Danny Jones Podcast - #78 - Online Courses & the Finesse of Fake Guru's | Patrick Bet David

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

Patrick Bet David runs the VALUETAINMENT Youtube Channel where he teaches the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and personal development. On this podcast we talk about fake gurus on YouTube, Patrick's success in the insurance business, creating a media company, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We're going to start posting each podcast episode that you see on YouTube a week earlier on Patreon. So feel free to join for early access to all episodes. Plus, we're going to start doing bonus podcast episodes every week. So if you want to join Patreon, it's patreon.com slash concrete videos. Next week's episode is already posted there. So feel free to go check it out. Hello, world. Today my guest is Patrick Bet David.

He runs the Valu tainment. YouTube channel where he teaches the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and personal development. On this one, we talk about fake gurus on YouTube, his success in the insurance business, and then creating a media company, and much, much more. I hope you guys enjoy this podcast with Patrick Bed David. Yo, what's going on, man? How you doing? Good.

How are you? I am good. Where are you based out of? I am based out of St. Petersburg, Florida. How about yourself? I'm in Dallas. Dallas, Texas. very nice why not austin that's where all that Dallas to me is more airport it's more the hub of

capitalism Austin is more LA and I was escaping LA oh okay it's more capitalism in Austin than there is in uh or more capitalism in Dallas than there is in ar yes it's by far okay and and and and Kai do me favor and let the uh z know to let me know the moment byron gets in so I think he just landed Yeah, it's by far more capitalism in Dallas than it is in Austin, by far, night and day. How so? Dallas is all business friendly. It's purely business-free. You go around, you say you're an entrepreneur, you're a CEO, you're an executive. Dallas treats you good. Dallas has probably six times amount of Fortune 500 headquarters, as Austin does. Dallas is a complete different market than Austin is. Austin is more L.A., San Fran. It's slightly a different culture.

Interesting. Very interesting. So you're saying, you're saying mainly the culture's different? Yeah, the culture's night, night and day. Okay. That's very cool. I've never been to either one. I never been to either place. I think you will enjoy both of them. You'll probably have more fun in Austin than you will in Dallas. Okay. Very nice. Dallas is quite boring, man. I'm 42. So I got, I got three kids. I'm married. If I was 28, I probably wouldn't be living in Dallas. Okay.

You got a lot of open farmland over there, huh? Yes. I probably be in Austin. Do you have any cows? I do not. No. No. I do eat cows, plenty of them. Yeah.

Yeah. Do you get them locally or what? Do you buy cows from like farms like like around where you're at? Like are there farmers where you can go buy cows from and eat them? I'm sure there is. I'm not in that business. I'm in the insurance business. So it's a complete different business.

No, no, I don't mean as like a business. I mean as like to get your food. I was wondering if there was like local farms you could buy. There are plenty of local farms. Yeah, there are plenty of local farms that have a lot of pride here. I mean, when you drive around, you'll see them. But when you're in the city, the city, the city is like any city. You know, it's a big city. But if you go 20 miles out, it's Texas. If you're in the city, you know, it's, it's Chicago. It's, it's Miami. It's L.A. It's, it's like any other big city. So you're going to stay. You're going to stay in Dallas forever? I don't think so. I think I'll be here for probably another less than two years. I'll be here. And then I'll be out. Where are you going to go after that? We don't know yet.

I don't know. I'm debating. I do like the state you're in. I almost bought a house in Tampa and moved to where, you know, all those guys right in Tampa Bay. We looked at some nice homes. But, you know, if I do Florida, it would be more on the other side, then it would be on the Tampa.

side. Okay. So tell me your business. What do you do yourself? I'm in the I'm in the advertising business. I, uh, me personally, I had started an ad agency in like 2011. Um, and I, before that, I worked in, uh, I worked in the film industry in particular. I worked on like sets of feature movies. Like, started as a camera assistant. And then, um, started being a camera operator, worked on a bunch of like, big feature movies for like Warner Brothers, did a lot of television production with, you know, pitching TV pilots to different TV networks and stuff like that. And, um, transitioned into advertising, doing commercials for, for big, big brands, like household brands you've heard of, um, as well as some smaller like local mom and pop brands.

And, uh, that kind of evolved in just creating my own content here on YouTube. And a lot of like the, a lot of the TV production work that I did that I pitched around to all the TV networks, I ended up just repackaging it for YouTube and posting it on there. And started doing a lot of like little, many documentaries. And then that kind of evolved into doing this kind of stuff where I can do like, these things are kind of like documentaries minus the B roll and music to me. So I can do multiple ones a week, interview people like you. I can interview a crackhead from down the street, whoever I want.

And it's kind of like they're interesting little character studies for me. So that's what I do. Good business model. And you're in, uh, the insurance business? I am. How did you get into that world? I,

by the way, do we start the podcast or not yet? Oh, yeah, yeah, we started. Sorry, I didn't tell you. Yeah,

I just started from when we first started. Okay, got it. Yeah, so I got into an insurance world. When I got out of the military, I went to, I wanted to be bodybuilders.

So originally, that was going to be right. I was going to take. And then I met a girl who worked at Morgan Stanley Dean Wooder, a long story short, I started working at Morgan Stanley Dean with her a day before nine 11 and then got my series 766, 21, you know, 26, all the licenses at 21 years old and fell in love with the industry. I said this is what I'm going to do. So I left Morgan. I went to Transamerica.

I became an insurance agent for the next seven and a half years. And then October of 09 started my own company, PHP with 66 agents. And today we have somewhere around 17 to 18,000 insurance agents in 49 states. Wow. What kind of insurance? to you sell? Life and annuities. It's a life, any kind of life and an annuities for retirement. Man, I don't have a very good experience with insurance companies. I'm not going to lie to you. I have a pretty, pretty bad experience with them. I had, I had business insurance. And, you know, for my experience, insurance companies only try to do two things, sell you the policy and then get out of whatever claims that you have. I don't think you're wrong when it comes up to PNC.

that's PNC. It's a complete different model. What does PNC mean? Property and casualty. You're talking about property insurance. You're not talking about life insurance. Right. No, yeah. I'm talking about specifically, actually, it was a professional insurance, something like that. The reason why there are so many unhappy people like you and I about PNC is because there's so many, so many words their attorneys use to give them an out. Yeah. But on life, if you have a debt certificate, there is.

no words. You're dead. Okay. It's very simple. So if you buy a million dollar policy and you die and you get into a car accident and you die, you send a death certificate. We're sending you a million auto check. Even if you just pay 30 bucks on the term policy. Wow. Interesting. That's a completely different world than what I'm what I'm used to. Night and day. It's not even the same. It's completely night and day. That's pretty cool, man. That's really cool. So how did you transition from insurance, insurance world to something like this, to making videos and doing interviews and you do a lot of cool stuff. Yeah, purely accidental.

You know, one day I was creating content on the back end. So you couldn't see the content we were creating for the company. And one of my guys came and said, Pat, why don't you create content for public? And I said, I don't really know if there's going to be a public need for what we're doing. He said, just try it out. I said, okay, let's make a couple videos. We made a couple videos. I said, if I do it, I'm going to commit to two years.

I did one video a week. It was called two minutes would pass. two years later you know there was some interest we had a few thousand subs and I said okay let's try to do a little bit more and then we went to 40,000 subs and then I changed the channel's name from my name to valetainment and then from value taming it grew from 40,000 subs to i don't know what we have right now but 2.5, 2.6 million subs and we interview a lot of different characters you know whether it's a colby brine the late Kobe Bryant to a Cuban to a Sammy de Bolgarvano to a

political figure President Bush to Magic Johnson to Wayne Gretzky a lot of different people we interview and it turned into what it is today. So it was purely accidental. Now it's a media company. Now we have a new site. Now we have Vaitainment Russian with 170,000 subs. Now we're doing Vaitainan Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese,

Vaitainment money, Vaitaintinger Economics, we just started a podcast. We got a new new site called vtpost.com that we launched, I think, three, four weeks ago. So now it's becoming a media company and that'll be kind of what I'll do after I replace myself here with the insurance company. Replace yourself with the insurance company. What do you mean by the, you mean you're going to put somebody in your place? Are you going to sell it or what are you going to do? No, you replace. So I hire another CEO to run this company. Oh, you're still going to own the

company. Until somebody buys it, I was still on the company. Okay, cool. That sounds like fun. Yeah, it's crazy. And in the meantime, I got to, try to have a good marriage life, you know, be a decent parent with three kids and make sure family's happy, health is happy. Yeah. And you got to do all of that in 168 hours in a week. Yeah.

That's a lot. That's a lot. How many kids do you have? Three of them, yeah. Three kids. And you're doing all this stuff. That's wild. I think, yeah, you were mentioning earlier about moving to Florida.

I can't believe the difference in the price of houses here in Tampa on the water versus directly across the Gulf Mexico and Texas on the water. It's like night and day the difference in price. It's like three times the price here. No, no question about it. But you've got to realize it's a different place to live where you live than to live in Galveston, you know, Houston. Yeah.

And nobody's trying to go party in Galveston, Hughes. Nobody wakes up and says, hey, guys, what do you want to do this? Well, let's go to Galveston. unless if you are a local person. My wife is from Galveston, you know, but nobody wakes up saying, I want to go to Galveston. But where you are, when I was in the Army,

we would, every time we had a Fourth of July or Labor Day or Memorial, any of those, we're going straight all the way down to Panama City. We'd go to Snippers, what is it, Spinnaker's? And Club LaVila, I think it was at Panama City. And we'd go to some of the areas on your side, definitely not to Galveston. Yeah, yeah.

there's definitely a it's a huge tourist destination here very like a transient area kind of like Vegas no one here is actually from here I'm not surprised yeah I'm sure it's a lot like I'm sure it's a lot like Austin yeah Austin is you and I talked about Austin earlier it's a very different Austin is very different yeah except there's no there's not many left wing people here it's it's all they're all hardcore Trump people here really where you are yeah oh Tampa St. Petersburg oh I mean there's there's a little central there's probably a very distilled area in St. Petersburg that is like that. But other than that, no, it's all. See, what I like is I like both. I like all three. So when I lived in L.A., it was all left. And so

you had 75% left and you, if you even talked about capitalism, you were greedy, right? If I, if I went to a different place, some states you would go to, it's all right. And it's also a little bit too much because you need a little bit of balance on the other side. What I like about Dallas, you know, I lived in L.A. for a while and I went all over a place in L.A. Westwood, you know, we go everywhere. You tell me streets. I know streets in L.A. because I was there for 24 years. There's, in my opinion, there's a bigger gay community in Dallas than there was in L.A. A bigger gay community in Dallas than there was in L.A. And most people, when I say that to them, they say, what are you talking about us? If come to Dallas, I'll take you, drive you around to area in

Dallas. And you tell me what you see here. It's night and day on what it is. But in Dallas, it's fine. You know, it's because they have center, left, and right. You got a little bit of everything that's here. And it kind of works out. But when it's too far right or too far left, I think it becomes problematic for everybody living there. On the description of your channel, Valuetainment, it says the best channel for entrepreneurs. What does that mean? And how did you, did you have that in mind when you when you started it or is that just kind of how it evolved naturally no it was actually originally i mean it was all entrepreneur every content we put up it was only entrepreneur every content was only entrepreneur so if you go on youtube

you go to filters you type an entrepreneur and you go filters views value taming pops up as a number one channel uh for the most views so that's the value taming part but at the beginning at the beginning it was purely business, how to raise money, how to hire, how to fire, how to recruit, how to bring a business partner, how do you negotiate with a multi-billion dollar company, how do you go out there in different ways of raising money, how do you deal with angel investors, how to send an email to angel investors, you know, how do you deal with bankruptcy, how do you manage running a company and being married and having kids? So everything we ever did for Vali-Tayment up until 2018 was 100,000.

percent entrepreneurship. In 2018, I did one interview with Michael Francis, the mobster, and from there, all of a sudden, everybody else started showing up. Hey, how about we do this? How about we do this interview? And all of a sudden, we did bodybuilding interviews. On bodybuilding interviews, we got 15, 20 million views on mob interviews. We got 30, 40, 50 million views on, you know, then it became niches. Then China took off. Then the topic of Iran took off. Then the topic of capitalism took off. So then it becomes topics, probably kind of like your own channel that you have. Who's your biggest hit you've ever had in your channel? Give me the one topic that's done the best on your channel. I think it's this kid who plays Fortnite

for a living. Okay, so go gamers. That's one, right? What is another topic? The other most popular one was about a guy who bought a $5 million dollar Lamborghini in South Beach. So if I go to Concrete's channel, you will kind of see even your own channel that you have. A gamer, 4.2 million views. Now, are you a big gamer yourself? No, but I'm good. I mean, he's just a friend of mine. I thought it was interesting.

I mean, it's phenomenal, 4.2 million views. That's a great interview, right? So next you got a guy buys a Lamborghini for $4 million. Okay, that's the second one. Third one is a pirate junkie. Fourth one is, he looks familiar. He's a UK guy. What's, he's, oh, he's the ecstasy guy.

You got the four. You got Michael, what is, Matthew Cox, right? Okay, so for you, you got gamers, you got cars lifestyle, you got pirate junkie, which is random, you got drugs, you got con, you got real estate, you got a real estate guy there. So those are your six that you're pulling from. I would probably be doing more gaming if I'm you, because you got an audience of gaming. So when you start doing shows, they become hit and miss. Like we started doing vlogs. When we did vlogs, I got to tell you, my vlogs are probably the worst vlogs you'll ever see on YouTube.

Why is that? If you go look at my vlogs, it's, you know, there's nothing crazy about the vlogs. Why is there nothing crazy about my blogs? I don't have the most interesting life to the average person to say, I can't wait to see what this guy does. Like, I don't have time to go out there and say, you know, let's go get a 16,000. cases of Skittles, throw it in a bathtub, and get two girls who are willing to jump in here and let's throw Nutella on top of it, get 70 million views. I don't have that kind of time, right? So some people who do vlogs, they're very interesting and they know how to keep attention

a lot for vlogs, like the Logan Pauls or the Jake Pauls or something. They're killing it with vlogs. But then the vloggers sometimes try to do what you're doing, that doesn't work for them. Sometimes the content creators, which are the how-to business guys, try to do things. others are doing it doesn't work for them sometimes the motivational guys going to interviews their interviews don't work obviously you're a good interviewer if you got seven eight interviewers over a million views you obviously are good at interviewing people but that's not everybody not everybody's good at interviewing people so it's not uh it's not something that uh works for everybody like i don't know if you've tested doing vlogs or not on your own life have you done vlogs before

no i'm not interested in doing any of that stuff i that's that's a that's an interesting idea that you just mentioned how you said because I have a video that has four million views about a gamer, maybe I should do more gaming stuff. It may have an audience for it. How do you feel about making content for your audience versus making content about what speaks to you personally or what you're personally interested in? Yeah. So I do bodybuilding because I wanted to be Mr.

Olympia before. So it's very easy to me bodybuilding because anything from 1990 on until mid-2000, I know all the bodybuilders. And I'm very good friends with Phil Heath. We're pretty much talking every single week. Good friend of mine, I advise him on a couple things that he does. So bodybuilding interview for me is very easy. Mob interview is very easy for me.

Why? I watched all the stories. I read all the books. I know all the things that I came up reading about the things that happen with mob. So whatever you do that there's interest in you, when you do that interview, the audience is going to feel it, whatever you do? You got to chase the views or do you chase just what you're interested in, even if it doesn't bring in views?

Do you focus more on business, the business side of it, the numbers, all that stuff? Or do you just, you know, whatever, follow your passion or your dream or whatever it is? If you're doing it just to have fun, you're doing it. If you're doing it because, you know, it's a business model and you're selling stuff through it, then that's a different thing. If you're doing it because it's so different for everybody on YouTube. I mean, you got these six-year-old kids, seven-year-old kids that are unpacking toys, you know, making 22 million years.

A kid's name is Ryan. You know, he's got this channel that all he does is open up Lego toys or different toys. He's a $22 million dollar year earner, seven-year-old kid. I mean, who's doing it? Him or his parents, his parents. There are so many ways to leverage technology today, but it's all on what you're solving for. And, you know, many times,

while you're doing what you're doing, you may not even know it for the first two, three, four, five years. Right. Five years later, you may say, you know what, this is going to turn into concrete. All of a sudden could have 10 million subscribers. Now you're getting sponsors or coming to you and saying, hey, what can we do together?

You have no idea what it's going to go from there. Now you need advisors. Now you've got attorneys. Now you've got agents, managers. Now you've got people come up to saying, hey, we want to use them in different ways. What do you think about this? Now you've got opportunities coming your way.

Then you really will be making decisions in a different way. Next thing you know, I'm on Patrick. at David's level. Well, listen, everybody has a different, the biggest challenge is, you know, when you look at the game, you said something very interesting here. Do you solve for views or do you solve for what you want to do, what your passion is, right? I mean, originally, when you're coming out, it's, it's unfortunately when you're smaller, a lot of times people compare, right?

Oh, my God, look at that guy. I'm like, when we were first getting started, it's like, oh, we only have 100 subscribers. Oh, my gosh, we suck. Nobody likes our content. this must not be good. Then you're like, well, we got one video, got 300 views. This is amazing. You know, and then who are these 300 people that are watching this video?

Then you get 1,000 views, 2,000 views. And then the moment you forget what the audience thinks about the content you're creating, that's when you start winning. The moment you forget, the moment you forget that I really don't care if you like it or not. I'm enjoying it. Absolutely. I really don't care if you, like, when I went into bodybuilding, interviews. I got to tell you, I got a lot of people that hated the fact that I was doing

bodybuilding interviews. They said, why are you doing bodybuilding interviews? This is an entrepreneur website. I said, I love bodybuilding. They try to keep you in your box. You got it. So you yourself, you have momentum right now. You're about to get big momentum. All of a sudden, you get to five, 10 million subs. You're one of these guys that are bigger channels, you know, people are going to try to keep you in a box. You got to play to what you want to play. Because that's how you won people over in the first place. Right. Absolutely.

And there's also a lot of people, I just did an interview with a guy recently who his name is, have you heard of him? His name's Coffeezilla. I have not. So basically he exposes quote unquote fake gurus. And he exposes people who go online and basically try to create or falsify a persona of them having extreme wealth, like having Ferraris in the background of their shots or whatever.

And then essentially all they're trying to do is to sell like courses, online courses, where they can, you know, get vulnerable people with little to no money who have hit rock bottom who they need to find, they're looking for some sort of light to bring them out of the darkness. And they find these guys with these flashy cars, these big watches,

find out how I make $5,000 a day. on Amazon. And it's super interesting. And there's a there's a huge culture of people like that on YouTube. I mean, he's got a couple hundred thousand subscribers. If it's working for him, look, in the world, some people want to be lawyers, right? Yeah. What's a lawyer? A lawyer sits there and tries to fight for their, defend their client, but at the same time expose you, if they're going up against you, that's their job. So to you, this person's lawyer is an because they're exposing you, right? But it is, there is a need for lawyers. As much as we a lawyers, there's a need for lawyers, right? Okay. Cops, you can't stand a cop when he's pulling you

over and it's annoying, you know, especially if the cop is a little bit of a arrogant prick and he thinks he's got the badge, he can kind of push you around. But look, if you're going out, the other day, I got pulled over by this cop, he pulls me over. I said, what did I, what did you pull me over? He says, what did I pull you over for? I said, what did you pull me over for? He says, first of all, you made a U-turn, you didn't put the, what do you turn signal, you were drifting the car, then you went and passed the red light, and you were speeding, and you were about to race the guy next to you, and you're lucky I don't have a gun on me. I can give you six tickets right. And I said, you know what, you're right? I do deserve all the stuff, right? So he comes back, he says,

look, just the fact that you were chill, I'm giving you one ticket. I said, cool. Thank you. We had a great 15-minute conversation I left, right? There is a place for guys like that. there is a place for guys like that. You know, when I was in LA, there was a... For the cop, no, for this guy, with Coffeezilla, what you're telling me. Oh, right. Yeah, absolutely. There is a place for people like that where they go and say, hey, look, I'm going to expose. Now, he may be right or wrong, but he's going to expose and let the audience make a decision for themselves on what they want to do because you are right.

There are a lot of people online right now where anybody can go out there and say, I'm worth half a billion dollars. People are going to believe it. This is why, you know, so interesting, you bring him up. The number one question I ask people, whenever somebody tells you they're rich, the number one question is the question I ask you. The number one question I ask you was, well, when we start, I said, how do you make your money? What do you do? And you said, TV, I worked on some big films.

I ended up doing advertising in 2000, and I think you said 11. Yeah, 11. And, you know, I got into advertising. I did some big companies. I did some local companies. Great. So in my mind, you're an advertiser. And then you're a good interview.

You're curious, you ask the right question. You got a channel that's soon to be over a million subs on your way to 10 million subscribers, right? Okay, great. But I went to how did you make your money? The number one question, a lot of these online gurus that you call it, when you ask them, how do you make your money? They don't have an answer to that question.

The way they made their money is selling courses. Selling courses. So by the way, and if they open up and say that, then that's okay. Meaning if you say, how'd you make your money? I made my money selling courses. Okay, cool. You know, it's versus how did you make your money? Well, I made my money because I did a real estate deal and I sold this real estate deal for $28 million.

How do we know you sold it for $28 million? How do we not know your share is only $50,000? But the story is $28 million. For example, I bought a hotel here for $36 million. Okay. Do you know how much of an owner I was on that $36 million hotel we bought? You didn't buy it with Grant Cardone, did you? No, no, no, no.

I bought it with my business. So I bought a hotel. here for $36 million. Okay. But do you know how much of that hotel I owned? How much? Less than a percent. So when people said, how much that I said, buddy, I don't own the hotel.

I just am one of the investors in this hotel, a very small percentage. They said, hey, you want to put some money into it? You know, here's 50 grand. Here's 100 grand. But you can spin it and say, I have a, you know, so a lot of that is on the marketing side. And look, and nobody nowadays walks on water. So if anybody wants to go out there and say,

oh, I'm holy. I don't do anything wrong. Sometimes you got to be careful because if you play the card of I'm holy and I'm an angel and I don't do anything wrong, that can also backfire on you. This is why for me, being married, I tell you what my wife and I say to each other. I'll say it all the time. When we got married, people asked me a question. They said, oh my gosh, you know, at my wedding, there were people on one side. It was all the hairy Middle Eastern folks, you know, who looked like me. They're all the same. They look the same. And then on the other side is all the good-looking blue-eye, green-eye people like yourself, my wife's family, right? They're all, uh, uh, you know, so they're standing on one side. They're all standing on one side and they look at each other.

No one's dancing. It's a big wedding. We got 400, 450 people there at this wedding. Then one of my friends gets up. He is hammered. He's so hammered. It's not even funny. He's so hammered. His wife's next to him. He's flirting with other people's wives. He's that hammered right there. He's that gone. Okay. And he's the kind of guy you want to party with because in a different career, he could have been Vince Swan from wedding crashes. He's like that kind of a personality. He's trying to give you a visual.

Go looking guy. He gets up. He says, look, I'm not going to lie. You guys seem very concerned about this, you know, wedding, whether this is going to work out or not. I am in the same place. I don't have a clue whether this is going to work. He's one of my groomsmen.

He says, but I finally figured out what Jennifer and Patrick have in common. Jennifer's from Texas. Patrick's from Iran. He says, look, both of these guys. like weapons of mass destruction and they're like oil. I think this is going to work out, right? Everybody starts laughing, cracking up. Then they started dancing. I'm given my final speech and I said, well, listen, a lot of you guys are wondering whether this thing is going to work out or not. You know, there's some vagus odds right now, whether it is or not. All I can tell you is

this. I know one thing for a fact. I know for a fact we can be married for one year. We're going to take a one year at a time. So we went one year, two years. Now we've been married for 11 years. I'm not going to put the pressure. We're going to be together forever. Why would you do that? You don't know what happens tomorrow. So, you know, sometimes these online folks that play the holy card, it's one of the reasons why I was an atheist for 25 years because I grew up in a church that people get up and talk about God and how perfect they are. And next thing you know, you know, they're the ones that are judging you that end up doing the things that they judged you on and you're sitting there saying, listen, man, this is exactly why I don't want to go to church.

but then you eventually find a community where they say, I'm here because I'm also screwed up. I don't want to go to church and you remind me that I'm going to hell. I know I'm going to hell. I just want to know I got a spot in heaven. You know, that kind of like that mindset of going to a place. So I do believe there's a great place for guys like this that are doing what they're doing because there are a lot of people online that they simply made their money selling their courses

and they should just come out and say, here's how I made my money. I made my money selling courses. Right. But the thing is about it is if they said that, they probably would sell nearly as many courses. And those people are right. They want to make money. That's why they're in it.

That's why they're doing what they're doing. And they need to sell those courses. So they have to. Then that's why a guy like this comes after you. Right. Right. It's sort of inevitable. Like this kind of guy is is bound to elevate.

You got to realize Tony Robbins has been dealing with this his entire life. Yeah, but Tony Robbins is very, very different. Tony Robbins, obviously, yeah, he's a self-help guy. You know, he wrote all those books on sales. and making yourself great, you know, being a better NLP, all that stuff. But he also, like going to a Tony Robbins event, you're going there for the experience. It's like, it's like going to the super. How are you?

How are you? I'm 33. Okay. You know how old Tony is? He's probably in his 60s, right? He just celebrated 60. Do you know when he started doing his first event? No, he was 23, 24 years old, right?

What's the point? Go talk to somebody here. his age. Tony used to put up events with 10, 20 people. Tony had to overcome that. It took him two decades. That's what I'm trying to tell you. You're saying he started selling courses. Oh, yeah. Tony was selling a, and by the way, here's what he, this is coming from a guy that's attended his courses. I bought his books, I bought everything that he has, I bought his stuff from way back in the days. But he struggled with that because he was known back in the days as the informational guy. middle of the night you'd be sitting there watching TV and he says are you sick and tired of being

sick and tired is your job not fulfilling your dreams have you made promises to your wife of taking her to that one destination in italy or friends that you've not made it happen it's time to you know all this kind of messages and it was informal we said oh my gosh let me buy this $200 program let me buy this $200 program so he went through that for a long time but what Tony that gets credit for is Tony recreated himself multiple times Some of these guys are going to get a lot of shots that's going to be taken at them. They're going to have to figure out of it to recreate themselves. Remember, Rogan was a Fear Factor guy.

And prior to that, he was an actor. And prior to that, he was a karate guy. And he was a good-looking guy that was coming up. Then all of a sudden, he said, let me team up with Dana White. They worked out together. He started doing his kind of still today he considers himself a comedian. All the other stuff is secondary, right? So comedy, UFC, podcast, he's recreated himself.

I don't know how many times. So the race, when people bring up names to me, the race of content is going to be who can recreate themselves the most times and stay relevant for decades. The reason why Ray Charles and Stink get the kind of credit and respect that they get, I believe they're the only two that have number one hits in four different decades.

Really? For different decades. Think about how much music changes every decade. imagine staying relevant for four different decades. It's a very difficult thing to do to stay relevant for different decades. You know, so a lot of these online guys, they're going to have to overcome these. You know who they are, you know, all these videos that you do on these guys that this guy does on them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Some of them are going to overcome it. Some of them are not going to overcome it. But they're going to have to overcome this phase of people like this going after them saying how you make your money is courses. Right. Yeah, it would be interesting to see what Tony Robbins would do if he was, younger and starting out in this day and age, how he would do it. I think he'd be 10 times bigger. Do you think that, I mean, but do you think that he, he baited his audience into thinking

he was some, like, big successful guy when he first started? Like, look at me, I'm rich. When he first started doing those courses. No, I think Tony's approach, Tony's approach was the story that makes Tony very vulnerable is when he was at his Venice apartment and his friend comes in, he's 38 pounds overweight, is disappointed. He said Rock Bottom. I think he was working at Jim Rohn.

And I don't know whether he was working in the nutritional company with Jim Rohn. And he came from a place. Look, I screwed up my life. Then I went and read books. And then I changed my life. And I'm sharing what worked with me to you. So that's still a very noble way of bringing the messaging. He's packaging it very well.

So he's not coming from a place up. Let me tell you how powerful I am. Those are the people that sometimes get a lot of people that come after them for the right reasons. Now, if they can handle it, they're going to be fine. If they cannot handle it, they may need to want to change their positions. For example, for Trump, Trump enjoys people going after him, his entire life. That's his comfort zone.

It's not for everybody. Some people get rattled. Some people don't like that. He loves it. Matter of fact, he will intentionally file a bankruptcy on a business just to get you to write about it. He is a very different kind of guy. But if somebody says, I want to be like Trump when I grow up, you can't because you've got to

have that guy's DNA. If you don't have that guy's DNA, you can't be like him. You got to take a complete different play of a different person's playbook rather than hits. It's not going to work for that personality. But if somebody online has Trump's personality, they're going to be all right. It's amazing how many people you can get to follow you and to worship you if you project this wealthy persona. You know what I mean? If you could put a Ferrari in the background of your videos, you can get so many people to follow you. It's not forever, though. It's such a weird thing.

It's really insane, like how effective that is for some people. Yeah, it's not forever, though. Think about it. Like, you know, like Kardashian, they would say, oh, she's famous because of that video, right? I've been probably even guilty of saying that, you know, she's famous because that one video she did with Brandy's brother, right? The porno?

Yeah. Yeah. Porn video that went out. And everyone was like, oh, my gosh, who's this girl? and she was friends with Paris Hilton and all this stuff, right? Okay, no problem. You look at Kim Kardashian today. How many times has she recreated herself?

I mean, they're on the 20th season of Keeping Up with Kardashian. I've never watched an episode. Not one time have I watched Keeping Up with Kardashians. You know how many people in my office keep up with it? And you sit there and you say, at this point, Kim Kardashian at this point has reached St.Stathis. You know what saint status is? Here's what saint status.

It's not she's a saint. That's not what saint status is. Saint status is no matter what you say today, no one cares today. You can say whatever you want about Kim today, no one cares today. She's reached a tipping point. The only thing she can do is if she does something royally stupid, criminal, something, you know, completely out of line. But she's reached a level right now that she's got millions. of haters and she's totally comfortable with it. She still looks good at 40. I don't know how old

she's. I'm going to assume she's 38, 40. I don't know her exact age, but I'm going to assume she's going to be that age. Kim Kardashian, how old are you? Let's see here. She's getting up there for sure. She's 40 years old. We're three days apart. Okay, cool. I didn't know that. She's October 21st. So you're three days apart in age? I had no idea. I'm 78. She's 80. So we're, we're, but you look at her. Good for you. She looks amazing. So, now somebody could have said to her at 21 years old, your looks alone cannot get you everywhere for the rest of your life. She can now laugh and say, I'm 40 and I still look good, and I'm still making my billions, and what do you got to say about that? She's like the,

she wants to be in the level of Sophia Loren and, you know, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor type of a level. She doesn't care if she gets married eight times. She just wants to get to that kind of a level. So when you talk about the cars, the cars don't work long term. They just don't work long term. They work temporarily. They do not work long term. You know, one of my first videos that it was called Life of an Entrepreneur, okay? And it was called Life of an Entrepreneur in 90 seconds. That's the one that got 35 million views in the first 30 days on Facebook and all my websites shut down in the first 12 hours because first 12 hours it got 10 million views. And we're on this, what do you call it, the hosting company.

They're trying to get it up. If you look at the life of an entrepreneur, guess what car's in it? A red Ferrari. Okay. So when I posted that video, everybody said, oh, he probably rented this far. I'm like, damn, there's people think I rented this Ferrari. Okay. I mean, I had that.

It was yours. You owned it? I had it for three years. I had that Ferrari for three years. I sold the Ferrari year ago. I had it for three. I drove it every day. I sold it with 25,000 miles.

You sold it last year? I sold it last year. Yeah. So for me, when I had my Venador, I drove it every day. I put 10,000 miles on it. I just sold my Evinador. I put 20,000 miles on it. I drive my exotics.

I don't buy it and put it except the next one. I'm buying. That one's not going to be driven a lot. But when that comes, that comes. What's the point? Moral to the story. If you go through my pictures on Instagram, I don't know how many pictures you're going to see with cars.

Maybe five, maybe six. Does it work? 100%. I will tell you, it 100% works. If you own a Ferrari and you pull up to a place that you want a network, and you pull up in a red Ferrari, you're going to get different kind of attention

than if you pull up in an S-500. It's just automatic. Everyone's going to look at it. So, yes, it's, you know, chauvinistic, whatever you want to call it, but when Trump goes to speak in North Carolina, and there's a plane in a back, not an Air Force one, but it says Trump.

Pretty sick. You know, it's kind of like, call this man broke. It's $10,000 an hour to fly that thing. So you think he's, broke. If he flies from Florida to New York and back, that's a $60,000 flight just on gas. You think he's broke paying $60,000. The average person spends $400 to go from Florida and New York back and forth. This guy spending $60,000 to go on a plane like that. You got to know that people sit there and

say, this freaking guy owns a plane and it's got his name on it. So there is an element that it works only. This is the part I was going to with this. He's a great marketer. He's a great marketer. but the reason why it works for him is because of what we talked about with Stink and Ray Charles. He's been doing this for decades, same as Kardashian. So you can put a picture with a Ferrari, but if that picture doesn't show up five years from now, you may have been a fraud. You can put a picture of your house, but if you rented that house, everybody wants to know what happened to that house 15 years later and you're forgotten.

And I will tell you, there is nothing. There is nothing worse. than being forgotten about it. It doesn't matter if you're a grandfather. If your grandkids and your kids don't want to see you anymore, it's one of the most painful things you'll ever have. If you don't get an invitation to a wedding and your grandfather, I mean, that's like a night.

No pain is going to be more difficult than that, right? Have you experienced that? Have I experienced on a smaller scale. I experienced on a smaller scale more on the nightclub scene because I was the guy that was, you know, you wanted to go to the parties with me and the girls and all that other stuff. And in one moment, I decide to, you know, get my act together

and stop being the guy that I was. And I wanted to change some of my habits. I was partying way too much. I was going to Vegas every other weekend. I'm at nightclubs, six nights a weekend. I'm at nightclubs. And, you know, women here, women there. And one day I just said, I want to drop this habit because I'm broke.

My dad had a heart attack. I went to the hospital. And I saw this man at UCLA Medical Center. on his deathbed lost, you know, nearly 40 pounds. And I said to myself, we got to make some changes here, man. This is not going to happen. I went in my car, sat on my Ford Focus. I was the guy that had the nice SUV.

I'd take everybody to the clubs. I got him on my Ford Focus. Crying like a little baby at 23 years old. I said, you're partying every night. Your dad's about to die. He works out a 99-cent store. And this man sacrificed everything to bring you to America. And you want to go party every night?

What are you doing? Get your act together. Next day I came to look on my face changed. I went to work, but I was forgotten about at the nightclubs. I was forgotten about. I was no longer the cool guy. It was the square guy. All you want to do is read business books.

What a freaking boring guy you are. But that's kind of a cool thing. But it's not, though, at the beginning when you're going through it. At the beginning when you're going through it, it's not because they're short-term pain. And most people believe it or not, if that was so easy, a lot of people would do it. But most people eventually hate the comment people make when they say,

you know what Bobby, man, I miss the old you. You've changed. Most people cannot handle that compliment. They don't know it's a compliment. They take it as a this. In that moment, you don't know what's going on because you haven't still proven that you're going to be successful. When I was going through the phase, I wasn't that $49,000 or so people are like, what are you doing? Come on down.

We're missing you. And everybody's asking about you. And it's like, oh, it's Pat, you know, so you kind of are forgotten about it. And when that happens, you know, you kind of start. thinking about what really matters in your life. And then eventually you get to the mature stage where you say, well, really, that stuff didn't matter to me anyways. But when you're in the middle of it, you don't know because you don't know if the price is

worth it. You don't know if the price is worth it. So, Danny, when you're in the middle and you're going through paying the price and you have not yet proven to yourself, okay? Meaning nobody yet knows you don't know if this 80 hours a week you're putting into working is going to work. Right. How many guys, you know, pay the price of playing football 24-7

and then make it this close to the NFL and they don't make it. They're working out of Starbucks. That's a very, so you're right there. You can go smoke weed with that girl and party and do a couple lines because you don't know for a fact if you're going to get into the NFL. And you're tempted. She's the one you always wanted to get together. When now she wants to get together with the end bring or grow with you,

that's some experience. Do you want to really give that up? And at one moment, you're in that tipping point. You may not make it in the NFL. So you're kind of like, well, I'm not going to make it anyway. ways. Why am I going to do it? I'm not going to build a real business anyways. How do I know I'm going to do it? So it's in those moments where we screw up. So yes, there is nothing more painful than being forgotten about. When it happens, many of these guys that were cool at one

point with their Ferrari pictures, they will be forgotten about if there's no substance. Now, you said you were born in what? 78, 78, October 1878. That's like right when the revolution was happening in Iran, right? Yes. So what's your story with that? What's the story, like your family and how you guys came to the United States? That painting right there, all going to back.

Yep. You know who's in the middle? Jeez, look at that Hulk. That thing's huge. Yeah, who is that? Is that the guy who died? I forget his name. Iran.

Yeah, that's guys, that's a Shah of Iran. The Shah, okay. Shab Iran, who was the pre-revolution. He was the king of Iran. right so he was he was running iran so i was born three months later he was in exile they kicked them out because the renewal for oil was coming up with iran with the four western countries we're talking france uk u.s i think it's germany it's those four that are together and if he falls they're not going to be able to have him strong armed them to negotiate their oil because i think

was like a 25-year contract. He signed with them, and he was about to ask for a lot more money, and they didn't want that. So the coup helped Jimmy Carter and all the other guys that were negotiating with them to have leverage because now Iran was in shambles, and a new regime would have given them decent prices because they'd be desperate because of all the problems they're facing. I don't know if you've ever read the book, Economic Hitman. It's a business model that's been going on for a long time. And Economic Hitman, I think sold 5 million copies. It talks about that business model back in the days where they would come, they would sit with you, that would say, hey, you know, we're going to give you this much money. Your kids are going to go

to Harvard. They're going to do this. They're going to do that. America's going to give you protection. But in return, we want you to sell us behind closed doors, the resources of your country. Your populace is not going to know about it. And if you don't tell us, we're going to fall anyways, or we're going to kill you. So that worked with a lot of different countries, but it didn't work with him because he was too stubborn. But they ended up doing it anyway. So, yeah, I was born out a weird time and I lived in Iran for 10 years. Wow. He'll, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he, he died, June 2nd or June 3rd of 89. But I think hominy died, uh,

and then, uh, we left Iran to Germany on July 15th, uh, June 30 died. Okay, so we went to, uh, Germany on July 15th. I lived at a refugee camp in Germany for less than two years. And then came to the states here on November 28, 1990. And so, yeah, it was 12 years old when I came here. Very, very weird times from Iran to Germany to U.S. Do you still have any family back there? If you ever visit? I do. I do. But it's more cousins. All three of my uncles that were there died. They're all dead. So I don't have any uncles or aunts. I only have one first cousin and a few second cousins and that's it. Do you ever, do you ever visit there anymore or no? not because oh you cannot okay why can't you visit um political reasons i cannot i cannot visit iran

interesting well cool man i appreciate you doing this uh it was it was great to meet you i got to tell you you you're a very good interviewer okay very you're a very good interviewer and i hope you double down on the amount of people you're interviewing because you you could you could really go places with the way you're interviewing people do you mean do you think you I should do more of them? I think I think you know how to do this well. I think you got to really know you. I don't know.

Who's told you or good at interview? Has anybody that's anybody that's ever told me that? You're the first. You're an incredible interviewer. Thank you. You're an incredible interview. I don't know if you studied it. I don't know if you watched other people.

I don't know if you grew up watching Letterman or Leno or Stossel or Wallace or I don't know if you did any of that stuff. But you actually are a very good interviewer and you should keep doing this. Thank you, man. That's a huge compliment. That's a rare compliment. And I appreciate that greatly. Yeah, I don't think.

I think I've said that maybe to two people that I've interviewed me. You're the second person. Really? If you go watch other people interview me, you probably will never hear me say what I just said to you right now. How many interviews do you do? Like, what is your schedule like with creating content? Well, I don't do that many.

I tell my staff and my board that I'm willing to do two interviews a week, like interviews like this per week, but me interviewing people, some weeks, like this week is a five week. I'm doing five interviews this week. And I'm running, and the reason why I'm doing five interviews this week is because I'm about to go through

a very busy season of my company. And if I don't do five interviews this week, I'm going to be very busy in November. November, December is very busy for us for whatever reason. It's our industry. We're very busy November December. Some businesses, they're not.

Some businesses are for us. It's very busy. And so I'm doing, to give me weeks back to me if that makes any sense. So I don't have to. I can kind of put two a week and you know what I'm talking about. So kind of give myself some time back. But I generally will do one or two a week.

I like to do two, but I'll generally do one or two a week. This week alone is five. I'm interviewing Newt Gingrich. I don't know who I got. I'm interviewing a few political people because we are at the season of politics. Yep. So I'm conducting the interviews this week. Very cool, man.

man. That's a... Yeah, but I tell you keep at it. Your... You got kids or are you by yourself? I actually have a one-year-old. Are you married? I am married, yeah. Okay.

Is the baby keeping you busy? The baby's keeping me very busy. Luckily, my wife is able to stay at home with and raise him. So that's her job. And so that frees me up a lot. But I try to spend... I spend a lot of time I'm there every day, p.m. for for dinner and bath time and uh it's definitely a it was a life-changing event as far as how i

schedule my life and how i have to structure everything around my life basically around that it's good for you it's uh it's been a learning curve and i'm you're used to it you have three kids right yeah you know i had my first at 33 as well so it's funny my my really yeah so you're well you had it at 32 so 33 he's one so so so i had my first at 33 so you're a you're a you're a you're a you're you're ahead of me on kids. But, you know, if you got one and your wife stays on with the kids, you got time really doubled down here. So do you have anybody that represents you and sets down and kind of maps out what your

thing, what your long-term planning are or not at all? My long-term planning as far as- What are you trying to do with this concrete here? What's your outcome? My outcome is just a key. I don't really have like a long-term plan with it. I'm kind of doing it as I, as it comes to me, really. I'm not, I don't have like a five year or a 10 year goal for it. Got it.

But, but. You got a very big upside. With, with, with this alone. I'd say, I would say my goal, if I did have a goal, it would be to, uh, transition my everything from my advertising business as far as building advertising and, and generating campaigns for other brands, putting all the, that time and energy into this would be my goal and have this be able to sustain everything and not have to do that. I know this is a weird plug. I mean, I totally forgot this is a book

interview we're doing. This is a great book for you because for you, it's knowing your next five moves because you got a big upside. You don't even have to put this up in your podcast, but you got a very big upside. I think, I think you ought to, you ought to kind of a think about what you want because you got a little bit of Howard Stern in you. You got a little bit of the weird side of him. You got a little bit of a letterman in you. So you got a big upside. That's cool, man. I'll definitely check that out. I really appreciate that. Really enjoyed it, man. This has been a blast. It was great meeting you, man. And I hope we can keep in touch. Take care, buddy.