Today’s episode is a fun one as we delve into the evolution of content consumption, and the intricacies of business models, particularly in multi-level marketing, and how politics and business affect each other. I also share what things I would do differently in my business if I had to start over today. We also touch on the power of long-form conversations, the importance of truth in media, and the necessity of personal accountability in navigating today's complex business and political landscape.

Takeaways:

• Long-form conversations allow for deeper exploration of topics.
• Business models are evolving, especially in multi-level marketing.
• Starting a business requires mental preparedness and a willingness to take risks.
• The landscape of politics is changing, and leaders are needed more than ever.

View full show notes here.

Welcome to the 200 % Life Podcast, your weekly insights to spiritual growth and business success with Adam Hergenrother and Halle Warren.

Also did you listen to that Joe Rogan, Chamath, Gman? Yeah, no, that's great.

It's awesome. So good. Yeah. Well, it's funny because he talked about it the All In podcast too as well because he basically said it was his first time he did a long format where you could actually get discussions out. was three hours long of being able to do that. And I actually do benefit. mean, it is is even listening at 1.5 speed, whether it's Lex or Joe or even Tim Ferriss, who doesn't do quite as long, but they do long episodes of what they are. And it is nice for the person being interviewed to be able to have a forum where they can actually speak.

and go down deep rabbit holes on particular subjects to really get people's thinking out there. And I think that's, because I always, you do get and you listen to people in other interviews where you just wish they went down a little bit more, but then everybody wants a little bit more of probably something a little bit different because what you wanted is different than what somebody else wanted, but it does benefit. I do like those long formats, especially when you can really get engaged in them and actually hear what the person is thinking because in that way things are context.

I was gonna say, and it goes off on more on tangents too, which I think is sometimes where the best stuff is. But you can't do that when you've got 30 minutes and sometimes you can tell it, like sometimes those feel really rushed and they just scratch, like you mentioned, they're just on the surface. In a shorter period of time, you either have to have like one subject or one piece that you have to take away. That's what I always like. Cause I mean, do, there's probably the most podcasts that I listen to are a mixture of both.

are anywhere from like 30 minutes to an hour. then I also listen to which ones are you listening to that are short? Well, Michael singers and then Eckhart Tolle's the one he does with Oprah are all like 30 minutes or less. So I don't know if Oprah does for her audience, but but Eckhart's are always between 25 and 35 minutes and they're never over 30, 35 minutes. And by the way, you listen to One Halftime Speed and it's like a it's like a 20 minute, 22 minute episode every now and then they may get to 40 minutes. I mean, rarely is he just sharing like a particular philosophy or tip

Yeah, it's actually a lot of it is like recorded from live events and they pieces of it and they chunk it down into like Approximately 30. I it's hard to do interviews that short. I agree but solo podcast I can see because you're just giving like a particular Michael and so Michael goes on there, which is really kind of like inspired. I always love his Individual talks that he gives He does three a week by the way, which is still just amazing to me that he's been doing that for 40 years and 68 or 69

He might be in his early 70s. bit older than that, but only because feel like I've been hearing that his whole billion dollar business story felt like so long It's also like, actually a couple of our friends are down there right now. really? Yeah, down there visiting him today. They texted me this morning. Who? well. Yeah, people from Project U. yeah. yeah. And they're down there, which is awesome, which they should be. I think the second time for some of them, if it's the same people I'm thinking of. is It's the second time. they go down there, and he does these three times a week. Two of them are

are open. One of them, two of are open, but he does, I think four talks and now Sounds True has picked up his podcast. I don't know if you noticed that. Sounds True is now publishing his podcast because before he didn't really care who listened to it. He even wanted on the airways, which I thought was interesting. And then his people that also helped work on the temple started putting them on the website just like two years ago, by the way, and he's been doing this for 40 years. So it wasn't even really on a podcast platform. was just on the website. a podcast platform at all. literally before the web that like they used to have them like

Google Sheet. Do you remember Caitlin sent them around? They found the underground ones. But they've been recorded for... feel like maybe she even put that together herself. She might have put that together. But it's just fascinating. so then he just didn't care who listened and he just kept doing his thing. And then now it sounds True's picked it up and they release two a week, even though he does three. Okay. So there's still another episode that you can grab.

To do it which is which is fascinating, but he literally just goes in front of a group or a couple times on Thursday It's a much smaller group. It's people that live with a temple and he'll do one That's you they're all like 45 to 55 minutes long He has an hour for his talk and he just talks for an hour Do you think that because I don't listen to him as much I was gonna ask that I know that's what yeah I was like is he just saying the same thing but I mean I get that it's important as you're hitting different people at different times and all of that but I was wondering if three times a week like

What is he?

He literally says the exact same thing in different ways, but I'll tell you for people that at least from from my experience when you're doing this work every single day and that becomes like the meaning and the purpose of your life first is that You need to hear these things because it's so doing the deep spiritual Whatever you want to refer to it as work is the hardest thing you'll ever do and there's no Ten-step plan and so it's basically all it's very it's very there's no there's concrete about it you feel the experience just like every

and know there's thoughts in your heads and you know you have emotions. But he keeps people engaged and he doesn't, he always say he doesn't teach technique but it is a technique that he's actually teaching to do that. Now there's also a thousand other ways people can do that as well too but his audience, which is massive, has.

as listens to that and religiously because when you're doing that work, this would be no different than like if you're playing tennis or you're starting to learn lacrosse, you just watch all of these same things, learning the same stuff. by the way, if you know, when you're playing lacrosse, your coach is going over the same things. I was just at a six hour training camp yesterday for the cross and the only things that these, these are high level.

coaches went over was off ball movement and picking and cutting. And that's all they did over and over and over again. It's all they've been going, this is the cross, this is what it is, boom, boom, boom. And it's no different than I think when you're into the thing that you're doing. It's not an interview, he doesn't interview, he doesn't have anybody else on there. Just kind of, just again, that's the way they do it. It doesn't work for a lot of people, just like Joe Rogan doesn't work for a lot of Everybody, yeah.

I guess it still makes sense. I love sports. Anything you're going to learn. Exactly. You just have to master over and over and over again. But it's also like business, right?

There's a lot of different leaderships or styles of how you approach your business and how you do it. there are certain things that are required when you want to build a business that are there. But you sent me over that article ahead of time that we were talking about. Yeah, yeah. I've been doing deep dive and going on Reddit and seeing all of the... Reddit. All of the... Which, by the way, have you heard that really interesting Reddit story? I have not. OK, so this is just a tangent, and I wish I knew the numbers off the top of my head, but...

many, years ago, let's call it 20 years ago or something like that, the founder, think his name was Alex of Reddit, said he wanted to, tried to sell or Yahoo wanted to buy Reddit. And they said to him, he tried to sell it and he was like, that amount, we're not gonna buy it. Yahoo said, we're not gonna buy it. That's a rounding, just a rounding error on our, what you're asking for is a rounding error. And then he was like, well then we're not gonna sell it for whatever they were trying to do. And then now it's like 20 years later and it's like,

I don't even know how many billions of dollars it's valued at. It's just kind of funny. But anyway, I did go down a Reddit rabbit hole about this. But I think it was last week, so Beachbody, I think it's the holding company, the name is Beachbody, and you know that company. do tea, what the hell is that program called? TRX? No, it wasn't TRX, those are the TRX bands. Insanity, those workouts, Insanity, and there's been so many other ones since then.

Basically an online, well it's not even online, it's a multi-level marketing Actually, I did that, do you remember? Yeah, it's Team, I know it, cause you did that. that. Insanity, right? Yeah, remember, I can see the guy right there, did that. Yeah, Sean. Sean T. Sean T, that's right, that's exactly what it was. That's a great workout, by the way. Yeah, and like, P90X, that's what we're trying to say, like that's like one of the, these are all the old programs. Insanity was before P90X, cause Insanity came, I think. P90X, Tony Horton is like one of the originals. But anyway, I don't even know how long that company has been around for.

long time when, and it's a multi-level marketing company. So they obviously have partners and coaches who are of course selling the products and build a team of other people and you know, you're not a, they say it's not a pyramid scheme, but it's multi-level marketing. But anyway, the big news that happened last week is that that company, which was not doing well, decided to completely eliminate their multi-level marketing structure and go directly to affiliate.

affiliate links like you would with Amazon and the other company yeah or AG one like the people become part affiliate partners and you just Here's my link go buy it. I'll get a little cut of it Which I think is interesting of course most level marketing worked really well before the internet and before social not before internet but before social media specifically now there's

won't say there's no point, but it's really hard to make the argument for a multi-level marketing company when people can just go directly and click on and use the influencer model rather than a multi-level marketing model. Anyway, of course, a lot of the people who were very, very successful in making a lot of money annually off of being at the top of the pyramid are, of course, very upset because it's just their income is completely eliminated from.

I think starting November, January 1st. They're going to pay out until January 1st. But as January 1st rolls around, completely eliminated. I don't know, I have lots of different thoughts and things about that, I just think it's interesting. my first thought is, and I don't know about all multilevel marketing, and actually, interestingly enough, there's a lot of multilevel marketing that are no longer multilevel marketing, and they're all going to affiliate. Not all of them. Some have been forced to because of some regulatory issues, and then some have just chosen to because of financial constraints.

I guess they laid off a handful of corporate people too. They did a whole corporate restructuring. But as they them like $400 million a year. Yeah. I don't know if it was quite that much because that was like their overall loss. Yeah, something like that. were trying to get it back to a break even. So I just assumed it was around $400 million. It might be. Either way, there's a lot. up being like $200 or something like that. anyway, yes, a ton of money, which means that's how much they were paying out collectively to some of their top people.

But yeah, my thoughts are it's a very, an influencer culture in general is very consumer, and especially in these companies, what do they do is they're selling a lifestyle to get people, to recruit people. And so it's very consumer focused, consumption focused, I mean, which means a lot of these people are buying very expensive cars, very expensive houses. They're buying very expensive gifts for the people on their team. And the only reason, who knows what their financial,

situation is but I can't help but think if they were making that much money annually and they just if they invested it wisely they would be fine today, you know Well that goes for I mean you can say anybody 99.9 % of people that are out there some of them are like in they're like this is ripping income away from my family and I'm like well You know in regular corporate America people get laid off all the time Business models change. Yeah and business models regulations people out of business

Well, I think the interesting conversation around it too is that so many of these who are in the multi-level marketing world are like, the CEO of our business. But if you're the CEO of your business, you can't be fired and lose all of your income. You can be the CEO of a company and get fired. Yes, yes, sorry. guess I didn't really mean CEO. I meant they own it. Yeah, we own our own businesses. Because it's a primarily female-dominated

industry, lot of them, their husbands no longer work because they are making enough income. So now they've got two people with no income, unless they decide to diversify. There's lots of people who ended up diversifying, but it is crazy. And I feel bad, of course, people who are in that situation. then I just think it's interesting the way you just, everything's changing from a business perspective. And remember, like businesses come and fails, whether you own, I mean, it's

95 % of businesses have failed in a decade anyways. So I mean, even being an owner, in those type of situations, you're taking somebody else's product and you're selling it, right? So it's like, it's, and you're building, I get it, you're building a team. I get what you're doing. You're still selling other things. Part of that is just businesses change. Regulations change businesses all the time.

whether or not you are being sued like Google to try to break up your own business and selling in the four different parts or whether or not your parent company is losing money and so they decide to no longer have this, maybe they might not even stay alive, right? Like, I mean, who knows if they're not even there or you're blockbuster and how many people invested in the blockbuster and we're living off the returns or dividends from that or.

how many people have invested into opportunity zones that you can invest money into or investment indexes or crypto, right? And you lost $40 billion just in crypto alone, right? When Sam Brinkman Fried basically bankrupt the company. Now they ended up getting, I think, like 13 back or something, like a third of it. But still, all of these are all risks. And this is why also you, I know the wealthiest people that I know get very nervous about their own.

personal finances and they actually invest very cautiously and live off that the rake that they coming in there. So it's like they would put it into like T bills or something that's much more may have like a four or 5 % return on it, not a 10 or 20 % return. But it's over time. There's a 95 % likelihood that that money is still going to be there. And so then you live off your money off of like the most secure assets that are paying you dividends so that you can then live off. mean, Bill Ackman actually, I don't know if you ever listened to him in his podcast that

Recently, he went through this really dark time. He's like an activist investor and walked through his old strategy. And there was actually really interesting listening to it. But he went through his dark time. they asked him, I think it was 2019 or 2020 when he got divorced. Basically, the world attacked him, essentially, in that world if you're paying attention to it in terms of investing in things. And said, how do you deal with it? He goes, number one, I always had protected our own personal assets. So I knew we were OK.

And so like to me, like this is what it is that it's like you put it into very secure assets that's always paying your own bills. And so that you're always having, so you personally don't have to make business decisions around what your business does. In the beginning, it's very difficult to do that because you are the business. But as your business matures, and kind of to your point, the goal is to keep taking money off the table so that your lifestyle mimics what you have in assets that are saved there, whether it's you're spending $100,000.

or 10 million, it's irrelevant per year as long as those assets are protected so that you know that you can make different decisions. We've taught this many times and it's still very true today. One of these core principles though is when you can live below your, whatever you want to refer to it as, if you're just living within a framework that you don't have to worry about your business succeeding at some level.

to fund your over extensive personal life, it has to at some point fund your life, right? But there's a difference, if your business makes a million dollars a year, just using that as a number, right? And you're spending $900,000 a year, let's say a million dollars after tax, and you're spending all of it every year, so now anytime if there's a hiccup in your business, you personally start to freak out.

Because now all of sudden your lifestyle has to be adjusted. And you're back to zero. Exactly. And so now also, and a lot of times you have to try to get out of that debt. Because honestly, like that $700 to a million dollars a year is a really tough part for people because what happens is, sure, you have enough cash coming in every year as long as things come in there.

but then you go out and buy a $7 million home and you've got a $30,000 a month mortgage payment and you also buy another home, which is fine to take care of it. This is why athletes go through this, right? I mean, just as an example, and there's other business owners that go through the same thing. This is such a common thing that your income supports your debt load until something happens. And then all of sudden, when you have to try to get rid of that, that's when things can go really haywire. And that's why it's always better if you can pay things in cash or pay them off.

pay them off and you are able to be much more free and then you can make different decisions in your life. Because, it may go all in on business, but you know that if you have a million dollars you're putting towards your business, that's all the money you're gonna put in there. You're not gonna touch anything else to kind of go through that. And that's just the way like the strategy of kind of like I've always seen and learned from other people ahead of me of like really basing your business on doing that and then taking the money off the table because there is gonna be something that's wrong with your business at some point in time. It will falter.

Like we'll go through it. It's the innovators dilemma. What was, I know you want to say something, like there was, what the hell is the business right now that they were just, they were talking about the innovators dilemma, which is again, if you haven't read that book, it's great. It's basically meaning that you have all these hype. you know what was? It was the big pharma and the healthcare industries.

are basically are stuck in this inter-phase dilemma, which is why they don't want anybody else to come in there with much lower costs because everyone's getting these shell companies that start up and they're getting their 10 % over here and they're referring it over here. And all these people are making all these amounts of money. But if you go disrupt that whole system, you disrupt this whole entire piece. And so now there's this dilemma where if somebody else comes in there and disrupts all of this, you may lose all of this until you actually start to go rip your own band-aid off and then start having to cut these things off yourself.

And again, that's the whole innovator's dilemma is I'm making so much money and I want to protect these profits that I'm unwilling to reorganize the business to do so. Blockbuster is a great example of that, right? They didn't want to go through and make those changes. I always just say, whether it's a little off color, but I used to be like, I'd rather stab myself and control the bleeding in business than to have somebody else do it. So at least I'm in control of it. I mean, we were one of the first ones in real estate to start reducing people's caps because we saw it we did it before everybody else. We put team caps in place. Again, we...

We extracted money from our profit, from our bottom line, to keep the business going and then hopefully get above that because you were able to grow in different facets of that. But it's the innovator's dilemma. Yeah, I was gonna just say as you talking about the business strategy and spending, obviously less than the business is making and all that, I've always also believed in that. I'm just saying this for any of the employees on the call or on the podcast.

because I didn't own a business, but I still always believed in that exact philosophy. And I do think sometimes we forget that as employees we can do, can and should do the same. Don't spend all you make. mean, it's so simple, but it's like, don't spend all you make. don't know the company could go bankrupt tomorrow. Maybe you work for a startup and they don't have any funding for year two, or you work for a massive organization and they do a restructure and you're laid off. And for me, it's also completely about control. So I've always wanted to live.

below whatever it is I'm making, save, invest, and then make myself into somebody who's highly employable or can do something on my own. Because you never know what's gonna happen. Being the CEO of your life, right, means that you operate, it doesn't mean you're the CEO of a business. just means the CEO of your life. So whatever income you have coming in, whether it comes from a business, whether it comes from dividends, whether it comes from your employer, whether it comes from multiple sources,

you still have an income that comes in and then you should be living below that and then you should be investing all of those different things. Because there are, if you haven't noticed, there's a bunch of shit that happens out there. And it happens all the time. And it's not fair, it's not right, it doesn't mean it's morally right or morally just. mean, things just change and all of sudden you could find yourself in those situations, which is why you always want to put your best foot forward financially.

Yeah, I just think it'll be, I'm just going to keep watching this whole MLM because I mean, look, I don't know all of the details and I don't want to make assumptions or judge people who are in those situations. But yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how people move forward from that. Like are they going to start their own businesses? Are they going to rejoin another MLM? Are they going to become employed somewhere? I think it's, I just think it's personally, I think it's very interesting to watch. But I do have a question for you since we're talking about businesses.

What are the first, we'll say five, but maybe give me three, three or five. What are the first five things you would do if you were starting your business over today? The first thing that I would do is I would make sure that mentally I'm prepared for it because right now I really don't have the, I'm just in a different phase of my life and I don't want to go work 70 hours a week, take a whole bunch of risk and put everything on there.

So mentally, if somebody hit me and said, look, we gotta go do this, or I really wanted to start, I had to make sure that I'm mentally there. Even if you were starting over your I starting over, I thought you starting now. No, starting your business over today. Is there something you mean, I started my business back then. I was ready to go. I was like, yeah, no, What was your mental state like back then? I was ready to go. Yeah, I was ready to go. And even today, it's not like you don't wanna do things. It's funny, because once you get to a certain level,

again that we talking about before, is like you want to protect it as much as you want to grow, which is kind of like this like, it's like a fine line between all that. Or do you want to grow as much as you want to protect I think you want to invest what you have and protect it and let that grow. But then you can take, you have to have a certain allocation of money that you're willing to lose. so, but the thing is, is when you don't, when you're building your first businesses and like you just bought eight grand, that's what I did to start our first business. It's not like a ton of money and you don't have anything to lose. So you're not like you're losing anything.

But then as you get more, mean, it's besides Elon Musk, Elon Musk is one of the only ones that I know. There's plenty of other ones that are out there, but like, know that he will put every dollar he's all in, like in every single thing he does, every dollar that he has, he'll go all in on every single thing that's out there. He's just an unbelievable, you know, entrepreneur in that that way. But most entrepreneurs that I know, they then take the money off the table. Right. And then I didn't.

get that phrase for a long period of time. I mean, I understood what they were saying, but until you actually go through it and then you experience that and you go, okay, I get what that means. Now you gotta figure out how much am I willing to? That's why people that have a ton of money, they go, why would you go get investors? Why would you go get somebody else to fund this project for you? Don't you have the money to do it? Well, sure, you have the money to do it, but then now you're going all in again on all of your chips, which is, and people don't want to do that. Yeah, it's a different level of risk. It doesn't mean you don't want to do those things, it's just a different level of risk.

And that's partially why people sell the private equity, not only to take money off the table, but then so they don't inherently financially responsible for the entire company. Because at some point, no matter how good you have, I I remember when Nike was amazing and they went down to lower and they jumped up again and then recently they're just, they've sucked again, right? So like, I mean, it's all, every company goes through these things and you, Starbucks, right? I mean, now that, know, they're, we'll see what they do now with.

Nickelback in here, like, I that guy's amazing. I mean, he turned around Chipotle, so we'll see what happens there. But going back, like, three things that I would do differently? Well, I guess just like, and maybe the mental headspace is a good answer. Like, if you were starting over your business today, like you were getting into real estate and about to start building your real estate empire, what would you do? What were the first couple things you would do?

if I answer that question as if like how I was thinking at the time was number one is like you have to have this drive and you have to be willing to take a lot of risk. Again, I bought $8,000, started my first business and then I just kind of like put my foot on the gas and kind of put a couple nails through it and just didn't stop. the thing is, is you're gonna make a lot of mistakes. Your mistakes have to be small enough. So you gotta be willing to fail, small enough so you can survive your failures. Because if you're not surviving your failures, then that's when people typically go out. And you also have to be willing to eat a lot of glass.

Like you just do, like you're just, there's gonna be a lot of things that happen that don't wanna go your way. And there's gonna be, people do a lot of things that are in your company or as you build businesses or clients are gonna treat you differently or they're gonna leave you. They're just, all these things are gonna happen. So you have to be prepared for the unprepared. That's why mentally you have to be able to, you know, the CEO of Navito was asked like, what would you, you know, the same question basically like, what would you do if you started Navito again? goes, wouldn't. And that was his, actually Eric sent that to me.

What was his reason? Because I wouldn't because I didn't I didn't realize how difficult and how interesting hard this is. Yeah. And he said I'm in it now like they can't and Naveed is one of the most you know. What is that company? Naveed they make the chips for like AI stuff and so they're like a massive massive company. I feel like I've seen it written somewhere but I didn't know what it did. Yeah basically I mean they make the chips for all like the AI infrastructure pieces that are there but it's I mean it's multi multi billion dollar organization. And he was asked recently like what would you do to start Eagles? I wouldn't start it.

And he goes, because you don't realize how much pain and suffering personally that you'll go through and how much sure you get success at the end and sure you get money. But he's like, you have to. Well, do you have? I don't know if they asked him this, but I'm just like, then what would he have done instead? They didn't ask. It was on a clip. can probably find that on X. just wonder, somebody who- Eric sent that over to me. Did he? OK. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, know, somebody who does have that drive and clearly was willing to weather the storm and eat glass and all of that.

but yet saying they wouldn't do it, well then what would they have done instead? Yeah, I don't know. I didn't understand that question. But like the thing is, so you go back there, that's why I mean like mentally you have to be prepared to step in this. I actually think a lot of reason why. Or naive enough to not. Exactly. no or That's the great one. Naivete. I don't take care, but yeah, not Not know how difficult it's gonna be. Yeah. Right? think like, cause I think if you, that's what he said is if I knew how difficult this would be, if somebody told me this is gonna be your journey, use all the things you do, no way I'm gonna up for this. Right. No way I'm gonna sign up for this.

That's also to a certain extent why I think people when they get to a certain level, they don't want to go and be the only person building a business again. I can speak personally from that because it is a lot. You know, you can have wonderful employees around you, but you are at the end of the day, the one holding all of the pressure. And that is a tremendous amount that you have to be able to withstand. And so you kind of look back and you go, I know what it takes to build a business. And when you get through there, you go, maybe I don't want to do it alone anymore. Now I want to go find partners. I want to go find a capital so that like

I maybe I'll have some of my money in here. I'll put 20 % of my fund in here, which is fine. Then you can be able to do that. But in the beginning, when you're starting, you gotta be doing, I think a lot of businesses fail because of just how difficult it gets. And it just, it's just because it's way more difficult than, it's not life though. Like it just in general, like everybody thinks that like, when I get this and I get that, it's gonna be easier and easier. It doesn't, it just gets harder. Sarah asked me the other day, we were hiking and she goes, you know, she hikes like three times a week, four times a week up this mountain and it's.

You know, it's a you know, she started off and she was like an hour 15 and now she's gone it down her fast time was like 46 minutes and she's like how come this never feels any easier and I said because you know what if you hike it and it's good and you have your heart rate's 150 and you hike an hour and 15 minutes at 150 it feels the same way and now all of sudden you're hiking it at 150 in an hour and now you're hiking it at you know 150 in 50 minutes and so like you just The pain doesn't really go away. You just get better and more efficient on what you're doing, but it still hurts

So every, all those, you just still go through the same level of pain. And just cause you have experience going through it, now you almost know what to look for and maybe you can navigate it a little bit better or you can put things in place better and better models and you can learn from your mistakes. Absolutely, you should do that. And at the same time, it's still gonna be very painful. Building anything is painful. It doesn't matter what it is. I mean, I look, you look around and you see people that have built massive companies and then they get ripped apart for something that they're doing. And it's like, you know, they didn't...

just because they sold another company for a billion dollars didn't protect them from the next round of people attacking them for whatever they were doing. And this is every day in our, it doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It's just you have to then gear up if you want to do that. Yeah. What else? So I think that would be number one. Number two is I think I would, again, I've said this before, but I think I would have hired higher level talent in multiple positions earlier on. And I actually would have hired a CFO earlier on in my life.

That was one thing, because you don't realize how important that position is until you get a little bit larger and you realize how much waste was there, that person would pay for themselves. They don't pay for themselves in same way a salesperson does, which is the problem with finance and or operations at times, because you can't quantify it the same way as, and sales is easy because, and so naturally I went after sales. One, I'm a salesperson, so I And I will say that you also had a background in finance, so you could personally carry that. I do think you were able to personally carry that load a lot.

I did all of our accounting, all of our books for years, right? Well, even just from the strategy perspective, even though you weren't maybe doing the bookkeeping. I I remember I remember downloading all of like like back in the day when QuickBooks came in there, I downloaded my bank account and I go through all the classifications and like and match them all up. Yeah, I mean, was it's not like it's hard. just I didn't mind that as much. just. And so I think that's when your when your organization gets to a certain point.

and you can't see all the money, that's when you need other people that are in there watching all of the different pieces that are happening there. Yeah, I was just gonna say that they, in theory, could do pay for themselves, not necessarily through the sales, which seems like an easier path, but yes, through economies of scale, through saving, through strategy. Protection. Yeah. I mean, all of those things. mean, it's more important than ever right now, just protecting those things. So it's like all of those pieces are really, really important.

And fractional CFOs are like probably, I don't even know if anyone did fractional CFO work, you know, 15 years ago, but now it would have been so, it's so easy to get a fractional CFO. So anyone listening should get a fractional CFO sooner rather than later. What else? So I think it's, it's again, mentally, understand that hiring a CFO earlier. And then I guess that also too can kind of go along with the same thing of just investing into.

I don't know what the price ranges would be now, and I'll kind of opt out from just kind of sharing price ranges, but there is like a- I was like, I could tell you probably. But there is a range of which you can get a certain individual that shows up at work, which is very functional and things that they do. And then I always call it jumping the brackets. Remember we used to teach that? Yeah, It was like the next bracket up. And back then, now things have changed. It was like-

from $75,000, like 50 to $75,000 was a certain individual you'd get. 75 to 125, again, this was probably seven or eight years ago, was the next jump up. And then at 150 to like 250 was a whole different level of caliber of person. And the problem is though is like when you're building a business, it costs money to do those things. And you have to be in, for me, I self-funded our entire business. I never raised money.

for specific real estate projects, but that's different. That's for building up real estate. But for businesses, I never raised capital, never went to peace. That means you have to sell fund through cashflow, which makes it even more difficult because you have to grow slower and you can't make as many mistakes because you don't have the money to do it. I also think it was an advantage to doing that because it also keeps you nimble, lean, watching every dollar that you spend. you having to be in all those different things. So again, I go back and I think about all that stuff and...

So when people ask me today, they're like, do you want to go start another business right now or do those different things? I go, I want to build something, but I don't know if I want to be the sole owner starting another business. just, I, and maybe that changes, right? Maybe that changes my life, but like, I think about all of what it requires and sure, you could go hire a bunch more people now and get involved in that. hire all that high level talent if you wanted to. like it's at the end of the day, you're still the owner and you still are showing up every day to make sure that you're doing these things that you need to do in order to be able to make the business successful.

which is what you need to do. And for at least for me right now in this phase, I don't want to take the sole responsibility of doing that. Anything else, a third? I think that would be kind of a third. I think even today, even more, you also have to, it's really fascinating this whole like,

corporations taking stances on public ideologies, if you will, or social issues, all of them, like everything. I think it's actually coming back around where businesses are no longer providing any of that is for a while, like, companies are being forced to it. I've been seeing a lot of businesses saying, we're just not gonna comment on anything political, or we're not gonna comment on anything that's happening in.

the, know, foreign wars or anything like that. Just like, we're just not gonna get involved in that. We're gonna do this. This doesn't mean we don't care. It doesn't mean you don't have a personal opinion, but from a business perspective, we're not gonna do that. I think that's a very tricky road to navigate. I'd also make sure that you are, I mean, I was gonna say like you have a present. I mean, I don't know. I think to me that would be the- Are you gonna start commenting on politics? No, not I was gonna say like you just,

Well, the thing is, is you get involved in politics because you also realize that one politician or the next or somebody's, I wouldn't say the individual, their core kind of audiologies of bringing something to the table will affect your business. And so we went to those regulation pieces, right? Like, I mean, that's depending on in any era or any presidents that are debating or coming into a term will affect different industries differently.

And so like that's why you pay attention to those things and again, it's it's almost self-serving you you you do it because it's your business and you may not agree with everything but you know, they're gonna help your business in different ways and so whether it's from tax cuts or from Regulation or from what are they gonna do with you know with AI and so everybody has a different flair of what they're looking at which is right because everyone has a different idea of what Is important or for their business? Yeah, I'm gonna say for their business. But even if we take even business

Yes, even if we take businesses even as just one of the categories like nonprofits are going to have their specific mission focused, the military or veterans organizations are going to have a very specific what's important. I'm talking to my sister and my mom. They both have very different issues are very important to them. You know, like everyone's different. One thing I did hear on that podcast, the Joe Rogan and how do you say his name? Cheemoth.

Which is funny because I don't even really know what he does. All I know is that I really listen to him. He just explains things very well and very with like a lot of neutrality, which I appreciate. And how he was talking about he had lunch with Donald Trump and then he had lunch with Harris. I was like, he seems like he has a balanced approach to most things. But one thing he did say, you know, we're talking about politics a little bit, but he said is that

He was talking a lot about first principles thinking and making sure that we don't, which is really, really hard to do, especially with the media, but be careful not to let the message get lost with the messenger by the messenger. that there, thankfully there are a lot of other, I don't know what he called them, maybe not proxies, but there are a lot of other messengers out there now and just make, that are saying this, sharing the message in different ways.

don't know about it for you, but for me, I find that it's so difficult to just untangle the truth from everything right now. it's like, it's it's, cause I, as I've shared before, like I take a lie, listen to a lot of different views from a lot of different people to challenge my own thinking. Cause I can go listen to something in support of Kamala Harris and I'm like, gotta vote for her. And then I can go listen to somebody in support of Donald Trump and go, well,

You got to vote for him. Like it's just like all these in like they're all like, there's just where's the truth. And it's just like, I think that's what people are so fed up with, which is like, okay, it seems like everybody is out. Yeah. Reading actually reading policies. Like those are, I don't know what else. What else do you do? I think also, I think we're coming into an era of like podcasts of like these long, you know, where people can actually explain their positions because I do, you know, people, really kind of rip on

Kamala Harris because of certain things that she's done and they said, well, she's changed her mind. And again, I'll be charitable here for a second and say, I think people as a CEO, you should change your mind on things. I think when you get fed new information, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. somebody had a support for something that was a year ago and they didn't agree with it. And then today they wake up and go, you know what, I've heard information. To me, whether it's Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, it doesn't matter. I hate it when people go, well, a year ago you had this. And as long as they can explain their position as to why they changed and articulate that,

to me that is a strong CEO. it's also just kind of growing and evolving. exactly I mean think about it's like taking a new perspective. They're hammering Kamala Harris on border. I don't think the Biden administration did a really good job at all on the border. So I'm not in support of that of what they've done. And now there you know she's committed to like well now she's just flipping for to win these votes. And I go maybe she is but isn't that the game. But also at the same time and by the way I'm not supporting Kamala Harris here I'm just saying that like also in the same way she it would be great for her like JD Vance did on some of his

positions came on and actually explained on podcasts and long interviews why he changed his position on even voting for Donald Trump. new information is exactly like new information. I would rather have that be so refreshing for any one of our president candidates and going forward to come on and being like, yeah, I used to think that and I'll tell you why I don't anymore. And then I agree where it is. And I would be like, thank you. Okay, great. That's all people want to hear. Not these like.

one-liners of like, well, I didn't really ever do that. And like, just admit it and then let's move on. And then that allow people to hear the truth and from where your policies are going today on any side right now. And that's why I think, cause both of them are changing their positions on different things. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. just think about that as like being an owner of a company. I'm like, if I kept all of my original thinking, we would never get anywhere, as in you'd be failed. The whole point is to change your thinking on all this stuff. Just why are we hiding that that's a bad thing?

Now, where people can come in and policy on this is to say, well, your policy on the border has been this in the past, all this stuff. then go, if that doesn't change, now you have an indication of how their policy is gonna go forward. I'm just using borders as an example. It could be on crypto, it could be on corporate taxes, it could be on capital gains, it could be on anything, right? On social programs, education, any of your positions are on these things. Now, what open debates should do in long form podcasts where you're not reading off a teleprompter for any partner,

should basically be able to have people asking the questions that you hear on Trimoth being able to answer these different things. I'm not saying they need to go in Joe Rogan or All In or Lex Friedman or whoever else. They should just be, or they should be able to go on to a long form commentary and not have everybody pick them apart for every single thing that's blown out of context so they can actually get their explanation across. I think to me, like if you watch the VP debate, which was actually

plausible, they were kind to each other, were courtesy, they agreed on points. I think we need to go back to that era of basically being like, let's stop blowing 30 seconds of a clip that's three hours long out of proportion for a ticket because then you're gonna get people to come back in here and do those type of things. And that's really what's missing. Because I think about that as a CEO and that's why we love these long form interviews. Because people can come in there and actually be able to share their opinions.

And then also hear other people's opinions while you're sharing yours. And it's just, don't know where we've lost that. And that's why I think the truth is so untangled because it's like, clickbait. I mean, it's exactly right. The media has transformed that. And I think we're coming, hopefully coming back on the other side of this. Yeah. To where people can actually engage and debate and share your opinions and be willing to not agree. And because that is the democracy.

is no super majority should be in charge on either side or any independent view. I don't think that the lines, I don't even know if we should be calling ourselves independents, democrats, republicans anymore. To me it's just like, so many people that I know off, that may not say this in a podcast, but off there it's like, well I believe in both sides and I have arguments in this stuff. Are we really setting ourselves in this box over here or can we just run and share our policies?

Well, and I can't keep going back to this podcast only because I listened to it within the past 24 hours. he was also saying something about the definition of liberal, because he's like, I always believed myself to be a liberal. he said, but I was basing it off of an older definition of what it meant to be liberal. And that's not necessarily how it's being a liberal is interpreted today. And, you know, so I think even just understanding what the definitions are.

is important. yeah absolutely and I heard you know Mark Cuban on the All In podcast last week which gets really feisty by the way because he's a Kamal Harris supporter and it's really interesting. I didn't know that. I'll have to listen to that one. I loved their back and forth because they both made a lot of different him and David Saxon particularly made a lot of different points for both candidates but at the same time

You know, Mark's like, I voted for Republican, I voted for Democrat, I voted for, it's like, whoever is going to come in there. And I think that's the same thing for even David Sacks, like they voted for different people. So it's like, why do we have to even identify? I think part of the identification itself is causing this divide. And it's like, how do we- Well, because it goes back to identity. know. then like, get around their heels and it's like, can't we just talk about a- Like you wouldn't go to a CEO that's running a company that's being, you're interviewing a CEO and being like, which one, you know, what do you-

You don't put yourself in a box in one way or another. You interview the candidate to make sure the right candidate for the position based on where the company needs to go forward right now. And that's going to be on their policy and their strategy and whatever it is. That's exactly to me when you're hiring the CEO, i.e. the president of the most powerful organization in the world, should be coming down with those particular aspects. It should be, what is your strategy? What is your policy? What do you plan to do? How do you plan to get us out of these things? What's the vision for? how are you going to execute? Forget about what side you're on. Like these are the...

that takes, treat it as if it was a business and then actually create a lot of these economies. Anyways, so there's so much, I think our country needs leaders more than ever right now to step up and I think, I almost feel like we're almost at a peak stage, maybe the next six months we get there and then get through whatever we need to get through and then just settle the divide down and come back to how do we get our country awesome again and like united and being able to have

public debates and being able to be wrong and people don't still like respect each other. Exactly. Just like you do in business. Just like you do in business. I know many people that wouldn't agree with my decisions in business. They wouldn't agree with my decisions now. They wouldn't do all those different things and I wouldn't agree with theirs. There's nothing wrong with that. And I hear from those people and I hear from people that agree with it or like, tell me how you did this or tell me how you did that. There's no, there's no right or wrong. But do you think that the different, cause I agree with that comparison between like business and government, but is it

Why is it there's so much, what's the word I'm looking for? Like, animosity? Or I was just gonna say anger or emotion really. Because not always anger, it can be excitement too, but why is there so much emotion tied specifically to politics and is it because, I don't know, like honestly, why is there so much emotion to that? it because it does, like what you do in your business doesn't really affect me as like how I run my life? But.

because politics can and government can potentially? I would make a side note that 99 % of people, regardless of whoever is elected, won't affect people's lives.

Yeah, I know. people over, the only reason why, on. The only reason why is because if you look at the last five presidents, they've only gotten between five and 15 % of their entire agenda that they've said. I know. That's why. think too. He was like, there's like a couple of tipping point issues between the two, but he said otherwise the rest of the policies will either not get done or they're pretty equal. By the way, it doesn't mean it's right. Like it doesn't mean we need go down that same path again. But so then you ask the question. if 99 % of people like,

Again, there's the 1 % of really highly informed voters that have a lot of stakes in different things than lot of what they're doing. But for 99 % of people, the sun's gonna come up, everyone's gonna do the exact same thing. And it's there. I think, again, the country's looking to, it's become very polarized in every direction right now. Yeah, but why do you think there is so much emotion around it? Or maybe it's just more evident? Because I guess- people wanna be right.

Conspiracy theories are flying on both sides. I think of anything else collectively as like us the country that we're so That we get so emotional about I don't know if there is anything. I mean by the way, I mean there's been two assassination attempts on a President and a a past president and a candidate and the last one discussed what's on the other rock I mean, honestly like it's nobody. I mean I did hear about it. Yeah. Yeah for a day Yeah, that one. Yeah, we did not get I mean it was guy

armored vest on it sat out for 12 hours. like, I'm just, my point is like, I'm just actually, I'm just saying to your point, like, that's like, okay. Like, not only, not what I'm saying, like, it's just like, just, why are we at this point where we're actually having to kill people over politics? Like, this is just wild. Like, it's like, if some, if we're in a Netflix series right now, somewhere else, like we have a lot of high ratings because the people are looking at our country going like, what is wrong with all of you down there? I mean, I'm serious.

You can't get your shit together. trying to kill people. mean, it's just unbelievable. We can't literally come down to the only place that we know right now that has this beautiful land and actually, sure, debate and not agree, but also enjoy And fight for what you do believe in. That's fine. not physically. way. Yeah. And that's why I think people are ultimately really upset. it's because they just want to

people are looking for something to unionize about and it's just, it's been over last eight years, it's just been splitting and now both sides are doing it. That's why the VP debate I thought was like, maybe politics can return to this, which is like how, like you greet somebody and you agree on a lot of things. Cause again, Jamal said this, but I also heard this in many other political interviews, a lot of what they, a lot of their policies aren't this greed. They're just now taking these tiny little pieces and throwing them out there and creating.

Well, and then again, going really polarizing about the person and their individual lives. that's why nobody wants to actually get into politics right now. Yeah. It's true. Like even local politics, people are, because it's extending to that. And so again, to me, it's just like we hopefully as society and as an organization can actually like move through this and then say, OK, how do we get back to, you know, less anger and like not, not

trying to demonize individuals for having opinions or for making mistakes or for taking things way out of context and blowing it up on social media for clickbait. By the way, I think there's a couple ways you do this. If you actually took away all of the money from corporations and lobbyists and you just allowed them, I think people in general, and you could only make individual donations of what is it, up to $1,000 or $1,200 per person that you can make or something along those lines.

and you just kept it to that and everyone had to run on those things, I think that would change the game entirely. Because right now all of the money, it's just like anything else, is being funded from these different places and those proposals shows up that way. For both sides. And it's had for- I was gonna say, don't even know of any massive donate, well actually I know of two. One of course, Elon. But remember, Kamala Harris raised $300 million in Well was gonna say, did you see that, so Ben Horowitz, Anderson Horowitz, did you just see that? They endorsed two.

Well, he endorsed Trump. Yes. A couple of years. Well, Anderson Horowitz did. Ben Horowitz. Mark Andreessen endorsed Sorry. Yeah, Andreessen. Ben Horowitz came on and endorsed Kamala Harris. Recently, but last election, was Trump. So Mark Andreessen endorsed Trump like six months ago with a fund. Ben Horowitz came out and endorsed Kamala Harris with money as well, too. They're basically funding both sides. Yes, except the article that I read said that Ben had

had supported Trump pre in the prior election because in or some I believe it was a prior election. Maybe it wasn't maybe it was as soon as he did not want to support the Biden administration. Yes, he did. But then once Harris became the candidate he yes supporting and don't know if it had a dollar amount attached to it. But they did very specifically he said in his little memo that that doesn't change injuries. Is it Andreessen?

Andreessen Horowitz's, the organization's, this was a personal decision. It doesn't change their decision as a company because he doesn't know what Harris's policy will be on his little, I think he called it the little tech agenda. And so the company, I just think it's interesting that he as a CEO to separate himself from the company. you took away all that money though and you, cause think about it, if you're getting a bunch of money from donors, you naturally sway to those people.

I don't care what businesses you are, just naturally do. That's just part of life. And it's been going on forever. So imagine if you just took away big corporate lobbyists and donations. What would it look like? I mean, that's one of the fastest ways that you would all of a get down to back to the basics of what it is. So isn't Elon giving a ton of money? gave $45 million for three months So that's not as an individual. It was by himself. But I thought you said that an individual could only give X number of dollars. Of taxable deductions.

as much as you want. OK, I was like, that doesn't make sense. But no, if you limited it to the individual, like, OK, each person can only donate a minimum of $1,500 per person. And then everyone's budgets would all come down. Right now, it's like they're saying is you have to do this because everybody is expecting the same amount. And so like, meaning like you have to go out and raise $500 million in order to even become relevant. You run all these ads. I mean, you turn your TV right now for football. It's just like.

whatever it is and it's just, and so if you took away all of that and you actually leveled the playing field and people raised, you know, a hundred million dollars for an entire race and then you're able to be able to, know, and then you allow the media to actually go out, whatever form of media, podcasts, know, traditional media to go out there and do all these different interviews, it would look a lot different.

Yeah, the one I always go back to the one thing, well, there's two things about politics in general. One is I never feel like I know enough and I, and I do, I'm like, what's this? What's the source of truth? Like, where can I go to see both sides truthfully? Like, is there like a website or something? If anyone knows that I need to know.

whole source of truth of food. don't know, mean, it's just like, there's been a lot, mean, I don't know if you saw that whole thing, like obesity has peaked and they're starting to down. It's because people are becoming more aware of the lies they're being told about a lot of different stuff and how. I heard it was because of the Ozempic. Sure, I mean, that certainly helped. All those drugs, yeah. I people are naturally starting to make a little bit better choices. And I just actually heard this this morning that a third of all federally approved foods

are out there are within 10 years recalled or warned on afterwards. A third that's alarming. And that's in the US obviously because yeah, I've also been paying attention to that stuff too. There's a website that's out there. I think it's like you can or something along those lines that like you can go there and you can type in the chemicals of like honey nut Cheerios and it tells you all the things and what they do and how they're bad. Well, and you just go to any other country. mean, even Canada. D4. mean, they don't even make the food the same way. Half of what we eat is not actually food.

just chemical components mixed together. But you're still being sold it like this. I mean, so the point is like, again, that's why I brought it up. It's like untangling the truth from all of this. And being the CEO of your own life, because like we can't just pay attention to media. We can't just pay attention to the ads of food that's in the grocery store. Like we really, I do think that we have to do research on our own. It makes me want to, one of the things I want to read in like the next couple of weeks is I want to read our constitution. Have you ever read our constitution?

I know, I'm gonna read that because I just, like. That'd be fun. What even, I mean maybe I did in school but I don't even think I did. it, yeah. Pieces of it but I'm like, I think I should read it.