Modern Wisdom - #148 - Jason Stapleton - How To Survive The 21st Century

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

Jason Stapleton is a former Force Recon Marine, investor and coach. The impending AI automation takeover is nearly here. If we're not careful we'll all be naked in the street with nothing to do but sling faeces at each other. So what are the skills, principles & mindset tools we need to be robust against this coming apocalypse? How can we futureproof our finances and career to survive the rest of the 21st century? Get a 6 Minute Diary here - https://amzn.to/2Ej1uAj Extra Stuff: Follow Jason on Twitter - https://twitter.com/Jason_Stapleton Check out Jason's Free Webinar - https://www.controlthesource.com/ Jocko & Dakota - https://youtu.be/E6LbwCKJ0lo Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Jason Stapleton and we are talking about how to survive the rest of the 21st century. We're hearing in the news and anywhere else that AI robots and automation are going to take our jobs and we're just going to be helpless, proletariat in the street throwing feces at each other. So how do we survive it? What are the skills and the knowledge that we need to make ourselves robust and resilient against this oncoming

apocalypse of meaninglessness? And Jason has some pretty good ideas about how you can future prove yourself. In other news, I thought I'd give you a quick heads up about some guests that are coming on soon. So Ben Greenfield, Steve Fawcett from JST compete Shane Parish, the guy behind Phanam Street and the knowledge project podcast, it's going to be a very fun few months. And finally, this episode is brought to you by the six minute diary. You will have heard of me speak about this on life hacks and throughout multiple episodes, it is the best way that I found for practicing daily gratitude and it's 20 quid. I'm not on a commission

deal, head to the link in the show notes below and go get yourself one if you feel like starting a journaling practice and doing some daily, daily gratitude, some daily gratitude would be really beneficial for you. I've stuck with it, my bullshit filter is pretty high and I've not stopped using mine yet. But for now, please welcome the wise and wonderful Jason Stapleton. Jason Stamleton in the building. How are you doing, man? I'm doing well, brother. Thank you for having me on your show. Thank you for being here, dude. What's been going on? What you've been doing today? Well, today I've been doing a lot of, it's so funny because the people think that what I do is, I mean, some of what I do is cool and some of it is celebrity, I guess, in

terms of how it looks in the places I get to go. I live in Los Angeles, so I get to go to a lot of premieres and stuff like that. But the bulk of what I do is sitting in a room, staring at a computer screen, looking over numbers for marketing and advertising. And that's what I do is sitting in a room, staring at a computer screen, looking over numbers for marketing and advertising. And that's what I was doing today. I'm actually writing sales copy, and I was building out a bunch of sales funnels for some YouTube advertising that we're doing.

So it was, it's not glamorous work, it's not sexy, but it's, it's, it's oftentimes that's the work that really pays the big money. That's where the dividends are made. It's not when people are seeing you, it's not when you're on Instagram or Facebook or anything like that. It's when you're bunkered down in your room when nobody's looking at you doing the stuff that nobody else is willing to do. I always say success happens when nobody's watching.

I guess I was involved in a little bit of that this morning. That's cool. I always think always think about Konno Megrega. You know, people look at this guy and he's essentially unlimited wealth now. And there's a bunch of things that he is capable of doing that pretty much no one else is. However, Konno's had two kids over the last few years. Konno Megrega, as a dad, has had to get up at three in the morning and change her dirty nappy. Like, that is just reality.

There's some things that you have to do that you can't stop doing, right? This is quote, I think it's a rasmus that says, from the king in his castle to the peasant in the street, everybody shits. It's like there are certain parts of life that you just can't get away from. And you know, you write as well,

like as a club promoter, people see you standing on the front door of a nightclub, and they just think it's like strippers and cocaine until six in the morning, the wake up, like, throw the condoms in the bin, have some cereal and a Budweiser and crack back on. I'm like, no, like, absolutely not. I'm the guy that has to sit in the office and argue with the manager because the, the till floats off and all this stuff.

So yeah, I think no matter your industry, you're always going to have to do the grind. to sit in the office and argue with the manager because the till floats off and all this stuff. So yeah, I think no matter your industry, you're always going to have to do the grind. No, it's funny. When you talk about McGregor, one of the things that I was always, I really loved about him, he, you've got video of him going back to when he was a nobody from nowhere. And not only what's always impressed me about him is that personality of his existed long before he was wearing the pants for it, right? Back when he didn't, I mean, he hadn't won anything of note, but he knew somewhere deep in

his soul that he was going to be the Muhammad Ali of the MMA world and he went at it with the ferocity and with just a cold, unwavering belief that it was possible. And I just, I think that's necessary for any amount of success in life. You have to believe it in yourself first before anybody else will believe it. And before you're ever going to be able to achieve what you want. You know, people, some people love him, some people hate him. I absolutely love him as a fighter, but I love him more for the industry that he's built

around himself. He's made himself into a true icon. And for anybody who studies influence or brand building, man, he is somebody that you have to look at because he's just done it perfectly. He's a basement. He really, really is. Yeah, it's, uh, it's interesting in that, right? Because I talk a lot about integrity and virtue and living your truth and speaking the truth. And in the same breath, I can totally see that fake it till you make it or kind of believe it ahead of where your achievements are at is also a worthwhile and virtuous thing to do. You know, like I

genuinely believe that I could become the best podcaster in the UK. I think that there's episodes I've put out that are some of the best content that's ever come out from the UK. An episode with Aubrey Marcus, maybe this one with you as well. And you know, like, I feel proud of that. I don't feel like that's, I don't feel like that's being unethical. I don't feel like I'm, I'm kidding myself or the people that I say that to, but you know, like leading first, leading with your confidence first. Yeah, I think someone like Conor McGregor is a good, a good role model for that. You know, he's, he's living in his parents attic on welfare, like with the same misses that he's got now,

like just some girl, some chick who's now, you know, got a husband that's worth probably a hundred million plus whatever it is, you know, easy. Yeah. No, I've been a, I'm always a big fan that changed happens first in the mind. I mean, we were talking a lot of self-help stuff here, but in reality, if you want your life to change, you first have to have a vision of that change. You have to know what you want and you have to see it in your eyes, so you'd have a kind of a destination to aim for.

That's in terms of like lying to yourself. That's where I like to lie to myself. I don't lie to myself about where I'm at right now or about what my current skill set is, but I do lie to myself about where I could be and what I want to have because I think that in order for me to move forward, I have to have that vision and I have to believe that I can get there. So yeah, I'm a huge proponent of that. I talk a lot about negative feedback loops with my clients because so many of them struggle with anytime you're building a new company or you're starting something from scratch, it's

a lot more failure than success. That always hurts and it's really, really easy to say, well, I just keep digging and digging and I'm not hitting any gold. And eventually they're just going to give up and walk away. And the truth is, it's the same for everybody. Everybody wakes up and works for months or for sometimes years. And don't see huge results from it. And then all of a sudden, all of that culminates into really vertical and explosive growth

in your company and your life can change. I mean, I struggle for several years with a couple of different businesses that just failed miserably until I started my trading and investment company that about 10 years ago. And it's so funny because I couldn't make money as an entrepreneur for the first five or six years. And then I start this one company. And within 18 months, I've made just short of a million dollars.

And the next year, I made a million and a half dollars. And a year after that, I made over $2 million. And you're just like, you know, you're just like, well, what happened? What changed? And nothing changed. You just, you learned and you advanced and you grew and you took your licks and you adjusted. And you just kept going because I knew that I couldn't do anything else. I just, I had, I'm, I'm, I'm unemployable at this point.

Like no one, I couldn't work for anybody. Like, people could hire me. I get, people would try and hire me, but I couldn't work for somebody else. It's just, this is the only choice. There's no place to fall back to. Success must happen. And so when you find yourself in, in that situation, it creates, I don't know, and you're doing things that you love. It just creates all kinds of, I don't know,

all kinds of spirit and passion and what you do. And so what I, what I work with people on is a, get out of that negative feedback loop. If you haven't had any successes in your life and you're waking up in the morning and you say, what do I have to be proud of? What do I have to be grateful for? I say start with the carpet under your feet. Start with the hot water in your shower because the bulk of mankind doesn't have it. If you need a success for the day, get up when your alarm goes off because there's a ton of people who can't even do that.

When the alarm goes off, get up and just like, boom, I'm winning. I'm winning because I promised myself that when the alarm went off, I'd get out of bed and I did. And if I can do that, then I can do the next thing. And over time, those little wins turn into big wins. And it is really, it is life changing, these little tiny tweaks that we make to the way we think. And the way we, like you said, in some cases lie to ourselves.

Yeah, for sure. Bill Gates says, people underestimate what they can achieve in, overestimate what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in five. And from James Clees, Atomic Habits as well, he talks about taking for you, it would be, you took six years to become an overnight success, which is like just so hilarious. I love that book, by the way. What a great book he wrote. I actually, you know, that he's got that I'd look at the grass. I've even used the grass and some of the stuff that I used to teach with and because it's so powerful, it's a great book. It's one of the best. So the Lindy effect, right? You know, the life, life span of non-perishable

items. If a book's been around, like 1984's been around for about 50 years, maybe 70 years actually, you can presume it will be around for another 70. What it means is that we should probably be a little bit more cautious about the stuff that we read or consume, which has been consumed, produced recently,

which is interesting that probably 99% of everything that we consume has been produced within the last 24 hours. Stories all the rest of it, that's not Lindy, right? But James Clees' atomic habit is one that books the trend. You know, that book absolutely will be 10 years, 20 years time, I think, because it's just so, so seminal. It'll be as applicable in 100 years as it is today, because human nature doesn't change.

We, you know, we were the same people today as we will be 100 years as it is today because human nature doesn't change. We were the same people today as we will be 100 years from now. You go, we go back and look at sales copy written in the 1800s when people didn't even really know what they were doing yet. We still use, we go back, if you're a copyright or a marketing guy, we'll go back and look at that stuff and refer to it as training tools because it's so good and it's the same today. So yeah, his book is going to go, his book is going to be like a historical book. It'll be good 100 years. He was on, he was on, he was on, he was on here last year and I was just

blowing away by him. Talking about sales copy actually, Richard Shotton, previous modern wisdom guest and he's coming on soon. He told me, he did an analysis of the number of new words that we used in Adverts, and there's been a significant downturn in the number of new words. And this isn't that words are being used up. It's to do with the fact that people in ad agencies and copyright is are playing it safe,

increasingly more and more. And the quote that he has is he says, people would rather fail safely than win with risk. Because if you fail, if you put an advert out that was maybe a little bit adventurous and it fails, it's totally on your head. Whereas if you put something out that just, oh, well, you know, that kind of looked like all of our competitors did, to surprise that that didn't work, no worries. You kind of get a pat on the back that try again. And that's so interesting how the marketing industry is moving like that. You know, it's like, we use the template. We use the template. It didn't work. So you can't blame

me because it's the template that we always use. Well, yeah, remember those ads it would have been a few years ago. And the ads were like, she thought it was all over and then he did this. For a while, you were clicking on all of them. And then after about three weeks, you're like, dude, I've seen 500 of these and everybody's doing it and none of them work. And most recently, everybody's video has to have like this banner box around it that's got writing at the top and some thing at the bottom. That's not a time bomb.

It's slowly moving. Yeah, yeah. Right. So it all looks the same. And it's like, yeah, if that's what you do, if you play it safe, if you don't push the envelope, if you're, I always say, if you're not looking at what 90% of people are doing and then doing the opposite, well, you're wrong. But there comes a point in advertising. It's cycles where, look, you got to get off of what everybody else is doing because that's

been saturated. And you're right. You won't, you might not lose your job for it, but you're never going to get rich doing it that way. You got to constantly be pushing the envelope and testing new things and trying new things at the risk of failing because that's the only way we learn. I love it, man. So, what are you talking about? Negative thought loops and how people can start to sort of move themselves out of that? Have you got some other things that you do with your clients to kind of foundational things? Like, how are you viewing yourself? How are you viewing the day? How are you going about your purpose and meaning and things like that?

Yeah, it depends on where the client's at. So early on in the process, when I'm talking with people, one of the first things I want them to understand and to work on is that we really live in the greatest period in human history. I firmly believe that. I used, for example, what we're doing right here. I were just having a Skype conversation over video. The first time I went overseas, it was 2005.

I was in Iraq at the time, and I was working for a contracting company. And I could not video call my, at the time my wife, during that process because there wasn't enough bandwidth to do that. And we had, we had pretty good internet there as well. And when I first started my company in 2009, but we really kind of moved into our first space in 2010, I had to put, make all of the videos that I put online available for download

because anybody who wasn't in a major metropolitan city oftentimes didn't have the ability to stream high definition videos. I'm not talking in 1080. I'm talking like 720p video, so the low high definition. And especially if you lived outside the country, you couldn't do it. Now, boom, cell phone. Cell phone. I was streaming the other day, a big presentation to about 600 people. We were out on Facebook, YouTube, streaming live over our own internal network and all of

that at the same time and people are watching it on their cell phone. Just like the world that we live in today is unreal. It has never been cheaper or easier to really take control of your life and to build your business, build your life the way you want it. And I said the second thing that I tell people is, you know, for the first time in human history, we get to consider personal fulfillment in what we do for work. And if you go back even 50 years, the idea that your grandfather got up every day and went, I wonder what would fulfill me as a person today in the work that I do. No, my grandfather's father was a farmer. He was a farmer. You know, my father

went to law school because that's what my dad, my grandfather wanted him to do, right? So personal fulfillment wasn't even a consideration. And now in 2020 where we live today, there is every single human being, especially watching this, has the ability to consider and to pursue personal fulfillment as part of what they do to earn their living. And I just, I think that's amazing. I just, I, other people look at this world and like everybody's suffering and everything's going to hell in a handbasket, it's all crap. And the truth is, I believe completely the opposite.

And I think it's one of the reasons that I've had more success, maybe than a lot of people is because mentally my mindset is just one that says, I'm surrounded by abundance, I'm surrounded by opportunity. And all I got to do is figure out how to harness that and how to bend it to me. And so that's what I try and get people to do first is to shift their mindset to one of, I'm surrounded by opportunity. I just have to figure out how to harness that

and direct it towards me. I wonder how many people struggle with this existential crisis, this lack of purpose and meaning precisely because there is this paradox of choice now. Like if you're not being fulfilled, now there are fewer excuses than there were 50 years ago. That's not to say that there aren't people who have disadvantages where they can't get themselves

to the stage where work is joy for them and blah, blah. But there's fewer reasons for that. And there is more onus on you. There's a really interesting point by Alander botan from the School of Life where he talks about the modern world is a meritocracy, right? And if the successes of the people who do well are theirs to bear, that means that the failures of people who do badly must be all so theirs to bear. I think absolutely. Now that is a very difficult pill to swallow. I oversimplify as I do with most things and I just say, you know, the most important phrase that you can learn is it's my fault. And if you will learn that everything, if you will accept responsibility for everything, I don't care whether it is your fault or not, just accept responsibility for it.

What you're really saying is all the successes that I'm in control of my life, that I get to direct where I want my life to go and what I want to have and what I want to be, and nobody can keep me from that. So if I'm not there right now, it's my fault. Far from being something that's negative, it's very liberating because once you recognize that you are what you have and what you want to achieve is completely up to you, it opens the world up. The problem is most people live a life of mediocrity somewhere between total failure

and their true potential. And so they, as I say, they go only so far and then they park. And then they look at their life and they feel terrible about it because they don't have what they want. And instead of looking internally and saying, what do I need to change about me, they start pointing fingers externally and saying, it's odds because my boss doesn't like me or all because my dad didn't treat me right or because my mom didn't hug me enough or whatever it is, it's something externally that is preventing them from going where they want to go and having what they want.

And I say, you've got to have a mind shift there. You got to have a shift that says, no, no, no, I'm responsible. This is up to me. I get one run through life. And I'm at the end of the day, what it's going to be me who determines how far I go and not somebody else. And so it's my fault is a common phrase that my clients will hear me say all the time. Wait, it's that Jocco video isn't it? That famous good, you know? That's it. Does everybody talks about Jocco? I've never seen an interview with him.

I've not even read his book. It's like, I guess I should as much as he gets talked about. He's good. So he did. One that I would recommend, if you want a first one, that just completely throws you in the deep end and allows you to fully take like Jocco in the ass, is the one that you did with the Medal of Honor recipient.

His name escapes me at Coda Mayor, right? Okay. And him and Dakota, Dakota wrote this book, very, very heartfelt. And he just talks through this particular experience where he was restricted by the powers that be for going back in to help people. He disobeys orders. He goes back in and he just starts fishing people out and all this stuff's going on. But they, this is interesting, especially for you as a podcaster.

And for everyone that's listening, it'll be linked in the show notes below. It's phenomenal, but I would listen to it on a day where you're feeling emotionally resilient because it's quite intense. And it's a podcast which has got the best use of silence that I've ever heard. So they leave 20 second batches with nothing being said, as they both just sit in this, allow this sort of sensation to swell. As Jocco's reading passages from the book, that kind of provides structure to what they're talking about. And Jocco's got this like real, growly, quite kind of intense voice. And yeah, they're having this

conversation, man, that one is a real, especially for yourself with your military background, it'll be really, really, really cool. Yeah, I'll definitely go check it out. You need to. Absolutely. The, you were talking about the fact that people should take responsibility. What do you think are some of the characteristics that you see in the highest performers within that domain, the people that take the most responsibility? What's the sort of mindset that those people have? Or what do they do, the sort of commonalities? Yeah, that's a really good question.

I think first and foremost, the people that I see you have the most success at life. And I'm not just talking about financial success or wealth, health, happiness, relationships, all that stuff. First of all, they have very long time horizons. So what we tend to see across the board is people who are, people who come out of poverty. Let's take just people who were born into it and come out of it here in America. They have very long time horizons. They're thinking 10 years, 20 years into the future. People with short time horizons, people who think only to the end of the week or

the end of the month until next payday tend to do very poorly. Because so one of the things I see repeatedly of people who are very successful is that they are willing to, they're willing to suffer the slings and arrows longer than most people. And suffering and pain, these are really negative gripping words. But what I really just mean is the ability to stick it out and go through the hard parts so they can get to the good part. Most people aren't willing to do that because their time horizons are too short. So that's number one.

A second thing that I notice about really successful people is that they don't rely exclusively on their own, the school of hard knocks to learn skill. So I'm very fond. I've been really focused on, I'll give you an example, been really focused on YouTube advertising right now. I think it's a very underserved area where there can be a lot of money can be made. And so I've been focusing a lot of time on that.

And the very first thing I did when I knew I wanted to get up to speed on YouTube advertising and how it was being done was I went out and spent $1,000 on a YouTube course from a guy who was doing a lot of really cool stuff in the space. I found the best guy I could to teach me how to do it and I paid him. Why? Because that $1,000 is a sentence to what it's going to cost me if I have to go out and learn it all from scratch, both in terms of time and the cost of testing.

So what I find the most successful people will do is when they want to go faster, they'll write a check. And that's something that I've tried to do since the beginning of my career and it's something that I advise everybody else to. I'm a student first and foremost. I've always said, I love being a student because eventually, if I'm your student, I'm gonna know everything you know.

And then I'm gonna know everything you know and everything I know. And I'm gonna know the most, right? So this is kinda, this is my, I will buy your information, I will buy your time because in the end, it leaves me better off. That's the second thing that I see most people do.

The third thing is that I think the most successful people that I've seen in both life and business have a joy about it. For the longest time, I looked at my businesses a war. It was something that I fought and got up every day and I had to win. I had to win on the battlefield. I sat down with a friend of mine who was talking with me and teaching me a little bit about how he had built his business. He had a brick and mortar business.

He looked at his numbers every single week. Every week, he looked at the numbers. I said, how do you do that every week? He's like, you're going to be up and down all the time. He's like, it's a game. He's like, I don't win every week. But he's like, it's fun to play. I come in and I look at my numbers every week and every week I try and beat last week's

numbers. And he said, if I do that every week, I've had 20% growth, a steady 20% growth in my company every year since I opened it up in like 1981 to give you an idea of just how big this guy's operation is now. He said, I've had 20% growth doing this every year without fail, come recession or prosperity. I always have it. And he said, it's fun for me. Completely changed my way of looking at my business and about life.

It's just like dude, life was meant to be lived abundantly. You're supposed to have fun at what you do. It shouldn't be a grind. You shouldn't hate it. And if it feels that way, you're doing something wrong. And so those are, I think those are the three things that really I notice about people that I admire and who I want to emulate as it comes to life and business. Who is the YouTube course by? What's his name? John Penberthy.

He's a Brit. Povernaathy, yeah. It's a really good course, too, by the way. I finished it up a while back, but yeah, just in terms of everything he did and everything was very simple simple too. I really like simple, I don't like complexity. And so he's really gotten it down to a very simple couple of step formula that allows you to track and retarget.

And I mean, even I didn't need the scripts or anything like that, but he had all the scripts laid out. So if you know nothing about it going into it, you can build a pretty significant advertising business on YouTube without any previous knowledge. It's a good course. That's awesome, man. So how do you find, I wanna get onto long-term thinking,

so I think that's really important. But before that, how do you find good coaches? Because everybody is selling a course of some kind. Everybody says, I'm the guru, don't listen to him, his stuff's bollocks, my stuff's the real shit. I'll teach you what they want to teach you. I'll teach you it faster, cheaper, quicker, blah, blah. How do you do that? Right? Because you try to sift through a lot of noise. Yeah, at first it's really hard. I've been in this business, you know, online information education for, I don't know, 11 years now. And so I've been buying, I probably buy $20,000 or $30,000 worth of coaching every year.

And so over the years you kind of learn, ah, yeah, that guy's full of it. Like I know, I know what he's doing here. I know, I know that sales trick and you kind of get a feel for whether a guy knows what he's doing or not. In the beginning, I just committed to learn a lot of stuff. And so I look at learning what about courses. Yeah, yeah. You learn what to bad one by right.

And here's the thing. Listen, I rarely will do this, but what I tell people is, it's wrong to go and buy somebody's information, go through it, and then just ask for a refund. But if you go, because, oh, it didn't work for me, well, maybe you suck. Like, maybe it's not that it didn't work,

but if you get into it and you're like, no, this was not as promised. Like, this isn't what he told me I was gonna learn in this thing. Just go get your money back for it. He should have told you. He should have been honest with you from the beginning. For this one in particular, not knowing much about YouTube advertising because I haven't

ever done it. What I did was I went to, I did some Google searches. I found some of the bigger names, the guys who are doing professional sites and all that. You can kind of tell who's got the professional funnels and stuff built out. And I went to, I watched three different webinars, sat through six hours of webinars. And this, and John's was the one that I felt like this guy really understood it better than the other two. At least that's what, that was my impression.

And so that's how I did it. I just went and watched three different webinars on guys and learned a little bit of knowledge and then bought a course. Wouldn't it be cool if there was hotels.com, booking.com, trusted trader type, central hub where everybody could glass door what their opinions of online courses were. That'd be amazing. Everyone would be from your grant card on to your kid that just started out how to build a TikTok channel thing.

You could submit yourself on there and have verified purchases. That would be phenomenal. Amazon reviews for online courses, and that would completely clear away this problem. Yeah, and I wish somebody could do that. They tried that in the Forex industry for a while and they had a thing I'll call Forex Peace Army or something. And the problem with it is, and the problem they had there, was that you get a bunch of guys who go in there and they, it's ultimately successor failure, as I said before, is really

on you. It doesn't, the course itself can be a great course. If you don't have the mindset to go win at that business or at that particular skill, you're never going to be successful at it. John can teach you step-by-step how to run YouTube ads. If you don't go do it, then you're not going to make any money or if you shortcut it or if you expect to turn on your first ad and have it make you $100 and give you a 5x return on ad spend, then you're dreaming, man. There's a learning curve involved with that.

And so then they go out and they're angry because like, I spent $1,000 on this thing and then I did what he said and the money didn't come in. Like, it didn't just print money day and night for me. So he's a terrible guy. What a liar and a cheat. And I'm just like, did I don't, that kind of thing really bothers me because having worked with clients for, you know, 10 or 11 years and seen the successes

versus the failures, the failures are almost always caused by the other person. Not the course or the thing that they took. I mean, like I said, I bought so much stuff, all by it just to see what's in it. I spent $4,000 on a course last year just to see what his back end funnel was, right? I just wanted to see after I just didn't do what was going on. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I want to know what he's doing on the back end because I know there's something

back there, right? So I do all kinds of stuff like that. And most of the time, 99% of the time, the course delivers, it's a decent course, it's going to help you out. And the people who are complaining about it are just there, that's what they are. They're just complainers. Compliance is number one, same with gym routines and meditation and stuff like that. It's interesting that you mentioned about finance. Have you followed the Wall Street Bet Reddit subreddit? Do you know what this is? No. Oh, Jason, let me change your life, man. So, ah, slash what's the name of it? It's ah slash Wall Street

Bet on Reddit. And it's basically a subreddit that's blowing up recently. I think Time Magazine or New York Times has something covered it a couple of weeks ago. And it's just a bunch of people that make insane calls in the market, like just ridiculous bets with remorgage to the house and do it just for internet points with a bunch of people that they're never gonna meet and Some of the people some of them turn. I'll just be like oh, I just made half a million yesterday of this one thing But then more often than not people lose and then there's a YouTube channel that does a collection each quarter of the does a collection each quarter of the dankest trades from Wall Street bets. And it's, man, it's so fun.

And once you're done, I want you to go and have a look because it will blow you away. But they were in the New York Times recently. They've been almost even manipulating markets on penny stocks by putting particular bits of advice into this huge subreddit with millions of people in it. And then just going on to Robin Hood and pumping the shit out of this.

And there's like companies, there's companies that have 10x their value during this most recent period where we've had a lot of turbulence with the coronavirus stuff. And these companies have like 10x, they're probably just like some random stationery company or whatever it is that you can trade that someone's just popped in this sub-raddit.

Man, it's so funny. Well, that's not new. I remember when I first started trading, I traded penny stocks and there are actually, there are teams of guys who will go around and they'll say, and it only, it takes one guy who really has a following of people and he says, okay, we're all getting into this thing now and you'll watch that thing go from five cents to 45 cents and then what happens is as it goes up, all the guys is small network of people ends up selling out as it's rallying, rallying, rallying. And then he says, okay, I'm out and then the thing just crashes back down. And everything that hang, yeah. Did you see that?

That's not new. That is a pretty on the regular thing that happens in the penny stock world. Yeah, did you see when John McAfee was really big into cryptocurrency a couple of years ago? And he was doing like McAfee's coin of the week or something like that. And he was just making people's fortunes.

And then some guys from Reddit had made a bot that would scrape Macafee's Twitter feed and auto put trades on so they could put a trade on what he'd tweeted about before everyone else. I'm like, holy fuck it. Like this is, you know, some kid in a basement somewhere bringing a complete armoured tank to war. You know what it is, that is a get rich quick mentality that you quickly give back everything that you make in that world. And in the trading space especially,

if you don't have a specific trading plan that has been proven profitable over time, and if you don't go in and trade it every day, regardless of what's happening in the market, you are your destined to fail. There's just no other way to trade and probably invest to, but certainly trade professionally and for the long term, then to ignore all of that other stuff. All of that is short term profits and all of it they give back. Now, hey, look, if you can go in on one trade and make $3 billion or $3 million or whatever

it'd be out, then more power to you, man. But the number of people, I work with traders for about eight years. And the number of people who came to me and said, yeah, I lost, I've lost $30,000. I lost 50 grand, you know, doing this. And yeah, oh, I remember one time I was up $150,000 and I lost it all plus some more. And I'm like, my brother, like just that I've seen so many lives get destroyed because people follow this, whatever the latest gimmick is, that I just, it's such a turn off to me. And I feel for those people because I know when I see this stuff, oh, I made X number

of dollars. I'm like, yeah, but you're going to give it back in the afternoon because you only, you're only posting your winners. You're only throwing those out there. You're not throwing out the losers that you had because if you did, you'd be showing a, you know, completely different PNL at the end of the month. So few people can take that win that they've had and just be like, cool, I'm out.

Like that's me, that's my one, I'm gonna take the fact that the one in a thousand chance of me making $320,000 in a day happened and it's not gonna happen again. So that's me. Like that's me, my mortgage is paid off and my miss has got a new car and we're going on holiday. See you later on. Like you write because the naturally the the way that the human brain wants those rewards, those unscheduled rewards,

right? We just wow, I just if I take just another little bit and you chip, chip, chip away and then blown. So it's a high. Yeah, it's a high. We were talking about a long-term thinking and how people can have a little bit better long-term thinking. Obviously, you know, last few weeks, financial markets and just generally the geopolitical environment is in uproar, or coronavirus, and worries about what's going to happen with healthcare and with food. And I'm seeing images of like Costco and stuff and there's aisles are just completely empty with because every America is secretly a prepper. And they like everyone's a prepper like on the down low. It's just now they finally got the excuse to be able to go fuck us. Yeah, we can use that coming in the woods that

we bought seven years ago and yeah, all those underground stores of rice and stuff. But yet, so we've got that. And then, you know, you think right, we're coming out the back years ago and all those underground stores of rice and stuff. So we've got that and then you think, right, we're coming out the back of that, which we will eventually get out the other side of this and no one will talk about it again. What happens? You've got more uproar at the end of this year. You've got the presidential election going on and then how do people deal with the chaos of life like that when they're going to organize themselves?

I think when I said, when I used to teach trading to people, most of what you see in the news in the markets is noise. It has absolutely no relevance to anything. And so you got to learn to ignore most of that. And what I see right now with coronavirus, with the elections that are happening in 2020, to me, all of that is noise. People clearing the store shelves to buy rice, like you're not going to be able to buy, like suddenly you're not going to be able to buy corn.

I mean, we produce, we're in the grain belt. What do you need? We live, we feed the world here in America. What do we need to buy corn for, right? But yet for some reason, we're not going to be able to get it. And we got to go clear the store shelves on. It's like, all right, fine. All of that is noise to me.

What's far more interesting is, and again, thinking longer term is what's going to happen over the next 20 years. How is our culture, how is technology going to change, and how is that legitimately going to impact our world? And one of the things that we've seen on my show on Monday, I took people through the last four or five great economic revolutions that happened, and revolutions that happened, in just in America, starting in about 1784. And what you've seen is over the last probably 50 or 60 years is the timeline, the time it takes

for one evolution to another, from one major transition to another, is getting tighter and tighter and tighter. And what we're in now is what I think is the greatest market and economic evolution that we've ever seen. One that is going to make roughly, this sounds extravagant, I recognize, but just the numbers play out. It's around 46 million jobs obsolete. I'm not saying that, oh, these guys are going to have a tough time or their skills are

going to be out of date. I'm like, you're not going to need 46 million jobs in America over the next 20 years because either automation or artificial intelligence will take over those jobs. And when I say artificial intelligence, people think, you know, like AI robot or something like that, like some sort of I robot. And that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about like, in the next 20 years, there won't be a man or woman alive in America who won't be able to drive a or won't purchase a self-driving car. That's artificial intelligence. That's the AI I'm talking about.

I remember reading Remnants of a stock operator when I was a kid and the guy Jesse Livermore who was in that story was rich enough that he drove from his house to Wall Street every day and he had a driver. And I remember thinking, how cool would that be to be able to have somebody drive you to work? And now in 20 years, everybody's going to have the ability to do that. The technology is already there. And so what other jobs that are less complex than having to manage the, the, the literally thousands and thousands of changes going on in the environment when a car drives down the road

at every, every second, what other jobs are going to be obsolete? How many other people are not going to have work? Well, basically any factory work, any sort of like repetitive labor that has to happen, fast food, low income, low and low middle class jobs are going to go away. So what happens in that transition? Well the middle class begins to shrink. What we thought years ago was that when that shrink happens and when it starts to happen, what we're going to have is very few people at the top making tons and tons of money and

then this whole big swath of mankind living in abject poverty. And what we found is the opposite. The middle class is getting smaller, but the bulk of the, about two-thirds of them are moving up into prosperity. They're getting wealthier, not poorer. And it's because they're seeing the transition and they're responding to it. But the change that's going to happen in my belief over the next 20 years is going to be so drastic and so fast that a lot of people aren't going to have the skills necessary to

move up and they're going to end up being forced down. And so kind of my mission and the stuff that I've been focusing on over the last couple of years is making my audience, my clients aware of the changes that I've been focusing on over the last couple of years is making my audience, my clients aware of the changes that are happening and having them try and disassociate from political change as a way to improve our lives and improve our well-being and focus more on individual change. What do I need to do to change my life to make sure that over the next 20 years, I prosper. I thrive.

Not that I survive, but that I actually thrive. It's a full-time job just going through all that because we want to be focused on the stuff that doesn't matter. We love focusing on the noise, but the noise doesn't make you any money. The noise doesn't protect you. The noise just distracts you, keeps you dependent and apathetic. And so that's kind of what my mission has been over the last couple of years. Man, you are right.

It really just feel like we're at an inflection point, you know, with what's happening at the moment. But then everyone said that before, everyone said the industrial revolution. I remember I got sent an advert about the dangers of reading the newspaper or reading books. That was it that the dangers of reading books would disassociate man from his wife and it would be the breakdown of the nuclear family. And then it was the same when radio happened, then the same when TV happened and then the same when telephone's happened. But what you said there is right that cyclical iteration of this is getting tighter and the intensity is also increasing.

You know, no one would deny that a mobile phone has more impact on our ability to focus and connect with the people around us than a book. So you got, okay. Okay. Yeah, let me give you an example of what I mean, because that is the typical response that I get from a lot of people.

Like, oh, they always say that. And they do always, they do always say that. But let me give you an example of what I mean. Over the last 30 years or so, since the advent of computer technology and it started to take a hold in the late 80s, early 90s, right? So we're talking 30 years ago.

You could see the writing on the wall in the auto industry. And anybody who was working in an assembly line started to see jobs go away and be replaced with automation. And what they should have done is recognize the writing on the wall, started learning new skills so that they would be protected when that transition happened. When they finally came and said, here's your pink slip, we're closing the factory, we're moving it to Mexico because it's cheaper labor or we're replacing you with a machine. They would have been like, no problem, I got something to fall back on.

Instead, what they did was they put their head in the sand, they turned to the unions and they said, the union will protect us. The union will make sure we get our wages. The union will make sure we keep our pensions. And they've got, they have 30 years. It's why I don't have any sympathy for any of these people who are losing their jobs. They're like, what am I going to do now? Well, you had three decades to figure that out,

but you just chose not to do it. Well, we're having that same sort of evolution, that same transition is going to happen in a multitude of industries as more technology and artificial intelligence begins to take over more of the repetitive work that we do as a society today. Now, that's going to open up a host of new opportunities for people to be creative and to engage in work that's fulfilling and exciting to them.

But you're going to have to learn some new skills to be able to make that transition. And the time to do that is not when they show up with your pink slip that says, hey, thanks for working here, but you've been replaced, you're fired, right? That's not the time to start working on this stuff. pink slip that says, hey, thanks for working here, but you've been replaced, you're fired, right? That's not the time to start working on this stuff. And so that's kind of been my message. It's like, yes, a lot of people are going to survive this. A lot of people are going to do well, but it will be those people who are taking steps

now and not waiting until they're out on the street. It's make sure that you're one of them, right? Make sure that you're one of the people who's there. So what are some of the skills? If you were to create a new human now, and so I'm gonna imbu you with skills that I think are robust as we move forward over the next 10 and 20 years, what would they be?

If you got a, if I had a kid who was coming to me and saying, hey, I'm thinking about a graduate in high school, what skills do I need? And he didn't really know what he wanted to do. The first thing I would do is tell him to learn how to code. Whatever the common coding language is of the day, it's the best language that you can learn because it does involve a great deal of creativity.

Just like writing, if you become a really good writer, a creative writer is a powerful tool. A good coder, someone who is good at that and can see the creativity of it, can do really well. The other stuff I would focus on is what are the jobs that will still be in high demand, even after repetitive work takes over, is taken over by automation. Those are going to be the jobs that require some sort of creativity, art, science, things like information. I happen to think, and I'm somewhat biased when I say this, so I apologize to your audience,

but I happen to think that the best business in the world that anybody can get involved in is the, call it the knowledge business, the information business, the consulting or coaching business, because we all are good at something and it's a very cheap and easy business to get started with high profit margins. And it's also something that's going to be in a high demand in years to come, because as, again, as technology evolves and it evolves quicker and faster. Colleges will not be able to keep up. And you're already seeing a lot of companies that are saying, you know what, we don't really need this college degree anymore.

I don't know what we were thinking here, but this check in the box is really unnecessary. What we want are people would drive and skill. That's what we really need. And people are getting that from places other than college. I never went to college. And when I wanted to learn how to do YouTube advertising, I didn't go and take a college course on it at night class, right? I went and I found somebody who's doing it right now, who's successful at it, and I paid

him to teach me everything that he knew. And I paid him a lot less than I would have paid, and it's in a lot less time than going to a college class. So I think it's a new industry, and it's already like $220,000 an hour gets spent on information by small businesses alone in America. And I think that that's only going to grow over the next 10 to 20 years. It's a good business, and it's a one I know inside and out. So I got coding. We've got creative work, which is our poetry science copywriting marketing. I'm going to guess as well would be in this.

Photography is another great one. Anything that requires something other than repetitive skill, it requires a uniqueness to it that won't be able to be created by artificial intelligence at least in our lifetime. What else do we do to survive the 21st century? Spin less than you make and invest the rest in things that you understand. A lot of books have been written over the last 20 years on personal finance and it can be reduced down to those two things.

Spin less than you make. Save and invest the rest in things that you understand. And if you don't understand anything enough to save or invest in it, then you need to be investing in you. Build your human capital, your store of knowledge and skill that gives you value to the market. Those are the things that will protect you over the long term. Your, someone else's desire for you, for your knowledge or skill is what keeps you safe in a changing environment, okay? It is not you, it's not a union that protects a worker, it's employers.

The number one thing that protects a worker are 10 other people who want that worker to come work for them. That's what really protects you. And the greater your, and the more marketable your skills, the more unique those talents are that you have, the more in demand you will be and the higher, the higher you'll be able to charge for those skills. So focus on that as your primary mission. And what you'll find is that you'll never be out of work. You'll always be in high demand and you'll always be pushing the maximum of what you can find is that you'll never be out of work. You'll always be in high demand and you'll always be pushing the maximum

of what you can charge in your industry. Well, Count Newport's book, Be So Good They Can't Ignore You. Yeah, well, it's funny. I always have a version of these. Like mine's like, mine's like, uh, be, be so valuable that they can let everybody else at the company go, but you, we can let everybody go. We can't let Tom go. If Tom goes, we might as well shutter the company

because I can't do it without him, right? You need to be that guy. You want to be Tom, be Tom. So, what? It's interesting. It's interesting that you said about the personal financing. A recently had Morgan Haussalon, you know, Morgan from Collaborative Fund.

And X, X, right, if I'm not lethal,ley fool like is is good guy real, real good guy. I'll link you when you'd you'd love him. You'd absolutely love him. And had him on and he was talking about personal wealth. And he said, wealth is the Ferrari that you didn't buy. It's the square footage in the house that you didn't purchase. So rather than the current shows of wealth, which are very externalized, it's the internalized ones, right?

It's what can you do that you can spend money on which either creates more wealth or that is liquid wealth that's there, you know, money that's in your house, money that's in your bank account, money that's in actual assets. You know, it's funny, I've always said wealth is measured in time, not dollars.

So it's a question of if all of your income stopped today, how long could you survive before you had to change your lifestyle? Whether it's a week or a month or a year, that's your wealth. You have one year of wealth. You have three months of wealth. And there's a financial component to that. But it really changes the way people think. Because if you make a million bucks a year, but you spend, you know, $990,000 of it, then you don't have a lot of wealth.

You can't survive very long if your situation changes and your income changes. And so, very much the same thing. I like hearing you said that sentence. You said that for size same sentence. Oh, did he? When you see the same thing from two different spheres of awareness, it's a pretty good indication that it's the truth. So yeah, yeah, I absolutely agree more, man. Can it isn't there a stat that saw? Oh, I've just got something that says internal temperature high allow it to cool. Is that your camera? I've never seen that. We must be talking here for an hour. I've had these cameras running a lot longer than an hour,

so I don't know what's going on. Do you think it could be just the pure, hot shit that we're dropping on this episode? It could be, yeah, it could just be the, you know, the knowledge we've been dropping in here. Boy, we really think highly of ourselves. Yeah, we do. We do.

Yeah, we'll see how much longer this thing lasts. That's crazy. I gotta look that up, figure that out. So yeah, Morgan's saying about the fact that people need to, oh, that was it. The statistic about how many Americans have more than $500, I think, in a bank account or like $1,000 in a bank account, it's like some incredible percentage of people don't have. Oh, yeah.

It's well over half, like 70 or 80% of the people wouldn't be able to cover a $1,000 bill of it happen. Yeah, it's really insane. And it just, it goes to show you, we tend to live at our means. And it's one of the reasons why nobody ever achieves much wealth. And then they want to complain that Bloomberg's got a lot of it. And it's like, well, you could have more if you just spent less than you made or you focused on acquisition of wealth as a priority instead of what you are doing.

So, anyway, I don't know. I talk with a lot of people about that aspect of it too because it's not just about the making of the money, it's about the creating of wealth and not what I call eating your children. You should enslave your money. You should put it to work for you. Whether it's in a business or in something else that you understand.

I happen to put most of what I make back into my business because that's what generates me the greatest return. And so my marketing dollars generate me a nice return and I don't have to do much for that. So that's where I tend to focus, because that's what I understand. That's what I can control.

So that's what I've always been interested in. I get it. What about the other things that people need? So we've talked about the skills. We've talked about investing in ourselves and our knowledge using some of the capital that we have, monetarily or in terms of time, to then convert it into knowledge capital, I suppose, our skill capital

that we can then monetize off the back of. Also, spoken about the fact that ensuring that you spend less than you earn and that you invest in things that you do understand. Are there any other things that people need to be conscious of as we move forward over the next 10, 20 years? What else are they looking out for? Man, I think those are the primary things. I would love to just continue to give your audience more and more stuff to be worried about

and to be focused on. But truth is, you can focus on one thing. For any length of time, you're doing better than 90% of the people around you. So, yeah, those are the things that I just drill into people. It's like, look, things are changing whether you want them to or not. Control your income. Your freedom is directly tied to the amount of wealth that you have. Not just your mobility.

I can right now I can fly to you and no problem financially and no problem with restrictions from governments. I can go to see you. You can come to see me and nobody's going to care about that. But for a lot of people, that's not a possibility because they don't have the financial resources to do that. And if you don't have the financial means to do it, then you're not really free to travel, are you? You're restricted by your own limitations.

And so if you need an example of this, take Venezuela or, you know, or trying to think of it, or take the Middle East, right? And all the people who are flooding into Europe now, it's not the poor and indigent who are able to move out of these terrible places into America or into Europe. It's those who have money. And those who have money have freedom of movement. Even if the borders are closed, they can still find a way. Wealth is liberty.

Wealth is liberty. Wealth is freedom. And if you have it, then you were free, and if you don't, then you don't. And so I harp on this a lot because a lot of my audience, a lot of people are attracted by message are people who are very libertarian in nature, and they tend to want less government and more, quote unquote, freedom. And I try and explain, look, government shouldn't be the focus. You should be the focus because your freedom is more directly tied to your ability to move than it is anything else.

I have not only financial freedom, but I also have mobility freedom. My business is transferable. So I could pick up everything that I have today. We could clean this whole thing out. I could put it on a truck. I could ship it overseas or around the world. I could be back up and running with a camera and a laptop tomorrow. As long as I got an internet connection, my business doesn't stop. My money doesn't stop. Nothing. So people say, aren't you concerned about what's happening in America and aren't you concerned about the election?

No, because if it gets bad, I'll just leave. And I'll take everybody I love with me. Why? Because I have the wealth to do that. I have the wealth freedom to do that. And most people don't. And so I say instead of trying to figure out how to change the government and how to fix the Constitution or fix our culture, why don't you start by trying to fix you and making sure that you're

in a position to protect you and your family no matter what happens. And then, once you've done that, once you try and convince as many people to do the same, now that you are an example worth following. Because that's the biggest problem, is that the first question people you is, is well, why should I listen to you? Now, you would not be talking to me right now if I had, if I couldn't demonstrate that I could live the values that I talk about because otherwise people wouldn't pay any attention to me. Like, I don't know who this job is, living in his basement down by the river with his parents,

but that guy didn't worth listening to. That's the mentality you have to have. We all have a lot more control over what we do than the second order effect of trying to influence policy, government, social standards, all the rest of the things. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

That kind of radical responsibility that personal sovereignty, having agency as it's called a good heuristic actually. This is a cool thought experiment that one of my buddies came up with. And he says to work out the friend or friends that you have that are the highest agency within your friend's circle. Imagine that you were in jail. You're in jail. You've been placed in jail wrongfully and you need to get out and you've got 24 hours to get out. Who do you call? Like that person that you call is the one that has the agency, right? They have upward mobility. They're able to think, literally and orthogonally, they're able to, you know, and it's like, those are the people, those are the people that are going

to win. They're the ones that are robust. Yep. That's the, that's the, that's the circle that you want. Yeah. As many people that can break you out of jail as is possible. Yeah. And, and that, you, you want that kind of mastermind team is so sad that mastermind gets overused. It's been annihilated. Doesn't it by the world? It really has. It's, it's such a waste now to even use that term. But the truth is, you want to surround yourself with people who are like that. Industry is successful. People who you can draw from

and who you can add value to. So yeah, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Jason, man, we made it. We made it through. We did it. Man, I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It was sick, man.

Where should people have? They want to check out your stuff? Where do they go? Well, the show I keep referencing is called Wealth Power and Influence, and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts. And then if you want to know more about this, if any of this sounded interesting to you, I got a great like two-hour presentation that I gave to about 600 of my clients, presentation that I gave to about 600 of my clients just not maybe a month ago. And you just go to controlthesource.com, controlthesource.com, and you can watch that presentation, and I'd love to get you all's feedback on it. It's basically just designed to help people discover what helps with the negative feedback loops and stuff that people struggle with, and it also helps them kind of figure out what they're good at.

So what are those, the knowledge and skill that you already possess? What is the stuff that's the creativity that you have? Because a lot of people say, I don't know what I would do. I'm not good at anything. Well, that's nonsense. And after the presentation, it kind of helps draw that out and helps put them on a path. And so I had a lot of fun teaching it. People got a lot out of it.

So, haven't go check that out at Control the Source. And yeah, those are the two things. Awesome, man. Everything that we've spoken about, we linked in the show notes below. You're already not to do like, share, and subscribe. But for now, Jason, man, thank you so much for your time. Oh, thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.