1:12:07Grant Owen · Interview
The Future of Social Media (Do This Before 2027)
A 72-minute interview mapping the exact hires and metrics that take a content operation from $0 to $100K a month.
September 4thThe argument in one line.
Getting richer is less a tactics problem than an identity, pricing, and risk-tolerance problem, since rebuilding those three is what actually raised this guest's income ceiling, not effort alone.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You've hit a real income ceiling, whether that's your first $100K or your first $1M, and more effort alone isn't moving the number anymore.
- You run a service business with too many disconnected offers and suspect the fix is narrowing down to the one thing that actually drives revenue.
- You feel outwardly ambitious but privately stuck around money and want a blunt, unfiltered outside perspective on why.
- You're deciding how to price a high-ticket service and want the reasoning behind a profit-share model instead of a flat fee.
SKIP IF…
- You want a tactical, step-by-step marketing or ad-buying tutorial; this is a mindset conversation with almost no how-to.
- Constant profanity and flexing about spending (six-figure handbags, multimillion-dollar yachts, private jets) will distract you from the underlying points.
- You need documented evidence behind claims like a specific neuron-firing rate for the subconscious mind; it's repeated as something the guest's hypnotist told him, not a cited study.
The full version, fast.
A marketing-agency owner who scaled from $12,000 to a multi-million-dollar-a-month business walks through the mindset shifts behind it: treating $100,000 a year as a trap, doing hard math before scaling, firing most of his staff in a single day once that math stopped working, and inventing a net-profit-share pricing model instead of a flat retainer. He argues that what you deliberately expose yourself to, from your living environment to your social feed, quietly sets your financial self-image, and that your reasons for wanting more money expire and have to be consciously replaced. Partway through, the host admits he feels personally stuck, and the guest spends the rest of the conversation coaching him through it live.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
guestJeremy Haynes
hostGrant Owen
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 10:05
01 · The $100K Trap
Opens with a three-tier framework for getting rich and a story about a family who couldn't afford a $5,000 emergency vet bill, then argues $100K a year is a trap: money unlocks options you can't currently picture, and most people are wired to avoid the pain real risk requires. Closes on a brief self-funded sponsor ask.
10:05 – 15:01
02 · Shedding Ohio, Becoming Someone Else
Backstory on a working-class Ohio childhood, watching a friend inherit a golf course and business at 16, and moving through Denver into a rough Miami neighborhood, with every move reframed as escaping pain rather than chasing opportunity.
15:01 – 25:24
03 · $12K to $550K, Then Total Chaos
The agency goes from $12,000 to $550,000 in year one, then a chaotic $2 million in year two with 27 staff across three offices, run like 'a chocolate factory also trying to make Skittles' with too many disconnected services.
25:24 – 29:17
04 · Firing 23 People to Invent the Rev-Share Model
Doing the actual math on what it would take to hit a million dollars a month exposes that the current setup can't get there, leading to firing 23 of 27 staff and refunding six figures of deals in a single day.
29:17 – 35:58
05 · Landing the Proof Client and the Perfect Client Traits Doc
A cold video pitch becomes the first proof of the new net-profit-share pricing model, and years of good and bad client lessons get written into a 23-point vetting document that also narrows the business to one core service: paid ads.
35:58 – 45:00
06 · Vision, Self-Confidence, and Asymmetric Risk
A biweekly vision-planning ritual, a 'foggy road' metaphor for trusting data over visibility, and a fire-versus-water framework for deciding which risks are actually worth taking.
45:00 – 59:39
07 · The Propaganda You Feed Your Brain
A $300,000 penthouse lease break, three Birkin bags, and a rage-fueled gym PR are framed as ways of proving scarcity is a mindset, alongside a curated content diet of yachts and Bugattis instead of frugality influencers.
59:39 – 1:13:11
08 · The Reasons Talk
Jim Rohn's 1981 lecture on 'reasons' reframes motivation as something to deliberately choose and update, illustrated by a man whose hatred of a homeless shelter drove a legitimately better one, and two stalled operators who needed new reasons to want more money at all.
1:13:11 – 1:21:26
09 · The Host's Confession and the Anchor Metaphor
The host admits he feels financially stuck despite three kids, a wife, and a career built on fear-based decisions; the reframe is that you can't risk money you don't have, but you can risk time, effort, and relationships, and responsibility is not a reason to take less risk.
1:21:26 – 1:34:39
10 · Rewriting Identity and Shooting the Gap
A recurring written exercise for rewriting your own identity, now on its 47th iteration, two stories framed as faith working through him, and a closing metaphor: everyone eventually 'gets juiced,' so push through the hard stretch instead of staying safe.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- $100,000 a year is only 'enough' if you've already decided to want a small, low-cost life in a low-cost place.
- Money doesn't just buy things, it unlocks possibilities you can't currently imagine, the way a video game map stays greyed out until you've earned your way into it.
- Deliberately comparing yourself to people far above your level makes your own goal feel closer and smaller, not further away.
- The hardest part of any big goal is rolling the first snowball; momentum makes everything after it feel easier, and most people quit before it ever gets rolling.
- Humans are wired to move away from pain, which is presented here as the real reason most people never take the risks that would make them rich.
- Doing the actual math on what it would take to hit a specific revenue goal exposed that the business's structure could never get there, and that clarity triggered a same-day decision to fire 23 of 27 staff.
- A net-profit-share pricing model beat a flat retainer because it was the only structure fair enough to justify a six-figure monthly fee: the agency only got paid big once the client actually made the money first.
- Narrowing from 'every digital marketing service imaginable' down to one high-leverage service (paid ads) is credited with letting the business actually scale, since only traffic drives revenue.
- A written 'Perfect Client Traits' checklist, built entirely from past good and bad deals, let a sales team screen prospects before signing them instead of relearning the same expensive lessons twice.
- What you deliberately expose your senses to, a smelly apartment, a small car parked next to a Bugatti, a frugal-flex influencer, quietly sets your financial self-image whether or not you notice it happening.
- People chasing more money after they already have everything sometimes lose their drive entirely; reigniting it takes finding a new reason, sometimes a selfish one, not more discipline.
- As responsibility increases with wealth, the common belief that you should now take less risk is identified here as the exact failure pattern that stalls people's growth.
- A concrete written exercise for rewriting your own identity in specific traits, done repeatedly over years, is presented as the real unlock behind bigger asks like doubling your prices.
The Real Blocker Is Identity, Not Strategy
MINDSET & MONEY
Across this conversation, a self-made multimillionaire keeps landing on the same point: pricing models, hiring decisions, and risk tolerance only work once you've rebuilt the identity underneath them.
01The $100K Trap
- A fixed income ceiling like $100K a year is only 'enough' if you've already decided to want a small, low-cost life; wanting more options requires wanting more money first.
- Every added dollar of net worth tends to unlock options you literally could not picture before you had it, the same way a game map only reveals itself as you explore it.
- Deliberately comparing your current goal to something far bigger makes the original goal feel closer and more attainable, not further away.
02Shedding Ohio, Becoming Someone Else
- Physically leaving an environment you associate with limitation can be a legitimate way to escape an old, poverty-oriented identity, not just a change of scenery.
- Painful memories and beliefs are more editable than they feel in the moment; techniques like changing how vivid or loud a memory feels in your mind can lower its emotional grip.
03$12K to $550K, Then Total Chaos
- Rapid revenue growth without a coherent service lineup creates real operational chaos even when the top-line number looks like success.
- Keeping personal overhead low while a business scales buys room to make aggressive, if messy, growth decisions without personal financial panic.
- Being willing to think 'bigger' before you know how to execute it is a different skill from actually knowing how to execute it, and conflating the two is a common early-growth mistake.
04Firing 23 People to Invent the Rev-Share Model
- When a business's structure literally cannot mathematically reach the next goal, more hustle inside that same structure won't get it there; the fix has to be structural.
- A single, well-quantified moment of clarity, doing the exact math on what's required, can justify a decisive, painful reset rather than a slow wind-down.
05Landing the Proof Client and the Perfect Client Traits Doc
- A pricing model that only pays you big once the client actually profits first removes a major trust objection and can justify far higher fees than a flat retainer.
- Documenting the specific traits of your best and worst past clients into a checklist prevents a sales team from relearning the same expensive lessons with a new client who fits the same bad pattern.
- Consolidating from many disconnected services down to one high-leverage service can be what actually lets a business scale, since that one service is the real revenue driver every other service depends on.
06Vision, Self-Confidence, and Asymmetric Risk
- A recurring, calendared habit of stepping back to reassess your business vision, even briefly, prevents a business from only ever operating in reactive mode.
- Decisions with a much larger potential upside than downside are worth taking even when they're uncomfortable; the discomfort itself isn't a signal the risk is bad.
- The further ahead you can realistically plan tends to expand as your financial cushion expands; someone with very little money isn't being short-sighted by only planning a few months out.
07The Propaganda You Feed Your Brain
- Your physical environment and your media diet both quietly shape your sense of what's normal for you to accept, whether or not you're consciously aware of it happening.
- Deliberately curating who and what you follow so it reflects the standard you want to hold yourself to is a concrete lever, not just a vague self-help suggestion.
08The Reasons Talk
- The reason you originally wanted to get rich can expire once you achieve it; if your drive disappears at a certain income level, the real problem is often a stale motivation, not a lack of ambition.
- A single strongly-felt reason, even one that sounds petty or spiteful in isolation, can produce genuinely large and positive downstream effects if it's aimed at the right target.
- People who've hit a plateau sometimes need permission to want something selfish for themselves again before they can reconnect with wanting to grow further.
09The Host's Confession and the Anchor Metaphor
- You can't take on financial risk with money you don't have, but you can still take on time-based, effort-based, or relationship-based risk, which is a real form of risk-taking without capital.
- Rising responsibility is treated here as a reason to take more expansion-oriented action, not less; retreating to 'safety' once you have dependents is identified as a failure pattern, not prudence.
- Modeling fear-based decision-making for your kids, even unintentionally, is framed as one of the more consequential costs of staying stuck.
10Rewriting Identity and Shooting the Gap
- Writing out, concretely, the specific traits of the next version of yourself gives you something to consciously act through in a difficult moment, like a hard sales call or a hard conversation.
- Identity change doesn't require rewriting everything about yourself at once; a single added trait, sustained consistently, can be the whole shift for a given period of your life.
- Since hardship is coming either way, the case made here is that pushing through a difficult stretch toward better circumstances beats staying in a 'safe' stall, because staying still doesn't avoid the hardship, it just avoids the upside.
Terms worth knowing.
- Net profit share deal
- A pricing structure where an agency charges a smaller flat fee plus a percentage of the actual net profit it generates for a client, instead of one flat retainer.
- Perfect Client Traits doc
- An internal checklist built from a business's past good and bad client relationships, used to screen new clients before signing them.
- Reasons talk
- A recurring presentation about deliberately choosing, and periodically replacing, your personal motivation for pursuing more money.
- Shoot the gap
- The episode's closing metaphor for choosing to push through a painful, uncertain stretch toward a better outcome instead of staying safely stuck.
- Asymmetric risk
- A risk where the potential upside is much larger than the potential downside, as opposed to a roughly even coin-flip risk.
- Identity rewrite exercise
- Writing out, on paper, the specific traits and behaviors of the next version of yourself, then consciously acting through them in real situations.
Things they pointed at.
07:16bookVital Lies, Simple Truths by Daniel Goleman
12:28bookUsing Your Brain for a Change by Richard Bandler
59:09linkJim Rohn's 1981 Anaheim 'reasons' lecture (free on YouTube)
Lines you could clip.
02:34
“That's how it is with money. There's all kinds of shit that's completely grayed out that you can't even fathom exists as options.”
05:47
“You stand there and you're like, I'm gonna build a fucking snowman, right? The hardest part is when you're initially picking up the first bit of snow.”
26:14
“The math just showed me with clear evidence... This level of pain isn't worth expanding into further. And so I made this decision. I was like, I'm going to temporarily contract.”
43:29
“The quality of questions you ask dictates the quality of the life you live.”
52:18
“I refuse to consume anything that doesn't validate the worldview that I intentionally want to think through.”
56:01
“Your subconscious fires 20 to 40 million neurons a second. Your conscious brain is like 20 to 40 thousand a second.”
59:39
“Between the last three months and tomorrow I have nine people that are getting a million-dollar-a-month trophy. I almost doubled above the highest I've ever seen after I gave a reasons talk.”
1:13:11
“Can I be selfish for a second? I think I'm stuck. I got a wife, I got three kids.”
1:16:18
“Picture at the bottom of an ocean floor an anchor... There's great men on earth that take those same exact anchors and they carry them in a fucking hot air balloon.”
1:21:26
“I'm on Jeremy 47.0 right now. That's how many times I've intentionally done this exercise.”
1:24:40
“He says, bro, I was just praying. This amount of money is the amount I need to be able to pay the difference in my rent.”
1:31:08
“They're going to crush you into like a little fucking juice... you're a hundred percent, no matter what, going to die. Why not shoot the gap?”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 09:18denseRedefining what 'rich' means and why $100K isn't it
09:18 – 10:05sparseSponsor break / subscribe ask
10:05 – 15:01steadyOrigin story: leaving Ohio, moving to Miami, shedding a poor identity
15:01 – 25:24denseScaling the agency from $12K to $550K, then a chaotic $2M year two
25:24 – 29:17denseThe pivot: firing 23 staff and inventing the rev-share model
29:17 – 35:58denseLanding the proof client and building the Perfect Client Traits doc
35:58 – 45:00steadyVision-setting cadence, self-confidence, and asymmetric risk
45:00 – 59:39denseCurating what you consume: the propaganda you feed your brain
59:39 – 1:13:11denseThe reasons talk: Jim Rohn, the homeless-shelter story, two stalled operators
1:13:11 – 1:21:26denseThe host's confession and the responsibility/anchor reframe
1:21:26 – 1:34:39denseRewriting identity, faith stories, and shooting the gap
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metaphoranalogy
I would love to help with three different levels because I think you can speak and almost like, I'm almost thinking about like a chapter with each one. Okay. Because the problems of the person making their first $100 ,000.
A month or a year? A year. I want to start there.
Wow, that's a damn shame. I want to start there. I want to start there.
Okay. Get a job.
What's that, $8 ,300? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you're fucking cooked.
I had a guy just the other day. I was out in California for my annual hypnotism with Dr. George.
And this guy, he's a trainer. His name was Brian. And he wanted to continue my training while I was out there because Nick wasn't coming with me.
And so Nick and him coordinated together. And I was like, how much do you want to do this? And he was like, I don't want any money.
And I was like. all right like i'll fucking happily pay you but whatever and i was like so why are you doing this you know and he's like oh yeah i just want to get to know you more and i was like okay like and i was um i was like dude i'll tell you what i'll give you one of my programs called master internet marketing you know 5k usually i'll fucking give it to you they're helping you out he's like oh dude i tried to buy that and i didn't qualify for financing and i'm like well dude we don't even fucking offer financing first of all like you just got to buy it or you know it's 5k like 5k big i mean how much you make each month 8k a month like you're absolutely fucked if you're only making 8k a month like you can't even buy something that costs five grand you know how many things cost five grand a lot like grant really think i'll give you a good one this one's real emotional you right this uh this happened to a family member of mine who's who had too much pride to call and ask anybody for help and was in the same situation couldn't get approved for any kind of funding or financing had a dog dog has some kind of medical emergency needs to get taken to the vet vet says we can help your dogs emergency surgery cost five grand girl didn't have five grand you know what happened to the dog
died dog died because person didn't have money you know you know how much they make actually a little more than eight grand about nine grand a month you know it's like the first thing is really important to understand about only 100 grand is regardless of what all these fucking people online will retaliate in regards to this message against they'll all say oh no 100 grand like that's a fucking lot and it's like listen if you're living in bum fuck nowhere right and you're not in a major city, and you don't have major goals, and you don't want to go live like a great quality life, and you can pull back your expenses on your lifestyle and live a small life, absolutely 100 grand can be enough.
I don't know who we're sitting here talking to, but I never talk to that type of person. I talk to the person who has far grander ambitions, who understands the true importance of money and why getting richer matters, which is options and freedom. You can't even literally think.
with possibilities until you make a certain amount of money. Like, have you ever played a video game? You ever play video games?
Yeah. Think about this. You ever play Grand Theft Auto?
Yeah. You remember when you first start, the entire map's grayed out? Yeah.
And it only unlocks as you go to the different parts of the map? Yeah. Really think about this.
That's how it is with money. There's all kinds of shit that's completely grayed out that you can't even fathom exists as options. And so you have enough money to unlock that part of the map to literally think with.
Meaning there's things that you don't even unlock as possibilities for yourself until you make a fuckload more money. There's so little possibilities down there at only 100K a year that I view it as just disrespectful to oneself. It's a self -imposed limitation.
So I consistently seek things that push me to my highest level. And I never frame myself that what I've done today is a lot. I always compare it to the biggest people on earth.
I always love talking about Elon as an example. Elon's like one of my favorite people in terms of capacity and human potential to look at that just immediately minimizes yourself. Or I say this frequently with mindset things, where it's like, if you want a $5 million yacht, like just actively focus on like 100 to $400 million yachts, and you'll naturally start viewing the $5 million one as not only attainable, but like really close to being free.
You know, it's like when you start really just comparing up in all areas, not just money, but like I said, potential. And in addition to that, you work in a place where it's not, not just you, but imagine you have dozens of people in the same organization that are all operating under that same kind of mental duress of just being impressed and trying to pull things out of yourself that you're in real time viewing as like not possible.
Like you're trying to get pushback where you're like, that ain't gonna happen in that timeframe. And you still manage to accomplish it in that timeframe. If you do that.
for again, even what might appear to be a short timeline, like 13 months, what do you think it does for your psyche for like that level of validation cycles and that many loops that you successfully go through that gets you to the other side? It just, you come out the other side of fucking monster. I think a lot of people lack that characteristic more than anything else.
They just go work like. regular jobs under regular conditions and kind of like lackadaisically go about life same thing when you're a business person just because you took the risk to go out there in the world and operate on your own and try to achieve freedom that push to have somebody just come in and point blank not only tell you but force you to experience it yourself like imagine that difference not just to tell you like what you and I are right now but to sit there where you're employed by that type of person, or you've paid that type of person to help hold you accountable, and you have them pressing their foot on your neck all day telling you, why the fuck did that take three weeks?
Get that done in an hour. What are you talking? Sometimes these guys tell me things like, I'll tell them go make 25 to 30 ads to follow the meta Andromeda best practices as an example.
And they'll tell me shit like their editors can edit like one video a day or like two videos a day. And I'm like, how are you tolerable of all this shit? And that's the main difference.
Most people settle into such a low level of tolerance thresholds for everything. And they end up just having such a slow paced life and they never achieve like true momentum. Once momentum gets in your favor, that's the other really important thing to consider.
All these things that, come off to others as excessive accomplishment in short timeframes are really just more of a byproduct of the momentum that they've otherwise created and now have in their favor as well. The hardest part is at the very beginning where you're trying to create momentum and you're trying, it's like, if you go look, you ever lived in Snow Grant?
Yeah. You see a beautiful backyard that just got like a thick layer of like six, eight inches of snow, right? Untouched, kind of like glittering, right?
And you stand there and you're like, , right? The hardest part is when you're initially, picking up the first bit of snow, trying to make sure it's packable, right?
And then rolling that little ball and just building that first giant lump. And then you got to build the second one. You got to build the third one.
You got to stack them all together. You got to get your little accessories in there. The easiest part is really after you just roll the first ball and get it going.
You know, it's like, that's when everything's in motion and everything else after that just feels easy. Most people never do that. They just like look at it and they're kind of like, eh, you know, I don't really feel like building a snowman right now.
Like I'm not, I don't know if the snow's right. You know, they never just like immediately try and get to the point in the action cycle where it all is easier. You know what I'm saying?
I think there's a lot of traps. Because there's a lot of traps, like even in the corporate - Hot chocolate in the inside next to your one fireplace would mitigate a lot of people's - That's what I'm saying, yeah. So it's like there's the corporate trap, there's the college trap, there's, I mean, that's aside from all the mindset traps.
It's exposure to risk. That's all it really is. At the end of the day, most people never go out there and just truly try to like take excessive risk because it's scary.
You know, living a life of excessive risk exposure. is arguably one of the scariest things that you can put any human being into feeling consistently and being exposed to. And that's why most don't do it.
They don't want to experience the pain. Do you know how little human beings like pain? You ever read the book Vital Lies and Simple Truths?
It's a great book by a guy named Daniel Goleman. In the first little part of the book, there's this page you open up and it's got a circle and it's got an X and he has you move the book back and forth. And then what you end up seeing is a blind spot.
The little X just fucking vanishes. Everybody in their vision, like you and I right now, as we sit here, we have these little blind spots about here. And you can see the blind spots.
If you like pull something that you're physically focusing on forward, you'll see a blind spot in your peripheral slightly. The book then goes on to say, we do this psychologically anytime that we start to experience pain. We manipulate our reality psychologically.
to move away from pain. That's how little we all like pain. So if you talk about exposing yourself to excessive risk exposure, essentially what you're saying is I'm exposing myself to the opportunity to experience a great amount of pain, a lot of pain.
And because of how naturally wired every human being is to avoid pain on a very subconscious level, most just won't do it because of that. The traps. I'm more here.
You know, these are like more of the surface level illusion of what you'd otherwise think you need to deal with. You have to go far deeper than that. You simply could just have to get really comfortable with a lack of certainty and a lack of comfort.
You will be exposed to pain. That's all risk is. It's just the opportunity to experience the downside of your decisions.
How many times you like to feel stupid in your life, Grant? None. Yeah.
It's like you also have the opportunity to expose yourself to just being a dumb ass. You know, you'll make some decisions where you'll be like. I can't believe I did that.
You know, like, my God. And you still have to keep it moving and you still have to recover and you still have to take expansion -oriented actions because if you don't and you're an entrepreneur, your whole life's going to collapse on itself if you don't sustain expansion -oriented action. You know, if you don't take revenue -driven actions, you're fucking cooked.
So your mindset becomes your best friend. You got to consistently work on it while you're being exposed to these. Otherwise, violent things to the human brain that we all just hate and try to actively move away from.
And you can't move away from the pain while you're going through it. You got to reflect on the deep reality and the true lessons of what you're being presented so you don't have to relearn them again and be exposed to it again. That's a tough thing to challenge anybody to go do.
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I can tell that you live in this. I can tell that everything, it's an overflow for you. What you're talking about right now is so natural.
It's so embedded in you over the past decade that this is an overflow. And I think like, it sounds like you also, were really great at shedding things.
Like, so like you moved away from your hometown to Denver. That's true. And you did move closer to family still.
I'm not sure about family life before then, but you moved away from that and you moved away from friends. And then you were like, I want to shed this. I don't like how the people talk here.
I don't like how slow this is. I'm going to go to Miami. And then within there, you shed poverty.
Like I can imagine there's so many tiers of like, dude, there's so many angles where you could just been that guy that just smokes weed and just been like that deadbeat guy, you know? Oh, it's true. Sedation.
There's so many tiers of it that you were like, oh, no, this isn't enough pain. I'm going to go to the next tier of it. And I think through each moving process, it sounds like...
Perceptually, I thought I was moving away from pain in those examples that you talked about. So as an example of moving from Ohio, it's like I view Ohio as a lot of pain. I knew...
This is a great backstory. In Ohio, at 16 years old, one of my friend's parents died, and he inherited a golf course, and he inherited about three homes. One was in Marco Island, Florida, and then another was spread out throughout Ohio.
At 16, I get this exposure to watching one of my best friends at the time just have to start running a business. I'm also exposed to the freedom that came with it and the challenges that came with it. It gave me a strong comparison bias where I was like, My father, he's a factory worker.
He works at a gas station today. My mom, she's a babysitter. She's on medical disability, and I have her on my payroll.
Long story short, I just witnessed limitation from a lack of money, and I witnessed challenge with running a business, but also the freedom that came with it and a lot of the options that I talked about, like unlocking for this. I got to see it all up close. I'd go back home, and then I'd go to my friends, and I'd just get this freedom on this golf course.
And it started to create a lot of pain to like the experience of being what I viewed as poor in Ohio. Like the house that I grew up in had sold for $119 ,000 during peak COVID pricing. That house, I think when it was bought was like $90 ,000.
Like very little appreciation over almost like a damn near 30 year duration in time. The moral of the story is very important to consider. Leaving Ohio was like leaving pain.
as I talked about in that Vitalizing Simple Truths book, we want to avoid and escape pain. So you can strategically do this as well. There's a great book by Richard Bandler called Using Your Brain for a Change.
He's one of my favorite authors. He writes books for psychotherapists. And Richard, in the book Using Your Brain for a Change, he teaches you all kinds of stuff about how powerful your brain is.
You could take a negative memory as an example. You can think to yourself, like, right, how am I processing this negative memory? Is it large?
Is it in color? Is it loud? And you could do things like turn the volume down and it lowers the intensity of the emotion you're experiencing.
Shrink it, you know, make it black and white. um he also then teaches you more advanced things like placing you as your current character like in the memory to like lend that more vulnerable harmed version of you like some power and you feel like the literal differences in real time that book uncovers a lot of stuff about simply put like almost like a light switch effect that you can tap into so point is you can justify anything you can you can look up is the sun good is the sun bad and you'll have information equal to both right Either one is something you can play into.
So therefore in all decisions, we have the ability to choose, do I want to use this this way or do I want to use this this way? I choose when I want to get away from something to start justifying it as like bad and painful because the brain wants to move away from pain. I wasn't doing that consciously at that time because again, I genuinely viewed it as pain.
Going to Colorado and having my best friend tell me like, hey man, I think this place suction is going to limit us. We're trying to get richer, dude. Like let's go to a place that seems like a better environment for us, you know, and coming to Miami.
that young age and being willing to move into the hood unknowingly. That was, again, a lot of pain. Like we're in the hood, dude.
It sucked ass. It was unsafe. Like you felt it, you know, limited options with our vehicles, quality of life sucked.
My living room was like one of my closets nowadays, you know, and we had a couch in it too. We had to like shuffle sideways to be able to get between the wall. We had air beds, you know, and they'd pop like every couple of weeks.
Like getting out of there, same thing. It's like the logic of like pain and trying to move away from it. I want to ask you on this, because I think it sounds like in this phase, right, when you transitioned from, from working to then starting your agency, launching your agency and getting the 550.
It sounds like the voice of motivation was this job and this guy. Yeah, I'd say so. I just knew it was possible because of that job.
That's the main thing I want to make clear. Like my skills were validated. There were many validation cycles that showed me I could do this and I'm just going to make more money from this.
So technically I have 5X my income in doing that in that first year, which was great. And then I started the process of just, enduring all of the upcoming growth cycles that related to that.
I had no idea to be clear in terms of being able to see things for what they are today back then. I'd have never guessed that. I think it's a perfect transition point because I think the level then is going to making your first million dollars, there's other gaps in there.
There's a lot. It sounds like the... Were you doing the $5 .50 a month by yourself?
To be clear... This is very important to know. I did 550 that first year.
And then that second year, that's when I believe I cracked a little more than, I think I did 2 million, a little more than 2 million in the second year. And that second year was chaotic. Like I'd hired, again, I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.
Hired a bunch of staff, like a little over two dozen staff. I expanded into three offices. I'm flying back and forth to Miami and LA every other week or every week at one point.
What was it like going from 12 ,000? to being like, okay, sweet, we're doing 550. Okay, now we're actually looking to scale.
These are our suite of services and these are the people I'm looking to hire. Like, who are you looking at? Was there still no information?
Oh, I mean, I was a pure fucking idiot to be clear at the time. I'm like 22 years old, like almost 23 years old at this time. Like, I can't stress enough.
Like, this is a totally different day and age. Like nowadays, dude, I have in my inner circle group a 16 year old that makes 800K a month. Like, this is like a totally different world even though it's only 10 years ago, you know?
There's, again, nobody, is like online talking about any of this shit. Like there's nobody I could have paid to help teach me this stuff.
There's no mentor to a marketing agency at the time. I was one of the mentors in a marketing agency course that came out like a year after that with Tai Lopez, you know, and he had 400 ,000 people that bought that thing. And like, that was when like that entire niche kind of like blew up with all these people finally teaching this.
But for me, I'm telling you, it was just pure pain, chaos, uncertainty. uh reactivity like you know trying to do my best of course through all of that noise and and just closing deals, trying to deliver, getting people great results.
We were killing it, but we also had a lot of failed deals too at the time. All these staff I'm hiring are just positions to try to help with fulfillment, sales. I remember at one point I hired 12 salespeople at one time.
That's how we got our third office out in Beverly Hills, which was hilarious. I have a photo, it was a great photo of, we had our second office in Beverly Hills and there's this parking garage, very small parking garage underneath the building there. And we had all these like plastic tables and like random office chairs that were just down there coincidentally that the guy had.
And we line up these chairs and I'm doing like two full weeks of sales training with these guys. I did three hours a day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening for an hour piece. And I had them walking around downtown Beverly Hills doing like selfie pitch videos and bringing people into the office that they were pitching and like closing people on all kinds of random ass stuff.
And - What were you selling specifically? So many different things. Like pretty much every one of those digital marketing skills I talked about, we were selling PR services in addition to that.
You were a one -stop shop. Every fucking thing you can imagine that was a digital marketing related service. We were absolutely selling.
Then that caused, if you can imagine, I always compare it to like a factory that produces chocolate bars. And then in addition to that, with the same factory and the same system, they somehow also try to produce Skittles. Yeah.
You know, it's just, I didn't even know that that didn't make sense to do at the time. You know, it's like, I'm just like pushing. and all this shit through.
Were you like desperate for money? Were you like, I just want money? No, I mean, I didn't feel desperate for money at all.
I felt very, I felt very like capable. Again, I had a really small lifestyle. I didn't, at the time I was paying, let's see, my personal place I had during that specific year, I upgraded from a place that cost $1 ,600 a month to $2 ,300 a month.
It was a way nicer building. I had office rents for the first time. That maybe took me like 20 -ish K a month in office rents.
Like these weren't like crazy places. I had, a place in LA that I split with, at the time, one of my exes and one of her friends.
So I was with two girls in that place. I was like 1 ,300 a month. I didn't have any cars.
I didn't believe in cars. I just would Uber everywhere. I was flying economy initially.
And then eventually I remember I got to upgrade to first class, which was great. But again, like negligible on that cost. Everything else was just either accumulated or going towards payroll.
I had a lot of payroll. That was definitely my largest. There was a decision that was like, I need to hire these sales guys.
Not just to be clear. Like I knew that I needed to go bigger. Like I, again, I knew.
From that time I'd spent with that sales trainer and all the mindset stuff that he gave me, I was like, I know I got to go bigger no matter what. Like under all circumstances and conditions, bigger is always better. And I have to find a way to grow.
And even though I don't know what I'm doing, like that doesn't negate the fact that I can get bigger and then I can bust out of this specific threshold I'm in. And so expansion was always top of mind for me well before I ever had reasons. You ever heard of Maslow's pyramid or Maslow's hierarchy?
The top of the pyramid is the self -actualization process. You got to keep in mind, like my brain wasn't even full. developed at the time, fucking 23 years old in this specific window.
You know, I, I, I would say though, in hindsight, that's kind of the logic I believe I was following was just, I know I could do more. I know I could be more. I wanted to see that potential.
I wanted to like become whatever that man specifically would look like. And I just try, you know, I just try my best to consistently grow and going smaller never made sense. Like I didn't, I never really resonated with the idea of small, you know, and that's because in that key development stage, I was working with somebody i was talking about going fucking 10 times bigger than anybody else could possibly fathom and like genuinely trying to go that big and justifying why you would go that big and so all those kind of things were floating around my head what was the worst decision you made in that in that shift and what was the best decision start with the worst one you know i'd say the worst one would just be running the business the way i was hiring all those people the conveyor belt example of having a factory that does all these fucking different things and trying to act like you're going to be the greatest when you have all these different things you got to produce in products to be clear like what departments did you have
I mean, dude, graphic design, videographers, copywriters. And you're not hiring VAs. No, these are like United States, like Los Angeles and Miami, Florida.
Are they W -2s? Yeah, like W -2s, 1099s, like every one of them in person. What person is being like, yeah, I want to work for this guy.
It's a 23 -year -old guy. No, you'd be impressed. I mean, these people were very enthusiastic about the opportunity because at the time it's like, you know, not to sound pretentious, it was a great.
amount of momentum that I had because I was like publicly documenting this entire journey. And so there was all kinds of young people. I'd say so for sure.
I had all these people that were just very enthusiastic about the story and wanted to participate in the story. And so, you know, people, I'll say very clearly, like people looked at me as a young person, but a great leader, even though I was pretty like stupid at the time still, and like, didn't really have the level of leadership characteristics and traits that i've been able to grow into today obviously but back then i still had like a lot of great characteristics and absolutely i could teach people a lot of stuff and like the skills were there and and again it was looked at as uh as i like a stepping stool for people to go into something else that they wanted to do kind of like how my role would have been at peter's yeah um were you finding a lot of good people yeah i'm not really I mean, they were pretty like average talent.
They weren't the best people. I didn't know how to recruit the best people yet. I also didn't technically think I could afford the best people yet.
And I don't think the best people would have worked with me at that specific timeframe. It was just stepping into a very chaotic world at that time where there was just a lot demanded of you. And keep in mind, I was taking what I had learned at that sales trainer's business and I was implementing it in my own of essentially just operating with this.
It'd be a very uncomfortable, non -traditional role that you'd step into if you chose to work with me during that timeframe. Were you discontent? Because you're talking about how when you've envisioned, okay, if you want to have a $5 million yacht, you're going to look at a $500 million yacht.
And you're like, ah, well, this is kind of poverty in this. I was surrounded by it. I mean, that's the thing.
That's the best part about these major cities. Being in Los Angeles, I remember thinking, my God, the wealth that's visible here is just exceptionally grander in comparison to what I was feeling in Miami. and i remember i remember just the people i started to get exposure to even in that year i had great mentors i finally got exposure to through doing deals with them and i got to experience like a really powerful network of like far older people than me that were far richer than me that weren't in my business but could give like great business advice and yeah i just had world -class like truly like world -class people through the types of niches we were servicing as well that became people I could just call upon and ask questions to.
And that helped me a ton. And it showed me how what I was doing was both insignificant, small, could be far better. There's just a lot of value in the perspective of comparison in that example.
But nothing ever made me feel derogatory about that comparison. I think it's a really important thing to point out for people is you're not going to feel insignificant in a negative way. You're going to feel...
quite the opposite like inspired motivated by this idea that you can do far more than what you're otherwise achieving in your current state does that make sense yeah because i mean you come like you're extremely humble like and in terms of like you there's nothing about you that's trying to impress you're just it's it's it's very evident that you're like i this is where i was i made a lot of mistakes this is where i got to and i was able to think and i like your risk tolerance just kind of grew like it wasn't like like these are small risks that you're taking that are really big risks in life but like i'm moving to these different cities i'm shedding these friends i'm taking these jobs i'm quitting this job that should be safe that most people might say hey i got a good situation here i'm making 120k a year why should i leave this that's a lot of people that sit in that space and then you're like nope i'm i see opportunity for i want to grow yeah and i'm not content i was always wired that way
you know, even before that sales trainer job, I was always wired with the idea of seeking like the next opportunity that would be better for me. I never really viewed these transition as like risks. I viewed them in the pursuit of trying to have a better opportunity than what I was experiencing in that moment, you know?
Yeah. So when you hit, so the 550 to 2 million that second year. Pure fucking chaos.
I mean, it was insane. Was there celebration in that or was it just like, dude, I'm not even close to where I want to go? Dude, I didn't have time to celebrate.
You know, I remember staying up till like 3, 4 a .m., like waking up the next day at like 8 a .m., fucking just dying. That was also during the timeframe where I was telling you, since I was out in LA, I started getting hit by all the vegan propaganda. That's when I chose to be a vegan and that added, who fucking knows how much body stress and years shaved off my life for that one.
But moral of the story is, no, I mean, it was cool. I remember thinking like, yeah, This is sick.
But I mean, dude, I was so busy with so much shit that I had going on that it was just damn near impossible. I will tell you this though, all of that boiled up to the point where I made one of the best decisions I ever made during that timeframe, which was a really hard, like excessively painful decision. At the time I had 27 staff, I cut 23 of them.
All the offices didn't make sense anymore. So I got rid of all three offices. I remember going in that particular day, I was just so high stress.
And just so fucking cooked mentally, I was like, this cycle's got to end. And what caused it was I did the math. I had asked myself, I said, what would it take to hit a million dollars a month?
And I went up to my, I had this little glass wall and I did the math. And I just remember looking at that math and being like, I mean, dude, I'm already stretched so fucking thin at like, you know, 200, 300K a month. Like how in the fuck?
Am I possibly going to 5X that or 3 .5X that, give or take the month, to hit a million bucks a month? And the math just showed me with clear evidence, which was, again, why I look back and see I was pretty idiotic because I could have done that math before I made all those other decisions to scale the way I did. I had the clarity I needed.
And I was like. This level of pain isn't worth expanding into further. And so I made this decision.
I was like, I'm going to temporarily contract. So I went in, first thing I did, fired and refunded about 109K worth of deals. So I contract back down to maybe like 100 -ish, somewhere in the 100, 150 range.
I don't remember the exact number. And I kept three people. That's a big choice.
Oh, yeah. And I sent this email. It reminded me of the big short.
Where Burry sends that email and he's like, get fucked. I didn't say it like that. I was like, hey, I'm super fucking stressed over here.
I'm done. Here's your money back. Here's all the assets we made you.
We got to dump it. And I go around, I tell the staff, I'm like, look, I'm just a fucking idiot. I'm sorry.
Here's all this stuff. Three of the staff come at me. They try to sue me in California for telling them I owe them extra money.
I get those fucking little settlements and start paying those people down monthly because I didn't even have enough cash to start paying them lump sums. I contract back down to come into Miami and I went back to my apartment. I had this little two bedroom apartment, technically a one bedroom, two bath, and it had a den.
So I viewed it as two bedroom. And I just sit down and I started doing video pitches. And the best decision I made was doing the math.
The math showed me the clearest possible answer. If I wanted to hit a million dollars a month, I asked myself, what do I want my quality of life to be like? How many deals do I actually want to do?
And I said an audacious number. I said, I only want 10 deals. A million bucks divided by 10, it's $100 ,000.
And so I thought to myself, I could do 100K a month deal 10 times over. I had one deal to that point that was a standard retainer deal with a guy doing like 200 mil a year that we charged 100K a month to just for a flat fee. And I thought to myself, I was like, I don't think I'm going to get there through a retainer like that.
I got to do $200 million. I probably got to do something that's a little more fair, going to be a rev share. So I start by thinking, businesses probably aren't going to want to pay a gross rev share.
I'm thinking a net profit share is what I'm going to end up doing here. So at the time we charged 10K a month for the fee. And I was going to try to make that other 90K a month per deal off of essentially like a net profit share.
I had at the time, like maybe a handful of deals that we had taken to a million bucks a month. And I thought to myself, I was like, why wouldn't they give me 10 % of that? if I'm the one who like really influenced it and helped him a lot to do it.
So I also made it even more fair. And I was like, it's only off of actions that are trackable back to us. And I made it even more fair than that.
I was like, we'll do a fucking month to month deal and really throw our balls on the table here. You don't want to work with us. We probably don't want to work with you.
We like to do deals that we consider are operating from like a high trust society. We don't like to think with all the exposure that the fear -based people will naturally bring up when they hear that like, oh, they could fuck you and just leave the deal. They could.
I hope I don't work with people like that, which thankfully I haven't. So anyway, I go back home and I start video pitching people. I sit down and I make these little five -ish minute videos, pitching them on what I thought I could do for these folks.
And one of them in particular was this guy named Dan Luck. And I pitched Dan by printing off a piece of paper, holding up his face. And like Dan at the time, he's about 300K a month in this period.
It's like 2018. And he gives us a shot. He hears about our experience with the sales trainer.
He was stepping into the sales training spaces, teaching high ticket closing. And he's getting all his deals at the time from JV deals. And so he wasn't even doing paid ads.
And he brings us in initially as a consultant, okay? This is at the time, maybe like a 5K a month deal, just for like a little bit of consulting. Then the first two weeks, we fucking doubled Dan's revenues for, for a bunch of shit we were telling him to do, gets a 600K a month.
Dan calls me, he goes, what's the highest client paying you right now? And I was like, about 20K a month. And he was like, I'll pay you 25.
I want to be your top priority. And I told Dan, I was like, I want to rev share it to you. And I want to be able to get to the point where I get 100K a month off this deal.
Like here's my goals transparently. And we shared that with every deal we'd ever do from that point forward. We always tell him.
And so Dan teased me up a deal where we thought that could make sense together. And dude, it took eight months to help get Dan to a little over 2 million bucks a month. And like within that period of time at 2018 of like this transition period for me where I'm starting to actualize and see the validation of that great decision of doing the math.
I had people around me just telling me like, dude, you're a fucking moron. Like you're not gonna get people pay 100K a month. I still get people today, even though I've done it so many times over that are like, you're not gonna get 100K a month of a deal.
Anyway, we. And validated it that quick. And then we went out ever since.
And it was just a game of accumulation. Like, can we get this next client to pay us like that? You know, and naturally we had, I'd say for a solid, like probably two years through COVID, a higher failure rate of getting people to that amount paying us.
And we'd probably have to work with like, you know, 15 -ish clients at a time to be able to make mid -range couple hundred grand a month. Eventually like high couple hundred grand a month and then through time. You know, we made the goal real and like we had enough deals.
We accumulated enough people. We actually didn't even have to do with 10. We had some clients that paid us a lot more than that.
Today, we can work with about 12 to 15 people tops because we also got far more efficient through the years. And bro, that decision was like truly like the best decision in hindsight I think I'd ever made was just rev shares. I want to break that down.
So did anybody teach you the concept of rev shares? No, I just did the math. And I was like, there's no other way to make this fair.
You know, like no one's just gonna fucking pay me 100 Gs a month. No one's gonna risk that capital on me. It makes more sense to risk that on like ad spend and all the things that it takes to grow to the point where you can comfortably afford that.
I just thought to myself, what's gonna be a fair deal? So that allowed you to cut out all these different services that you were doing. Yeah, that's another great thing you just brought up, which was another, it's like the second best decision I ever made.
All we did was we recognized nobody gives a fuck at all about our time and effort. They only care about the revenue. So at that point I thought to myself, I was like, I'm only gonna do things that produce the revenue, which is what?
Running the fucking ads, okay? I was like, we'll build a funnel for somebody. Like we'll build emails for people, but like we're just gonna do it more as like a thing that we do rather than a service that we're selling so we're not obligated to keep doing it.
We just literally would tell people, we'd be like, we'll build this shit out, but like we're not doing this shit ongoing. Like we will only do this when it relates to something that's gonna make us more money over here, okay? And the main focus became the most efficient service you could do, which was paid advertising.
And as much as everybody wants to argue that like these other things are revenue drivers, they're a part of the revenue process, but none of them drive any revenue until traffic goes to them, right? And so we just became essentially like, let's go in and create these things, be incredible at messaging, be incredible at running paid ads, like dominate that specific field and do it across every ad channel that makes sense to spend for that specific client.
That made everything - And you were honing in on info. Well, at the time specifically, when we very first got started, I'd say for the first like three -ish years of being in business, we were exclusive to operating in info just mainly because of that period of time I spent. And because you had accumulated all these relationships.
All that experience, all that relationship capital for sure. And then after that, I realized, I was like, that doesn't make a lot of sense. It's kind of dumb.
What we did instead was we opened up to just a specific type of deal. Around 2019, maybe 2020, I developed this system. I called it my perfect client traits, which were these 23 individual characteristics.
And it was just, it was more about a good deal at that point because we recognized like a good deal from a bad deal. You wrote down 23 different things. Yeah, literally.
I have a doc that literally says, it has a little stick figure at the top. It says, Megaldon Marketing Perfect Client Traits. And it's just 23 of these characteristics.
Says things like understands our work, respects our work, and these little paragraphs underneath it that kind of articulate the lesson of how we - You learned it the hard way. Why 23?
Just the number that it came out to. It wasn't like, hey, I need 23 straights. It was literally just sitting down and thinking, okay, our worst deals, what have those been like?
Our best deals, what have those been like? Let's just document those lessons. Let's give them to the sales team so they can go out there and try to identify who are the good people, who are the bad people, and so we can vet from this perspective.
We actually share this shit with clients. If they're in our sales process, we go through it with them. We're like, hey, we want to share this doc over to you so you can see if everything matches up.
There's so many lessons that we've learned. It'd be silly not to document those kind of things into a version of an SOP or a guiding principle doc to ensure that you don't make the same mistakes because you can do a deal again. with somebody else that has the same characteristics of the worst people, you're going to get a shitty deal as an outcome of that.
You got to keep in mind, like there's a very, very particular type of deal that has high probabilities versus low probabilities of hitting the amount of revenue we need them to make. You got to keep in mind, really think about this grant. They have to net a million dollars from me to get a hundred K.
You understand? So it's like, they're paying me 10 K. But that 10K fee gets deducted from what they owe on the rev share.
So if they net 100K, I only get the fee. If they net 200K, I'd get 20K because they already paid 10 of that 20K they'd owe on the rev share. So I had to net these guys a million bucks.
You know how few businesses on earth, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, they claim 0 .1 % of all businesses on earth ever achieved 10 million bucks a year, let alone the smaller probability than that that would ever achieve a million bucks a month. Gross. Think about the fucking tiny little.
And then you're talking about within the niche of it too. Yeah. And that's what I mean.
So then it became less about like, all right, let's stop just operating in this niche. Let's look at just deals in general that might be able to hit these levels. And that opened us up.
That opens it up a lot. That's where we got the expertise to help like any kind of high ticket product or service based business. Yeah.
Like we are the fucking best at that because for years, like half our business initially. for about, I'd say at this point, actually about a third of it was in info. And then we've obviously maintained that.
But in addition to that, we've expanded into like such a broad amount of random high ticket shit. I want to ask on that though. So like, let's bring it back.
You fired 23 people, you kept four. Yeah, I had 27 altogether, so I kept four of them. That's right.
Are those four people, were they killers? They were great. They were more like integral roles for the business that I felt like could fit into the new way of how we were going to operate.
How did they react? All their friends just left. I'm sure there's some small offices.
It wasn't really like that. It was kind of like a scary thing, but these people had a lot of reassurance because, like I said, I told them specifically. I was like, look.
I was just running this like a total dumbass. Like the way that it was doesn't make sense. Like here's the new way.
And they all saw it clear as day. They were like, this makes so much more sense in comparison to how it was back then. And as I also mentioned, we were able to validate, a leader is a dealer in hope, Napoleon, right?
It's like, that's all I did. I just. They refocused everybody on the new vision.
And that's what people need to believe in who aren't going to go out there and take the entrepreneurial risk. They need to have somebody that is leading them. And they also need to have a vision that they actively want to participate in building.
So we all believed in it. We all knew it was possible. I mean, we all could look at our client roster and say, look how much money we already made these other people.
Why wouldn't we have more money if we did a net profit share with all these other guys? And the incentive was also aligned perfectly. Like all these people, since there were fewer of them, I could also pay them better.
Like it just made sense for them to stick. And it's important to note, although yes, the volatility of my leadership aside, it's like I still added stability to those people specifically, even though I brought definite chaos under the others that we had to let go. So the other thing I'm connecting is you sat down, you did the math.
Yeah. And this other situation, you sat down and you said, okay, here are the 23, like math 23. How often are you kind of just sitting down and looking at the scope of the business and saying like from a vision perspective?
Usually every other week I actually have it in my calendar. It's at 10 p .m. and it just says sit down and plan your vision.
And it's kind of like at this point more of like a vision calibration, especially at this level because visions are like very long term at this level. Usually visions are much shorter term, the smaller amount of money that you make so you can increase the frequency. You have to have like kind of just a simple kind of move.
It's very important to note. Visions are hard because as I mentioned, you don't even know all the possibilities of, you don't have those options unlocked yet for all the things that you're going to unlock. I always compare it to driving down a foggy road.
You got maybe 100, 200 feet of visibility in front of you. You can trust your GPS blindly. Pilots fly through clouds all the time because they have those fancy instruments up there.
Boats fly through complete darkness, same kind of concept. They got instruments to rely on. That's in business, generally being able to trust the data.
compounding in a specific direction, being able to generally guide your business a particular way to get a specific set of outcomes. And along the way, maybe the certain points, the fog clears up a bit and you can see a tad further ahead. And then a certain point, the fog just recedes.
And you're like, well, I got so much more expansion into how far ahead I can look at. And therefore you get to make longer term decisions. The less money you have, the shorter that specific view generally is.
The more money you have, the further into the future. Like you could eventually start thinking in decades or like some people do like generationally as an example. But until then, it's a very isolated, like, you know, focus on self kind of thing.
The more money you accumulate, the more you expand beyond self and the further that time horizon becomes. So as I made more money, the vision naturally expanded. Has your self -confidence always been high?
I mean, you look at a man today in front of you that's gone through, I don't even know how many validation cycles of trying something, seeing it work day in and day out from like small things to excessively large things to insignificant bets, like very significant bets. Um, it's, it's, uh, just, I don't even know how many cycles of action that I've gone through and endured that have led me to this current like state, you know what I mean?
Articulate it with, uh, okay. I needed to sit down and eat a meal. It's like, bro, my to -do list compounded by the day, you know, every moment I was like a well -paid babysitter, like constantly all these staff were coming and like asking me fucking infinite questions, all the clients hitting you up and asking questions, all the new people you're about to do deals with hitting you up and asking your organization questions.
all these people you got to lead and guide and direct. And like, in addition to that, the conveyor belt chaos of all these random services that we're doing at the same time, it was like four hours of sleep on a night overnight basis, thousand plus caloric deficit every day for like a fucking year and a half, just eating away at my body and accumulating who much, who knows how much body stress.
Yeah. The amount of like, again, like actual like pain that I just consistently endured just eventually like accumulates to the point where these decisions, although yes, have a lot of emotion and negative things associated with them that we could sit here and dive into.
The pain, I can't stress enough, like human beings absolutely fucking hate pain. If you want to make any decision, you can do that strategically by just starting to absolutely fucking hate the pain that you're experiencing and like justifying the pain of your current circumstances and looking at your circumstances as painful to actively use that.
as leverage to overcome anything else you could articulate on the other side that would hold you back. I mean, I think fear is the thing that I'm dancing around here where it's like, I think a lot of people, I feel fear. Yeah.
So it's not necessarily like, I guess there's a certain point where like the amount of pain you feel gives you the encouragement to overcome whatever that fear is. Did you experience that? If you're on fire and let's say there's like a little body of what might be water or it could be gas in front of you, right?
But you're on fire, okay? And yeah, it could be gas that you're about to jump into, but it could be water, right? Are you jumping in that little body of water or maybe gas, or are you just going to stay on fire?
I like how you put that. Well, that's what I'm saying. It's like, that's how all situations are.
It's generally an asymmetric, it's not, not all risk is symmetrical. Like me, it's not like a 50, 50 generally risk is asymmetrical. And so in most situations, there's.
a lot higher upside than there is downside in simple decisions like that. Whereas in some situations, there's an unknown risk, like there's unknown unknowns. And then in some situations, there's not a lot of upside, but there's a lot more downside.
Those are generally the ones that you'd want to stay more clear from unless it's a situation that you have to figure out. Like I said, in that situation where you're on fire, it could be gas. You might even smell gas because maybe you're covered in gas.
Who knows? There's a lot of situations like that where you've got to determine what makes the most sense in real time. The decision we're talking about here, it seemed like a very asymmetric upside risk for me where I could see that if I did make that choice and endure that short -term pain, that I would experience a tremendous lift on the other side to my quality of life, my circumstances, my business.
Everything seemed like a very positive on the other side of that choice, regardless of the fear and the pain associated with it. Do you think that... a lot of people mistake that, like that in reality, it is asymmetrical, a lot of these decisions?
Most people don't even think with that at all. You know, if you really think about it, like what amount of people do you know that genuinely have a articulate way to break down risk? I mean, how many people really look at most decisions from a risk -based perspective?
You know, how many people attempt to like quantify it? You know, it's still a guess. to be fair.
It's not like life's giving me some fucking AR overlaid perspective where it's like this decision, Jeremy, is this much upside and this much downside. It's like, you're just kind of feeling it out in real time and trying to determine if it's going to be good or bad. You don't really know, you know?
So that's what you have to figure out. You kind of have to trust your intuition. A lot of people, like especially religious people, I'd encourage leaning into God and trying to trust that like intuitive thing inside of you in those moments.
I was very far from that. It sounds like you mentioned you had some mentors that kind of came in. Oh yeah.
And these are really just like clients and like people in a network at that point that I know, none of which were like mentors that were able to say like, Hey, we see that you're doing good stuff. Yeah. I'm just asking questions.
It's a great, great quote. One of my earlier mentors as a client of mine, his name, Greg, Greg had said, um, the quality of questions you ask dictates the quality of the life you live. And so I would just constantly go around and I would ask people who had results and outcomes.
I want to just. whatever the best question I could think of was. And I would usually get like one or two little nuggets that for that next short -term duration of time, I'd attempt to apply into my life and business.
And a lot of those little nuggets were some of the things that brought me some great clarity along the way in my initial journey. You mentioned faith. Was faith a...
part of this the whole time? I didn't even know the word faith until like a year ago. You know, I didn't have any connection to God.
I didn't have like any faith -based decisions. I didn't have any of that at that time in my life. I was very isolated in that regard.
You seem so well -rounded in this. Was it therapy? Was it just like, hey?
No, definitely wasn't therapy. Yeah, never did therapy. I think I did.
I think I had therapy once. I had fallen out with some of my best friends at the time when I was like real young. And I'd seen a therapist literally one time and he told me, he said, you know, all this happened because you didn't love yourself.
And I remember feeling like that was like the most profound thing I'd ever heard. You know, and I didn't feel like I needed therapy again after that. I was like, it makes sense to me, doc.
You know, that changed my life for the better for sure. One session, 125 bucks.
That's awesome. So tell me, I want to get to that level. We've surpassed that level of, you know, $1 million.
And now we're at this place where you're scaling to $10 million a year. I'm seeing these like mentality stack. Yeah.
and these decision -making processes that you're making. And I'm hoping, like my goal is that it would connect with someone that feels like, I want to make where you're currently at feel attainable to people that are not even close to that. I want to see that gap.
I want them to be like very aware of the mindset that you have and the mindset that they currently have and what's holding them back. I feel it myself. Like there's aspects, there's so many things of what you're saying is like, man, I just, yeah, I'm playing in such a small way that I just limit myself more than anything else.
Yeah, most people do. You know, that's the biggest issue. I call it propaganda.
You know, you got to have a high level of awareness around the data that you consume through all of your senses. Okay. And think about this as a great example.
In the most recent month and a half. The penthouse in which I currently reside in while I sit here and film this started to have a sewage smell in the entire guest wing of the house. The building acknowledges the problem.
They claim that there's these P traps that are failing and you'd have to demo all the bathrooms in order to solve this problem. And I don't know how the fuck a little piece of plastic, little P trap looks like this, by the way. It's like a little J and then it runs through the wall and it holds a little bit of water in it and it acts as a seal.
So whatever's on the other side doesn't come through your sink, shower, toilet, things like that. And I'm like, how the fuck does a piece of plastic pipe just all of a sudden fail? Who knows?
Don't care. I call the owner of this place. I rent this penthouse.
And I'm like, hey, like, here's the problem. Like, you know, you gotta fix it. This is what they propose.
And he essentially just tells me a very nice way, okay, sorry, I'm not going to do anything about it. Go fuck yourself. And I'm like, go fuck myself, huh?
So fine with me. I dropped about 300 grand over the course of this last couple of weeks, okay? 104 ,500 to break that lease because I was in a three -year lease.
I was year two and I'm responsible for 75 days of the lease term after that. I'm paying 29 .5 a month for this new little mansion I got. That was about 90K rent times three to be able to move in.
And I spent about 100K in furniture to move in. My fiance bought out on some furniture and thankfully - was a little conservative because she could have gone harder.
And so about 300K deep on this, okay? And as an example of the propaganda lesson I'm trying to articulate to you, even just smell, okay? It's like, what kind of actions do you think I would take if half my home is unusable because there's just like a sewage shit smell in half of it for about a month and a half that just kept getting worse?
It's like, what kind of decisions do you think you make in that type of environment? Or like, are you excited or enthusiastic to come home knowing that's a problem in your home that's technically solvable by somebody who's in control of it but doesn't want to solve it? It's like, no.
In that example, it's like, not only am I going to immediately spend that money that's required, whatever the fuck it takes to get out of that situation, I also look at it like a great financial endurance test. Like, am I going to feel the effect of the 300 Gs in that example? Am I going to let something like money, hold me back and make me live in sewage.
You know what I'm saying? I like to think of this in all contexts. I like to think of it like, I'll give you a good one.
The last month and a half between December and right now while we film it, we're in the middle of January right now. I bought my girl three Birkin bags. One was 25K, one was 30K, and then the other one was like 24K.
Now, I don't like a piece of leather to be bigger than me. And so whenever I get to the point where I feel like even just the smallest little bit of scarcity, dominate it somehow you know i want to i want to be able to because at this point in revenue it's like there's nothing that would make me feel scarce there's nothing that should make me feel scarce it's only a mindset okay so like most people they don't condition it out of them they don't take the opportunities that are right in front of them where something like a piece of leather is bigger than you or like a little fucking watch is but you're telling me a fucking watch is bigger than you grant you know it's like you're telling me a car is bigger than you yeah like stuff stuff is bigger than my human potential.
You know, like no fucking way is it happening like that. And then I go and I buy the stuff and every single fucking time it obliterates that little fucking pussy that sits in us that tries to act like the limitations are real. They're never real.
You know, the other day I was telling this in this vlog I filmed on the way here. I was, this was just yesterday. I just done lap pull down.
I just done shoulder press. And then I sit down at this like little cable row machine. There's this thing on my chest and I'm sitting down and all I got to do is go like this, okay?
And I go to pull it. It just doesn't fucking go, you know? And I'm looking at my trainer and I'm like, did you up the weight?
And he's like, no. And I'm like, this is what I did last time. He's like, yeah.
And I'm like, I'm not even joking, dude. I'm trying what I think is my hardest. And it just won't fucking go.
And my neck's like all fucking, you know, I'm like, and it just wouldn't fucking move. And I just get up and I fucking lose my mind. I'm like, you're telling me that the same fucking weight I just did is not being fucking moved right now under conditions I've previously moved this weight dozens of times in a row.
It's not fucking happening like that. And I just start pacing around like a fucking madman, start hyping myself. I'm like, you're going to shut the fuck up.
sit down and move that fucking weight. And I tell, I tell my trainer, his name's Nick. I say, Nick, how many reps have I done with this at my max?
He said like 20 some, I'm like, we're doing fucking 20, whatever. I sit down and immediately, immediately just fucking crank the shit out of it. Get up, keep pacing, tell myself to shut the fuck up.
And we're doing it again. Ask him how many reps I just did. He said like, I don't know, 26.
I'm like, fuck, we're doing 27 up the weight to ups the weight. Do fucking 28 of them at the higher weight. right, go to do the third set, get four reps in, and the fucking cable snaps on the damn thing, I'm like, good, mission accomplished, you know, the fucking inner pussy will shut the fuck up now, okay, it's like a constant, that was yesterday, it's a, you have to dominate, it's like if you're playing musical chairs, and there's one chair left, And it's two people that have to sit down the inner pussies one of them and then the captain Which is you needs to sit down and run the fucking show Okay, that inner pussy will attempt to sit in the chair sometimes and make decisions you ever watch the movie 300 You need to spartan kick that motherfucker in the chest out of that damn chair And you got to do it through the situations that present themselves to you Like when you can't move the weight or like when you look at the piece of fucking leather And you think that a piece of leather is bigger than you and you can't
financially afford it. It's like you have to be able to show yourself. You're going to live in shit.
You're going to live in sewage. No, I'm not going to fucking live in sewage. I'm going to spend 300 grand.
I'm going to make it all back too because you know what it does when you spend the money? It unlocks a heightened level of creativity. It unlocks a new way to make a fuckload more money that you previously would not have committed to if you weren't spending the money in the first place.
Hire that employee that costs more than what you think you can otherwise afford. They always make more money when they're true A players and they cost a lot of money. There's circumstances across the board that through real life can act as propaganda to be able to show yourself through these data.
All your senses have it, okay? And in addition to that, the stuff that we consume. with the eyes and the ears consistently hearing the emotion it stirs in us.
It's like I was telling you about my feed. I refuse to consume anything that doesn't validate the worldview that I intentionally want to think through. Okay.
I love following people that I think are like true fucking idiots. Like I follow people on Twitter that try to say that like a Camry and a double wide trailer and investing like, like I watched this guy, I don't know his name. It's like I'm blinded to whoever he actually is.
But he says, he's like, dude, I have a Camry. I bought cash. I live in a dribble -wide trailer.
And he has like $50 ,000 invested. And he flexes it like he's the fucking goat, dude. He flexes it like he's the man.
And I demonize that motherfucker. I demonize it. I hate it.
I don't want to be like that at all. Then I follow people who just... ball the fuck out like i said like okay in the context of me saying like oh i bought these three bags it's like somebody out there doesn't buy any fucking bags it's like it's so much it's like no it's not i follow the asian people you ever see the asian people in beverly hills it's like bro those asian people go so fucking hard if you know what i'm talking about they have a whole show on netflix yeah called like crazy rich asians or something like that bro they have dior they have there was this one lady in that show that had dior come to her home With racks and racks of clothes, right?
Like I'm so poor, I got to go to Dior to buy stuff, right? They've never offered the opportunity to physically come to me, right? And it's like, what level am I operating at?
You know, three bags. It's like, they haven't fucking offered me more, right? They haven't come to my home.
They haven't done any of that kind of shit. It's like, think about this. Again, like I live at this place currently, like I said, I'm currently buying out of, to be fair, that.
is is right in downtown it's right across from the heat arena there and bro i watch across the street there's some of these yachts that pull up that without exaggeration are like $200 million, $400 million. Sergey Brin, co -founder of Google, pulls up the other day with the fucking co -founder of WhatsApp's yacht in front of his.
This motherfucker has three yachts. That one yacht was $450 million. Okay, it took me two minutes and 27 seconds to walk from the bow of that yacht to the back of the yacht.
And I'm six five, I was walking fast. Okay, two minutes and 27 seconds, bro. You know how long that is?
Okay, and I'm sitting here and I'm like, And I can't buy a fucking like $10 million yacht. Like, what are we talking about?
You know, this guy's got three. It's like you watch, like you get exposure to this kind of stuff. Or it's like, you know, I got nice cars.
It's like, I got maybe a million -ish dollars in cars. And then I walk out front into my valet to get into my roles. And I watch a guy who's got a $3 million Bugatti pull up and get in his car at the same time.
And you know what I mean? It's like, you got to dwarf your significance in the sense of the content consumption, right? Or it's like the messaging in general.
You got to be able to follow stuff that keeps you in the right frame and doesn't kick you out of it. Like, imagine this with the news. Think about how many people we've come to the conclusion now collectively.
like, oh, watching the news is bad because it's all like fear -based negative shit that'll just like put you in a bad state, right? Like, you know that. But it's like, think about that with the content that comes across your feed when like you're unknowingly watching stories and watching videos and like listening to this hearsay and like.
your subconscious consumes 100 % of what you expose it to. Just because you don't think it consciously has an impact does not mean it doesn't subconsciously have an impact. My hypnotist, Dr.
George Pratt, he likes to say, and I don't know if this is accurate. No, this is what Dr. George says.
He told me the other day when I was there at the end of December, he was like. your subconscious fires 20 to 40 million neurons a second he was like your conscious brain is like 20 to 40 000 a second and i'm like dude if that's a real stat like that's wild in terms of the difference and people don't understand it they don't study it they don't understand that All consumption, like I said, living in the sewage impacts me whether I consciously think it does or not.
The exposure to like, my car's small, that guy's car's fucking big. The yacht is fucking wild. That makes this more attainable.
The content I consume, the Asian people. It's like all these examples I'm telling you are just like random things I'm thinking of out of like thousands that likely get exposure to me in a week, right? And then all those things, they maintain a worldview.
You shape beliefs. and behave in the context of how you view yourself in the world. You view the world completely different than how I view the world.
I make my decisions from how I view the world. You make your decisions based on how you view the world. Right now, while we sit here, Grant, there's some crazy motherfuckers that are in this very city that believe the world's going to end tomorrow.
And they're out there at the store prepping like a motherfucker. They're out there buying a ton of shit. They're buying batteries.
They're buying rice. They're buying fucking canned foods out the wazoo. They're buying ammo.
They're prepping as though tomorrow's the end of the fucking earth. You and I sit right now casually and we just fucking yap about making money and getting richer, right? We're on the same earth as that person.
Why is their decision the way it is? Why is ours the way it is? Right?
Think about this. It's because of how you view yourself on the earth and how you view the world and what's happening in the world. That is the most important thing to consider and to maintain.
Okay? You let that shatter or unknowingly shift to a slightly different worldview that's not going to benefit you relative to whatever vision you want to actualize, you're fucked right there. As soon as you become self -aware of that, the game changes dramatically.
Everything becomes excessively intentional with consumption and the propaganda you expose yourself to. You'll never fucking go watch, listen. People will be in the middle of telling me some shit.
You ask my staff. They'll say some shit. I don't want to hear it.
I'll tell the person straight to their face. I'll be like, I don't want to fucking hear what you're talking about. Shut up.
Stop talking to me about that. I don't want to hear it. Can I ask a question on this?
Nobody does that. You know what I mean? Because they don't maintain their worldview.
Can I ask a question on this? Good. There's so much about what you're saying that I'm like, goodness gracious, inject this into my veins.
You know, like I wish, it's in that lane of, yeah, it's like a motivational reel. You know, I'm like, inject this. I want to wake up every single morning and kind of remind myself of that.
I want to live that headspace. I also want to hold the frame of like, when does it become vanity? because i want to i know that you hold this from a from a powerful reason for you yeah when i say like you hold you hold this where it's like the physical things that will not have power over me because i can be more than that yeah talk to me about from a philanthropic perspective because i think that it can't just be about getting the bigger stuff yeah 100 i want it to be about being a bigger person and being like i want to be like i almost want to be about giving Dude, it's different reasons for everybody.
So that's the most important thing. You know, Jim Rohn has a great four hour video you can watch from 1981 in Anaheim, California on YouTube for free. Real shitty quality, but incredible presentation.
Little green chalkboard in a gray suit. And in that video, he introduces the concept of needing reasons and he barely touches on it. And I've given a whole talk on this at one of my masterminds recently.
And dude, listen to this. So the talk that I gave on reasons, we usually get like maybe, One to five people that'll hit a million a month or like go real big and hit five million a month We give them these big fucking trophies to celebrate it at this most recent mastermind.
So between the last three months and tomorrow I have nine people that are getting a million dollar a month trophy So I almost doubled above the highest that i've ever seen and given away after I gave a reasons talk Okay, and here's what I want you to understand in terms of self -awareness to this Reasons and motivational drivers are dynamic, okay?
So you can be like me in that example and you can choose to not like let stuff if that feels like a profound thing. But absolutely to your point, it can be philanthropic. I'm gonna give you a fucking great one, Grant.
You're gonna love this, okay? I have a guy, he absolutely fucking hates with all his heart homeless people. Hates them.
It's the thing drives him up a fucking wall, okay? Poisons. his local community that he participates in, okay?
In that community, it's incredible what would happen if there wasn't a homeless shelter smack in the middle of it. And it's not a regular homeless shelter. It's one for the drug using homeless people.
So it's a bunch of fucking loonies. And they only let people sleep there three days a week, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The homeless people have to have $5 to be able to stay the night.
So they all go pander for $5 every day. Apparently a hit of crack only costs three bucks, by the way. So they also pander for little hits of fucking drugs.
This guy knows that this community would be off the fucking charts better if that homeless shelter didn't exist. How much, just right here in the story before I continue, how much of a dickhead does this guy sound like so far? It sounds like the biggest asshole in the world.
Does he sound like an empathetical dude? It sounds like a mob boss. Okay, so listen to this.
So this guy's drive to get excessively richer, okay, comes from the fact. that he wants to build a way better homeless shelter in a part of the city that's not here so he can get those homeless people out of there. He wants to get way richer to be able to lobby the correct politicians to be able to help transition these homeless people from here to there.
And he wants to get rich enough to be able to pay for press in the process to look like the man. Because at the end of the day, he's taking these people from a place where they're poisoning a community. to a better place with a far better facility and i mean a larger far better facility that has so many more things that are beneficial to them comparatively what that facility lacks and fails to provide them seven days worth of care far more beds far better food far better conditions in a part of the city that's believe it or not actually far safer and doesn't allow them to go out and just roam into a community where there's high foot traffic and high tourist areas right Because every politician that he needs on his side goes out there, accomplishes that exact outcome.
And in the process, about 3 .5 Xs from a couple, low couple million bucks a month to damn near about seven plus million dollars a month, right? From a perspective of pure fucking hatred of homeless people, right? He pursues a philanthropic action that genuinely benefited not only the local community, every business a part of it, every tourist that would go in there.
But in addition to that, the actual homeless people that he claimed he hated. It's like as an example of a reason. No, it's genuinely hatred.
There's nothing but hate in that man's eyes when he was taking that set of actions. And that's the point I'm trying to make. It's like for him, that was a profound reason.
As another example, I've had this happen with two guys recently. One of them was at 2 million. Actually, matter of fact, they're both around 2 million bucks a month.
One was, his name's Edward. Edward's about 2 million -ish a month, sometimes hits 3 million a month. And we had a guy just recently joined us named Steven.
Now, Steven specifically does about $20 million a year. So again, give or take the month, 2 million bucks a month, but someone's a little bit below that. Um, both of them have jets, like nice jets, like, you know, Gulf streams.
Uh, both of them have kids. Both of them have been very like oriented towards their families and like sacrifice doing things for themselves for a long period of time. You know, they get to go on nice trips.
Their kids go to the best schools. Um, you know, they have things like sprinter vans and drivers and like, in some instances, security, give or take the conditions, they eat the best food on earth. Uh, they get to pay and, you know, consume content and help from whoever the fuck they need whenever they need it.
Um, and they lost all their drive. They have absolutely zero drive to get richer at the point that they come in and like get exposure to me, okay? And the very first thing I do is I give them the reasons talk.
And I say, every reason that you've used to get to here is no longer valid and it has to be swapped out to something else. And I tell them stories like the homeless guy. And I tell them stories like some of the selfish shit that I don't like to have dominate me.
And a lot of them just be like, no, I understand that. And I'm like, what we have to find We have to find your specific reasons, okay?
Like I want to be really clear when I say this. There's plenty of people on earth who are some of the most empathetical, like philanthropic versions of whatever you can view a human being to be. Those things do genuinely drive them and they really want to use that stuff.
I'm telling you now, majority of people are very selfish and they are not in any way, shape or form motivated by empathy. or philanthropic drive to go do anything. They view it almost as a tax strategy more so than anything else from the exposure to the types of people I've seen.
Up close, personal conversations you'd never hear otherwise that if they ever said out loud would make them, to your point, look like raging assholes, okay? And I tell these guys, like the Steven guy's an example. I said, I go, Steven, when was the last time you'd literally done anything for yourself?
I said, just something that... wasn't for your family, wasn't for your kids, something big, like something that you previously wanted, something that you wanted to do, something you wanted to accomplish, something that you wanted to make real that you just literally haven't gotten to do. And this was so profound for Steven.
You can tell in real time, he was like, he's probably set himself aside for over a decade, hadn't done a selfish thing. And I asked Steven, I bring him to the awareness. I go, up to the point where you started making $20 million, what was all this stuff?
And he was like, getting the hottest wife. having kids, getting them into the best school, everything he had otherwise accomplished, getting a jet, like these kinds of things were all on his list. And after he accomplished that, he like unknowingly shifted to, okay, I'm moving from Miami to like a smaller city up North where there's like better schools, you know, every decision he stopped making for himself and he started making for others.
As soon as he started tapping back in. to selfish motives and selfish reasons. A man unlocked a fuckload more money on the other side of that.
And you can see the fire come back in his eyes in real time. Edward, on the other hand, none of these things resonated with him. You know, it didn't matter how many random things you told Edward about X, Y, Z that he could go do that may help him out, that may get him to the point where he like feels alive again.
And it took Edward just trying a bunch of random stuff. He couldn't think through. what the reasons may be.
What he had to do instead was he had to go and just try different stuff. Now, here's the crazy part about what Edward chose to do. Edward chose to spend a fuckload more money on his staff.
He chose to give everybody a big old pay raise. Chose to give everybody in his team, and everybody knew that was going to work for him, about 2X to sometimes as high as 3X, whatever they were making prior. And he watched in real time the quality of life for every person that he worked with improve exponentially to the point where all these people started helping him and his organization make a fuckload more money.
So in his world, what he had to do in order to make a fuckload more money was help all the people that were already working with him and the new people that were going to come in and work with him. He just had to help them get rich. That's all he had to go do.
And that helped him in the process feel a little better about his circumstances and what he was doing to provide for people. But he came to me at the end and you know what he said? He said, Selfishly, this feels remarkable to be the man that can employ these types of people.
And I now directly realize I am financially responsible for them. I'm the reason they have the quality of life they do. I'm the reason they get to go and spend time with their kids.
I'm the reason their kids go to wherever they go to school. I'm the reason they afford the healthcare they afford or that they don't afford. I'm the reason, like you say, Jeremy, their dog dies or not.
You know, he's like, after I became aware of that, I'm the reason they drive what they drive. They travel the way they travel. They go where they go.
He's like, I dictate all of it. He's like, it's the most like selfish commanding thing I think I've ever felt that I realized I was lacking. And after I started contributing to it officially, it unlocked all the next revenue that I needed to grow beyond where I was at.
So again, my point is, is like the reasons are something that generally create some kind of emotional stir because as a human being, the one benefit that we have over any kind of artificial intelligence or something that may otherwise be able to replace knowledge work is the ability to stir emotion. And anytime, really think about this Grant, anytime that you've experienced a heightened emotion, what you do with the emotion next can either be profoundly beneficial or even some instances ruin your life.
I got pulled over yesterday. Was it yesterday I got pulled over? Yeah, I got pulled over yesterday.
I do this dumb ass maneuver where I'm, so my office got this little set of train tracks in front of it, okay? And I pull up and there's like a regular car in front of me that just decided to stop as the. train track light just starts coming on.
You know how when the train track lights come on, you still got a little bit of time well before the train comes. Where the stick's not even coming down yet. This fucker sees the light turn on and just like within a millisecond, his reaction time was insane.
This stops his car. And all I got to do is just get in front of this guy and then take the quickest left you can imagine. And obviously I do that, right?
Asymmetric risk clearly in my favor. So I go around this guy. I'm like 20 feet to taking the left.
Lo and behold, What a fucking day. There's a pack of motorcycle officers just sitting on the corner of that little road I turned onto from my office.
They're not even on their bike. The fucking guy just points at my car and just goes, pull over, come on. And I'm like, fuck, dude, I'm just trying to go to my office.
He's like, I don't care. That was so stupid. And I was like, yeah, you're right, officer.
My apologies. That was like the one instance of experiencing the asymmetric risk. Anyway.
I hate the fact, I tell this guy, which is probably stupid of me. I go, I'm sorry, officer. I just had a call.
I got to jump on. Like I was trying to go fast. You know, I didn't like that the guy stopped and he goes, he's fucking ranting about how stupid that was.
And I was like, all right, officer, my apologies. Like, you know, please write me the ticket. This fucker takes probably an additional like 20 minutes to write this ticket.
Okay. Just to obviously fuck with me. That's how I viewed it anyway.
Maybe he just took that amount of time, but I viewed it that way. And so anyway, I go inside after I get this ticket, I do my call and I just have this like fucking. rage inside of me where I'm just like, I fucking hate this guy.
And they're just still sitting out there on the corner. I can see them on all my cameras. I could see them in real life through the windows.
And I'm like, fuck, I hate these guys, you know? So anyway, any kind of moment like that, I always use the emotion for benefit rather than for a negative. I tell my trainer, Nick, I'm like, Nick, let's go to the gym.
We just walk, you know, in our little shared backyard with the gym next door. And bro, that was what I was telling you. Like I used.
pure fucking rage to like endure one of the greatest workouts I've had ever. I turned that emotion into like a great, hopefully like physique. I'd lost, I don't remember the exact amount.
It was like under a pound, but it was like point something in fat yesterday. I gained a little bit of muscle this morning when we weighed. And right after I got done with the workout, again, I felt like I'd released it.
I'm sweating my ass off and I'm a white boy. I get all red, you know, and I. fucking panting and i walk outside to the officer where they're out on the corner i just reach out my hand and i'm like just want to say thank you officer and he grabs my hand he shakes it i'm like i was one of the best fucking workouts i i've had in a long time like thank you so much and i'm sorry for being stupid you know if you boys need to come and use the bathroom like come on over and um you need a drink or something like we got waters and whatnot And he didn't take us up on that, thankfully.
I still didn't like the guy after him. Anyway, my point is, is like, we get stanced through reasons to experience an emotional state, okay? And when we are able to successfully tap into something, because think about what happens is you really get like real rich.
Like I'm talking like jet money rich, right? Your life becomes so peaceful. Like you live in the neighborhoods where like birds chirp all day.
You probably even start to buy trees. that attract certain birds, right? Like you're curating your environment.
You know, you ever been seeing those like oak trees that have the warm white lights wrapped around them? In this new house, I have so many of those trees in the backyard and they're center around this beautiful pool. And I called some light guys right away, cost 12 grand to just have these beautiful lights on year round in the backyard.
It's like, you get to start curating your environment like that. You just experienced nothing but pure peace. and comfort you ever seen that video of drake the rapper having people try to catch bees for him when he was in saint trapez you ever seen that there's a video of of drake he's sitting at a restaurant he's outside there's bees flying around and all his fucking people are literally grabbing bees with their hands yeah drake doesn't even have to deal with bees anymore that's how rich he is you know it's like again you you buy the most stable peaceful calm life you can imagine when you get some serious money and so you lose all of the like little emotions that you don't even have the awareness in the past Gave you an opportunity to tap into them to like craft your circumstances to be better And then if you did leverage those kind of emotions to get richer, they're just not there anymore once you got richer And so to get richer beyond that it's like the reasons change dramatically Sometimes they're small like the officer pulling you over and they they fizzle out right after a workout Some of them are like that fucking german kid.
I told you about we're like I gotta tell you as time goes on it loses power, you know, and then Most recently with my fitness journey as an example, it's been, what would God want me to look like? I felt like I'm almost disrespecting God just being fatter.
It's like, what would the messenger look like is what I've been telling myself now. And that gets the extra reps out of me. And that one sustained itself over a broader duration of time.
You know what I mean? It's like, you gotta be dynamic with the reasons. Can I be selfish for a second?
Yeah, good. I think I'm stuck. You're saying this and it makes a lot of sense to me.
I think I'm stuck. And I wanna describe my situation to you. Yeah, good.
I got a wife, I got three kids. Nice. And we got married, I was 20.
First kid was an accident. I was working as an investment banker. I feel like I've made fear -based decisions every single time.
Even when it's pain -related, I still make the fear -based decision or I make the calculated measured risk that to my shed circle. It seems like, oh, you're going for something. My wife was just saying to me, she's inspired by me flying around and doing podcasts.
She's like, I just love that you kind of think about things and go for it. And I'm like, you don't recognize the gap between where I'm at and where I'm needing to be. And I appreciate the encouragement and the affirmation.
I love that my wife is affirming me. That's great. I love that.
But I'm so poor. And I think it's hard for me to break the fear of what it would take, to get rich because you don't have a lot of money yeah yeah it's like that's all it is so when you don't have a lot of money you really you really think to yourself well i can't take a lot of risk but this is what you got to detach from you can't take a lot of financial risk by literally risking cash that you've got to make more cash.
What you can risk is time and effort based risk or relationship based risk. Like you doing things like this is a great example. There's got to be some kind of opportunities that crop up to be able to do something.
Like as a great example, you spending time right now to do this, like you didn't ask me like, Hey Jeremy, can we throw some links down in the description? And will you like affiliate with me if I, if I like put some shit down there and I'd be like, yeah, sure do that. I'll give you some money.
You know, like you're probably originate some sales for us. You're probably going to originate sales for us by me being on this and getting the exposure i am right now regardless when i get a little bit of money off that you know it's like how many other people you think you've done how many podcasts you think you've done grant that's my 12th one To be clear, it's like you had 12 different people so far that have just straight up fucked you if you haven't asked for that kind of cash.
And that's what I'm saying. It's like you're already taking the action and technically taking the risk. It's like you spent your money to rent this place.
You spent your money to fly out here, right? It's like think about this. You spent your money on this camera equipment and the editing and things like this.
It's like that's a time and effort -based risk. There's still financial upside in that risk that could help you get richer. Now, I want to be clear in saying generally time and effort -based risks are the ones that have longer cycles of time to get to the point where money comes out of it, and they're not as high leverage as what a money -based risk is.
A money -based risk will typically result, depending on how you risk the money, of course, in either a short -term gain that can be large or potentially a longer -term gain that can compound and be significant. And that might be, as an example, some of the the ways that you're thinking that are going to inhibit you and make you more like fear -based.
In addition to that, you have to layer in an additional complexity, which is the responsibility of your family and your wife. So typically, if you , okay? Picture at the bottom of an ocean floor an anchor that's labeled kids with each one of your kids' names on it, right?
Picture your wife's name on it. Picture things like debt repayment or like vehicle expenses or like mortgages or rents and any other costs that you simply have like business costs or just things like this as an example. Now, those anchors at the bottom of the ocean floor, they're there because they're heavy anchors, okay?
And they've sunk to the bottom of the ocean. What you have to learn to do is you have to learn to be able to negate the weight of the anchor and be able to carry it successfully.
There's great men on earth that are amongst you that take those same exact anchors and they carry them in a fucking hot air balloon and are like 20 ,000 feet in the air and not giving a fuck about that level of responsibility. There's guys like riding rockets that have little baskets behind it carrying their anchors while they just fly around the earth a kajillion times.
Meanwhile, you're stuck at the bottom of the ocean. And so what you have to do is you have to start to detach the weight of the responsibilities. Typically, as you get richer, Responsibility increases.
I believe they're correlated. I will say there's instances where that cannot be the case. Like if you just get like a windfall of cash and like a stock or a crypto or some shit like that, it's like that generally doesn't come with a heightened responsibility.
I traded between 2023 and 2024, risked about 80K and made about a million trading NASDAQ futures. There's some of the most emotional money I've ever made in my life. But to be clear, anytime I make the money, there was nothing on the other side of it.
That was like a responsibility. So there are instances where like getting richer does not correlate to heightened responsibility. For the most part in a business, the richer you get, the heightened responsibility is.
Now, typically when you have a heightened responsibility, most people have the mental model of heightened responsibility means I can take less risk, which is where you really fuck up. That mental model is a failed model, okay? As you get a heightened level of responsibility, you have to get.
better and do more and increase your leverage in the next set of actions you take to get paid more money. Okay. So what you actually have to do is you have to get richer, get the heightened responsibility, and then continue to take expansion oriented actions, revenue driven actions at an aggressive pace, fulfill on the responsibility that you've taken on, show yourself and validate that you're actually going to fucking do what you need to do to get that done.
And then guess what happens as a result of that? You go right back to getting richer again. And that's an accelerated cyclic process that happens.
You get richer, you take on more responsibility, you continue to expand and take the actions necessary and you get richer again. Now through that cycle, you literally accumulate more cash. Your revenue goes up each month.
Most people have the most complex version of that same model. They get a little richer. Their responsibility increases.
Then they break off over here and they say, more responsibility means I need to risk less. Then the contraction cycle starts. And then when the contraction cycle starts, that adds pressure.
And then when the pressure officially comes, they have to take action again. And then when they officially are forced to take action again, guess what happens? They get richer.
And then as a result, they have this long, inefficient part of that same mental model that can be completely cut out by one simple shift mentally, which is as responsibility increases, that doesn't negate the fact that you still have to go out there and take expansion -oriented action, revenue -driven actions perpetually.
When you do that, you officially break that gap of thinking that responsibility lowers your ability to take risks. You understand? Can I ask this last thing on it?
For me, I'm really scared of asking because I have this firm subconscious belief in reciprocity. And I think it actually like really screws me. And I'm also really scared of asking for a lot of money or like someone called that out to me a couple months ago.
And like someone was just like, Grant, just double your price. And I did. And no one said no.
Yeah, very common. This is also very important to consider, Grant. Identity, okay?
So as you go through the process of wanting to level up in life, generally you have to detach from old identities, okay? There's old characteristics, there's old traits. That when you stay attached to the idea that that's how you are, you won't be able to actually grow beyond a certain level because you are acting through an old, no longer beneficial identity.
Okay. So let me be really direct to the United States. Every trait and characteristic of you is fully fluid and dynamic.
100 % of what you consider you can change. Okay. There's a physical attributes.
There are hereditary variables at play. There are genetic variables at play that, sure, you do not control, okay? But let me be very direct when I say this.
Every single thing that you view that's environmentally shaped you into the person you are, that from a story -based perspective, a trauma -based perspective, a win perspective, that has made you think, okay, this is who Grant is, 100 % of that is something that a light switch can change. in a decision, right? And so what you have to do, this is a great thing.
You initially need to define what the next identity is and what it looks like, okay? And you have to ask yourself, what would grant 2 .0 be? And characteristically, you got to define what that looks like for what's going to be the most beneficial to you at that next heightened level you're going to operate at, okay?
And when you do this exercise, initially, it's just a sheet of little characteristics and traits. And what I did, I actually did this when I had very first quit that job. I did Jeremy 2 .0.
And I'm not trying to sound like some fucking dickhead over here that's just ranting about stuff. I know this might sound a little ridiculous. I'm on Jeremy 47 .0 right now.
That's how many times I've intentionally done this exercise. So the very first time I quit my job and I go and I'm just out here doing sales calls all day and just pitching the shit out of people to try to start my business. I literally wrote on a piece of paper, it was one of those giant like sticky pads, you know what I'm talking about?
Like an easel board that you can rip off and like put on your wall. I had these things all over my fucking wall. I probably look schizophrenic, dude.
So I write down, I write at the top, I write Jeremy 2 .0 and I write this like little kind of like stick character in the middle and around the whole character, I just write all these traits and characteristics. And when I'd be in the middle of a sales call, all I would do, bro, is just look at the sheet. And I would just try to act and behave through whatever characteristic might benefit me in that moment that I'm trying to shift.
Now, I want to be really clear when I say this, because I think it's really funny to be fair. When I say I've made that many iterations, it just means there's been that many times that I've realized there's some specific trait. or characteristic in my identity that's no longer going to serve me.
And it doesn't mean that you have to like redefine every single thing about your character. It might be like one specific thing. Like as a great example, in this most recent iteration of myself, I've really made God like a core part of who I am and what I do because it's had a profound impact on me in the most recent couple of years.
In the last year. I didn't change anything else. Everything else has been very beneficial to me, but it's like that is a core part of my next identity that I view I need to consistently act through.
What has that changed? I mean, everything. I mean, it's been profound.
It's given me a dramatically larger purpose. It's helped expand my vision. It's brought me a tremendous amount of peace and calmness.
It's given me an opportunity to communicate to people from a completely different, far grander perspective than just themselves, which generally then can change themselves extremely easily to get them out of the way. It makes you think just excessively larger. It also at the same time makes you so insignificant in that grand scheme of things to just continue the expansion.
It's given me this view of like, I keep having this intuition of like. be the messenger, you know, like what would the messenger look like? What would the messenger do?
Like, what would the messenger say? Even just things like what I've done here tonight. It's like, I know that these are lessons I'm sharing with you from my own life experience, but also from a perspective of God, I look at it like.
I feel very blessed I can hand down this wisdom to others so they can learn it through this mechanism instead of having to learn it the hard way so I can save people from pain. Maybe there's people that are praying for this level of wisdom or insight. There's also just little things where God uses you as a vessel.
I had somebody that I needed to send $1 ,600 through Zelle. One of my staff was telling me the phone number, and I entered in the phone number what I thought was the right way, and I sent this person that we needed to pay $1 ,600. I was like, can you confirm they got it?
And the staff member was like, no, they didn't get it. And I was like, what do you mean? I just sent it.
And he was like, no, dude, you put the phone number wrong. And I was like, all right, let's call this guy. Let's just let him know, hey, I guess God blessed you today and you probably needed this money.
So we call this guy, this random fucking dude that we gave the 1600 bucks to. And he owns a little gym down South in Miami. And he answers the phone and he was like, he's like, hey, what's going on?
And I'm like, hey, my name's Jeremy. Dude, listen, I know this is gonna sound like I'm probably trying to scam you, okay? I was like.
I am not. I just accidentally sent you 1600 bucks. I don't know what to tell you other than it just kind of feels like in my intuition that God wanted you to have this money, man.
I don't know what the fuck else to say. It's very insignificant to me. It's, I don't know what level of significance to you, but I just wanted to say, God bless you and don't send it back.
And this guy starts crying. And he says, bro, I was just praying. You have no idea.
I'm not going to be able to pay rent this month. Literally, this amount of money is the amount of money that I need to be able to pay the difference in my rent. This is in December.
So in a month where he's a little slower in his business. And there's little things like that. And I have a tremendous amount of little things like that that happen.
We just did a toy drive. We gave out a little over, I don't even know how many exact toys it was. It was probably over 3 ,000 toys.
We have a toy vlog you can go check out. huge fucking piles of toys. We had a little over $20 ,000 in toys I gave alone.
And we had all these people from like homeless shelters nearby. There's a family homeless shelter that's nearby that gave all them, all these people from all kinds of local community help groups and stuff that came by. We do, we give out trash bags, not like a traditional toy driver.
It's like one toy per kid or two toys. It's like, bro, we gave kids like massive trash bags and they were just fucking loading up toys. Like some of these kids left, they had like seven kids, eight kids, every single one of them left with like massive fucking toys.
fucking trash bags or the fucking toys that they got to go home with, you know, like things like that. Anyway, point I'm trying to make is I wouldn't do that from any other perspective than just like what I think God would want me to do with some money around Christmas time. It's been great.
I mean, it's been a profound thing. But again, in terms of identity, it's helped a tremendous amount in my own expansion. as i continue to attempt to accelerate that self -actualization process and achieve more and do more and you know to your point like absolutely i'm still driven by stuff in my set of reasons but i also deeply love this new uh you know more like god -driven version of of reasons that i'm able to experience now and start to share so point i'm trying to make very simple You are likely held back by many things.
The responsibility component to it, the fact that you just don't have the thickest fucking bank account ever, so you don't get to operate from a place of true freedom and options. You can risk time and effort based things. You can absolutely capture and squeeze more out of what you're currently doing, but none of that's going to happen with your current identity blocking it, which is why as an example, you didn't even ask me that kind of stuff that I brought up to you.
You didn't ask the other people that you fucking did these deals with, or maybe you did, I don't know. Moral of the story is the identity blocks. everything else, right?
So it starts with the identity. The identity is like a foundation to this whole system. And then as you work through identity, that is when all these other things just become like super easy things to work through, like double my price.
You can probably double it again and you'd still be fine relative to how you're currently operating. Redefining some of these specific things that you talk about. And as I also mentioned, I would not in any way, shape or form undermine the worldview perspective in which we've discussed, where you got to reconsider like how you are in the world and how you view yourself.
Because right now, Grant, no offense, I mean, you kind of sound like a man that's just being taken advantage of to a degree and that's not actually operating. Think about this. And I don't really want to hit you in the chest with this or anything, but honestly, it always does with the guys with kids that operate like you.
Imagine one day, like really imagine this, okay? The kids are all grown up and they're going out there in the world and they start to operate like you too. And when you look at them, you see yourself exactly as you become self -aware of right now, how you look at you now.
And now you see it in them. And you know with certainty it was because you led by example for them like a recorder to just sit there and consume the ways you think, the ways you behave. They observed every action you took and didn't take and they go do the same things.
And they live limited lives because you chose to be that type of leader to your children. It's like even just think about that as an example of a set of reasons. You can look at your kids.
What age are your kids? Six, three, and six months. even the opportunities they're going to be able to have relative to where you can place them, you know, what level of options you can provide your family.
Like even these things, like you talk about your wife, I'm sure she a lovely woman. She sounds very supportive to be clear, but it's like, dude, think about this. You could even through expanding what she experiences, get her to in turn, press you to go expand more and press you more and hold you more accountable because she, knows that you are what is going to enable her to do that or what's going to prevent her from being able to do that, right?
It's like you control 100 % of the experience, right? These are human beings that we're talking about that have their own independent experiences and realities and absolutely they're in control of their own worlds too and can change anything at any point for themselves. But you're the leader of the family.
It's like you define all of this for them. You define the experience that you all collectively have. Even if you just try to tap into reasons like that, especially when you're a family man, those typically become quite profound too.
And the moral of the story is whatever specifically makes you kind of stir up somewhat of an emotion that you can tap into consistently that you either want to eradicate or expand into and feel more, those are some of the best things that you can tap into in terms of drive. It's going to do the most for you that you can imagine, dude.
It's going to be fucking awesome.
Thank you.
Thank you. I think my goal is, and the way I kind of position this podcast even is, I feel like I'm in the audience seat. I want to ask the question that I feel like is accessible.
And I think what you've laid out is not only have you related to people at these levels. Everyone relates to what you've experienced in the beginning. And I think my goal was I want them to see the gap.
I feel the gap. I'll leave you with this. You ever see one of those movies where the walls are going like this?
Yeah. And they're going to . You know, they're going to juice you.
You know what I mean? It's like, okay, now picture that this is, this is like the walls of life. Okay.
And the squeeze at the end is your death. And like, you're a hundred percent, no matter what going to die. And like, there's technically a better set of circumstances over here.
And like, you're over here right now. And again, whether you shoot the gap or not, you're still standing in it. You're going to die either way.
Like a hundred percent, you're going to get juiced. Okay. There's no question about it.
You're a thousand percent going to get juiced. But as you continue down that path, it's like, sure, there might be some pain. There might be some fear.
There's absolutely going to be some uncertainty. Okay. You don't even know how long that fucking gauntlet that you got to shoot is.
Okay. But as you shoot it, the one thing you know is certainty is that somewhere, somewhere you can't see it yet. There is a fucking awesome life that you're still going to get crushed by that thing.
But as you go through the gauntlet, your circumstances improve, your conditions improve, all the things you could do for all the people that are still way back here improve a lot. You start reaching a hand back and helping them out and get them to accelerate. You're going to die no matter what.
You're going to get squeezed no matter what, right? It's like, why not shoot the gap? Why not try to push through it and get deeper into it?
Why not experience the downside too? Because I'm telling you now. In hindsight, some of the most pain -oriented or quote -unquote traumatic stories I've experienced and lived through are also great stories in hindsight.
They're nothing that really hold a lot of weight after you move through them. And I've had a tremendous amount of failures that have held me back and that have slowed me down, but that's all it ever really does. It's like even if you go backwards a little bit, It's like you still can go right back up and just recover yourself and you become a much better version of you on the other side of every single one of those sets of circumstances.
That's the most important thing to consider in all of this is you either just are going to stay the way that you're acting now, right? And just continue to experience what you experience or you have to shoot the gap. And you have to overcome the fear and you have to overcome the uncertainty and you just have to endure it regardless.
And if you claim you truly want to be a better man and you look at it either from a human being perspective or from a God -driven perspective, I mean, why would you not want to pull the potential out of you and try to at least see what it could be like on the other side of those decisions? Worst comes to worst, you can just contract back to where you are now.
Like I said, you can at any point, if I at any point just stop. I just wanted to experience like a small life. It'd pretty much be free.
You know, I'd be free forever. Wouldn't even have to think twice about it. I could fucking go.
I have random pieces of land that I've accumulated that I don't even have genuine use for. You know, I don't even know why. I've sometimes just been a little bit ripped just shopping for land at night and just buy random chunks of land.
You know, it's like I have so much random shit like that. My point is, is like, actually go big. And everything that you view as scary is actually going to be one of the things that you come to value the most about the whole story after you get to the other side.
Because as I said, once you get to the other side, all the emotion is removed and you're just in pure peace and calmness. Does that make sense? It does.
Jeremy, this is impactful for me. And I know it's impactful for them. I just want to say thank you.
Yeah, of course. Thank you for sharing this. I appreciate it.
Thanks for everybody watching too. That was real fun. Yeah.
I appreciate you so much. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Cool, man. Yeah. you're awesome
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Ninety minutes in, the host stops asking the questions and starts answering them: married at 20, three kids, an ex-investment-banker who admits he's stuck and still making decisions out of fear. The advice comes from a marketing-agency owner who spent the first hour explaining how he scaled from $12,000 to a business he can barely summarize in one sentence, then turns around and rebuilds his own host's mindset in real time.
