020 - What You Think About You Bring About - Joel Therien
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 10 minutes
Words per Minute
224.5131
Summary
In Episode 20 of the Playing to Win series, I'm joined by my friend Joel Theron. We talk about the early days of playing to win vs. playing not to lose, and what it's like to be part of the "playing to win" community.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
all right gentlemen what is up we're live for episode number 20 of uh playing to win i actually
00:00:09.540
put btt there i have to update that but it's the playing to win series and i'm joined today by my
00:00:14.780
friend joel theron is it theron or terran terrian actually terrian yeah it's french canadian not
00:00:21.440
too many people can pronounce it properly but that's all right well i lost my french now that
00:00:27.380
i've been living in the united states for quite some time so don't worry about that yeah no worries
00:00:31.100
man all right so let me do a little bit of a background here let me uh intro you because i
00:00:36.120
met you on one of yannick silver's um maverick baja off-road adventures and i should let me pull it up
00:00:44.380
real quick see if i can share the screen to kind of give you guys a little bit of frame of the kind
00:00:48.680
of batshit crazy stuff you end up doing when you connect with some dudes so this is this is from
00:00:53.940
the 2010 trip here and you start out this one we started out in loretto mexico and these are the
00:01:01.240
cars that you're driving they actually rent these out to the public in the off season but they're the
00:01:05.700
actual cars that they uh race in the baja 1000s in a in a challenge series and they're quite capable
00:01:12.340
fast cars uh they do of course take some punishment there's a flat tire uh there's another one uh you know
00:01:19.400
you hit cactuses there's a lot of uh you know like the deep mexico baja scenery that you kind of get
00:01:24.420
into that was an old church um where's joe sugarman there's a picture here of him that's yannick i
00:01:31.360
don't know if you can see my cursor on the screen right there so that's that's the guy that organized
00:01:35.320
it there's one here with sugarman that's that's joe and yannick after they smashed into a cattle guard
00:01:40.700
with the car and they basically ripped off the back suspension but uh yeah like you get the idea so
00:01:47.300
um i ran into joel on the trip the year after this one i don't know why i don't have any pictures
00:01:52.560
you know of us together but um funny story was let me just fix this over here so we go back to that
00:01:58.820
setting so funny story was um they sent everything to us in the mail before we went and i got this uh
00:02:04.500
thing and you can't really read it on the screen if you can see it it's hard to read here anyway it it
00:02:10.480
says uh 20 where the hell is it maverick uh richard cooper guns out suns out baja 2011 and i remember
00:02:20.540
when i got this like i showed up and i had it on the wrist like everybody else says i know that you
00:02:24.100
got one of these too and i go to yannick i go what the hell does guns out suns out mean because i never
00:02:28.860
heard that before right he goes well you know you're always walking around with a wife beater or
00:02:32.220
sleeve to shirt you got some big pipes on you and then in walks this guy and he's like a monster
00:02:37.760
i'm cowering in the corner because the hulk walks in the room with his giant guns and i'm like okay
00:02:43.180
i got the wrong van but yeah joel you're a you're a solid dude um when i met you on the trip i think
00:02:49.600
um you were still married at the time that was 2011 yeah yeah you might my divorce was only 11 months
00:02:55.160
ago it'll be next month it'll be a year yeah yeah and um you know you moved down to texas from
00:03:01.200
ottawa you're originally canadian yeah um so like the whole theme for those of you guys that are new to
00:03:07.140
the series watching sort of thing it's it's about playing to win versus playing not to lose and for
00:03:11.700
a lot of people that sounds pretty similar uh but they're quite different i mean you do take
00:03:16.380
additional risks and you've got certain tolerances that some people that play not to lose don't
00:03:21.340
necessarily want to accept so i kind of wanted to dive in your story and you know we pinged each other
00:03:26.460
back and forth over the last five or six months just kind of shooting the breeze about maybe doing
00:03:30.300
one of these episodes um where should we begin like let's let's kind of start with your childhood
00:03:35.380
because you sent me like a breakdown of you know your first job which you quit eight months
00:03:38.820
later but yeah as you're growing up like what did you want to be when you're growing up
00:03:42.840
uh age 11 i remember distinctly i was sitting in the basement playing atari my father was upstairs and
00:03:49.340
he said joel come here i don't know why he did this but i came upstairs and he pulled like two
00:03:54.000
thousand dollars out of his pocket in 1983 and i was like holy damn you know like what'd you do for
00:03:59.600
that he goes oh so my dad owned a yellow page company and he's like oh i went out and sold ads in
00:04:04.220
in the telephone book and i'm like my best friend's mother has to work like a month for that
00:04:10.020
money and you made it in a couple hours now of course there's overhead and stuff but at that point
00:04:14.440
i'm like teach me how to do this like i'm not working for anybody else but my mom was the other
00:04:19.860
side she was government and uh you know military style and you know get a good job get a good education
00:04:26.080
so needless to say i did i did go to university nothing wrong with that but it was an internal struggle
00:04:31.200
for a long time because i knew what i wanted to do but i had a better relationship with my mother so
00:04:35.240
i wanted to appease her so that at that point i didn't know what i was going to be but i knew that
00:04:40.020
it's like man i don't want to trade time for money ever in my life but that's what i ended up doing
00:04:43.700
just to make my mom happy which was that hospital job you know that that that time for money in
00:04:48.880
ocean i've talked about that quite a bit on my channel i don't know if you've heard heard it
00:04:52.460
because i've because i know you've watched some of the videos i've watched a lot of them
00:04:55.960
yeah yeah what i mean if you can explain that well i was uh you know uh you you were so bang on
00:05:02.800
dude like i about three years ago i realized so i was separated for almost seven years um a couple
00:05:09.340
years ago i started realizing it was really going south and uh you know i watch all these videos
00:05:13.720
well you know before this before that watch they get really scorned i'm like my my wife at the time
00:05:19.060
won't be like that and yeah once once she realized it was really over everything you've said is
00:05:25.440
100 bang on and i'm like wow just so that's how i started watching and uh and uh yeah you provided
00:05:32.600
a lot of great advice and stuff and it was a it was a deep deep deep black hole at that time and
00:05:38.400
i'm happy to say that i'm well past it now which is good but you helped me out a lot brother i
00:05:42.600
appreciate that thank man um talk about the exchanging time for money notion like what does that mean to
00:05:48.700
you like what does that look like for you in your head oh well you know there's a lot of people who
00:05:53.000
get a real business you could be away from that business and still be making money so you know
00:05:57.180
like i was a personal trainer for a long time well not a long time like but you know growing up all
00:06:01.740
in college i realized if i wasn't working i wasn't making money so i wanted to do something that i knew
00:06:08.020
i could be away from it and still you know passively making an income so that's why i just decided to do
00:06:13.960
stuff on the internet there's a little bit of a story behind that i was training dr michael copeland
00:06:17.640
the founder of korella at the time and i would train him in his house in rockcliffe park and i
00:06:22.580
mean the it's massive massive house beautiful and uh you know again kind of trying to appease my
00:06:29.100
mother i would share my ideas with him we became good friends like that's a fantastic idea like why
00:06:33.520
aren't you doing that and i used to always share my ideas with my mother but i realized over time
00:06:38.220
that no matter what and a lot of people hopefully will resonate with this because they want their
00:06:41.400
significant others their better half their best friends or what mothers wives whatever to be on
00:06:46.660
board with them and my mom just never was and so i remember thinking to myself because he was
00:06:52.020
running krell which is a software development company why was she on board what's that why
00:06:57.080
wasn't your mom on board with the plan like uh because she just it was her programming it was you
00:07:02.940
know just 100 of programming her father was in the military her mother worked in the government and
00:07:06.920
that was the same thing to do no matter what you know yeah and that's the whole like playing not to
00:07:10.900
lose notion right like playing to win is what an entrepreneur is going to go and and and take the risk
00:07:15.560
to win but playing not to lose is hey joel go secure the uh government job the teaching job
00:07:21.640
you know fire carbon whatever right yeah yeah exactly well you've been wrong with that no no
00:07:26.640
there's no no exactly didn't make her right or me wrong or good or bad it just was different
00:07:30.700
and i remember one day i i kind of succumbed to this thought and this notion that well
00:07:35.340
you know his name was he had a phd copeland had a phd so dr copeland so i assumed it was in
00:07:40.000
software engineering or whatever and i asked him one day i said you know where'd you get your
00:07:43.440
your software engineering degree goes software he goes i'm a civil engineer i don't i didn't
00:07:47.580
know anything about software and i at that moment i was like okay i gotta i gotta change directions
00:07:51.980
here and so i was i was working at the hospital at the time doing his personal training he'd give
00:07:55.980
me 200 bucks cash on a saturday which was like super easy money and it was always inspirational
00:08:00.800
and i uh um quit my job didn't tell my mom for two years start playing on the internet didn't make a
00:08:07.360
dime for about two years but i had a part-time job and a very low mortgage at the time so i you know
00:08:12.620
a lot of people i find they they go all in you don't need to do that you know got to make sure
00:08:16.720
uh 20 21 i started doing this full-time when i was 23. okay so i mean like you bought your first
00:08:24.640
house in your very early 20s too then yeah yes yeah i bought my first house and uh yeah and
00:08:29.680
yeah it's you know first couple years was rough but it once once i figured it out and stuff and
00:08:35.840
i was pig-headed because i you know i wasn't i was in the attitude i can do it all myself i can learn
00:08:41.580
it all myself and when i started associating with good people that was one of the reasons i went on
00:08:45.440
the mavic trip you know when you start associating with good people around you it makes a huge
00:08:49.560
difference you know and so yeah and luckily but what's what was really interesting i remember one
00:08:56.380
day waking up like oh it's going to be a big fat donut hole in my bank account again and i sold at
00:09:00.980
three o'clock in the morning a product for nine dollars and 97 cents i was like wow man holy cow i can
00:09:06.800
actually do this you know and i went of course i went to my mother she's like yeah okay you've been going
00:09:10.680
at this for two years and you made nine dollars and that's like 0.000 cents per hour like rain on
00:09:16.240
my parade again um but you know for me that was the breakthrough that okay well how did i do this
00:09:22.220
and how do i replicate it a thousand ten thousand times and i think once i started having that positive
00:09:26.740
action and it really is what you think about you bring about kind of like the topic is once i started
00:09:32.360
taking more and more action i started seeing more and more results and because i was seeing more
00:09:35.440
results i was taking more action and i think within three months i was making about 25 grand a month
00:09:39.580
did you have um do you have like a frying frying pan to the forehead moment where
00:09:44.780
you saw things happening and it just hit you like okay this is what i need to be doing or this is what
00:09:49.880
like was it that nine dollar transaction at three o'clock in the morning that you got the email on that
00:09:55.220
two two of them was one part i didn't tell about copeland so back then he was complaining that he was
00:10:00.480
they're only doing about five thousand dollars a day in online sales which is very low for a company
00:10:05.500
that size at the time i said well why don't you just set up an affiliate program he's like well
00:10:09.440
what's that i'm like you know somebody sends traffic to your website you pay them the commission if they
00:10:12.980
buy your software it's that simple and uh anyway he called me a day later i was 20 or 21 at the time
00:10:18.000
he's like i want you to come talk to my board of directors about an affiliate program so he was just
00:10:22.600
somebody who took massive action and uh i was like what did you say like you want me you know in front of
00:10:28.560
your board of directors so anyway long story short the board of directors said no but that day i
00:10:33.860
remember driving home i'm like man this guy who's you know he's built mitel he's built correll he's
00:10:38.280
built other companies believes in me and i don't believe enough in myself that i keep having to
00:10:42.920
reinforce back to my mother and that was the biggest aha moment where like i don't know what i'm
00:10:48.120
going to do i don't know how i'm going to do it but i'll make sure it gets done no matter what do
00:10:52.360
the work i from that point on there was no more fear it's like i know i will make this happen
00:10:57.300
there was um a business that you started up called aylmer kiosk yep yep yep that's that was
00:11:05.620
kind of the first one that really kicked it off for you yeah so so i so i went to my father's
00:11:10.120
company and i said dad listen your yellow pages aren't going to be around much longer uh i want
00:11:14.280
to sell everybody a website and back then like nobody knew the value of a website nobody had a
00:11:18.960
website and so their perception was and this is a good tip that i can leave to everybody but their
00:11:23.480
perception was listen joel so many japan clicks on my website it's not going to do me any good
00:11:26.860
you know like i'm a local restaurant and so just you know just because it's not working doesn't
00:11:32.600
mean it's not going to work and so i listened to the people and i created the very first search
00:11:36.940
engine and what i did is i put elmer kiosk in the top of the yellow pages on every page of his book
00:11:42.140
so i created a local search engine which drove local traffic to the local businesses and next thing
00:11:47.840
you know we had about 400 to 450 clients paying us 20 bucks a month what was your dad's reaction when
00:11:53.080
you said to him you know the yellow pages are not going to be around forever because that was like
00:11:56.880
there's a lot of younger guys right now i bet that are watching this going yellow pages what's that and
00:12:01.040
like that was a giant phone book that they plop on your front porch almost on an annual basis which
00:12:06.920
kind of organized everybody's name every single business and i remember there was a time where i was
00:12:13.600
kind of involved in conversations like that in my late 20s no was it early 20s or late teens i don't know
00:12:20.080
earlier on in my uh youth maybe 2021 or so and they were starting to have those same conversations
00:12:25.820
like the yellow pages are going to disappear and it's going to be replaced by the internet there
00:12:29.100
was like this this older generation i was like ah you guys don't know what you're talking about that's
00:12:33.040
just a fad right that's okay nobody even knows what the yellow page is anymore yeah well even so he's
00:12:40.380
like you know i was running faster than he was i was young and i was energetic i i knew what i knew a path
00:12:45.600
that we wanted to take and uh he he just like go for it and even still today he'll call me like my
00:12:51.560
dad's 80 now and and he still sold the yellow page business imagine this richard he sold it three years
00:12:57.080
ago for about 45 000 bucks and i'm like wow they obviously they paid for the database and stuff like
00:13:02.140
that but so he sold it and he calls me the other day goes do you think we could put a business card
00:13:07.500
on the internet i'm like yeah dad it's called a website but you know enjoy your retirement so
00:13:12.000
um you know he's very old school uh but he taught me a lot about um you know the value of of making
00:13:19.960
sure you provide a good service and he really taught me that if you can't look somebody in the
00:13:23.260
eye and shake their hand you shouldn't be in business so he uh he taught me a lot you know
00:13:27.660
one other valuable lesson uh so the the way the yellow pages would work you would create the ad
00:13:32.520
the person who owned the business would sign off on the ad saying it's perfect or whatever you know
00:13:37.220
that way if there was a wrong phone number or whatever um it was on the client's end so there's
00:13:42.020
this one guy named uh electrician i was young at the time and he would my dad did three different
00:13:47.300
telephone books so the guy called the phone number was wrong but he had signed off on it that the phone
00:13:51.160
number was right and i could hear the guy reaming my dad out over the phone and uh my dad said hey you
00:13:56.760
want to take a drive and it was about an hour and a half away to shawville i'm like sure anyway long
00:14:01.740
story short he goes you know when you sell somebody don't think about now think about having them as a
00:14:05.740
long-term client for life and uh he went up and he said listen obviously there's nothing we can do
00:14:10.920
for this ad this year but i feel bad you know it was an honest mistake on both our parts so he ended
00:14:16.080
up putting two free ads of the other books that were in the circulating area and it was just profound
00:14:20.980
to me because my dad wasn't in the wrong at all but he understood the value of a client and that person
00:14:26.560
was a client for another 10 or 15 years so it's things like that just really hit home even though
00:14:30.720
he's old school you know how did you get into this hosting stuff because there's not a lot of
00:14:36.840
people that even thought about this around around the time you got into it it was like 99 1997 it says
00:14:42.980
here in the description that you're registered almer kiosk um i guess in hindsight you would probably
00:14:48.840
name it something else and been on a more global scale rather than so yeah i was yeah i was at first
00:14:53.640
and again just by listening to the objections of people like hey i don't need somebody in japan or
00:14:58.200
whatever my radius is 10 miles i thought okay well how can i clear those objections and and the other
00:15:04.780
thing that i did uh is everybody buys based on a comparison right so they knew that their ad the
00:15:10.120
telephone book was like 800 or something for the year um so i said listen if you buy our hosting for
00:15:16.600
20 to 25 a month i'll give you a second ad in the telephone book for free and i'm going to advertise
00:15:21.740
this local search engine all over the place in the telephone book and stuff so they're like well
00:15:25.860
that's a no-brainer i'm already paying 800 for an ad you'll give me a second smaller ad
00:15:29.640
and 20 but you know even back then 20 25 bucks a month if you can afford that as a business owner
00:15:33.720
forget about it and so that's how we kind of squash the objections and put a lot of people online really
00:15:39.560
quickly and what's really interesting aside from those who have probably sold or gone out of business
00:15:44.100
i would say a good you know we're talking back in 97 to you know early 2000s probably 25 20 of those
00:15:51.640
people still host with us today which is really cool um talk about the the growth to the first
00:15:56.940
million dollars in sales what was that like i was pretty interesting because i don't know it i remember
00:16:03.800
saying so my dad's business was doing about four hundred thousand dollars a year uh his overhead was
00:16:08.400
low because he only had about one one staff i said dad we'll take this to a million bucks so i was
00:16:13.100
it was an extra six hundred thousand and i actually did it that year um one year yeah in one but
00:16:18.180
richard i was going door to door to door to door i was willing to do whatever people wouldn't do so
00:16:24.280
i would go see 40 people a dad get two or three yeses and then as i honed in on what the objections
00:16:29.140
were you know i started getting a 50 yes and stuff like that and so it did really well and that's when
00:16:34.060
i started looking more and talking to a couple about affiliate marketing i was like man this door
00:16:38.160
to door stuff is still hard work you know it's still no real leverage because if i'm not outselling
00:16:42.640
i'm not making money and that's where i started looking at affiliate marketing more
00:16:46.340
and uh we uh we built our first affiliate platform back in 2001 and and launched our
00:16:52.820
first affiliate program which was just selling the web hosting and people would refer us clients and
00:16:56.540
it did really well and uh it's it's it's interesting because online i was having a hell of a time trying
00:17:04.700
to make any money and uh all of a sudden i had rheumatic fever i don't know how i got it but i had a
00:17:10.360
fever 104 and the phone rang and at that time i was still operating out of my basement i actually had
00:17:15.100
servers in my basement and i was so embarrassed i wish i never took any pictures back then
00:17:19.280
and this one guy called me he's like i like what you have to offer ask me about four or five questions
00:17:25.320
maybe a few more and then he's like uh i like what i hear get ready to get about 300 clients overnight
00:17:31.080
and i'm like i i hug up the phone i went to my wife at the time i said i just talked to some loony bin
00:17:35.620
who says he's going to bring us 300 clients and well he lied the next day we had 412 clients from
00:17:41.020
this one customer from this one affiliate and i was like wow we're definitely heading in the right
00:17:45.240
direction with this so he ended up to be a big influencer in blogging at the time and blogging
00:17:49.380
was taking off at that time and he just you know sent out an email to his newsletter and so i the next
00:17:54.580
day i'm calling and i'm like i'm like you know piss excited i'm like holy cow like but i can't sound
00:17:58.980
too excited because i don't want this guy to know that like he was everything to me at the time
00:18:02.540
and i said what'd you do he goes oh i just sent an email to my newsletter i said what he goes yeah
00:18:07.520
i said you know i have 80 000 people on my newsletter i sent down an email what year was
00:18:11.800
this in probably 2000 2001 you know what's funny about newsletters and email lists is they still
00:18:18.460
work remarkably well i was i was on a call on monday night after the before the train wreck show with a
00:18:24.720
bunch of guys in my um entrepreneur's brotherhood and we were looking at the open rates on active
00:18:30.160
campaign for two that i run and one was uh 78 on average for my debt business and 60 on the uh red
00:18:39.380
flag list that's phenomenal numbers open rates you're talking about yeah open rates yeah yeah like
00:18:44.860
open rates i think typically are considered good after about 20 right yeah yeah 10 to 20 is good
00:18:50.940
you know in these days especially well you know in any type of marketing space but yeah it's a it still
00:18:56.280
works very very well and that's when at that moment i'm like okay send an email make that kind of money
00:19:01.560
and that's when we started developing our first autoresponder software way back then um and i was
00:19:08.080
still folk right now i still focus my whole business on generating a lead which means a name email and
00:19:12.640
hopefully a phone number so that we can do sms and uh that's it and then we just do a lot of email
00:19:18.100
marketing and uh yeah and it's a great business build a list um definitely collect email addresses
00:19:25.380
and or or and phone numbers so you can sms text market to them but yeah build a list because if
00:19:31.200
you have a audience that that's that's listening to you and wants to hear what you're talking about
00:19:36.360
um when you offer something you know for sale they will often buy yeah well you know as an example
00:19:42.300
you've done a phenomenal job with youtube and and some of your other social media platforms but you
00:19:46.760
have to you want to take that social media and still generate a database for yourself because
00:19:51.420
you know people's youtube channels gone overnight well if you don't have that database you're in big
00:19:57.180
trouble i know one of your fan pages got shut down right well you've got the database yeah you've
00:20:01.200
got the database to to to you know uh that's yours you're not you know social media you're renting when
00:20:06.760
you when you build a database of clients and emails phone numbers stuff like that that's yours to keep
00:20:11.400
so it really solidifies income because there's a few people i know that literally lost there was the
00:20:16.200
google flap back in like 2010 too you know a lot of people are doing stuff and making phenomenal
00:20:20.880
money with google adwords and they can change the algorithm overnight so building a database is the
00:20:26.040
key to stability for huge i wanted to ask you because we talked moments earlier about um you know that
00:20:32.560
path to the first million in sales receipts and you know i know that like you're uh you're basically
00:20:39.500
what most guys out there watching my channel would consider a chat if they met you in person like
00:20:44.100
you're you're big strong muscular you're successful you drive nice cars you got bank
00:20:49.020
would like would you say that it's easier to grow a business to a million dollars than it is to find
00:20:54.400
that one perfect woman yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely and i remember the day not so much a million
00:21:02.980
dollars gross the first time i had a million dollars in my bank account i want to share this
00:21:06.780
too because again a lot of people they naturally just want that validation from the people they love
00:21:11.220
the most so i took a screenshot of my bank account and i sent it to my mother and her reply back was
00:21:19.320
i'm like joel you're so stupid like when you think you're gonna get a positive answer and stuff like
00:21:26.800
that so but uh yeah it was definitely um it's mindset it it again what you think about you bring
00:21:33.600
about it and i had you know not really fast forwarding for now but when i started the whole
00:21:37.660
divorce process like we lost millions and millions and millions of dollars in revenue because i was
00:21:43.220
thinking about the wrong things you know so once we once i knew what i wanted to do and once i knew
00:21:49.520
the path that i wanted to take it was relatively easy it doesn't mean it's a lot of hard work but i
00:21:54.900
was willing to put into work you know like you've talked about your mom a lot so far and it almost seems
00:22:01.320
like you seek approval or validation from her more than your dad is that something that you've always
00:22:06.740
done uh yeah well in a way so so because my father was the provider my mom was a homemaker
00:22:14.520
basically um he was out selling all the time and uh and so i didn't see him that much my mom was
00:22:20.600
the one that was a communicator and stuff in the family but i think it was more so i could never get
00:22:25.080
validation from my mom so if i shared an id with my dad he'd be like just do it you know i have trust
00:22:30.180
when you do it and with my mom was always well dear you don't know anything about computers i don't
00:22:35.120
think that's a good idea or whatever so but she was she was definitely my protector like that's
00:22:39.900
the reason i started working out i was the skinny little ethiopian kid on the block and so she would
00:22:44.480
uh she was actually on the she was one of the supervisors on the school playground in elementary
00:22:48.960
school because people would pick on me and my problem was i would never start a fight but i would
00:22:54.860
never ever back away from one like i just i wasn't gonna let anybody show any weakness even though
00:22:59.940
i was scared to death at the time so my mom ended up being on the school board so yeah and i miss her
00:23:04.580
she passed away five years ago uh but we had a we had a strong relationship for sure um what lesson
00:23:11.220
did you have to learn the hard way and how could you help others avoid that same mistake in business
00:23:16.160
or in personal or both let's do both okay uh in business it's such cliche hire slow fire fast trust your
00:23:27.160
got way more than you think uh if you don't know what people are doing chances are they're not doing
00:23:31.560
a whole lot so what do you mean by hire slow fire fast because i actually have a chapter in my upcoming
00:23:36.340
book that's titled that well because you know people do the perfect interview they always do oh we'll do
00:23:41.460
this i'll do that i'll do whatever and uh and then of course you bring somebody on board and without
00:23:47.360
naming names you know i thought okay we'll get higher quality people if we go through an agency
00:23:51.580
uh one guy i hired cost me 45 000 because he was going to be our cto so his salary was quite high
00:23:57.600
and uh the second day on the job he went missing for four hours and i'm like wow and and yet i kept
00:24:03.220
him for a year and a half i have no idea he went off drinking
00:24:06.560
crazy okay so yeah go ahead um so that was your business angle what about on the personal angle like
00:24:18.860
what lesson did you have to learn the hard way and how can you help others avoid making that same
00:24:22.380
mistake i mean if you want to deal with relationships or self-care i mean you know
00:24:26.120
you end up deciding um well let's start with the the earlier days of self-care so you know i was
00:24:32.980
definitely picked on and i was 11 years old and i saw this guy in atlantic city new jersey muscular
00:24:39.020
getting all types of attention and i didn't care why he was getting attention i just like i want i want
00:24:43.920
some of that and i started to work out but the point being is i started getting bigger and bigger
00:24:48.440
but it didn't fix here i was still very insecure in my head at the time long story short what fixed
00:24:53.840
here was i became a stripper to put me through college and that was so out of my comfort zone
00:24:58.280
that i remember saying to myself like man i'm sitting here naked in front of 300 women and i can't talk
00:25:04.080
to a girl on the street corner whatever and i was like that was another aha moment like joel if you can do
00:25:09.360
this you can do anything so maybe a joel magic might well my stage name was jonathan at the time
00:25:15.400
i wanted it to sound real but anyway so that was something that i don't regret because it just had
00:25:20.320
brought me so out of my comfort zone that it really helped me to become a better you know i'm classified
00:25:25.880
introvert extrovert like when i first meet you i'm a little shy i'm a little standoffish but then i warm
00:25:30.580
up quickly you know and then um what about with women like what like what lesson did you have to learn
00:25:35.900
the hard way that you can help others avoid prenup
00:25:39.580
truly i mean we we had a were you already successful when you met your wife and got married
00:25:47.020
or no no the success came after that i mean i was driven i was very very driven but did you get
00:25:53.880
married in canada or in texas yes no no in canada so we were together over 20 years okay so you met
00:25:58.580
her here then you brought her down to texas yeah yeah yeah and and you know i mean nothing bad to
00:26:03.800
say i i realize now that a lot of the scorn ang you know just the aggression that she had she was
00:26:10.280
scared to death you know she was scared to death and and and stuff but uh yeah there was red flags
00:26:16.420
early but again for the kids and whatever you know you try to uh you try to stick around and and uh i
00:26:22.200
i shouldn't have but i did but no regrets because she's a very good mother it's just
00:26:26.940
irreconcilable differences i guess at this point uh but yeah if i do it again there will definitely
00:26:33.100
be some sort of pre-arrangement for sure because i had to give up every single asset that i had to
00:26:38.460
keep my business which is which is fine you know you got you got two sons and a daughter right two
00:26:43.160
daughters and a son actually two daughters and a son so a question for you would you tell your
00:26:47.880
would you tell your sons and daughter anything different about marriage like would you tell your
00:26:51.660
son something different from you tell your daughter because for me like i would i would definitely
00:26:55.380
encourage a daughter to get married a son i wouldn't i mean i don't have a son but that
00:26:59.920
would just be my angle um i i for me personally i don't i don't think so i think there's a double
00:27:07.680
standard uh you know i'm very protective of my daughters i love that i have a lot of muscle
00:27:12.120
because it scares the shit out of all the boys that come around the house which is good
00:27:15.040
um whereas my son he's got a great they all they're all in good relationships right now so
00:27:19.780
to say i except for you know maybe maybe have a prenup with my son or whatever because you're
00:27:26.280
you're bang on to the laws so favor the women you know like just completely favor them and it is what
00:27:33.060
it is so uh but i mean it's not even that it just favors women but it's also that it encourages them
00:27:39.260
to use the legislation in a way that it's actually harmful to kids it's definitely harmful to the
00:27:47.520
father and women won't see the harm in it to themselves because of their solipsism but
00:27:51.600
not only is the legislation favorable to them but it also encourages them to use it in a way that's
00:27:57.460
it's quite damaging it is and that was one mistake that i made maybe guys who were just beginning to
00:28:03.500
process when we got separated and i left my thought processes in my head was i want stability for my kids
00:28:09.080
so they can stay at home with mom and what happened was is they habitually got used to not seeing me as
00:28:14.860
often because i wasn't living there anymore and so you know what over time that's just became the
00:28:21.020
norm for them and so there was many many lonely like i my my family was my wife for starting a
00:28:27.000
business of course i love having good money and freedom but it was freedom for my family to be able
00:28:31.120
to travel and we did a lot of that as a family group but um yeah that was a big mistake that i made
00:28:36.700
i should have brought my son along with me or something like that we only live 10 minutes apart but
00:28:41.480
when you're used to tucking in your kids every night or listening to their their banter upstairs
00:28:45.840
or their video games or whatever it was there that was the hardest part like just sitting with four
00:28:50.740
walls around me and i remember at first i had just rented an apartment thinking you know maybe we'll
00:28:55.660
work this thing out or whatever and then after six months of renting an apartment i bought another
00:29:00.040
house because i thought okay if i buy a bigger house and i can have some friends over but none of that
00:29:03.620
ever transpired and was so it's very very very difficult time for sure so that's the other thing is
00:29:09.660
is stand up for your rights really early in the process you know what um what advice would you
00:29:14.860
give give yourself if you could go back in a time machine and have a conversation with yourself before
00:29:20.600
you got divorced did um you end up leaving or did she leave you by the way no no i i left i left okay
00:29:27.920
yeah yeah yeah and we we flip-flopped for years like because it was there's a lot of good qualities in
00:29:34.020
her uh but there was a lot of things that obviously we just didn't see eye to eye on and uh and uh i
00:29:39.540
think i think being more decisive because i did flip-flop too much uh being more decisive looking
00:29:46.960
up hey i don't know how many hundreds of videos i re-watched or watched of yours saying they're going
00:29:52.900
to get scorn and they're going to get mean and they're going to come after everything that you have
00:29:56.700
and i'm like oh she won't do that like i mean she knows that i i built the business and stuff like that
00:30:01.380
but once once the fear is there yeah just there was there was no playing fair at all you know it
00:30:07.880
was just come after everything and and then uh there was no ability i always tried to communicate
00:30:13.360
there was no ability to communicate because it was just screaming and yelling constantly you know
00:30:17.920
that's the that's the big lie that every that every guy usually tries to default to is we'll just
00:30:23.520
we'll just communicate better because that's what you hear your entire life is just learn how to
00:30:27.340
communicate but even but even women don't understand why that narrative is out there
00:30:32.160
yeah yeah it's just a big uh huge uh disservice um what would you consider a defining moment in your
00:30:39.540
life uh definitely that one with copeland where you know he had all of his staff and board of
00:30:47.340
directors say like like it was just like man this guy believes in my ideas why don't i believe in
00:30:52.120
myself a little bit more like why and and uh it it was sad because here's this close to a billionaire
00:30:57.980
if not a billionaire believing in stuff that i was doing and and and so that was defining moment
00:31:02.860
um that was the biggest defining one uh the hardest one was obviously the decision to leave the the
00:31:09.120
matrimarial home and leave my family uh but it's definitely for the better so that those are some
00:31:15.380
defining moments um watching karate kid was one because i was picked on so much i remember leaving
00:31:21.700
there and going like that's it so i ended up becoming a black belt in taekwondo and then that's
00:31:25.380
when i started bodybuilding as well and all the bullying went away but it's still again it didn't
00:31:30.160
fix up here you know i still had a lot of problems and not not big problems but insecurity issues and
00:31:35.360
stuff like that yeah you know did you ever read uh uh psycho cybernetics by maxwell malt no i didn't read
00:31:41.860
that no he was um i'm trying to remember the uh details of it specifically but i believe he was
00:31:48.860
uh the book was written around the time that uh like reconstructive surgeries first started coming
00:31:55.880
about like rhinoplasty for guys that had like car accidents or stuff like not not for cosmetic
00:32:01.780
purposes like you see today but more for like you know reconstruction after an accident or a fire or
00:32:07.060
burn victim or something like that and one of the things that he noticed um was um you can go and
00:32:13.940
go through the entire procedure have your face uh redone and you got a perfect nose but you still
00:32:19.040
have a very low opinion of yourself because in your mind's eye you still see yourself as you know
00:32:23.880
the skinny kid that got picked on you know for example so there's like a part of the mind that
00:32:28.420
needs to catch up even even when you change your body like i had the same sort of problem that you
00:32:32.800
did like i was a real real skinny kid i think i'm uh i think by the time i was 15 or 60 and i was
00:32:38.460
about six foot one but i weighed maybe like 135 140 pounds like i was a skinny like real thin dude
00:32:45.060
yeah and then it was around that same time that i think my dad gave me uh charles atlas's uh what
00:32:52.020
was it called dynamic tensions mailer like one of the earliest mailers that came out in the 50s so he
00:32:57.780
gave it to me he got it in singapore when he was in the royal air force and i'm reading this thing and
00:33:01.740
i'm like okay do lots of push-ups do like you know stuff like this and bicep stuff like this and
00:33:06.380
you know i started to put on size and i got up to 180 pounds within a couple of years
00:33:10.720
but my mind still saw me as a skinny runt you know what i mean like it's i know exactly what you mean
00:33:16.180
exactly like there's a lot of guys that'll go to the gym and they end up with um what was i think
00:33:22.060
coined at one term in in bodybuilding magazines and muscle media uh reverse anorexia yeah um they
00:33:29.500
actually called it big orexia and even though you're huge you still don't think you're big enough
00:33:34.460
yep and i had that same you know thinking going on in my head too when i was in my 20s like i was a
00:33:39.000
i was a good 204 pounds like rock solid like ripped as fuck but i still never thought i was big enough
00:33:44.540
well you know i suffered from that so i just when i decided i wanted to do something for myself i wanted
00:33:49.680
to do something that i enjoyed and something that i can make money at so i went for the professional
00:33:53.260
bodybuilding route i got all the way to the national levels i remember going up a flight of stairs like 15
00:33:58.260
stairs i was 272 pounds and by the time i got to the top i was sucking wind bad like really bad
00:34:05.860
really bad and i was like 20 probably and at that same time though so i started getting some endorsements
00:34:12.200
because i looked pretty good like pretty to me i was still skinny right like that's the the head game
00:34:18.260
but i remember my cousin was playing for the philadelphia flyers with rod brindamore and lindros
00:34:22.960
and all those guys he was a defenseman making 3.6 million a year at the time and he was only four
00:34:27.540
months older than me and here i am still starving you know and i'm like okay directions need to change
00:34:33.340
and i looked at the roi of the amount of drugs that those guys have to do and stuff and and that was
00:34:39.300
another you know defining moment where like i got to change directions again you know so because you
00:34:43.960
can love a lot of things in life but if they're if it's not going to put food on the table like it's
00:34:48.160
it's gonna you're gonna have a stressful life you know what i mean like i wouldn't want to take up
00:34:51.460
knitting or something like that if i loved it because you're not going to make any money doing
00:34:54.740
it you know what's um what's one thing that you'd not do again that's probably one when i went to the
00:35:04.560
national levels i started to do a lot of not a lot because they all think it's a lot but you know i
00:35:09.100
started doing some some anabolics because you had to um i wouldn't have done that for sure because
00:35:14.800
there's just no money in it like if i'm not going to put at least seven figures in my pocket i'm not
00:35:18.660
going to put my body through that type of risk that's one thing i would do um another defining
00:35:23.260
moment was my very first love um we dated for a year and a half and uh she dumped me and i chased
00:35:30.700
her and chased her and chased her like for nine months i chased her and i just realized that she
00:35:35.640
just wanted to keep me as the backup plan and i remember from that day forward i'm like if i ever
00:35:39.720
fall in love again that's it like as hard as it's going to be i'm going to cut ties and just walk away
00:35:44.880
that's the best bargaining position you can have is just no you know you hear all about it no contact
00:35:49.920
walk away and uh and definitely did a lot of that during this process so that's yeah one of the things
00:35:55.620
you know yeah that's one of the things that they teach um guys a lot now in a lot of the red pill books
00:36:01.800
is um you know if you have any inkling that your relationship's about to break up you need to dump her
00:36:08.660
because yeah it basically puts you in a better position um but yeah that's that's like one things
00:36:15.500
that that the guys flop so badly on is they'll go and chase a girl that ends up breaking you know his
00:36:20.880
heart and nothing dries up a woman quicker and faster like turns her into the fucking sahara desert
00:36:26.420
than you chasing her she hates that yeah well i mean there's nothing else i mean you're such a poor
00:36:32.880
beta male coming crawling on your knees and stuff and i mean i remember my first girlfriend her she was
00:36:38.460
beautiful and and and you know i was like enamored and all that kind of stuff and she was quite cruel
00:36:44.420
with it because she i you know looking back she enjoyed the process of being able to keep me right
00:36:48.460
on her pinky but had she absolutely without a doubt wanted nothing to do with me you know it's just
00:36:53.280
power play i guess i don't know but i learned i learned i'm like i'm not chasing you know if it's on
00:36:59.560
an even playing field of course you'll do whatever you do to keep your relationship strong but when when
00:37:03.740
when when the energy changes you don't start chasing that like you said women hate that you
00:37:09.620
know yeah what's um what's your top business achievement like the thing that you'll never
00:37:15.360
forget um so i i put in my bio we want to hit 100 million uh in 2014 we we hit 78 million dollars
00:37:23.420
in revenue that year uh which was a great achievement but it was also something that um you know
00:37:28.980
was not what i thought it was going to be because we had about 250 employees at the time
00:37:34.560
and and i and i don't know if it's the same for you but i can remember coming to the office here
00:37:39.700
and having anxiety in my chest because i knew as soon as i walked through the door hey joel hey joel
00:37:44.660
hey joel hey you know like it was just like overwhelming and i i found myself not being able to do
00:37:49.520
anything that i wanted to do so it was a big achievement to to to get there and if we if i do it again
00:37:54.460
i'll just do a little smarter so that was uh um you know some of the smallest achievements uh are
00:38:00.480
the biggest like we i started doing some fitness stuff online because i'm very pretty good with
00:38:05.780
the internet marketing side of things now and when i you know i almost get emotional thing about but
00:38:10.580
there was a lady who was misdiagnosed with uh either some some autoimmune disorder either multiple
00:38:16.760
sclerosis or something and it turned out to be something toxic in her diet and stuff and she just came
00:38:21.780
up to me gave me the biggest hug of the world balling her eyes out you know so even though it
00:38:26.440
wasn't a huge achievement from achievement but on a human humanitarian level it really meant a lot and
00:38:32.180
stuff like that you know you said something um when we were talking offline before we went live
00:38:38.920
um i can't remember what the hell it was though but we needed a head on it when we were uh getting
00:38:44.740
into this business stuff and all really tied into the um obstacles that kind of get in the way while
00:38:51.260
you're playing to win um what the hell was it that we were going to cover bro don't forget i'm
00:38:57.720
older than you richard so i get more senior moments than you do you know yeah right yeah huge right
00:39:01.940
i'm sure it'll come back to me um have you ever had a near-death experience yes i nearly drowned
00:39:08.960
in acapulco how did that affect your life don't go swimming again
00:39:14.140
was that because you're a bad swimmer or was that yeah so you know like well you know so let's say
00:39:21.560
back then i was probably still 255 260 uh not doing an appreciable amount of cardio and when you have
00:39:27.460
that much muscle mass you know muscle tends to sink in water so i got caught in a small riptide
00:39:33.280
and i'm like oh god damn it like and i did everything what you're not supposed to do which
00:39:37.640
is go against the tide and try to get back in and i just i was screaming and screaming and screaming
00:39:42.960
and screaming for help and of course nobody was hearing me and i i think i was on my last stroke
00:39:48.340
i'm gonna go under like my arms were everything everything was burning the lactic acid through
00:39:53.000
my whole body was horrible i'm like one more stroke man and i'm gone like there's just no way
00:39:57.740
and i remember what it what it was now we're talking about employees and the size of the business
00:40:02.600
and like a healthy appreciable kind of business that really serves you um because what you described
00:40:08.900
there were you know you did 78 million you go to work and you have anxiety because you got have 250
00:40:14.320
people ready to jump on you when you get in the door um i know what that's like when my debt business
00:40:20.400
was at its biggest but i mean today it's a lot smaller and i don't need to go to it every day my
00:40:25.460
brother runs it and all i really do is automate a lot of the marketing and some of the other top level
00:40:30.260
stuff and i like it a lot more now even though it makes a lot less money yeah we were talking about
00:40:36.680
that with your business offline can you kind of dive into that a little bit and you know like the
00:40:41.500
sweet spot for you with your business and what you learned kind of getting it to that sweet spot
00:40:45.220
yeah well definitely um you know you you have you have illusions of grandeur that okay if i hit these
00:40:51.440
numbers you know my life is going to be perfect i remember the first illusion of grandeur was i thought
00:40:56.560
to myself okay if i get a thousand people paying me 20 bucks a month i can live on the beach all day
00:41:00.920
and actually that was one of the hardest times of business because that was at the time where i was
00:41:04.540
making good money but i needed to start hiring people by you know at 20 if there's 20 000 gross
00:41:09.460
you hire somebody there's 5 000 to 6 000 gone right away you know what i mean on on a decent
00:41:14.660
programmer or whatever um so that um you know that was one defining aspect and then yeah when so when we
00:41:23.280
got to those numbers it just wasn't fun anymore and i i think that was part of the
00:41:28.120
looking at my whole life like okay where am i personally where am i professionally um and is
00:41:34.560
this what i want you know like if the definition of insanity keep doing the same thing and expecting
00:41:38.780
a different result and uh i decided that no it's you know i'm not i'm not happy i'm i'm not happy
00:41:45.280
money the money's good but the stress is so unbelievable so we're we're doing maybe half that
00:41:52.560
right now you know which is which is but you know the past couple years i've spent probably six
00:41:58.620
months out of the country almost actually i'm a i'm a canadian u.s citizen now but during that travel
00:42:04.020
i was only a green card so you're not allowed to leave the country more than six months so you're
00:42:07.800
not considered a permanent resident in the united states anymore so but you know people say i just
00:42:14.640
remember the anxiety of knowing when salaries were due and stuff like that it's like
00:42:18.620
so much money was going out that if i wasn't in the office keeping an eye on everybody and making
00:42:24.800
sure the efficiency was there it was like but i'm spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a week
00:42:30.420
just on you know salaries payroll yeah and and so i felt trapped even though i had a business that
00:42:37.120
leveraged itself i felt trapped that i had to be here all the time now that that were a lot less
00:42:41.560
the anxiety is not there on the payroll side because it's more justifiable and and here's
00:42:48.600
the really interesting thing so we probably have about 65 65 to 70 staff total now and they picked
00:42:56.100
up for 80 percent of what the 250 people were doing you know what i mean just the right people
00:43:01.300
uh with you and and stuff and and it creates a lot of distension because the good people will pick up
00:43:07.000
for the slackers but it creates a lot of distension because like oh i gotta do his job and that person's
00:43:11.580
job and whatever and when you get rid of those people and you're able to pay your good people more
00:43:15.980
then it's a it's a much more efficient business and the people i have now i can't say enough good
00:43:21.060
things about but it took a long time to get there and a lot of defining moments to get there and and
00:43:25.580
yeah it's allowed me i was god i was where where have i not been i was in rome not long ago before
00:43:29.920
this whole covet thing obviously let me get that on the table um but i spent four months in tulum i spent
00:43:35.400
four months in cancun i spent a month in egypt i spent uh a month in spain i spent all over the place
00:43:42.260
just traveling and a lot of that was you travel by yourself or do you have friends or you have a
00:43:47.400
chicken bringer yeah pretty much all of that yeah all of that yeah i couldn't travel alone alone it
00:43:53.520
would be kind of boring you know what i mean so yeah um but it was definitely looking back a little
00:43:58.200
bit was to hide the pain that i was going through on the personal level and stuff like that because
00:44:02.340
did that help like did the traveling actually help you deal with that pain and kind of get
00:44:06.840
it was a distraction it was definitely a distraction it it beats you know being brutally
00:44:12.200
honest in in the the lowest of lows i was like anything would trigger me and tears would come
00:44:17.920
to my eyes you know what i mean so i'd be sitting at home and i found it very difficult four walls no
00:44:23.160
kids and you only had your thoughts and so the traveling definitely definitely was a distraction what
00:44:29.540
it must have helped in some way but was i happy traveling no it was still in the back of my mind all the
00:44:35.220
time you know because it was this i remember the when we saw july something i can't even remember
00:44:40.240
now but the day we signed a decree i wasn't happy or sad i was just relieved because every day her
00:44:47.020
attorney would be she wants this now she wants that now she wants something one thing that was so
00:44:52.260
i won't get into too much of it but i was uh before father's day last year and she's like hey i
00:44:58.440
noticed that you have a lot of air miles based on the business why don't you take the kids on a
00:45:02.340
holiday for father's day and because i know you miss them i was like okay that's is she turning
00:45:07.560
in a corner the next day i get an email from her attorney saying that she wants half the business
00:45:11.860
i kid you not yeah so it got a little a little a little ridiculous at times you know yeah here look
00:45:23.480
there's a comment here from a guy by the name of ace golden gloves and he says every man needs to hit
00:45:27.580
rock bottom discover himself and reach his potential again sort of thing and that's like
00:45:31.720
that's like pretty common for a lot of guys i mean they're like um i don't know if you know philip
00:45:37.220
uh mckernan he's a irish dude you know one of the things that he says is um you know the absence of
00:45:43.600
clarity do something yeah yeah so you know you may not have clarity around what's happening post
00:45:49.460
divorce something that's happening in your business but the worst you can do is just kind of
00:45:52.740
like sit there crawling a ball you know or just crawl yourself in a ball and like cry yourself to
00:45:57.720
sleep i mean that might be one thing you can do for five minutes but at some point you got to get
00:46:01.860
back up and stop being a little bitch and kind of figure it out yeah well that's it and that that
00:46:06.360
that was the part that was very bizarre for me because i'm usually very creative you know i'm more
00:46:10.960
on the marketing side of my whole business and writing good creative emails was always something
00:46:14.900
that i was strong at and stuff i remember sitting in front of my computers four hours have gone by
00:46:19.180
and i've written like two lines because it was the negative aspect you know hitting the back of my
00:46:23.120
head all day long and that's when i said i gotta get out of here and i started traveling and uh not
00:46:28.080
too many people know this but when i was in uh when i was in tulum i did like this ayahuasca ceremony
00:46:33.140
and that was that was really enlightening it was very very very very enlightening for sure it's uh
00:46:39.520
it's hard to describe it set and setting uh is very very important but it was still definitely very
00:46:44.660
healing for sure where did you stay in tulum it's like one of my favorite places
00:46:48.960
uh we stayed in a condo i just rented an airbnb condo for a couple months and stuff and uh it was
00:46:54.520
like on like the old old town beach strip like close to uh no no it was a little cheaper yeah i
00:47:00.820
know what you're talking about we didn't stay beachside we were a little further in where it
00:47:04.380
was about a five minute cab ride yeah that way the condo was only like 1100 bucks a month or
00:47:08.700
something like that yeah if you wanted to stay on the beach was probably a thousand bucks a week or
00:47:12.160
more yeah and uh but yeah tulum was nice and then uh for me because i like to do a lot of things um
00:47:18.600
you know as long as there was a gym there was a gym that was fine but this year i stayed in cancun for
00:47:23.260
a while and even though it's kind of teenage style there was a little bit more to do um a little bit
00:47:28.340
more to see so i enjoyed and the beach in cancun was beautiful too but tulum was was great as well
00:47:33.180
uh pyramids of egypt that was enlightening that was really cool but uh what did you like about that
00:47:39.280
because that's because that's kind of on the list for me to go um you know you you learn about it
00:47:43.960
in school you hear all about it all that kind of stuff and uh uh what's weird and i don't want to
00:47:50.040
get into it because it's a whole nother thing but when i was doing the ceremony i ended up going back
00:47:54.680
to these egyptian times you know i was just very enlightening but it's it's it's phenomenal like
00:48:00.580
to be in front of these structures and you know you've got these these stones that are a couple of
00:48:06.780
tons each and from one side to the other they're off by half a millimeter you know what i mean
00:48:11.300
and and it's structural like it's just incredible incredible incredible so that was uh uh cairo is
00:48:17.720
dirty though i mean i've been i've been to india and india can be very dirty like i've been to mumbai
00:48:22.260
cairo itself was very dirty but we ended up staying at an all-inclusive resort uh in i forget the name but
00:48:28.560
we took a plane and we took a flight into cairo spent the day in cairo with uh with a guide going
00:48:33.620
through all the pyramids and stuff and that was that was fun it was definitely worth it for sure
00:48:37.520
one of the things a lot of guys wonder about is how do you run your business while you're you know
00:48:42.740
uh sort of gallivanting yourself around the world you know dealing with your shit like is that something
00:48:47.780
that kind of rely on a number one for like do you have an inside guy while you're the outside guy
00:48:52.360
combination of of that and then what i also learned is you know um if it can be automated and it's not to
00:48:59.000
cut people out of jobs automate it so um after 2014 and realizing that we're just pissing all kinds
00:49:05.860
of money away needlessly even though we're making money um i've got checks and balances throughout our
00:49:12.560
whole system so that i can tell what people are doing yes i have a couple of right-hand people so i
00:49:17.020
have an office here in texas an office in ukraine and an office in india but i i could see with it
00:49:21.780
within a moment's notice what's what's happening what's going on and stuff so it's all documented and
00:49:26.320
and uh that allows me to but trust is a big factor if you've got i there's a key people that
00:49:32.200
i trust in each office that uh have stood the test of time you know and the whole good to great type
00:49:38.680
of model you know get the right people on the bus and it allowed me to uh to to to do what i wanted
00:49:43.900
to do and you know i was very transparent with those people too i was like listen man i haven't lost
00:49:49.020
all my mojo or drive but something's wrong like i i need to go i need to go fix myself like i because
00:49:55.540
my productivity in the business and i'm generally a happy-go-lucky guy and i was really cranky and
00:50:00.900
pissy a lot of the time you know going into the office i don't want to portray that onto my team
00:50:05.460
i'm supposed to be the top guy you know who's happy and and so forth so they were very because i was very
00:50:11.260
vulnerable and transparent with them i'm like listen i love the business the business is going
00:50:15.720
to stay afloat we're going to be okay but i i got to go do something for a little while that's okay
00:50:19.980
they're like go for it you know um favorite book and how it changed your life
00:50:24.580
well after looking at some of your stuff the rational mail was pretty interesting book
00:50:30.840
you know uh definitely changed a lot of things good to great was another good one
00:50:34.620
uh that i really enjoyed uh i'm always curious when somebody that's an entrepreneur reads rollo's book
00:50:42.140
like what did you think of it how did it change your perspective on things
00:50:45.980
the the the initial gut feeling was like but he says it himself he's a little bit sour
00:50:56.020
you know what i mean uh you know a little bit biased um and that's where i'm at it's like
00:51:01.040
do i regret getting married no do i regret taking so long to make a final decision yes like it dragged
00:51:07.800
on for seven years that's way way too long uh but do i think like hypergamy and that does it exist
00:51:14.980
hundred percent um but are all women exactly the same i don't think so i think there's varying
00:51:20.520
degrees of women that are better than others and stuff like that so that part yeah like you know he
00:51:26.380
really puts the kibosh and i mean i i understand it comes from his perspective and stuff like that and
00:51:32.280
i don't know like maybe i'm considered a high high value male like i it's not to sound shitty but i don't
00:51:40.680
know i don't understand how a man can live off 40 or 50 000 dollars a year you know like it's it's it's
00:51:46.220
it would be scary i mean jesus you know it was enough when our grandparents came back from the war
00:51:54.140
and started a family you know they could have a factory job and make you know like a decent uh
00:52:00.100
earned living you know women would stick around they could have a family they could have a house and
00:52:05.020
that sort of stuff but today like like just having a a a job is literally just being just over broke
00:52:11.220
that's what job stands for right exactly and and that's why i agreed to so many people say like keep
00:52:16.820
fighting you know keep fighting to get what you deserve out of out of all this but what i realized
00:52:22.280
richard was if i keep fighting and this negativity keeps up i'm losing way more money of opportunity in
00:52:28.700
my business thinking about the wrong fucking things excuse my language yeah and i'm like no
00:52:33.180
so i gave her everything that she wanted so that i and and sure enough and that was a pound of meat
00:52:39.180
that you had to give up that's one of the things that i yeah exactly exactly and it was so the day
00:52:44.380
that it was on paper and signed by law it's like okay i could i i realized subconsciously i'm not
00:52:50.920
working on my business because what if she wants more of this or more of that or more whatever so i was
00:52:54.960
like i'm not gonna put more effort into something that i don't want and don't get me wrong i would
00:52:59.100
even still today maybe it's wrong i would make sure that nobody was living on the street that's
00:53:03.300
just who i am if my ex ended up in trouble i'd probably help her out or whatever if i whatever but
00:53:08.480
yeah i was losing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue because i was thinking
00:53:13.340
about the wrong stuff you know yeah there's there's a lot of acrimony that happens in divorce and
00:53:20.500
again you know you don't say this again like family law is not written to um allow things to
00:53:25.840
wrap up quickly and in the best interest of the kids it it's really designed to like draw out uh
00:53:31.780
rack up legal bills cost you a lot of time and at some point you got to realize that you know as a
00:53:37.060
guy you only have so much time in life and you can always make more money back later so exactly
00:53:42.200
women need to feel like they've gotten a better deal than you in the divorce and sometimes it's the
00:53:47.780
the guys have to pay to kind of like wrap things up yeah yeah exactly well i was watching your
00:53:52.600
interview the other day where your friend interviewed you for your and and he said one of the questions
00:53:57.420
what would you do if you lost everything and i felt the same way you did it's like okay well i'll just
00:54:02.320
do it again yeah you know just just build it back up again and and because i think once you have
00:54:07.500
certain skills that you've acquired and you've been able to do you never lose it no exactly what a mind
00:54:12.380
once expanded can never contract like when i first got started my goal was to cover my mortgage
00:54:16.860
of 450 dollars a month i lived in a very small townhouse and you know there's uh now if we if
00:54:23.220
we don't do 30 grand a day i'm pissed off you know what i mean like it's so so yeah you know how to do
00:54:29.180
it again and the confidence is there and you take the right actions to make it happen so i i was like
00:54:34.920
yeah that's exactly what i would have said too like just do it again you know yeah are you still a car
00:54:39.620
guy i remember seeing a picture of you at some point in front of a red uh ferrari f430 that was a
00:54:45.840
number of years ago though i think that's when i first met you and we did that trip yeah that i love
00:54:50.300
cars i just got myself a nice 750i um with the m performance uh the ferrari was fun um i i what i
00:54:59.760
didn't like about that car especially being you know if you're in miami there's ferraris everywhere
00:55:03.260
but being here i would stop for gas and people would get into like personal bubble invasion like
00:55:08.260
this far from you while you're filling her up and like nice car man i'm like i'm gonna get a gun put
00:55:12.520
my side or whatever um so i ended up giving that away in a contest and russell brunson of
00:55:17.880
quick funnels won my ferrari back okay and uh but yeah i love you know i i do i do i mean i love
00:55:24.480
real estate more because i know it's a better investment you know like me cars are cars are
00:55:28.320
great so yeah we've got a lot of cars right now you know relative to my kids and stuff like that so
00:55:35.160
what was your favorite car that you've ever owned
00:55:36.540
the ferrari was the one because it got the most attention and i think it was a childhood dream
00:55:43.340
like you know if you get yourself a nice ferrari or a lamborghini you've made it so that was a lot
00:55:47.780
of fun uh but there was a lot of negative that came well here's one thing look i mean they're race
00:55:52.020
cars right so they i wasn't going to be the guy that got a ferrari and put 5 000 miles a year on it
00:55:57.060
like screw that i'm going to drive it as much as i can so i probably put 25 000 miles on it
00:56:01.600
in two years and so it uh it was broken a lot like it would you know it was broken all the time
00:56:07.720
i i remember going to um to go see ryan dice at uh digital marketer up in austin it's only like 50
00:56:13.700
minutes from here here's a guy with a 20 inch arm pushing his ferrari off the side of the road because
00:56:18.140
it wasn't working right so they're not the most reliable vehicle um uh so for reliability i've had
00:56:23.840
a couple of s class 550s that i really liked as far as just uh i was going to get a tesla at one time
00:56:29.160
but the tesla backseat was very small you know so i didn't like that very much um i've had i yeah
00:56:35.440
yeah when i get people say would you get another sports car i might in the near future i mean being
00:56:41.080
in internet marketing it definitely attracts attention and stuff like that like some of the
00:56:44.920
videos that i did back then with the ferrari some of the best converting videos that we've ever done
00:56:50.060
online because it's hard to not say well this guy's got to be doing something right you know what i
00:56:53.960
guess your attention yeah exactly that's like the standard formula whenever you see like a youtube
00:56:58.280
pre-roll video now or on facebook it's always some like young guy and in front of a rented lambo or
00:57:03.280
ferrari that they claim is theirs you know for the most part yeah yeah true um those cars have gotten
00:57:09.200
a lot more reliable too over the recent years like the f430 they stopped making i think around 2010 or 11
00:57:15.540
and um like i know a guy that's got a lambo huracan that he has out on rental and it's got something
00:57:23.140
like 130 000 miles on it really and yeah no issues with the car whatsoever right yeah so some of them
00:57:29.860
are are really really anything with like the audi lambo v10 super reliable you're really not going
00:57:37.620
to have a problem with it but when you start getting into like the only cars today that are
00:57:40.980
really not that reliable are mostly like in the mclaren brand lineup because they're still kind of new
00:57:45.000
and yeah they pump out a shit ton of them what's your favorite that you have uh the fastest car i've ever
00:57:50.960
driven is the love ferrari and i got that up to 203 miles an hour on an airstrip and that was just
00:57:55.560
batshit crazy i love that but i think that i think the next car that i'm going to add is is is probably
00:58:01.860
going to be a 720s and even though it's a mclaren and yes it's going to have problems and it's going
00:58:06.080
to be expensive to maintain it's just like it's it's it's hyper car type of performance but with super
00:58:12.280
car pricing yeah um plus it's got the doors that go up which you kind of have to get if you're
00:58:16.600
going to move away from an audi r8 yeah yeah um i got one more question for you before we wrap up
00:58:21.520
so as you've gotten older what has become more important and what's become less important to you
00:58:26.260
uh more important is enjoying the journey so when you know when i started my company and up until
00:58:32.860
probably my mid 30s it was just grind grind grind grind grind all the time and there's nothing
00:58:38.560
i still grind but it's like there's a lot of time where it was probably unproductive working 16 hour
00:58:45.520
days and when i think back now maybe seven of those hours were productive the other set you know
00:58:49.860
seven or eight weren't that productive so you know enjoying life more uh it's definitely been
00:58:56.080
uh you know people can blame a lot uh you know everything on a divorce on yourself i realize now
00:59:02.600
that i probably was very emotionally unavailable because i figured my dream was everybody's dream no
00:59:07.840
matter what and and stuff so i learned a lot that way so yeah that's that's what i care less about
00:59:12.520
now is i want to make good money but i also want to not that i didn't enjoy it because that was my
00:59:17.300
goal at the time but it's like i didn't stop and smell the roses enough i didn't stop and take the
00:59:22.020
kids out enough for or things like that you know yeah you know kids grow up really really fast
00:59:28.020
um let me um throw up on the screen here uh kind of on the exit because you've got this uh
00:59:34.360
program you're kind of working on within self-care so let's throw this up here you can talk about
00:59:40.740
that um men over 35 who want more swagger and so this is you obviously you're you're what 48 now
00:59:49.820
40 i'll be 48 july 7th so everybody right now that knows anything about bodybuilding is going to say
00:59:55.400
well joel that's trend and winning and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah sure what are we looking
01:00:01.380
at here like you're obviously on trt right yeah i you know it's funny the only the only symptom i had
01:00:07.580
of that i was 41 years old when i started trt um was um brain fog i still had a lot of muscle
01:00:14.820
but brain fog was the main main thing that that just drove me nuts and he i went to the doctor he
01:00:20.800
said yeah your your testosterone is 182 at the time that's pretty low actually yeah it's extremely low
01:00:26.480
but i was still 215 pounds and maybe eight percent body fat at the time you know okay so the trt did
01:00:32.560
help me gain more weight i i i built such a base when i was younger so right now i'm about 235 at
01:00:38.520
510 um nothing more than that than than a little bit each week and that really helped with my clarity
01:00:45.200
like my mental focus and and better energy for sure for sure for sure um but what people don't realize
01:00:51.880
i'm very much a mike menser dorian yates style of a person i train seven to ten minutes a day three times
01:00:58.380
a week and that's it high intensity very short duration so a lot of people figure that you know
01:01:03.820
joel you must be in the gym you know an hour a day you know five days a week not not even close
01:01:08.360
do you still lift like really heavy like can your joints handle it or no so so it's all a relative
01:01:13.700
term right so when i was younger i would always train into the four to six rep range meaning i would
01:01:18.040
fail at four to six reps now i'll fail around eight to 12 reps so i'm still training with very high
01:01:22.660
intensity just not the same amount of weight on the joints and and most of my upper body is okay
01:01:27.500
but i find my knees are the ones that can't take it the most you know i would do you ever throw a
01:01:31.240
duck into the mix just kind of you know to deal with your joints and stuff uh i glucose i mean
01:01:36.720
it's helped a lot omega-3 has really helped my joints more than anything fish oil helps a lot
01:01:41.360
yeah uh it's also good for your brain and your cardio as well yeah yeah no um yeah that's it i had
01:01:46.360
you know then i hurt my knee when i was 40 and like when i was younger it's like okay it'll be fine
01:01:51.280
in three months you know and two knee surgeries later that kind of stuff so uh i definitely train i still
01:01:56.300
train with very very high intensity but i'll fail around eight to 12 reps rather than four to five
01:02:01.280
reps you know so you've put together this uh program for self-care if you guys are interested
01:02:06.560
pinned in the top uh link below in the video if you're watching this on a replay if you're watching
01:02:11.420
it live it's it's it's already pinned there but um you know you put together this landing page
01:02:15.940
um 21 minutes sorry so the first thing guys are going to say uh is you know 21 minutes is not going
01:02:22.940
to get me looking like usual right so can you kind of explain what this is all about and what's all
01:02:28.380
involved with it um yeah so so i mean it's not going to get you looking like consistency is the
01:02:33.120
king to everything right so i um you know very long story short when i started training because i was so
01:02:38.380
skinny i would go to the gym every way every day and i didn't see the results because training provides
01:02:42.940
the stimulus for your body to improve so i actually train each body part once every 10 days that's it
01:02:47.780
and by giving that much recuperation time i've i've seen the results that i have so it's basically
01:02:52.640
for people who don't have a lot of time um you know diet's on point but uh it's really not all
01:02:59.060
that hard so it's catered to ceos it's catered to people like you know the one thing i think that was
01:03:04.760
when i was going through the whole divorce process knowing that i was still in very good shape and that
01:03:09.460
was my decompression time to my time to think and think about my life and stuff and i'm like well at
01:03:14.140
least i still look good you know you know i didn't gain 80 pounds of fat over the marriage and
01:03:18.600
all that kind of stuff and uh it uh but it definitely works you know we got a 60 day money
01:03:23.000
back guarantee because i know that it works i tell people do one 10 day cycle we train each body part
01:03:27.640
once every 10 days and you'll see improvements so quickly that that uh it just works and i've been
01:03:32.340
training that way oh god 30 i started training at age 11 did my first show when i was 16 i started
01:03:38.240
training that way when i was 18 so i've been training very high intensity very short duration only three
01:03:42.720
days a week for the better of 30 years i guess okay and you've got it all broken down it's like 25
01:03:48.860
bucks a month or they can buy up buy it up annually yeah and it's everything it's your diet it's your
01:03:53.520
nutrition it's your mindset it's everything everything everything everything in there okay
01:03:58.100
who's the hottie here uh don't want to get into that it's going to be a sore thumb across a few people so
01:04:05.700
all right i want to just yeah somebody i've been dating and stuff like that you know okay so um
01:04:11.840
link is pinned in the top description if you guys are interested in uh self-care program and
01:04:16.360
supplementation and stuff like that it's it's it's not expensive you you actually sent me some of your
01:04:20.480
supplements i don't have them here right now but um the one that fills your stomach um you know you
01:04:25.640
did like a video demonstration of it where you basically mix it with water and it like just expands
01:04:29.980
so like 10 or 50 times the normal size it'll expand you know yeah and it's just like a fiber
01:04:35.440
so it's calorie free so i've been using that a lot just to kind of like you know fill up my stomach
01:04:39.560
especially in the morning so i can fast but check it out if you're interested joel thanks for sharing
01:04:43.780
your story and you know all the other experiences and getting vulnerable and just kind of letting guys
01:04:47.980
know what it takes to you know play to win in life and there's there's life after divorce the guy i just
01:04:53.540
remember like you know before a divorce i'd have my good and bad days i could never empathize
01:04:58.860
what a true depression was and when it when it hit me man i was like when i get through this i will
01:05:04.040
let people know that you can get back to normal even better you know that that's my whole objective
01:05:09.120
i know there's some guys who are like just you're you're paralyzed you're freaking paralyzed you know
01:05:15.660
and you're like what the hell is the matter with me you know so i always i always love going back
01:05:19.760
to that story um what's his name howard schultz the guy that did starbucks it's howard schultz right
01:05:25.300
yes yeah it's like the story of 242 it's like you know he went to something like 241 different
01:05:33.420
um investment firms angel investors and all this sort of stuff to kind of like pitch this business
01:05:38.300
idea and it was like on the 242nd one or something like that they actually said yes to the idea and
01:05:44.040
allowed him to launch it but you know it just goes to show you that you know you got to do the work
01:05:48.660
as ace golden glove says here um you know life's going to knock you down it's just a test you know
01:05:54.280
divorce losing money in a business making some shitty choices in life it's all a test you know
01:05:58.680
you can either stay down and knock it back up which some people do or you can get back up and you know
01:06:04.020
do the work and hopefully you know you make it out of it a-okay if not stronger and better you know
01:06:09.640
um you know what we forgot to talk about before we go real quick is um surround yourself with um
01:06:16.980
you know the right people um we met on a business trip well not a business trip it's a business
01:06:23.580
adventure trip that a mutual friend of ours put together and he kind of put all these guys together
01:06:27.940
uh the price of admission i think at the time was 10 or 12 000 for that off-road trip i know you
01:06:33.820
and a lot of the other guys were paying a membership due to that uh group as well to have access to all
01:06:38.860
these guys and events and networks how important has surrounding yourself with like-minded people been
01:06:44.580
in this journey to excellence for you and dealing with all this shit i honestly believe there's no
01:06:49.420
such thing as a self-made millionaire and what i mean by that is you have to get around the right
01:06:53.660
people you just because you know coming back to my mother i would share an idea with my mother and
01:06:58.700
she had no experience but her gut instinct was to say that's a bad idea you know my first mentor being
01:07:03.760
kind of copeland and he's you know got this you know done a couple times over and he's telling me it's
01:07:09.980
a good idea but my mom says it's a bad idea i started realizing that you really have to get
01:07:14.100
yourself around people that are going to believe in what you're doing and and more importantly when
01:07:19.120
you share experiences i might ask you about that consolidation on something you're like well joel
01:07:23.120
do this and where i might ask my father who knows nothing about it he'll give me like just really
01:07:27.340
shitty advice you know what i mean and uh it's been at least 60 to 70 percent uh of my success is
01:07:33.920
getting myself surrounded by really smart people who who have just the right positive mindset
01:07:39.400
for sure and it just makes it fun because you know you get around these people and they're
01:07:44.440
legitimately happy to see you succeed they're legitimately happy to to help provide value to
01:07:49.420
to you know i i mean i would do anything for anybody like yourself who if i had experience in a certain
01:07:54.800
field and said well do this or do that and here's why because i tried it and this is what worked and
01:07:59.360
what didn't work based on on experience you know it's very very important very very it's only at the top
01:08:05.100
isn't it's a it's more a mindset it's not about finances it's about being around the right people
01:08:09.460
who just see the world very differently you know like a lot of people think that you're batshit crazy
01:08:14.840
when you run a business and they always you know like your mom said well you know just get a job or
01:08:18.620
just you know play not to lose sort of thing and it's only guys that have gone through it that um
01:08:24.280
have an opportunity to network that are guys dealing with similar sorts of struggles that actually
01:08:28.200
believe um in in the stuff that you're doing and will support your mission and those are the people
01:08:34.400
you want to surround yourself with it makes a big big difference yeah it does and i'll tell you one
01:08:38.040
more crazy mom story just to show that being around the right people are so important so six months
01:08:42.720
before she passed we knew she was terminal and she called me on the phone and she's like she starts
01:08:47.340
to giggle and i'm like what mom she goes i have to tell you something and i know it's crazy but i need
01:08:52.660
to tell you i'm like what she goes i just wish you had a good stable job
01:08:56.860
i said well there's 250 people that work for me the last person to lose their job will be me and
01:09:05.660
she was obviously she was semi-joking at the time she'd see that it was the right path and decision
01:09:10.500
for me uh but yeah being around good people is the key you know like i mean i i can't thank you
01:09:15.760
enough richard what you did for me you know with your youtube videos and it was a pleasure meeting you
01:09:19.540
in cabo and stuff and uh i'll uh i'll definitely come see you this summer i'll be up i'll be up there soon
01:09:24.620
yeah if you're in toronto let me know and uh but uh by the way guys if you want to join my men's
01:09:28.960
community that's how you get to it that's also pinned in the top uh link description there's
01:09:33.520
either an annual membership option or or monthly it's it's the one percent of men that are chasing
01:09:39.420
excellence not women they're putting a dent in the universe all that good stuff you can click it watch
01:09:43.700
the video there that explains how it all works joel thanks for hanging out let me know if you're
01:09:48.240
heading up to toronto anytime soon we'll definitely grab some dinner and and you know hang out for a bit but
01:09:52.620
it's good to have you on and catch up and seeing you know what's all up in life i appreciate you
01:09:57.520
and i appreciate what you're doing and thank you for watching everybody i appreciate it have a great