PATRICK BET-DAVID – YOUR NEXT FIVE MOVES

You could call our guests today. The true essence of the American dream with an incredible life story and entrepreneurial journey from a humble beginning as a young immigrant escaping a war torn country with this. To founding his own company and media platform. He has gained a firsthand understanding of what rags to riches actually means and how it’s fueled by freedom and opportunity.

Patrick Bet-David is a successful entrepreneur, bestselling author and popular content creator, committed to helping people get more out of life. Patrick is the founder and CEO of PHP agency, a financial services organization, and one of the fastest growing companies in that industry. As well as the creator of value team is regarded as the number one media channel for entrepreneurs and business builders.

He’s also the best selling author of the book. Your next five moves, which gives entrepreneurs and high performers, the skills and methods to strategically plan. The practical steps needed to realize the vision. I’m excited to get into all of that and a lot more with Patrick Bet-David it’s an honor.

Welcome to the run GPG podcast. It’s great to be on with you, man. Very good. Yeah. Well, thanks for, being on with us, happy to have you. And you know, when I was preparing for this conversation, you know, I was thinking, where do I start? Because there’s so much to unpack with your story, but I think it’s essential, that we talk about your background just for a minute to paint the picture of who you are and why you’re so successful.

You know, you have one of the more compelling backstories of any of the guests we’ve ever had. I think the majority of our listeners who are, you know, entrepreneurs, sales, professionals, business builders, they might know who you are, but I think there’s a large portion of our audience that will be introduced to you for the first time today.

So, to break the ice, how do you introduce yourself? Who is Patrick? David? Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Yeah, I’m born and raised in Iran. I lived there 10 years. six weeks after Khomeini died in 89, we escaped, we went to Germany, lived there for about a year and a half at a refugee camp, and then came out to the states, Glenville, California, November 28th, 1990.

Went to school, joined the army right afterwards, a hundred first airborne division aerosol. Great experience. Three years got out, wanted to be a bodybuilder. I wanted it to be the next middle Eastern Arnold is what I wanted. I was going to marry a Kennedy. I was going to be a governor. I was going to be a Hollywood star.

And then I met a girl named John Pierre at Venice beach, who worked on Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter and bone, everything. day before nine 11, I started working on Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. I got my series seven, the whole nine, and then went to Transamerica. You’re later had a great run there for about seven and a half years.

October of oh nine started my own insurance company. And we grew that from 66 agents to today, we have somewhere around 16,000 active agents. They. We’ve licensed shy of 30,000 and we have about 150 offices nationwide and then accidentally started creating content. And that content, you know, got some interest and our main focus was entrepreneurship.

We ended up having a few million subscribers would, Valuetainment a few billion online views and I’ve interviewed a few interesting cats in my tenure as well, creating content. So that’s briefly. Yeah, really, really interesting. I do want to unpack a little of the early life just for a moment here, because when I, I was reading your book yet, it’s like incredible story.

You know, when you and your sister were escaping the city and the bridge blew up behind you, and like you said, you ended up in that refugee camp and I’ve heard you say that you had some really fond memories. That refugee camp in Germany, which is a little surprising. Right. So what did you learn from that experience?

Like what did that help you tap into your instinct, as you mentioned, right? First of all, you, so it’s a two-part question, right? Like what was it about that period that was so enjoyable and how did it prepare you for a new life in the U S I think the biggest part was the fact that people from all over the world, all value.

You know, freedom is so unbelievably underestimated undervalued. When you have it, you don’t even think about it. It becomes the law of familiarity. You’re like, yeah, I’m supposed to have it. It’s normal for me to have it. And then all of a sudden, when you don’t have it, you realize how much you miss it. So thinking that there is a place you can go to, that offers a kind of freedom you didn’t have.

And that’s America. I mean, it’s was an incredible experience. So you escape a war torn country, you’re in a refugee camp, you know, in your early years, who did that make you like? Who were you in high school? Because I think that’s when you actually entered the U S right. Probably your most impressionable years.

So in high school, I was a 1.8 GPA. I was a guy that always carried a jug of water. Cause I was lifting weights and I, there goes pat again with his water. I was the guy that would come to school with two backpacks. One of them had the books in there and the other one had hats. I would buy hats for my dad’s 99 cent store.

And I would sell it at school for 10 bucks, a pop or two for 15, something like that. And I was the guy that was always lifting weights, not good in school. I would take. Biology might teach them biology. I’ll never forget what she told me. Ms. Tiffany was me, me and another guy named Shawn. She says, can Sean and Patrick stand up?

This is when we’re taking our finals. She said, even if you guys get a hundred percent on your final exam, You will still not get a D in the class. So look, I just wanna let you guys know. You don’t have to take the final. And we, she gave us a hug cause she loved both of us. Cause we told good jokes and then we celebrated leaving because my parents at the time, the divorce got me to be extremely rebellious.

I really could care less about life at that. I couldn’t be, I didn’t do well with anything having to do with rules and do this and do that. I just didn’t do well with authority. And that’s probably why I desperately need a little bit of military in my life. And I joined the army a few months after graduating from high school, you also got a D in ceramics.

I got a D in ceramics. I will never forgive that teacher, you know? That teacher. I went back to that teacher years later when I was 26 years old and I was doing well in business. And I said, do you remember. She said, of course, I remember you. I said, you know, I’m the keynote speaker in school today. There’s 600 people in the auditorium.

She says, no, I saw your name. I see, you know, you gave me a Dean class. She’s no, I know. I said, well, good to see. You just wanted to come say hi to you. And, we had, we, we shared a unique moment together, but her and I never got along, I looked, I didn’t take ceramics because I was trying to get along with her.

I took ceramics because a girl named Erica Flores was in ceramics. That’s why I took ceramics. And that was my only intention of going. I was going to ask, right? The struggle is real, a DN ceramics. The struggle is real, but I had no intentions of being a, you know, guide that does design and art in his life.

That’s definitely, I mean, I buy stuff, but I don’t create them. So that’s a brief history on the biography, the early biography of Patrick Bet-David. But I do want to get into your life as an entrepreneur. As you said, you had a brief stint in the military, and then you. Teeth in sales first. I believe it was gym memberships.

You were selling at first, correct? I was, yeah, I was on gym memberships and I was at Bally’s for a few months. Wasn’t good at sales about a year, a month after selling memberships, I was planning on leaving and then my boss, Cisco says, stick around. I wouldn’t qualify where you send me to sell gym memberships at the mall Fox Hills mall.

Wasn’t comfortable talking to strangers. Couple of days. After that I started selling memberships. I became the rookie. Broke a bunch of records. And then I left valleys and, went and started a few businesses on my own, but that was my first experience I ever had with sales. Do you remember your first sale?

Yeah, I do. It was a girl that I was flirting with and we were flirting with each other and it was right by the escalator and she came in and she says, you know, I’ll buy a membership. I said, you’re going to pay $75 on and $32 a month and buy a membership for me right now. She said, I said, you just made my date and she gave me confidence.

She sat down in the chair and we had a one hour conversation together. Fantastic girl. We had a great time together, but that was my first sale. Never forget her. It’s crazy. You asked that question because I vividly remember. Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting to go back and think about, you know, where it all started.

So, but you eventually became really good at sales, right? You became very good at sales. So what made you effective at sales and what qualities or skills do sales professionals need to focus on to be successful in your. one, you got to figure out a way to believe the product. I have a hard time when people can sell anything.

I can’t sell anything. I can sell things that I fully believe in that, that part to me, it’s easy. I can sell gym membership. I can sell exercises. ’cause it’s easy. I can sell investments because it’s easy. I can sell insurance because I believe in it. I can sell entrepreneurship cause it changed my life. I can sell certain things, but number one is you got to sell it.

Number two, the best salespeople. I know. They’re great listeners. They’re great at asking questions and sales to me, it’s the, it’s a skillset, everybody. If they knew the value of learning, how to sell, how, where would help them out, it would help you. When you ask you for a promotion, it’ll help you with parenting, it’ll help you with in, in every possible way.

So I think even a person that is not in sales would benefit from taking a year and learning how to sell and negotiate. It would benefit you in ways you never thought before. So yeah, the sales businesses, I wouldn’t be where I’m at right now. If I didn’t know how to sell, knowing. Yeah, it’s really interesting.

Actually, just as a side point, you know, we’re, we’re really, fast-growing national brokerage in, in one of the things that’s interesting is the shopping behavior of consumers has changed. We, you know, we’ve been telling our agents this for a long time, you know, they’re involving real estate agents later in the process, right?

They, people don’t want to be sold to anymore. The way that they’re seeking information is completely different, right. You have to have a non-threatening way to give them information. They’re actually involving eight. later in the process now, but I do believe that sales skills comes down to, you know, one of the biggest things is reading people, being able to understand personality types, you know, not one size fits all.

And a lot of the time you just touched on it, which is, you know, people, salespeople try and sell themselves as opposed to just listening, finding. It’s motivating a move or, you know, a purchase. I think that’s super important. Now you’ve said, I’ve heard you say this, that everything in life is sales and you just kind of unpack that, right?

Everything in life is sales, but then you got into the insurance and financial services industry. What was the Genesis of, of PHP and what made you decide to work in the insurance game? Over everything? Yeah. So when you get into financial services, you got a different routes to go in. You can go money under management, which is kind of how I got started.

You can do retirement plan. Let’s just say 401ks, and that’s your niche. You can do health insurance, you can do loans. You can do PNC auto insurance. You can do life. I chose a life because to me, the way I look at it is every one of them has to do with numbers. So if you’re like, You can go to any one of those things.

There’s a number should be involved, but I wanted to go where people weren’t looking. I didn’t want to go where everybody wanted to go. Nobody graduated from high school and says, I’m going to go do insurance. So to me, if everybody is going here, this thing here, no one is looking at. Okay. It’s a form of a blue ocean strategy, even though I didn’t know that concept for 10 years after we were doing that, but I chose insurance for that site.

And then I saw how noble the industry was. And then years later I saw what the industry was lacking. The industry is the average agent at the time was a 56 year old wife. Okay. 56 year old white male, where the agency we created, you know, is the average agent is a 34 year old Latino female. We take a slightly of a different angle with that, but the insurance space was a space I got into an and I accidentally realized the power of what it does.

When we delivered our first death benefit to a 19 year old kids, parents, which nobody expected this to take place. And an obviously one from here to here, the rest is history. Super interesting. So as you mentioned, a company now has how many agents? 16 texts, 8,000, 16,000. 150 offices. Right? So what’s made the company so successful.

We have a real vision. We have a real mission, extremely urgent about executing our strategies. We don’t know it all. We’re constantly in the curious mode of figuring out ways to get better. At the beginning stages of it, we had people that were true believers in the cause. Everything’s about a willpower, too many people emphasize way too much on scale.

We put a lot of emphasis in. Willpower is to develop thick skin, to toughen you up to desensitize. You have the day-to-day challenges of being a business of being a sales person, being an entrepreneur. It ain’t easy. And if you don’t desensitize and work on the willpower to leaders that you have in the organization, then the first challenge that takes place, first client that changes their mind that they were expecting.

10,000 auto commission. Oh my God, what am I going to do with that? You know, commission was going to pay for my bills for two months. I was going to catch up and now I don’t have anything, but then you can’t hang. If you have something like that, the only way you can hang during times like that is, would willpower.

So speed, focus, urgency, great leadership, and a ton of luck. I will say that as well. We had a ton of luck, a lot of good things happen throughout the time that maybe we were not expecting it. Some can say it’s due to hard work. We work very, very well. And some of it just could say we got lucky and I wouldn’t debate either one of them.

Yeah. Fantastic. That’s I appreciate that breakdown. Now. How do you see, the financial services world being disrupted in the next five to 10 years? It’s all going to be technology-based, COVID kind of accelerated this process because, you know, if you were selling face-to-face, you can no longer sell face-to-face.

People don’t want you to come to their house anymore. They may want to come to your office. And if you know the people, maybe they’re okay with you going to their house, but 70% of people want to figure out a different way to sell. They’ll come to you. They’ll do a zoom, but it’s not going to be a face-to-face deal.

No one what products could sell online and which products still have to be. Face-to-face, you know, there are certain things that you can do on your own, which will be more automated, certain products. I don’t like, for example, real estate selling Combs. Will it ever fully be automated? I don’t know if it’s fully going to be automated.

There is still a relationship process with the, can I go there and just see the house and say, yeah, I’m making an offer on the house and that’s it. Maybe. Is that going to be an angle that a lot of companies are going to take? I certainly wouldn’t. We may be 20 years away from that take in place. Maybe eventually it’s going to be in that angle in that direction, but definitely not today.

So if there’s anything that’s technical emotions are involved, where somebody, you need to process an issue. Probably is not going to go away face to face. Now on the opposite side, became a vacation component of any industry, those who find their niches. Again, not nothing’s changing with the niche part.

If you find your niche and you stick to. And you figure out a way to be tech enabled and, and figure out a way to add a limited level of gamification to your agents, to your sales folks. I think that that’s the direction it’s eventually going to be going. Yeah. It’s funny. You touched on that. I believe that, you know, the real estate industry, probably like the insurance industry is, is incredibly archaic.

You know, these models were built in the eighties, nineties, early two thousands. So you do have to adapt and change. We believe that. Anyways, I do want to talk about value team. And, like I said earlier, it’s considered one of the top rated platforms for entrepreneurial content. What’s the story behind the creation of value tainment.

And at what point did you start to create content on social media and why? Yes. So behind closed doors, I always create a content, but it was only for my sales guy. So it wasn’t public. It was strictly for my sales guys and they would watch it. And then one day, one of my guys, Mario. Now here. He said, pat, why don’t we create some live content?

Then I said, you know, I really don’t want to create live content. I prefer private life. But when I saw the direction, things were going, if you chose to stay private, Well, then the direction I was going to go was the world was going to dictate who you were. They were going to say, here’s who he is, here’s who she is.

Here’s either. And are you going to lose? Because it’s going to be massive eventually, you know, dictating and controlling the narrative. And I said, no, we got to kind of control the narrative and see, let the audience decide who we are. So we started creating videos two minutes with pat was the first show we did for two years.

I said, let’s do a hundred episode one a week for two years. We did that. And then we changed it up and I wanted to change the channel. And then we went on our next run. We added a couple new shows and then we went to a 400 and I don’t know, 55,000 subscribers. So while this has happened, I’m like, I’m not creating content anymore.

We took three months off. I said, if we do come back, we’re coming back because we’re going to build a real media company. That’s going to compete with everybody in the marketplace, not just a YouTube channel, but a real media company. So we wrote out three words. I wrote on the board. I said, so what do we do?

We bring value. Okay. It’s entertaining. And it starts to become a movie. Why don’t we call it value chain. I said I’ve been, no one has ever thought about this name before. Well, again, being naive, there was a media company in Germany called Valuetainment owned by a guy named Dirk. That’s a publicly traded company.

So you gotta be kidding me. So I find a guy’s email, Derek. I sent him an email, Derek I’m interested in buying. Is that, first of all, who the hell are you? Number two. Why will this domain number three on publicly traded? I’m not selling you to domain. I said, but if you did, what would you sell it versus I’m not selling it anyways.

Finally he gave me a number, like a million dollars, like go away on that song. The domain, two years later, he sold me the domain for $27,500. And he changed the company’s name to value tees. And then, you know, we started gradually. Taken off, you know, million subscribers, 2 million, 3 million. Now we have the PVD podcasts on a separate channel.

We have I-Team and Russian, that’s got nearly 300,000 subs. We have a short clip channel. That’s got nearly 200,000 subs, but, it, it started off just as, Hey, let’s create some content around the world of entrepreneurship and then it took off into what it is. Well, it’s impressive. And as we were talking about earlier, you know, you, you have interviewed some of the biggest names in pop culture, some of the most relevant personalities, influencers, and creatives in real time.

Now of all the notable guests you’ve interviewed, is there one or two that stand out more than the others? Maybe the most compelling.

Now all the notable guests you’ve interviewed, is there one or two that stand out more than the others? Maybe the most compelling. Well, I mean, I’ll never forget. I interviewed John McAfee, the late John McAfee and in the middle of the interview, some guy knocks on the door. When I pulled up to his house, Mario and Louis go inside to set up the interview.

He wouldn’t give us the address. So three hours prior to the meeting, because I was visiting Arthur Laffer. Anyways, we eventually pulled up to the house. Mario calls me says, pat, you may want to come in here. These guys got guns and it’s very uncomfortable. So I walked. Guy pulls up with an M 16. Then another guy pulls up.

Who do you, you know, I’m just here to conduct the interview with John. Great to meet you guys. Who are you with? What’s your background? What’s this? What’s that? I said, listen guys. I was at the a hundred first airborne. You were at the hundred first airborne. What’s your MOS? 63, probable 63. Bravo. Where’d you go to AIT and then they thought I was, but I knew everything.

They were talking. Oh, get the fuck. Come on in here, man. He don’t let’s have a whiskey bring out the good whiskey. Hey, we got five prostitutes upstairs. If you want to go get some, before we do the interview cannot be like, listen, thank you for the offer. I’ll pass. I’m going to do the interview. And while I’m doing the interview in the middle of the interview, some guy knocks on the door.

One of the former Navy seal jumps out with a gun at the door and it’s live. You can see that in the middle of the interview, that was fully epic talking to McAfee. The great lakes, Kobe Bryant interview on him in front of six, 7,000 people magical. We had made such a great connection together and things were coming together for us to do some things.

But unfortunately, the event that took place, president Bush was, great to talk to because he opened up. Drinking alcohol and losing all those great years with his kids have one day. He’s like, I’m done, I’m not drinking alcohol. He took everything and threw it. And then he became a president. Just the fact that he was willing to go and be open about it.

Of course you have to put Sammy Michael, those things on the list. But, Ray Daleo, I really enjoy talking to Ray Dali because it was a little bit of friction. We had a good debate together. There’s many of them, so, but those would be some of the ones that are. Yeah, I was going to ask you specifically about Kobe Bryant.

What did you take away from that? Sit-down the, guy’s a, you know, high level killer instinct, dominator, obsessive personality, great memory. You call them out. You say something, he’s not going to forget. He’s going to come back and want to prove his point. Somebody you don’t want to have as an enemy bullying the bully.

He’s a guy that’s not going to back down. Backstage when we were talking, he spent 15 minutes talking to my son. One Colby died. My son was emotional. Dylan is like, I just, my lost my friend. My friend just died. I’m like this kid made a connection with Colby, you know, Coby sitting there talking to him like as if they’ve known each other for years, very respectful to everybody behind closed doors.

But the guy’s got fire in his eyes. That interview led to him making comments about the shack that was shown on every ESPN, CNN, Fox, Emmett, everybody emailed within a six hour span. We got 50 media companies emailing us to use the clip to talk about. That interview probably brought, I don’t know, 400 total million views from different platforms that shared it and a ton of conversations about it and controversy about it.

But, yeah, he’s, he’s a unique one. The world definitely lost a very unique cause I don’t think he was done. I think he was, I think he was going to end up doing stuff that was going to be just as big as his basketball career or if not bigger. I think it was just getting warmed up. Yeah, it was awful loss.

Sad. I gotta ask you about our friend, Michael. When Michael and I did an interview, Michael wasn’t yet mainstream as much as he is today, today is everywhere. And we were not, I mean, we were 455,000 subscriber channels. Not like. We had some stuff, but when Michael and I did the interview, he didn’t know why we were doing the interview.

And quite frankly, I didn’t know why we were doing the interview because I’m in the business space. He’s a mafia monster. And I kept telling the book, right. I don’t want to talk to Michael anyways, eventually when we got to get, and we did the interview within three days, I got an email from Worldstar. His interview was on the cover of worldstar.com and then it was an all the hip hop community was fascinated by the interview.

All the former gangsters were showing up an email. Different people from the Russian gang, Russian mob, all these guys Albania, and everybody had a certain level of interest and it got, I don’t know, 12, 13 million views. And every time Michael and I sit down together, it gets views. People are fascinated by his story.

You know, if I would have told you, when we first did the interview, it was going to turn into something like this. I would have said, you’ve lost your mind. You know, that opened up an entire new Gianna of interviews that we did. I mean, I know we’ve done business, we’ve done finance, we’ve done politics, never thought we were going to have an entire mafia serious.

And now interviewed Sammy the bull Gravano, Phil lionetti, Oscar Goodman, Frank colada. Yeah. That opened up a new community and it’s a massive community. The commonality, you see among successful entrepreneurs. They don’t like to be told. No, they want to prove a point they’re big on proving a point. They love it when somebody doesn’t believe in them.

Yeah. There’s a, there’s definitely a chip on, on those guys. I mean, I relate, I’ve been in that space for quite some time and entrepreneurs. Don’t like to be told you can’t do something. They typically have an obsessive personality. The guys that make it at the highest level. When I say obsessive, I mean obsessive, like my oldest son, he’ll ask the same question 30 times and it’s so flipping.

When he asked the same thing 30 times, but I walk them and I’ll say, let me take this. Guy’s going to get whatever the hell he wants in his life, because he’s relentless, right? The guy’s just not willing to stop until I give them the answer to the question. And I think there’s an element of that with entrepreneurs.

I think there’s a big element of that with entrepreneurs, but then at the same time, you have to know that there there’s some entrepreneurial. That think maybe let me make sense of this one here in everything in life there’s levels, you can be a great bottle ride YMCAs. You ain’t nobody I’ve been in. You can be a great Bennet’s beach basketball player.

You can be a great NBA player until you go into playoffs and you’re facing the best NBA all-star team out of. I’m not at these guys’ level. Everything in life has levels. Okay. You have to understand it. So there’s a big difference between me being an entrepreneur or me being compared to a bayzos or Musk is not the same level.

It’s complete different level, right? Too many times, the guys who are dying, dying for everybody to accept them as if they’re all at the same level. Those guys are limited to. Okay, because the guys that I’ve met that continuously grow pay don’t yet think they’re good enough. And they think they belong in the, in the circle.

So it’s like, it’s the idea of, I, I have to figure out a way to get them out. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do it at the next level that fire of wanting to get. But I think I belong in a community. So there is levels to the game. A guy that makes six figures may be a rockstar on his siblings.

That’s making 50, but he’s a nobody around the guy. That’s making a million, a guy that’s making a million dollar, your income make, go to all the nice restaurant and tip big and drive a nice Ferrari. But he ain’t nobody to the guy that’s making 10 a year. So this keeps going. This keeps going. So there’s perspectives and levels to the game.

So he asked that question. I’m giving you the answer many different ways, but that’s what I would say about entrepreneurs. I do want to talk about the book briefly. It was during the pandemic, correct? That you released your next five moves right? In 22. Yeah. Yeah. Can you tell us how that happened? What it’s about and why entrepreneurs and high performers should read it?

I loved it. I love it. Like I’m an audio book guy, so I like books that are read by the author, which was you. And by the way, that was three times of going there. And eight, 10 hour days of talking, but. Yeah. So why, why did I write the book? So to me, everything is about your next move, right? And I mean, everything is about your next move.

A guy says, you know, man, I’m really looking for a wife. Really? Yeah. You sure? Yeah. You’re going to give up all those other, you know, side girlfriends that you got. Yeah. Positive. Yeah. Once I find her, I’m going to do that. Okay. But if you do really want to find a wife and you want to settle down, what are your next 10, 15 minutes?

Okay. Maybe it’s the community. Maybe you need to change your habits. Maybe you need to really be honest with yourself and see if you can drop some of the bad habits that you have of being a single. What if you end up getting bored? What if you have a boring, you know, personality that gets bored quickly.

Should you get married? But those are the questions you get asked to see what the next 5, 10 50 moves are. So if you want to start a media company, if you want to start a real estate company, what are your next 10, 15 minutes Avalara. That’s the difference between three guys, all in the same space, they all work.

80 hours a week. They’re all workaholics. They’re all approachable. They’re all attractive. They all have charisma. Tick all. Everything is the same. But one of them has a better method of sequencing their next 10, 15 minutes. You cannot compete with that person. It’s all about sequencing. So that’s the whole thing about your next five moves is to spend more time thinking about is my next three moves the real moves or is my move number three, really move number 11.

And I need to be a little bit more. That’s why I wrote the book your next five months, and I have the whole formula in there on how I do it myself. That’s worked for me. But, yeah. So that’s the story with your next five moves? It’s a really, easy listen. Like what I mean is there’s no dry spots in the book, you know, from beginning to end, I really enjoyed it actually.

And there was, there was quite a bit in there that was a pretty mindless, like the one thing that was really surprising to me was your breakdown of how Steve jobs was an intrepreneur. Right. And when you, when you broke that down, I shocking. I didn’t really think of it that way. Cause we always think the second time around when he came back the second time, like he’s an entrepreneur, but then he became an entrepreneur.

Right? The interesting, and by the way, when you, when you make that point is that this whole thing about everybody that talks entrepreneur, entrepreneur, entrepreneur, it really created a division between. Dose who are doing a lot of the work 40 entrepreneur and one guy from IBM. I wrote about in the book, one guy from IBM messaged me and he says, look, I feel like crap.

I said, why is this? I’m at IBM, I’m making very good money. Everything’s good. My life is good, but I feel like I’m not maximizing my life unless I become an entrepreneur. I said, and that’s when I sat back and I said, you know what? He’s probably not. Here’s a guy that’s bringing value to the company. He’s probably working just as hard as an entrepreneur would be, but he’s feeling guilty.

Does he have to leave IBM to feel like a success? No, he just has to. So that whole concept of entrepreneurship came up. When that IBM guy executive asked me that question, and then it led into a whole new series of episodes. Sometimes you don’t need to go start a business to do well. One of my friends, who’s now my CSO chief strategy officer.

He’s 20 years, my series C a senior mentor advisor, but I hired him as a president and I hired him as a CSR. The company we met 13, 14 years ago. He said, pat, do you know what’s crazy? I said what? He said, it took me 50 years to, to realize I’m a terrible number. I said, what do you mean? He says I’ve been a startup founder three times.

Never once did I make money? He said, you know, what’s the most money I ever made. I said what he said when I was a number six in a company, he said, think about it as a number six. He made more money as a number one. So this whole idea isn’t about, I have to be the boss. I have to be number one. Maybe you’re not meant to be.

And maybe before you become a number one, maybe you need to learn to be a number three or number two, then you go to a number one because you know, the current number one leaves and you replace that number one. But that notion of knowing where your positioning is, like the whole concept of thinking son, you can do anything.

You put your mind to it. That’s not true. You can’t. You cannot be the center of the Los Angeles Lakers. If you’re five 11, no mom, you’re not right. I can’t, I can’t do that. I understand. Mom’s trying to be, but a part of that compliment is also, it can really mess with the kids mine as well. My mom told me anything, how come I can’t do this?

Maybe I suck. No son, not all of us can do everything. Nobody can do everything. But there is something you can do to be the greatest ad with the talent that God gave you. So that’s the part that we struggle with because I want to be like that guy. I want to be like this guy. I want to be like that can maybe you’re not meant to be that I learned very early.

I went to Mr. Olympia because I wanted to be the next Mr. Olympia. Right. That was my obsession. I’m going to be a stroller and beyond telling you I’m determined, I’m going to be, I go to Mr. Olympia contest. Oh one. And I learn about all the things that you need to do put in your book. Which I said, okay, fine.

I don’t mind putting that stuff on my body if I can win it seven times, because on a one to seven times, not if I’m going to win and be able to compete, I don’t care if I have to. They said, well, if you take it, you’re tall. You’re not going to live a long, long time. I’m like, I don’t care if I live a long time, I want to be able to master being the best at something, like, look at the mindset of a 22 year old kid, how he’s thinking 21 year old kid, you know?

So that is very hard for people to. Where you eventually find out your positioning. And a lot of that is covered in the book.

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You know what it did for me as I was going through, I was from a company owner perspective. I was thinking, how are we encouraging entrepreneurship in our own company? That’s what I was thinking about through it. You know, you know, who are we identifying? You know, because we’re encouraging, you know, a lot of people in our company to bring new ideas and build out a new pillar in the company or something like that.

So as I was going through it, I was thinking, how are we approaching entrepreneurship in our own company? So that was a big takeaway for me. One of the questions I want to ask you about what the book, you do hit on some key points, in sales, specifically for the real estate industry, actually, really anywhere.

Ownership, which is a identifying USP or unique selling propositions as key differentiators. Can you talk about the importance of identifying them to drive growth? And the reason why I ask about this is because our company is founded on a USP’s for agents to help them grow and scale their business. I just wanted to ask you about USP’s briefly.

I think rule number one, call read blue ocean. Okay. I mean, it’s just simple as that go read blue ocean strategy. I’ve done this meeting once every other year with all my guys, we just did one, four months ago in Florida. I had all my C-suite executives and directors out of Dallas. Read the book, write about it.

And come to Florida, I took them out. We had a 12 hour meeting and everybody was supposed to give ideas on how we can become a blue ocean again, because just because you were once a blue ocean doesn’t mean you’re a blue ocean again. Now there could be your blue ocean could be a red ocean, in, in your, in your industry.

That you’re a part of. So the blue ocean to me is not only the USP that you’re talking about. And you’re asking about how can you as an individual have a blue. You, how can, how can you know, John working for David create his own blue ocean for you, where he becomes irreplaceable to you? You know, how does he do that?

How does he become somebody where you’re sitting there saying, man, let me tell you, I really need John. And John comes and says, Hey David, I think I needed a $20,000 raise. You’re like, listen, you’re right. Here’s a $20,000 raise plus 20% bonus. Plus if you do X, Y, Z, the next three years, I’m going to give you equity in the. No. Yes, absolutely fricking awesome. Why though, because he is a blue ocean to you and he’s he replaceable to you today and that’s the idea of. Company product service selling. What can you do? Like one of the most common questions I asked for my sales guys, I created a sales manual. What all my brokers in a company and in here, one of the chapters all the way at the end asks the one question I’ve been asking about for the last 15 years.

And you’d be amazed how many people are startled by this basic question that they don’t have an answer for. And the question is, why should someone work with. Why should someone be your customer? Try answering that? Well, what do you mean exactly? Answer it. Why should someone work for you? In what way does my life become better by being your sales person?

In what way does my life become better by being your customer? In what way do you improve my life? In what way do I get better? And when you go through that exercise and you start writing things down and you say, you know, why should somebody be your. Oh, I’m fun. Okay, cool. That’s it? What else? I tell good jokes.

Okay. Hubris. Great. What else people trust me. Do they really though? I think so. Tell me what. Well, you know, when this happened, this happened, this happened, you ask five people. You’re right. People trust you. That’s a high value. What else? I’m a big thinker. And I try to figure out a way to challenge my friends to also think big.

Cool. What else? Why should you be a seal? Why should someone work with you? I honestly, I don’t have an answer to that question. Well then why don’t you go figure out reasons why somebody ought to work with you and your company. Go figure out reasons why somebody ought to be your customer. Go figure out reasons why I, as the customer was about to buy a $5 million.

And I got 6,000 realtors around my community, the top 1%, which is 60 in the community who are all capable of selling me

this $5 million home. Why should I come to you? But I don’t know if that answered your question for you because I took slightly a different angle with that. Too often, all we think about is how lucky to customers to work with us, how amazing we are, because I’m this I’m that.

But if you flip it on you and you ask that question, you will be amazed on how different you will look at the world rather than what everybody can do for you becomes more about what you can do for others. And people kind of want to work with people that want to do things for them in a positive way. No, you nailed it.

You, you know, answering the question what’s in it for me, every sales person needs to answer that. I’ve got a couple of wrap-up questions for you if you’ve got the time. I hope that’s okay. How do you deal with pressure? Great question. It’s you just have to understand that in life you have a Pendle.

Okay. And here’s what the pendulum looks like. The higher you move up in the bigger vision you got, the more pressure that comes with it. The less pressure you want. I don’t have a big vision, have a simple vision, have a simple life you live and you don’t have to have that pressure. My dad told me one thing one time, the guy’s like a philosopher.

He said, be careful reading books. I said what? He said, be careful reading a lot of books. It says I’m always senior reading books. Like you’re never taking a break. Be careful reading books. I said, tell me why to be careful. He says, because the happiest friend I have his name is Albert. He said, Albert is happy and he has no clue what the hell is going on in.

Because he’s never read a book. He never did anything. He doesn’t know about, you know, taxes, global warming war, all of a sudden, he’s just a happy guy. He says the people that read a lot, learn a lot. Their brain never stops. And a little bit of happiness goes away because now you feel like you have a responsibility to do something with that knowledge that you possess.

Again, I don’t know if that answers your question for you, but to handle pressures. If you’ve got a big vision and kind of comes with the territory also, I’ve noticed you’ve been pretty vocal, lately regarding politics, or maybe you always have been just, people are paying closer attention now. Where do you see America in the next decade?

If things don’t improve, I know that might be a long answer. And are you gearing up for a political. No, I’m going to be a guy that’s going to help. A lot of people run and a lot of people will come through me. I’ll be a kingmaker all day long. I’m a good guy to be in whoever’s ear. That’s running strategically.

That would be an area that I can help out a lot of qualified candidates. But in regards to where America is going, unfortunately, I did a video yesterday with the biggest threats in America, and I wrote out 18 lists, not even the obvious I set aside, which is China common sense. You know, virtual government, social media, all that stuff.

And then I wrote the other stuff. That’s not so obvious. We are in a very hypersensitive community era. We’re in an era where everybody can not handle opposing ideas. People don’t like opposing ideas. The incentive structure is changing back in the days, you got incentivized to work hard and create something today you’re being incentivized.

If you stay home and not do anything and care more about your habits. While the person that’s going out and creating he’s been demonized. So we’ve completely restructured, incentivizing the right behavior. And now we’re intense to incentivizing the bad behavior, which is going to lead to a lot of, interesting, good people in the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years.

But I think. America could go one of two directions, either a synergies could show up that brings everybody together. And I thought that was going to happen during COVID because last time nine 11 happened, everybody in America, nobody gave him if you were white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Republican, Democrat, independent, we would do not as states of America because we had a common enemy and that was the common enemy.

But when COVID happened, rather than making China the common. They may Trump the enemy and that divided America protesting riots. It was a collapse. So that told you that politicians are more concerned about their party than America. It’s very scary where your party matters more to you than your country, because when you go that direction, unfortunately, You’re giving birth to a lot of dividing Concord division fights wars, unnecessary.

That’s what we’re going. There’s a 20% chance of personal, like AOC could get elected to office the next 20 years. I think it’s very realistic for a person like that to get elected and try to completely revamp the system that we have in America. And there’s a very, also high likelihood for synergist to show up.

I think who shows up between the two. Is when, an equal opportunity competition shows up for Facebook, Twitter, somebody that’s also allowing opposing ideas to be entertained. If we don’t entertain opposing ideas and everything’s about censorship, it’s going to be a very weird time, but regardless of it, my level of optimism comes from this.

Freethinkers have one thing in common. They don’t get bullied, freethinkers value, freedom more than their money. Free thinkers are experts at bullion. Freethinkers don’t want to bully anybody, but if you cross the line and you mess with their freedom, they’re, they’re capable of doing very bad things to you and exploiting you and exposing you in ways that nobody’s ever done to you.

So they keep bullying the free thinker. And I think the free thinkers, society and community is about to have a massive wake up call and it ain’t going to be pretty fascinating. Breakdown. Final question, Patrick. You’re opening a bottle of champagne one year from now celebrating something you’ve accomplished.

What would that be? It’s going to be seven weeks from now, and I cannot tell you, but one year from now, if I’m opening up a bottle, and they can come in, by the way, if I’m opening up a bottle to celebrate something 12 months from now, 12 months from now, we open up a bottle of champagne. What are we celebrating?

12 months from now? Yeah. 10 million subs. I don’t know, but it would be, we have a lot of big things we’re working on, so it couldn’t be one or the other just stay tuned is all I will say, because if the man upstairs keeps us healthy, the next 20, 40 years is going to be very entertaining. Yeah, it’s a tough one.

I mean, a lot of people, they have a hard time answering that because they’re always doing things, especially entrepreneurs, but anyways, Patrick, thank you so much for your time today. Really compelling conversation. So good to get to know you a little bit better and, and in some detail inspiring, fantastic business vice well, thank you very much.

Thanks buddy. Take care.