Aired 4 months ago 17:27

Lean In...

During your troubles you’ve got two options, run away or lean in. On this episode Russell talks about something his friend and former employee Steven Larsen said to him in passing, but had a big impact on him. Here are some of the awesome things to look forward to in this episode. What Steven meant when he told his sister to lean in, instead of giving up. What would be different in Russell’s life if he hadn’t chosen to lean in at different times. Why you should always lean in when times get hard instead of walking away. So listen here to find out what would be different in Russell’s life if he had walked away instead of leaning in. ---Transcript--- Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I just dropped my kids off at school and now we get to hang out. Hey everyone, I hope you guys are doing amazing. I am trying to get on a better rhythm of doing podcasts consistently. I had this really weird thing where like I’ll get in the mood and I’ll do like 10 in a row, and then I’ll get out of the mood and I won’t do some for a while. And I’m trying to get more consistent where we get two or three a week. So I apologize for my inconsistency, but I’m grateful for you guys and for listening in. And hopefully you get good stuff each time. You know, it’s been fun doing this now for 500+ episodes, and if you haven’t gotten the Marketing Secrets black book yet, go to Marketingsecrets.com/blackbook. Some of you guys know that Julie Stoien and I went through, and she listened to every episode and took notes on them all and then rewrote them into a book of the top 99 takeaways from this podcast. So to shortcut your life a little bit, go and get those, print them out, that’s what everyone’s been doing, printing them and reading them. But it will catch you up on the Marketing Secrets, the last 5 years of the best and most important ahas and things like that. That’s a freebie for you guys. But today I had a specific thing I wanted to share with you and I’v ebeen wanting to talk about this for a little while, but life’s been a little crazy right now, trying to get done some big projects. This month of October is crazy, I’m speaking all over, flying a bunch of places, we’re doing an event for Two Comma Club X members and a whole bunch of other things. Rebuilding the whole company structure, anyway, I could go on and on. But it’s so much fun. I love what we do. I love that we get to play this game every day. Anyway, what I wanted to share with you guys today, it was kind of fun, Steven Larsen was in the office the other day. Some of you guys know we launched the One Funnel Away Challenge, which has been nuts. We had over 7500 people sign up for it. It’s 100 dollar challenge, so 7500 people paid $100 to be a part of it, and every day for 30 days Steven jumps on and yells at everybody and pushes them forward through some curriculum that we’re taking people through. Again, it’s called the One Funnel Away Challenge, a lot of you guys are part of it. If you’re not part of it, then it’s because you didn’t pay attention to the 30days.com launch we did recently. Anyway, for all you guys who are in there, it’s been so much fun. It’s been fun though because Steven comes into the office everyday, which I miss having him there, he used to be there every day. You know he had to go out and start his own business and all that kind of stuff, which I am proud of him for. Just teasing, it is really cool. But I am really grateful to be able to pull him into that because it’s fun to see him everyday and see him in his element where he’s jumping on it, and training and motivating and pushing, just doing his thing. It’s amazing. This new program though, this One Funnel Away Challenge is going to change a ton of people’s lives and I’m excited for all of you guys who are going through it. But I digress, the reason why I’m telling this story is, he was in the office and we were talking aobut a bunch of stuff, and we were actually talking about the Two Comma Club X coaching program, which is something we sold at the last Funnel Hacking Live, and I think we had 650ish people join it. And it’s not a cheap program, it’s $18 grand a year or $1800 a month. And a lot of people came in at $1800 a month, which obviously is not a cheap investment, but at the same time, I talked about when we sold it, I was like, “It’s less than half the cost of a crappy employee.” And you’re getting access to all these coaches and all these things. So far we’ve done three or four events, I’m doing a two day event this month that only they are allowed to come to. It’s expensive but it’s also super cheap, you know what I mean. And we’re talking about some people that had dropped out of it for whatever reason. And some people have dropped out for legitimate reasons, I totally understand that. But the story I wanted to tell you today was interesting, was about Steven’s sister Marie. She joined the program, and she was probably in a group of a bunch of people that probably shouldn’t have joined. I think for some people it was as much money as they were making at the time, and they still just jumped in because they saw the vision, they wanted the thing and they jumped in. And it was interesting, Steven was telling me this story that like two months into the program, I think it was the second or the third month, the next $1800 a month payment came up and she was freaking out. And had kind of a thing like, “Oh my gosh, I’m not making enough money for this. I can’t do this, I need to drop out.” And she told Steven, “I can’t do this, I need to be out of it.” And Steven listened to her talk about all the reasons why she needed to drop out, and he listened to it and after she got done saying all the reasons why she should drop out, then he said, “Or you should lean in.” And that is the message for you today, “Or you should lean in.” What does that mean? You should lean into it, instead of freaking out, “oh, I can’t handle this.” Let’s lean in and double down and go all in. And when you do that’s when amazing things happen. And to Marie’s credit, she did. She leaned in and during that time got through the scary bumpiness and launched her business and right now her business is doing somewhere between 8 and 10 thousand dollars a month, which is amazing and insane and so cool. She’s helping people launch podcast. It’s like my podcast, if I was working with her  I would record this and send it to her and she would just somehow make it magically show up on iTunes right. My brother does that for me. But that’s what she does for people now and she’s killing it. But it’s because during the turbulent times of backing out and running away, she leaned in. I want you to think about everything great that’s happened in your life. For those who went into sports, think about the hardest times, the times..I only know wrestling because that’s my world. But the times where I needed to cut weight or I had to go get someone who was really, really tough, or I lost a match or whatever, those are the times you want to quit right. You’re like, “I’m out.” And back out and walk away from it. But it was in those times that instead of backing out, I leaned in and had success. Yesterday, it was kind of fun, we were working on a video and I was like, “I need my old wrestling matches from back in the day.” So my brother, Scott, he had them all on his hard drive so he dumped them all onto Google drive, so I was looking at all these old videos of me through high school and college wrestling. So I was kind of going down this jaunt down memory lane, and I saw in there the match my junior year where I lost to this guy named Nick Fresquez, the very first match of the season. And I remember this because we recorded it, but I think my mom accidently recorded over it or something like that, but we had a 22 second clip of that match and it was when Nick did this move on me that was the move he beat me with. And I remember my dad used to watch that 22 second clip over and over and over and over again. I’d come up during the season, I’d wake up in the morning and he’d be upstairs watching it and he’s like, “Russell come here, come here.” And he’d sit me down on the carpet and he’d show me how the move worked and we would drill it, and go to the wrestling room later and drill the move. Man, we must have watched that 22 second clip of my loss like a thousand times or more during that next four months of the wrestling season. And we’d practice it and practice it and practice it. And yesterday I found the match of me winning the state title, and we’re watching it and seeing as I did that move, the same move he did on me to beat me at the first of the season is the same move I used on him to beat him in the state finals. And I was thinking about that, I was like, in context of this whole concept that Steven shared with me about leaning in, I was just like, man, if I hadn’t leaned in to that, if I would have been like, “Oh my gosh I lost to him.” And had fear and all these things, then I never would have been a state champ, which man, life circumstances since that moment that brought me to where I am today, all hinged upon that moment. It’s kind of crazy, if we were to go back in time that far. Right so in sports, the times it was the most painful and scary and the things I freaked out about the most, is when I leaned in, when greatness came. I think about marriage, I love my wife, I love my kids, but marriage isn’t easy. I thought it was going to be. I’m not going to lie, if I was to go back to Russell 20 years ago, I was struggling through life just waiting to be married, then everything will be good. And my marriage has been amazing , but man it’s been hard. And I think my wife agrees, it was way harder than we thought. And it’s those times where it’s hard where it’s like, man it would be so easy just to like, back out. “I can’t afford the monthly payment.” Boom, back out. But instead I leaned in. I was like, I love her, I’ve committed to this, I’m doing it. And because of that is how we’ve made a marriage that wasn’t just good, but a marriage that’s great. I think about it in business, how many times I could tell you the stories of me building a company and crashing it, and building and crashing it. I’m working on, we’re doing this event in Utah, the Dry Bar Comedy club in two weeks, or I guess it’s a week and a half now. I want to make an outline of the history of my business, so I went to the good old way back machine and went to try to find every single funnel that I’ve ever built. And I forgot how much stuff I’ve done, how many software products we’ve launched, how many info products, how many courses, how many viral sites, how many list building sites, it’s crazy. I haven’t finished the list yet, I’m already at ten pages of links to funnels that I built. And these aren’t just like, every page in the funnel, because I can’t in the way back machine. Way back shows you snapshots of your websites back, as far back as the way back machine was created. If you never used the way back machine by the way, you should go. Go to archive.org, in fact, do this for fun. Go to archive.org, that’s the way back machine, type in dotcomsecrets.com, my site, and go look at the history of my site, you’ll see every variation of Russell over the last ten years on that site. Every blog I launched on there, everything. But it’s fun to see the back, the history of these things. So I went to way back machine and was trying to find all these things, and you can’t see the upsells or downsells, so I can just find the landing page of every funnel I’ve ever created in my life, and it’s ten pages now of funnels. And I’m going through this and I’m laughing at some. Some of them were the worst ideas ever. Some that completely bombed. Some that I spent literally millions of dollars on that never went live. In fact, there were two or three that I found that I was sick to my stomach. I was like, I spent four years of my life, I had six full time developers I was paying a million and a half, two million a year for these guys, and none of these ever saw the light of day. I’m like, ugh. Some of them were the pre-cursers to clickfunnels. I remember clickdotcom.com was the pre-curser to clickfunnels, and I saw this thing. That was one that we literally spent, I’d say conservatively at least a million and probably closer to two or three million we spent on that thing. I found all the screen shots, all the everything, but it never went live. Nobody ever saw it. But had I not leaned into that and tried to build that, we wouldn’t be at Clickfunnels today. I think there are like 5 different software programs we created that were all pre-cursers to Clickfunnels. One of them was an RSS auto-responder, one was a desktop auto-responder, one was a funnel building software, one was a shopping cart. All these things that I tried to build that failed. I found this site, champion sound, this is like, I was in the brinks of bankruptcy, literally. I had just had to fire 80 of my employees and we moved from a 20 thousand square foot office to a 2 thousand, I had 150,000 in IRS back taxes that I owed and I was trying to figure out how in the world to save the company and save myself from bankruptcy. And If I would have gone bankrupt, I still had all this outstanding coaching liability. So I would have destroyed my reputation. So I was on this thing where if I would have given up I would have gone to jail and destroyed my reputation. So I was like I can’t give up, I have to lean in, I’m being forced to. I remember I had, I was on Flippa.com, trying to buy a website, trying to figure out my future, and at like 2:00 in the morning I saw this site called Championsound.com, which you should plug that into the way back machine, you’ll see what it is. Anyway, it was an email, text message auto-responder fro bands, and I was like, “Oh my gosh this could be the greatest thing in the world. I could start this thing, we could sell it to bands, and I could re-launch or clone the site and launch an email/text message auto-responder for dentists, and chiropractors, and I was like, “This is the future of my business.” So I leaned in, took 20 thousand dollars I didn’t have, bought the website. And then what’s crazy, when we tried to make it go live, or after I bought it and they tried to transfer it to me, they’re like, I gave them access to my server, and they’re like, “No, I need a server that can run Ruby on Rails.” I was like, “What’s Ruby on Rails?” they’re like, “Oh, it’s like a different language.” I’m like, “What?” I’d never even heard that word before. And I remember none of the development guys I had on my team at the time knew Ruby on Rails. I tried to hire people on Odesk to do Ruby on Rails, and I couldn’t find anyone that could do it. Man, after three or four months of trying to find somebody who could edit the software, after they installed and then left, and then all these things were broken, it wasn’t working, all the customers were angry and it was horrible. I literally, after that three months that I was like, “I just wasted 20 thousand dollars that we didn’t have. Just shut it down.” The servers were like a thousand bucks a month too, they were super expensive. They just shut it down. And I was packing up my bags for the day and was walking out, and as I walked away from my desk, I stopped for a second and I was like, “Wait a minute, I wonder if there’s anyone on my list who knows Ruby on Rails?” which is a stupid thing to say, because at the time my list was a bunch of business opportunity seekers, and they weren’t programmers or developers, but I had that thought in my head. So I walked back into my desk, I leaned in, sent an email to my list saying, “If you know Ruby on Rails, I’m looking for a partner.” And that email happened to land in the inbox of somebody who had bought my micro continuity product five years earlier and happened to be on my email list. But because my subject line said Ruby on Rails and partner, he saw that and he said, “I’m looking for a partnership with a marketer, I know Ruby on Rails.” And it was Todd Dickerson who responded back. And anyone who knows my story, knows that Todd is my cofounder of Clickfunnels, he’s the one who built it. And had I not bought Champion sound, had I not leaned in with the last bit of money we had, if we had not tried to get it to work, if I had not instead of giving up, had I not sent an email to my list…if I hadn’t done all these little things, that email would have never landed in Todd Dickerson’s inbox, and Clickfunnels wouldn’t be here today. So my message for you guys today, I know that in all areas of your life there’s up and downs, and typically when everything’s up in business, something going to be down somewhere else. Sorry guys, they’re blowing leaves behind me. When you’re up in business you’re going to be down in your spiritual life. When you’re up in your spiritual life, your business is going to go down. Or you’re up in personal health your business will collapse, or your marriage will collapse. There’s always going to be ups and downs and I don’t think anyone has ever had it where everything is perfect all the time, if so life would be too easy. So it kind of cycles like that. And I say, you know whatever season of your life you’re in, where you’re in that hard time, instead of running away from that hard thing, do what Steven said to Marie, and lean it. Yeah you could, you could walk away. Yeah, there’s a million reasons why you shouldn’t do this, but you know it’s right, you know it’s good, you committed to it, so let’s lean in instead of step away. And if you do that I promise you greatness is just on the other side of that. If Marie wouldn’t have leaned in, where would she be today? Would that company ever be there, would all the people she’s serving now, would she be able to serve them? Probably not. If I wouldn’t have leaned into sports, would I have become a state champ and an All-American, and wrestled in college, and ended up in Boise where I needed to be to be able to create Clickfunnels. In my marriage, all the hard times where I wouldn’t have leaned in, would I be where I am today with my amazing wife and my amazing kids? I got the coolest kids in the world. Last night we were downstairs because we are re-doing our bedroom, so we’re sleeping down in the basement right now, and on the big screen I wanted to show my wife a video, so I showed the video and then we stared looking at all the videos in our camera roll. And then somehow, I don’t even know how this works, but somehow on iTunes, on the big screen tv, they had all these clips from way back in the day, that somehow got save to iTunes or iCloud or I don’t know, something. So we’re watching these videos of our kids from back in like, like Aiden who is 8 years old now, there’s videos of him when he was like a newborn. And there’s this one, he’s probably, I don’t know, maybe 3 years old, and he had on Ellie’s swimsuit, so it’s like a pink and purple swimsuit and he’s dancing. And we’re like crying/laughing last night watching him dancing and in the video Collette’s like, “Aiden someday we’re going to send this to your wife.” And he in the video is like, “Mom, why don’t you send it to her right now?” We were just dying laughing at him in his little stick legs dancing in her swimsuit. And we’re sitting there just laughing our faces off and I was like, man, there were so many times in this marriage where either of us could have walked away. So many times in our relationship, and we’re like sitting here and just laughing at that and realizing how happy we are and how grateful we are for each other and how grateful we are for our amazing kids. But that didn’t come from stepping away from the challenge, it came from leaning in. So there’s the message for today, thank you Steven Larsen for sharing that with me the other day. He said it kind of in passing, but it had a big impact on me and  I wanted to share it with you guys. And hopefully that will help someone in your moment of struggle in any area of your life, just remember to lean in. Thanks so much and we’ll talk to you guys soon.

Marketing Secrets

Aired Last month 25:04

We Are Funnel Hackers And These Are Our Stories - Part 1 of 3

On this special episode we will hear part one of Russell’s first presentation at Funnel Hacking Live 2018. Here are some of the inspirational things you will hear in today’s episode: Hear stories of other funnel hackers in the community and some of the things they have done. Hear a little of Russell’s story and how Clickfunnels came to fruition. And be introduced to Todd Dickerson, Clickfunnels co-founder and Russell’s business partner, and hear some of the stats of Clickfunnels and it’s members. So listen here to hear part one of this very special three part presentation from Funnel Hacking Live 2018. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you enjoyed the last few episodes, we brought in one of our, my favorite presentations from Funnel Hacking Live number two when Sean Stephenson came and talked about all his amazing stuff, insecurities and finding people, and I hope you loved it as much as I did. With that said, right now I am cramming for the 10x event, I’m going to be speaking in front of 35,000 people in like 10 days. And then right after that we’ve got Funnel Hacking Live coming up, where we got 4000 people. Anyway, my life is a little bit hectic and crazy as you can probably tell. So because of that, I thought let’s bring another amazing presentation from one of our past Funnel Hacking Live’s to share with you while I am prepping for Funnel Hacking Live. And I’m sure I will be slipping in a couple more really fun episodes as I’m planning and preparing, and probably post 10x event to probably give you guys an update. But I didn’t want the podcast to slow down. So what I’m going to do right now actually is my very first presentation from last year’s Funnel Hacking Live event.  For those who were there, I hope you loved it. For those who weren’t there, it’ll hopefully tease you and get you excited for Funnel Hacking Live. So if you haven’t got your tickets yet, we’re probably sold out by the time you hear this, if not we will be sold out very, very soon. You gotta go to FunnelHackingLive.com to get tickets. But this whole presentation is one, the event happened at Disney World, so I talked a lot about Walt Disney and shared some really cool stories from him. I talk about Value Ladder, I talk about the three phases of a company going from, you know, phase one-figuring out the what and the how. Phase two and phase three, I’m not going to ruin the surprise for you. Anyway, a lot of fun. So I hope you guys enjoy. We’ll break this up over the next couple of days. But I hope you enjoy these episodes and it gets you excited for Funnel Hacking Live. For those who are coming, I cannot wait to see you. For those who aren’t coming, this should push you over the edge. Go get your tickets, FunnelHackingLive.com. Thanks so much. With that said, let’s queue up the intro, and then we’ll start with the next presentation. Oh man, are you guys excited for this. I was in my room and I could feel you guys screaming and shouting when the doors opened, it was amazing. Thank you guys so much for coming here. I am insanely excited. We have killed ourselves over the last few months putting this together and I’m so excited to be here today with all you guys here at Disney World. Now to kick this off, this year’s theme is a little bit different than last year’s. Hopefully all you guys got your t-shirts yesterday. And we made a really cool video that I want to show you guys that will kind of introduce this year’s theme and what we’re trying to do, so I’m going to queue up this video right now. Video: “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently, they’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, about the only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some might see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” Russell: Thank you. It’s pretty special, when we were planning this event last year we thought, how cool would it be to go to Disney and do this in Disney World? There’s so many amazing stories about their whole journey and how Walt Disney built this company. And I was researching Disney and studying him and his life before we came here and I heard a really amazing story. On Walt’s death bed, he was literally in a hospital, he was about to pass away and this reporter wanted to interview him. And they kept getting pushed off and pushed off because he wasn’t well enough to do it. And finally this reporter got the ability to come in and interview Walt. And he came in and started asking questions and he couldn’t understand a word that Walt was saying. So Walt motioned to him, “Come here, come here.” So the reporter actually laid down in the bed next to Walt Disney, and he’s laying there for 30 minutes and Walt was looking at the ceiling showing this vision to this reporter of this place that we’re in today; of Disney World. And he started explaining, “This is how we’re going to do the restaurants and the rides, this is where people are going to come, and this is how it’s going to change their life.” And he sat there for 30 minutes. Spent 30 minutes describing this place where we’re at today, five years before it was ever built. Not only was he describing his vision, but he was describing his role that he would play in that future, which is crazy from someone who is about to pass away. And I think for all of, as entrepreneurs, as people, as leaders, this is what I want all of us to be thinking about this weekend. The way to live, to truly live, is to believe so much in your vision, in your mission, that even on your death bed you’re going to whisper it in another person’s ear, explain what your vision is so it won’t die without you. What’s interesting is five years after Walt Disney passed away, they dedicated, they were opening up this place, Disney World and all this stuff was happening, he was going crazy and one of the reporters actually came up to one of the main people at Walt Disney, in charge of Disney, and said to him, “Man, it’s a shame that Walt couldn’t have lived to see this moment.” And this person looked back at the reporter and said, “you don’t understand, he did see it, he did see it and that’s why we’re here today.” And when I heard that story I was just like, how powerful is that? How many of us have a vision and we just know no matter what happens we have to get it out, we have to do whatever it takes? I guess that’s why most of you guys are here today, which is really fun. This is one of my favorite Walt Disney quotes. How many of you guys have seen the movie, Meet The Robinson’s? If you have kids you’ve probably seen it. If not, it’s one of my favorite movies. At the very end of the movie they share a quote and it said, “Around here however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. And that’s what entrepreneurship is all about. That’s what we’re doing. Every day we have a chance to wake up and figure out what we’re going to create, what we’re going to make, what we’re going to, whose life are we going to change, which is like, the most exciting thing in the world. Now in this room right now we’ve got about 3000 of you guys and every one of you guys have a different story. And I wanted to share a couple of the stories here. I wish I could share everybody’s story, but we’d be here for like 6 months. But there’s a couple of stories I wanted to share that had a huge impact on me over the last 6 months to a year, as we’re building Clickfunnels. We hear these stories of people coming in and they have emotional impacts on us. I hear this story and on our team meetings with our entire company I tell everyone the story, because I don’t want anyone in our company ever feeling like we are a software company. As soon as we believe we’re a software company, we become like every other software company. And we become boring and bland and you crazy people don’t run through the door screaming like you did earlier today. We’re more than that, we’re changing people’s lives. So when we hear these stories, I love sharing with everyone on my team, and I want to share a couple with you guys today. So this one right here, first off, is Paul and Stacy, are you guys here? Can you stand up? Let’s give them a round of applause. I had a chance to meet these guys a few months ago, they came to Boise, Idaho, the greatest place on Earth. And while they were there I met them really briefly and then I had a chance after they went to the first event, they signed up for one of our higher end coaching programs and they stayed for another couple of days. And I didn’t know much about what they did or who they were. And then they got onstage in our little office and they shared their mission, what they were doing. And they told their story and most of our businesses are built out of something painful in the past. Something happened that we didn’t like that made us cause a change, which made us create something which now gives us the ability to help and serve other people. The wounds we have are typically wounds we heal for other people. And Stacy and Paul they were telling their story about how, I think it was 18-19 years ago they were in a relationship and the relationship started to break and it was horrible, it was a horrible thing. And Stacy realized that to save this relationship she had to change. It wasn’t like, “I gotta change him.” Like most people do in a relationship, she’s like, “It’s me. I have to change this if we’re going to work.” So she did the most difficult thing that human beings can do and she changed. And because of that they ended up making an amazing relationship and a marriage, and over the last 15 years of their life, they’ve helped over ten thousand couples to save their marriage and bring back the spark for more than 10 thousand more. Yeah, give them a round of applause. One of my goals for this entire event is hopefully to give them one or two little ideas so they can help 10 thousand more, 20 thousand more, 100 thousand more. When they came to the last event, they, her webinars she told me, converting at .5%, is this right? One half of one percent. What was your last webinar converted at? 28.5%, amazing. That’s why we do what we do. The next one I want to share is Annie Grace, is Annie in the audience? There’s Annie right here, give her a round of applause as well. So Annie came to this event last year, that was your first Funnel Hacking Live, right? She came last year and she was on a mission. So her backstory, she was in corporate America and the job she had they basically told her, “Hey you need to be able to socially drink. That’s how it works, if you want to raise up the corporations. You gotta be part of this.” So she was going on these business trips and she was drinking, and eventually she kept drinking and drinking to the point where she became addicted to it. Alcohol is very addictive. And after a couple of years she realized, “This is not the way I want to live my life anymore. This is not how things are supposed to be.” So she decided to try and break the chains of alcohol addiction. And for anybody who’s tried that process, you know it’s not a simple thing. And she didn’t want to go to AA and things like that, so she figured, “I gotta figure out a different way to do this.” And she went through a journey for 18 months, figuring out how to break herself from the chains of alcohol addiction. And then she did. And then she could have just left right there and been like, “Okay cool, I’m fixed.” But she said, “No, this is something I now need to help other people with.” And so she went out there with this message to share with other people and as I asked her the other day, I’m like, “Give me some impact numbers. What’s happened in the last year or so?” Over 50,000 people are now in her online communities doing a 30 day alcohol experiment helping themselves to break the chains of alcohol addiction. Is that amazing? Awesome. Think about that. All these numbers are amazing. 50,000 people are amazing, but think about for each of those people there’s a family and there’s kids, and there’s other relationships and the ripple effect that grows from it is amazing. Next one I want to share is from Pamela. Pamela, where are you at? Let’s give Pamela a round of applause. Pamela is actually going to be on Dr. Oz Thursday, right. So we gave her a pass to skip whatever sessions so she can watch herself on TV, it’s kind of a big deal. But I met Pamela last year as well, she came to one of our events. And at first I didn’t know what she did, and she came back and did a little presentation to our group and she told her story and within about 15 minutes, all of us were crying our eyes out. What Pamela does, she’s a doctor. And when she was going through medical school, medical school is tough. I’ve never went through it, but it’s a difficult process. And she was telling me the other day, she was actually at a funeral for the 8th or 9th suicide victim, doctor suicide, one of her friends. And at the time she was like, “I have to fix this.” So she started a suicide hotline. And I don’t know if you guys knew this, doctor’s have the highest suicide rate of any profession, almost double the number two if I’m correct, and there’s no one out there helping them. No one’s talking. So she spent the last three years filming a documentary. She’s been out there writing books, she’s written two different books talking about this thing, she has a hotlines for doctors to call in. She runs retreats and she’s literally save hundreds of doctor’s lives. But on top of that, each of these doctor’s lives, who she’s saved, he’s been able to impact thousands and tens of thousands of patients on top of that, which is amazing. And I love Pamela and her story. She’s such an amazing person. The funniest thing she told me on the message, she’s like, “Hey, before Clickfunnels I didn’t dare to take payments online, so I made people mail me checks, in the mail, to try to change their lives. Now I can get people to give me money online and we can actually help them, and it’s growing very, very fast.” So she’s going to be on Dr. Oz this week and she’s going to impact millions more lives, which is the coolest thing in the world. So I’m grateful for her. And like I said, there’s so many stories. One last story I want to share with you guys, because we’re going to be talking about this actually a lot today, this is Tim Ballard. I don’t know if Tim’s in the room right now, he may not be. So Tim runs an organization called Operation Underground Railroad. Who here has ever heard of Operation Underground Railroad? Very cool. So this is a mission I’ve gotten behind a lot in the last 6 or so months. Tim goes to the darkest, most evil spots in this planet and goes and finds kids, takes them and rescues them from a hell they can’t escape by themselves. And last year he saved over a thousand children and he’s helped arrest over 433 traffickers and it’s growing from there. Now tonight you guys are going to have a really cool opportunity. At about 5 o’clock tonight I’m actually going to bring him onstage and also another guest. We spent the last few months actually filming a documentary. And him and Nick Nanton’s going to come up here. And Nick and his team actually went down to Haiti during these raids, strapped GoPro camera’s on their heads and on their guns and actually went and saved kids and filmed a documentary. So 5 o’clock we’re going to show you the trailer of that documentary and you’re going to have a chance to meet Tim and meet Nick and then we’re going to have a break where we’re going to do this vendor speed dating, which is going to be a ton of fun. And we’re paying for dinner tonight, which will be a lot of fun. And then after that, for those who would like to, we’re actually going to be showing the entire documentary. It’s 85 minutes long, and you’ll have a chance to see what’s happening in the world. And not only see, my goal from this event, I want to make an impact. And not a little impact, I want to make a huge impact. We’re going to save a lot of kid’s lives during the next four days and then I’m going to ask for all your guy’s help on Saturday. After Tony Robbins talks to you all, we’re going to talk about how we can take this, this darkness, this evil. If you look at how slavery was broken back in the time of Abraham Lincoln, the way it was destroyed was people shone a light on it. What I want us to do as funnel hackers, I want to shine the biggest light possible on this problem so that the cock roaches in the room have to scurry away and disappear. And we’re going to disrupt this and make a lot of noise and I need all your guys’ help to do that. Are you guys okay with that? Alright. So there’s four of the 3000+ stories in this room, you guys. And that’s the reason why we do what we do. That’s why our team is so obsessed with making the software better, with training, with making you guys better at what you do because I know that every single one of you guys are not going to change one person’s life, you’re going to change hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands. And that’s why we do this. So my question for you guys, I want you to think about right. What’s your vision? Why are you here? Why did you jump in a plane? Some of you guys got stuck in tornado warnings for hours, flying around in circles trying to get here. What is your vision? Why are you here? What are you guys trying to create? Who are the people you want to serve? Because that’s the key to business. As soon as, for me and I don’t know about you guys, but for me when I started shifting my focus from “How can I make money? How can I make money?” to these questions, who is my mission? What am I trying to create? Who can I serve? That’s when the money came. That was the shift. So I want you guys thinking about this the entire week. What’s your vision? What are you trying to create? Who do you want to serve? And again, this is the quote, the theme for this entire weekend. Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers (that’s all of you guys), the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently, they’re not quite fond of the rules, they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. The only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things and they push the human race forward. And while some of you may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do. I love that. And then for those of you guys, some of you are kind of new to our cult-ure. How many of you guys are kind of new to this whole world? Welcome. For those of you guys who are quite sure what is your vision? What’s your mission? Who has no idea yet? Like, “I’m here, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m just excited.” How many of you guys are that? So for you guys, that’s okay. I want to share with you, this is one of my favorite quotes of all time from Winston Churchill. Winston said, “To each there comes in a lifetime that special moment when they will be figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents.” It’s true, for all of you guys. God didn’t put you on this earth just to walk around. There’s a purpose for all of you guys here. You’re here training, learning, trying to understand that. And that’s why I’m so grateful for you guys making the effort to be here. We have a lot of Clickfunnels members, 5% of you are here. The rest aren’t. You guys are the ones who are here to try to make the biggest change and the biggest impact. The quote goes on and says, “What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.” A lot of you guys don’t know what that is yet. I didn’t know what it was for me for years, for decades. And the more I moved forward the more I keep finding out, what’s the mission? What am I supposed to, I don’t know what it is. I’m just running forward as fast as I can. So don’t be nervous if you’re not sure yet. Just know that you’re in the right spot, you’re around a whole bunch of people who are here to help serve you, and to keep running forward and you’ll find that you find those things that you can do, and eventually it will come to you. And you’re going to be like, “This is my thing. This is what I was created to do.” And you’ll find that out. So I want to talk really quick about the vision for Clickfunnels. Now that I’ve kind of challenged you guys to think about your vision I want to share my vision. So Clickfunnels was created with a goal. Our goal was to free all entrepreneurs so they could share their gifts with the world. I honestly believe that entrepreneurs are the only people that can actually change this planet. I don’t think it’s politicians, I don’t think it’s government, I think it’s entrepreneurs. We’re the ones who are crazy enough to go out there and try to change things. Right? Do you guys agree with that? Yeah. So that’s the reason we want to free all entrepreneurs so that you guys can focus on changing your customers’ lives. That’s our goal. Now, I want to actually introduce a special friend and a partner. And before I bring him up I wanted to kind of tell a quick story. So this is my cofounder and my business partner Todd Dickerson. And a lot of times I’m the one on stage jumping around like a dancing monkey and people know who I am. They’re like, “Russell, you created Clickfunnels.” And I’m like, “I didn’t create, I don’t know how to code.” I hate to break that to any of you guys who didn’t know that. All I know is when we had this vision, this wasn’t a unique thing. I was not the very first person to say, “We should build a platform where people can do all their entire business on it.” Many people have tried over and over and over again. I tried three times myself in the past and failed. It wasn’t until I met Todd, we were sitting there in a room one day and we start mapping out this vision once again, for the 4th time, and Todd said, “I can do that.” And I was like, “Everyone’s tried dude, I don’t know if we can.” And he’s like, “No, I can do that. I can do it.” So we mapped out the vision in Boise, Idaho in front of a whiteboard in our little tiny office at the time. He jumped in a plane, flew back home and spent the next 6-8 months of his life in a room coding what became Clickfunnels. And this was not like the easiest thing in the world, as you can image. Most companies that we were competing against have dev teams of 80-90 people. We’ve got a Todd, and Todd built the initial Clickfunnels, and he is one of the most amazing human beings I ever met in my life. So what I want you guys to do, I want everyone to stand up and give Todd Dickerson a huge round of applause as he comes up onstage. Todd: That’s awesome. What’s up Funnel Hackers? Russell: This is such an honor for me to be onstage with Todd, this is like the coolest thing in the world. So just so you guys know, September 23rd 2014 was the day that my life, Todd’s life and all your lives changed forever. That was the day that he clicked live and Clickfunnels actually went live. Now this is obviously a lot of work on his end, prior to that to get to that point. But do you want to talk about what’s happened in the last couple of years since we’ve gone live? Todd: Oh my gosh. Well of course our original expectation was we were going to have 10,000 member week one. It ended up taking us about one year to get there though. So year one we ended up with 10,000 people. And then year two we actually rolled up and hit 20,000. Year three, we went crazy-50,000. Russell: Dude, that’s awesome. Todd: Well today, I pulled the latest stats, this morning, as of this morning we have 60,000+ active members. Insane, absolutely insane. Russell: That is amazing. Todd: I got another awesome stat for you guys. So this is insane, right. You guys have officially joined the three comma club, as a group. Processed over a billion dollars, through Clickfunnels, that we can track. That’s not even everything, we can’t even track everything. So it’s pretty crazy. Russell: That’s a billion with a “B”. I want to put this into perspective for you guys. I’m not that good at geography and math and all that kind of stuff, but there are 15 other countries who GDP is not as high as that. What that means is that if Clickfunnels was a country and we were the people of Funnel Hackers, we have a higher GDP than 15 other countries here on planet earth. Is that insane? Todd: Yeah, that’s awesome. Insane. Russell: And Todd’s going to run for president of that country, it’s going to be amazing. Todd: Clickfunnels Island. Russell: A couple other amazing things about you guys, what you guys have accomplished in the last few years. 258 of you so far have joined the Two Comma Club. Todd: Congrats. Russell: Where’s my Two Comma Club. Stand up here, stand up really quick so every can see them. Todd: Awesome. Russell: I want everyone to look around. These are your peers. Some of these people were in this room last year, thinking the same thing, like, “Holy cow. That guy made a Two Comma Club award and now he’s sitting next to me.” It’s amazing. Alright, you guys can sit down. We’ve got a new award. You want to announce the new awards coming out this year. Todd: Oh yeah. So we’re going to announce this for the first time ever, we have just created the 8 figure award. 17 people have qualified for it at this point, 17 of you. So ten million dollars in Clickfunnels. Russell: Where’s our 8 figure award winners? Can we stand up? Insane. So last year before the event, before we launched Two Comma Club award, I told Dave, “Can you pull the stats and see how many won the Two Comma Club.” I’m like, “I’m guessing it’s probably 15-20 people or so that made a million dollars with clickfunnels.” I think last year was 93, and now we’re at 258. And this year 17 have made over 10 million dollars in a funnel. And there’s people who encroaching upon the 9 figure one, so we gotta go make another award for next year, there are people who are getting close. The four minute mile, just so you guys know, it got broken, and then it got broken again, and it’s about to get broken again. So for all you guys who are sitting here wondering, these are the people who have done it. Grab them during the breaks, ask them questions. It’s possible. We’re seeing it happen all the time, so don’t dismiss it, it’s true, it’s real. Todd: You can do it. Russell: it’s insane. Again, our mission for Clickfunnels is this, is to help free all entrepreneurs so you guys can focus on changing the lives of your customers. With that said, let’s all give Todd a huge round of applause. Todd: Thank you, thank you very much. Russell: So tomorrow, not tomorrow, Friday we’re going to be bringing up all the Two Comma Club Winners and awarding their trophies, as well as the new ones, so I want to make sure you guys are all in for that. I promise you, if you’re in the room and you watch that, it’s going to be something that’s going to change your life because you’ll be like, “That’s my new goal.” If you’re in the Two Comma Club, your next goal is for X, if you’re just beginning, it’s going to be Two Comma Club. And I want you guys to see that and see all the people who are doing it. Because for me, as soon as I realized it was possible, then I was able to do it. And I want you guys to all see that it’s possible and it’s happening every single day.

Marketing Secrets

Aired 4 months ago 29:02

Helping Business Owners Be Seen - Joe Fier & Matt Wolfe - FHR #283

Why Dave Decided to talk to Joe and Matt: Joe Fier & Matt Wolfe are the co-founders of Evergreen Profits and absolutely love showing people how simple it really is to get seen online in competitive industries. They share their system of driving targeted traffic that turns into leads and sales to business owners who want to scale (but have failed in the past). They aren't an agency (they're pretty much the anti-agency). Having generated over $100 million for themselves and their clients, Matt and Joe pride themselves on helping other business owners who want to be seen,  and give great advice on affiliate marketing strategies and audience growth systems. Tips and Tricks for You and Your Business: Traffic strategies (2:30) SEO strategies (4:10) Creating content around affiliate offers (7:30) Using ManyChat as live chat (12:40) Funnel Stacking (15:50) Quotable Moments: "People want to be talked to as a human, not an automated bot" Tools: Yoast SEO EvergreenProfits.com/funnelhacker Links:FunnelHackerRadio.com FunnelHackerRadio.com/freetrial FunnelHackerRadio.com/dreamcar ---Transcript--- Speaker 1:     00:00       Welcome to funnel hacker radio podcast, where we go behind the scenes and uncover the tactics and strategies top entrepreneurs are using to make more sales, dominate their markets, and how you can get those same results. Here's your host, Dave Woodward. Well everybody. Welcome back to funnel hack Speaker 2:     00:18       radio. I'm your host, Dave Woodward. You guys are in for a treat today. I have opted to have two amazing podcast host as well as guys who are absolutely crushing it. So let me know just to you guys, Joe and Matt Wolfe. What can the show guys? Hey man, how you doing? Thanks for having us on. I'm so happy to have you guys. So these guys are the cohost of hustle and Flowchart, which is an amazing, amazing a podcast. They've got cool, cool guys on there. I just know she had Tom Breeze on a couple of other guys. I've noticed obviously Billie Jean and the whole list. I'm like, Gosh, these events. Read them. Know a lot of these guys. Good Friends of mine. So it's a mucks. The most important thing that I want to make sure those guys who are listening. The reason I wanted to have Joel and Matt on today is these guys are almost anti agency and I want to kind of address why would, why we bring up anti agencies. Speaker 2:     01:06       The main specialty they really have is driving massive amounts of content. Also a of traffic, I'm sorry, using ads and content, podcasts being one of those content pieces, but one of the really cool things these days right now is they have this weird like super power of being able to be seen everywhere, but by the right people. Everyone these days talks about being seen everywhere. It really doesn't matter if you've seen everywhere, if no one cares about you, so we're going to talk today about is how to get seen everywhere by the right people, how to do affiliate marketing the right way, how to actually use ads, content traffic, so hold on tight guys. It's gonna be a fun podcast and super excited at both you guys on the show. This is our favorite topic is just kind of opening up some eyeballs to how traffic can actually be done effectively and not extensively and it's a super easy. Speaker 2:     01:53       Once you get that foundation layer, well do I know that's one of the biggest things most people struggle with is this feels like to do traffic. I got to spend thousands and thousands of dollars. I never know which dollar really works and which one doesn't. It's kind of proverbial going back to the old branding days and you know, 50 percent is going to work. I just don't know which 50 percent it actually is. So with that, let's kind of dive right in guys. So tell me what, where do we start? How does, where do you want to take this thing? All right, so you know, probably the best way to approach this. I'll kind of give a quick breakdown of our traffic strategy and then you can kind of pick it apart if you want and we'll just dive deeper and deeper into it. So the way we drive traffic, is it sort of a combo of Google ads, Seo and facebook ads? Speaker 2:     02:32       Um, so what we'll do is we'll create a piece of content around the problem that our product solves. So a blog post on our wordpress blog, we'll create a piece of content and we'll go to google and we'll find what people are searching for keywords around the content that our problem solves. We're not trying to sell them on that first touch. So for example, one of the examples I gave on a previous podcast was, um, let's say you have a home remedy for, okay. Um, somebody goes to Google and says a in, how do I cure heartburn at home? Right? Well, that person is looking for a solution to their problem. You put content in front of them with some tips on home remedies for heartburn. Now that they've used that content, they essentially raised their hand and said, look, we've got this issue. That's how we know that this problem is interested now, or this person is interested in what we have to offer. Speaker 2:     03:23       Now what we're gonna do is we're going to retarget the heck out of them everywhere. So they're gonna start seeing our ads to our product offering on facebook, on Google display network, on youtube ads onto Bula. Uh, you name it. We've probably experimenting with retargeting on those places, so the key ideas use google search ads so that people are searching for the problems that they have, put content in front of them related to that problem and then just retarget them everywhere once they viewed that piece of content. So that's the sort of game plan in a nutshell that, that we operate under and we do it with both our own products and with affiliate products Speaker 3:     03:56       in our podcast and our podcast. So I'm really curious because Seo is one of the things I just suck at. I've never done anything. You get this thing out. The whole idea as far as google content scares me. It's how do you, how do you really do this thing effectively without having to outsource all of it or do you outsource at all? So there's a combo. We do outsource a little bit. We actually hired some interns and have have a little team as well. We're lean and mean, so we're not a big company so. But it appears that we have this massive budget, which is really cool. It's only being shown to the right people. All these ads, so for Seo, we always use a yoast seo plugin for wordpress sites, so just the free version can do a lot for you if you just turn the all the lights inside the plugin green. I mean that's a good first step. I mean everyone should be doing this and we didn't focus on that for a very long time. We did that for about two months with all the previous existing posts and now what do you know? Organic traffic is the number one player for us. That's how we get most of our traffic. So the retargeting Seo while ast, is that right? Why O a s t a r y s t, Speaker 2:     05:05       yeah, and if you're not familiar with that plugin and essentially what you do is you install it and then we write a new blog post. It says what keyword you're trying to rank for. You plug in that keyword and then we'll give you a whole bunch of suggestions of how to optimize that post so that it ranks for that keyword. So you just kind of follow the list. If you follow the list, there's a little light that starts out red saying you're not optimized. If you follow the list, the light turns green and you're now on Speaker 3:     05:26       page optimized for Seo tools. I'd love to see. Yeah, I mean it's great for existing content. We're all sitting on a bunch of it, so let's optimize that and then you can go further with some new keywords. So how you guys didn't use that on your podcast Speaker 2:     05:42       and cast. We specifically try to rank for our guest's name. That's kind of our big game plan with the podcast is anybody who comes on our show, we want to be on page one for that guest's name. We want our episode with them to be on page one so people will search for, let's say had dave Woodward on our show. They searched Dave Woodward. We're ranked number three probably below your site and you know, maybe click funnels and some of the stuff you're involved in, but ideally we show up on page one as, um, an interview with you that people are interested in. They click into our blog, they click deeper into our blog, defined other, you know, other things, and then based on what they look at on our blog, we then retarget them with offers. Awesome. So you're taking that podcast, make a transcript out of it as a blog article, taking that blog article using seo yoast and other tools to then rank for that Speaker 3:     06:29       guess. Yeah, exactly. And we see it as a big segmentation tool. Any piece of content, no matter what you're producing, we just, she's podcast. It's easy for us. We have a system and it's multipurpose, you know, we can go across the web and upload a transcript to things like a medium, you know, or use that on medium.com. You can make them into slideshare, pdfs and then get traffic that way. So we're big into repurposing, but bringing it into our, bringing people into our ecosystem so we can let those retargeting pixels do their work. Speaker 2:     06:58       Yeah, I love it. Well, I'm really curious on the affiliate side of things because this is one of the things that people are always bugging me about. You know, at first obviously you click phones, has our dream car award winning thing, so you get 40 percent recurring commission plus if you get to a hundred accounts on a monthly basis, you get $500 a month for your car twitter accounts, you get a thousand. So we've always got people saying, how do I get a car, how do I get a car, how do I get this money? And one of the things people I struggle with trying to help people understand is there's more to it than just taking our current links and blasted him everywhere. You are just magical at really creating content around affiliate offers. I want to spend some time on that. Sure. Speaker 3:     07:37       Sounds good. Um, yeah, so we start with I guess our approach. We'll start there as we like to work with tools that we love and ones that we use in our own business so we can put our knowledge, our experience behind all the content that we create around that tool. So, uh, yeah, we'll, we'll usually also work with folks that we kind of know who probably have act like better the relationships we have with that affiliate offer, let's just say that helps the entire thing. So we'll start with creating content and we'll select probably the top five common objections and then from there, you know, that's where we can start pointing ads on Google for instance. And then, um, that's more or less our first touch from Google ads to a piece of content. And then from there we have pixels for Google, facebook, youtube, there's, I mean there's all sorts of different platforms you can retarget on. That's where we call it our cleanup crew. More or less, you didn't buy on the first touch. There's always a call to action inside the value giving a blog post there. But we know that it's gonna take multiple touches. So we feed the Pixel. That's what the guys like. Vince Reed, Billie Jean, all those guys, you mentioned a Tom Breeze, they're all big on feeding the pixel. I think that's the big thing. People have to get over it. Speaker 2:     08:50       Don't go what that means because we hear that term feed the pigs all the time, but I don't people really understand what feed the pixel really needs. Yeah. So if you want to do retargeting, which is, you know, you, someone lands on your website once and now they're cookie cookie drops onto their browser. That's the pixel that you would grab from a facebook or Google ad platform. Uh, so that would be the pixel we're talking about there. And for retargeting you can build this audience. So the Pixel is essentially creating this new audience of visitors who are engaging with your content. So basically the idea is you put a piece of content in front of people, your pixels on there, anybody who views this piece of content is going to see our other ads. So we want to get as many eyeballs on this piece of content as possible so that more people see our other ads. Speaker 2:     09:37       So that's essentially what feeding the pixel is so that our ads are being retargeted all over the place to more and more and more people. I love it. Super Cool. And I guess one little wrap a bow on that, a lot of folks try to get super targeted on, uh, the, you know, the platforms she feed the pixel, you're leveraging their algorithms and the, yeah, the rocket scientists that work at Google and facebook, let's leverage what they've done really well, feed that Pixel and let them do the hard work. Yeah, we'll follow up when it comes to advertising. We've actually kind of gotten in the habit of selecting less and less options inside of facebook and Google and letting facebook and Google optimize for us. So you know, we're going to start with some, some very broad like interest targets on facebook, you know, we may start with like digital marketing or something like that which has $20 million fans, but it's still pretty broad and then we won't set any other targeting and if you let it run for like a week or two overtime, facebook's going to start to figure out which of these people are converting and which aren't. Speaker 2:     10:35       And they're going to start putting more of the right people in front of your ads. So I love that idea. That is super cool, so on the affiliate side, because affiliate marketing is one of the most can be a struggle for a lot of people because they have so many other people competing for the same type of words. Everything else. What are some of the key things you guys are doing? I know you guys, first of all said you take is find out what are the five objections or things about what else? I think there's a lot of ways with affiliate marketing that we go probably way above what most people are willing to do, which is why we've been so successful at it. Um, you know, real quick, I want to make sure we talked about that kind of success because you guys are just your normal affiliate marketers who are making a couple hundred thousand 100 bucks, a thousand bucks or even 100,000. Speaker 2:     11:18       You guys are like seven figure affiliate award winning marketer. I mean, you guys totally get this thing right now. Eighty percent of our business affiliate marketing is our main income stream. We do sell courses and things, but affiliate marketing is our main revenue stream. Um, if you want to learn how we're doing it, that's what we have the courses for, but we make enough money doing what we do. So, um, so, so as far as affiliate marketing goes, there's so many things that we'll do. So, a, we always like to create a landing page so we're never going to send straight to our clickfunnels affiliate link. We're going to send them to some sort of a piece of content that maybe compares click funnels to other alternatives that are there, that explains the various ways we're using click funnels in our business, things like that. We're going to create a lot of content around click funnels and why you should want click funnels. Speaker 2:     12:01       So that's where we're going to drive our Google ad traffic to. Um, another thing that we do is on our landing pages, we always put a little mini chat. I'm not sure if you're familiar with mini chat, but a little of course chat Bot that basically will allow people to communicate with you over facebook messenger. We put that on all of our, all of our pages everywhere across the Internet. So if somebody's interested in affiliate product and they have a question, they get access to me or joe or one of our two team members that are actually in mini chat fielding questions. So we'll actually get into mini chat and close sales over mini chat of products that we don't even own. Um, now I'm want to stop you there because this is one of the things that people screw things up with many chat is they've had this idea as far as it set it and forget it type of approach. Speaker 2:     12:44       You guys are actually, that's one of the things I love about what you guys do. You guys actually using mini chat as live chat, which is something most people don't even consider. It's like, you know, I don't want to do that. I'm just going to set it up and let it run and whatever happens happens. So yeah, we used to use, which was kind of the same idea, a little button thing that said, hey, do you have any questions? They message us and then we'd go into the dark app and respond to people when the mini chat opened up the version where you can do the, essentially the same thing, but it goes to facebook messenger. We got rid of our can just put that on there instead. But yeah, I mean the first two messages are actual automated messages. Like, Hey, what do you need help with, you know, select one of these options that applies. They click one, maybe there's a link to like an Faq or a video or something. And then beyond that a real person jumps in and actually communicates. Speaker 3:     13:32       And we have a whole system. So this is, I'm happy to bring this up because no one is doing this, not even for their own products. And we've had a, we just actually spoke to Mike mcalary of profit first and he bought a product from us and uh, and he noted he was like, you do better customer service than the actual product owners do affiliates doing this because of the follow up. And people want to be talked to like a human, not an automated Bot. People mainly think it's about talking to them. I'm like, no, no, no, no. This is joe here. This is Matt and I'll even do. We'll sometimes do loom videos where it's a customized screen capture maybe a minute or 200 percent of the time. Ninety eight percent of the time people are like, holy crap, you just took that time for me. Like personalized and by then you're pretty much close. They're telling everybody else about their experience. So it's super cool. Not very many chats. Amazing. You can do a lot, but flipping it to be pushed. Personalized and humanlike I think is the key. Um, so deeper down the, the affiliate funnel, Speaker 2:     14:36       no, the list around every single product we promote. So we have a list of people that are interested in click funnels. We have a list of people that are interested in thrivecart and other tool. We promote pushcrew yeah, we do push crew notification. So when, whenever we want do a promotion, we send it out to our entire push crew lists. Um, I don't know. We actually have an affiliate marketing course. It's got 120 different ways to promote products as an affiliate and if you just did them all, I mean there's no reason you can't make six figures a month doing it. Okay, so stop right there and tell people where they can get that because I've known them. People are going to go crazy. So how do they actually get that course? So that would be the best places to go to evergreen profits.com/funnel hacker. Speaker 2:     15:16       So you'll get a book actually, it's a little free book for the coastlines that all this traffic stuff and you'll have an opportunity to see the affiliate course and it's a piece of. It's a piece of a bigger funnel. We'll say that, which again, I want to make sure people understand. I think it's one thing I love about what you guys do is this I refer to is funnel stacking where they come in one funnel and they literally get stacked and layered and that layering is what allowed you guys to really crush seven figures as affiliates. Which is phenomenal. And I think too often people think that I'm going to create one funnel and it's just going to take care of everything for me. So explain kind of how your, how your funnel stacks work. Yeah. So everything is content based and we love to, you know, start with content and interest. Speaker 2:     15:58       Kind of like what Matt was lining out with, uh, you know, we'll have either topics around a specific product or maybe it's podcast and our case and we use that content to segment folks into these different funnels. So these are all different followup sequences based off of the type of content they just consumed. So they'll have, will have an email follow up sequence. Pushcrew has its own kind of marketing, a mini chat has tags as well, so we have the opera and then obviously have the pixels, the different ad networks that are going to show irrelevant affiliate offer or maybe it's additional training and other podcasts we want people to listen to. So that's the idea is using content to kind of leverage where we want to take them. We're personally choosing to go based off of the content. And then as far as far as like the actual funnel elements, you know, I don't want to say this is easy to do, you know, it's kind of a simple concept, but it's not easy to set up everything we do. Speaker 2:     16:53       So one of the things we do is we actually have a split test running all the time on all of our pages. So even when we're promoting affiliate products, let's say we have a landing page that promotes click funnels, I'm going to have two variations of my headline on that page going at any given time or two variations of our video explaining why you should get click funnels or two variations of the button. There is always, always 100 percent of the time I split tests running on both our landing pages and our various ads that we're running. So we're just optimizing, optimizing, optimizing. And I've just, I'm never satisfied. I've got some ads in Google where we're getting percent click through rates on them and I'm still trying to optimize them up into better click through rates. So that's awesome. Matt, go ahead. I was curious as far as when you're doing a split test, how, how often are you changing it? Speaker 2:     17:39       Because the problem I run across people that say I'm going to split test. I do, they set it and they forget about it. It's like dude, you're not doing anything with that. So split testing, so use vwo visual website optimizer to run our split tests and I actually I check in on them once a week, but it really depends on the amount of traffic going to a landing page. Some of our offers get a lot more traffic than others. You know, we've got paged at some pages that will get up, you know, a thousand visits a day on them. So those ones I can legitimately optimize on a once a week basis. Some of them, you know, they'll get a thousand visitors a month so I'm actually, I'm checking on them once a week but I'm actually only going in and making a new variation once. I feel like I've got enough data to really justify a new variation. Speaker 2:     18:20       So you know, so man, do you feel like a thousand is enough? Is that Kinda the magic number? It has got to be technically, I think if you were to talk to like a real hardcore conversion rate optimization guy, he would say that's not enough. Um, for me it's been working. It's been working. We're seeing incremental growth every month. So I'm, you know, I'm happy with the results we're getting out of it. That's the key thing that we had the Aha this year is I think as a business coach and said, okay, look at the little indicators that you have in your business, like conversion rate, uh, you know, traffic numbers, all of that. If you can increase those little bits, that little bits every week, I mean, just look at the compounded effort over 12 months and then look at where you're going to be over that span of time. Speaker 2:     19:00       You will, I mean conservative things about tripling your revenue. Now, you know, if you're just slowly doing just that and then optimizing your ads as well in the same way. And it's not rocket science, you just have to have a really solid offer or multiple offers. And then just do these little small, monotonous tweaks that, you know, it's not starting something from scratch, but as entrepreneurs love doing, staying in your lane and going, oh yeah, that's been a big Aha for us is just the small incremental improvements week over week, over week, look at it over six months. And you went, wow, how did I get from there to here? So how do you guys deal with the whole shiny object syndrome? Because you guys are getting a ton of offers in front of you guys all the time. Speaker 2:     19:41       The best people to ask on that. Matt had been in business together for like 12 years now, which is crazy. He's like my other brother I never had. So we have a similar brain. It's different, but this year I honestly, we, we hired a coach and he told us to stick with the plan for like a year minimum. And that's where I went into the optimizations. That's where we went into a very deliberate mood on what we're doing. Each week. We've even kind of cut down our work time because of just personal things we want to do rather than sitting behind a screen. So we'll, I'll say, I'll say the times, the most difficult thing that gives us shiny objects syndrome is we have a podcast as well, so over the last year and a half since we started this show, we've interviewed 112 people now and every single person has good ideas, so that's where our tiny object syndrome comes into play is we'll get off an episode with somebody and go test that and then like we'll talk to, you know, one of our mentors and they'll be like, no, stay the course, you know, verbally slap us. Speaker 2:     20:40       A mentor works getting super clear on what we're doing now. And then what's the, what's the infinity project? James Schramko calls it like this thing and you're always kind of working on what your team is and that's worked for us. Yeah, no, I love Schramko's infinity project. It's a great, great analogy. He thinks he's a great guy. Yeah. So I'm really kind of curious as far as I'm sitting here going massive shiny object syndrome with a ton of affiliate stuff and going, okay, so evergreen.com four slash funnel hacker. I got to see who's going to go ahead and actually go through all 120 of those and put those in place so we can do. Let us know. We'll give you something cool. If you do that and prove that you've done them all, it'll be good. Yeah, I mean that's. That's the cool thing about affiliate marketing I guess that we want to. Speaker 2:     21:29       It's a great bolt on. You don't have to just do affiliate marketing. Do you have a solid offer that you feel like you're still leaving some things out that you can then leverage someone else's offer product or service or even brokering a deal? We've done so many of those and that's the thing. It all compiles up into more profits based off of what you're already doing. So bolt on. I think that's a good little like, oh, that's it. One of the things you guys made mentioned, which I don't hear too many people talking about these days and that's Taboola. Do you wanna explain what to Bula is and how you guys were using it. So taboola is what's called a native advertising platform and essentially what it is is if you ever go to some of these bigger sites like CNN or Msnbc site, you read some news and you scroll down to the bottom of the news site, it'll say you know, also recommended and there'll be some little ads and usually they're very like click baity looking ads with the image. Speaker 2:     22:21       You can't really make out what they're doing in the image. And they're like, you know, wait until you see what this guy did after he ate a pickle or whatever. And you're like, oh, I need to click on this. What is this? Right? So you see these on these big platforms, these new sites, and it's down at the bottom and they call it native advertising because it looks like it's native to the site. It looks like, like you're clicking on more internal content on the site, but when you click to it, it's, you know, an external site and the extent of what we've really experimented with is just purely retargeting because the idea being if they view a piece of content, we want them to see us in as many places as we can possibly put ourselves. So there'll be a piece of content. Maybe the content is around, you know, click funnels, here's all the way we use click funnels and now all of a sudden they're seeing our ads to our landing page about clickfunnels. Speaker 2:     23:08       They'll see them at the bottom of an MSNBC page. They'll go to somebody's blog, they'll see it on Google display network, on the sidebar banner. They go to facebook, it will be in their feet. You know, it's just part of being everywhere. And so our budget for it isn't very big. We don't get just a ton of impressions on that. We might spend $7 in a month on it because it's a very low volume play, but it's part of that branding thing is part of that psychological thing. We're holy crap, I'm seeing these guys everywhere and that's what it does for us at least. I love that. A two bullets. One of the things we're starting to play around with ourselves. So I, again, I haven't heard too many people playing around with it says, cool, you guys are using it. Yeah. Yeah. And it, it's, it's great for feeding the Pixel to um, you know, we tried to put some of our content, the same kind of content that if somebody searched google, they would see those blog posts. We tried to put that in some of the native ad platform stuff and put some like click baity links just to feed the pixel. And what we noticed was the time on site from those people was like three seconds long. And we're like, okay, these people are clearly not spending the time required to be a good prospect. So we actually cut out all cold traffic from taboola and just made it purely a retargeting play for us. But their dive back into it in the future, I'm sure we will. That's the key. Speaker 3:     24:20       Just be on his men. If you have, you know, the access to all these platforms and can just do retargeting, why wouldn't you just place that Pixel on your site and let it do its work? Keep an eye on the budgets, you know, make sure you're not spending a boatload of money but, but the branding play, you know, it's what five to seven touches is the average. They always say, for someone to make a conversion, well might as well do it this way. That's how we choose it. Speaker 2:     24:41       And I mean with the, with the risk of sounding like I'm kissing butt a little bit, something like click funnels makes it really easy because once you get something one of these funnels that works really well, there's a little button that says, clone your press that button and you do it all over again. Wonder how we do that landing page, that evergreen product. I love it. So obviously one of the things you guys are magicians ad is making sure that you're seen by everywhere, but most importantly by the right people everywhere. And I appreciate you guys spending time with the state as we kind of get close to wrapping things up here. Joe, Matt, anything else you guys want to leave with our audience? I think Speaker 3:     25:16       the big thing is, is just the Aha is, is think about how you can bring all these platforms and let them work together. A lot of folks try to keep things. I'm a facebook guy, I'm a google guy. Well, why not be everything you know, and focus on your input where, where, where's the best input they could bring those qualified eyeballs to your ecosystem. And then, you know, let the magic happen with the platforms. Speaker 2:     25:39       That's the big thing. I mean, you pretty much covered it. Um, you know, and, and we do the same thing with the podcast. We didn't really dive too deep into it, but with the podcasts, um, you know, that's the podcast could be huge. If anybody who's thinking about doing a podcast, I'm always blown away with the excuses. People don't, they give for not having a podcast because it's probably been the most impactful thing we've ever done in our business. But you can do what we call our invisible podcast funnel where essentially people listen to an episode and then once they listened to an episode of, let's say we had a, a creator of a software product on the podcast, we can interview that person than anybody who listened to that interview. All the sudden we can now retarget them with that person's. So it's just a real quick way to use and monetize a podcast through, you know, that that's essentially them raising their hand and saying, I'm interested in this because they just spent an hour with me, Joe and the creator of the product. Speaker 2:     26:34       They're going to start seeing everywhere now. So take for example, you guys had me on, if you have me on your podcast, you didn't win target click funnels because we'd be talking about click funnels and everything else. And then you're going to have your affiliate link type to see all those ads that we send them to a landing page. We wouldn't, we'd never really linked straight to an affiliate link. We would send them to a landing page. That way we have the opportunity to, to, um, capture him on an email list and give some reasons why you should get it through our link and maybe offer up some bonuses and things like that. Uh, but yeah, that's exactly what we do. We would put our landing page for clickfunnels in front of anybody who listened to our episode together. Yep. Oh, such a cool idea. Speaker 2:     27:12       We should probably do that. I'll probably do that. That sounds fun. Anything else guys? Again, thanks so much. Yeah, just everybody. Evergreen profits.com/funnel hacker. You can go down the rabbit hole and learn a little deeper and that's going to get something. This book right here, it's called, um, the evergreen traffic playbook. That's the book that will give away for free. We'll give you a free digital copy over@evergreenprofits.com slash funnel hacker. There you go. Awesome. So guys, again, check it out. Evergreen profits Dr. Com, forward slash funnel hacker. So again, evergreen profits.com, forward slash funnel hacker. They're kind enough to give you guys a free copy digital copy of the book. And most importantly, you then get a top into their funnels and see how you get retargeted literally all over the entire world online and take it down and follow exact what they're doing. So again guys, thank you so much. You guys are amazing. It's always fun talking to you guys. We'll talk soon. Speaker 4:     28:11       Thank you. Hey everybody. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to the podcast. If you don't mind, could you please share this with others, rate and review this podcast on itunes. It means the world to me or I'm trying to get to as a million downloads here in the next few months and just crush through over $650,000 and I just want to get the next few 100,000 so we can get to a million downloads and see really what I can do to help improve and, and get this out to more people. At the same time, if there's a topic, there's something you'd like me to share or someone you'd like me to interview, by all means, just reach out to me on facebook. You can pm me and I'm more than happy to take any of your feedback as well as if people would like me to interview more than happy to reach out and have that conversation with you. So again, go to Itunes, rate and review this, share this podcast with others and let me know how else I can improve this or what I can do that do to make this better for you guys. Thanks.

FunnelHacker Radio

Aired 3 weeks ago 7:00

What Is Light?

Killers. Don't make any effort to involve media or best Gators. They're very secretive. They don't want attention. They almost want their crimes to go on notice. But the idea of committing a crime, and then calling up the police and bragging about it. That's a whole 'nother level of terror. A man who wore a mediaeval style executioner's hood who has police and baffled the media. He seems to crave publicity. He sent letters and Ramsden newspapers. And the beliefs subject stated, I wanna report murder. No, a double murder. I did it. Here. We are fifty years to the first sodium killing in today's world of friends IX, the old cases are being solved who doesn't wanna know how it turns out from the creators of Atlanta monster come season two. This is monster the zodiac killer. Listen and subscribe at apple podcasts or on the iheartradio app. Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, brain stuff, loin, Boca bomb here light. In addition to being a bright, Patrick, sunshine on your window. Sill is a metaphor for enlightenment and exploration, which is a bit paradoxical for phenomenon that even after thousands of years of inquiries and endless experiments. Scientists still can't quite explain is it a particle or wave or both or neither do we need a new word for it. Your eyes tell you a lot about the way light behaves. It travels so fast that seems instantaneous about one hundred eighty six thousand miles or three thousand kilometers per second. It blazes through air and space and laser like straight lines. But it also bounces reflects and refraction, and when it interacts with the right medium like a camera lens, it make her we know that it's made up of tiny units that we call photons, and we know that the term waves can describe its movements. But neither of these words really encompass lights auditees in ancient times. The Greeks used philosophy to attempt to address lights wide range. Of behaviors perhaps they thought light is actually composed of little bits of stuff that bounce to and fro the idea never really caught on then in the sixteen hundreds French philosopher Rene Descartes became convinced that light was essentially a wave one that moved through a mysterious substance that he called platinum Isaac Newton thought that light was a particle, but he was at a loss for a way to explain many of its properties. Like the way it refracted and could be split by prison from a single beam of white light into a rainbow of many colors of light. This was largely before the rise of empirical studies in science wherein, we attempt to answer questions about the world around us by designing experiments that demonstrate well how stuff works back in the day. Science was a matter of philosophy people coming up with about how stuff works and basically arguing about the ideas merit to be fair. Our modern microscopes computers and other equipment help just for example, lights behavior becomes more evident, depending on where you're observing it in the vacuum of space. Ace light zips along at the aforementioned one hundred eighty six thousand miles or three hundred thousand kilometers per second. But point a beam of light at a very dense bit a matter say a diamond, and it can slow to only around seventy seven thousand miles or one hundred twenty four thousand kilometers per second much easier to observe relatively to try to explain in. These are modern times. What light is let's I remember some science basics waves are not a thing or substance. They're a property of thing. A wave is a compressing and stretching of a particular medium, a like an ocean wave that drives toward the shore or the ripple spreads out across the surface of a pond when you toss in Iraq, you can see the waves with your eyes feel them with your body. And sometimes when a sound wave happens in the air, you can hear them with your ears particles on the other hand are not quite so easy to define particle can be a tiny bit of matter. A matter broken down into its smallest and most basic units water, for example, is made up of countless party. Guls particles that are affected by waves. What's really happening when you watch a wave in the ocean or ripple in a pond is that each particle or molecule in this case of water is being moved and thus the medium of the ocean or pond is being compressed and stretched in sequence and we see waves, but light as experiments have proven also consists of particles that we call photons the behave like waves. Let's unpack that there was a famous nineteenth century double slit experiment in which researchers beamed light through two slits and observed the way the light struck a screen behind the slits what they saw was that the streams of light affected each other like two hands splashing water in the same sink as if they were waves interfering with one another. But then in the twentieth century scientists began their pioneering explorations into subatomic particles. Like neutrons electrons, Albert Einstein wondered what would happen? If you emitted light one photon at a time in the double slit experiment. What scientists saw dumb found? Did them the single photons went individually through the slits, but the way that they struck the screen over time showed the same interference pattern that occurred with full-scale beams of light streaming through both slits this behavior can't be explained by the physics. We use to describe particles and waves in the macro world around us, it's in the realm of quantum mechanics. The physics theories that describe what goes on at the very smallest subatomic levels, and which we humans still don't really understand. So ultimately, if you want to answer the question, what is light you could call it both a particle and wave and you'd be correct. But as for fully explaining why and how it works. We're still working on it. Today's episode was written by Nathan Chandler and produced by Tyler claim for iheartmedia and how stuff works to learn more about the weird behavior of light. And the history of how humans have thought about it. Check out. Our sister podcast Daniel hit explain the universe. There. Episode is light a particle or wave goes into lots more details, and of course, for more on this and lots of other light-hearted, topics. Visit our home planet has stuff works dot com. Hebron stuff listeners today. I wanted to tell you about another podcast how to money, which is not your typical personal finance podcast, the hosts Matin Joel are best friends. Aiming not to lecture you but to make conversations about money. Interesting informative even fun every Wednesday. They cover real life money topics like ways to cut your grocery Bill. Why your house is an awful investment, and how to achieve financial independence, if you kind of second money, or if you just want to learn more about how you can support yourself and your future, you can listen and subscribe on apple podcasts the iheartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for how to money.

BrainStuff

Aired 4 months ago 19:36

Chemical scum that dream of distant quasars | David Deutsch

Hello. It's Chris Anderson. The guy who gets to run Ted now you're tuning into a special archive presentation of TED talks daily. This one features one of my favorite all time. Ted speakers from back in two thousand five David Deutsch. If you like the talk as much as I do, I urge you to subscribe to on new podcast, the Ted interview because we've posted an episode featuring David Deutsch, and in it, I get to dive into his thinking about knowledge its role in the cosmos, and the fact that humans might not be quite as insignificant as we sometimes think we are please join me for the Ted interview. Wherever you listen. We've been told to go out on a limb and say something surprising. So I'll try and do that. But I want to start with two things that everyone already knows and the first one in fact is something that has been known for most of recorded history. And that is that. The planet earth or the solar system or our environment or whatever is uniquely suited to sustain. Are evil Lucien or creation as it used to be thought and our present existence and most important our future survival. Nowadays, this idea has a dramatic name spaceship earth, and the idea there is that outside the spaceship the universe is implacably hostile. And inside is all we have all we depend on. And we only get the one chance if we mess up our spaceship, we've got nowhere else to go. Now, the second thing that everyone already knows is that contrary to what was believed for most of human history. Human beings are not in fact, the hub of existence and Stephen hawking famously said we're just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy and so on. Now, the first of those two things that everyone knows is kind of saying that we're at a very untypical place uniquely suited, and so on and the second one is saying that we're typical place, and especially if you regard these two as deep truth to live by into inform your life decisions, then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other. But that doesn't prevent them from both being completely false. And and they are. So let me start with with with the second one typical. Well, is this a typical place? Well, let's look around, you know, look in a random direction, and we see a wall and chemical scum and and. That's not typical of the universe. At all. All you've got to do is go a few hundred miles in that same direction and look back, and you won't see any walls or chemical scum at all is a blue planet. And if you go further than that, you'll see the sun the solar system and stars and so on, but that's not still not typical of the universe because stars come in galaxies. And and most places in the universe. A typical place in the universe is nowhere near any galaxy. So so let's go out further till we outside the galaxy and look back, and yeah, there's the huge galaxy with spiral arms laid out in front of us. And. At this point. We've come one hundred thousand light years from here. But we're still nowhere near a typical place in the universe to get to a typical place. You've got to go a thousand times as far as that into intergalactic space. And so what does that look like typical what does a typical place in the universe? Look like well at enormous expense Ted has arranged a high resolution immersion virtual reality rendering of intergalactic space the view from intergalactic space. Can we have the lights off, please? So we can see it. Well, not quite not quite perfect. You see in intergalactic space is integral lactic spaces completely dark pitch dark. It's so dark that if you were to be looking at the nearest star to you. And that star were to explode as a supernova. And you were to be staring directly at it at the moment when its light reached you you still wouldn't be able to see even a glimmer. That's how big and how dark the universe is. And that's despite the fact that a supernova is so bright. So brilliant an event that it would kill you stone dead at a range of several light years. And yet from intergalactic space is so far away. You wouldn't even see it. It's also very cold out there less than three degrees above absolute zero. And it's very empty the vacuum. There is one million times less dense than the highest vacuum that our best technology on earth can currently create. So that's how. Different a typical places from this place. And that is how untypical this place is. So can we have the lights back on please? Thank you. Now, how do we know about an environment that so far away and so different? And so alien from anything we're used to well, the earth our environment in the form of us is creating knowledge what does that mean? Well, look out even further than than we've just been for. I mean from here with a telescope and you'll see things that look like stars. They're called quasars quasars originally meant quasi stellar object, which means things that look like stars. And but they're not stars. And we know what they are. Billions of years ago and billions of light years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a supermassive black hole, and then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse and some of the matter back out in the form of tremendous jets, which luminated lobes with the brilliance of I think, it's a trillion Suns. Now, the physics of the human brain could hardly be more. Unlike the physics of such a jet, we couldn't survive for an instant in it the language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets. It would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion. But at point blank range and for millions of years at a time. And yet that jet happened in precisely such a way that billions of years later on the other side of the universe. Some bit of chemical scum could accurately describe and model and predict and explain above all there's your reference what was happening there in reality. The one physical system the brain contains an accurate working model of the other the quasar not just a superficial image of it though. It contains that as well. But an explanatory model embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure now that is knowledge, and if that weren't amazing enough the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time that is the growth of knowledge. So the laws of. Physics have this special property that physical objects as unlike each other as they could possibly be can nevertheless embody, the same mathematical and causal structure, and to do it more and more so over time. So we are a chemical scum. That is different this chemical scum has universality. It's structure contains with ever increasing precision, the structure of everything this place and not other places in the universe is a hub which contains within itself the structural and causal essence of the whole of the rest of physical reality and so far from being insignificant. The fact the laws of physics allow this or even mandate that this can happen is one of the most important things about the physical world. How does the solar system in our environment? In in the form of us acquire this special relationship with the rest of the universe. Well, one thing that's. True about Stephen Hawking's remark. I mean, it is true. But it's the wrong emphasis one thing. That's true about it. Is that it it doesn't it doesn't do it with any special physics? There's no special dispensation, no miracles involved. It does it simply with three things that we have here in abundance. One of them is matter because well, the the growth of knowledge is a form of information processing information processing is computation computation requires a computer, there's no known way of making a computer without matter. We also need energy to make the computer and most important to make the media in effect on the witch. We record the knowledge that we discover and then Thirdly less tangible, but just as essential for the open ended creation of knowledge of explanations is evidence. Now, our environment is inundated with evidence we happen to get. It round to testing let's say Newton's law of gravity about three hundred years ago. But the evidence that we did to do that we used to do that was was falling down on every square meter of the earth for billions of years before that and we'll continue to fall on for billions of years afterwards. And the same is true for all the other sciences as far as we know evidence to discover the most fundamental truths of all the sciences is here just for the taking on our planet. Our location is saturated with evidence and also with matter and energy out in intergalactic space, those three prerequisites for the open ended creation of knowledge are at their lowest possible supply as I said, it's empty it's cold, and it's dark out there. Or is it now, actually that's just another parochial misconception? Because. Imagine a cube out there in intergalactic space, the same size as our home the solar system now that cube is very empty by human standards. But that still means that it contains over a million tons of matter and a million tons is enough to make say a self contained space station on which there's a colony of scientists that are devoted to creating an open ended stream of knowledge and so on. Now, it's way beyond present technology to even gather the hydrogen from intergalactic space, and and form it into other elements and so on, but but the thing is in a comprehensible universe. If something isn't forbidden by the laws of physics, then what could possibly prevent us from doing it other than knowing how in other words, it's a matter of knowledge, not resources and the same. Well, if we could do that, we'd automatically have an energy supply because the transmutation would be a fusion reactor, and and evidence, well, again, it's dark out there to human senses. But all you've got to do is take a telescope even one of present day design look out and you'll see the same galaxies as we do from here. And with more powerful telescope you'll be able to see stars and planets in those galaxies. You'll be able to astrophysics and learn the laws of physics and locally there. You could build particle accelerators and learn elementary particle physics and chemistry. And so on. Probably the hardest. Science to do would be biology field trips because because it would take several hundred million years to get to the nearest life bearing planet and back, but I have to tell you and sorry, Richard. But I never did like biology field trips, much and. I think we can just about make do with one every few hundred million years. So in fact, intergalactic space does contain all the prerequisites for the open ended creation of knowledge any such cube anywhere in the universe. Could become the same kind of hub that we are if the knowledge of how to do so were present there. So we're not in a uniquely hospitable place. If intergalactic space is capable of creating an open ended stream of explanations, then so is almost every other environment. So is the earth. So is a polluted earth and the limiting factor there, and here is not resources because they're plentiful but knowledge, which is scarce now, this Kuzmic, knowledge based view may. And I think ought to make us feel very special, but it should also make us feel vulnerable because it means that without the specific knowledge that's needed to survive, the ongoing challenges of the universe. We won't survive them. All it takes for supernova to go off a few light years away. And we'll all be dead. Martin recess has recently written a book about our vulnerability to ask all all sorts of things from astrophysics to scientific experiments gone wrong. And most. Certaintly to terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. And he thinks that civilization has only a fifty percent chance of surviving this century. I think he's going to talk about that later in the conference. Now, I don't think that probability is the right category to discuss this issue in, but I do agree with him about this. We can survive and we can fail to survive. But it depends not on chance, but on whether we create the relevant knowledge in time. The danger is not at all unprecedented species. Go extinct all the time. Civilizations end the overwhelming majority of all species and all civilizations that have ever existed on now history. And if we want to be the exception to that, then logically, our only hope is to make use of the one feature that distinguishes our species and our civilization from all the others, namely. Our special relationship with the laws of physics our ability to create new explanations new knowledge to be a hub of existence. So let me know apply this to a current controversy. Not not because I want to advocate any particular solution. But just to illustrate the kind of thing I mean, the controversy is global warming. Now, I'm a physicist, but I'm not the right kind of physicist in in regard to global warming. I'm just a layman and the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. And according to that theory, it's already too late to avoid a disaster. Because if it's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent co two emissions with something like the Kyoto protocol with its constraints on economic activity, and it's enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever it is. Then that is already a disaster by any. A reasonable measure and the actions that advocated are not even purported to solve the problem merely to postpone it by little so it's already too late to avoid it. And it probably has been too late to avoid it ever. Since before anyone realized the danger was probably already too late in the one thousand nine hundred seventy s when the best available. Scientific theory was being us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age in which billions with die. Now. The lesson of that seems clear to me. And I don't know why it isn't informing public debate. It is that we can't always know when we know of an impending disaster and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself. Then there's not going to be much argument. Really? But no precautions and no precautionary principle can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee, hence. We need a stance of problem fixing not just problem avoidance. And it's true that an ounce of prevention equals, a pound of cure. But that's only if we know what to prevent few being punched on the nose. Then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches if medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either. So the world is buzzing the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature and with plans to live at the higher temperature and not at all costs, but if fishing Lee and cheaply some such plans exist things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide at the moment. These things are fringe research. They're not. Central to the human effort to face this problem or problems in general and with problems that we are not aware of yet. The ability to put right not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely is our only hope not just of solving problems but of survival so. Take two stone, tablets and carve on them. On one of them. Carve problems are soluble and on the other one. Carve problems are inevitable. Thank you. For more TED talks to Ted dot com.

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Aired 2 weeks ago 39:52

How Savers Can Overcome the Reluctance to Spend Money (Hour 2)

from the headquarters of ramsey solutions it's the dave ramsey show were that is dumb cash is king and all morgage has taken the place of the b._m._w. the status of full of chores on dave ramsey your host jump in we'll talk about your life and your money it's a free call triple eight eight to five five two two five and some say advices worth what you pay for it just as whether's in portland oregon i justin how are you good dave pleasure to talk to you what's up well my life and i got some medical debt here a while back and we have a bunch of different offices trying to get money from us and it's a little bit more than when you just pay off a lot of it like hundred hundred dollars and we were wondering it's hard to keep track of can we maybe get something to kinda condense those together pay on them and get them knocked out even if they're not interest it's just such a headache try to keep them all together like in line we keep missing them and how many other oh probably fifteen ten fifteen because it's just like you know you have the e._r. the doctor the hospital expert review difficult to make a list of ten or fifteen bills and pay them thing is i didn't have all of them and then you get another one and you know just busy with work it's difficult to try to keep track of a mall you know you're not spending enough time managing your money right turn off the television i mean seriously making a list of ten bills is not that big a deal and updating once a month i mean because you got a new one in so what does and you said the balance is only two hundred bucks or something right yeah i think totally about six thousand what's your what's your household income i take home we're about forty five hundred month so about fifty thousand a year okay and well that's your take home yeah eighty if you did gross so you got money going out for your 4._0._1._k. yes sir ups i have a pension through ups and then i also have like i think ten percent going for you my phone k- yeah i would temporarily stop that until you clean this mess up and it will get you on a written detailed budget you should be able to pay the six thousand dollars off in six months and be done with it and those little bitty ones will all be gone in one month the little hundred dollar ones in two hundred dollar ones will be gone in a month once you start doing a written budget each month so you u._p._s. driver yes sir i do freight for them like semi truck like oh you're trucker okay you're not a delivery driver all right and what your wife do she's a hairstylist okay all right are you home every night or you do over the road now i'm a local pick them deliver we just do phrase just like u._p._s. imagine heavy stuff gotcha local freight it's all in town yeah but you're still working your butt i mean u._p._s. got you work ten twelve hours a day five days a week so that's why it's hard to get time to deal you know yeah five days a week yes i lose two off days budget budget in our budget on our you and your wife set aside no kids no t._v. and start doing written plan because here's what's going to happen when you write it all down you're gonna smack yourself in the forehead and go tad gum it i feel like i got a raise because your fact that you're not making this behave is causing all these little mosquito size bills buzzing around your head to give you great stress in there too small to give you great stress yes question i had this same topic here is we have a twenty thousand dollar car on when it's got a hundred thousand bumper a hundred thousand mile bumper to bumper warranty it's pretty new cars reliable other cards paid off we were wondering if we should sell that get out of the four hundred dollars a month payment and by her mom's car that's been gently used for you know four or five thousand bucks alone again but much less if you're not gonna sell it you need to look at your budgeting process that we're talking about and be able to see your way to pay it off within two years i think you could be debt free all the medical bills and the and the car loan the of any other death that is not your home no sorry we just rent the home from her parents on the homeworks kind of i think about it actually so here's what's happening okay what are you guys twenty eight mid thirties mid thirties okay here's what's happening you guys work your butts off and the money comes in and the money goes out and you have no idea where it went you're just normal you were you work really hard and you worked too hard to be broke as you are you really i mean you work hard both of you stand on your feet cutting hair on an easy job but now people not an easy job delivering the stuff you know the work you're doing it's nice job so you guys are working your tail if you work too hard to be broke and so i'm going to challenge you won't be your coach i'm going to do locker room and say i have time i'm out there in the second half and win because you're behind on your score right now by twenty six thousand dollars and either to sell this car or we're gonna pay it off but i think you can pay it off if you like it yeah we do okay and then you're gonna start making intentional very careful decisions with every dollar and it doesn't take an hour a week to manage this that's all it takes and to make these dollars behave but you guys are just run run run run and you're really tired when you get home you don't feel extra with anything right and so that's why you got to set aside like some weekend time or something and just go okay this is our time and this is the time we're gonna commit to spending on managing money wrong get the everydollar app it's free to use for your phone or your or your desktop either one you and your wife sit down and give every one of your dollars of income a name before the month begins stop your 4._0._1._k.'s temporarily stop having anything come out your check get as much money coming home as possible and then we're going to tack that twenty six thousand dollars with a vengeance if you'll do that you can turn this around if not you're gonna work your whole life and you're gonna end up with an pay for car and no money other than what you put into your 4._0._1._k. and what you know what they set aside for you at work but that's just the if you'll do this on purpose you'll have millions of dollars more and you'll have a lot less stress on purpose so that's what you need to do thanks for the call dave is with us dave's and tulsa oklahoma hi dave how are you hey doing some good to talk to you we just finished last night number four nothing debt here it's great we will we are really enjoying my wife and i it's been fantastic thank you so right speak you i've one thing i'm in my lord sixties my wife has at least twenty more year she she wants to work she's younger than me and we live very frugal don't have any debt of anything house this paid cars paid no credit cards pay them off every every single month awesome what's your question my question is we have my mother passed away we have our house right next door to us and my my question is we were thinking about purchasing it for an investment and i would have to borrow ninety thousand dollars just cringe at the fought to being in any kind of debt we really hate that but it would be fifteen years or whatever with the option of one up on payments you know we listen at home equity loan i didn't like how that sounded him you watch the lesson last night i don't believe in dad and i don't i haven't used save up and pay cash for my rental properties or i don't buy them i want to recommend the same for you i'd say about cash for it or when you have the cash that's fine okay okay this is the dave ramsey show if you own a business you have to get it online in order to survive in today's marketplace no exceptions now there's a lot of ways to do that but the smart choice is host gator hostgator web hosting is reliable and they have twenty four seven live support and host gator has an easy to use dragon drop builder that comes free with your hosting plan plus dave ramsey listeners get up to sixty percent off their hosting packages now that's a deal go to hostgator dot com and make sure to use the code dave and get this great offer host gator dot com code dave our question today comes from blinds dot com brand new custom blinds from blinds dot com are the easiest and most of forcible way to give your tire all of face live with blinds dot com you get free samples free shipping and with the new promos they run every month you'll save even more us the magic word the promo code ramsey and you get the best possible deal blinds dot com those questions from ricky in washington these davis gone through my second beater car tired of being on a first name basis with triple eight tote trip diver amount of debt i have my -mergency fund save now have the money to get a little nicer car having hard time parting with it because it worked so hard to save it can you talk a bit about the struggle people have with spending money even when they have it to spend yeah it's so hard to finally get some in savings it's hard to release it a specially if you're wired as a saver i'm wired as a spender my wife is wired as a favor usually fall in one of two categories i think you're wired is safer she gets great comfort from having that pile of money more than she would get great comfort from having a reliable car me i'd rather have reliable car pass the emergency fund you're at the you know this is an emotional thing at this point it's not a financial thing it's a i have the money but i have trouble releasing it and so what that says you're just getting some you know it's a normal thing and it's not a bad thing but it's it just says i get security ech from that extra money beyond my emergency fund and i'll tell you this i think it's something we all have to work at one of our money skills there's really three basic money skills that you have spending properly reasonably learning to enjoy money falls under spending running to enjoy life with your money which is kind of what your questions about the second one saving and learn to save money for -mergency for college for retirement to change family create a bill wealth learn to invest learned to ride the investment waves right and giving the power of generosity completely change you when you learn to give as the natural rhythm of your life it changes everything so giving saving and spending everyone has at least one of those that they struggle with minus saving i'm a spender no trouble for me to enjoy money also no trouble for me to give money a lot of spenders easy from them and be generous because the release of money doesn't bother us as much as it does a safer in and so but i'm weak it saving and that's why god makes me teach us every day i'm no longer we could saving but it wasn't my natural default i had to intellectually decide to have an act of my will to save an invest and really what drove me to do that as a spender giver is that i would have more to spend in give if i built more wealth i spend more and get more and that's my only reason for saving it's not because i just love saving money i still don't this day it's so you're on the other side of this ricky is what we're saying you know you you don't enjoy spending we don't know about giving you didn't address that in in your thing sometimes i can get spenders or savers like this to turn loose of their money i by increasing their giving and then that kinda gives them permission to also enjoy the money themselves but it would be a shame to save and work and not enjoy some of your money and one of the things you should enjoy is a reliable vehicle and you don't have a reliable vehicle you've been you know you've been doing beaters and so you know you you need to go buy the car you already knew that you weren't asking about that but you already knew that but maybe also take a little bit of that money and give it find someplace to be generous at your church or find a couple that struggling or a single mom than pair light bill for a year or whatever but fi find something to do because there's something about giving that kind of then gives you permission down inside your spirit also enjoy money money's fine if you got some jato enjoy it enjoy some nice things if that's all you do and you don't save you know give then you're just a shallow tour right but you know to assume that just because someone has the ability to joy in enjoy money means that they're greedier shallow that's just bogus and the way you can tell is what percentage of their financial situation is going towards stuff for them and if if all the money you make is going to buy you crap then then you're out of balance you know but if you're giving a percentage of your income and your investing a good percentage of your income and you're enjoying some of your income on lifestyle purchases travel cars close whatever it is then that's inbalance once you're at baby step three and beyond and and that's where ricky is but it's a really good question ricky it's a good question for me to stop and just kind of rant on our vint on for a second here teach on for a second because sometimes people think well no one should ever have a car like that what what anyone house like that for i've got a friend that's worth about three billion dollars now a billion is a thousand million he has three thousand million he has three thousand million he spent six million on his house and people sent him hate mail no is it house like that his house as a percentage of his net worth and his income is like you going through the drive through at chick fillet and buying a biscuit it didn't affect his life one i owed to spend six million dollars on a house as a matter of fact that's a very conservative house for someone who has three billion dollars see that's that's where people get out of whack right and of course that's for people you know in our culture today it's like this it's a it's an art form to judge other people to get in other people's business now it's called twitter and what's intriguing is is that people are so stupid that this i think to tweet this out because all strips and people this younger generation that is so technologically savvy if i don't know how to work my iphone i can hand it to one of you in your twenties and you can fix it in a heartbeat you're so technologically savvy and when it comes to understanding human nature you're just stupid because the number of you on the internet that believe everything you read on the internet that's just absolutely stupid i have a keyboard i can type up whatever i wanted to up and put on the internet and you'll believe it and so you automatically assume when you read something that it's true on the internet abe lincoln said everything on the internet was true i mean and they believe it how abe lincoln was not okay it's so base that's the ultimate sarcasm there but i mean i it's not because his only internet doesn't make it true and because you put out your opinion on the internet doesn't make it true about what someone else purchased because you don't know what you're talking about you should maybe mind your own freaking business comes into the same equation comes into the same discussion your friend buys a car and you're you got an opinion about it maybe you ought to just have an opinion about your own self 'cause you pretty much suck right now and you got a lot of work to do on that figuring out what's wrong with your friend and putting that on your little facebook instagram account she's map and then everybody thinks is true just as you had an opinion it believe anything printed on the internet it's just ridiculous automatically assume that it's true just don't this is the dave ramsey show thank you for joining us america chris with us in los angeles chris how're you doing taking my call sure we'll i'm pretty new listener by a good thing is a little cleanup i should maybe four or five and six time my question is on my mortgage so currently minimum mortgage payment is about twenty percent of my take home pay is ton of thirty years seven one arm i've been paying about additional principle of fifteen hundred dollars a month that i'm expecting the continue and i i'm a math nerd so i think i should pass my loan in the next eight years i'm giving that should i go ahead angry finance fifteen year fixed my steer is that minimum payment and thinking about forty percent of my take home pay at that point which is about where it is what you're paying on xtra right you're paying was what extra you're paying your taking over that yeah you're fifteen hundred is what i'm talking about right but the only problem is we're locking that in and we don't give you any the thing the downside with the i would never tell someone to take out an arm as you've already discovered even new listener and the reason is is we're in you know it's been sixty years since interest rates for this long this low and so you'd wanna lock that rate in all ways okay and yours can go up you said seven one is that what you said it was so go up one percent a year for seven years i thank -ly maximum in about six years we'll be i reset and it can go up to percents and then one year after that it can adjust oh okay that's what you meant by seven one okay so it's not an annual cap it doesn't start annual for six six more what's your balance what your balance seventy five seventy five who okay and your income one eighty what do you do for a living i'm an accountant good for you well done okay i'm hearing a lot of things number one you're already that free or almost and number two your systematically prepaying this thing down to the tune of an extra twenty thousand dollars a year give or take throwing at it you think you're going to be done before it starts justin much or almost but if the point where i don't think the interest rate matters much because mostly principle then well it's not that's not how it's calculated but the the the interest rate will matter but it will be such a small balance that it's calculated on that it won't matter much so that part of statements true i would not put it on a fifteen and take you to forty percent i know that in your case and i'm not and i wouldn't jump up sell the house in your case because you've got a plan you've been working plan already before you got to me even so this is not a out of control situation i don't like uncertainty on your home i don't like risk and this represents risk and that's scaring me so your current your current a._p._r.'s what three i would just go ahead and refinance it on a thirty okay i'll pay the refinance cost is lost what are you paying why would you pay the refinance costs the re whatever you spend on the refinance will be you're buying insurance the that this thing's not gonna sums not going to happen i mean let's say that things don't turn out over the next six years exactly like you've got planned like you got married and had three kids or something you know and all of a sudden you're like whoa i can't pay extra on his more you know and all sudden you're still sitting there looking at two hundred fifty thousand and then the stupid thing starts adjusting you out of your house in that that life happens in these scenarios it doesn't run in a vacuum and so i i'm willing to spend the cost of refinance and you'll end up with the proximity the same interest rate to take thirty year mortgage today fixed to get rid of the arm and then let's run your plan out at least if you're planned on work perfect you're still going to have a fixed locked in situation and that volatility doesn't run you out of your own home lighter so yeah that's kind of a middle ground in your case the you make really good money you're really good with math you're an accountant for god's sakes you're smart you're on your own point you're being intentional so there's a lot of positives in this story those are variables that are controllable you control you and so though you know if i heard a lot of sloppiness in your background and in your approach to this i'd probably be telling yourself house because you've got too much house but i think you can make it through it and obviously los angeles market is a great market owns them real estate in it's going to go up dan is with us in grand rapids hi dan how are you i'm doing very well how are you sir better than i deserve what's up so i have a question regarding two things i am currently third your undergrad and graduate next year i have two big expenses i'm looking towards the future one of the study abroad trip and taking this time next year and then grad school after that so i already have a little bit of money saved up i have no debt i wanna know like what kind of funds what i do with my money i'm gonna put towards grad school so can work best for me okay i you're not gonna have time for it to grow much or to ride a cycle if you put you know ten thousand dollars aside and the market robs ten percents you've got nine thousand dollars and that's not a big deal if you got if you got time to ride the roller coaster out but you're going to need that money about the time the markets screwing around with it you have a fairly short planning window is what i'm saying and so i'm not going to try to make money on it i'm just going to park it and something safe like a money market account and you know how much money you got saved i personally have sixteen hundred and then my parents are great people and they have about five thousand left for me yeah i'm not gonna try to make five hundred dollars on this instead of making fifty dollars and lose some of it okay it's too precious these dollars are right now and so what are you gonna study in grad school floyd i'm studying sport management and spanish double major something i'm gonna do sport administration or go for them be with your national business concentration okay all right sports manage your your your graduate in sports might be what sports administration so sports business essentially gotcha okay all right give you a suggestion it's not it's not an absolute rule but i probably would do the n._b._a. and take some sports management classes okay then you can enter either field that n._b._a.'s got a lot broader brush a lot of different things you can do and it will still work going into sports management especially if you put some of those in your pocket while you're there like i did a bunch of grad psych work while i was doing undergrad with no intention whatsoever except i wanted the knowledge and what i do everyday it's turned out to have been a good investment so i had no intention of becoming a counselor i had no intention of getting a masters and that kind of stuff but i went ahead and took it just because i was interested in it and so you can put another feather in your cap so to speak the tool in your belt that way you do whatever you want but that's just an old guy looking at from the outside at what you're studying because always want people to get a good rate of return on the investment that they make an education and the best way to do that is the education leads them to lots of possible options where they make a lot of money and that gives you the right of return and so if you study something that's too nuanced and to narrow it's you might you might struggle and i'm not saying sports is to nuance or narrow but it is more narrow and nuance to than general m._b._a. an n._b._a. as a great field of study there's a lot of different stuff you can do for with it i've got a bunch of molnar team here very smart folks and i've learned a lot from them over the years so i thank you for joining us open phones at triple eight eight to five five two two five we are glad you're here we appreciate you being there cathy's on facebook why do i pay taxes on social security is it's not a double taxation if i paid texas when i was working out is i can't answer that you'd have to call your congressman your senator your president until you don't want taxes on stuff you've already paid taxes on kind of like an estate tax pay all taxes on his crap finally able to save a little bit of it and leave it to my family but if i'm over five million dollars of that you wanna take fifty five percent of it all in the state fax i call it a death tax already been taxed on that stuff once his me off i'm with you so call your call your congressman won't be taxed twice with you so is a bunch of money anyway social insecurities what it is this is the dave ramsey show joining us amount the nestles in detroit michigan i've another how are you hey this is actually adrian heaven we're married and we called in to get some advice on how we should pursue our path right now cool how can i help right now we have a hundred and twenty three thousand growth annually but i take home about fifty five hundred a month we have a hundred and eight thousand student loans about ten thousand in credit cards our rent is currently six seventy five in the apartment we were recently married this year and we graduated this year and so it's possibly going to be going up next month because the we got it during the good time when everything was low and i'm not talking what's that who's the doctor lawyer oh no i'm i'm a nursing she's a social worker a hundred and eighty three thousand i hear that right yeah hole in a little bit longer than we were supposed to be holy what a mass yeah yeah so what is your all's income doing hundred twenty-three sounds low well yeah we just started well i started and she just got a raise with because she got her masters and i just graduated so that's where i income is right now who just graduate you you're the nurse or the we both graduated she got her masters and i just finished my my r._n. degree okay so your social yeah right now number one your take on pay is wrong or your groceries wrong or you got a bunch of crap coming out of your check that doesn't need to be we have we're still doing our 4._0._1._k. your brown you don't need to do 4._0._1._k. you're a hundred eighty three thousand dollars student loan debt you don't need to be doing anything that's the other question we kind of had because we're in a student loan repayment programs and jobs off in ten years so we're trying to we're in the process of trying to look for a house because i went will be going up when we knew in august no way we go up to eight hundred dollars no way and trying to see if every better to find a house no net same payment rain though no no no no no you are broke you do not need a house one hundred ninety three thousand dollars student loan debt you get the cheapest possible ranch you can you need to get your take home pay corrected and start bringing a whole lot more of it home stopping all investing in need to stop everything and you keep living like you were called broke college students because you broke and list your debts smaller two largest pay minimum payments on everything but the little one and attack this i'm not waiting ten years to get out of debt i think we might end up waiting on that long it just feels like that with the way our income is versus how much we have all right let's no math what did you guys the year before you graduated your students will the year before i graduated my income about twenty thousand yeah there's still boys irs fifty having your income has virtually doubled in one year yeah okay on anything i got i got it just let him out okay if you were to keep your lifestyle super low fifty thousand dollar lifestyle and you make a hundred twenty three that's seventy thousand dollars not counting taxes okay one twenty three minus fifty if you lived on fifty which is doable for a young couple getting started as a matter of fact the average household income in america's only fifty nine so i know it's doable okay so let's say you lived on fifty and you put twenty and taxes and you put fifty thousand dollars a year on this two hundred thousand divided by fifty what four years i'm trying to write down everything you're telling me okay that's all right you have one hundred eight three thousand dollars in student loan debt plus all the other crap right so if you throw fifty thousand dollars a year at your debt for four years that's two hundred thousand dollars isn't it fifty times four okay you're debt free now here's what's going to happen you're going to do it in three years because your income that you're giving me right here is your starter income and as a nurse you have a wonderful field career field that you are entering you have unbelievable income earning opportunities okay and your income is gonna go up very quickly and even if it doesn't go up at the particular job you're at it can go up just by working the e._r. you got all kinds of places you can pick up extra jobs as a nurse and make serious bank if our goal is now because i want you to get a house i just don't want you to a house while you're broke because it'll kill you okay and so i want you to get this mess cleanup because if you move in a house with all this debt you have to buy an extra bedroom just for sallie mae yeah i mean you this is this is a lot of weight and i certainly don't want to walk around with for ten years so my game plan for you guys would be that you get very focused and very intense you stop all investing temporarily you stop all saving temporarily you get on a beans and rice rice and beans no life budget like you a college student making fifty grand and you throw you squeeze every dollar out of each paycheck that you can find and you throw it at your smallest debt i pay that off your next malls death in pay that off you don't borrow anymore you get credit cards and cut them up you get in attack mode like it was like you were in the e._r. trying to save somebody's life clear right i mean you gotta get after it that's what you gotta do here because otherwise you're gonna you're gonna waste your life away for a decade you won't give a decade to this stuff no way ball thinking about how much it would be forgiving so i thought that was a good idea no that would be because what you're gonna lose seven years of your life that's what you're gonna lose yeah and you just don't want it's not worth it the beautiful thing about your particular career track is you have the ability make a lot of money as a nurse as an r._n. i mean you you really there's you're always going to get find employment and you always get extra employment out there so did you say you got just got married to cool well congratulations have you heard me talk about you sound like you're kinda new to all this have you heard me talk about our class financial peace university we've actually been to the class and we're kind of redoing it right now yeah you need to because you didn't get it 'cause you just call me up and asked me to buy a house with a hundred eighty three thousand dollars in debt so that means you didn't get the class because the student loan repayment forgiveness wasn't addressed in the class so oh snowball but we didn't know about forgiving should we be making minimum payments and allow it to be forgiving and leave that income if it wasn't if it wasn't a decade of your life that you were a slave i if it was three years we talk about it but it's a decade and if you had almost no income upside potential and you got tremendous income upside potential so yeah go back through the class then get a reset get refocused get re-energized reset your goals jump on every dollars budgets going you need to get over and stop your 4._0._1._k. you need to do that already and you didn't do it and you need to stop all savings temporarily and make sure no other trash is coming out of your check and they're not over withholding on you so that you get big refund you don't wanna big refund that's you giving the government too much money we're gonna just dial everything in dollar thing in all everything in row squeeze every dime out of your life and we're unclear this data off the table fast then you save up your emergency fund and then you go buy you a house but that's the smart way to do it this is the price you're paying for having been unbelievably sloppy in your study process and in what you are willing to pay for your education because you guys have overpaid for your education's tremendously and you got a mess on your hands as a result so but you clean it up you can clean it up you've got a good preacher but don't don't just fall into slavery mentality i'm going to be in there for a decade please don't do that please please please don't do that thanks for the call open phones at triple eight eight to five five two two five rather some people feel guilty after paying off student loans is that possible i don't think so what when they feel guilty about most people cheer dance have a party shoot off confetti opened a keg people celebrate i i've never met anybody said you know i feel really bad i paid off loans i've never and thirty years of doing this i never many by this said that that come up that puts this hour that i've ramsey show in the books are james johns and kelly daniel in the booth i am dave ramsey and we will be back thompson senior executive producer for the show you can listen or watch dini wear the dave ramsey show app on your smartphone catch the full show or watch the highlights checkout dave's upcoming guests head to the app store and download it today hey guys if you're looking for real world leadership and business advice from the top minds in business check out our entreleadership podcast hey folks can coleman here would love to have you join us weekly as we dive into conversations with the top minds in leadership and take your business questions to help you grow yourself your team and your profits don't miss an episode subscribe to entree leadership where you listen 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