they’ve been doing representation and there’s their philosophies and values, and, you know, you learn Picasso, you know, when he was doing cubism, that you see this cubist piece and you’re like, that’s just ugly, like, what’s going on there?

1:42:37 And, you know, he was experimenting, trying to look at something from all sides at once and put that on a two-dimensional surface, and then you start digging into his reality and you understand how he thought, and, you know, then you get into Dali and, you know, surrealism, or, you know, some of the, you know, the expressionists, and you see how they were seeing reality and what they were trying to do, and you, it’s just fair, it’s profound, you know, it’s really interesting to see that they saw a reality differently and they were trying to transmit that other way of perceiving things through two dimensional if it’s painting or three-dimensional if it’s sculpture, and when you get it, art means something different, right? Yeah, without language, they were trying to communicate with that language, so it misses that whole weird cultural filter on theirs and they just show you.

1:43:26 Yeah, exactly, you learn about symbolism and, you know, what these things mean. I mean, I’m really happy with the way that this book turned out, because the hand grabbing the lightning bolt is a very, it’s a powerful iconic symbol, you know, it means something, and I hope, you know, we’ll see, but I hope that that becomes associated with opportunity, and, like, that’s a much more powerful marketing communication than a lot of the things that I’ve done in the past that used words that were also very powerful. Yeah, you know, so you learn a new way to think.

1:43:58 Do you see a lot of kind of entrepreneurs and business owners that you’re thinking, you know what, you need to go to Burning Man, you need to go hang out with some artists and some musicians and some architects and some, lot, because a lot of these, a lot of quote-unquote either internet marketers or even solopreneurs or even entrepreneurs, I mean, they kind of hang out sometimes with the same people, and I’m just wondering if, because you, you don’t obviously, you ever have buddies where you, like, you know what, just try doing something a little weird, go hang out with your musician, go to Uptown, don’t just go to a concert, yeah, go to the backstage and see how they create and hang out with them and go to the after-party. Yeah, I’m just curious if you have that realization.

1:44:36 Yeah, Robert Anton Wilson, I don’t know if you ever heard of him, and he wrote a bunch of books, he’s really interesting, and it’s, you know, to check him out kind of thing, he’s one of the most original thinkers there is. He prescribed, he prescribed this idea they called, um, model agnosticism, where you get outside of your model of reality and you need several models of reality. And so the way to start out, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, yeah, maybe I do kind of hang out with just my group and read things that are just in my world and watch stuff that’s my values, maybe I could get outside of my world, what you want to do is, don’t just get a little outside your world, go far.

1:45:14 You know, so if you’re like a really super conservative, you know, religious person or something, go, you know, go to Burning Man and see those people are, you know, if you’re like a musician, artist, super free spirit, you know, go, maybe go study the somebody that’s a legal professional or something, you know, or, you know, maybe go learn about business or, you know, how to organize projects or something like that. Go study something, a domain of life that’s really different from whatever it is that you’re up to and go make friends with people in that world. Go to the Meetup, go to a seminar, go to the, you know, the industry convention and become interested in how those people see the world.

1:45:58 Every subculture has a different model of reality, of what reality is and how it works, they really do. They’ve got a different value system, they’re up to different things, they’re trying to do different things in the world, they’re trying to make the world into a different place. And the more of these versions of reality that you can learn about, that you can load up natively, that you, because you really understand them because you’ve been a part of them, the I think the better, the more dimensional of a person you become, and the more, as Robert Anton Wilson says, the more you become model agnostic, you can switch models of reality.

1:46:35 Now, if I’m in a conversation with someone, sometimes I’ll say, like, one of the ways I say it is, okay, you know what, I’m gonna put on my marketing hat for a minute, and then I switch into a marketing perspective of how do you communicate about this thing that you have so that people will come and buy it from you, or I’ll say, you know what, let me switch on my artist hat for here for a second, and we’ll talk about expression, you know, or let me switch on my, you know, my dating hat here for a sectional, let’s talk, let’s talk about attraction, or let me put on my dad hat for here for a minute and talk about being a role model for another human being. And when you get that these are different values sets, they’re different identities, there are different ways of looking at things, you can start switching between them, you kind of loosen the grip a little bit, you know, the egoic grip on your one like gig in life, you know, your one winning formula.

1:47:22 I think that’s important because we’re all going to need to grow and change and learn and adapt faster and faster as the future unfolds, and let’s get started now and more opportunities come. Tell me a bit about you, did you know, daily habits, do you have certain practices that you do, physical or, I don’t, you do the green smoothie for your family, you know, I don’t know, meditations, than anything that just keeps you, you, yeah, I try to start with a full night of sleep every night. You’ve always been good about that, vigilant about your sleep?

1:47:56 No, um, I don’t know if I’d say I’ve been vigilant about it, but the last several years I’ve really gotten that if I can go to sleep and wake up whenever I wake up, that the day is just a lot better, yeah, like, in my life just works a lot better, you know. The, they’re saying that, you know, for each hour of sleep you miss, your IQ drops by 5 or 10 points or something, it’s pretty, pretty serious. So yeah, deep sleep. We travel a lot and so beds are, you know, kind of hit and miss, but at home I found the most comfortable bed that I could find, I found the most comfortable pillow that I can find, it, the blankets, exactly.

1:48:38 I mean, I want to sleep in an idealized environment, you’re gonna spend a third of your life somewhere, you know, like, do that. So, you know, sleep. I do the green, you know, big blender filled, packed with organic, you know, green vegetables and protein powder and spirulina, and I just, I’ve looked for all the highest nutrient value things possible and I put it in there and I give it to me and my wife and my daughter every single morning. I make a second one that I keep for another meal later in the day, and I travel with a blender.

1:49:09 When we’re traveling around, like, when we landed here I went to Argos right across the street here and I bought a big, you know, UK, you, 220 kind of blender, 220 to 240, I don’t know, and so we travel around here, we’ve got that blender, make that thing every day, and I have that for two of my meals. I try to do, try to get, you know, 45, 60 minutes of good brisk walking in every day, that’s just my preferred way of doing exercise, and after just kind of looking at it, that, you know, that works best for me. You know, I get a lot of dates with my wife.

1:49:44 Okay, that’s important. My daughter’s five, we’re kind of hippyish in our values with her, we’ve been very attachment, you know, therapy or attachment theory oriented. She slept in bed with us since, you know, she was first born. She sleeps in bed with us now to this day. My wife and I put her to sleep together every night, that’s a family ritual that we’ve just done every night, my wife and my daughter and I would go to sleep together every night.

1:50:14 Sometimes my wife and I will get up and we’ll stay up a little while after that, but it’s like family sleep every night, and we basically wake up, you know, with her usually, my wife and I wake up a little earlier, but we try to go to sleep and wake up as a family, and that’s been a, I know, I think it’s a really key thing, you know. My little daughter knows that she’s gonna be with mom and dad to go to sleep and she knows, you know, they’re gonna be there when she wakes up. And I mean, I could go down the parenting thing, that one’s learning so much, they’re watching her, you know, a lot of people, you know, they have their little baby sleep on its own, you know, right from the beginning, or they, you know, have a bottle or they have different things or they don’t want to spoil their child.

1:50:53 We’ve been a lot more of the let her do the things as she wants to, you know. She actually didn’t stop, she would have a little bit of breast feeding all the way up until now when she was five, but she finally stopped and she gradually did it all by herself all the way through, you know, when she was like two or three she would say, you know, I’m gonna not have, you know, I’m not having me for the rest of the day, kind of thing, and at the end, you know, it was like, you know what, I think I’m kind of ready to stop. It’s just incredible, sleeping on her own, you know, some nights we were just home in Miami several months ago and she had this little tent and we’ve gotten her her own bed kind of for when she’s ready, and she was just like, you know, mom and dad, I think I’m ready to sleep on my own.

1:51:38 We said okay and she, like, went and laid in her bed and rolled over and went to sleep, and we looked at each other and were like, okay. She did that for a few nights and then said, no, you know, I think I’m gonna come sleep with you guys again, and she, you know, climbed back into bed, and she’s gradually, and, I say this because we’re, Robert Kegan talks about adult development and he says that, you know, Piaget, he knows childhood development goes through these different stages, he, you know, Kegan and some of the other developmentalists, Clare Graves, they noticed that development keeps going. We keep developing, we keep having these paradigm shifts, these kind of developmental levels, these new worlds, like you go through a developmental shift in you, everything means something different, it’s one of these paradigm shifts we’re talking about, they keep happening.

1:52:21 And when you understand that about children and about adults, it’s so cool being a parent. I don’t know, it sounds like you’re loving this anymore, kids coming or they aren’t? No, I think this is a, think we’re good on that. Best day of your life and when worst day of your life, what comes to mind? You know, falling in love with my wife, when we realized that we loved each other, that was the, that was the best day of my life.

1:52:56 Okay, yeah, that was it, yeah, realizing I wasn’t gonna be alone, I didn’t think I was gonna find someone. Yeah, I know, you know, I was, I was in my late 30s, 37 maybe, and I had accepted that, and meeting my wife was really amazing, matter of Burning Man by the way, so another shining endorsement there. Let’s say worst day of my life, worst day in my life, when I was young my father was pretty violent, and yeah, there were a couple of times where he was pretty violent with me and with my mother, that’s probably the worst.

1:53:42 Okay, why the worst day? Is that change now as you’re a parent, do you kind of like, oh, I do remember that, in what sense? I mean, it doesn’t give it more perspective, kind of knowing like what that child was like and maybe what you might have been feeling now that you’re a parent? Yeah, I, you know, I also, my father passed away a few years ago and, okay, he and I fortunately worked all that stuff out, we worked all the way through all of it until it was, you know, until it was resolved.

1:54:10 I have a more philosophical perspective, you know, he had me when he was, I think he was 20, and and he and my mom had a lot of, they both had a lot of problems, a lot of kind of emotional issues and things, and I having a child now myself, and I mean, and I’ve got, you know, my wife, my partner, we fortunately have stayed together and we have, we can afford to have help when we need it, so I am, I am so fortunate in my life to have things the way that they are, and when I look back at the pressure that he was under, now that I’m a parent and I can see how intense it is and, you know, the stress that that can come with it. Yeah, I look at, I look at it in as a gift in a certain way. I mean, I can, I can see in myself sometimes I get a little bit too angry, and I can see how, you know, as a growing up as a child with a parent who hit, and, you know, he was from a different time, that was more normal, you know, he had it much worse from his mother, I can see now, I can look back on it and I can see how that damages relationships and how getting too angry or being too aggressive, how that makes this, these permanent wounds when you cross a certain boundary, certain line.

1:55:35 If I get frustrated with my daughter, we don’t, we don’t hit our daughter, we don’t really, we don’t yell at, or we don’t criticize her, we don’t, we really try to be attuned to doing things in a different way, but I see, I mean, sometimes we get upset with her and, you know, and get frustrated, but I can see how, you know, sometimes if she’s more, when she was younger and so forth, but there sometimes it just comes over me, like it would just be so easy to slap her right now and just tell her, just, you know, shut up, but I know how that works because I went through that as a child and I know the shock of, you know, and how that damages relationships, and so can’t take it back. Yeah, I’m thankful that it happened to me, right, because now as a parent I’m a lot more sensitive to how sensitive my daughter is, and while I challenge her and I push her, and I, you know, there are a lot of times when I just say, you know, no, you don’t, you do not need to be fussy and crying right now, that’s, you can totally handle this, I don’t need to hit her, and yeah, so yeah, anyway, I don’t know if that can answer the question of it.

1:56:43 Helps. What scares you? I’m very interested in the future. My mentor, Wyatt Woodsmall, he said something interesting in the, in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator system, one of the big personality systems, I’m an intuitive thinker type, an NT type, and it’s a great system, everyone should, you know, check it out and learn about it, helps you understand yourself and others, but he said that Wyatt said the disease of the intuitive thinker is anxiety about the future.

1:57:21 All right, and so I like to think about the future a lot, but to read books about it and hang out with futurists and just think about what, you know, what could happen and try to be in tune with that stuff because of the change that’s coming, but if you think about the future a lot, you think about all the different scenarios, how things could go well and how things could go negatively, and so anxiety about the future is, yeah, it’s one of my issues. I worry, become afraid that people are gonna make mistakes or technology’s gonna get out of control or somebody’s gonna light off a nuclear weapon or, you know, yeah, you know what’s, have been doing 20 years from now? 20 years teaching people, teaching people how to be self-aware role models for other people, teaching people to be thinking in terms of, you know, Gandhi said my life is my message, to really get that who they are being is the game, and to be thinking about who they care about, whether it be their family, that children, their customers, their partners, their friends, and to make themself into their most actualized version of their own potential, of who they uniquely are, but also to be a living icon or image or role model of the values that they have so that other people can learn, because you learn so quickly about watching what another person does, by seeing who they are, and it happens automatically, it makes an impression or an imprint on you.

1:59:18 And so teaching people to do that, to be a self-aware, self- designing role model for the people that they care about, probably more of that, because I think I’ll be teaching at, in 20 years I’ll be teaching people who are more parents, mentors, teachers, leaders, and in that context this is very, very important. I mean, if you’re, you know, 21 and you’ve just started your first business and, you know, and you’re trying to figure out financial success, the self-aware role model, you want to have some of that, but you know, you’re just about, like, trying a bunch of stuff and making a bunch of mistakes and taking risks and figuring it out, if that isn’t the stage of life really that you’re at where this becomes more profound, but that’s just, that’s my guess.

2:00:05 You know, I started broadcasting on the show, I thought I was gonna just broadcast these great conversations and information and people were gonna get these nuggets of knowledge, and then when I, a few years in, I realized that they were actually watching the way what I was doing and how I was changing, and, like, I always realized it was more, it wasn’t about the info, it was just, like, people are, you know, watching how these people make me change, and that’s the thing that we’re paying attention to more than anything. Um, it’s, you know, it’s fascinating. I had no idea when I was making the David DeAngelo, when I was doing the dating advice stuff, that I was being a role model for men.

2:00:42 I did, I was, you know, I was my early thirties kind of thing, I thought I was teaching them knowledge, but then later, you know, unfortunately I, you know, I’m basically proud of the way that I presented myself from the knowledge, then, you know, a few little 20%, I wish I could go back and change, kind of thing, you know, but it’s, it still stands pretty well. But yeah, the men that have come to me and talked about how I, they saw someone living in a way where they were integrity with their values and that, but they still could have the success that they wanted, like an, you know, with dating and with women. Yeah, yeah, amazing.

2:01:24 It really was, you were teaching this to a state of being, a masculine state of being, not just say this and do that, and it all came across on your stage presence and everything you were doing, and even what you were teaching, and that’s probably why you moved one way and the industry kind of went this way, and you’re like, I’m gonna go do some other things, but yeah, true. Eben, I always ask people a couple questions at the end. I’m gonna ask you, if you could make a phone call to the 20 year old you, yeah, I guess he’s still in Eugene and no, be doing musician gigs and working with metals, you know, um, you know, if you could give him one piece of advice, what would you tell him?

2:02:08 It would have, it would have something to do with self education, the idea of being an autodidact. I would, I would tell him, every few years in your life, for the rest of your life, things are gonna change enough in the world, in business, in society, that you could go and take on learning a whole new body of knowledge, and it’s going to be up to you to notice when that opportunity is there, to find the people to learn from, and then to go and take the initiative to learn that thing and to meet people in that area and build a, you know, a social group and community, but but do that every few years, go and learn something new, and make sure they’re diverse skills that will likely become more valuable into the future. Think a couple of moves ahead and learn skills that are going to get more valuable into the future, not skills that are going to get less valuable.

2:03:20 Okay, on that same note, best advice you’ve ever received, could have been an ocean side or something you learned at Burning Man or something your dad or your mom said to you, what’s something that stands out? Mm-hmm, you know, my wife, my wife is my greatest teacher. She’s just revolutionized my view of life and reality and what this whole game is. She watched me when we first fell in love, you know, several, this is now nine years ago, and she noticed, so I, I didn’t, I didn’t think I was gonna get married or have children.

2:04:19 I just, relationships never worked out for more than a year or two, I was totally afraid of having a child, I thought, you know, it’s gonna kill my freedom, kind of thing, I couldn’t imagine the upside of it. Like, I was in that, join the club on that one. Yeah, yeah, I’m talking about, yeah. And so she pointed out the places in my life where I was doing loving things for friends and family, where I would have some friends over and I would go to the store and, you know, buy some thanks food to give to them, or, you know, I’d do a talk, she came to a talk that I did at Burning Man and I’m in this dusty tent just talking about some of my ideas about, you know, reality in life and so forth, and I had brought little packages of fruit and nuts there, little things, and I had a sprayer and I’d throw the mouth to people while they were there and I’d spray them with water, and she just watched these different things and she said, you know, the way you’re loving people, that’s the part of you that’s a father, that you, you have this father, there’s a part of you that is a father and that that’s how it’s coming out, and change it, it changed everything for me, you know.

2:05:25 And she kind of said, like, it’s gonna be okay, you know, what the kid thing. And then we had our daughter, and I remember when she told me, when she told me we were pregnant, which we weren’t kind of expecting it, we were kind of, like, not trying but also not not trying, and when she told me, I remember I was so happy, she wrote me a card and had the little ultrasound thing, she had, you know, mister period and all that, and I remember I was so happy when I heard about it, and I was so relieved that I was happy, I was so relieved in that moment, I was like, oh my god, I’m so happy that I’m happy, and but ultimately it helped get me across the, you know, the narrow psychological beam across the chasm to, you know, okay, I can have a child and it can be okay.

2:06:12 And yeah, and it turned out that that was true and I love being a dad, and now I’ve got a place to put this caretaking energy and Ike, but I can do it like a man, you know. I know, I know it’s kind of politically incorrect to talk about men and women being different, but we are, and, you know, moms love children in certain ways and dads love children in other ways, we have different things that we bring, and getting to care in a masculine way is such a cool gift. And I don’t know if it’s advice, but it’s like she pointed this thing out that turned out to be great advice, you know, in the long run.

2:06:50 Paradigm shift, yeah. Last part of that question is, to that 20 year old that’s watching us right now from somewhere around the world or listening to us, advice to them. You know, you said sometimes, when you’re that age, you gotta focus on what’s in front of you, okay, but also there’s opportunities to think about those, the future, there’s, there, and they’re gonna be living their 30s and 40s in this, you know, crazy time that we were talking about in the future, what advice do you give to them?

2:07:16 Mm-hmm, Eben, thank you so much for the time. A lot of people are maybe surprised that we could start off talking about internet marketing and Double Your Dating and we could get to, you know, Burning Man and opportunity and fatherhood and life-changing stuff, but I’m not surprised, because I find that when I meet someone who’s done incredible things with their life, even in business, that they’ve also grown personally, and I see this time and time again, and even when I have my own media bias where I’m thinking, oh, we’ll just talk about business, usually it breeds through those challenges, are really fascinating, well-rounded, you know, interesting person, it’s gone into the fear in so many different levels and taking risks and been beat down and gotten back up, and, you know, they’re actually using these fascinating, nuanced people that have diverse interests, and you didn’t disappoint by any means, so thank you.

2:08:35 Thank you for your honesty, I really appreciate, um, really going to even answering these questions and I love this stuff, this isn’t now, this makes sense. Opportunity is part of your evolution, and I’m think there’s gonna be more of your evolution as well as we start watch you over the next 5, 10, 20, 30 years, maybe for the next 200 years depending how long we’re gonna live, and that’s a beautiful thing, and I like how you stay true to yourself, you know, because we’ve all met the guy that it was David D and stayed David D 20 years too long, and I’m so glad you’re not him anymore, and you’re like, no, I’m gonna go do this and go do that, so that’s a beautiful thing. I think that’s kind of what you’re talking about here, check yourself, ask yourself those questions and be willing to change your dogma, you know, because that’s where big problems happen, when people, you know, think that they’re the same person they used to be and follow these old core values and then they get there and they’re like, what am I doing here?

2:09:24 So thanks for much for the book, thanks so much for your time. I know it was kind of weird how this all happened in the last moment, but you know, I’m not one who said this was meant to happen, but I think somehow it was. So thanks so much for the time. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well in your continued one, and thank you so much.

2:09:42 Yeah, thank you.