Episode 220: Inside the Mind of Patrick Bet-David
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode of the Empire Podcast Show, Pat sits down with Patrick Bedavitch, founder and CEO ofPHP Agency and Valuetainment. Patrick is a serial entrepreneur who owns 700 Gyms and is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world.
Transcript
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30 seconds, one time for the underdog, ignition sequence start.
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Let me see you put them up, reach the sky, touch the stars up above, cause it's one time
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You know, so many times many of you ask me and say, well, Pat, I want to know what you
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I know you interview a lot of people, but how about you allowing other people to ask
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Today, I'm sharing one of the recent podcasts I did that is going to give you a little bit
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of an insight on my mind and what I think about.
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Dietainers, every once in a while I get interviewed by somebody that runs their own podcast or YouTube
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channel that asks questions that have not been asked before, which leads to answers and topics
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that we haven't spoken about before, and I get compelled to want to share it with you,
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and that's exactly what happened with Petros when he interviewed me.
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He runs a business, owns 700 gyms, very successful entrepreneur out of California, and I think
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you're going to take a lot away from this video today.
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Again, multi-dimensional type of a conversation that I think you will appreciate.
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Welcome to another great episode of the Empire Podcast Show, Inside Look.
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Today, we have a very amazing friend, someone that I look up to, learn from, and of course,
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get entertained by Mr. Patrick Bedavid, founder and CEO of PHP Agency and Valuetainment, an
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First and foremost, I got to tell you, I got to...
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Well, mob bosses and people that infiltrated the mob had me so fascinated that I went back
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and watched Donnie Brasco and all those movies again, because I'm such a big fan of that
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I do have a question for you where that's concerned.
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If we lived in a different time, maybe if we went back, let's say, 40, 50 years, would
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I think if a Michael Francis was a father figure type, probably, and I would have probably done
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If I had a father figure like a Michael or a Sonny or one of those guys, most likely.
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Do you think you think like a gangster at times?
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We may talk here, but within your world, the bigger you get, there's a lot of people that
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This is not exciting to a lot of other people that own gyms.
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It's not even exciting to somebody that runs a different model when it comes down to franchising.
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And when it comes down to it, if it's between your five locations versus my five locations,
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So you get in the world of business being very, everybody wants to help, everybody's this,
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and then you realize there's a part of it that some of the people would take their side
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Now, I think the bottom line here as we start off the show is that entrepreneurship is a
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Well, we're killing spirits sometimes, and there's a lot of truth to that.
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Part of good marketing, I believe, is killing the spirit and the will of your competitor
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And I think all great entrepreneurs must do that.
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And so let's start off here before we get into value attainment and PHP.
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I'm very fascinated about your journey because, like me, you're an immigrant to the United
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What catapulted the move from Iran to come in here?
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Well, my father, my mother would go back, and my father would say, let's wait till we get
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And then when the war happened between Iran and Iraq, and Khomeini died June 3, 1989,
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We went to Germany, lived there for about a year and a half at a refugee camp, and then
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My parents didn't want me to serve the military over there.
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And once I hit 12, I can't leave for no reason in Iran.
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Yeah, so they wanted to get me out before I hit the age 12, so we can, you know, not
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get caught up being there till 20, 22 years old.
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Obviously, I came over here, and I served the U.S. Army, which was kind of wild.
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My mother was in Iran, and she got at a point where she ran out of money in the States, and
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My mother went to Iran, and she said, you have one of two choices.
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You can come back with me to Iran, or you can stay here and figure it out.
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I went to South Carolina, Fort Jackson, Kentucky, started the Army.
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So I'll give you the logical and the emotional.
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A guy named Jesus Guerrero kept following up with me since 14 years old.
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So he kept coming, saying, what do you want to do with your life?
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I don't know what I'm going to do with my life.
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He kept saying, you ought to consider the Army, all these other things.
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So one day, I'm living with my sister for a month.
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The following morning, we partied till 4 o'clock in the morning at her apartment.
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And in the morning, her boss came, you know, her, what do you call it, a landlord came
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to her saying, listen, you guys partied too hard last night.
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You know, there's bottles of tequila and vodka all over the jacuzzi.
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And in the morning, I woke up, they stole my Toyota Corolla 1983.
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I said, dad, take me to the recruiting station.
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I tell the guy, if you can get me in the Army tomorrow, I'm signing up.
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Come back two weeks later, I'm in South Carolina.
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Why, if you can get me in the Army tomorrow and not wait three months?
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I am a guy that when I make a decision, I make a decision.
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So for me, what has happened with maturity is I am now calculating a lot more reason and consequences of the decision.
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Because back then, I only had to think about one person as a decision goal.
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Today, I have to think about my employees, my investors, my family, my wife, my kids.
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The crusade, the cause, the vision, long-term, short-term.
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So I'm going to fast forward just for a second to today.
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Like today, you've got this amazing YouTube channel, Valuetainment, which truly, when I say,
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this man entertains me, guys and gals, my wife and I, I'm like, honey, you've got to
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I'm like, this is a guy, and Pat's interviewing him.
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For me as an entrepreneur, it doesn't matter who you're interviewing, whether it's athletes
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or Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belford, or any kind of former gangster, FBI agent, doesn't
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I can take something to apply to my life or my business.
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So it's entertaining, and I can extract value, hence Valuetainment.
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This obviously seems like your passion project, and you financially do very well in life that
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So if you go back in high school, if you and I hung out together, I told stories, I pulled
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I was the jokester, but the guy that would bring people together, and I was curious.
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I want to know about your parents, how your parents met.
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Even when we're upstairs, I'm asking you questions.
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I want to know your upbringing, older sister, older brother, six years old when you came out
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I'm looking at everything you're telling me, your age, you talk about your wife, the two
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Here's a story of a guy who's got a strong father, who was a card member of communism
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because he had no choice, comes to the States, tells you there's no way in the world you
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have, you're going to turn out to be nobody, wouldn't come here for you to be anybody.
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So for me, when I came out of the military, I wanted to be a bodybuilder, and then I hung out
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with bodybuilders, I realized it's way too much on the body and on the logical side.
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Six, three and a half, six, four bodybuilding today, you've got to be 330 to compete.
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I don't want to carry 330 pounds on this body frame and go with that.
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And then all of a sudden, I made a girl and got into the financial services.
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I was never going to sell stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
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So at this point, you're in your late 20s when you meet this girl?
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Bea, I think we were together, by the way, when I met her.
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I met her at Venice Beach, California, and then she's working on Morgan Stanley.
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So my resume had Bob's Big Boy, Burger King, Haagen-Dazs, you know, Bally's, and military.
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So I sent a resume with a joke on a cover letter, and I told them, I said, listen, you know,
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if you laugh after reading this joke, this is exactly how my customers are going to feel
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If you want somebody like this part of your team, give me a call.
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I took one of them with Morgan Stanley Glendale.
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And so this industry of financial services was never intentional.
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If I had it my way, I would have probably gone to entertainment.
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As in managing or agency, or actually being in front of the camera.
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You know, I'm the guy that for me, therapy is going to movies by myself at 10 o'clock in
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So I go to movies, and I'm sitting by myself, and I'll see the movie like, somebody will come
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back, and they'll say, you know, I am a legend.
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The director's trying to tell you, look at that.
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Sometimes we don't catch those additional messages that we need to get, right?
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So I realized today, the world we're living in, if you don't tell the world who you are,
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if you don't tell the camera of the world who you are, the world's going to tell the
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So a lot of people that say, well, I'm a private guy.
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Or you can get in front of the camera and say, this is who I am.
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You have to, because if you don't, no one really knows who you are.
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See, I can watch a couple videos of you, and you pop up, and you comment on Instagram,
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And I say, wow, this guy communicates very well.
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All I'm going to take is, those three people that I used to work with who didn't like you,
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they'll say, you never want to work with Petros.
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That is an overall lesson in how to create your legacy.
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So you were supposed to be, is there any aspiration in going into entertainment, film, still now?
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First 20 is just trying to figure life out and survive.
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I have to make it out of 20 without committing a massive crime, going to prison, or doing anything dumb.
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The big dumb mistakes you make in your first 20, I was lucky enough to graduate without making that.
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Hey, what was your dumbest mistake in your first 20?
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I mean, it was, association was my biggest part because I was so fascinated with, you know, authority.
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So it was like, hey, you're telling me what to do, you know.
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We're in Vegas one time, me and my four guys from Burbank 3, and we're driving down, and New York guys pulls up.
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And my dad and Albert are staying at the hotel.
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You don't know who PBD is, because financial services fell on you.
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They're going to knock on the door, and nothing happened.
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No, my dad and my mom had a divorce, and if he, you know, if this story got out that
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under my dad's watch that I see him once every other week, this happened, I would never see
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my best friend in the world, so I'm not throwing him under the bus.
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So mom's going to say, look what, you can't even control your 14-year-old kid who goes out.
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Well, mine was, there was no guns involved, but I was part of a home invasion robbery,
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So three of my friends enter a home that they think is empty.
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Turns out the little old lady is there, and so instead of just a rob and dash, it ends
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up in home invasion, is what the cops call it, because, well, the lady sees them, they
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come running out, and I'm thinking, did you guys get everything that quick?
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And I drive, and I see a helicopter, so it's a police helicopter chase, Brookhurst and La
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Palma is where I end up getting, you know, unmarked cars, police helicopter, pull over.
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As soon as we get out of the car, no one's running.
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We're sitting on the hood of a car, the four of us, those three guys who were in the house
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And she points out, yes, I saw his face, his face, his face, but she couldn't ID me because
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That was a turning corner for me that I will never break the law again.
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So that could have been something very permanent.
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So that could have been a very permanent scar on me.
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So I'm very grateful that that never went further.
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Well, if the old lady's watching, thank you so much for doing that.
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The economy's doing better because of this man here.
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So there you are now through the grace of this young woman that you're dating and who
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I went to Wilson Junior High School and then Glendale High School.
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So from Wilson Junior High, we would drive down Verdugo.
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And I lived on Broadway and Verdugo right across from, there's a, you know, post office
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He would tell me, okay, Pat, tell me a story today.
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So I'd say, listen, would you rather be a millionaire?
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The best, you know, the richest man in the world, the best baseball player in the world,
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the biggest rock star, the best Hollywood actor, which one would you want to be?
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These kind of, oh my gosh, if I'm baseball, I got that time Barry Bonds.
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Or what if I'm, you know, the rock star performing, 100,000?
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You know, when you, that song goes, it was all a dream.
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I mean, it literally was all about the dream, okay?
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I had one uncle who lived on upland off of San Antonio.
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I don't know if you know that area, like Snoop has a house up there.
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And every time I'd go to his house, it was a 7,200 square foot house.
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Kitchen where they would always hang out together and make breakfast.
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There was a Jacuzzi up there for he and his wife.
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And every time I was there, he would sit and his kids would come.
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He would say, let me tell you, I saw an argument the other day.
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God doesn't exist because of dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
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If God is predetermined and everything God knows what's going to happen next,
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And I would see this guy just asking all these questions.
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His kids, Dad, you don't know what you're talking about.
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This man named Luther Lazar, in backyard, tennis court, swimming pool, changing room,
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That was the only element of dream I had in my life.
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So for me, when I saw this girl and I said, look, anything to get out.
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I don't know if you ever did anything with Ballets and Anaheim.
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But Ballet Total Fitness, so for me, that was the way I got into it.
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And I said, if I can get in and they give me an opportunity, I'm going to make it work.
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Because from what I've heard, and you tell me if I'm right, you don't even start selling until months later.
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If you get recruited on intern, you're not selling for three years.
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You're not even taking your Series 7 for three years later.
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Then three years later, you give me the green light.
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Then I go take my 7 after I got my bachelor's degree from whoever.
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And so when I got the position, day one, they submitted my U4.
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U4 is what you submit to take your Series 7 exam.
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If you fail your Series 7 the first time, you're done.
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So I got started with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter a day before 9-11.
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3,700 employees at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter World Trade Center is gone.
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So our training went from World Trade Center to Mark Hopkins, San Francisco.
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And then at that time, Morgan had a minimum of $12 million you need to bring in your first year.
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So at some point, you decide, hey, I don't think I'm going to work for someone.
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It sounds like you were making, doing pretty well.
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I got a little bit of taste of money prior to Morgan making 10 or 20 grand in a month one time.
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And so from Morgan, at that time, my girlfriend at the time was an assistant to a guy who owned a windows company, a guy named Aaron.
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He was a New York guy that flew him from New York, came to L.A., but he made his money in New York.
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Perfect nails, flawless eyebrows, like plucked, like I'm talking like perfection, like, you know, the ones that you do.
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He would just come in and the way he would walk, he'd be very particular about shaking people's hands.
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So I'm sitting with him, and I said, hey, you know, I would tell my girlfriend, you've got to give me one-on-one time with him.
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He says, listen, your girlfriend keeps telling me you're going to be a millionaire one day.
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Never, ever work for a sexy, established company.
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He said, if you work for a sexy, established company, no one knows you.
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If you quit, you get fired, you're just another employee ID.
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I was there with him for about seven and a half years.
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And then October 20th of 2009, just said, we're going to leave and start a PHP agency.
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October 28th, the company I was a part of filed a lawsuit, 400-page lawsuit.
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It's the only time I've ever been sued in my life.
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And that, I went from having some savings that I saved in my 20s, depleted all the way
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I was playing poker, acting as if I got a million behind me.
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Never missed payroll, never missed commission, never missed anything.
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And it was a very dirty, this is part of the mafia thing that came in.
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I was the guy that was a nice, naive guy coming up, and it was cool.
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Now, obviously, I saw a lot of stuff in the streets, but I was optimistic about everybody
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And then you get into business, and you see a different side.
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A lot of people that were friends, all of a sudden, they're looking at you as an enemy.
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When people you came up with then see you as the enemy?
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Boghossians were Armenians, Bedavids were Assyrians, right?
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Now, you got to realize that, by the way, they believed in communism.
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So they were not card members because they had to.
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They were card members because they chose to, okay?
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And Today was like the communistic, you know, underground project in Iran.
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So when my parents got a divorce, if I hung out with my dad's family,
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And when I was with the Boghossian family, they would say, look at him.
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So they would both say, so I was eight, nine years old.
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I sat my uncles down and I sat my mother's family down.
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I said, let me explain to you something very simple here.
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There's only three people in my life that matter.
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I am simply good to you because you're my father's brothers.
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You're saying this at the age of eight or nine?
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How do you even have the wherewithal, the emotional wherewithal to say this to an adult?
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And in that culture, because that's the culture I come from, you're supposed to look up to them.
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You have to realize that these people are very good to me.
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I mean, my mother's brother is who brought caviar to me.
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He'd come at two o'clock in the morning at the party and he'd wake me up.
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We'd eat spoons of caviar together in Bandar Palavi, which is, you know, Caspian C.
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And Johnny and these guys over here, Victor, they were very good to me.
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Because I am here because I am Armenian proudly and I am Assyrian proudly.
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I'm Armenian and Assyrian, born in Iran and American.
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I'm proud to be Iranian, Armenian, Assyrian, and American.
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So I was used to that manipulative games when my parents got a divorce.
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And so when it happened, it was just purely flashbacks.
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In the next 10 years, you're going to love to be friends with me.
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So the level of patience to say to yourself, if I'm staying true on the way I treat you,
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your family, peers, people call me, ask about competitors.
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If I stay true to my game and everybody knows I'm predictable in the way I speak about everybody
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in the marketplace, eventually people are going to know who you really are.
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Your true color is eventually going to come out.
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Would you say you had a chip on your shoulder, Pat?
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I try to fix it so it doesn't come out every once in a while.
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What do you say to people who say, you know, hey, do something about that.
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I got a six-year-old, five-year-old, two-year-old, right?
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I don't mind my kids having a little bit of a chip.
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So my raising up my kids isn't the environment of don't fight in front of your kids,
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don't show conflict in front of your kids, let them not see.
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I come from the school of thought that they have to see.
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Now they're living with a father who's got a lot of money, successful, whatever.
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Everybody's always wanting to take care of you because your daddy's this.
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And, you know, but let's just say Mario is tough on my son.
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He says, Mario, don't talk to my son like that at all.
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If my son acts up with you and you try to discipline him, say we're friends, you will never hear it from me.
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Like, it's not going to come, hey, Petros, don't talk to my son like that.
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So, you know, I tried to find a way, like yesterday.
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I almost missed my flight to come to you, by the way, yesterday.
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Like, we were blowing stuff up, like with tanks, with blow, what was that thing called?
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I mean, we were doing, you know, Sherman tanks and shooting up drones.
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We're dealing with a guy that's an 18 Charlie guy.
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Then we go get a haircut to the two boys, which they like to get the haircut and the massage
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And then my oldest, every time he gets upset, he says, no one loves me.
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And he just wants to, you know, have this idea.
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And he wrote this nice letter to his friend Lennox.
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He rips the letter that he drew to his best friend and he trashes it.
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The moment that you drew that thing and wrote that letter for Lennox, you need to still share that emotion
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I said, you're going to go give this thing to him.
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Because you cannot hold back an emotion like that to somebody you love just because somebody else pissed you off.
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But he has to get that because you and I have the luxury of seeing a lot more terrible things when we were growing up.
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Why do you think that's a luxury that we had, the hardships?
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People ask me, what's the biggest difference when you were in the Army and you got out?
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Like, listen, a blind person cannot see what somebody with, you know, vision can see, right?
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At the same time, Richard Turner, whom I interviewed, who's the number one card mechanic in the world,
00:29:28.080
who's been blind since he was nine years old because one day he's in school, he's reading a book, he can't see anything here.
00:29:36.380
He becomes the number one card mechanic in the world.
00:29:48.760
I feel that left hand you just moved right now.
00:30:02.820
The only reason he has that, that's 20 years of experience of being blind.
00:30:12.100
You just kind of look around and everything's slow.
00:30:27.020
And that ship allows you to say, I don't know why we're afraid of this.
00:30:35.920
It brings a certain level of poise, confidence to the crew that you're running with.
00:30:43.220
You can only gain that from being in hell and back.
00:30:46.780
And so if you haven't had that, you've got to almost put yourself in certain situations
00:30:52.140
If you don't put yourself in those situations, no conference in the world is ever going to
00:30:59.160
So who's your favorite personality that you've had on value payment that you've interviewed?
00:31:06.000
Well, first of all, Michael and I are very good friends now.
00:31:10.840
Because of the show, he ended up getting a massive show in Vegas, which if you haven't
00:31:16.260
seen Mob Story, if you go to Vegas, you've got to watch Mob Story.
00:31:21.140
He tells a story about Hoffa, about Marilyn Monroe, how Marilyn Monroe really died and
00:31:30.700
Well, I mean, listen, I do believe the part that the mob had something to do with Kennedy
00:31:35.640
because I've asked that from a lot of different people and they have said yes.
00:31:38.400
Because when he became president, the mob helped him a lot.
00:31:43.120
And you know, in Chicago, I interviewed Abraham Bolden, who was the first African-American
00:31:48.280
He specifically said that 7,000 people in Chicago who voted for Kennedy were all dead.
00:31:57.380
So there was a lot of that stuff that happened that the mob helped out.
00:32:05.280
I respect somebody that's gone through hell and back and for her to be a firm believer,
00:32:14.860
But, you know, you can't explain what she went through in 1984 when she got raped in
00:32:21.200
From there, she decides to come out and become who she is.
00:32:23.960
You are never going to change a person's mind like that.
00:32:35.040
The ones that I like the most, you will know which ones I don't like if they're only less,
00:32:39.240
if it's less than 40 minutes, I was really not enjoying myself.
00:32:43.220
So look at anything below 40, and I'm saying it.
00:33:02.220
You know, you did something that's big, but it's not that, you know, so you can't pull
00:33:09.860
But yeah, if any interviews below 40, I didn't enjoy it.
00:33:12.040
Any interview above an hour, I'm pretty much enjoying myself.
00:33:19.260
And this is an agency where it's financial services.
00:33:29.340
So we have 8,200 insurance agents in 49 states.
00:33:45.280
Gabriel Brenner is an investor who's the first Mexican-born professional sports owner in America
00:33:49.660
and Adelaia Fund out of New York, which is a $2 billion fund.
00:33:52.020
We have 60 employees that support 8,200 agents.
00:34:06.140
How often do you get a big group of these agents together to pump them up, motivate them, give them clarity on vision?
00:34:12.320
So it used to be more before than now because if you think I tell the story, well, you have to hear them tell the story.
00:34:19.780
I mean, you would think these guys are the founders of the company when you hear them tell the story.
00:34:28.760
And, you know, they're incredible at what they're doing.
00:34:31.200
So now it's more, I go out when needed, but for the most part, our guys are doing it.
00:34:36.340
We do do one big conference every year, which we did in August.
00:34:44.820
I mean, it was, listen, it was absolutely as untraditional as a conference in the financial industry as it could be.
00:34:52.040
Because Kevin Hart said the F word maybe 200 times.
00:34:56.020
And our carriers are not used to this because it's a lot of good old boy, you know.
00:35:06.000
You know, our average agent is a 34-year-old Hispanic female.
00:35:16.860
I'm curious, was this by structure or is this just how it turned out?
00:35:24.360
Yeah, so I like immigrants who are hard workers.
00:35:32.780
To be like, you and I would get along very well because you know what it is to pay the price.
00:35:36.600
Then no one has to explain to you what time to get up, what time to work.
00:35:41.100
And then when it comes down to support team, I recruit April babies.
00:35:53.200
When it comes down to support, when it comes down to feel.
00:35:59.180
We've had some amazing people there from Tom Bilyeu to Jesse Itzler to using astrology
00:36:07.000
to decide who's going into support and service.
00:36:12.740
So because I ask so many questions, I'm a numbers guy.
00:36:17.540
So you say July 22nd, and my brain, I go and say, who's in July?
00:36:21.780
And then I go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
00:36:23.840
What is the level of consistency for 70% of them?
00:36:35.120
Now, by the way, for me, it's more months than it is astrology.
00:36:38.400
So a lot of astrology, people don't like it when I say that because it's more months than
00:36:43.520
I must, I've missed it by one day, you know, I've, you know, so that part.
00:36:47.000
So then for field, for field, like running the agency, I like June, I like July.
00:36:53.600
I'm very comfortable when June and July, when they deal with sales organization, but that's,
00:36:57.300
you know, those, now you got to realize, of course there's an anomaly.
00:37:00.020
I'm just telling you stuff that I see that for me, it's like, okay, I'm comfortable with
00:37:04.100
So October, February, April, home office, June, July, dealing with the field.
00:37:12.780
And in such a short time, nine years is a very short run.
00:37:14.940
And it's ironic that you did it in such a short time.
00:37:17.740
So the economy crashes and you decide that you're going to go into business and get sued
00:37:22.800
I mean, you didn't decide to get sued, but that was an outcome of you quitting and moving
00:37:29.820
Because right now we're living in one of the best economies ever.
00:37:37.340
What is your mindset like in 2009 when the unemployment is 11 and a half percent and the
00:37:44.280
I mean, I am so looking forward to the next crash.
00:37:47.520
I am, I am so enthusiastic about the next crash.
00:37:51.300
But I hear everybody saying this right now, but Patrick, what are you crazy?
00:38:00.020
I can't even describe to you how much I'm looking forward to.
00:38:05.720
When the crash happened, okay, wealth is not made in times like this.
00:38:11.100
The people that are making real wealth today is because they were ready in 07.
00:38:16.080
Not because, some of the people are making money, oh my gosh, I turned $7,000 into $228,000
00:38:23.200
I'm talking about a guy today who is preparing himself for the next 12, 24, 36, four or five
00:38:33.360
Every five years we have a small dip, but every 10 years we've had a good size crash.
00:38:44.300
In a market you'll see, oh my gosh, she's scared.
00:38:58.880
And you see some guys saying, boom, boom, boom.
00:39:02.760
Because everything is on sale when a crash happens.
00:39:08.100
When a mortgage, when mortgage was booming, if you went to LA, you know this, S500 was
00:39:32.060
Everybody was getting financed at a $1.5 million home.
00:39:34.840
Refinanced, make $200 grand, $2.5 million home, $3 million home.
00:39:47.100
And some people said, well, I'm going to stay in because I'm on the long call and all this
00:39:51.000
Well, they lost a lot of the money and then they started doing REO, all these other things,
00:39:55.740
Right now, something's going to happen in the next five years.
00:39:58.820
And the people that are going to make massive wealth are the ones that save cash.
00:40:12.620
So right now is a great time to have a lot of cash.
00:40:15.900
Because what would you do with that cash if tomorrow morning you wake up and the economy
00:40:18.980
A Mickey Mantle card PSA 8 sells for $1.5 million today.
00:40:26.480
When the crash happens, that Mickey Mantle card is going to sell for $300,000, $400,000.
00:40:33.800
Ten years later, that Mickey Mantle card is going to sell for $3.5 million.
00:40:37.480
A Mickey Mantle PSA 10 1952 Topps just sold for $12 million.
00:40:47.260
All of these things that people don't know how to buy.
00:40:50.020
These are all things that are $1 million, $3 million.
00:40:52.820
When crisis happened, they bought it because the market was doing good.
00:40:55.620
You go to the people that bought all those fancy stuff when the market was doing good.
00:41:03.680
This is a perfect time to be sitting on a lot of cash.
00:41:07.120
I sat with a guy who was the grandmaster of backgammon, Victor Ashkenazi.
00:41:11.820
I think you and him would do very, very good together.
00:41:20.220
And three days before the market crashed, I said, how do you feel about the market?
00:41:24.220
I think my opinion, I think we're about to experience a massive crash.
00:41:40.480
The issue with China right now, midterms, there's a lot of manipulation that's going to be taking place.
00:41:45.520
And so you've got to be careful on what's going on with the people that are the decision makers behind the president.
00:41:50.360
Not necessarily the president, but the people that control Fed, all these other things.
00:42:03.320
If you're watching this, if you're listening to this on a podcast, there's so many deep layers of lessons in here for the entrepreneur who's new, who's seasoned, and who's ready to strike.
00:42:13.280
I had the good fortune, Pat, in late 2007, 2008, as the economy crashed, as you can imagine, I'm coaching and consulting personal trainers, gym owners.
00:42:23.440
And, well, all of a sudden, they stop getting clients because people start losing money.
00:42:27.220
They don't want to get a one-on-one personal trainer, which means one-on-one personal trainers stop working with me.
00:42:33.400
I turned the outdoor boot camp model into an indoor model and franchised it within the next two years.
00:42:41.460
And so every time I look at an economy crash, people say, well, the money went away.
00:42:47.980
My mindset is the money just exchanged hands, and I just need to know whose hands it went into and what offer I can make that person.
00:42:54.760
And so I love how you explained this, that you've got to be sitting on cash right now because opportunities are going to come, whether it's a Picasso painting, whether it's a Mickey Mantle card, whether it's someone who's got a competing business that's going to sell it to you at wholesale.
00:43:07.640
So what is the future for Patrick but David through this agency, with the agency, and also with Valuetainment?
00:43:15.120
Like, what is the big outcome you're trying to achieve in the next five years?
00:43:23.620
We have sold more insurance policies than the prior quarter, 14 quarters in a row.
00:43:28.840
We've been up, like, two years ago, we were selling 500 policies a month.
00:43:32.120
Two months ago, we sold 4,773 insurance policies in one month.
00:43:40.540
So we've grown three years in a row at a worst-case scenario, 75%.
00:43:46.100
Worst-case scenario, we've grown at a 75% that's three years in a row.
00:43:53.680
We just made the biggest investment into technology, multi-seven figures.
00:43:56.500
We invested in this technology that's going to condense time frames of processing from 15 minutes to two minutes to catching things that we need to catch.
00:44:06.820
So we're excited about this technology we're creating.
00:44:10.620
And the part of the insurance industry today is most of the insurance companies, the carriers, the big companies, they tried selling policies career-side.
00:44:20.300
Career-side is if you work for New York Life, I'm New York Life, your career.
00:44:25.140
If you work for Northwestern Mutual, you're courier, right?
00:44:28.840
If you sell for AIG, Nationwide, XYZ, you're independent, okay?
00:44:36.000
A lot of the insurance companies banked on courier for many years.
00:44:40.840
So once they fired their courier, they had to rely on what?
00:44:43.560
Because they thought, I'm going to go into the Internet, and I'm going to sell insurance on the Internet.
00:44:48.580
Nobody in the right mind buys life insurance on the Internet.
00:44:51.780
Nobody wakes up and says, honey, let's go buy life insurance today on the Internet.
00:45:08.760
So someone has to come to you for you to get the willingness to want to buy a policy.
00:45:13.080
So Internet, once Google realized how much money these insurance companies are making,
00:45:17.600
the most expensive word on Google today is insurance.
00:45:23.300
So if you go on Google and you type in most expensive word on Google, it's going to come
00:45:30.380
It's a real nice pie chart to actually see visually.
00:45:33.340
So they realize Internet's going to be too expensive for them to sell insurance on the
00:45:38.200
When you look at distribution, for the most part, it's taken.
00:45:40.600
Farmers has their own, but you can't sell them.
00:45:52.920
We are still in a place where a carrier can say, we need distribution.
00:46:00.620
We need to do something about it to lock us in.
00:46:05.880
Valuetainment side, we're about to cross a million subs.
00:46:08.000
When we said we're going to cross a million subs, we're going to do a two and a half day
00:46:14.380
And that's going to be exciting once we do that.
00:46:16.320
It's going to be, you know, A to Z, how to think, how to decide, how to process, hiring,
00:46:24.780
It's not going to be, you know, sometimes you go to conferences, you can buy my package for
00:46:34.940
You're going to have a handbook and we're processing each issue on how for you to level
00:46:40.820
up, leaving with the community of valutainers to help you grow your business to the next
00:46:44.640
So people are going to come from all over the world to help entrepreneurs expand.
00:46:47.840
And this valutainment community is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
00:46:50.220
So with that part to me, I'm committed to spreading the concept of capitalism around
00:46:55.780
I think if we want to really minimize unemployment, crime, a lot of these other things, if we
00:47:00.060
increase entrepreneurs, a lot of those things will go lower.
00:47:03.460
As far as the entertainment story stuff, we got some special cool things coming up soon
00:47:09.800
So before we wrap up, obviously you're one hell of a leader.
00:47:13.180
You're a great entrepreneur, marketer, forward thinker.
00:47:15.700
And if there was a young man or young woman who is an emerging entrepreneur and you're only
00:47:21.280
going to see them one time and there's two, three, four pieces of advice by way of being
00:47:25.200
an entrepreneur that you could impart with them, what would those messages be?
00:47:29.760
So this is one of the things that I notice young people don't have.
00:47:34.060
They typically don't have an answer to what they want.
00:47:37.280
The scariest people in the world is somebody that's clear on what they want.
00:47:40.500
When I was single, I thought I knew what I wanted as a woman.
00:47:43.660
So I'd go date and one time I dated the same kind of girl with three different girls.
00:47:49.140
When I tell you, Petro, it's identical, it's the same exact girl, same exact girl, same
00:47:54.960
And one day I sat down and I'm like, oh, you know what, all these girls, you know, the
00:47:57.660
market today doesn't have any good girls and all this other stuff.
00:47:59.800
You know, the victim side, oh, they're not out there, right?
00:48:03.460
And then I sat down one day and I read a book, 101 Questions to Ask.
00:48:08.860
And I literally went through every single one of the questions.
00:48:11.160
What I thought I was looking for, I wasn't looking for.
00:48:14.520
What I thought I was looking for was on the outset.
00:48:16.700
What I thought I was looking for that was really important to me and what things were
00:48:42.720
A week later at her house, six hours, we went through every single question together.
00:48:50.180
You know, what are some of the stuff on the path?
00:48:51.680
So, if a young person's watching this, when I got clear on what I wanted, everything became
00:48:59.460
I knew what kind of a business I wanted to build.
00:49:01.040
I knew what kind of a friend I wanted to have in my life.
00:49:02.740
I knew what kind of people I wanted to mentor me.
00:49:04.820
I realized exactly what's the right kind of a mentor.
00:49:11.100
The reason why we get a lot of these things to come, we don't go to them.
00:49:17.400
I don't do a lot of speaking because we don't accept a lot of speaking ourselves.
00:49:34.860
You meet a lot of people online that are mentors and they read 200 books and now they're theories
00:49:39.380
on how to build a business, but they've never built a business.
00:49:45.160
So the experience is, there's a big difference between you being a salesperson versus having
00:49:52.780
It's a very, there's a reason why so many people don't do it.
00:49:58.860
He's applied and knows what works and what doesn't work.
00:50:01.880
So my eye got very clear in knowing who to take counsel from and I wanted to be around
00:50:09.280
Look for trifecta type of mentors around you because you're not getting gibberish.
00:50:16.400
Like my friend Bradford sitting back there, his background in the military is special ops,
00:50:25.060
I can't tell you what it is to be into war and seven people did and I'm carrying one
00:50:33.120
If it's coming to military, I can't give you stories.
00:50:35.940
So the moment I went to that and I saw people giving me advice on what to do with my business,
00:50:40.600
I always asked a set of questions and I realized this is a T person.
00:50:46.860
I want to be around trifecta types of people because their counsel is always going to give me
00:50:51.220
the blind spot that most people will miss, a trifecta person won't help you miss it.
00:50:55.740
A trifecta person will say, by the way, these three things I just told you, you could still
00:50:59.300
do it wrong if you don't pay attention to X, Y, Z. That's the trifecta.
00:51:02.840
So those are some of the things I would tell the younger entrepreneur to be thinking about.
00:51:06.500
So I'm fascinated that you're so into mentorship because I was going to ask you, when is it
00:51:14.780
And then, of course, you said when we hit a million subs, we're going to launch this big
00:51:19.560
And so I'm curious, do you plan on creating some kind of a coaching mentoring thing?
00:51:25.000
Because you've got to have people banging down your door saying, hey, mentor me, coach
00:51:29.040
I want to experience what you know as an entrepreneur.
00:51:34.340
And I don't want it to come across as a takeaway or an arrogant approach at all.
00:51:42.420
I like speaking to people that are building a business that are maybe past phase one.
00:51:46.480
Phase one, people just go watch Valuetainment and come to a Valuetainment conference.
00:51:50.420
You're going to be inspired to want to go into phase two.
00:51:53.000
But when you're talking to a phase two, phase three CEO, that is where I can give direction
00:51:59.940
Phase one, there's plenty of contact to help you go from zero to six figures.
00:52:03.240
You don't need a direct relationship to go to six figures today.
00:52:10.740
When we were coming up, it was like, you talked about the books.
00:52:14.220
Tom Hopkins led you to, you know, Brian Tracy led you to, Abram led you to, Kennedy, then
00:52:21.140
So you went through that part and you read the book.
00:52:24.520
Today, YouTube, you can sit on YouTube today and watch the right videos, the right videos
00:52:32.480
If you don't get to six figure income, purely you don't have the work ethic.
00:52:35.680
I want to get to the part where I'm going with a guy that's doing 10 million to go to
00:52:41.600
That's where I get excited about it because the numbers are scalable.
00:52:44.560
And it's typically two, three small things you find to tweak where a guy just goes like
00:52:50.980
Three years ago, he started watching Valuetainment.
00:53:07.480
I brought somebody that was just in my business group.
00:53:09.320
So we're probably going to go into that direction, but it'll be people that have already built
00:53:17.300
I had a feeling that was the direction you're going.
00:53:18.980
And I think that there's a massive vacuum in there for someone just like you.
00:53:27.840
Instagram, PatrickBedDavid, Twitter, PatrickBedDavid, and YouTube.
00:53:33.160
I do have one more question before we can log off.
00:53:39.040
Did you guys craft that to go viral or was that just it went viral?
00:53:43.860
So we made the video and we went on YouTube and the title was Best Motivational Video 2015.
00:53:59.400
I'm like, Mario, this thing didn't do that good.
00:54:00.940
Mario is always like, well, Pat, you've got to think about the long term.
00:54:11.340
And so I was with the founder of Lululemon, Chip Wilson.
00:54:16.360
When it comes out, it's going to be sick when it comes out with Chip Wilson, his new book, Little Black Sketchy Pants.
00:54:23.500
One of the things he said is, he says, I asked him, I said, are you ever happy?
00:54:28.020
He says, a true creative person is never content with what he's creating.
00:54:31.280
The moment they produce a product, they don't like the product.
00:54:34.000
The moment they, I was blown away by what he said with that, right?
00:54:36.720
Here's a $3.9 billion guy saying from the moment he produced a product, he was never happy with it.
00:54:41.460
It was always like, I have to make you better, make you better, make you better.
00:54:43.320
That's why sometimes it's hard to work with somebody like that, right?
00:54:46.320
So going back to the question with the Life of an Entrepreneur video.
00:54:57.300
I'm about to take my kids trick or treat, and we're going to go to Northridge Mall,
00:55:00.500
and then we're going to go to some friends and go trick or treat.
00:55:04.860
I uploaded on Facebook without telling Mario, I said, I'm going to change the title.
00:55:13.320
So I said, Life of an Entrepreneur in 90 Seconds.
00:55:16.180
So I changed the title from Best Motivational Video to Life of an Entrepreneur in 90 Seconds,
00:55:23.480
And then all of a sudden, I look at my phone on Facebook.
00:55:28.060
That's a lot of views if you've never had a quarter million views.
00:55:41.720
The amount of emails in 24 hours, I got 25,000 emails.
00:55:48.500
That ultimate self-discovery questionnaire on the website was taken 33,000 times.
00:55:56.760
And then obviously it goes 10 million, 20 million, and 31 million views later.
00:56:02.620
It's inspired a lot of people around the world.
00:56:05.740
Yes, but just because you did it once, let me tell you, to do it again, it's not like, well, we're going to do it again.
00:56:13.480
There is some luck when it comes down to virality.
00:56:16.920
Mr. Patrick, but David, thank you so much for spending time with us here at The Empire Show.
00:56:21.720
And, of course, if you're not following Patrick, please be sure to follow him.
00:56:28.060
And you will get a really good glimpse into the history of what makes this man an amazing entrepreneur.
00:56:36.220
And, by the way, if you haven't already subscribed to Valuetainment on iTunes, please do so.
00:56:43.600
And if you have any questions for me that you may have, you can always find me on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.
00:56:51.680
And I actually do respond back when you snap me or send me a message on Instagram.