The Pomp Podcast - #1168 Kris Krohn | Broke To Financially Free In 4 Years

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

Kris Krohn is a real estate investor, a business coach, and owns more than 400 different companies. I have never met someone who has created so many systems, processes, and continues to acquire so much real estate. Topics include learning from successful people, how to hire CEOs, managing businesses, social media, and what his most important metric in life is.  ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Chris Krohn is a real estate investor, a business coach, and someone who owns more than 400 different companies. This conversation is unlike anything

else that I've ever had on the podcast. I've never met someone who's created so many systems and processes, continues to acquire so much real estate and create so many different businesses. Obviously, it takes someone to think very, very differently than the average person in order to accomplish what Chris has accomplished. After you get done listening to this conversation, jump on Twitter and let me know what you thought. What did you agree with? What did you disagree with? What do you think Chris gets right? What do you think he gets wrong? Him and I both would appreciate the feedback and be fascinated to hear what each of you thinks about this conversation. Here is my conversation with Chris Krohn. If you pull a muscle, all of a sudden you realize how often you use that muscle.

So the bladder is exactly like that. When it's working well, we don't think about it. But when it's not working properly, you're getting up at night, or in the cases of many men, you may have some leakage. If this is something that's affecting your quality of life, there are really good solutions these days. Depend makes the guard and the shield. The shield would be if you have some leakage on occasion,

if you have heavier leakage, you could use the guard. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion.

This podcast is for informational purposes only. Alright, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Chris here with me. Chris, I thought a great place to start would be in the real estate market. you are well known as a real estate investor, as a coach, as a mentor. What do you think the biggest mistakes people make when they set off on this kind of real estate investing journey? There's tons of people who know majority of the millionaires in the United States of America made it in real estate. What are the big mistakes that people could avoid to help them just increase the probability of success in that asset class? Man, we talk about real estate. We could talk

about business. We could talk about personal life. We could talk about marriage and it's always the same mess. Everyone is always lone wolfing it. They're basically just intuitively thinking that they have what it takes. And that is always the slowest path to achieve anything is just assuming that you know. So if you're going to invest in the game of real estate, you can do the typical mom and pop shop thing. You can go it alone. You can say, I read a book or two and now I'm good to go. And I'm like, well, I don't know if that's going to produce your best results. Think about that. There's 30 major strategies in all of real estate. And what are you going to do? Try a flip, try to wholesale a deal. You're going to try to buy an apartment

complex and you're coming into this with no experience. And so sometimes your, your learning experience is enough to kill you financially, but people don't really get that. And so it's just bizarre to me. I'm like, why does, why don't more people understand that if you're going to go and expect greatness, do something where you want to make a big splash, you got to surround yourself with people of experience that have been there and done that because it's almost like the biggest ripoff strategy on the planet. It's the ultimate shortcut, which is just literally don't reinvent the wheel. Just get in proximity to people that know what they're doing and then copy them and literally just follow them step by step because I'd rather follow someone that's done it

a thousand times. Take single family real estate. I've done $2 billion worth 6,500 projects over the last 20 years. At this point, I invest in the top five markets out of 324. And I've made my mistakes. Like the first time I went and bought out of state real estate, it was a nightmare. I lost a million dollars on 186 properties after 2008 that I thought I had bought right. Turned out I was 100% wrong. But today I've gone on to buy now literally over 6,000 out of state properties. And I've learn how to like maximize my ROI. So you can literally learn from me, watch a guy like me and have way more success. Or you can just do the prideful, stubborn, I'll do it all by myself thing. So when you think about this idea of surrounding yourself with people who have done

it before, getting proximity to people who have experience, what is that normal conversation in your career? Is it something where you go to them and you say, hey, I need a mentor? Or is it you go to them and you say, Hey, I want to be a real estate investor. You're a real estate investor. Let me try to learn from you and kind of shadow you day to day. Like what does that actually look like from a practical standpoint as people go down this path of trying to get around successful people and learn from them? Yeah. So there is this world of coaches and mentors, and then there's a world of successful people and they're often not the exact same thing. So there's a lot of people who have great success, but they actually can't reverse engineer and tell you exactly how they do

it because it's just not their calling in life. They're just too busy building wealth. They can't tell you what they're doing. But on the other extreme, you've got people that love to teach and don't do. The world is filled with all of these fake people that, oh, yeah, I bought three deals and now I'm a marketer. So I teach hundreds of people how to do what I've done only this little bit. And what I'm actually looking for is someone who's relevant in the game today. And what that means is my standards, they have to have at least achieved 10 times more than the epitome of what I hope to. So for example, if I want to be worth nine figures, a hundred million dollars, then I

got to be training with the billionaire, someone that's got 10 times that result. And they've got to be actively in the game today. It's kind of like what I want to train with Michael Jordan today, or what I want to train with Michael Jordan, 1998. eight. And for me, it's like, I want the dude that is that crushed it, but is still crushing it today. And number three actually has some type of system or pathway or mastermind, or I can freaking write a check, something to get into their airspace enough that I can learn it directly from the horse's mouth. And as you're going through this process, right? So I love this

idea of finding people who are 10 times as successful as you want to be. And also people who are actively doing it at the moment and able to deliver those practical kind of details that really is where a lot of the value comes from. What is that conversation like? How much of it do you think people can get out of being like, hey, here's a deal I'm looking at. What do you think? Versus, hey, I just want to watch you do a deal and I'll kind of just learn through osmosis. Yeah. So let's talk about the most lighthearted version of that. I read their book. The book doesn't talk back. The book doesn't answer questions. I love reading, but I do not mistake books for mentors. Then you go a little further. If this person has, for example, some type of

mastermind, sometimes you got to stroke a check to be in the room. And that doesn't mean that they're helping you. That just means that you're in their airspace to actually learn from them. If you go to the furthest extreme, what I actually look for whenever possible is partnership. How do I get you vested in my success? And it might be a, I'll do all the work. I'll put up the resources. I'll put up the whatever. And as long as you're like on my team and we're sharing in the winnings together, that's where you can almost guarantee the highest and best outcome. So for example, you know, after I made my big splash in real estate and I've automated my systems and I'm buying houses literally every day right now, but I spend an hour a month on it. Like I have a team

doing all that. I've graduated. I'm not the operator. I'm the owner. Now I'm in the game of private equity. And so for example, Roland Frazier literally has helped participated in 1000 different mergers and acquisitions and exits. And Roland and I are now partners on 27 different companies together. And that means that he's vested every time I need something, I call him, I text him, and he's there, he shows up, he brings resources to the table. And I'm achieving a much higher level of business outcome with Roland than without. Now he's got a consult for equity model where he basically, I, I give him 10% of the company, but I get a hundred percent of his brains whenever I need it. He's not an active employee. He's not that kind of partner, but

that 10% of his mental bandwidth and experience is enough for me to trade 10% for a thousand X growth. And so that's another example of, Oh, I got to find out how to literally catch a tiger by the tail, get the most successful person I can and find a way to literally structure deals together. So you've got a very unique way of viewing kind of how people can find success, get around the right people, but you're actively doing this yourself. What's your daily schedule like? You've got a lot of things going on. You own a bunch of different companies. What does your daily schedule look like? So I don't believe that time is required to create outcome because I used to be that 80, 100-hour-a-week entrepreneur many, many years ago. I'm married. I got four

kids. And I felt totally out of balance in my life. And many years ago, I had my best friend die in a paragliding accident and he left his widowed wife and four little baby boys back on earth. And I remember after that, I thought, why am I killing myself and working so hard? Because what if today were my last day? And I said, okay, this is going to be weird. There's going to be a stretch for you, Mr. 100-hour week dude. What would your ultimate schedule look like? What's perfect? Because I know, I wake up at 4 a.m. I got two hours in the gym every day. I love that. I got a bodybuilding competition coming up in seven weeks. Last year, I took second. I'm pissed. This year, I'm taking first. I'm going to do my best. So I got goals there. I got goals with my

wife. Everything that's important is done by 9 a.m. in the morning. And when we kind of talk about my typical schedule, it's kind of weird because here's what my perfect life currently looks like. On Mondays, I produce videos for the game of influence. Tuesday and Thursday, I work on my businesses from home. Wednesday all day is my wife's day. We spend all day together. We'll take our jet. We'll fly somewhere. We'll hang out. We'll do something, something that builds us. Friday is my kid's day. All my kids are privately educated. We bring teachers into our home. We got four people that basically create this custom education for them. Saturday is my Sunday is God's day. So for me, my perfect is working about 25 to 30 hours a week. And if I

work twice as much, I might be able to make more money. I don't believe so. I think I would be less happy. I think I'd be more stressed. And so I don't really think success is a function of time. I think it's a function of understanding your value and then also balancing that against what is your perfect. Cause all of us should be striving for our ideal in our relationships and our health and also in our finances. And I've been living that schedule for years now. and that one, it works for me. If I work more than 35 hours, I get cranky. If I work less than 20 hours, I'm not creating enough.

25, 30 hours is kind of my jam. And for me, I like to block that. So it's not just a little bit every day. It's like, uh-uh. When I'm in, I'm 100% present and I'm working on this thing. I'm having a board meeting, pull people in. We're causing, we're creating, we're doing something.

And when I'm not, I'm out. I'm fully present in some other game of life that is designed to produce other utility, other happiness, other joy, other fulfillment. So let's talk about the impact on the businesses. How many businesses do you think that you are an owner of or kind of actively operating alongside right now? Over 400 companies right now. Okay. And are all of these in the real estate slash investment, you know, including other types of content or like what would the buckets be of those 400 companies? Yeah. So you've got everything ranging. So I have an intention and a goal over

the next decade to own companies in every industry because I'm building towards being the entrepreneur's economist. I'm going to be the most valuable human being on a plant on the planet a decade from now that can literally advise in any industry, which means that, you know, currently I've got tech companies. I've got restaurants, a variety of different franchises, health and medical spas, definitely my fair share of real estate. Any financial planner would say I'm probably out of balance with so much of that going on. So it's really a variety. And I use this idea of fractal geometry in running my businesses.

It's this idea in nature that if you take a tree and extract a branch, the branch looks like a tree. If you extract a twig, it looks like a tree. If you take a leaf, it actually under a microscope looks like a tree and on and on. So in my world, I've got a president of the board that runs, you know, X number of companies, those people report to the other companies, and basically everything flows down in this business geometry. And I can in two board meetings a month in about eight hours a month, I can run all of my companies. So of those 400, what is like the biggest one maybe? And then what is one that you're like, hey, we have it, it is a business, but we spend almost no time on?

Like give us kind of the example of the two different extremes on that spectrum. Yeah, well, you're actually bringing up, Pomp, a really good point, which is what is the goal? And I'm going to hit this a little bit sideways if I can for a moment, because you got a lot of people out there that are entrepreneurs, and what they do is they traded a job for their business. and what they did is they went from one stream of income to another stream of income but the problem is they have a stream and some businesses have huge potential but honestly sometimes we get

to a point where it's like wow i maximized my market cap my potential what i can do or i can't bring more to it and so most entrepreneurs fail to graduate and graduate means you empower an executive director a ceo somebody to run it for you so that you reclaim your time and on the second you go around, pick a bigger business, pick a bigger space, take all your experience and do it bigger and better. After that second one, and you get a CEO in place, then you're going to want eight more because you're going to learn that you don't have to bootstrap anymore. You have resources that you can borrow or get to self-fund. You can start with the CEO from day one. You don't graduate to one. And that's, that's when all of a sudden the whole world opened up to me where it's like, wow,

The most intelligent approach to business is the one that doesn't need you. I start the party. I bring the people together. I collect them, collate them. I get them organized. I get them producing. That business has six months, a year or two to do what it's supposed to do, or I take it out in the back of the shed and shoot it and just start iterate again.

And most entrepreneurs don't understand that their most powerful creations will not be on their first, second, and third business. It'll be on their fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh. So the goal is to have a system to iterate, to not become so attached to your own core business. So with that in mind, my real estate that kicked off this whole party, every year I add hundreds of new doors to my portfolio. And my system is on Monday, I shoot a bunch of social media, people from around the world,

millions of people every week watch me. They look at my vast and growing experience in real estate. They come into my sales department, decide if they're going to partner with me. They put up the assets. and there's this whole system that runs and operates independent of me that basically builds portfolios for people we're 50 50 owners that business takes me about an hour a month and with an hour that whole thing is really hands-off now that's a really ideal scenario to get to but if we go to the other extreme this last year we've launched half a dozen companies or acquired

companies that have billion dollar potential one of them is actually a master franchise company that creates franchises for companies where we actually vet companies set them up for franchise and then take the very best ones negotiate some equity and then we do the marketing for them and sell the franchises and and blast them off one of the companies um in there that we launched is called property and it's actually a real estate franchise that i'm partnered with on carlos reyes where we are actually combining the power of wholesaling for people that want to make a couple million dollars a year wholesaling and all of my buy and hold strategies so that you know after every number of wholesale deals and flips you're also acquiring, and you're actually getting the

longevity of the long-term play while having an absolute killer active income, you know, that will probably be sold out in a two to three year spance. It'll be a hundred million dollars in sales to onboard all the people for that. And that's designed in royalties to produce about a hundred million dollars a year. Just yesterday, we pointed our CEO for that company, our pre-launches in two months, our official launches in June, and we've got all the components that we need. that one I'm probably going to put in a couple hours a week for the next couple of months and once it's up and going I'm basically going to be playing a board of directors role and I will on that one you know because of some of my expertise I'll be doing a little bit more social media for

it when we have conventions I'll be booked to speak at those conventions and then we're going to have you know our leadership franchise training modules so I'll participate probably once or twice a month for an hour here or there to share my perspective on how to successfully run this franchise. So that one's going to be a little bit of a heavier lift. That's probably my heaviest type of lift on that other extreme. But even there, I'm not going to allocate on average more than two, three or four hours a week. That's the max that it gets as it's going through its optimization process. How do you pick the CEOs for all of these businesses? Like what are you looking for? Where do you find them? How do you compensate them? How do you incentivize them?

Yeah, so this last year, we started having a much higher need for vetted CEOs, and it takes months to find the right fit, someone with the experience, etc. So last year, we actually launched a private in-house leadership training program called CEO Bootcamp. And this is where we take our culture and our companies. something we do that's a little bit weird is that all of my companies operate under the same cultural environment. And so we've got a credo and approach to business, a way that we build business. And so, you know, if you were in Orem, Utah, and you were in my 40,000 square foot building, you'd see a couple dozen different companies all sitting together. And even though they have different companies, they're building and growing, there's a, there's leadership training that is communal accounting. We've, we centralized a lot of our systems. And so what I'm now doing is we're going out into the marketplace and we're recruiting talent, potential CEOs. And basically

they get to know us. We say, we'll fly you in, come check us out, go through CEO bootcamp, train with us, educate with us. We got people paying 50 to a hundred thousand dollars for that training. We'll give it to you for free. And now it's an incubator. So we incubate our leadership well in advance of our needs. Two days ago, I appointed a new CEO. Yesterday, another one. And on Monday, I'm flying in someone that might be a CEO, I'm hoping, for my franchise company. And so, we're trying to now start the courting process months in advance. But depending on the company, you know, CEO salaries can range, you know, from $100,000 to $250,000 or $300,000. Bonus is another $100,000, $150,000, $200,000, depending. It just depends

on the company and the size the tech space or what really what it's in and and um i'm a huge believer in talent density which means i want to find top of market talent and not people that i hope end up becoming great and i'm their first i don't want with some companies you can be my first if you were a successful division leader a manager and we promoted you cool that happens but for some of these really big ones i i like to find the most expensive people that i can because they bring in the most experience they've had, you know, usually multiple eight figure, nine figure wins, maybe even a 10 figure win. And those are the people that we bring in to help build these companies. How do you screen those people for, yes, they have experience,

but that they will also be able to operate within a startup environment, right? There's something different between the fortune 500 CEO having to go back and kind of build a building from a business from scratch with two or three people. Those are two very different types of roles. How how do you screen for that? Yeah. So what we usually do is we have multiple interviews just to get to know him. I just had a call a few days ago with a gentleman who had a nine-figure exit at his last company. This dude interviews so well. And the president of my board is like, Chris, I need you to talk to this dude because Tim, he's either too good to be true or he's real. His resume is real. His Glassdoor reviews are real. And as I got to know him, I got to throw

some very funky sidewriter questions by him because my culture is built on feedback, candidness vulnerability um a lot of organizations find that taboo they won't go there so i actually asked him a lot of vulnerable questions i actually got hyper personal talked about his personal life and he passed that interview really really well because he was willing there was no resistance and he was having the kind of conversations that people just normally don't have i'm like okay we have a personality fit we have a character fit and we also look like we have a professional fit let's fly him in after we fly him in we'll investigate some of our company options and then I'm probably going to dump them into CEO bootcamp and say, Hey, come hang out with us

for the next several weeks or several months and learn with us. It's only going to take a couple hours, uh, you know, a week. And our hope is that as we grow together and find philosophy together, if we have a match, the moment we have something that could be a fit, we'll now have an interview for that. So all the original interviews are not about a company. It's about down the road, three months, six months, a year from now, we might have a really impressive company fit for you. So what we're doing is recording before there's an opportunity usually. And that creates an environment where people don't have to impress more than they should. People can really take the time to get to know each other. And I think with CEOs, that's the best approach. What are some of

the questions that you would ask in that type of interview where it's a little bit more probing or a little bit more personal that you're trying to really understand who is this person? Yeah, I actually want to go to in their childhood, what was the most difficult thing that you faced? I'm going to find out real fast if they're willing to be vulnerable or if they're going to be, you know, they're going to tighten their sphincter and they're going to pull back a little bit and say, Hey, can we keep this professional? Can we just talk about my career? And I'm like, actually for us to embark on the journey that we're going to, our culture is actually built on vulnerability. And I need to see if you can demonstrate the ability to get personal like

that. And frankly, if I find people that can, I just don't want to have anything to do with them because I don't want just, there's a strong attraction that people have to the culture that we built. And it's one of personal growth. Our core foundational philosophy is what you achieve in your personal life is far more important than what you'll ever professionally achieve. So are you finding fulfillment in your health and in your relationships? Because look at these basics. When someone can't keep a budget and financially they've got problems or they just can't control their spending, when someone has relationship problems and issues and they just can't figure them out, and when someone is fat, when someone doesn't prioritize their

health. How does that not impact your leadership in an organization? And it sounds a little bit harsh, maybe a little bit rude, but the reality is I'm looking for leaders that can inspire. And if you've got a problem with your health, I'm sorry, you're going to struggle to inspire people. And there are going to be people judging that book by its cover saying, why should I follow you? You clearly are wearing all of your problems on the outside. It doesn't mean people have to be perfect, but if they're willing to work on their stuff, that's attractive and people that aren't that's unattractive so if there's resistance it's just not going to be a fit how do you manage the businesses from like an operational or financial

like uh reporting standpoint right so you've got all these businesses i can only imagine uh kind of the day-to-day of some of the people who work with you uh what they have to go through because there's individual companies that i'm an investor in that they struggle to figure out you know what is the revenue in Stripe? Where did that money go? Which bank account? Just the complexity of one business now multiplied by 400. What have you learned there? Or are there certain systems or processes that you all have put in place that have really been helpful that other people could learn from? Yeah. So I find that with every new startup, with every new company, there's a bunch of decisions that have to be met if you're going to achieve success. For example, what is the

culture? How are we going to tackle accounting? And I think, by the way, those two out the gate are really important. Some other ones are, what is our system for accountability? Are we using critical drivers and KPIs? And so, you know, when someone is a brand new business operator, they don't understand these things. They're literally, I'm throwing out money, I'm hiring you to do stuff, and then we're going to figure things out. But after you've actually optimized a business to the point where you know how to get it to make money and you're manipulating things to impact margin expenses, et cetera, you finally figure out how to actually run business well. So when we start a company, I never say, Hey, let's start from scratch again and see if we

can figure out culture and systems and CRMs and management tools. I'm like, no, when we start a company, you are going to inherit our entire system. So for example, my CFO, his name's Tim weeks. He owns a company called Company Vitals, and they do fractional CFOing for companies. And when I started with them years ago, it was for a handful of my companies. Now they provide 19 fractional CFOs for all of my organizations. Well, what that means is our weekly reporting is the same. Our monthly financials are always prepared at the same time so that our CEOs and directors can review them. Our quarterly reports all look the same, and everything is on the same system. I am, you know, there's people that look at me like, wow, Chris, you're like that real

estate guy that knows how to make, you know, snap your fingers, make money in deals. And I'm like, actually, I'm the scale guy, which is if I have to repeat anything one time, then it's worth building a system around so that I never have to ever repeat ever again. I don't want to like to repeat what I say. I don't like to repeat words. Everything that is manual should find a way to achieve some level of automation. So in business, we just, we basically adopt our systems for automation. When you're doing this, there's a lot of other companies that reach very large scale that have a bunch of different philosophies. One of them I'm thinking about is the Koch Industries business, one of the first or second largest private companies in

America. They have this whole philosophy of good profit. The idea is they want to pursue profit that is done not through regulatory capture or government credits or anything like that. they want to pursue profit that is captured by competing in the free market. And you only can do that by actually solving customer problems. Is there some phrase or some way that you talk about your business philosophy that people can kind of take away and say, okay, when I think of Chris, this is the business philosophy that he's used to build these 400 companies? Yeah, I think there's actually two. We live in a world where enlightened capitalism is really being diminished. And we have, it's been replaced with a selfish version of capitalism.

Hey, I want to, my intention is to create this company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Create value in the world. And I'm going to have this exit. I'm going to make a grundle of money. And where that's selfish is that the core focus is not on your just cause. Simon Sinek wrote a great book called The Infinite Game. And he talks about this enlightened capitalism where a company has to be driven.

If you're going to, if you die, who's going to pick up the baton and continue the mission forward? Profits is not a mission. Profits is a goal. You know, Eli Goldenroth wrote this, my favorite business book called The Goal. And basically, the goal is your profits and your margin. And if you don't learn how to do that well, then you don't get to stay in business very long.

So on the one hand, one of the missions has to be, yes, we have to generate appropriate margin profits for the success of the business, or else we don't have sustainability. But that has to be balanced with your mission. What is your just cause? what cause is, is powerful enough that people want to work for you because people don't want to work for you. Like, wow, you guys are really profitable. You're stable. Sounds like a great company. You're going to attract professionals that are basically looking for stability and financial opportunity. And I just think that's weak. I think there needs to be a balance of who

are you and what are you about? What is your cause? And is it inspiring enough to take people's breath away? Does it cause them want to be with you? For example, I, I put on a, I own an event center in Utah and five, six times a year, I have people come in from the, you know, mostly around the country and they'll enjoy a four day fully immersive event where they experience powerful financial training on real estate and private equity and everything that, that multimillionaires and billionaires are doing. And then I combine it with really, really powerful mindset training. And this stuff, I mean, we get crazy. We're doing glass walks, fire walks. We're challenging our limiting beliefs. It's a space of incredible vulnerability. It's terrifying at first,

but all of these exercises I put people through force them to make a choice. Either you are, or you're not about the personal development thing because I'm, what I'm doing is I'm attracting a culture of growth and find people that are so committed to their personal growth in life. And that's who I want in my companies. So that is a place where we display a part of our just cause, which is pouring into people.

Literally. I want to promote everyone in my company. And if you're not an eight player and you don't seek promotion, I don't want you on my team. Literally. I want you, if you're making 50,000 a year now, I'm asking you, how do we get you to 100K? How do we get you to serious six figures? Why? Because if you're an entrepreneur, you've got to work with the founder and the owners of the company who want to pour into you, that will want to pay you for

adding more value on this planet, so that you can save enough meaningful money to be a professional investor and say, for my career, I'm a crazy successful entrepreneur. And I have enough financial success on the outside that either way I get my millions of dollars and I'm not replying, relying just on a single sole source of income. Well, in my crowd, that's really exciting. And I don't just say it. I mean it. I invest in them. I give them access to my investing tools for free when they're a member of my team. And, and so I've got people that work for me with that are being encouraged, have businesses on the side. And it means that from time to time, I lose really good people, but I would rather lose people to a better opportunity of them doing what they're

meant to do with their life than just trying to control people. And most corporations don't get that today. They're losing people because their cause isn't just, it's not worthy. People are feeling disconnected. The, the mental health crisis is so out of whack and companies don't know how to treat their, their people in a way where, man, they think they had a hard time adjusting to millennials. Just wait, Gen Z is coming up. 94% of them want entrepreneurship, which means if they get hired to work in your company,

if you can't create a fun, stimulating, exciting opportunity of growth, they're out. And so corporations, I think they're in really big trouble because the shift that's coming is so much bigger in tidal wave size than the millennial shift that we've had over the last decade. You mentioned earlier that Monday is for all the content, Tuesday and Thursday is for the business. Wednesday is a day for you and your wife. Explain a little bit as to what you guys do on those Wednesdays and what are some of the benefits and maybe even some of the trade-offs that you've had to make sure that Wednesdays you spend with your wife. Hey guys, I hope that you're enjoying this conversation. As you probably realize, we don't run any ads on this show.

That's right. All the other podcasts, all the other YouTube shows that you watch, they have advertisers. We don't have any direct relationships with advertisers. And we simply create this because we enjoy doing it. Now that we do that, though, we have a team. And if you'd like to support us, one way you can do that is to go subscribe to the Pomp Letter. It's a daily letter that i write to about 235 000 people about my personal opinion on financial markets business technology and bitcoin just go to pompletter.com and you can sign up there i'd love to have you join us and it's a great easy way to support the work that the team and i are doing on a daily basis all right let's get back into this conversation so imagine for a moment that you

had all the money on the planet and you didn't need more and then the question is are you happy Do you feel fulfilled? And often the pursuit of financial success and fulfillment, they don't go hand in hand. There's a limit. There's a limit to a perfect amount of work that someone can gain from fulfillment from, but then it leaves a huge gap in the rest of their life. And everyone's a little different. I can't speak for others, but I can tell you that for me, my wife is my best friend.

We've been married for 21 years and we just love spending time together. We love learning new things together. We love traveling together. We love experiencing the world together. We've been to more than 40 different countries together. And we live to have time for each other. And when I realized that, it actually kind of backs up a little earlier in the game because my wife and I, you know, a decade ago, we were only traveling once a year.

We were taking like that annual trip because I was too busy working and doing other stuff. And I wanted to, I was in hot water with my wife because I had made some mistakes. And I really wanted to show her on this particular Christmas that I was sorry. So I wanted to make something really sentimental for her. And this project, you know, was a quilting project. I enrolled my mother-in-law and I spent 500 hours building this tapestry that was a symbol of our love and our life and what we're creating together. And part of the process was I had to find, I wanted to embroider it on the edges with

100 printed pictures on fabric of my favorite life memories. and when I went through 10,000 pictures at that time to find the top 100 moments period 91 of the 100 were found traveling and after I realized that I said we're going to start traveling every month we're going to live to create these memories we've brought our children on that journey and that's when we're at a routine and doing what matters most to us for me to experience balance in my life. I live to have time with my wife, to connect meaningfully, to spend time with our kids and just be with my best friend. And so, you know, the trade-off is my company probably would love to have more time with me, but it forces me to value my time differently and empower

the right kind of people that can keep things growing without me. What do you do on those Wednesdays? Do you just sit and talk? Do you guys go visit? Like what are you actually doing? Yeah, no, I mean, we, you know, one of my favorite things to do with our private jet is to do a same day teleportation in and out. And so what that means is, my morning is a sacred routine between exercise and meditation and time with my wife and kids, but at nine o'clock, that's all done. So we usually, you know, our airports 20 minutes away are private. And so, you know, by 930, we're in the air. And the goal is to sleep in our own bed. And so, you know, one of our Wednesdays this last year, we went to Disneyland for a day. And we literally just lived it up, did the very best rides, flew home, slept in our bed. That was a blast. and so my wife and I we you know we'll go teleport somewhere and go experience a culture a people or something fun sometimes it's a spot a you know something local my wife is a crazy I'd like to use the professional word geologist but she is nuts about crystals and rocks like crazy our house is filled with them and so we'll we'll go out to like Tucson to the big annual gem show or in

Denver in September, we'll do that one. Or we'll literally go rock hounding in Oklahoma where we can pull up big quartz crystals out of the ground. That stuff lights her up. My wife and I practice this thing called spousal advocacy. And the game is she knows what I want and I know what she wants. And whatever my wife wants, I want it more for her than she wants it herself. What we try to do is outdo each other. And so in this game, you know, sometimes a Wednesday will be focused on her. Sometimes it'll be focused on me. And that way we get to try different things. And the goal is to just support each other's different approaches to life and learn and grow together. That's amazing.

Friday, you said you spend with your kids. What do you guys do on Fridays? You know, it's winter now and we got a lot of snow. We got last week, we got dumped on two and a half feet in a single day. So we'll go skiing together or there'll be some kind of outing, you know, Shenzhen, that big Chinese, you know, you know, traveling show was here last week. The kids have a Shakespearean module that they're going through. So in a couple of weeks, you know, there's a Friday play that we're going to go to.

My wife and I, when we got married, we decided, wow, you know, if we are fortunate enough to figure out how to become, you know, financially well enough, we'd love to pull our kids out of the public school system and we'd love to customize our education. And so we've been experimenting with our kids. I mean, I don't know, maybe a decade from now, I'll look back and say, well, I really messed some things up because I don't believe my kids need to know chemistry, trigonometry, whole bunch of useful useless things that i was taught growing up and instead i'm like what are you good at what do you excel at and let's spend the majority of our time there and let's round

you out by also helping you understand a couple of really important things in life that you're not good at to you know stretch your neural muscles and help you develop and grow and do a good well-rounded human being but it's a crazy different approach to school because i i i think that my what i want is for my children to fall in love with learning so my son is a beekeeper and he's got bees and he's got a mentor that helps him figure out that whole thing. Cause he's nuts about that. And I've got another one of my boys that just, he's totally into architecture and wants to build things. So he gets projects based on that. Uh, my daughter wants to learn Japanese. So she's got, you know, uh, a teacher in Japan that she converses with and, you know, we're

going to Tokyo as a family this summer. And so, you know, part of what we're doing on Fridays is just rotating, Hey, what do our children need to fulfill that custom curriculum? For example, my kids are crazy about animals so we went this last year we took the jet down to ecuador the galapagos islands rented a private yacht for the week and just went around the islands and got to like we got to see all the crazy creatures that darwin saw and my kids loved it like it was amazing we're on this private beach and we've got sea lions swimming up to us playing with us interacting putting on a show as if they had been trained you know by by some circus and it's like i'll never forget that and so i you know creating leaning into these custom educational experiences

is you know what we hope will end up being the hallmark of their education how much time do you think that you're able to spend with your family versus at work is it 50 50 is it 60 40 one way or the other like how do you think about that just based on the uh the days yeah so pomp i don't I think there's a danger in time blocking and the danger of time blocking is that sometimes it keeps us from actually understanding the objective like I remember I took my family to Disneyland and when my kids were young and I was doing what I thought a good parent should my wife and I we drug these you know by the afternoon they were crying I was wrestling with them they were just they were so done we were trying to get our money's worth and at the end of the entire

damn. I'm in the, in the hotel with my wife in our bedroom, exhausted. And I just realized something. I didn't connect with any of my children meaningfully once, but the truth is I can sit down with any person, including my children and less than one minute cause a tear to drop just by connecting with their soul. And then from inspiration, speaking into them, the greatness I see in them, I can create more meaning in one minute than a whole day at Disneyland. So when I time block, I'm, I'm always asking, what is the objective? Because most objectives are not a function of quantity of time. They're a function of quality of time. And so I feel like I maybe get, you know, my, my hope is I'm just getting a lot more done because

I'm pausing to reflect on what, like, it's not about having two hours together. It's what can I do in this moment? Anything that is meaningful is always experienced in a moment. It's not experienced over, over time per se. And so I'm constantly challenging the time blocking and asking what, what is actually meaningful this morning when I, you know, right before coming down here, I was lying on my bed with my wife and my daughter. I had headphones on and I was doing a private meditation to her, you know, with really nice, calming, soothing music. And I was asking her in this directed process to look in a mirror and figure out something that isn't working for her, that she'd like to give up because she's struggling with a lot of depression

right now. And she said, Dad, I'm carrying this weight on my body that I gained for a boy that likes bigger girls. And I'm done with that boy. And I don't like myself this way. And I said, great, who would you want to have help you release that? She said, my parents. And when she came out of that meditation, I looked at her. I said, I promise you by tomorrow night, your mom and I will give you a plan that you love. We're at your side. And over the next few weeks, we'll help you do this? Well, there was a, there was an emotional exchange there that really only took less than 10 minutes. It didn't, it wasn't two hours of hanging out together, doing something else. And so I'm asking, I'm always asking, how do I use this moment to get the real objective? What is the maximum

meaning? What is the maximum good? What is the highest and best use of this moment? And I think that's how we can condense a thousand meaningful lives into one is just by being far more intentional and present. It's interesting that you talk about this. There's a bunch of studies that recently have come out about the impact on young girls from social media. And I think that folks like you and I who have daughters, but also have had immense benefit from social media, there is almost this kind of pro and con or this trade-off that as a society, we are somewhat struggling with, right? It's this amazing thing that allows people to connect with their family and friends, to learn, to benefit, to build companies, like do all these awesome things. And then there's almost this dark

side of it. How do you think about those pros and cons or if there is a trade-off from a society standpoint? So the last couple of months, this same daughter has been suicidal. And in December, she was in a mental hospital to keep her safe. And it was the most difficult thing my wife and I had ever been through. And when I came out of that, I realized, all right, God, I literally am a breakthrough transformation artist. People come to my events to experience life-changing breakthroughs, but I, as dad, don't get to do that for my own daughter. And I felt inspired. I'm actually pursuing a company right now where I want to create an environment that is safe for children to experience everything from the internet and social media that they want.

i'm not talking about filters filters are problematic you filter out all the bad and what gets left behind isn't good and so we're talking about and uh you know a version of social media the internet a browser where everything is curated with family values so you could set your kid loose and they wouldn't experience the dark side and um that company is uh right now deep in uh vetting and research process and we think we might be on to something so imagine if your daughter could you know if you actually look at the dark side of social media the problem is is there the science is now confirming the dopamine hit of these kids who have accounts they're posting and doing things because they're literally determining their self-worth from

whether they are liked and we know how cruel dude bro you and I know how cruel people are with their comments because they can be they can literally be trolls that hide behind keyboards and they're mean so I'm creating a version that where I can bring all the entertainment and education from social media but it's not about having an account or being liked or being a creator because there's something that they want but there are some dark sides as well so we're trying to figure out what to keep and what to lose um so with my own kids on their phones literally even my 17 year old doesn't have the internet you know on her own she doesn't have her own social media accounts it's super ironic i literally produce 2 000 pieces of media a week that my

that my team were put out and my own kids are restricted from social media heavily they don't trust it like the creators of tiktok in china their version of tiktok is educational what they sent america is undermining and hurting and weakening the fabric of our society with this mental health condition this young generation that feels all this awkward social anxiety they've been told to wear diapers on their face mask up social distance and it's it's it's wrong so yeah this generation definitely has some challenges and for me um i believe we have a really important, just cause to try to fix it. And, um, right now, you know, we might see later this year, the emergence of a company, um, you know, that can try to be a part of the solution.

You mentioned on Saturdays, that's your day. What do you do on Saturday? Uh, you know, I think that everyone's got to have some type of system for self-care. How, and by the way, that system is daily, but I also give myself permission once a week where it's like, maybe I want to go snowboarding by myself. You know, maybe I want to go hang out with some of my friends. Like, what does Chris time look like? And, you know, in my world, I actually don't need a ton of it. Personally, there's other people I know that need loads of it. I'm an extrovert. I like to be with human beings. I feed off of that. You know, but this is where I just get really clear on, hey, what will create the most meaningful memories in my

life? Let's go do those things. I got some people coming in town. I've got a six by six apocalypse. a mounted a 50 caliber Modus on it. We're going to go take a bunch of Tannerite and fruit and we're going to blow stuff up. Uh, I've got a buddy of mine who's bringing flamethrower and a whole bunch of, um, you know, you know, full automatics and we're literally going to go create in the desert, this crazy custom experience and just have fun blowing stuff up. Like that's fun. I enjoy that. So yeah, part of Saturday is just asking, Hey, how do I rejuvenate me? Because the most important person on this planet that i pour into is not my wife and it's not even god if i'm not okay then no other relationship can be and so um i don't i don't sacrifice myself for the greater

good or to even serve my family because the most powerful way for me to serve them is to make sure i'm good and i think that's a principle that all people need to get clear with which is are you achieving balance in your life are you do you like where you're growing in every area that's important to you. My body's got to be growing to sustain superhuman health. My finances have to be growing. My relationships with each of my children, my wife have to be growing. And if all that's going down, that's great, but I can't do those things. Well, I can't optimize those if I'm not taking care of myself. And I I'm an advocate for people making sure that that self-care is present in their life on some daily level. And then once in a while for me, it's weekly, there's got to be

some other expression that is even bigger. So a lot of things are going right today. Um, you've built this amazing system you've been able to launch a bunch of businesses you've been able to put yourself in a position financially and also from a self-discipline standpoint to spend specific days doing specific things with your family or work or whatever what would you say is the exact opposite end of the current situation what was the darkest time in your life what was the the biggest thing that you faced where you felt like my business is blowing up my relationship like just everything is caving in on me what was that situation and how did you get to the other side of it yeah um so i served a two-year christian mission for my church as a 19 year old

no college before then so when i got back at 21 i felt late to the game and for whatever strange reason i really felt inspired that i wanted to i didn't want to do the 5-10 year dating game i actually wanted to find my best friend and on third day of college uh i found my wife and we were married 10 months later and um i sold her on this dream i was going to be a doctor and i'm doing all my pre-med classes. And, and after failing chemistry for the second time, I gave up on that dream and I was scared of what she'd think. And I felt, I remember at that time in my life, I was the one paying for my schooling. My wife didn't want to go into debt. So I had a full-time job and like literally 18 credit hours and working full-time was, it was a lot. And it

was stressing me out max. And after four months of deciding I wasn't gonna be a doctor, I couldn't find a major in college that I could connect with. I'm like, you could be this director of that how many make 80,000 a year. You could be an educator, make 30,000 a year. You could do this thing. Psychologists make 60,000 a year. And I was like, wow, this sucks. There's, there's no money in this whole college system. And that's when I started, um, trying to figure out, I got to find something outside the walls of these university. That's going to work for me. Um, but what kind of sucked is the job that I had was a, was a telemarketing job. I didn't enjoy it. Uh, just was sucking the life out of me. And even after just being at this one day, I'd been at work for

like an hour. And I was like, I do not want to be here. And so I went home and it was early afternoon because I'd done school from six to noon. And when I come home, I found my wife in tears. And I was confused because this woman I'd known for over a year now, I'd never seen her cry this way before. And I thought someone must've died because she had, her cheeks had been stained with tears. I could see it under the tiny little puck light, the only light in this tiny 400 square foot apartment. It's a little hallway. And so when I finally had the courage to ask what's wrong, she said, Chris, we have tuition due in three weeks and we can't pay for it. And I'm thinking, wait, is she stressing over going into debt? Is that what's producing these

tears? That doesn't add up. And then she said, Chris, we have rent due in five days and we already spent this Friday's paycheck. And I was like, oh, I don't know. I don't know how I'm going to fix that. And then I found out why she was really crying. She had gone grocery shopping. We only literally kept five days of food in our cabinets. We were empty. She had put like, I don't know, 20 or $30 worth of cheap ramen and groceries in the, in the cart. She went to check out and basically insufficient funds. And she got denied. And the clerk told her that she couldn't take the food unless she had another form of payment and she didn't. My wife had been home already for a few hours crying and literally hungry. And in that moment, I was like, oh my gosh, like I'm about to

relive all of my parents' financial nightmares where they're constantly stressed and fighting about money, my entire childhood going up and here we go. This is it. Like my wife is, I suck as a human being. I don't know how to provide. I've let my best friend down. I feel like this big of a man and that was a really sucky moment for me but it was also one where I made a different decision too because I poured a lot of negativity into my soul but I also decided I am going to do whatever it takes to never be in this situation again and four and a half years I was financially independent graduated college quit my job never needed to work ever again I basically lit a fire a bonfire under my ass, my ass just changed everything for me. And, um, I mean, so that was

that, that was definitely a key moment. Um, but the one that really probably felt like it was going to destroy me was, um, 2000, 2009, I had an employee steal some money from me. She got caught and then wanted to get back at me, which was really weird and went to the sec and made up 93 complaints. They went and did a full investigation on my company. It was a 14-month investigation. I was not emotionally equipped with hardly any intelligence. I'd never experienced anything like that. I learned how powerful this governing body was. And if they wanted to, they could shut me down and destroy me. Literally, someone could go to jail. Even though we had done nothing wrong, I learned at the end of that, my deposition at the end of that 14-month journey was

the worst day of my entire life. And I remember after that thinking, oh my gosh, it doesn't matter how financially successful I am. Mentally, I'm retarded. That's probably not a PC word, but I have zero emotional intelligence. I have like no coping mechanisms without my coaches. I am, I'm worthless. I have to figure this out. And, um, what it did is I, I challenged myself to, this is when I leaned hard into mentorship, spent a couple million dollars paying coaches like Tony Robbins and others to come into my world and literally start pouring into me and teaching me emotional intelligence, business intelligence. I started leveling up my body, my health, my relationships. And I said, you know what? I need to fortify this man. I need

to become something more than I've been. Because if I go on to fulfill my mission and purpose in life, this regulatory incident, that'll be nothing compared to what I'm probably going to face in my future. And so, you know, for me, I, a lot of people will take hardship pump and they will or negatively into themselves only. And they'll perceive everything as a failure. For me, there's a handful of people that go the opposite and they say, you know what, I'm going to take, I'm going to take this horrible mire and I'm going to consecrate it and I'm going to make myself something better. And, um, that that's what I did with those incidents in my life and have sense with some of the others. You think very differently than most people. I think that's

pretty obvious. I think you know that as well. What kind of content do you consume? What books do you read? What movies do you watch? What do you watch on YouTube? Who do you follow on Twitter? Like what would you kind of characterize as the content that you're consuming on a day-to-day basis? Yeah, I would first just pass an admonition. I think you have to be careful about books because there's a lot of people, there's these sayings, leaders are readers. And the more books you read, the smarter you're going to get. And for me, I don't care about how much you consume. I care if I'm consuming the right quality and if I'm acting on it. And so I've probably honestly read less books in the last decade than a lot of people out there. I've probably read a hundred

books. And of those hundred books, for me, I will slow down and ask if it's the right book, it's an inspired book and it's got the quality. For me, I would rather slow down and implement. And so for me, you know, I'm always warning people, be careful of just getting so consumed in the reader game. My current strategy today is I read about an hour a day. I do that on double time audio books. So it takes about 30 minutes. It's the first thing that happens between 4 a.m. and 4.30.

And I toggle always back and forth between two books. One is some level of personal mental expansion, personal development minded book by some major thought leader that I'm really connected with. And then the other one is usually some type of business book. and so every day I just go back and forth between uh between books and uh the moment I'm feeling inspired the moment I'm connecting I pause and I allow my mind to work instead of getting lost in someone else's mission and audio and so what that does is it massively slows things down but I believe that sometimes you should go slower if you want to go faster so that's kind of my

strategy for putting thoughts and ideas in my head but it's also like nothing compared to being in a mastermind. I'm engaged at any moment in multiple masterminds. You know, these days often I actually don't pay to be in masterminds. I get, you know, I'm the one that keynotes or speaks at them. So I actually get to swim in a lot of really cool ecosystems. And when I'm there, even if I'm going to be, you know, a main speaker, I always pause and put my student hat on and just, my goal is to take more notes than anyone present and to get myself in that inspired state where I'm just writing. I like multi-day events. So if I go to a three-day conference, I usually want 10 to-do takeaways that are inspired per day. So I do a four-day conference. I'm going to have 40 takeaways

and I'll book time in the next two weeks after to implement all 40 things so that a month, two, three later when I get to the next conference, I didn't just learn something and fail to implement. I would rather consume way less and do way more rather than what most people I think do, which is consume a ton, but then do very little with it. That I think makes a ton of sense. If you had to give yourself, when you were first starting out, some advice, what are two or three things

that you could have told yourself and saved yourself a lot of time, pain, and headache? This is gonna be, this is probably not gonna land or make a whole lot of sense, but the most valuable skill, I believe in mastery. Gladwell says, Malcolm Gladwell, you need 10,000 hours to master something.

I don't think that's true. I think that every time you master something else, you truncate the time and it gets faster and easier, especially if you go to source. So if you're going to do entry-level amateur classes, you're going to read books. Sure. It's going to take four or five years to achieve $10,000 of mastery on something. But if you go to source and you go right to the top, there's usually a shortcut where in 50 hours or a couple of hundred hours, you can hit mastery, especially if you've mastered other things. To date, I've mastered 21 different things. And if I could take one of them with me to the very beginning, it's an odd skill. I call it belief breakthrough. And it is an

emotional intelligence skill to uncover the blind spots in your belief system. Humans are operating under 10,000 notions that they agree to be true, although most of them are not. That's what a belief is. It is an idea. For example, I'm smart. And someone else says, well, I'm dumb. And someone says i'm successful and someone says i'm a failure someone says i'm too fat my genes won't let me i'm not capable i can't do it by the time we're all 16 years old we've heard can't literally 50 000 times from well-meaning parents that are trying not to get you to touch the stove or walk into the street and at some point we become adults but as adults when we can now say yes to everything most of us are literally operating under a a a perception and a perspective of no and so um this

skill that i've developed with a lot of my coaches is a it's a it's a mental process where i would just every day I ask what's the number one limiting belief holding me back a thought comes to mind I judge the crap out of it and I replace it with something limitless instead of its limited notion that skill I've practiced 6,500 times it is rewritten my entire mindset so everything in here is positively reinforced with of course that I can't of course I can be president United States if that was my mission and purpose in life which by the way it's not of course I can this of course I can build a billion dollar company, a multi-billion dollar company. One of my companies we're working on is literally a hundred billion dollar

potential. That's not mentally scary as a number because I've done breakthroughs to be okay with that quantity and to be, you know, so belief breakthrough is probably the most, it's like a master skill for me because whatever you believe you can or can't, you're right. It's your thinking that makes it. So we've all heard that. And so this is the skill I'd take back to the very beginning and say, Chris, bro,

you have to challenge your thoughts because most of them are crap. You've got to look at them because if you operate under the assumption, they're true when they're not, you're not going to be able to manipulate reality and produce the results that you want. But that's probably the biggest thing I take back. Yeah, that's great. When you think of your life, how many of the people that you're surrounded by now are friends from childhood or people that you've known for, you know, 10, 20, 30 years versus

people that are new, but you've almost sought out because they have specific experience or they are, you know, in a similar type of business? Like, how do you think about the balance between what I think a lot of like childhood friends that you've known for 20, 30 years versus maybe people you meet later in life, but they bring other value? Do you have any kind of framework to think through

in your life specifically what that balance is? I think that it is a natural developmental process to want to keep a small, close group of friends that you've known for a long time and keep them close. those friends are holding you back the question is the people you spend time with are they growth minded or fixed minded 99 of this planet has a fixed mindset that means that um you know i'd take a look at my brothers today beautiful souls great men they went to college they decided their career what they wanted to do and today you know 15 20 years later they're still doing those things

And when I look at their lives, they have beautiful families. They have, you know, they've got great careers and they've done well. And I would chalk that up as what I would call a normal life. I think a lot of people want to have a normal life. Me personally, I detest normal. I associate it with mediocrity. It feels like the opposite of fulfilling life's purpose of growth. And I hate it.

and so I've had to get comfortable being a traveler through life, letting people move in and out freely, and there was definitely a time when I wanted to keep certain family members and friends real close, and I haven't let go of all of them, but most of them, you know, they're not in my world the way they used to be in the beginning. Some of those people just don't get me, or they don't understand, or they, you know, I'm addicted to growth. I'm addicted to change. I love it. Like, change is my jam. If I can find anything that will make me a better human, I'm going to latch onto it and try to build a habit around it. Um, and that's weird. I, I, there's definitely a group of people out there that are built that way, but most are not. So at some point

I had to just be okay, letting go and just being okay with that. And so I, you know, on my side of the family, um, I've got eight brothers and sisters. My parents live with me. I take care of them. My siblings once or twice a year, we'll pop into town. We'll connect. There's one of them that I have a really deep, meaningful relationship with. Um, on my wife's side of the family, she's really close with her family. We get to see them a couple of times a month. They're, they're off, you know, half of them are living locally in the area and we'll do a, you know, we'll travel together, you know, once or, you know, you know, I think once every other year on some kind of reunion thing together. Um, but honestly, I don't spend a lot of time with them.

Uh, the friends that I spend my time with today, um, right now there's five couples that I spend a lot of time with for my wife and I, in our friend circle, they're all entrepreneurs for the most part. We put on literally every month growth night where we're gamifying the game of how are we growing and developing. Most of them are getting on stage with me in eight weeks for this physique competition. The ladies are doing bikini for the most part. The men are doing physique competition. We go to conferences together. We travel together. We're going to Iceland later this year together. And I found a tribe of people that I can grow with. And then outside of that and my family, you know, that I have my own masterminds that I run where I'm

connecting with like ultra like-minded people that believe in that just cause profitability, the game of growth, their health, everything. And, uh, that's kind of what my, my universe looks like. When you think about your life today, um, is there a word that you would use to describe it? I think it's growth. It's growth. Yeah. I think growth is a spiritual game. I think it's the game of life i think it's the one that matters the most and and um this probably sound highly judgmental but when i evaluate humans not judge but when i evaluate and assess behavior um what i'm looking for is whether they whether they resist growing or whether they lean fully into it and most don't um and i lead a tribe of people that are trying to figure that game out and they

want more of that in their life. Um, so yeah, growth is, is I think at the center. When you think of your life, um, one of the other things that a lot of entrepreneurs feel is, um, uh, interesting and inspiring is just to see how much growth someone can actually, uh, experience. If you go all the way back, you told the story of, uh, you know, when your wife went to the grocery store, the card was declined and, and, uh, it was this, you know, somewhat embarrassing but just kind of a moment that really shook you and said hey you have to change when you think today how much money do you make how much are you able to invest every year like how do you think about your financial portfolio what what information are you comfortable sharing

there that can kind of help people see like hey you can go from not having anything right and kind of being in this really bad situation to like here is what is possible so i look at health first. And, um, when I got married, I would say I was relatively fit, but I came from a very unhealthy family. Diabetes was always a fear, heart attack, stroke. Um, and so I was trying to make fitness my game and I'll go to the gym five to six times a week. And I couldn't figure out the result. My body was usually 30, 40, 50 pounds overweight, pencil necked. And, um, it was probably 10, 11 years ago. I got some specific health coaching and I was just like, I hate that I feel like I've wasted a decade of my life,

like mistaking movement for achievement because every day I go to the gym and I move and I am not getting the outcome. I'm clearly doing something wrong. And so I went heavy into belief breakthrough work and hiring health coaches and within six months completely transformed my life and haven't been back since.

Like I carry my trophy with me every year. My body right currently is a little faster, a little stronger. Longevity is connected to your VO2 levels and your musculature. That's it. those two things determine the length of life. I want to be 140 years old and I take care of my body with the assumption that I am going to be. That's what I'm programming and signaling my

genes and my body to do and produce in a 25 minute meditation I do every single day. So my health today, I now carry a six pack with me all the time. And every year I'm a little more muscular. I'm a little less fat. And I do that for me. In the beginning, it was like, it was vanity. I wanted to uphold a certain image. I wanted to look good naked. I don't really care so much about that right now. My, my health is my wealth. And so that's a huge change. My marriage, 21 years. And honestly, the first five years sucked. My wife and I were not on the same page. We marry our opposites for a reason. I was Mr. Change and she was Mr. Don't move Mrs. And, um, so she was, I was like morphogenesis. She was homeostasis and it took us years to figure

out how to advocate for each other and support each other. And in the last decade, we have built an incredible marriage. Everything I want, I get. Everything she wants, she gets. And we have a system for verifying that every single day. That's one of our top priorities, one of our standards. Whatever you want, I want it more for you than you want it yourself. So literally going from kind of in the dumps, honestly, with just we don't get the marriage game to where we're at today's beautiful thing then of course financially um there's games that i used to play i spent way too long in the real estate game i was stuck as an operator most entrepreneurs are just like well this is my identity and this is who i am this is my baby and like women make babies and then they

get attached to them for 18 years frankly for the rest of their lives they have all this oxytocin and chemistry that's just like i'll die for my baby i'll do anything for my baby but men that entrepreneurs and females, when you create something like a business, it's also like a baby. And so we get really attached to it. And detachment has been a beautiful process for me to finally get to the point where I'm like, wait, create it. And then the real measure of success is not how much time you put into it. It's the maximum value you create in the world while reclaiming maximum time for you. So you can move on, leverage the life experience and do something bigger. So if you were to look at me financially, you know, six, seven years ago, I was still only

the real estate guy pump. And so sure, my net worth like is on a great trajectory with all those doors that I buy. But most of what I do is a buy and hold strategy, which means there's limited cashflow and huge growth, like a single property over 20 years at a 34% average ROI turns into $17.4 million. And every day I form a partnership with someone in the world that says, here's my 401k or my equity or my home equity. Let me dump it in. Let's buy a house or two because in 20 years, I want to wake up and be surprised by 10, 20, 30, 50, a hundred million dollars. And so I build portfolios with people. When I finally gave myself permission to not be the operator, that's when I started my second business. And within a year I learned it should

be 10 and then it should be way more than that. So, um, yeah, I mean like how vulnerable am I willing to be? Um, I'll put it to you this way. My goal since January 15th, 2009 was to be a billionaire. And right now sometime end of 2023 or mid 2024, I believe that's when that's going to happen. And, uh, in my lifetime, I want to be a trillionaire. Like I'm like, I have the ability to grow and use the time that is set aside for this. And I'm just going to keep multiplying wealth. And, uh, and if I have 104 years on this planet, totally doable because, you know, my wife and I, we put a lot of effort into our foundation. That's where we find a lot of our meaningful time together. And, uh, right now I want to just pour billions of dollars into that

because that's the legacy that continues when we're not here. And, and the work that it does is it changed lives. It saves lives. It's, it's hugely impactful. So that's kind of the core motivation of just, why more? Well, it doesn't really change my lifestyle much, but it sure can for a lot of other people. That is a beautiful place to end. Chris, where can we send people to find you on the internet, find the content that you're producing, the books that you've written, or any of the other things that you're doing? So I've got a whole bunch of gifts for anyone that's listening today. If you feel like there's something you want to explore more, you can go to freewealthgift.com. And what I did there is I put multiple giveaways. I put some of

my books. I put free consultations or just literally even free event tickets. So instead of paying $1,500 for an event, literally you can come as my guest. So freewealthgift.com is where someone could go and learn more. But other than that, you just Google my name. You just got to spell it right. It's Chris with a K and Chrome with a K. And I'm on all the different platforms. So yeah, feel free to connect and grab some of those gifts. Chris, I appreciate it so much. I've learned a lot from you today. I think there's a lot of people out there who, uh, who could take your message and implement it in their life. And I appreciate you taking the time to have the conversation and hopefully we'll do it again

in the future. Appreciate you, Paul. Thank you.