Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Patrick Bet-David UNCENSORED!! Got Fired? Make these “Your Next Five Moves”! (#066)

Episode Date: August 19, 2020

  Patrick Bet-David runs one of the most successful YouTube channels in history, Valuetainment: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIHdDJ0tjn_3j-FS7s_X1kQ Let his clarity of purpose and ability to build a great team inspire your next 5 moves! On this episode of INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE, Patrick and I talk about his newest book “Your Next 5 Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy.” We discuss his approach to business, life, and learning. His enthusiasm and drive to not only succeed but help others reach their potential are great motivators. Subscribe to my mailing list to receive show notes for this episode: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 04:26 Choosing the title “Your Next 5 Moves.” 08:46 Patrick talks personality types. 13:25 The value of Valuentainment fans. 16:46 What is the difference between a visionary and someone who’s all talk? 22:09 The math of life insurance. 26:35 What would Bet-David University teach? 31:52 Patrick knows how to find and retain great employees. Patrick Bet-David immigrated to the US from Iran as a child. He served in the U.S. Army and then began to work in the financial industry. He founded the successful insurance sales company PHP Agency. His Valuetainment YouTube channel has nearly 2.5 million subscribers. He recently started the podcast “The Bet-David Show.” Order Bet-David’s newest book “Your Next 5 Moves” here: https://amzn.to/3kU9Lyk Take the personality assessment quiz on https://yournextfivemoves.com Find Patrick Bet-David on the web: https://www.patrickbetdavid.com and Twitter: https://twitter.com/patrickbetdavid What are your next 5 moves? Watch my most popular videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM ‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinction for magic. Have you ever been fired? I have. It didn't feel excellent at the time, but in retrospect, it turned out to be one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. In fact, I probably wouldn't be here talking to you right now if I hadn't been fired long ago as a postdoc working away at Stanford University and what I thought was my dream job. And it turned out to be somewhat of a nightmare. But I'd never been fired before. I had no idea what to do next. And I really wish that I had a book like Your Next Five Moves to kind of guide me not to the final destination.

I think that would be asking too much. And it would be impossible for me to really be able to glimpse what the future might hold, given the traumatic circumstances of that recent termination. However, having it now and thinking about the lessons that we can learn today from our guest, Patrick Bette Dabeed, into the impossible. thinking about what you do next, it doesn't mean you have to know where you're going to end up. Oftentimes it's important as a pilot to know your first few stops, your first few waypoints along the way on your flight plan. And if you miss it, you're in for disaster. So it doesn't give you a guarantee of success of getting to the destination.

But without a flight plan, you're basically planning to fail. There's a saying that I quote often that if you're off by just a destination, a quarter of a degree, you can miss the moon. The moon is only about a half a degree wide. So you only have a tiny window, a little radius, to make it to your destination. And so if you're off by this tiny half of a half of a fingernail held out at arm's length, you'll miss the moon.

And so it's important to get the first few moves down right, and then hopefully you'll get to the destination intact. So today's guest is going to tell us about that and tell us some other ideas, like about how he to a two and a half million subscriber following on YouTube and how he got to interview some of the world's most fascinating people, including Kobe Bryant, the late, great Kobe Bryant. So I hope you'll enjoy this episode. Give me some comments, some feedback.

I never know how people enjoy this or not. My producer tells me to tell you to please hit the subscribe, like, notifications button, hit anything you can just to keep the podcast going. And please leave a review on iTunes if you're listening to. this. It's important for us and the algorithms that control our destinies as podcasters. Thanks again. Please enjoy this very stimulating interview with a fascinating character, very controversial character, and we'll see how that plays out in today's interview on the Into the Impossible podcast. Patrick, Esmamamam host Brian Keating, Kosh Amudin, B, into the Impossible podcast. Welcome, Patrick.

It's good to be with you. I learned all my Farsi just to say those words to you. That's all I get from you. It took me a week to memorize that. That is impressive. That is impressive. I thought maybe you were. Maybe your mom is Armenian,

your Farsi, and your dad is Caucasian. Because that's how my kids are. My wife is white from Texas, and his father is me. No, I get confused for that. I take it as a high compliment by my Persian friends are spectacular. Anyway, I got some help with that because I've been wanting to meet you and do this interview and talk about your phenomenal new book. But I got a question for you, Patrick.

So you're a multimillionaire. You're one of the most successful YouTubers in history. You left Iran with basically the shirt on your back, fled to Germany, had this exciting upbringing that you opened the book up with. You talk about it like it's a James Bond opening scene in a James Bond movie. That's you. Why did you write this book? And let me ask you a question. You get fired today.

YouTube cancels you. Something happens on iTunes. It's not uploading. What are your next five moves? So that's a great question. So let me answer to both questions. First one is, why do I write this book? So why I wrote this book?

I wrote this book because years ago, I woke up in a morning, and I never forget this. I felt lost. I woke up in a morning. My phone had a text message from my girlfriend saying, you're spending way too much time with the business. I think you love your business more than you love me. I think it's time we break up. So that's text, 6 o'clock in the morning.

Message from a phone, my mom's telling me how bad of a son I am because I haven't called her back and I don't hear from you. What happened to my little son that wanted to talk to mom? So then I got the guilt feeling. So my heart's broken, then I have guilt. Then I check my email or my email says that the client I had just written up that was going to pay me a good $15,000 commission, he cancels because he's going to with the competitor, and then my number one sales rep also resigned. That all happens within a

five-minute period in the morning when I woke up. When I woke up, I said, I have no idea what to do next. So in my mind at that time, we were having a lot of debates with different friends where they were talking about what's the key to success. Some were saying the key to success is you got to marry the right person. You got to go to school. You got to find God. You got to work hard. You got to save money. You got to take care of your health. All of these different things. So I said, I really want to know what is the key to success. So when this has happened and the dialogue about the key to success and this has happened in the morning in the first five minutes, girlfriend breakup, mom is disappointed, you know, clients leaving me, salesperson's leaving me. I realize years later, the number one reason

why some people succeed is because they have a system for how they process issues. So everything to me became in that moment, you could have 10 different people are going to react to that problem in 10 different ways. Someone's going to say, oh, let me call my mom first, and then let me get together when my girlfriend spend a whole day with her. And oh my gosh, let me see. So the sequence of how you handle that

dictates your success. And fast forward to today, every single time we make decisions with the company, we wanted to come out with systems because everything for us here is about standard operating procedures and it's about leaving clues that I can teach you how to solve problems,

how to solve issues, how to negotiate. So one of the reasons why I wrote to your next five moves, is whether you're getting married, what do you want to have kids, whether you're thinking about going from single to being committed to somebody, whether you want to be a millionaire,

whether you want to lose 40 pounds, everything comes down to your next five moves. And most people don't do them right. They typically wanted to move 13 on move number two and screws the whole thing up. So that's first question, right, on why I wrote the book. The second one is,

if I lost everything today, what would be my next five moves? One of the most comforting quotes I ever read was there's two things they cannot take away from you. They can take everything away from me. They cannot take two things. One is what's in your stomach, what you ate, it's there. The second thing is what you fed here. So what you feed here and what you feed here. What you fed your stomach, it's done. It's yours. And what you feed your mind. So you can take everything away from me. I can be broke today. I'd probably be depressed for a month and I wouldn't want to see anybody

and maybe I'll spend some time with Jim, Jack, and, you know, all those guys and, you know, want to there and hang out with friends who just kind of want to get over it and then eventually I'm going to snap up it and say here's what I'm going to be doing and I'll be back at it again with my next five moves so the strategies is what makes it more evergreen to any industry it's not specific to an industry it's to any industry when you hear the advice that I'm about to give you I want to see how you react to it so you often hear don't judge a book by its cover but actually we all know people judge books by their cover I'm curious how did you come up with the idea for both the cover the artwork on the cover and the title itself, the title and the subtitle, you and your co-author,

I should mention. That's a great question. So, number one, originally, I wanted to name it Salfour X because in the book I talk about Salfour X, but Salfour X, you know, we talk about the fact that it is a good topic, but it's not a good title for a book, which I agreed. Then we agreed originally when I was going to publish it with Pingu and instead of Simon and Schuster, they like the deepest why. What is the deepest why?

because when you're processing issues, you have to get to the deepest Y. So we said deepest Y. Then we said, let's solve for... You went from X to Y, by the way. You went from X to Y. So then my agent said, let's go solve for Y. Soft or Y, like W-H-Y, which I thought was pretty creative.

That was one of the one of the time. And then I said, your next 15 moves. They said 15 moves is way too many, less to your next five moves. So you pretty much got the whole, you know, what took place with the processing of a title. And then the cover, the way we chose the cover is, you know, I like red, obviously by it team, it is red, and, you know, I like the color of red that was chosen.

It's a different kind of a red that's on there. And then I was originally going to do it white, with red on white, I mean, white on red. Rather, we said, let's switch it and let's make it to red on white, and we switched it. And the publisher actually originally made the cover. And then eventually, I just said, let my people make the cover. And I had my designer designed this cover. So this cover is actually not made by Simon & Schuzen. This cover's made by us.

And we loved it. And they said, let's go with it. So we picked it. Wow, that's fantastic. It's sometimes, you know, the last five moves of a book, as I know from just the one book that I've written. But nevertheless, it's something that's essential because people judge it. They judge you by your cover.

They judge the title. And people judge you and judge, you know, an individual based on, as you say, what's in your head, what's in your character, what's in your heart. You focus on that a lot and valutainment on YouTube. And we'll hopefully get to that later on. I want to come back to chess. I'm a scientist. I'm a professor of physics and astronomy at UC San Diego,

where I run the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. And I'll be honest, we got a lot of nerds. A lot of nerds listen to this show, watch this show on YouTube. And we love chess. And part of it when I started reading it, I was like, hmm, is there going to be like 200 openings, you know, from Capablanca to the Kings Indian? I was kind of stoked about that, to be honest with you.

But as I got deeper, I realized this is another kind of genre. and it's not even limited to the title, you know, business strategy. I think that actually is a little limiting. If I could tweak it, I would not limit it to that because it's a psychology book. It's actually a self-improvement book. It's a book that to me, you know, they talk about comps. What is this book comparable to? To me, it's kind of like this, you know, strategic art of war combined with rich dad, poor dad,

combined with, you know, Ray Dalio. And, you know, in reading it, I was like, hmm, this kind of reminds me of that. And I looked at all the endorsements on the back. it's Ray Dalio, Kevin Hart, you've got Robert Kiyosaki, got all these big, big-name people. But plus people like Steve Wozniak. Now, most people don't think of scientists like he was or engineers as outgoing. You know, the old joke is, how do you know an engineer is outgoing? He looks at your shoes when he talks to you.

But in this case, you know, I was thinking about it because I used to dabble in chess. I'm not that great at chess. There actually is a book called Think Like a Grandmaster. And that's a phrase you used in the book and you've used in some videos. it describes two different personalities. And I wonder, which do you cleave more to? There's the depth versus the breath. There's the guy who can think or girl who can think 50 moves ahead, not five, not 15, 50 moves ahead.

And there may only be 20 or 30 reasonable moves that a human being could do. And then there's a really deep one. Then there's a broad one who studied all the openings in that book that I thought you wrote, with all these opening moves and everything. And then kind of the closing takes care of itself. they separate via intellectual horsepower, the CPU, the computer cycles that are devoted. Where do you see yourself? Are you the deep guy, the broad guy, the high horsepower, intellect that just drills down like a laser? Or are you broad? I see behind you the shelf that you talk about

in the book. You're extremely well read. I know that we have friends in common, and they told me that about you, that you're just thirsty. So that to me speaks of breath. You just have one book that you've read a hundred times. You've got a thousand bucks behind you. So what are you? Are you a deep guy? Are you a broad guy? You can't say both. Let me tell you, that's a great question you ask. So, you know, we would do the analysis of the four personality types. You know, there's a lot of different personality tests you can take over the years. You're probably taking all of them. You know, I'm an ENTJ. I mean, you know, all these guys put there what they are. The one that we would talk about was Starr. So Star is somebody who was very structured, extremely organized,

They're systematized. Everything to them is system, system, system. Then you have the technical, which very analytical. They like data. They break everything down. They want to know why this took place. Very, very technical. Then you have the A. I'm going to go take over the world. Tell me I can't do it. I'm going to prove you wrong. Chippy, competitive, you know, chip on their shoulder. Then you have the R. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your family. Tell me about your life. Tell me who you are. Tell me how are things. You know, very good with compassion, very good with building relationships. So for me, for the longest time, I thought I was an A-R-T-S. I'm not an S.

Although if you ask anybody here, I hire S's all the time. If you, the best people that do very well with me, they're very organized because everything in my life needs to be organized, even though I'm not organized. I have, you know, people that help me get things organized. Eventually, one day my wife and I were sitting down and people were asking and said, so what is Pat? You know, I think Pat is an AR-dis, Pat is a this, Pat is that. She says, I don't know. I think Pat's a T. And they said, what do you mean? And she said, for five and a half years when I didn't date and when I watch him from a distance,

when we were in the same company together, Pat always had a very strong personality. So I thought for a fact, he was an A, and he was always there where if I needed help and relationship and, you know, he was a good listener. But eventually, I realized Pat's a T. Pat's is so analytical when it comes down to everything. What's the motive behind us? Why did they do this? What was that? What's this all about? And at this point of the game, I will tell you, I'm probably very, I would give it a little bit of an edge of A over T. And then it's R S is the least, but it's probably going to be A and T very close to each other. When I was in college and I took classes and I ace my classes, I would ace calculus. I would ace anything that had to do with math outside of geometry. I wasn't too interested in geometry. I got to be in geometry. But everything else that was a lot of numbers, a lot of to figure out that interested me.

And I would fail biology. I didn't have a lot of interest in that. So for you to ask the depth versus the width, extremely curious, my uncle was a physicist, I was always compared to my uncle that was extremely analytical. So I would say there's an element of that. I'm always curious to know if I was raised in a family where my parents weren't in the situation they were at and say they were able to, I was raised with a father and a mother and I went to college, I was always curious to know what I would do.

I don't know what I would do. Would I go to a degree in law or physicist or physics or any of that stuff? But it's a great question you're asking. I'd say some technical and action combined. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice.

Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. The truth is our city. It's just so huge. beautiful on pluto tv free streaming of terminator two fringe arrow the 100 n the x files may cause excitement loss of sleep and sudden belief in extraterrestrials no credit cards or alien encounters necessary pluto tv stream now pay never so uh what that brings up you know we talk about personality tests and and everything and i i can never remember if i'm a right brain or a left brain and i think that means

i'm one of those two brains i got to be one of them right uh but uh but nevertheless i'm a behaviorist i like to look at how people behave and sometimes the the owner's manual you know when my wife and I had our first kid. One day he was crying and I'm just like, get the owner's manual. It's like, there is no owner's manual. You know, you've got kids. And, but I think, you know, there are tools in this book, both in the book and the actual appendix of the book and elsewhere online at your next five moves.com, which we'll put links to in the show notes that are really about, you know, practical tips to actually do stuff. And as I was thinking about this book, there's another book that kind of reminded, I thought it would remind me of it because I'm also a private

pilot in my spare time, which is not that much. And we always have checklist. We always have flight plans. And a flight plan is just your next five moves. I mean, you can't actually know whether this cloud is going to be or you're going to run out of, you know, fuel over there. Some passengers are going to have to take go to the bathroom. You could only plan a few moves ahead and you've got to be flexible. And one of the things I liked about this book compared to, say, Ato Ligawande's The Checklist Manifesto, which has some similarities, is that there's actual actionable ways that you can approach it. So I really salute that process.

And you have this, you know, personality audit. and we've gone over it. But to impact 200,000 people, I was kind of doing a little simple math, how many other tools have had such impact? I mean, and actually, you wrote this and, you know, you published this, you started writing it, probably finished it last year, early this year. It's probably even more. So how do you feel about that impact that you're making for people like me who are kind of geeky nerds to actually sit down to be introspective about what they're doing? Is that a value to you? What is a value to me is when I run into somebody.

at the airport or the mall or somewhere I'm out there and I'm at school and one of the kids' parents is a attainer and they come up and they say you know the other day I was coming home at 10 o'clock at night a guy was chasing me I'm like wait a minute what is this guy chasing me I'm pretty protecting my kids and my wife's I come out I go up to the guy says no no no no no I'm just somebody my wife and I watch all your content Indian engineer that works at a local place and he's 10 years older I mean we had a great conversation together what what is rewarding is to hear people that the philosophies and the content shared on valuatainment help them get clear on a decision they had to make. It's very, very rewarding. What I don't do to myself is I don't sit there

and make myself think that it's that big of a deal of what I'm doing because it goes back to the stoic of Marcus Aurelius who would put a slave behind them whispering in his ear. You are not as important as you think you are because sometimes I think when we allow too much of the edification and the praise and the flattery that comes your way you are almost stunt you know it stunts your growth to the next level and I'm always I'm curious about the unknown you know because I already know what today feels like I want to know what this feels like what is what is the possibility of raising kids who one day they're able to do stuff their dad couldn't do and you know they're inspired to take this mindset to the next level I'm always curious about

So in one way, very rewarding. On the other side, I also don't put a lot of, I don't wake up and say, oh, my gosh, I need more of it. And that's simply because I'm curious about the next level. Yeah, hopefully we'll get a chance to talk to what is your next level, both in terms of you personally as Patrick, but also her competition, because you're in a very heated field. You're in a very competitive market. Unlike me, there's more people playing starting lineup in the NBA than practicing experimental cosmologist who are studying the origin of the universe. But that can be also challenging because if you're in a smaller pond,

sometimes the competition can be pretty darn fierce as well, especially in academia nowadays. But I want to talk to you about possible competitors. And some of the stuff that I see, you know, I'm sure he's not watching this, but you know, it's people like Gary V. And it's like there's so much of these types of people, Ramets Setti, and other people like really promoting this idea of hustle and finding your niche and just they'll teach you to be rich. Rich dad, even rich dad, poor dad. Some think it's a little bit

on the scammy side, just to be honest with you. And sometimes they're all in conflict. Like there's, there's a lot of psychology in this book. And what I like about it is you're just like, here's what you do when somebody ticks you off, take responsibility, state specifically, what you did, channel your frustration into getting better. So it's a self-improvement book, masquerading as a business book. But what do you say to people, like some of the skeptics who, who like feel about Gary Vee or somebody like that, that they are really just kind of promoting their own book. They're really like to use the insurance room or whatever.

Like they're selling their own stuff. And they actually are depending on people to fail. It seems like you are engaged with people succeeding, not failing like Weight Watchers. They only make business because people like me go back and recidivism is high. How do you like keep integrity in such an environment? You know, I read a quote a long time ago by, Is it Richard Branson, the guy from Virgin?

I think it's Richard Branson. He said, teach your guys, your employees, everything that you know so they can go away, leave you and compete against you. But treat them so well that they don't want to. It's a fascinating message to be given, right? Where it's, I'm going to share everything I do with you guys. I say, like, one of the things I have a reputation for if you work with me, I always like to do meetings. and another person said next to me because I want you to learn how I negotiate. I want you to learn how put out of fire.

I want you to know and see, well, that one time Pat got heated, but he went from heated to this point, and how was he able to bring it down? And why did he get heated? But he's done this seven different times, and it's always worked out well. And what happened there? How was it that two personalities get heated? And then they end up becoming friends and new business together for a long time. And, you know, he realizes what area he has to say that was my bad, we'll fix it.

and the other you puts the pressure on the other person, because it's an element of shadowing and learning from somebody else on what to do and what not to do, right? That's a part of doing that. But going back to these guys and what they're doing, look, my ideas, I was one time interviewed with, I think, Cardone, and Cardone one time said, you know, I was telling them the fact that communism is not a good idea.

He said, well, communism is good if you were the communist in charge. And I said, I have no desire for power because power comes easy. I don't care about that. I'm driven by a freedom. I left Iran to come here because I wanted freedom. So as far as some of these other guys, what they're doing, I think time will tell us too early to tell who's who and what they're doing. You got 10 more years, 20 more years to really tell what people's outcomes were.

Some people's outcomes you're not going to know. Some of them, you're just not going to get revealed for a very long time. Like I bet you at 45 years old, Trump probably knew he's possibly going to be running one day. And he never really told anybody outside of the people on the end. inner circle. And he thought about it. What if I run one day? I promise you that, and Obama maybe at one point knew, hey, you know, one day I wouldn't mind making a run out and see what I can do. You know, a must one day probably said, I'm going to go out there and do something and compete against NASA. But how do you say that to a friend and say, I'm going to

beat NASA one day. NASA's going to say, you know, for us to go to space, stay there for two weeks and come back and up, say Flanning is going to take 12 years and $26 billion. This is a committee led by Obama-led committee that said it's going to take 12 years. $26 billion. And here's a Elon Musk that's an entrepreneur, comes and says, I'm going to do it in six years with less than a billion dollars. I mean, you have to know, you don't know what everybody else is thinking and what all their motives and visions are. But when you listen to everybody today, what their messaging is, some people are just driven by money and fame and success. You know, some people are simply looking for that. And there's nothing wrong with that. Some people just want

more and more and more of success and credit and all that other stuff. And some are not. Some's vision it's much bigger than that. And unfortunately, I said this to a couple of my friends the other day. We're sitting now. I run a mentor and call on Tuesdays with the executives of my company. I said, how do you know who's a visionary? So I said, I've got a question for all of you. Can you tell me the difference between a visionary and a bullshitter? What is the difference? Because they both talk a big game. They're both salesmen, right? They're both salesmen. My wife told me, she says, you know, you and my ex have one thing in common and one thing that was very different. I said, what is it? she said, you know, both of you were very good at talking dirty about what you're going to do big in your life one day.

I said, what's the difference? You actually did it. So you don't know the difference between somebody that's like, one day, we're going to go out there. One day we're going to go out there. You don't know if this guy's telling the truth or not. The only way you're going to know, it's going to take a decade or two. So I think it's still very early in the game. I think we'll have to revisit this when we're in our mid-50s or early 60s to see what everybody's really up. to and at that point of the game, it's going to get very clear.

And by the way, here's one thing we have to realize that too often we forget that there's been many people who were celebrities at one point that were forgotten about. We're very quick to forget that. I mean, just because somebody's a star today, we think this person is going to be around forever. It's very, very hard. The reason why Ray Charles and Stink have so much respect is because they had a number one hit in four different decades. It is very, very difficult to stay relevant for a long time.

So I think it's too early, but we'll find out what happens in the next few decades. Gates. So I want to ask you, because it's not so often I get to speak with someone so knowledgeable about insurance. And I want you to convince me that I'm wrong. I think insurance is a scam. Basically, people are betting in the insurance company that I'm going to live, and I'm betting I'm going to die or vice versa. And I'm just like, I look at it like a casino. You were just out in Vegas, as I understand from the podcast. And it was kind of dead out there. But you look at these casinos and they have no windows in them and they're palaces. And it's like the maximum edge you can possibly get in any game besides poker. is like 1.5% that the house has, 1.5% edge. And with that edge, they can make millions and millions, billions of dollars in something, at least before now. How is insurance different from that? I mean, they've got to be making serious money somehow. And if that's by betting that you're going to, you know,

that you're betting you're going to die. And so you want to protect against that. Are most insurance policies basically scams or am I just totally full of it? So I'm going to ask the question different from you. Let me ask you, when does the insurance company make more money? If you keep the policy or cancel the policy. Oh, you want to keep it, right? No, the other way around.

Oh, they have terminations and stuff like that. I have insurance from the governor that you love so much, Gavin Newsom. I love them so much. Yeah, you're right. But, you know, I will tell you this. Think about it. Yeah. The insurance company, the only way you get even with a life insurance company is if you keep your policy.

If you keep your policy, you win, they lose. Give you a perfect example. So think about it. The insurance policy is hoping every time there's a crisis like this that, like right now, coronavirus took place, right? Guess who made money? All the insurance companies made money. Why? Let me explain to you why life insurance companies made money.

What do you think is one of the first things people cancel when the crisis takes place? Cancel their insurance. They cancel the life insurance policy. Now, watch it. I say I've had a term insurance policy with MedLife, and I've had it for 12 years. And I've been paying $80 a month. It's a million dollar policy, okay? Crisis takes place.

I canceled my insurance policy. I was paying $80 a month, right? $80 a month over 12 years is how much money? It's around $12,000. But that $12,000 is now kept by who? The insurance company. If I now wanted to start an insurance policy, would it be $80 a month?

No. It'd be higher because I'm 12 years older and I'm probably heavier. I probably had a couple surgeries. So my $80 a month for $1 million is now $400 a month. So if you wanted to buy a policy, now you're paying five times more you were paying before. So insurance companies make money because they know most people don't keep

their insurance policies. And once you cancel your insurance policy and it lapses, that's all profits going to the insurance company. So the best way to get even with life insurance companies is buy it and don't cancel. They hate that. If you buy it and don't ever cancel it, they eventually have to pay out the math to you, the money to you. And what about some bypassing, you know, what you guys do and go directly? Can I get a better policy if I just a better deal? If I just a better deal, me as Brian Keating, I go to the insurance. Why do I need Patrick? Why don't I need the company? Yeah. So the way math works on life insurance is there is not a wholesale retail, meaning if you buy it from me or you buy it directly from AIG or you buy it from another

agent that works for me, it's the same exact rate. There is no, you know, if I buy this from directly wholesale, it's going to cost you $4. But if you buy it from Amazon, it's $14. but if you buy it from me at a swap meet is $22. That's not how insurance works. Whatever the insurance, you can go to a website called term for sale. And it just tells you everybody's price for their life insurance policy. So you don't even need to have an agent. You just go find out what is the cheapest term insurance policy for your agent and how much you want.

And that's the price, no matter who you buy it from direct, from a website, from an individual. So there is no wholesale retail when it comes on to life insurance pricing. I got it. Okay, the next topic I want to turn to really comes through in the acknowledgement section at the end of the book, which is easily devoured. And you obviously thank your wife, your co-author, etc. But the most kind of touching thing to me was this following sentence, how valutainers have impacted you.

So I wouldn't be writing this book, you say, or creating new content if it weren't for the millions of valutainers and entrepreneurs who follow the content on a monthly basis. I'm grateful to you. You energize me in ways that words can't describe. First of all, was your wife pissed off that you acknowledge the valutainers

almost as much as you did to her? My wife probably the most easy-going person you'll meet in your life. So I go to the Valuetainment YouTube channel. I click on About, and it says an entrepreneur created by serial entrepreneur, Patrick Bet, David.

Valuet is referred to as the best channel for entrepreneurs with weekly how-to's motivation and interviews with the unique individuals. You've done such an amazing job with the channel. It gave me an idea. You reputedly, I talked to one of your high school guidance counselors, you had a 1.8 GPA.

You didn't go to college. You went to the Army. Thank you so much for doing that, the U.S. Army. And you've become this huge success. My question for you is, if you were not going to go to college, but you're going to create Bet David University, what would you offer?

What would you teach the students there that they would need to know and could uniquely learn from you? let me tell you, it would be all human nature, it would be all debate. My entire education, so you got to realize, I go on four different 20-year terms, right? First 20 years was, don't make a big mistake. Second 20 years is go find one industry, stick to it and make your money like real money so you can take that money in the next one. Combine your crusade, your cause, your passion, and turn it into a business, which is the next 20 years. And the last 20 years is a

formal contribution, giving back politics, education, nonprofit, et cetera, et cetera. If I were to start a university one day. Let's call it David University. My university would be very, very different. Here's how my university would be. If we're teaching, if we're teaching economics, you would have two professors, or maybe three professors. You would have a socialist, a communist, a communist, and a capitalist, and you get to watch them debate nonstop. That's how I would teach. If you want to have, you know, a course you're taking on marriage and relationship, you would have somebody that's single, never gotten married, you'd have somebody that's divorced, happily divorced, and you got somebody that's happily married. They're each going to sell you why you ought to consider getting married,

why you ought to consider, you know, marriage is tough to be, or I'm just happy staying single. If I'm teaching you negotiation skills, you would get the people that are, you know, hostage negotiators, you would get people that went to prison and are drug dealers. You'd get the people that worked in the streets. You get the people that worked in a business world that did the biggest deals when it comes on to negotiation. You will learn that. You'd learn human nature. You would have people sitting down on stage. And I would say, can you read that person's body language? How do they feel right now? Do they trust you? Do they not trust you? What's that given you? What is this giving you? How do you read this person's tale? How do you read that person's tale? It would be a very different kind of a human

nature university to be going to. And then of course we would have the courses to teach, but it wouldn't be about, oh, I got a four-year degree from Bed David University. It would be more closer to an academy, a military toughness, mental, emotional toughness type of an academy. When you come out of there being the future governor, president, CEOs, you know, disruptors of the world, that would be more the mindset and more, let me go take a, you know, philosophy. Calculus. Do you feel like augmented reality and artificial intelligence has a role to actually play in that, where you could war game with Genghis Khan, you could put, you know, Robert E. Lee over there,

you could do sort of the battles and the skirmishes and Carl Marx, you know, and, and, you know, Adam Smith, put them together. Could you see that? So have you spoken to anybody that knows me very well that I wrote a fiction book? Do you know what's in a fiction book? No, I don't. I'm sorry. No, I didn't do my homework.

Don't get me an F, please. No one knows that. I thought maybe you have gone that far because, so I have a fiction book that I wrote. It's 95,000 words that I will not launch until I leave Ph.B., because it kind of reveals how I view the world. Wow. And what I would be doing. It's a little bit political.

It's a little bit controversial. People are going to say, this guy's a little weird on how we've used things. But one of the things is studying, you know, I have a painting on the wall right there. Yeah, yeah. Tell me that. Show me that. I have characters. Yeah.

You know, I have a painting on the wall there. Sorry, Pat. Can you go back to that? Because I was talking over it. Yeah, it's called dead mentors. So you'll see Lincoln there. You'll see JFK. It's opposing personalities, by the way.

Einstein, who's a math genius, but he believed in socialism. Milton Breedman, who's a math genius, but he's a capitalist. MLK, who took his approach in a different way, and Tupac, who took a different approach, a little more controversial. And then I have Senna, who was fierce competitive. Then he had the show in the middle. And they're debating two books. communist manifesto and Atlas shrug in the middle

and then you got Marcus Aurelius and he got Aristotle and a bunch of hidden stuff and it's a vault they're in a bank vault having strong debates together so for me why waste all these dead people that did incredible things in their lives mistakes good things bad things why not study them the universe what I talk about in the fiction book it's kind of a combination of hunger games divergent meets I am a legend

all combined together that's kind of what that book is about but two, three years from now to be out. But some of the stuff you talked about is actually in that book, I wrote it like seven years ago. Oh, I'd love to read that help out, whatever way I can. That's really fascinating. I feel like, you know, I'm a pretty smart guy. I'm a good professor.

But, you know, am I better than Galileo? You know, you want to sit down with Galileo to learn about that, to learn about, you know, motion or Einstein, learn about relativity. Obviously, you do. And so, you know, we can aspire. And I think having that, you mentioned that painting in the book. It's great to see it in person, so to speak.

I want to move now to a couple, you know, sort of rapid fire questions. And then I want to conclude with some questions I ask all my guests if you still have a little bit of time. First question is, given all the personalities you've interacted with, I see you as this kind of like molecule that's literally been on, you know, all these different continents, except Antarctica. That might be the only one place I've been that you haven't been. But never, I don't know, maybe you've been there. We could do a value taintment summit there. But I want to ask you of all the personality types you meet, which is kind of the worst thing you look for and avoiding a person? And what are kind of the best things that you look for in working with someone, an employee, obviously integrity is different in a spouse.

But let me just say in an employee, employer dynamic. What are some of the things you avoid like the plague? Sorry to bring that up. Or things that you gravitate towards like a magnetic field. So it depends on what the position is and what you're doing. For example, I'll break it down for you. If I'm dealing with a salesperson or somebody is in sales that's working 1099, I look for somebody that played sports.

I look for somebody that's got a chip. I look for somebody that, you know, had a massive public humiliation of a loss, a breakup. I look for somebody that had major challenges that took place with them. I look for that. If I'm dealing with sales and so because they have to be competitive, you've got to be willing to do the work, 60, 80 hours a week. If I'm dealing with somebody that's more operations and customer service, I'm looking for somebody that's, you know, maybe a certain spiritual foundation, faith,

where a little bit more easygoing to deal with customers. And, you know, like one of the folks that have working here, Alexis, I've never met anybody that's that good with people. I've never met anybody that's that good with people. And she's able to address issues in a way that others can. Now, she came from sales, but she wasn't good in sales. but she's very good in dealing with people. So the same person didn't do well in sales,

but she does very well when it comes out to addressing issues. Then if I'm dealing with somebody that's finances and it's economics, I almost need somebody that's a little bit of a loner. You know, I need somebody that doesn't talk too much that maybe is not very personable, maybe it's a little bit private, doesn't want a lot of bragging rights. You know, it just kind of wants to do the job and, you know, get respect. forward once there's an exit or a victory. That's what I look for when it comes on to somebody

with money, finance. When I'm dealing with operations, I'm dealing with somebody who is extremely analytical, yet step-by-step process and a little bit annoying, a little bit quirky, a little bit like can get under your skin a little bit, you know, like you're semi-annowing, obnoxious, but you trust it because they just have a method of, you know, back to back to back to back to back. they can do the same thing over and over again. So again, going back to answering your question for it. It all depends on position and department. But yes, everybody has a little bit of a quirk that helps in that department.

Great. I want to turn towards, I'll have one more rapid-fire question. But before I get there, I want to talk about the YouTube channel, because I have about the square root of the number of the subscribers that you do, which is not that many, you know, from mathematics. But nevertheless, I want to ask you, how did you build it? what was kind of the inspiration for doing? And obviously, I'd like to know, how can somebody like me starting off develop it, grow an audience, you know, think about how do you think about monetization, et cetera?

I don't really focus so much on that. But growing the YouTube channel, what it's done for you, what it's done against you, you know, because it's made you the superstar in a certain sense. And I want to talk about fame at the very end of this. But first of all, how did you do it? What are some tips or five moves that we can apply out there? that are aspiring. So first of all, let me ask you this. How many people have you interviewed yourself?

How many people have you interviewed? 68. 68. Okay. I've been interviewed by a lot of people. Your top three best ever that's ever interviewed. You can't see me say this to other people. So if you go watch other people that I've interviewed me, I've never said this to anybody.

So I'm saying this to you because you're gentle, you make me trust you to open up to you and talk to. And it's almost like it's just you and I, even though there's audience that's watching us, the idea of somebody that can interview has to make me feel very comfortable that I'm speaking to them. You can do that. You are able to do proper research. You're asking questions. Other people are not asking. So you're not the conventional. Mercy, mercy, mercy. Yeah, I mean, I'm. Mercy. Mercy. Yes, you are welcome. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at ImagineUCSD. Watch us on YouTube.

Listen on iTunes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Vary, director. Brian Keating, co-director. Patrick Coleman, associate director. Produced by Stuart Volko.