CoffeeZilla hosts dismantle the "fake guru" industry, exposing predatory schemes by figures like Dan Locke, Graham Stephan, and Brian Rose who exploit desperation with high-ticket courses on wealth and health. They critique the platform's algorithmic bias toward virality over nuance, contrasting this with true education that requires grit rather than magical shortcuts. The discussion highlights how early fame hinders resilience, citing Macaulay Culkin and Shia LaBeouf, while condemning the obsession with short-term metrics that prioritizes sales over genuine value, ultimately arguing that authentic success stems from enduring failure and creating products that sell themselves through word-of-mouth. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Explaining Coffee Break Channels00:01:30
So cool, dude.
Thanks for doing this.
I'm a big fan of all your work.
I really like your video essays you do on the Coffee Break channel, as well as I'm a huge fan of your exposing internet frauds on the CoffeeZilla channel as well.
I'm happy to be here.
Cool.
How did you get into doing those video essays?
I love the video essays.
They're like their own little mini documentaries.
They seem like they take a lot of time and research.
Yeah.
So I kind of got into them after college.
And it was sort of like I would research for a month, whatever I was interested in at the time.
You know, I like to read a lot.
So I would just find myself reading this stuff anyways.
And it gave me an excuse to try to monetize it.
And so that's what I was doing for a while.
I would prepare for a month and then I would kind of, that was a way for me to close the chapters.
I would make a video about it, basically.
And so it's a very, it's hard to describe to people because the topics are so miscellaneous.
A channel that I can explain a little bit easier falls into one category or another a little more easily.
But if you try to describe what I do on Coffee Break, it's very, the topics are much more me following my own nose.
So, yeah, no, I love Coffee Break.
I'm going to still make some videos for it.
I've just taken a little break as I've dived into this other end of the pool.
Has anyone ever told you you sound a lot like PewDiePie?
Like you have the same voice.
No, it's very, very similar, minus the Swedish accent.
The Bitter Pill of Education00:14:50
But yeah, that's my first thing I noticed about you.
I'm like, this dude sounds like PewDiePie.
It made me instantly like you.
Okay, good.
Yeah, I was about to say that's a polarizing, you know, I didn't know where you were going with that.
I thought you might have been going the other direction, you know, it really turned me off of your comments.
Did people not like him?
Some people don't.
I like him.
Yeah, I think he's hilarious.
It's a nice compliment.
He's not selling any courses.
That's a good thing.
That's for sure.
And like the dude gives a ton away to charity.
I actually find so I think he just has some controversial things in his past, but I find that it actually makes creators more.
It kind of gives them an arc to their story.
You know, if you've always been just this likable guy, it's hard to become more likable.
But if you've kind of had some problems in your past, you become a more compelling kind of person, I guess.
Yeah, you kind of like, you can see with him, especially.
I mean, he's grown and learned his entire career from where he started to where he is now.
You can kind of like see the character development, if you will, of him.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So, I mean, I learned a lot from some of your video essays that I watched, especially the one about pop science, where you talk a lot about these entertainers that educate and how celebrities can kind of trust celebrities or people with public figures like Bill Nye, for example.
People will inherently trust them in what they're saying, even if the facts aren't necessarily true.
I just thought that culture, that whole kind of idea that you were exploring in that video was super interesting to me.
Yeah, it's like, I don't know if you're familiar with the idea of memes, sort of as an idea, like ideas that are spreadable, sort of things.
Like the spreadability of an idea being a trait of the idea.
A marketable idea, kind of.
Yes, like a, yeah.
So the big thought there is that the virality of our education or of our science ideas.
Is not correlated to the truth of the idea.
So we have these ideas.
There is some correlation because if you learn that an idea is just wrong, you won't spread it around.
But some of our most viral ideas get spread around in a simplified, overly simplified form that makes them almost untrue.
So, a great example of that is the 10,000 hour rule, which most people know from Malcolm Gladwell.
Are you aware of that?
I'm not aware of that rule.
Oh, okay.
So, 10,000 hours was this famous idea that all experts have about 10,000 hours in the bank.
So, if you want to be an expert, you have to put in roughly 10,000 hours to be an expert.
Expert at any given thing.
That was a big idea in like 2014, 2012, maybe even before that.
But when you go over to the actual researcher who did the studies, he says, wait, no, 10,000 hours is sort of just this arbitrary number.
People loved it because it was this really clean number, but it has nothing to do with 10,000 hours.
It actually has to do with deliberate practice and not to do with the number of hours you necessarily put in.
Of course, you have to put in a lot of hours to be an expert, but that the nuanced truth of that.
Got muddied up when it just became this headline of you got to do the hey, haven't you heard the 10,000 hour rule?
Malcolm Gladwell, dude, just put in your 10,000 hours.
Yeah, it's it reminds me of YouTube videos.
People will use compelling headlines in their videos to get more views on all their content.
I mean, every most YouTubers do that.
Yeah.
Like, what's the point?
Obviously, you're going to make great content.
You don't want to, I mean, no matter how much integrity you claim to have in your own content, you always want.
The most people to see it.
Right, exactly.
You want it to be marketable to some extent.
Let me tell you something.
So, I haven't talked about this too much publicly, but one of the reasons that I stopped publishing on Coffee Break, one of them, there's a few reasons.
One of them was I've gotten extremely jaded with the concept of online education on video.
Sorry, I should preface that.
Online video education.
I don't think it's really that good.
I think it's actually terrible.
Video as a medium is a bad medium for education, like true.
When I say true education, I mean education that cannot be summarized in five minutes or 10 minutes or in a little podcast.
I'm talking about education that is hierarchical, like math, for example.
Math is a great example because you can't just show up in a Cal class having not taken the prerequisites of Algebra 2, Algebra 1.
That's what I mean by hierarchical.
Right.
Video is not good for that.
Video, the primary form that it takes, that it's That it is economically viable at is entertainment.
So when you see a lot of these education creators, who's one of the biggest education creators?
Like Mark Rober.
He's not making, he's fundamentally an entertainer first.
The function of his videos always have to serve, it's a slave to entertainment first because otherwise no one's going to watch it and you lose the viewership.
If you just start really getting into exposition, which is where the real education happens, by the way, and the real nuance happens.
You lose all the viewers.
And so I was getting frustrated because I was taking these ideas that were increasingly complex.
Well, as I just cared more about the ideas and getting to talking to experts, you really quickly find that in any field worth looking into, it's going to be complicated.
And there's going to be experts who've all spent their whole lives studying this thing, and there's going to be two of them that totally disagree.
They both think each other are idiots.
Right.
And to tell that story meaningfully, you have to give due to both sides.
You have to explain that maybe we don't know, maybe there isn't a way to summarize this very nicely.
But that comes at the cost of the viewer.
And if you want to make a real viral hitter on YouTube, and which is the way to make education viable, because you have to do sponsorships, you have to do all those things to make your channel work, and they're just looking at views, you kind of have to simplify.
You have to cut things out, you have to trim the script.
And so I was getting super frustrated with that.
And one of my friends who was like this, who had been in the education game for a long time on YouTube, he said, Oh, yeah, you know, really, you're trying to make your audience feel smart.
Not be smart.
You're trying to make them feel smart.
He goes, an educational video is going to be great if it makes your audience the type of people who want to feel smart.
And that's when I was like, all right, dude, I've got to find some other.
If I'm in the entertainment industry, then I'm just going to entertain, but I'm not going to have the pretense of trying to teach people something if that's not really what I'm able to do.
Obviously, and of course, there's limitations to this.
It doesn't mean that no one's learning on video.
But it means you always have to entertain first if you want to be successful.
And that's like a bitter pill to swallow if you care about the actual topic and the material.
Interesting.
Well, how do you feel about that?
I'm not sure how I feel about that.
I feel like you might disagree.
It's fine.
If you disagree, tell me.
No, I don't think I disagree.
I think that it's look, I mean, I think number one, it's definitely better to have.
Entertainment that has some sort of education tied to it rather than just, you know, mind-watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
I'd rather watch a video essay or a documentary.
They're kind of the same thing: a documentary on Netflix or HBO that is fucking has great cinematography, has great storytelling, has dope music that goes along with it, and makes me more compelled to watch it.
Makes, you know, something that I can sit down with my wife and eat popcorn and watch it and we both enjoy it.
That's not just like fucking sitting down reading textbooks.
So I think there's a huge.
Benefit middle ground, you mean sort of a middle ground there?
Yeah, I think there's definitely a middle ground.
I mean, I don't know.
I think, no, I think, I think there is too.
And to be clear, in my videos, I never have really escaped the trying to educate people to some extent.
I'm still trying to educate people on marketing, shady marketing, bad actors, you know, all these things.
But I've accepted the fact that entertainment comes first.
And I think that was a hard pill to swallow because Coffee Break was my art project.
It was my thing that I was really trying to be pure about.
And when you're purely trying to educate, that is a bitter pill to swallow.
I agree with you that there's really meaningful work to be done on the margins of doing a bit of both.
And I think there are creators out there that are doing that.
They're funding themselves with things like Patreon, they're funding themselves with other things.
But you find the more you go towards the education, this is the bitter pill.
The more you go towards the actually educational, the less economical it gets.
That's true.
So that's kind of the bitter pill to swallow is that the people who are going to succeed are not always the people doing the due diligence, or they're just the people hyping up the entertainment and really lowering that actual meaningful component.
Podcasts kind of found a weird, podcasts themselves kind of found their own weird little crevice in between these two worlds, right?
Like, it's not necessarily educational.
It's just people, you know, vomiting thoughts back and forth, right?
And, you know, Discussing different ideas or whatever, or having someone like you on as a guest.
Like some people that are watching my YouTube channel may not know who you are.
Now they do, and they can, you know, compare our ideas that we're bouncing back and forth between each other and decide they agree with something or they don't agree with anything.
I mean, podcasts, I think it's what's cool about them is they inspire a little bit more thinking.
I think the benefit they have is they're primarily audio, and people have a greater, for whatever reason, long form just works better.
It just does.
And whenever you have long form, You can expound on ideas.
You can go farther, go deeper.
That is one of the great sort of crimes of YouTube that people's attention span on the platform is so short.
So, actually, you brought up Netflix.
I think Netflix actually has a different market on attention because you don't go to Netflix.
Your idea of Netflix isn't to go there and watch a five minute clip.
That's people's ideas on YouTube.
They want to watch a five minute clip.
And I'm talking in generalities because obviously there are exceptions to this.
People make five hour documentaries on YouTube and sometimes they find success.
But when people come to YouTube, most people's attention span is like eight minutes, nine minutes, maybe 10 minutes if you're really pumping them, right?
Right.
Because the entire time, even the way YouTube is set up is to make you ADD.
Like it's like your video, but then there's other things on the side.
So even your viewing experience, or like people will be scrolling through comments, you're not even getting a true viewing experience.
When you put on Netflix, they're not showing you as you're watching the show other shows you could be watching.
Whereas like YouTube, they're constantly hitting you with like, hey, have you wanna watch this?
Maybe this is boring.
You wanna click off?
Hey.
You want to interact with the comments?
Hey, you want to do it?
It's like this ADD experience that you're not actually zoning in, tuning in completely.
And that's another thing that just hurts that educational quality because in education, you need that.
You need people to really tune in.
So that's one of the benefits of podcasts.
When you're listening to a podcast, a lot of people listen on their way to work.
They have nothing else to do, they're tracked in with what you're saying.
And so there's a much larger timeframe you have to talk about ideas, tell ideas.
So, yeah, no, I think podcast is a different game.
I'm not necessarily talking about that when I talk about my own cynicism.
I'm talking specifically about my experience on this platform.
And some people may disagree.
I'd love to hear what people think of that because that's my own pet theory that I've been working on for a while, mostly taken from Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
He's a sociologist from like the 1900s, and he really influenced me.
He's got these three commandments of television that I think are totally true in the modern age.
What are those three commandments?
Yeah, I'm trying to remember them on the fly, but basically, one is knowledge can never be hierarchical.
You can never ask a viewer to come in with knowledge.
The only, like, TV never does that.
Neither does YouTube.
You never watch a YouTube video and they go, hey, if you haven't watched the first 10 episodes, unless it's serialized like a drama, you're never going to watch an educational video that says, hey, guys, we're going to have to stop you at the door if you haven't seen this.
Everything's built for beginners.
And whenever everything's built for beginners, it's never going to go that deep.
The other side of it is avoid ex.
He words it like a commandment.
He goes, Thou shalt avoid exposition like the plague, which is as soon as you turn into nuance, people turn off.
That's just not the way video works.
Video is not great at long, winding ideas.
Books are great at that.
Podcasts are actually pretty good at it.
Video is not.
When you think about video, when somebody starts just rambling on, hey, I'm out.
I got to, because it's stimulus, you know, I've got to be stimulated.
I want to watch a car blow up.
I want to watch, Something.
I want to watch something happen.
But when you're just talking to me, when you're just expounding one idea forever, it gets boring.
And so you see people compress ideas in video because of that.
And then I'm trying to remember the last one.
I think it's something to do with you should, thou shalt avoid confusion or something like that.
Basically, all ideas must be simplified to a single point.
Everything must be kernels, takeaways.
There has to be the one sentence summary.
And so he's talking about, he was talking about education on TV, by the way.
So he's talking about that.
But if you think about, you know, a lot of these shows, they end up any kind of TED talk you have, they're always trying to give you.
One idea.
That's what communicators do by nature, but especially science communicators.
They want to hit you with that one little factoid the, oh, you know, something about Mars, how far we are from Mars, or hey, this is the rule.
This is the blah, blah, blah.
This is the secret.
And in reality, that's not teaching you that much.
Building Reputation Amidst Scams00:11:26
That's giving you a little party tidbit.
But should education be more than that?
And so those are his three roles.
But if you want to go read the book, I would.
That sounds interesting.
And I think, yeah, I think education should be like that.
But I don't think that's.
I mean, I don't know whose responsibility that is, but I think it's a cultural thing.
And I don't know what has created that, although I'm sure it's multiple things.
But for an example, going back to YouTube titles, YouTube headlines, I think the most popular headlines are exactly what you said.
They're just like boiled down versions of a one hour conversation into like a few words.
A few words that just grab you by the throat and really drag you in because you kind of have to have, like, again, with the way our culture is and with the way YouTube culture, you know, YouTube's algorithm works, you kind of have to have that bait and switch.
Everybody's looking for that bait and switch.
Unless you're Joe Rogan, then you just make the title of your video your guest's name.
Yes.
Okay.
So actually, so he, first of all, he's a legend for that.
The ball is required to just like not even, well, I think it's partially because his success never required him to really adapt to like, Grabby titles, but anyways, I'll say this about YouTube.
Like, this is my biggest hate, and why I think education is sort of dying on YouTube.
The other factor is okay, how do I explain this?
There is no reputation on YouTube, which drives me crazy.
So, how did the New York Times have the luxury to kind of build a reputation?
Well, it's because reputation mattered.
Everyone kind of knows the New York Times, maybe less now, but as a reputable newspaper.
You have reputation there.
And reputation allows you to sink cost into quality, knowing that it'll pay off in the future, right?
So, YouTube, to some extent, that was captured in subscribers.
You could build a reputation because, hey, I'm getting you, you're subscribing to my content.
So, I know that if I publish something that's maybe a little off the wall, maybe not as grabby, maybe not as clickbaity, I know my audience will still be there because you guys have signed up to my newspaper.
You've got my reputation matters to you.
And so, it'll surface in the algorithm.
Well, what YouTube has done.
Is they've really distanced themselves from subscribers.
It's largely a vanity number.
It still means something, but it's largely a vanity number.
You'll see channels with millions of subscribers who get 10,000 views in a video.
And you're thinking, how does that happen?
Well, how it happens is YouTube is now deciding for the viewer that they're not interested in a show, even if they've already subscribed to it because they didn't click on the last video.
And so they won't show you this video.
Right.
Or they're saying, hey, your normal channel.
Your normal fans, they're not clicking on this video as much.
So we're going to test it out.
We'll test it out with 10% of your audience.
And if they don't click on the video at like a high click through rate, then we're not even going to show it to the rest of your fans who have all agreed that they want to see your stuff.
And so, what does this do?
It incentivizes that it tells the creator that every video has to still be grabby.
You can never graduate from People magazine where you're trying to grab people's attention because you're forever in competition for their attention.
Because if you don't, if every video doesn't hit like that, then you're sacrificing your long term.
Growth, where if there was reputation involved, you could build sort of that more qualified reputation of, you know, you guys know me.
And you wouldn't have to do that.
Now, as you pointed out rightfully, there are still a few creators who get away with this, who still can build that reputation.
If you're big enough, you don't have to play by everyone else's rules.
But if you're a normal creator on YouTube, if you're not playing the clickbait game, if you're not playing the over the top titles, you're going to lose.
And it's sad that we're.
Doing that, like it's sad that the whole platform is having to bend to these new incentives.
And it's like, how do we build a video platform where you can grow that trust with your audience and know that your audience will be there because you've made quality things in the past?
They'll trust you enough to show it to your subscribers now.
I don't know, I don't know the answer to that, but that I think part of it, yeah, it's a sad evolution of YouTube and how it's changed because of the growth.
I mean, I'm sure there's things that we don't know about, like.
What's happened with the way the company's grown and the billions of hours of content that are uploaded every day?
I'm sure there's things that they have to do to keep their shareholders happy that includes this kind of suppression of content that makes people have to run this rat race of clickbait, this clickbait rat race.
Yeah, no, I mean, there's definitely a side to it.
Ultimately, they're just optimizing for long term audience retention.
But what they're not optimizing for is long term creator freedom and creator satisfaction.
So, right, they're like in, they want to make sure they retain you as long as possible on the site, but they don't realize, and there's not really a great metric to do it, as far as I'm aware, to measure, okay, how does this affect creators now that we really don't show their videos to everyone anymore?
We only show them to the like 5% who clicked it last time, and you're left in this like, Spinning wheel of having to clickbait.
How does that change?
How does that change their content?
Every piece of the algorithm is like an evolutionary pressure on the ecosystem, and your creators will change what they're making based on an algorithm change.
We saw this with as they valued watch time, videos got longer.
Now it used to be you'd see a video of a person saying, I jump off a giant cliff, and it's them jumping off the giant cliff.
Now, if you go to YouTube 2020, they'll say, Hey, watch me jump off this cliff.
They'll jump off, they'll freeze frame.
Let me show you how I got here.
And then it's 10 minutes of stupid, pointless exposition.
And it's like, you'd think about why is this here?
Why is all this filler here?
Why are just so many videos just pointless filler?
Well, it's because the evolutionary pressures of the platform.
They've said we want more content.
So creators go, well, I'll find a way to fit it in there.
I'll bait you and then I'll put eight minutes of filler and then actually give you what I baited you with at the beginning.
So that's what happens YouTube, I think they're probably aware.
But I think they could become a lot more aware of how they are affecting the creators on their platform.
And long term, is this going to make YouTube a place where you don't feel like you can find the quality creators anymore because they've stopped creating or they've really kind of sold out to the clickbaity, you know, overhyped content?
Yeah.
Isn't it weird how something like that, like just a little change in the YouTube algorithm, can just affect the way that kids think in general, like the culture of people under the age of 30, like a change in a YouTube algorithm can change the way.
A huge portion of this population thinks and acts in any sense.
It's so, it's insane to have that much power.
Yeah, because they're creating the world in which we can have dialogue and the incentives shape how big your megaphone is.
And when everyone's trying to get the biggest megaphone to share their ideas, whatever game you're going to tell me to play, a lot of people are willing to play it, you know?
And so, yeah, it's what.
Whatever they're like incentivizing creators to do, they don't even have to say it because creators will just find out.
They'll find out the way to play the game and then they'll tell all their friends and everyone will start to play it.
And you just see like the same recycled behavior.
Okay.
So going back to the coffee break videos you're making, the long form video essays, what did you transition to?
So, what kind of content are you making now and why do you like that better?
Oh, sure.
So I was, yeah, I was making coffee break videos.
And I had started this second channel called CoffeeZilla.
You could tell I have an addiction to caffeine related things.
And yes, you'd be right.
So, but the focus of that channel was kind of miscellaneous.
It's where I threw up stuff.
And then I started talking about these scammers that I would see.
I was just kind of pissed off about it.
I was like, enough is enough.
Someone's got to call out these people because it's a bunch of yes men in the marketing space.
It's a bunch of yes, oh, where nobody's going to say anything bad about anyone else.
And so I was like, this is ridiculous.
This marketing game has gotten out of hand.
Everyone's promising that they're going to make you rich.
I know it's all a lie.
Everyone's saying they're a 22 year old millionaire.
Oh, wait, no, now I'm a multimillionaire by the time I'm 22.
They all have Lamborghinis that are all rented.
They all have houses that are rented.
It's a big joke.
So I said, enough is enough, guys.
Let's call this out.
So I started to do it on YouTube.
No one really was doing it at the time.
And it kind of blew up.
People said, I resonate with this.
I was a victim of such and such scam.
And so I just found it, it was a place in the culture.
It's a time in the culture.
Where calling this stuff out felt really meaningful, felt like I was doing kind of a public service.
And so I kind of went that way for a while.
And now I'm doing more beat reporting, which is different from what I was doing, like sort of mini documentaries where you try to summarize a big idea.
And what I like about beat reporting, why I love doing it is because I'm taking small chunks of a big topic and I'm telling them like almost every day.
But eventually you can cover a lot more ground on a topic.
So, I don't cover nearly as much information in a CoffeeZilla video as I cover in a Coffee Break video.
But over time, I have really explored this industry, which I would have never been able to do in just one video on Coffee Break.
So, that's the benefit of beat reporting you really get to understand an industry, you get to understand what's going on.
And I've really enjoyed it.
And it just so happens that it also aligns better with the YouTube algorithm of like having some momentum on your channel, not just uploading every month.
But I also just enjoy the way it works.
Yeah, it's cool too because things change, right?
Because things change, facts change, shit people do changes every day in the daily news cycle.
And if you'd make one long, if you spend a month working on some shit, it could change the day you release it.
And then all of a sudden, you have some outdated shit in your documentary when if you do reporting every day.
Yes, yes.
And if you've ever tried to summarize a big idea, you know the problem, which is you're usually pressured to summarize it in like one or two, three ideas.
But there may be 20 amazing things about that industry you want to talk about, and you just can't.
And so you just end up cutting a lot of it out.
When you do more of a sort of beat reporting job, you can take an episode to talk about this, then you can take an episode to talk about that, then you take an episode.
You just have that time to really flesh out an idea.
And that's what's happened with gurus.
We've covered now the like webinars.
We've covered the lying in their advertising.
We've debated some of these gurus live.
We've talked to their victims.
We've talked about the different industries they occupy.
We talked about health.
Selling Desperate People's Dreams00:14:02
We talked about wealth.
We haven't gotten too much into the relationship gurus, but they're kind of their own hilarious little niche.
But we've really kind of seen this industry for what it is.
And what it is, is a way for people to make money off the backs of desperate people.
So fundamentally, my contention.
Is that these guys, and for those viewers who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know if you've seen Ty Lopez.
He's kind of.
Yeah, I know who Ty Lopez is.
He was like, Ty Lopez was kind of like the innovator of this guru industry, like the fake gurus.
He was like the originator of this weird little slimy market.
But it all goes back actually further back to the infomercial days, but he brought sort of the infomercial to YouTube, and that was like the first really way to do that.
And basically, what he sold was health, wealth, happiness.
A course for that saying, I'm going to make you, you're like, you were miserable before, but I'll make you happy.
I'll make you, you're poor before, but I'll make you rich for, I don't know, like 70 bucks.
Nowadays, people have really innovated on that.
Now they're selling $2,000 courses for all how to make, how to get rich.
And why I call it predatory is because the people who end up buying these courses are people who are broke, are people who are desperate because the marketing is so over the top.
If you watch it and you have a job, you'll never believe it.
Like it's so scammy, it's so scummy.
They're like, Yeah, dude, I'm just gonna make it.
I was broke, but then I just became rich using this one secret and buy it for 2000.
And you're like, Who would ever buy this?
Well, when you're desperate, when you have no job, all those promises, which sound crazy if your life is stable, suddenly sound just good.
You don't hear too good to be true.
You just hear good.
That's an opportunity.
No, I, McDonald's, you know, I could work at McDonald's for the rest of my life or I can.
Risk $2,000 and go take this guy's course.
And he says, I'm going to make six figures in six months.
There's a weird thing, too.
I think it really captures not only desperate people, but I think young people.
I remember when I was really young, I think I was like maybe 17 or 18, I got sucked into this pyramid scheme.
That was really what it was called.
Yeah, it was called Talk Fusion.
It was like this email video marketing thing where if you use it, you can send videos inside of emails.
And it's the most innovative, cutting edge piece of technology, especially for marketing your business.
And if you sell this marketing thing to this marketing tool to your friends, you can then make, you know, earn exponential sales revenue or commission on it.
And I was like, I was so excited about it.
I was, because I, this is my first introduction to what a pyramid scheme was, or I think it was called an MLM, multi level marketing thing.
And I was like, I was thinking about it.
All day, every day, I couldn't even sleep at night because I was thinking about like all the cool shit I was going to do.
I'm like, I know how to do video better than anybody.
I'm like 18 at the time.
And I was like, all these old people doing it, I'm going to blow them out of the water.
I know I could do cool stuff.
I know how to use Photoshop.
And I was just, I was so sucked into it.
And I thought it was so cool.
I had never, you know, owned my own business at that point.
I had never.
You got sucked into the get rich like opportunity mentality.
Yes.
Which is what all these guys get sucked into.
And it's because sort of if you haven't been scammed once, it's sort of you're not inoculated to the disease sort of thing.
Yeah.
Like it's like you haven't gotten chicken pox or something.
You're just, you just don't, your body doesn't know what it is.
Your mind doesn't know what it is.
So when you're hearing these guys go through the same pitch that all of them use, it's sort of the same formula repeats over and over and over.
You don't recognize it.
And so you kind of fall to just believing it.
You just default to like, oh, yeah, why would this guy lie to me?
Of course, it's this amazing opportunity.
And then you end up buying in.
And ultimately, you realize, wait, this isn't nearly as easy as they made it sound.
They made it sound like everybody could get rich together and da da da.
And of course, that isn't true.
And the only people who really get rich are people who scammed enough people.
And then they get rich, but then everyone else loses money.
So, yeah, it's an unfortunate system.
But that's exactly what's going on with these gurus as well, they're saying, hey, I'm going to make you rich on Amazon.
Well, of course, the reality is, Jeff Bezos does not make anyone rich for free.
That's just, I mean, think about it for two seconds.
The guy's one of the most ruthless business owners of all time.
You think he's going to make you rich overnight?
But they make it sound like such an easy thing that people end up paying them $2,000 to get rich quick.
And now, what these guys do is they take the money from the course that they're selling on how to get rich on Amazon.
They say, Look how rich I am from Amazon.
And it's like, Wait, no, no, no.
You didn't make the money from Amazon.
You made the money from selling Get Rich on Amazon, which is a totally different thing.
And they're flashing the car, they're flashing the house, and they're making it sound like you can get this if you sell on Amazon.
Well, maybe if you're one of the best third party sellers of all time, but you're going to be in the 0.1% of society.
But most people are going to fail.
You know, I did the math because Amazon FBA is really big right now.
Fulfillment by Amazon is what that means.
They're people who basically take products from China, they sell them on Amazon for a markup.
That's simplifying it a little bit.
But people say, oh, it's such a good opportunity.
Well, I ran the numbers.
According to third party data from Amazon themselves, about 8% of people that are selling on Amazon make a fry cook's income.
8% on Amazon even make what a fry cook makes.
So, these people saying, oh, yeah, it's the best opportunity ever.
Oh, you're going to make so much money.
Hey, you could work at McDonald's and make more than 92% of them.
Are you joking?
That's not a great opportunity, right?
Like, even just saying it, it sounds ridiculous.
And even a smaller percent make, you know, $60,000 a year.
And then it's like 1% makes a really good income, like 1% of all third party sellers.
But you're telling young kids that they're just going to jump in.
They don't even have a work ethic.
They're going to jump in Amazon, but thanks to your magical secrets, they're going to make tons of money.
No, it's not going to happen.
Yeah, it's super predatory.
It's super, super predatory.
I know you're so predatory.
These people are told to take out credit cards, take out a loan for this course.
And it's like, so now they're less than zero.
They were at zero.
Now they're at below zero because you sold them on this crazy idea.
And it's not just Amazon FBA, they create a new opportunity every month.
It's like Forex, day trading.
Oh man, the new secret is drop shipping.
The new secret is Amazon automation.
The new secret is it's all a bunch of new secrets.
And but they all run the same business model, which is really they're making money from the course, they're not actually doing the thing.
And these guys also spend a shitload of money on.
So, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong.
On ads.
Yeah.
These guys spend a shitload of money on Google ads, right?
So pre roll commercials that are on YouTube.
Correct.
And I noticed watching a bunch of your videos that these guys have their commercials in front of your videos that are calling out fake gurus.
Oh, it's hilarious.
Like, there was one guy.
I got one guy.
I got his commercial like three times.
It's the guy.
I don't know what his name is, but he's sitting there in front of his computer.
And in his office, he's got like a Lamborghini or a Ferrari behind him with lights shining down on it.
Because that's normal, right?
You put your Ferrari with your computer.
Yeah, yeah.
Right, right.
Anyways.
Yeah, no, it's ridiculous.
It's my favorite thing about my channel is that if you didn't think it was a big deal before, you will understand that it's everywhere because as soon as you start watching my videos, you'll see what I'm talking about.
It's like really funny.
I don't think there's ever been such a perfect, like, they're proving my point as when they run ads on my videos.
And it's only because the algorithm's bad and it doesn't see that I'm bashing these people.
And so it just sees the keywords and it just automatically puts me in their like ad category, I guess.
But they spend a bunch of money on my show trying to advertise on it just automatically.
And nobody's converting because nobody wants to buy it because they're getting seen these people get caught out.
So it's hilarious.
So hopefully I'm driving up their cost per acquisition.
Yeah, you definitely are.
I think you are for sure.
So who are some of the biggest fake gurus that you've uncovered?
I think probably Dan Locke's the biggest.
Okay, Dan Locke's the one that I don't know anything about.
Sure.
I did some looking into him.
I know that he has some sort of a pyramid scheme set up with people that are underneath him that are trying to sell his stuff.
Is that right?
Sort of.
So a lot of these guys do affiliate.
It's not quite a pyramid scheme, but it's close, where basically what they say is hey, okay, you take my course and then you sell my course to your friends and then you make a commission off that.
But it doesn't go any level deeper than that.
Because if your friends sell a course, you don't then get money.
That would make it a pyramid scheme, is if it like flowed all the way up.
But it's really just a one line.
It just like you make a kickback on what you sell to other people.
Just like a sales commission, kind of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it is funny.
Yeah.
Because these guys who are supposed to be trained to become high ticket closers become high ticket closers for high ticket closers.
And it's like this big loop of like you're selling the product.
And then those people are trained to sell the product.
And it's like, wait, what are you actually selling besides?
The product, like, what are you really doing?
But Dan Locke, no, he's this Asian gentleman from Canada, and he's built this huge following off the idea that he's the boss in the Bentley.
That's what he calls himself.
And he's the high ticket closer.
He teaches people how to sell high ticket items, right?
But the thing is, he takes anybody.
So he'll take a kid off the street, and supposedly he's training them to be a high ticket closer.
But I've talked to these guys on the phone.
They're like, yeah, I completed the course.
I've never sold anything in my life.
Not only have I not sold a high ticket thing, I've never sold anything at all.
And you're calling me, you're just calling me a high ticket closer.
I've never sold anything.
These people are not salesmen.
And if you've done an ounce of selling, what you know is that sales books cannot really take you that far.
They're great to read, but then you, it's like basketball.
It's like, hey, how much are you going to read about technique?
The way to get good is by doing the thing, right?
And so the real way to sell is by doing the thing.
But he's sort of famous for really spending millions and millions of dollars on ads, getting so many people involved.
And then the big thing was the upsells.
So it wasn't just about the $2,000 course.
It was about, hey, once you're done with the $2,000 one, really the way to become a high ticket closer, mind you, nobody has sold anything yet, is to go join the inner circle.
Okay, what's the inner circle?
Well, it's more money.
Okay, go spend more money on Dan's inner circle.
All right, but once you go to Dan's inner circle, now you got to go to the closers in black event.
Okay, you go to closers in black event, spend a few thousand dollars on that.
Now at closers in black, it's a big sales pitch for high ticket millionaire.
Now, what's high ticket millionaire?
Well, you still haven't sold a course, but now you can spend even more money.
And now we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars on this high ticket millionaire thing.
And what people told me who were in this thing, in this sales pitch, was people were running to the back to swipe their credit cards.
People were crying that their credit cards had been declined because it had been racked up with so much spend on Danlock stuff.
And this guy goes, The famous thing is from one of my victim testimonials if I could sell my soul to take this course, I would.
I would do anything to take this course.
You know, can someone give me a loan?
I'll pay it back.
And these people are already mountains in debt.
They went to Dan in the first place because a lot of them are desperate.
And it's like this.
So, so that's really where you go from predatory to even something almost worse than that because you have these people basically ruining what they had left of a life.
They already were struggling to find their footing.
They ruined what left they had of that because now they're in debt.
They're not selling.
And then Dan instills in them this idea that, like, well, Maybe the reason you're not selling is because you don't believe enough in the product.
Maybe you need to take this other class.
Maybe you need to do this other thing, right?
And it's this really vicious cycle.
People have gotten $50,000 in debt or they spent $50,000.
It's just crazy.
It sounds a lot like Scientology.
Well, that's the thing.
It's very cult like and religious.
The people from it called it, both people I talked to called it a cult.
The guy has everyone call him Sifu.
He calls it a family, the high ticket closer family, the HTC family.
He has them call each other brothers and sisters.
He says, if your family's not supportive, maybe don't talk to your family.
What is your family doing?
They don't want you to succeed.
Hey, we're the high ticket closure family.
We're your brothers and sisters.
It's very cult like.
You're supposed to listen to these meditations in his course every morning and every night of Dan Locke talking to you, like of affirmations.
And you're supposed to, it's crazy.
It's absolutely crazy.
And so, yeah, that's one of the worst things that I've seen so far.
Now, he specifically teaches how to be good at selling.
The psych, the psych, I mean, because sales is all about most people who do sales are all into psychology and all kinds of weird things like you know, building the ways to build rapport with people to make them like you and want to want what you have to offer, right?
So, is that what he's teaching?
Yeah, but that's not even really what he's good at.
He's mostly a copywriter.
Graham Steffen's Real Estate Myth00:02:42
I mean, this is again, all my opinion.
I'm just gonna say because Dan Locke sent me cease and desist letters before for saying what I'm saying.
So, let me reiterate.
Has he really?
This is my opinion.
Oh, yeah, I've got one right over there.
Actually, I packed it up.
But yeah, I could have gotten it for you.
If I know we were going to talk about this, I would have shown it to you.
Yeah, they showed up at my door and they're like, hey, this is from Dan Locke.
And the letter was like, you can't talk about this.
We're going to sue you, yada, yada, yada.
But I don't know.
They can't intimidate me.
So it's ridiculous.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
And that's how I know that I'm getting through to people is because the fact that they're wanting to intimidate me with lawsuit threats, why would you do that to somebody who's not affecting your bottom line?
If you had such a pristine course, No one would be leaving just because some guy started criticizing you a little bit.
Yeah.
No, that's something I noticed when Graham Steffen came down here.
I was doing this little documentary series about a real estate investor.
And it was kind of like what you were doing with Coffee Break.
It was more of an art project where I put a lot of time into creating these cool cinematic videos that told a story.
It was like its own little business comedy documentary type thing I was doing.
And it became the most popular thing on my channel because it was.
Probably 80% just entertainment and a little bit of education sprinkled in there.
And I just had this outpouring of people that were emailing me and messaging me, you know, all day, every day of like these, like it was always the same thing.
It was always people who had not made it and they were super motivated to make it.
And like their profile pictures were them wearing a suit and tie, you know, and they're an up and coming realtor or they're up and coming real estate agent.
And, uh, You know, they want, oh, please just introduce me to this guy.
Please, what can I do to meet this guy?
And, you know, they weren't seeing what I was seeing.
You know, they have this perspective.
People, there's a huge group of people online that have a perspective of rich people, a false perspective of rich people.
And I noticed that when Graham Steffen came down here, he was on this show and I, and, you know, he's a, he was like a real estate agentslash investor.
And I expected him to be this, you know, hotshot real estate guy who made all his money in real estate.
And, He also made these videos out of the kind.
I mean, I had this perspective that he was this big investor who, just through the kindness of his heart, wanted to share his knowledge with the rest of the world.
Fake Gurus and Red Bull00:16:16
Okay.
Right.
So, I mean, that's how he positions himself, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And when he came here, I realized that's not, I mean, he said it himself.
He's like, that's not true.
He's like, I make most of my money on YouTube.
He's like, I make all my money through ads from my YouTube revenue.
Sure.
So, I was like, They kind of like sent my mind through a loop, and I was like, okay, people watch you because they want to learn how to.
I mean, don't get me wrong, he has a lot of videos that will teach you a lot of valuable things about finance and how to use credit cards, how to build your credit, et cetera.
And I think there's a line that you have to dance when you are positioning yourself as an expert in a certain field.
Really, what you're doing is just earning money from the entertainment that you're putting out by positioning yourself as this wealthy person.
Correct.
A lot of self development is just about making money through the show, the glitz, the glam.
Honestly, I have so many problems with the current state of self help, self development, and then mostly this coach or mentor culture we've created.
And people don't realize that the reason everyone's talking about you need a mentor, you need a mentor, you need a mentor, you need a mentor is because they want to be your mentor.
Like, how hilarious is that?
It's like a piano teacher saying, Hey, you really need a piano teacher.
It's like, all right, well, of course you're going to say that.
You're trying to sell yourself to me.
But I think it's done this real disservice for young people trying to make their way in.
They've never experienced any success, so they don't know how to get it.
And it's just kind of this magical thing to them.
And you have a bunch of quote, quote, successful people saying how you become successful is you get a mentor and you copy them.
Okay, let's be totally clear.
That is not how you get successful.
They say, like, Kobe Bryant had a mentor, right?
Kobe Bryant had a mentor.
Hey, Kobe Bryant, the reason he's successful is not because his coach was so great.
Sure, he might have had a good coach.
The reason he became successful is because he put in hard work.
A lot of these kids, they don't put in the work.
They don't just go do the thing.
That's the secret.
The secret is that there's no secret.
It's like losing weight.
Everyone's trying to sell you a book that tells you it's not your fault you haven't lost weight before.
It is your fault you haven't lost weight before.
You didn't have the discipline to do it.
Like everyone knows how to lose weight.
No one loses weight because we don't have the discipline to do it.
But rather than say that, that doesn't get any sales because how are you going to sell discipline when it's something that you have to kind of like, That's an internal thing.
So they don't sell discipline.
What they sell is it's not your fault you haven't succeeded.
You just don't have the right coach.
You've had the wrong coaches this entire time.
And what it does is not only do those people make a lot of money, they cripple their quote people that they're supposed to be helping who are wondering, how do you succeed?
And they're telling them the only way you succeed is with coaches.
No, the way you succeed is by getting off this cycle of feeling like you need someone to help you, someone's going to come and take your hand to success.
It's not happening.
That's not what's going to happen.
You're going to have to find a way to be successful through grit, perseverance, and hard work.
And yes, there's going to be a little education sprinkled in there, but the amount of education versus like just application and like basically putting in elbow grease is 99%.
You know, 99% hard work, 1%.
Maybe you were inspired by Graham Stephan or any of these Tony Robbins, any of these guys, you know, these self help guys.
That's really what it is.
I maybe I shouldn't label Graham Stephan a self help guy, but like these inspirational guys or these coaches or whatever.
I think Tony Robbins fits into this category.
I have mixed feelings on Tony Robbins.
Yeah, same here.
I do.
I really like, I've read a bunch of his books.
I really like what he does.
I don't think he's one of these people that are spending tons of money on Google ads and Facebook ads trying to sell courses.
I mean, listen, he is a guru, like he is this guru type person.
I mean, he, I think he charges like millions of dollars to like really rich people to coach them on.
Things, right?
Yeah.
Listen, listen, let me say that there is a place for coaches.
It's just that the place is not really at the beginning of your trying something out.
Like, that's the funny thing most people, when they look for the most help, is like at the very beginning.
They go, Hey, I just had some guys reach out to me recently.
How do I start a YouTube channel?
Well, there's no really magical solution.
You start it and you try a bunch of things.
No one can tell you what your genre is going to be, no one's going to tell you, be able to tell you your voice.
Where a coach Actually, it comes in handy, in my opinion, is when you get to an elite level, is when you want to min max that optimize that 10%, when you want to go to the next level and you just need help because you're putting in all the hours, but basically you don't have a way to see from a third party and see it sort of unbiasedly, like what your actual business model is.
And you just need help going to the next level.
I think coaches can be great for that.
I think there's a real value to coaches, but everyone's a beginner's coach.
Why?
Everyone's taking you from zero to one because That's where the money is because there's the most beginners.
There's very few people who need to go to that next level as an expert.
And so that's why all of that stuff is high ticket.
But the new beginner thing is you charge high ticket for selling to millions of beginners.
And it's like, wait, it's not worth to a beginner who doesn't know anything about Amazon $2,500 to learn how to set up a store or do basic product research or set up or how to buy from Alibaba.
Like these are all things that are available online for free.
And if the person's not willing to put in that basic work to go find that out, they're probably not cut out for Amazon in the first place.
Right.
I've noticed that when you're talking about YouTube, people asking you, How do I start a YouTube channel?
That's another thing, people want to be experts before they start something.
They want something to be perfect.
I've had someone come to me and say, Hey, I want to start a podcast or whatever.
Can you send me an equipment list, please?
Please send me my cameras and my microphones that I need.
I know I need at least $10,000 to start this thing.
I'm like, Dude, no, you need an iPhone.
That's it, really.
You need a personality.
You're missing the big things, which is you need work, you need time in to know even what you're doing.
You can have beautiful audio quality, you can have beautiful video quality.
And no one will watch you because you do not have the skill to be a podcaster.
You need to develop that basic, like, basic foundation of work.
And I think part of the problem is everyone goes through this school system that encourages dependence and like spoon fed answers.
And you're just taught, oh, this is the answer to the test.
There's one answer, and your teacher's going to tell it to you.
That's not the way the real world works.
There is no one answer for sure.
And no one's going to feed it to you.
If there was an easy answer, everyone would be successful.
You know who has a really good podcast with really good quality and really good camera angles is that guy, Brian Rose.
And I noticed you've done a shitload of videos on that guy.
I'll tell you what, when I first watched your first video about that yesterday, I had no idea, no clue.
Most people don't.
So give me, just for setup's sake, give me like a brief background on how you got interested in this guy.
Sure.
So Brian Rose had a video that was taken off YouTube.
So he is, for people that don't know who he is, he is the guy who has the YouTube channel called London Real.
Yeah, he does a bunch of great interviews.
I actually like quite a lot of his guests.
And I don't think he's even a bad interviewer.
He has a lot of legit guests come in.
Yeah, 100%.
He's built up this real thing.
But he had this thing that happened, you know, at the start of COVID.
I don't know what it was.
Maybe he's just an opportunist.
I don't know.
But he had one video die and he decides, okay, I'm going to do a crowdfunding thing and I want to make.
A freedom platform, right?
What do you mean?
You say he had a video die?
Sorry.
Like YouTube took it down because it was basically saying COVID doesn't exist.
Okay.
You're talking about the David Icke interview he did.
It was a David Icke interview.
David Icke's a conspiracy theorist who believes in reptilians.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And so YouTube's like, we're in the middle of a pandemic.
We can't allow this on the site.
I'm normally very much against deplatforming.
That was one of those edge cases where I was like, this guy's literally saying, don't.
Worry about COVID, go outside, you're fine.
It's like, this is not something to tell people when everyone's trying to pull together and social distance.
But okay, everyone has their opinions.
But what Brian Rose decides to do is he decides to crowdfund.
So he starts one goal and it's like $100,000 from his audience.
And he realizes he reaches it in like less than 24 hours.
What?
Then he creates a stretch goal and he goes, Hey, I'm going to crowdfund a little bit more.
Oh, $500,000.
And he basically says, Look, we're not going to crowdfund any more than this.
This is it.
$500,000.
That's it.
Hey.
And then we're done.
We're going to only fundraise for a very short time until the live stream.
We just happen to raise a little bit more, but then we're done.
So he raises the $500,000.
The next day, a video comes out.
Hey, we need more money, guys.
We need more.
We need more.
And he's grifting off of this idea of freedom.
People love freedom.
People love free speech.
I love free speech.
But then he says, give me money to protect your free speech.
So then people pay him even more money.
He gets a million dollars from his followers, all from his followers.
And I started to look at the fine print.
And he'd make all these claims like, this is a free platform, you know, for the people.
But when you look at what the conditions are, the freedom platform allows anyone on the platform that Brian Rose allows on the platform.
And lets Brian Rose at any time delete things off the freedom platform that do not conform to his community guidelines.
Now, tell me that that's not exactly what YouTube did to him.
So he gets mad because YouTube kicks him off for community guidelines, like violations, says this is unfair, this is against whatever freedom, and then creates a freedom platform where he has community guidelines and says you'll be taken off at my discretion.
And so I was like, oh, this is a huge scam.
Let me call this out.
And as I'm calling it out, he starts rolling out even more stretch goals.
He goes, Hey guys, we need now we've raised a million dollars, but that's not enough.
We need to raise even more.
We need to raise $250,000 a month for the next 12 months.
So I saw, yeah, that's the same thing YouTube does.
I saw a video where he was claiming that he was banned from like Dropbox, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, a whole slur of.
Of social media platforms.
And then I went on YouTube and I saw his channel was posting videos every day.
Oh, yeah.
So he was just.
YouTube's banning me, banning my free speech, and he's saying it on YouTube.
It's hilarious.
And he's saying, no, it's all this big free speech grift where he's saying, oh, I'm so censored, I'm so da da da da.
But really, he's still playing by the rules on YouTube while trying to gin up all this controversy so that he can basically reap the rewards.
It's super bad faith.
And I called him out on it.
I said, Look, you're lying to people.
You said you were going to create your own platform, but really the streaming service was not, it was third party.
He was like hiring it out, but trying to disguise the fact that he was not actually using his own software.
He was talking about, I'm hiring all these developers, all this stuff.
It's not true.
Like a lot of the things he was saying just were lies and he was using it to raise money.
So I called him out.
I said, Look, this guy's lying to you guys.
A lot of, he took a huge hit to his reputation for that because, of course, he was lying and he never responded to me.
He never responded.
Reply to any of the things there.
And then, you know, he's still continuing to do that.
It's unfortunate.
He was a good podcaster.
What was the guy you were talking about who was his partner in the beginning, who he pissed off a bunch of people?
Joey Diaz was ranting about him for something he did.
Oh, yeah.
So his partner is this guy, Nick, and they started the podcast together.
I can't get too into it because there's some things that were just off the record, but basically, Nick was.
Oh, did you talk to him?
Zuckerberg, I can't say.
Okay.
Which I guess maybe says too much.
But yeah, yeah.
It basically, he got Zuckerberg from his own company by Brian.
And there's just a bunch of shady things with Brian and everyone that I've talked to about it, him.
And a lot of people reached out.
Let me say that.
Like past and current employees reached out to me.
They said, this guy's psycho.
You got to say more about this guy because he's the biggest narcissist I've ever met in my life.
The guy has a freaking painting of himself in one of his rooms.
Like, who does that?
He has a painting of himself, a gigantic painting in his own office.
Like, who?
It's weird, dude.
Yeah, that's fucking weird.
That's a red flag.
That's the only thing you need to know.
If you walk into a room with somebody who has a painting of themselves on the wall, that doesn't tell you to run the fuck out of that room, then you deserve to be fucking scammed.
Maybe that's true.
Maybe you do.
Maybe that is like, that needs to be your fucking icebreaker experience into getting scammed so you can actually be enlightened to this world of fake gurus.
A lot of people, it is.
I mean, a lot of people that is their icebreaker is Brian Rose or somebody, one of the millions of people just like him, who are just grifting a living from basically poor people who don't know any better, who are just looking for that idol of success.
You know, one thing I've noticed is that people who are successful, they have people they like model themselves after, but it's never one person and it's always very intelligently.
It's not like they, Most people I talk to that have some business going, they're not saying, oh my gosh, Jeff Bezos is the only person I look up to, and everything he says is correct.
It's like they know they're intelligent about it.
They like, I like this guy for this.
I take a little bit from here.
They're inspired, but they're not like worshiping these people.
Whereas in this self help space, they're building these people with all the answers.
Oh, I've got all the answers.
You just have to be exactly like me, and you'll experience the exact same level of success.
That's not how the business world works.
You can't go be Elon Musk and start Tesla today.
Tesla's already exist.
You need to go do something else.
And there are going to be different rules in that new space that you design.
So I don't know.
I think it's really unfortunate that the incentives of this industry have actually created terrible business advice for people.
It's supposed to be a world that teaches you business.
It's like watching fake wrestling.
It's like this is not actually, you're doing it so much for the attention and the clicks.
We're not actually getting real business advice anymore.
We're getting like a parody of it.
Yeah, it's like a weird little remora, like a whole other organism that's kind of just evolved as like a parasite that just sucks off what's really going on, what people see.
I mean, people like to use, there's certain people that you think of like Jeff Bezos or people like Steve Jobs or even people like Tony Robbins.
But if you look at most of them, by and large, like the billionaires of the world, most of them, they don't chase money.
They're not chasing those ones and zeros, those dollars.
They're chasing bigger ideas or they're working on building something bigger than themselves, like building a brand that's big.
Like one of your video essays about Red Bull.
Red Bull's not trying to just sell more.
I mean, sure, there's people in Red Bull that are focused on numbers and sales and accounting and whatever, but the people that make Red Bull what it is are the ones that are focused on telling a story.
100%.
Honest Money vs. Inelastic Demand00:14:00
And that's the success of their marketing is that focus.
The difference in focus is what makes them such a strong brand, they're not constantly shoving Red Bull down your face.
Instead, they sponsor some amazing BMX event and it just happens to have Red Bull on the side because Red Bull sponsors it.
But it gets so many more clicks that way because now you're just watching advertising as content, which is so interesting.
Most people skip the ads.
In Red Bull, it's a Red Bull ad, but you actually watch it because it's entertainment in itself.
You have to stay in a certain lane as far as like, are you creating content and building a brand and trying to make valuable content and shit with some sort of integrity, or are you trying to sell shit?
And when you get too far on the side of, I'm just trying to sell shit, the content that you're making is eventually going to suffer.
Same thing with advertising, same thing with making commercials.
And but, however, on the other side of things, what's to say, what's the difference between letting Google run 30 second commercials, sell 30 second commercials for some bullshit fucking guy selling an affiliate marketing scheme in front of your video versus, okay, I'm going to sell my own affiliate marketing scheme at the beginning of my video or at the end of my video?
As long as your content isn't about what you're selling.
I mean, I think it's like the difference of running a phone scam and using a phone.
And sometimes you get called by these scammers.
It's like you're not, you have no participation in the actual scheme.
You know, like for example, you take my channel, my ads are automated.
I can't control if Coca Cola or Dan Locke advertises on my, on MedVideo.
I just have no control over that.
And to be honest, I am actively chopping off on the tree, on the limb that I'm sort of sitting on.
It's like I make videos about fake gurus.
I'm trying to end the end, not end it.
But clean up the industry to the point where you get laughed at if you make the same claims that these fake gurus are making now.
And so I have no problem if there comes to be a day where there's no fake guru ads.
I'm actively working towards that.
I want there to be honesty in marketing.
I want the price of these courses to come way down.
And I want them to stop targeting young people, young, desperate, mostly men, to be honest.
So I think that has everything to do with that are you participating in the weird scheme or do you happen to live in a world where there are scams?
I think there's a mountain of difference between the two.
And I do think, you know, there's this lionization of making money.
People just think if you make money, you're automatically ethical or like not even ethical.
Ethics don't even come into the equation, but you're doing good if you're making money.
You're successful if you're making money.
And I think it's just from our culture of like we're constantly consuming, consuming, consuming, money's kind of the scorecard.
It's unfortunate that that's where we've gotten because.
Ethics is left in the dust.
It doesn't matter how honest your marketing is.
What matters to these people is at the end of the day, how many people bought.
And that's very sad to me because what they don't realize is that there are people at the other end of these transactions.
It's not just a number.
You're not just making a bunch of money, you're making the money from somewhere.
You're selling it to some poor school teacher who's putting their last diamond going into debt because they think you're going to take them out of their situation and you're getting them more in debt.
You're selling it to some Malaysian kid who thinks this is their opportunity to become something.
And you're getting them in debt.
You're selling a Ponzi scheme to some kid in Norway.
I'm trying to give you a real example.
I think it was the Balkans who has no money.
Now they're in debt to this company, this loan shark agency, which might end up breaking their legs.
There are people on the other ends of these transactions.
And when you lie to them and say it's easy to get rich, there is human cost to that.
I agree with you.
And I agree with you to the point where you're saying success, there's a problem with how people define success.
Especially in the country as far as making money.
But isn't success defined?
I mean, isn't how do you define success?
Is it being happy?
Well, isn't happy?
Couldn't you define happy as having enough money in your bank account to where you don't have to worry about paying your bills?
So I think.
No, no, no, no.
I don't think you could ever reduce happiness to that.
I also don't think money is not a part of the equation, but it's not the goal of the thing.
Like it's like saying, it'd be like saying this.
It's like saying, hey, most people want to be happy, and money helps you not be sad for money problems.
Therefore, the goal of life is money.
It's like, whoa, wait, those things don't naturally follow.
If you want happiness, it doesn't mean you chase money.
It means that money helps you avoid some of the things that will make you unhappy.
But if you just reduce the equation to money, you've lost the plot.
And so, what I'm saying is that by sort of making Marketing and some of these businesses only about money, they've lost the plot of really the purpose of creating something.
It's not just to make money, it's to have an exchange of, to use an overloaded word, value where both parties benefit from the transaction.
That is the way to be successful you make a bunch of people happy and you can make some money on the side.
There's nothing wrong with making money.
Right.
But a lot of these exchanges are one side of exchanges where one person is losing and the other person is winning.
That's another thing is that.
When you create something or when you create a product, for example, that actually does provide that value, you no longer have to spend tons of money on marketing because your product sells itself.
Word of mouth, people talk.
If I see something I really fucking like, or if I watch a documentary I really fucking enjoy, I'm going to tell all my friends about it.
Yeah.
And that way, those people don't have to spend tons of money marketing their product or trying to push some false narrative about their product to a certain group of people.
Absolutely.
And even if they do spend money on advertising, I don't care.
That's fine.
Advertising is not inherently bad.
Where it becomes bad is in these market segments where rationality leaves the equation and you get what I always call predatory advertising, but maybe it's worth breaking down.
Look, when you talk about health, it's the easiest way to see it here the health industry.
You know, let's say I have cancer and let's say the doctor comes to me and says, hey, it's inoperable, nothing to do about it.
But then you come down, you're some slick salesman and you see an opportunity.
You say, hey, I can sell you this pill and it will cure your incurable cancer.
What is the price of that pill to me?
What can you sell that to me for?
All your worth, everything you're worth, the last penny you have.
That's called inelastic demand.
It means there is no supply demand equation because there is no price at which I will not buy it.
I will just buy it forever.
That is where predatory advertising comes in because that's the reason you can charge $2,000 for information you could find on the internet.
Is because they lie and they say the reason you're not successful is because I have this magical pill over here.
How much are you willing to pay me for it?
It's $2,000.
And people will say, even though they've never spent $10 on a book, they'll say, hey, I'll buy that $2,000 course.
Why are they buying it?
They buy it because they believe it will make them rich and they'll pay any price because obviously any price is worth it.
If you're going to make me rich and right now I'll give you my whole net worth to be rich, right?
It just makes logical sense.
So this is where these industries become really scummy and there needs to be a lot, uh, More regulation around the advertising of these things.
I wouldn't be ranting and raving like I do if people went in front of the camera and said, Hey, this is a really, I mean, you know, obviously you could glam it up a bit more than this.
But if you were honest about the fact that most people fail, if you're honest about the fact that even when you do succeed, maybe you'll make six figures or something like that.
And, you know, this is really hard work.
If you aren't known to be a hard worker, it probably isn't for you.
You probably should go get a nine to five job where you have to be a lot less disciplined, a lot less, you know, kind of.
Clever and crafty.
This just isn't right for you.
If people said that and they qualified their prospects, they wouldn't sell shit.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing.
They wouldn't sell it, but I'd have no problem with it because it's like, yeah, you're actually being honest.
And they would have to lower their prices because there's no way you can justify a bet.
People want a sure thing.
They'd never spend $2,000 on something that's essentially unsure, but that's actually what the product is.
And so in these industries where you get this scummy price gouging, I think is what I'm concerned about.
Again, mostly health and wealth.
Sometimes it gets into happiness, sort of religious stuff.
People are.
Yeah, televangelism is the same thing.
For a lot of this stuff, it's very unfortunate.
It's very disgusting.
They prey on people's sort of trust and faith in common decency that, oh, you're not scamming me.
You seem like a good guy.
That's something I get a lot.
Oh, this guy seemed like such a good guy.
And it's like, no, that's part of their image they're using to sell to you.
People who are vulnerable, it's a lot easier to market to them and to sell them and to.
Make them a prisoner of belief, if you will.
I like that title, that Scientology documentary.
And going back to Grant Cardone, he lives like three hours away from me.
He is a huge Scientologist.
You mentioned in one of your videos that you actually like him.
Sure.
What about Grant Cardone do you like?
Well, let me qualify that.
And let me go back to what we don't forget we just got done talking about people who try to make videos showing off their Jets and their Lamborghinis and their Rolls Royces.
No, I know where you're going with this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I made that video a while ago and I get so much crap for it.
And the problem with online videos, you can't update your beliefs too well.
It's like a time capsule.
So, the time capsule of where I was, listen, I just got, I had finished a job in which I took his sales training.
We were, oh, really?
I was in a home sales job and I knew home sales.
And my father in law had access to one of his courses.
He's like, hey, check it out.
So, I was watching some of his videos.
And it's funny because a lot of the training is old.
Like, it's like Grant Cardone back when he had.
Hair that wasn't, you know, white.
It's back when he had like the actual whatever.
When he was painting it?
Yeah, when he was painting it.
That's right.
And I thought some of it was good.
And mostly he was selling to businesses.
He had a business that was selling sales training to businesses.
And that usually is pretty ethically fine for me.
If you're selling to a business, I don't really care what you sell.
You know, it's like, it's fine.
Now he's gone to this new direction since then.
And I've kind of watched this unfold, this Grant Cardone transformation where he said, I want to build a brand now.
I'm going to go be the guy in a jet.
I'm going to go be the guy in the.
Now he's doing all the guru tricks.
He's playing all from their playbook.
He launches this now, this thing called 10X, the 10X event.
All it is is a big sales pitch for all these other gurus' products.
So, as far as I'm concerned, Grant Cardone is no longer some clean guy.
I don't know if he ever was, but I had just taken some of his sales training.
And look, Grant Cardone's a good salesman.
I think it's hard to deny.
But now he's engaged in some of the marketing side that is.
More ethically gray for sure.
So, yeah, no, I wouldn't give him a ringing endorsement anymore.
I think that was sort of from the past.
Yeah.
What were you saying, though?
It is interesting, though, he's from Scientology.
I think that is something that's a little weird, right?
He's a super high level Scientologist.
And what Scientologists do is they donate money to the church.
And the more money you donate, the higher the ladder you can climb.
Yeah.
Scientology's a really weird one where money is so inexorably tied.
Like a lot of churches, they raise money, but They do it more or less, sort of like, is not a big thing.
It's like, sort of, this thing that's like on the side, like, hey, we have to support ourselves, whatever.
Televangelists are like, buy my jet.
But Scientology, from the ground up, it's all about money.
Absolutely.
And that's one of the strange things like your money is your access to.
I don't know if they believe in God.
I don't know what they believe in.
They believe in a galactic overlord named Xenu.
But I think, I would say that Grant Cardone's one of those people that he really embodies what I mean when I say the lionization of wealth too much.
Because what he's always talking about, oh, you got to get your money right.
And Oh, you just got to make money.
You got to make money.
You got to make money.
Why?
And he tries to make it ethical by saying, well, you'll give it to a church.
Well, you'll give it to this.
Well, you'll give it to whatever.
And he's like, you'll take care of your family.
And sure, all those things are true.
But the source of that money matters.
And that's what I try to tell all these people who are selling these courses.
I've had the opportunity to sit down with a lot of them.
And I'm like, you know, it matters that you made your money by scamming people.
You should care about that.
Like, you should care about the fact that you hurt people on your way to the top.
These people are like, you know, Looking up to Jordan Belfort, one of the biggest scammers of all time.
And it's like, why?
Right.
No, sure.
He might be a good guy now.
Jordan Peterson and the Cost of Success00:04:33
Like, you understand that this guy's a criminal, right?
But in America, we just kind of, the money just blinds us.
We're like, oh, he must be a good guy because he's on a movie.
He's in a movie.
He's the wolf of Wall Street.
Yeah.
Another thing those guys do.
Oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
No, I was just going to say Jordan Belfort's now part of a stock picking scheme by Jeff Bishop and Jason Bond.
It's called The Mind of the Wolf.
And it's hilarious to me because here's a guy who defrauded people on penny stocks and now he's supposed to teach people how to trade.
Like, why are you taking his advice?
Are you a nut?
Did you not see the same movie I saw?
This is not a good idea.
He's like, saying, Hey, you should go join so and so's course.
He's like endorsing them and stuff.
It's like, dude, you are a famous stock scammer.
And now you are telling all these young people, Oh, yeah, jump in this course.
This is trustworthy.
It's like, dude, how?
It's crazy.
Doesn't fucking matter.
He's too goddamn entertaining.
Yeah, I know.
He's too entertaining.
I like him.
I like him, but I see that stuff and I'm like, what are we doing?
That's what I mean.
It's just like self help has just become so dumb.
I really wish most people could just look.
There's a few good things in self help, there's a few good things in self development that really matter.
It's like when you learn to work out and you kind of have to learn some fundamentals of lifting form, you know, all these things.
After that, it's all effort.
It's not about going to more and more seminars on how to lift weights.
It's like, no, no, you just have to get in the gym.
And so, a lot of self help and self development is that people keep repitching the same ideas we've known about for hundreds and hundreds of years, and we're all supposed to continue to buy their products.
It's like, hey, we learned this stuff a long time ago.
There's nothing new.
There's nothing new.
Well, I mean, there are some good things to it.
I mean, as far as what's his name, Ty Lopez, he kind of didn't make.
Reading cool.
He was always like running around, like, look at my bookshelf here.
I always got a book.
I'm always reading a book, driving my Lamborghini and reading a book at the same time.
He kind of did some cool things as far as like reading was always cool and it always was the thing you had to do.
Ty Lopez just attached it to his brand.
I mean, that's the thing.
They just keep reinventing old common sense as now I'm going to sell it to you.
It's like Jordan Peterson saying, make your bed.
Everyone was like, whoa, make your bed, dude.
Best seller.
Best seller.
Jordan Peterson's like the most brilliant guy ever.
It's like, wait a second.
Your mom's been telling you that forever, but this guy coats it in a layer of psychology to make it believable to a modern mind.
And all of a sudden, you're like, wow, that is profound.
It's.
Yeah.
No, you're right.
And it all goes back to headline.
You got to give them, you got to coat the pill in peanut butter.
You got to make it swallowable.
You got to help them.
You got to lead them to water to an extent.
As long as your pond isn't full of incesticides.
Yes.
And as long as at the end they're getting the actual help, because my thing is like, well, how much did Ty Lopez really inspire people to read?
Maybe he did.
Maybe he did more than I know.
But as far as I'm concerned, most of the people who listen to Ty Lopez bought his course.
They didn't buy books.
Maybe they did.
It's hard to know sometimes, but that's my thing about educational videos.
Sometimes, even I'll watch an educational video.
And after it, I'm wondering, wait, what did I just learn?
I don't even remember.
I was just so into the show.
I didn't really get much out of that.
And especially when you're watching a lot of videos, a lot of these guys, these young guys, they'll just be obsessed with self development.
So they'll be watching self development videos all day.
And it's like you're taking in so much information that half of it's left your head by the time you stop watching YouTube.
That's not really, you're not really getting anything out of that.
And so I'm really the real, if I had a message, my core message is that there are no secrets, there are no shortcuts.
And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can get off this treadmill of trying to find the right advice before you start, the sooner you can get rid of the excuses that are preventing you from just realizing, hey, there's nothing between me and what I want except my own work.
My own effort and getting out of my way with all these excuses.
I need to find some guru to tell me how to do it.
In your experience, what do you think is the best way to learn and retain knowledge or retain information?
The Curse of Early Achievement00:10:09
Do it.
You have to do something yourself.
Like, and man, this is part of the problem with making education entertainment is that the core part of education is repetition.
Like, anytime you learn to do math, you just go through problem sets.
Why do you do the same problem over and over and over?
It's because that's how it sticks in your brain for more than 10 seconds, is by just basically running into the same thing over and over.
Our sort of medieval minds finally crack the code and we kind of get it, right?
So, same way shoot a basketball.
Why can't you just have to do it over and over in the same situation again and again until you finally get into our skulls?
And so, that's how ultimately you learn too.
I mean, you could be talking about a lot of different types of learning here, but like we'll talk a little more.
Pragmatically, like about business, you know, the way to succeed in business is to fail a lot of business, absolutely.
Yeah, I agree.
And so, yeah, there's just I don't know, I think you're right.
Like, people want to be six, they want to be experts before they start, they want to avoid the pain of failure.
And it's like, yeah, there's just there's doesn't exist.
There's never been a stand up who didn't bomb for years and years, there's just no such thing.
And you see it across all domains in life.
And so, why do you think you're special?
Yeah, an interesting thing for me.
Is that like doing this?
So, doing this podcast is a super weird thing for me.
I think this is like my 74th one that I've done.
And I've always just been good at making cool videos with music.
And, you know, I've been really good at using my camera.
And, you know, I've worked on, like I told you, I've worked on movies and worked on TV pilots and stuff like that.
So, I was always good at just like filming stuff and being in weird situations in the underwater, shooting cool shit, making stuff look cool and sound cool and just give you a really cool feeling.
You know, when you see.
A guy flying on a jet or driving in his Rolls Royce with some fucking Rick Ross beat in the background, it hits you.
It just hits you.
You know what I mean?
It's a thing that you do that you can't articulate.
The thing it does something to you, you can't put into words necessarily.
Um, and I got really good at doing that.
And a lot of the stuff I was creating was getting lots of views, hundreds of thousands, millions of views.
And then doing this is the complete opposite of that.
There's no music, there's no cool camera angles.
I realized I am terrible at fucking communicating to people.
I am the worst conversationalist ever.
At least I was at podcast number one.
Now I'm a little bit better.
I'm a This is like number 74.
I'm a little bit better at having a conversation with somebody.
I still suck.
I'm still not an entertaining, charismatic person.
I'm getting a little bit better every time I do it.
But I enjoy doing things I suck at because it makes me better at that thing.
I realize I'm terrible at doing this.
That is okay.
That is the secret to greatness at the end of the day.
You have to just be willing to suck at something.
And one of the things that we like to train people to be afraid of in school is failing.
There's like this huge cost of failing in school, right?
You know, there's even F for failure.
And then you repeat your grade, your parents hate you because you're repeating your grade.
It's like this horrible thing.
And now we've created where no one fails, even if they do fail.
My mom's a teacher, they're not even allowed to fail their kids.
They go, hey, if you want to fail kids, you have to fail.
Like half the class is failing, right?
She teaches inner city, half the class is failing.
They go, you can fail two kids this semester.
And really?
And you're still on people's bad side.
Oh, yeah.
We laugh about it at dinner, at the dinner table, because she's telling us about these kids that are just not getting it because they've been pushed through school for so long that some of these kids are at a third grade reading level and they're in high school.
And how can they fail no matter what?
We should have failed them back then.
Now they're just getting pushed through this system like cattle.
But my point is that there's no encounter with failure that is positive.
And that we encourage, and that you know, we enter like we put in as a regular part of life, but that is what life is at its essence it's a bunch of failure and then success.
And you've kind of hit upon this thing, this you know, core principle of life that most people go through their life never getting to, they've never really failed at something because they've never really tried because they're afraid to try because they're afraid of failure.
Um, but ultimately, that's how you learn.
And what you said is true, like, I can already tell that you've been podcasting for a while, you can just sense it.
In the way you carry yourself, the way we even organize this whole business.
That's how you get better.
And at episode 1000, when you get there, you're going to be a great interviewer, and it's going to be night and day.
And there is no shortcut for that.
Even if you try to teach people what you know, there is no way to get it into their heads.
It's like being funny.
It's like a comedian cannot tell you how to be Louis C.K. Louis C.K. cannot host a class.
There's no way to do it because you learn it through experience.
LeBron James can't teach you how to shoot.
A three pointer or dunk on somebody like he can because it's just through slogging through hours, slogging through the dirt.
And so it just drives me crazy where we have this generation of young entrepreneurs.
They're all on YouTube.
They're all trying to watch, how do I become an entrepreneur?
And they're getting garbage advice that's self serving to the people selling them garbage courses.
And the message is, you're just missing a course.
I saw an ad just the other day and it goes, you failed in the past.
And they underlined it in red.
It is not your fault.
It is your fault, and that's okay.
Of course, it's your fault.
And the guy's like, you just haven't had the right opportunity.
You wouldn't believe what a popular saying that is in sales pitches.
It's not your fault.
You just haven't had the right knowledge.
It's not the knowledge gap, it's the effort gap.
It always is.
And if it is an information gap, it's an experiential information gap almost all the time.
It's like you just haven't been in the situation enough.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
They find their ways to weasel into that, into your mind with what you are doubting about yourself, especially if you're vulnerable.
And Failing is the journey to somewhere.
Like the problem is, these young people think that achieving, getting that jet, achieving that success is like you've reached the final level and you're there.
Now you can finally be happy.
But what they don't realize is the process of trying and failing and trying and failing.
That is what success should be.
That is what success should be because then that is life.
Life is ups and downs.
If it's a flat line, you're dead, right?
It's peaks and valleys.
Well, and that's where you get the most information is in failure.
I mean, look, it's this old thing, but people who experience success early often fail late because what happens is if you experience success early, you don't learn what you did.
You're not really understanding what you could be doing better because you're already successful.
And so there's no reason to sort of autopsy what's going on because, well, I'm succeeding, I'm already successful.
And so it's actually a curse in some cases to experience success early.
Really early in your life because you never have those moments which teach you the most about your craft, which is like the points of abject failure.
You thought something was going to work, you were sure it was going to work, you put a ton of work in, and then it flopped.
That is what teaches you the most out of anything.
That's a really weird thing, right?
That people that are young that get really successful really early, it's kind of a sad thing when you see him like as little kids, like McCully Culkin, for example, and Home Alone and all those things he was doing.
And now, you know, look, he's kind of a Kind of a crazy person now.
And well, why do you have to become a better actor, right?
Like, why would you become a better actor?
People already love you.
What is there to improve?
Everyone's telling you you're great.
Why are they telling you you're great?
Because your box office is great.
So they just assume you're great when you're not.
You're just somebody who just happened to hit the lottery, you know, on that magical spark, whatever it is.
But then you never go through that process.
Now, some people, you can save it by becoming obsessed with the craft, but few people make that kind of negotiation.
And it's got to be way, it has to hit you way harder too when you haven't experienced failure.
And you're so like, I know a couple of young people that have made tons of fucking money in this internet world and especially like gaming in particular.
Sure.
That are so young that have so much money that have no life experience whatsoever.
Like, I've been sucking at most of the things I've done my whole life.
And this, when you're 16 years old and you have millions of dollars, And that only lasts five years.
Yeah, that's gotta be fucking devastating when you get older.
Yeah, because you never get the chance to see also the fruits of your labor.
It's like almost like the fruits of your labor are uncorrelated, or your reward is uncorrelated to effort.
And that's a really bad motivational structure.
Like the best way to structure wins, if you want to incentivize yourself to do more hard work, is that you win after putting in the effort, not before.
And so when people have their biggest success, You know, they're on their first project.
Like, I can't imagine what a disaster that is.
I think, like David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest is one of his first books.
Pigeonholed by First Project Success00:14:49
And he was, you know, he even talks about, you know, what a kind of curse that was.
Shia LaBeouf went huge with holes.
And he's one of the people who, like, later fell in love with the craft.
But there's all that period of just kind of freaking out very publicly because you're trying to negotiate, like, wait, what is my career now?
I probably got the biggest that I ever got.
Like, that's weird.
It's a weird thing.
Yeah.
And they find a lot of them find like weird things later on, too.
Didn't he?
Become like a didn't he like direct a bunch of stuff and try to do he got into like other avenues of like experimenting and like finding new ways to reinvent yourself where you don't have that huge pressure on yourself?
Like, uh, J. J. R. Tolkien did this, no, not Tolkien.
Who am I saying?
Um, Hogwarts girl, the not uh, J. K. Rowling, J. K. Rowling, she wrote under a pin name like Robert Gold Braith or something like that.
Why did she do that?
Well, she wanted to lower the bar for a bit so she could fail without having it also just be this big upset.
You know what I mean?
So she could experiment new writing styles, try to reinvent herself.
That's another thing that happens you get pigeonholed in your success.
They want you to keep doing what you've been doing.
Yes, yes.
To keep showing us the shame show.
They want you to dance the same dance you've done.
And you're like, hey, I've moved on.
Can you?
It's hard sometimes.
Yeah, when you start becoming so successful at something that you're never failing.
It becomes sort of lifeless.
And when you lose the struggle, right?
When you lose that path, like getting from point A to point B, when you're already there, there's something about it where there's just, when you lose that struggle and that striving for success, I don't know.
And people do want you to stay, keep doing what you're doing because they're used to it and they want more of what they're used to and they don't want things to change.
Yep.
Yeah, no, eventually one day I'll move on.
I kind of moved on from coffee break.
I don't know if I'll go back to it.
Probably will, but I'll move on from fake guru content one day.
And I'm sure people will be very upset about it.
They'll be like, why can't you just keep giving us the same things you've been giving us?
And it's like, I'm saying my piece and then I'm done.
Like, I don't want to.
This isn't just something that I want to do just forever.
It's like, I want to make my point.
And then when I feel like I've sufficiently made it, I'll move on to something else.
You've got to.
If you're at all creatively minded, if you're not just doing it for the money, Like you said, it becomes lifeless at a certain point when you just, the record is on repeat.
We both do things that we can see ourselves in our work and we can see ourselves getting better and building something bigger.
And a lot of people, they don't realize that is like, I got to keep chasing these.
Like, I know a lot of people who do this, where they're just, they have businesses.
And of course, there's products and marketing that they don't pay as much attention to that stuff, but they pay attention to.
Their PL statement at the end of the month.
Like, okay, all I want to do is it's a competition.
It's like gambling.
It's like, yeah, you can get addicted to wanting to make that number bigger every month or every year.
Yeah.
And it's the problem is that in a lot of situations, you can win short term and lose long term.
And that's what I see the sacrifice a lot of companies make, large companies and small creators make.
So, for example, to take my one real job, so to speak, was I was, as I said, new home sales, graduated with chemical engineering, hated that.
So I was like, well, let me do YouTube.
And on the side, I got this job.
And one of the things I hated is we'd have these weekly sales meetings, and everything was about sales that quarter.
And like, even like there was big pushes, like, if we're going to miss our numbers that quarter, it was the obsession was not make more sales, but let's move a bunch of sales up.
Like, let's sort of fudge the numbers to make it seem like we're doing more sales this quarter.
We're hustling for this quarter.
Everything's about numbers now.
But there's an immediate cost long term because the sales this quarter is a sales not next quarter.
So it doesn't matter.
You're just moving numbers around.
But they were obsessed with that, not obsessed with how do we make the experience better for our buyers?
How do we improve the product we're selling?
How do we make things better?
And probably 80% of the energy of the company was all about now numbers and nothing about long term happiness of the clients or the customers.
No focus on that.
And so when I look at creators, put this to YouTube or sales or any kind of these info products, when your focus is just moving numbers around, pushing pencils, taking numbers from tomorrow and bringing them to today, you're going to lose long term because you're not putting the effort into what actually is bringing in the sales, which is the customer experience.
That's the long term sales generator, it has nothing to do with quarterly reports or anything like that.
And so I find the problem is that most of the metrics we have access to are quality unrelated.
That's the problem.
People are obsessed with watch time.
Oh, man, this has the watch time.
It's all a competition.
Click through rate.
This is whatever.
Well, what I'm saying is those quantitative numbers are not necessarily linked to what's going to get you the views.
No, definitely not.
And if anything, they drive down what's going to give you the most amount of views.
And to, for example, to give you what Joe Rogan has, if you want what he has, then you can't worry about the numbers.
You can't worry about your headlines because that's just going to stifle how good your content is or the integrity of your content.
And the problem, like going back to what you're saying about companies, is that I think a problem with these companies, why they worry about all of their monthly sales reports and trying to pack as many sales in or to hit a goal for that month is because they're competing with a bunch of other businesses that have extremely high overhead and they want to beat those businesses to be listed as the top 10 most profitable businesses.
Their city or whatever that month.
Instead of taking a breath and being like, okay, how can we create something that is just better than everything else?
You nailed it.
I mean, it's hard to say it better than that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And you're incentivizing people.
So, one thing that I saw is the sales managers were incentivized to focus on the quarterly reports because that's what they reported to.
So, their bosses were looking at that.
And so they looked at that.
And I'm sure those bosses were also looking at, like, so in order to, I mean, now we're talking about sort of management theory, but like, I'm a big believer that incentives drive everything.
It's part of the reason that I mock people who are in this world is because I believe the incentives shift when you get mocked and you're like, wait, I don't want to get mocked.
Let me not do this.
Right, right, right.
And so it's like, but yeah, all the folks, when all the focus is on short term from the top, it trickles all the way down to your employees and just everything goes wrong.
Totally agree with you, man.
I guess I'm agreeing on this podcast.
Yeah, we have a lot of agreeing, not enough disagreeing, not enough disagreeing.
Well, we're gonna have to do another one where we can find some things we disagree on for sure.
Yeah, so you don't sell a course.
I do not sell a course, never have sold a course.
You're being pressured to sell a course?
I mean, I find that everyone wants to get everyone to sell a course now.
You dirty, dirty bastard.
I've been suggested by people to sell a course.
Really?
Yes, I have.
Well, a course as well as.
So when I was doing that sort of business documentary series, Graham recommended.
An additional way to monetize our show, whatever.
And he, I mean, he was throwing around some numbers that he was seeing from other people in his niche from doing seminars, making tons of money.
Be like, look, dude, you can make 700 bucks a head, and you could pack this place with a thousand people, 2,000 people.
And is that a great opportunity?
Is that a great capitalistic opportunity to make more money?
And yeah, of course it is.
That's a great, I mean, that's a way to look at things.
But I just couldn't, I can't, I don't know what it is, why it seems so unattractive to me to do something like that when, because it just, I feel like it just taints the art.
Because that whole thing was like, like you said, it was an art project to me.
And when I, when I try to throw in something that just, Sells people an opportunity to listen to some guy ramble for an hour.
Yeah.
It taints everything for me.
It makes me just feel, I just feel gross.
I don't know how else to say it.
Here's why.
And I think you instinctually feel what is actually true about what that offering is.
You're not giving people their money's worth.
There's like no way that that's actually worth $700 a head for them to, as you say, watch a guy rant.
Like, what is this?
So you're obsessed with creating.
Value, we might say, for your listener, and more value than they're ultimately having to pay at the door.
There is this mentality of like, just take what you can get, sort of, from people that I think is so toxic right now.
And it's because they don't know who their buyers are.
That's what I find a lot of these people have not encountered their course buyers.
They only pay attention to their successes, they don't pay attention to the losers, they sue the losers.
For complaining.
And so it's really sad to me.
I think a lot of people don't see the cost of what they're doing.
And that's something I'm trying to shine a light on.
But yeah, I think you're just feeling something instinctually that is just sort of obvious, which is it's not a good deal for the people that you're building up an audience of.
You're selling your audience out.
And it's like, it's one thing to sell them out in a way that gives them something that is like pretty obviously negotiably equivalent, like selling a mug, right?
Okay, you're spending $10, you get a mug, mug's worth about $10, whatever.
That's fine.
But when you're trying to get $700, squeeze it out of people, really crank the toothpaste tube for all it's worth, that's when you get into this weird world where you and I, the people, we're kind of architecturing something where we know it's not ethical, where we like we know in the back of our mind that it's not a good buy.
So why are we selling it?
If a lot of these people are selling courses, they would never buy themselves.
That's what blows my mind.
They would never buy it.
So why would you sell it?
Especially because I've been a victim of it.
I know what it's like.
Really?
You bought some cool stuff?
I was telling you about the pyramid scheme I was a part of when I was like 17 years old.
Of course.
Of course.
You don't want to do that to somebody.
You don't want to be the death of innocence for somebody.
No.
Those who, what was it?
What is it?
Those who, have you heard, you know what I'm talking about?
I forget.
Those who cannot do teach?
Yes.
Those who cannot do teach.
Yeah.
Let me fucking look up that goddamn quote.
I got to find out what it is.
It's those who cannot do teach.
If you see someone trying to teach something, you immediately become.
Suspicious of, okay, why are you charging money to teach people how to do this instead of doing it yourself?
Right.
If you knew so much about stock trading, why are you charging someone to teach them?
Like, why don't you just go do it and make a bunch of money?
Yeah.
Well, 100%.
That's the question they can never answer.
They'll go spin off about, you know, well, it's because I just care about people so much.
Yeah, right.
You care about somebody.
That's why you're charging them $2,000 because that's how much you care about them.
But then again, dude, I have to say, I would totally spend $2,000 to go sit at a Tony Robbins seminar.
I think that would be pretty cool.
I've always wanted to do that.
Sure.
Yeah.
Like Tony Robbins is one of those weird edge cases where it's like he's so much at the top of his game and it's almost like a different experience because he's not really even selling you information.
He's sort of selling you himself.
It's like, it's like experience a unique human who you will rarely see.
And it's almost like a performance, not even a, you know, Yeah, you're right.
It's not about information.
It's really about like you're just going to see Tony Robbins.
You could be told that it's the exact same information, but no Tony Robbins.
And it's like going to the Super Bowl.
A hundred percent.
It's an event.
And Tony Robbins, he more teaches, like he doesn't normally, I mean, from what I've seen, teach how to get rich.
He's more teaching, be inspired, be whatever.
And that is one of those things that if that's what you want to do, I don't really care.
Because how can you measure the failure of a be inspired speech?
You really can't, but you can measure the success or failure of a get rich quick.
And that's the whole thing these people aren't delivering.
So, Tony Robbins, if he's telling you he's going to make you inspired, he probably will make you inspired.
I don't know.
Dude, I was listening to a.
Sometimes in the morning, if I'm just not feeling it, I'll put on his fucking Tony Robbins Hour of Power and I'll just listen to him in the background just ramble.
And it just gets me fired up sometimes.
It just gets me energized and wanting to get shit done.
And sometimes you need that.
Sometimes you need it.
It's fine.
It's fine.
Like the funny thing though is there's so many free things out there that the idea of buying some of these courses to me is almost funny because it's like you guys know we have like Zig Ziglar, we have all these famous guys who did this and now a lot of them are dead.
A lot of their stuff is just free online.
Go do that before you join somebody's course, right?
Like, yeah, but instead it's the shiny thing.
Professional Gamblers and Lifestyle Brands00:07:25
It's the marketing that ends up selling it and it's a marketing that.
The main message is like you can be a millionaire by the time you're 20, you know, in your 20s.
You can be some big shot, retire on a beach somewhere, whatever.
Yeah.
And it's like they're really selling, they're not selling an info product, they're selling a dream.
I call them dream salesmen.
That's what their actual job is.
They take your dream and they sell it back to you.
And that's what turns the tickets.
It's not the idea that I've always died.
You know, I really wanted to work for Jeff Bezos.
It's that I always wanted to live on a beach somewhere, and you're telling me I can, and it's easier than I thought.
And if I just follow you, the expert, you're going to teach me how to do it.
Those are the people that I call out.
Now, this Dan Bulzerian doesn't do anything like this, does he?
He just sort of sells his lifestyle and has his like his weed brand, right?
I don't actually think Dan Bulzerian's like a fake guru in the sense that I usually say it.
He's just a big joke, like, because he just says he's rich and he's not really rich.
He says he made his money.
I mean, sorry, he said he's self made wealthy.
He's not self made.
His dad was a corporate raider in the 80s and he's basically took a bunch of money, a corporate raider for it.
Yeah, like, there are all these companies that their job was to.
Take over other companies with like hostile takeovers, basically, using this basically some stock tricks.
You're buying up majority shares of the company, you're basically taking possession of a company without them knowing that you're planning to do it.
And a bunch of money made doing it.
Paul Bulzerian did it.
I'm not too familiar with the specifics of why his type of trading was particularly because a lot of people were doing it, but he's one of the people who got arrested for it.
Okay.
And he owed the government like hundreds of millions of dollars.
And the government has now gotten, I don't know, like three million out of them.
Meanwhile, he shuffled all these accounts around.
So, his basically his family lives in a mansion, but he technically doesn't own it, right?
Like, I don't own it, so I don't have the money.
I don't know where any of this money is.
It's all gone.
But meanwhile, they're all living in the lap of luxury.
And his sons, Dan and he's got another son, basically have been trying to find ways to launder this money into actual, you know, so it's not Paul Bolsarian's money.
It's not obviously his.
So, Dan's cover story was I won it in poker.
I'm this genius poker player that no one's ever heard of.
By the way, like he hadn't appeared on any circuit, like he appeared one time and he did like a loser's run in some poker series.
But it wasn't like Dan Bolzarian was some big shot, you know, Phil Ives or something like that.
Like he wasn't known in the poker world.
And so, but he's saying he made more money than almost any of these other professional poker players have made.
And that's the way he was laundering the money.
So that's what I sort of talked about.
It's like he's not a poker expert and he's got this goofy lifestyle brand that spends twice as much money as it's making in weed sales.
Which is sort of the perfect weed business, you know?
You're selling, you're spending twice as much as you actually make.
Yeah, I found it weird that he does so many like podcasts.
I feel like, if I was that guy, I would not be like responding to all these interview requests from people like Brian Rose, for example, who did a podcast with him or all these other like.
It's a great way to build your celebrity at a low time cost.
Yeah.
I think.
Why did you find it weird?
I find it totally believable.
Because I don't know.
I just thought that, well, because I guess I didn't know.
As much about him as you did, but I thought, like, here's this super rich dude who's surrounded by, you know, who lives in this massive mansion in LA and Hollywood and surrounded by all these half naked chicks.
You know, if I have all that money, why the fuck do I want to spend my time talking to this nerd?
I mean, I understand if that's what you're interested in, but that doesn't seem like his brand.
It seems a little bit off brand to be having, doing podcasts with people, you know, when you're a professional gambler and, you know, professional playboy.
Well, he's not really a professional gambler and hasn't been really doing it for a while.
Ever since he's gotten popular, conveniently, the gambling has left the scene, which is kind of funny because if you weren't a real gambler, of course you wouldn't show people how good you or bad you are at gambling.
But yeah, he's not really a professional gambler.
He's a professional Playboy guy.
He just hires a bunch of models, takes pictures with them, or he says, sorry, he says he doesn't hire them, whatever.
Well, I mean, when you have that big of a following, you don't need to hire him, right?
You can just be like, oh, you'll.
You'll be a social media celebrity if you hang out with me for long enough.
Correct.
And so everything's about expanding a celebrity.
And a lot of these podcasts, they'll do that.
I mean, they'll expose you to 3 million new people who would have never followed you before.
And as long as you can seem semi coherent, people will go, Oh, man, this guy's deep.
He's really a thoughtful playboy.
Yeah, right.
That's funny, man.
One of my favorite things that Danville's there and he goes, He goes, Yeah, I'm not really like a pleasure guy.
It's like your whole life is hedonism.
It's the funniest thing to me for someone to be like, Yeah, man, it's like pleasure won't really get you happiness, man.
I'm just like, I'm after that happiness.
It's like, come on, dude.
He said pleasure won't get you happiness.
It's something, it's like that.
It's hang on.
He said something like that.
Yeah, I think that was actually what he said.
But it was like this thing that sounded really good.
But I was like, dude, your whole life is set up to be the opposite of that.
It's just funny to me.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
When I see pictures of people on Instagram taking pictures with Lamborghinis or Ferraris, I instantly just feel like there's a stigma now.
Oh, yeah, you're a loser.
If you're taking a picture still with a Lamborghini, dude, you're just a total fucking kook, in my opinion, if you're doing that.
And I don't think many people, I mean, other than like people that are in the FaZe clan, if you're in the FaZe clan and you're, you know, a hotshot video gamer, you live in the FaZe mansion, you drive a Lambo, but at least those guys aren't selling fucking slimy courses to kids, people that are desperate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, well, yeah, the Lambo has been become the status symbol of the douchebag.
It's just like it went from the status symbol of the rich to like it's been so overused.
That it's now nobody who's rich probably wants a Lambo because they know if you know of the stigma, you know, like, oh, that's not what I want.
You get a car that people maybe who know, know, and who don't, don't.
It's like, it doesn't matter.
You know, you just find, like, again, it really does come down to it feels like what we advertise as success on YouTube is just a parody of what real success is.
Because when you look at actually successful people, they don't feel the need to show off.
They don't feel like Joe Rogan is a funny example.
It's like that guy's worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Especially after this Spotify deal.
Does he dress up in some suit every day and project success?
No, he doesn't need to.
Right.
I mean, I'm sure he has a nice car.
Do you ever see it?
No.
He could buy it.
Like, you don't feel the need to brag when you already got it like that.
Yeah.
So, the people who do brag all the time, you know, they don't actually have as much money as they're saying or pretending.
Yeah, you're totally right.
You don't see pictures of his cars or his houses or anything like that.
Learning to Enjoy Reading Like Gym00:04:59
And he doesn't even like to talk about it either.
Yeah, any successful guy, unless their entire brand, like Bolzerian, I believe he probably does have a lot of money, but his entire brand is having a lot of money.
So he, of course, is going to do it.
But most successful people you talk to, they're not douchebags who just drive around in the Lambo.
You'll never know they're worth as much money as they're worth because honestly, it's a hassle.
It's like when people know you're worth a lot of money, they want things from you.
It's like you just keep it low key.
Absolutely.
Well, cool, dude.
I think that's two hours.
I appreciate you doing this.
This was a great conversation.
I feel like we.
Talked about some really interesting things.
Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
I think you have a cool podcast.
It very much feels like I sort of feel what you're searching after, and I like it.
I like your hunt, sort of to learn podcasting for the art of it.
Yeah, I love it, man.
Yeah, not only that, I think it's an interesting way just to learn shit, period.
I've never been, I can tell that you're someone who's very well read and you enjoy reading and learning and just from watching your video essays.
I've never been like that.
I just, Oh, you got to do it.
I've never been the person to just sit down and want to read a book for enjoyment.
That's just not me.
I mean, don't get me wrong.
I would like to develop that habit.
I very much would.
And I'm trying to, but this encourages it for sure.
So that's another reason I do this.
Yeah, no, what I was going to say is like, okay, you probably don't like reading for pleasure because you've never read for pleasure.
Like, you probably read some awful books.
Like, we don't teach people.
The problem is, it's kind of the same thing we do with everything.
When we try to get people interested, we're obsessed with them like learning the classics.
And we don't actually have them just do what they want to do, which is how you actually stoke an interest.
Yeah, for sure.
It's very unfortunate.
We're like, you have to read Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
It's like, nobody wants to read Grapes of Wrath.
It's backwards, it's totally backwards from how it should be.
And so now you're left thinking, I don't know, I just don't like reading.
No, you just, you're reading probably some dry stuff from dry authors, and everyone just decided it's a great book, but it's not a great book for you.
So, yeah, man.
Do you like listening or reading better?
So, I really have been listening a lot because I just it's hard to carve out time and audio you can fit in easier.
But I there is something about a book that I feel like you retain it a little bit better.
Yeah, I like the I like how like on the Kindles you can like highlight shit and save as notes and export it later.
Yeah, I feel like that's really helpful.
I just got into that super helpful.
But if you're trying, listen, let me just say this before we go.
If you're trying to read for pleasure, don't read self development, don't read all these books where there's a big takeaway at the end.
Don't feel like You have to, uh, everybody's after just like, oh, I've got if I'm not, they treat reading as like an exercise in education necessarily, and then they wonder why they don't enjoy it.
First, learn to enjoy reading, like going to the gym.
You mean, sorry, are you comparing it like they're treating reading as an exercise, like similar to going to the gym?
Exactly, exactly.
And it's like, if you just learn to enjoy this thing, it wouldn't be such a pain, and you wouldn't constantly be kicking yourself that you're not doing the thing.
Like a lot of people, they stay in shape because they found some way to enjoy exercise.
That's the best way to do it.
You like learn to play tennis or you learn some sport where you're doing it, you don't even know you're getting in shape.
You're getting in shape.
The hard way to do it, really, the challenging thing is to go to the gym.
You know, if you don't like the gym, some people like it, but going to the gym every day, that's the hard thing.
I can't imagine.
Yeah.
And it's harder in the beginning, definitely, than once you get into the group of doing things.
Cause I mean, the hardest thing is taking the first step.
For sure.
Listen, do you like fantasy?
Or fiction?
I do.
I love fiction.
I love fiction for sure.
Okay.
Let me give you a suggestion.
Okay.
If you take it, we'll send you down a rabbit hole.
It's this guy, Brandon Sanderson.
Get Way of Kings.
I'm laughing because I've recommended this book to like probably like 20 people at this point, and probably 75% of them, if you get through like the first seven chapters, you will be hooked.
You're going to be, it's going to be gonzo.
Like you're done.
Way of Kings.
Way of Kings.
What am I getting myself into?
Can you give me a.
Sure.
It's like 800 pages for the first book.
Jesus Christ.
That's a lot, dude.
And there's three books out right now.
The fourth book's coming out in November.
And it is.
You can't describe it.
It's too epic.
It's too epic.
It's like if you've ever enjoyed Lord of the Rings, if you've ever enjoyed any kind of book like that, it's just better than that.
It's just better.
It's a better world building.
I don't know.
Boiling Down Epic Worlds00:01:01
You can't boil it down.
It's like, how do you boil down 800 pages?
You can't.
Yeah.
You'll love this book, though.
If you read it, we'll have to.
Yeah, I will read it.
Call me.
Just call me.
I'll read it.
I'll read it, and we'll do another one of these one day.
Do it on Audible.
It's actually a really good audible.
Okay.
And it's hard to read that much, anyways.
Like, that's a lot of reading.
So, just like go on a walk, take an hour walk, just listen to it.
And yeah, again, by like chapter seven, once you get your hands on what's going on, you're going to lose your mind.
Hell yeah, dude.
And you will start enjoying reading.
That's the point.
Okay.
I will do that and I will report back to you, sir.
Okay.
Thanks for doing this, dude.
I really enjoyed it.
And I'll link your channels down below.
For people, is there anything else besides your YouTube channels that people can go to to follow more what you're doing?
It's fine.
Coffee Zilla is where I'm posting right now.
Coffee Break, if you want to watch the video essays that we talked about.
And that's about it, man.
Cool, dude.
Well, thank you again, and I hope to talk to you soon.