SvB Who's your Guru? The guys talk about who is influencing them in business

This week Theo and Mr Benja talk about the Guru's of the internet. The guys (and very few gals)  who will sell you freedom, money and happiness for only $9,997 !  We talk about Grant Cardone, Myron Golden, and old school Gurus like Tony Robbins and Tim Ferris

Show vs. Business is your weekly take on Pop Culture from two very different perspectives. Your hosts Theo and  Mr. Benja provide all the relevant info to get your week started right.

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Transcript

Mr. Benja: Oh my God, Theo, I am so excited. I am super pumped and so glad to be here today talking with you. Would you guess what I just heard about, 

Theo: What 

Mr. Benja: this great guru that I found? Oh my God, she told me the 10 secrets to long-lasting life, wealth and prosperity. I'm gonna get into it big. I'm gonna do it, but you just need to wait five minutes while I explain all the details of this great, exciting program that you can get for 200.

Wait, hold on. I'm sorry. I, I got, I got brainwashed there for a second by the all the guru talking. So good. was so good. 

Theo: Yeah. Yeah. Almost have me

waiting for the offer, man. I was waiting for the offer. . 

Mr. Benja: Oh man, that's, that's, that's hard for me to talk like that, man. It's just the guru life is, is hitting me from all different directions, man. And I don't know what to do with it. 

Theo: Oh man. It's guru life, man. It's man. Yeah, it's since like that always been around, doesn't it?

I mean, as long as you know, my business life, even before my business life, you know, these guys that come in and they have the, the secret to life, you know, financial prosperity, relationships, you know, you know, it's, it's, it's amazing. You know, they, they have everything you ever wanted and it's, it's, it's like all I gotta do is just buy their book, right?

The 39 99 book, and they'll give me the secret to life 

Mr. Benja: Order now, quantities are limited. 

Theo: Yes, man, this goes back, I mean, you know, there's nothing new having folks out there. I mean, this goes back before our time, right? I mean, when they have pedalers, you know pedalling snake oil, right? going from town to town, this elixir will make you stronger or grow back your hair.

And so you know, and then of course coming from you know, the Christian background preachers, you know, they, you know, give me a good message and then the lord, you know, he wants that tie. And so, you know, that's, that's kinda the aspect of it as well, right. You know, with that, you know, calling out and getting people to understand, you know, and feeling like they're connected to God by, you know, providing money.

You know, so it's, it goes back, it 

Mr. Benja: goes back, this is religious baby. You get into that cult. You're part of a religion son. I didn't Oh, yeah. There's certain connections I didn't make before that I just made when you said that. And we'll, we'll get into it a bit, but I thought this would be a fun topic.

We've been talking about some gurus. We've been talking about some you know, ways, alternative learning, I'll call it. I don't know. You know, you want to get the greatest information and then you open up YouTube and there's so many people talking. It's like, so yeah, this all wraps up into a whole bunch of stuff.

But the thing is, I was speaking with, and I, I've been doing this for a couple years, looking at creators and what they're missing. , and we had an AI discussion last year how the people in, in the creative community were just pissed at the ai, how it's taken over some things. Mm-hmm. . And I'm like, yeah, you gotta get out there and market yourself, brand yourself, and that that's what makes you different and special.

And the kick the fight back, the pushback was so, so hard. It's like, no, I'm, I'm just a creator. I'm here to build models. I'm here to paint. I'm here to make my, my movie or my play or whatever. And so I was like, well, here's some information I got from these gurus. And that doesn't go over well. I get to all the creators, throw tomatoes at me for bringing up rumors,

And, and I get it. I, I, I ki I get it, but then I'm like, you gotta get with the program. So I know you came from a technical background, right? I mean, well you started you were doing Mechanical engineering, right? Electrical or, or 

Theo: chemical, mechanical, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You, you, you're, you're close.

Electrical engineering, electrical, my training and then, you know went to school for the ag, got a master's degree in it. So yeah. I'm, I'm more of a builder too, right? I was initially a builder and thinking about like, oh, you gotta build it. You make this great product and people flock to it. But you know, I think, you know, my, my, I understand where your artist friends are coming from, right?

Because that's the normal take of how we kind of think of things. But that's no longer the case, man. I mean, it's, you know, it's always been about marketing, you know, how you position yourself and the client's mind, or how you communicate the benefits your product gives to someone. But it is really more so now than ever because the internet There's zero cost for distribution.

You can get out a digital product for nothing. And so before, you know, you had to get gatekeepers to get on TV to, on radio and all that, but now, man, it's like , you know? So, so now you can put marketing messages out there Aite and see what at infinitum, and you can figure out which ones stick. You may not even have a product , but as long as you can, you can build an audience before you have a product now, just based on words alone and positioning alone.

And so that's, that's the, the new thing now. So yeah, I've been you know, slowly, you know, moving over into that space more and more. So as I started having my own business, realizing that, you know, it's all about sale, marketing, sales, man. You ain't got, you ain't got that, you got nothing. So, so it's definitely been one a journey for me as well.

Mr. Benja: Yeah, I think with the, you know, definitely a journey. I think with the whole transition into the internet you know, I've been calling this the attention age that we're getting into, and I heard that and listened to it, but I didn't really understand it until I started trying to put a product out there and listen to how it compared to products that speak to people versus products that just are, are quote unquote good and quality on their own.

And it got me to start challenging the idea of if you build it, they. , because that's a, that's a common perception, right? If you build it, they will come. Why doesn't that work? That idea? , , 

Theo: I mean, you know, there's scores of, of folks who built a better product that didn't win. I mean, I just think the first thing that came in was Beta Max, which is vhs, right?

Like Beta Max is supposed to be a superior technology, right? But they just couldn't beat VHS out, right? And so that was one for a long time, you know, Mac, everyone knew Mac was better, but PC was eating his lunch back in the day, right? And so that's another one, you know, they were positioned themselves well and you know, there was some also some things around distribution and how they can get the, the PCs out a little bit faster than MacBook could.

I mean, but now that's different. You know, apple you know, from a marketing standpoint, they've, you know, they, they understood that and they've kind of rolled with the punches ever since. But they still make elegant products, right? So that's, that's, that's one of the few companies that that's figured that out.

Did you But it, 

Mr. Benja: go ahead. Oh, real quick, did you see that video of Steve Jobs where he's having a conference, an internal Apple conference, and one of the engineers stands up and says, how can you justify pushing forward with this new OS when it uses Java in this way and clearly does not? He goes down to a technical breakdown and basically calls Steve Jobs a dumb ass

Theo: And what does Steve Jobs. , 

Mr. Benja: well, you know, he put his, he kind of furrowed his brow and put his hand on his chin, you know, like he was, you know, kind of stroking his chin. Like, well, what I've come to learn is that it doesn't matter what we think and the, the point is to talk to the customer. And he, he, he basically goes to this short discussion on how he had to change his thinking from being, you know, starting from a builder and reaching out to the people, to mentally switching that, to going to the people and building backwards from there where it's like whatever you're building, it's fundamentally about people.

So if you start with people, you'll probably be in a much better position when you actually build. . 

Theo: Absolutely, absolutely. And also what I've come to believe too is you know, just ship, right? Just get the product something out there so you get fast feedback, right? So, you know, you know, even if it's not perfect or even if you haven't ever figured everything out, you get a better sense of what people want.

And then that, that was, that, that makes you a better understanding of what the market is looking for any point in time. So I, I'm a big believer in that, you know, just get something out and see what the market is, you know, and not so much like just saying stuff, you know, just to say, but almost kind of , kind of just like, test me out the waters.

Like, Hey, what if we did this? Okay, okay, what about this? 

Mr. Benja: See that? That's the, that's the point you, that's the point that gets a lot of people what you just said, you know? Well, let's just say something. Well, let's just put something out there that sounds like it's a bad thing to people who are creating.

So like, okay, when you're, when you're talking to your gurus or whatever you know, you, you hear all this. And because of that, I think it just really sounds bad. How, how do you know what's good and what's bad? What's a scam? What's not? 

Theo: Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you don't, , let's be honest. I mean, you know, it's so much out there.

I mean, you know what, you know someone who you know and be honest with you. So, I mean, you know, I don't know if we wanna talk about like, our history with gurus. I mean, you know, I can remember you know, Tony Robbins, you know, back in the day, and I actually bought, I forgot what his program was. It was like, you always has a new program.

It was one program. I, I actually f it was like a booklet you were supposed to read. The booklet mm-hmm. . And I actually bought that. I, I never bought anything. That was like the first thing I bought. That was a what? Back in like, Ooh. Early days of my business. Career at Cisco, and I was like, Hey, I needed something to kind of, you know, get over the hump.

And so I looked at it, I said, okay, this is good. And that's pretty much it with some tapes and stuff like that. And just to kind of prepare your mind. And so that kind of you know, set the stage for me to kind of think differently about like, okay, you know, this stuff could work. I mean, it's about mindset and I think if you do control your mind, it does control everything else.

And so I thought that was really insightful, but just like everybody else, you know, it's just one of those things, you just gotta be in it. Right. You know, some people take to it like like a duck and water, right? They just jump in and just like all in. And then some people like, okay, they di and dabble with different gurus.

And I, I even before that, I remember my dad, he was in sales, he used to listen to tons of tapes like Zig Ziegler, ler, yeah, Zig Ziegler you know the old school, Jim Rome. Yeah. I dunno if you guys know, know who that is. And so you know, all the time, you know, in his car, listened to tapes and stuff like that.

And, and, and it kind of, you know, seeped into me. And so even to this day, you know, I'm always listen to a podcast or some, some guru or something. So, so I think I come by honestly to kind of say, Hey, if nothing else, it does inspire you to think differently and give you new ideas and concepts as you kind of navigate your, your particular situation.

Because you know, if nothing else, it just gives you a different perspective and different ways of seeing things. And that's kind of how I kind of gravitated to gurus. What about you? What was your history with 

Mr. Benja: gu? You know what? Similar situation, my, my dad, as you know, he was a professional artist.

Mm-hmm. , like, he worked for he worked with the state of Florida. He did portraits for people. He was actually, you know a job employed artist. But yeah, every artist has their studio side where they kind of do their own thing. And my dad's in a different, so he had this idea of, you know, getting his art out there, going to galleries and he realized that like, Hey, there's a whole side to this.

I don't understand outside of creation, where it's getting it out to the people. Talking to the people. And I remember we were at this art show when I was a kid, and there was this guy there I think his name was Fazel or something like that. . And, you know, coming from, you know, we're in north Florida, south Georgia area, and there was this guy named Fazel.

This dude had like the loudest clothes. They weren't crazy colors, but he just had like this, this flaring trench coat with, you know like black on the outside and white stripes on the inside. He had this crazy fedora, you know, he was looking like a super villain way before, you know, comics were cool and cosplay was in, but he was just walking around talking to people.

And my dad just looked at him and I think he mumbled something along the lines of, . I wish people would stop looking at Fazel, , if Fazel had all the attention, but his art wasn't that great. I mean, oh man, that's funny. But everybody else, there was just the, the pure creative artist and Fazel was out there just hamming it up for everybody and getting money and 

Theo: getting paid , 

Mr. Benja: you know, I don't know how well he did in the end, but I just remember my dad kind of like not being concerned, but kind of looking over at this guy, like, what's he doing?

And when my dad did that, I did that. I kind of looked over like, yeah, what is he doing? And I think that kind of started the spark in me too, because my dad had, you know, a lot of you may not have ever seen like the, the big collections of, you know, 17 CDs or that big book, little cassette tapes where they all like were arranged in the Yes.

In the album. So I 

Theo: remember that. Remember those days? . 

Mr. Benja: So yeah, I actually ended up going to a seminar where you got the whole cell nice. You know, my parents would, my parents would take me on all their stuff, right? So I got a seminar and the guy was up there like, listen, if you wanna do this, you could buy this and then move that and sell this.

And I was asking my mom, mom and dad, I was like, why are we here? And my mom was like, Hey, they promised us knives in a microwave and our microwave's about to go out. Figured this would be an interesting thing to go to.

Theo: do you remember what the guru was that you went to go see? You remember back, 

Mr. Benja: back in the day? I don't remember what the guru was talking about, but my mom was in the, in the seminar hall grading papers. Right. while this, while this guy's talking, and my dad's over there with his sketchbook open, you know, drawing pictures, right.

They're both doing things that aren't part of the seminar. And after the guy finishes talking, he's like, okay, for everybody who stays, you can get, you know, we're gonna offer get, get you your microwaves, but if you go ahead and leave now you're gonna get your knives. And I was like, Hey, we can get the knives.

And my dad's like, Hmm. Do I feel like staying longer to get the microwave? What do you think, Shirley? You know, he turns and it was just the whole, the whole market, the sales and marketing thing. Right? The whole sales pitch, you know? Yeah. You gotta stay longer. Yeah. If you've never been to one of those experiences, it's eye-opening.

But basically that, that was my first big intro to that whole world. And after that it, it just changed my trajectory a little bit on like watching out for people who are trying to scam you, watching out for what's maybe a good product but may not be for you. Mm-hmm. , figuring out that whole landscape.

So that was my history. Yeah. And nowadays it's like, , you know, same, same thing. Pretty much just on the internet. 

Theo: Yeah, yeah. You know, and so you know, continuing college, I think a few folks kind of, I forgot what it was, but it was some anway thing. People got, some of us college students trying to get engaged in, you know, kind of want those pyramid schemes, you know,

Yeah. You get folks working under you to do stuff. And so, you know, it was the, I think I, I think, I think I'm went dark for a lot of gurus for a while, right. Until I kind of jumped back onto Tony Robbins and when I was working. And then every once in a while, you know I think what happened, I don't know if it was with you or just on my own, I heard this thing called 10 x and I just like, man, well, well, no, I take that back.

It was first, it was this, this guy named Gary V. And this is like, you know, not too long ago, right? When I had kind of started this business doing healthcare technology. And I heard this guy named Gary Fi, who's this joker, and I start, you know, eating this content. I mean, he was one of them first ones I kind of saw just big on internet everywhere.

He has some books. I read his books and I was like, oh man, this guy, you know, I mean, he, he cussed like a sail seller, but he knew what he was talking about when it comes to just, you know, getting attention in this new world of internet, right. Where Yeah. You know, everybody was everything. And so that was like one of the more recent gurus I kind of, you know, glued onto to, you know, and when was this?

Oh man. It had to be around like 20. 4, 15, 16. Yeah, it 

Mr. Benja: was like that, that sounds like the early Gary v era when he really started popping. 

Theo: Yeah, he started popping, I started listening and you know, he was the only one kind of on YouTube, right? He, I think he started doing Daily V before anybody was thinking about putting content out every day.

Right. And so he was just out there, man. He was like far ahead. Everybody else. I think he was one of the early investors in Uber, cuz he knew Travis Kalanick. I mean he, you know, he was just, . He just happened to be the right place at the right time. And his claiming of fame, you don't know, he, he basically had, father had a wine business, you know, he helped his father build the business up from 3 million to 30 million, basically selling wine over the internet.

And you, and he's got some old videos of him just sitting in front of a, I guess camcorder, doing this, doing videos of him selling wine. And, you know, he just took that to the next level. He knew, you know, he was doing banner ads back in the day. He did everything right before 

Mr. Benja: email marketing, 

Theo: email marketing before anybody was kind of doing it.

And he kind of figured all that out. And he made a good point. I mean, we'll talk about later, but, you know, I think there's, there's, there's nuggets in every guru that you can kind of take. And one, one of his big nuggets, he thought he's like, reason why he's always first to everything is because that's where you had the biggest arbitrage.

In other words, you had the biggest advantage because no one knows how to optimize on it yet. And so you can, you know, take advantage of it. So j you know, that's why he was getting open rates in his emails, like 30% when it first started. Right. Which is unheard of. . Yeah. 

Mr. Benja: Yeah. , what do you okay, hold on.

How do you define arbitrage? Cause that's an important. 

Theo: Yeah. So yeah, that's a good point. So, I mean, it may not definition, but what does it mean? Yeah, I mean, for me it means there is, you could take advantage of the market inefficiencies, right? Because now everything's like a perfect market, like a stock market, for instance, right?

You know, it's hard to know when to buy he sell because there's imperfect information you can take advantage of it and you know, make a lot of money. So basically in the email market, no one knew what he was doing. When they sent the email, they said, oh, I never got an email from a stranger before, so let me just open this.

Right? . So, but no one knew what the protocol was. And then once he figured that out and he got like huge, you know you know, open rates, then, you know, eventually the market finds out this is working. And so you get more competitors in, and then you change your behavior to consumer. And then pretty soon people are like, I'm not opening this crap.

It's, it's gonna be someone selling me something. And then now you can open rates at 3% and then you need copywriting to kind of, you know, differentiate. Or just like Google Ads, for instance, you know, when they first started, you know, everybody just clicked on everything, right? They said, oh, this is search.

I'm searching for, You know, paper. Right? And you know, the first thing that popped up, oh, that must be the best search. Nu-uh, that's an ad. . We weren't checking for an ad, so you click on it and you know, now someone's selling you some paper. And they just got paid off of that as opposed to you just, you know, some random search.

And, but we got wise to that and soon that became, you know you know, people. So, so basically it's a, it is basically that the period in the market where there's inefficiencies and people can take advantage of the unknown and the fact that consumer behavior hasn't adapted yet to that new change. So, yeah, so he was the one that kind of helped me understand that's why he went on, you know, all this stuff.

Twitter first, TikTok first, and you know, whatever the next new thing is. I'm sure he's, he's right there. 

Mr. Benja: And an example of that, like you're talking about with Twitter, it's, people were online, but they weren't used to having conversations with random people. Right. So they would get online cuz Twitter was just kind of open.

Right. Yeah. And you would usually only talk to your friends or whatever and only respond if somebody asked a direct question. And, you know, it was, it was a weird environment where it was pretty tame compared to what we have now. Right. Yeah. So I remember getting on there and I wanted to find out, when was this 2000, 10 ish?

Nine? Mm-hmm. , I don't know, eight, seven, something like that. Early Twitter. And. I got on there and I started just looking up like, well, who is on Twitter ? You know, I mean, this is the whole black Twitter thing. I was like, who is on Twitter? Let's see. Okay, this guy's on here, but he's not talking. And I found DJ W Kid, that was the G unit, DJ 50 cents dj.

Right? So I got on there and I was like, Hey, W what's up? And just kept going, . And then a little while later, boo whoop, Hey man, what's going on? Nothing much hanging out in Greece. I was like, what? , , what? I, I gotta reply just like, like that. It blew my mind that it was so, it, yeah. The whole arbitrage thing was there.

It's like, wait a minute. And the way I kind of look at it is to, I totally agree with your definition. I've always looked at it in the gap between what the, the market expects mm-hmm. and what the people want. There's this gap in expectations and want where the market doesn't know that it can feed the people in a certain way, or the people don't know that the market has a certain offering.

Mm-hmm. . So you can, you can capitalize on that. You can exploit that where it's like, oh, people on Twitter don't know that they can just talk to random stars, and random stars aren't diluted with people's messages. So I can literally just go searching every celebrity and say, . Hey man, how's it going?

Check this out. Hey man, how's it going? What's your name? You know? And I just started having this conversation with Wooki and that blew my mind that nobody was doing this 

Theo: yet. Wow. Wow. Because they didn't know. And what I think also, it's learned behavior, right? You know, it's like after a while you realize, oh, there's people who are trying to sell me stuff.

And then so, you know, people see it work, you know, just like any kind of market, right? If, if it's working. Because even in my market, I was selling a new way to kind of help with doctors getting paid for not doing anything really. And I saw my, I saw my market kind of just get saturated , you know?

It's like, wow, everybody just, there was nobody here. And now all of a sudden everybody's here. And that always happens. And just like with all these kind of, you know, media tools. So, you know, I think going back to, to Gary V as a guru, you know, you know, so that's kind of one of the guys. But then I started kind of realizing that he was kind of, not basic, but he was, he was always gonna stay kind of low level where he was kind of more about exposing, getting out there.

And so a lot of, you know, he's always doing a lot of, you know, the same kind of kind of communications, right? Mm-hmm. around how to get engaged in social media. So, you know, I was kind of looking around and then, you know, I saw this book about, I, I remember seeing this book at the barbershop, and it was like 10 x.

Yeah. And I, oh, that's an interesting concept. , you know, 10 x Yeah, sure. I wanted a 10 x, everybody wants a 10 x. Right? And then, so I finally, you know, bit the bullet bullet and bought the book and it was about this guy named Grant Cardone and man that dude man. So , so, so Grant Cardone, for those that don't know, was a guru that came from car sells initially.

And then he created a, the worst stereotype. Yes. Yes. The worst Sale stereotype came from car sales, built a national-wide, nationwide sales kind of program. Right. That was his kind of claim to fame. And I think he wrote, you know, a book, you know, well, he wrote a book before that, I think through the last recession.

I forgot what was sold to be Sold, or I can't remember what it was called. But celebr Sold came 

Mr. Benja: before that. Yeah. And he had the Millionaires booklet, which was a smaller one. 

Theo: Yeah. So, so he, he dabbled in it. Right. You know, kind of, but, but it was his 10 x was his piece of resistance, right. Where he talked about like, you know, if you have a goal or target, you know, 10 x it.

Because then you're definitely gonna hit your golden target. So if you're trying to make a million dollars, say you're gonna make 10 million, 10, eight, and then you are like, what? And then, but then you start thinking about that mindset. He ain't, he ain't, he's not wrong. Because yes, you may not hit that, that you know, that that 10 x goal, but you did hit that initial goal that you set for yourself and it gives you a sense of thinking bigger and, you know, achieving more than you ever expected.

And so it was, it kind of revolutionized, you know, I mean, well, you know, he definitely put him on the map and you know, now it's his 10 x movement, 10 x conference. You know, he's just big time doing all this stuff now. A and so I kind of read, I kind of went all in on him, like listen to his audio tapes and videos and books.

And I didn't buy anything from him. No . So it was weird. I was just like, ah, that was, nah, I'm good . So, but I felt like, you know, I got a, the gist of what he was kind of, you know, communicating around, you know, and it will always, you know, it begin a year, I think for the last couple years, I would always kind of reread his book just to get inspired again as I was building my business up.

So, so that was my exposure to him. 

Mr. Benja: So the 10 x rule was it's, it's subtitled 10 X rule. The only difference between success and failure. Hey, that's, that's, that's bold. So he came at you? 

Theo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the guy. I mean, you know, if he, I mean a guy, you know, he is a marketer. Peace. I mean, you know, and he came at this game late.

I mean, I think he started in his fifties, right? And then he just kind of blew up. I think he. up the top, you know, pretty much the top now, right? And now he's all about real estate, and now he's starting to work up a lot of other smaller gurus and stuff like that, which we'll get into the second, you know, but he's been up there for a while and starting to, you know, differentiate himself, you know, almost on that, you know, the gurus, the gurus, Tony Robbins level, right?

When it comes to just the, the marketing level marketing on the internet, Tony Robbins is really king of the what the info mail show back in the day. Remember Tony Robbins was the man Yeah. Infomercials. But I think Gary grant Cardones kind of positioned himself as the man when it comes to just marketing on the internet.

So 

Mr. Benja: yeah, I think he's got the most grant Cardone that is, has the most success in like, real world success money to go along with his guru ship. Like if you were 

Theo: Yeah, he is. Got some, he's legit. I mean, you know, so he's not, you know, BS in here. I mean, with the real estate game alone, you know, he's been doing it, but kudos to him, man.

So, yeah. It, it can happen. So and he's a twin too. You ever saw an interview with him and his twin? 

Mr. Benja: Yeah. Yeah, 

Theo: I have. Yeah. I thought that was cool. I was like, oh, he, he really is a twin . 

Mr. Benja: No, there's yeah, there's some interviews with Gary Cardone that are Yeah. That are funny cuz dude is, you could tell Grant is more of an entertainer.

Yeah, I was listening to Gary. , what was it? The Real Bradley podcast. Mm-hmm. . And and Gary gets to there is like, yeah. I mean, attention's one thing. It's, it's cool, but I don't want attention . I wanna go to the, I wanna go to the mall, get a hamburger and be like, you know, just do whatever the hell I want.

Doing a million dollar deal. I don't need somebody ask me about my YouTube channel. . So bonafide business man, also, but, so all these, all these gurus, right? How do we, the, the story I'm always hearing is, you know, you can find this stuff in the libraries and people, you know, they're, they're scamming you for your money.

And I know a lot, there are stories where people have spent like, you know, tens of thousands of dollars and are still, are still broke and. People are kind of saying, yeah, you just could have got that, that information from a library. What is it these gurus offer? And, and like, I guess where do you draw the line?

Theo: Yeah. I mean, you know, I thought that for years, you know, and I mean I mean recently, to be honest with you, recently I've, I've actually spent some, some, some real money on buy, you know, getting some, some gurus to kind of assist. Yeah. And I, I think the, the mind shift happened for me was you know, just looking for something right.

You know, it's just like, Hey, you know, I need new thoughts, new ideas, like w you know, to get to that next level. Right. And I saw this one guru, Myron Golden. He had this thing called a challenge, and, and I was back in November, I think I, you and I had talked about, so while we went, Attacked about grant Cardone because he did this whole reality show, the billionaire next door and undercover billionaire.

Undercover billionaire. Billionaire. Thank you. Billionaire, next door, undercover, billionaire, . Yes. Undercover, billionaire, . And you know, just basically they dropped him in the middle of nowhere, Pueblo, Colorado, and they had 90 days to build a million dollar business. Right. Not using his name, money, or, or context.

And it was just fascinating to see all his little Grant Cardones that me and Mr. Benja kind of knew readings, books, but he also was fascinating when you watched that that reality show was his movements. Right. What he did. Right. What he didn't do. And so that was fascinating. So he kind of, you know, I think that kind of got me on the tick of like, okay, you know, gurus can't be helpful.

Not so much of what they say, but also what they do. Mm-hmm. kind of watch what they do. Right. And so for some reason there's one guru, it was one few black gurus out there, and we'll talk about that in a second, but he kind of popped on my, my radar, Myron Golden. He talks about business principles from the Bible.

Mm-hmm. And he's actually based here in Tampa, Florida, where I'm at. So I thought that was kinda interesting. Okay. So anyway, I started, I listening to his stuff, he's older too. And that I said, oh man, this guy is like, knows his stuff, you know, from the Bible, but also from just business in general. So I, I, this is the first group where I finally.

opened my wallet and paid a little money to see what he was about. And I was amazed, man. And so going back to your original question, he broke it down. He made a good point. He said, the reason why you get a coach or a guru is to go faster. He said, look, you're right. All this information's out there. You could probably do it, but you know, it may take you six months to finally put it all together.

Whereas if you get a guru, they sit down with you for a day. Yes, you're paying money, you can probably have all that knowledge in a day, right? Because they'll either a, do it for you or you know, told should give you the tools and stuff like that. And what didn't work? What does work? Why does, works so much faster?

So usually people pay cuz he said and he said, it is really you know, people say time is money. In his mind he said, look time is way more valuable than money. He said. So if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to, you know, you wanna go fast, then you rather pay, you know what it takes to go fast and that's why you bring in a coach, a guru.

And that kind of shifted my mind. He's like, oh, he's right. , 

Mr. Benja: yeah, that I got choked up over that, that Senti. That makes, that makes a lot of sense. And you know, I can, I'll, I'll confess it, it, because of my creative background, it took me too long to fully embrace what the gurus were going after and how to like, Look past the scam, malicious nature of a lot of it, because you can find yourself just broke and you're looking for a magic bullet or something.

And I, I think that I had a switch in my head that flipped when you know, I was listening to a guy Dan Locke. Mm-hmm. And he's making a lot of good points. And while he was making the points he said, he said, no, no, you don't get it. One of the things you're learning by getting involved in what I'm doing is you're firsthand experiencing me selling you something and you can't help but be interested because you're this close to me.

And unless you're studying what I'm doing, as I'm doing it, as I'm saying it, you're missing out. And he kind of looked at everybody in the room. It's like, he's like, I haven't said anything groundbreaking. Nevertheless, we're 45 minutes into this and you were all around the edge of your seats. . And I'm on the edge of my seat in my, in my studio looking at YouTube.

I'm like, holy crap, he's right. Whatever he said or didn't say, I was stuck there the whole time I started, I started fighting back. Like, na no, this is, this is just mental trickery psychology. And there is that in there, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah. . I was looking at it, I was like, no, this guy knows what he's talking about.

And the important part is, if I can use that power for good

what could I accomplish? I was, I was dead serious about it, cuz I'm not trying to, you know, it's a lot of creators and get into, or just, not even creators, anybody, it's like, well, I don't want to do this because it's a scam, it's a trick. And it's like, yeah, that's there. But I, I, I take it back to like you were saying with, you know, getting that intense working and, and, and going through things fast.

My parents used to actually put me into camps. So they would be these really intensive two week, three week, one month weekend getaway, whatever to learn something. Mm-hmm. . So I remember I went to this two week swimming camp, you know, my cousin taught me to swim, but my mom was like this boy needs to learn how to really swim.

I'm like, I can swim. She's like, no, you, you thrash . You don't swim. So she put me on like this two week intensive training camp for swimming. And that was like all you did. So you showed up in the morning and they're like, Hey everybody, you know, we went out ate breakfast by the pool while the guy talked, you know, we finished our stuff, went back to the dorms, went back out to the pool, pool safety and.

It's like, all right, everybody's sit in the pool. He's talking about pool safety while we're sitting in the water. It's like, couldn't do this in the classroom. It's like every day we got in, our trunks, got in the water and the guy talked to us or showed us stuff. It was so intense. For two weeks, I had never gotten in and out of the water, and it's so many times in my life, multiple times a day, just getting in and out of the water, getting used to it.

Yeah. The smells, the feels, the people around you, man. I mean, at the end of it, it was just like, dude, for just little kids who couldn't swim. He's just like, Hey, listen, I'm gonna jump in the water. They're gonna throw you in the water. I'm gonna catch you. I'm gonna drag you to the other side of the pool. So it's like, yeah, you're jumping, you're throwing kids who can't swim into the deep end, and then the trainer dragged them through the water to the other side just to hand show them.

It's like, no, no, no. You can make it to the other side. I happen to be here. Mm-hmm. , but let's get you over this fear. Mm-hmm. of being in the water and swimming all the way to the other side. Man, ma'am. Now I'm like, I mean, decades later, literally, you know, I just kind of thanked myself, oh, swimming pool and flop right in.

And think back to those two weeks that really got me there. 

Theo: I mean, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, that's what you know. I mean, a good coach, right? I mean, well, two things while you were talking. . You know, I think about, you know, sports, right? They, they have coaches that coach the team, but even individual players, like a great player, LeBron has a, you know, physical coach that's helping them, you know, body parts get more emotions or, you know, figure out how to, you know, starve off injury.

And, you know, of course they make millions of dollars. It makes sense. But then why don't you do the same thing for your own career or your business, right? Because you can't know everything. You just, you just just, you just can't. And so to your point, having a coach that, that's giving you two things, you need competence and confidence, right?

And to kind of feed off each other. And so having a coach kinda helps create that feedback for you. So now you have confidence you can do it, and then you begin more competence to have more confidence and then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so that you become stronger and stronger. And really that coach is really making that, that cycle go a lot faster, right?

Because they can kind of give you more confidence, cuz you lean on their confidence, right? They'll, they'll say, Hey look, I've done this for like a hundred kids before. Oh okay, so you can be like them, right? You like, oh, okay, so now you got confidence, right? Then they give you competence, right? They give you little, little things to show you that you can, you're doing better.

Yeah, you're doing great. Keep it up. And so now you're feeding this loop where you become stronger and stronger. And so, so to me, you know, I think if, if it's a good coach, right? And you'll know, you know, yeah, you might be some trash out there, but you'll know because you know, you feel like in your business and your thought processes you're getting better at something and you're learning mastery cause that's what you want.

You don't want to just go in there and just, you know, I know little copywriting or I know, you know, , I can dibble and dabble. No, you have to know it intimately so you don't even think about it. Right? So he could just, just sit down, boom, make it out and keep it moving. And that's what a coach can kinda help you do, right?

Just, just like a, a baseball player, you know, with hitting a baseball or a basketball player, shooting a shot is, is almost gotta be unconscious mastery. And I think that's what the coaches, you know, the good ones do are, are trying to do. Right. Especially with your two week intensive, like you said, you don't even think about it now, right?

It's almost unconscious. At this level, because you took that, that intensive coaching that kind of got you to the next level. 

Mr. Benja: Oh, totally. It made me made me just, I, I, I didn't realize it at the time, and I look back to that now where it's like, I took a, I took a heavy dive into like certain gurus, like, all right, if, if Grant Cardone's gonna be the thing let, let's put it to the test.

And I got like, seller, be sold, be obsessed to be average. Mm-hmm. The 10 X rule, , same here, brother. The 10 , 10 X mentor, and yeah, I, I actually wanted to go through that kind of intensive program and I even bought some of his materials online. Bought the 10 x growth conference digital pass for one day.

Oh, you didn't go? Okay. I didn't know it was one of the digital passes. Right. And just seeing the people in the comments, it's like, okay, there's that sense of community. Mm-hmm. . And you know, you have a thing that says, you know, Hey, show up now for this webinar, or you're a punk. You know, that's basically

And it was kind of like, it was kinda like, yeah, you're part of this program. Get in the pool, dog. Get in the pool, and you're like, crap. So, you know, you get in this webinar, you're in the pool and you're forced to go through this stuff that. Honestly would've taken me weeks to do it myself, even though there was no reason not to do it.

Yeah. It's like I had to go download the pdf, print it out. Yeah, I would've, I would've been like, well, I'll do that tomorrow. Or, oh, it's just a questionnaire. But no, I'm in a, I have a community of people and I'm seeing all the answers fly by, like, you know, all right, this is number one question. If you haven't printed out your PDF or if you don't have a printer, go to Best Buy, then come right back with the printer and start printing this out cuz you need to.

And I'm like, what the hell is this guy talking about? He's just, he's just being loud and rah rah. But I plowed through the little program and was answering all the questions and it forced me through stuff. So now I'm like, this shit is.

Theo: Well, you know, and that's what I realized too, man. I mean, like you, I mean, you know, I did this fi you know, finally did a guru training back in November for, they, they do this thing called challenges, right? It's like one week, you know whole week, five days, hour long session, and then some homework, some simple homework, and I did it.

They have a community, and then you got accountability. I even have a still of accountability partner from that experience, and she's, she's in the healthcare field and we kind of keep each other accountable, which is awesome. Like did you do your, did you do your videos? Like you said, oh, Theo, you're doing a great job.

Keep 'em up. Oh yeah, you too. I see your videos. And so to your point, you know, it's, it, it, it almost is forcing you to become better, right? And because not only did you pay a little money to do it, but also, you know, so you going pay attention, but also it, it encourage you. It's like, Hey, you know, there's other people like me, right?

That that's, that's in this space and we can kind of go together. So that kind of pivoted into my, my next big coaching, which is on the social media piece, right? And so this one guy, Ryan Pineda, I just remember watching this guy like years ago, like a couple years ago. He was like, you know, just getting started and he was a real estate guy out of Las Vegas, you know, doing flip flipping houses.

And, and I was like, okay, but I kind of liked this content. He was kind of like you know, low key with it. He wasn't really kind of, you know, saying he knew everything and I kind of liked his Affleck. And so, you know, outside, I watched him early on and then, yeah. and then I kind of fell away cuz he started talking about NFTs and I was like, I'm not, I'm not listening to this scam.

But he sounded like he did well with it, . But then it was weird. So after I did the one group course, I was like, okay, I gotta get on social media now I gotta just get my name out there. And come to find out Ryan had a program to help entrepreneurs, you know build out their social media presence. And I said, okay, this is timing.

So I just jumped in his program right away and it's been good. I mean, it's, it's more of a mastermind. So a little bit, a little bit, a little bit more costly, but I get one-on-one coaching with him and his team, you know, so if you've seen, so my YouTube 

Mr. Benja: explain the mastermind content cuz that's, that's been around for a while too.

Yeah, 

Theo: it has been. And so this is my first time kind of doing it. But basically you kinda in a cohort and you kind of sit down with you get kind of one-on-one, almost group coaching mostly, but you can get, you know, some one-on-one time with the head guru if you will, and kind of get, you know, pick their brain on what's successful, what's not.

And you know, they kinda walk you through, you know, how you're building towards success and so, , I've been kind of, you know, yeah. I've been kind of enjoying it. So, you know, they've been kind of guiding, you know, if you've seen some of my content out there, you can see, you know, gotten some interesting, you know, kind of, you know, got a sense of how it could be.

Right. Because I, I learned, I didn't, I, if I had to do all that my own, that probably took me about two months , right? Yeah. They gave me the contact, gave me the con connections to do the editing. They gave me the way to kind of frame everything. They gave me some ideas on how to, you know set up the content I, I should talk about, you know, talk about things like trend jacking where, you know, you, you, you know, do content that's based on the trend, like ai or you do evergreen content, which is based on your, your niche.

And he says, you know, near your niche. And so stuff that he did. So, cuz like I said, I saw Ryan like, you know, when he was like maybe a hundred thou thousand followers, now he is got like a million followers. Really? Yes. And so he, he definitely, so to me, you know, he was the best salesperson cuz I saw it literally when he kind of built it up, I said, okay, this guy can do it.

I mean, you know, and, and he's at that level now where he's interviewing Grant Cardone. That's when blew my mind. I said, oh dude, this dude is nobody. Now he's interviewing Grant Cardone and David bet. We didn't put what was it, David Bet. Patrick be bet David. Bet David Patrick. Yeah. So So, yeah, so it's yeah.

So anyway, he's, he's like I said, so that's kind of like, you know, I kind of went to that, that path. And then finally last but not least, I jumped into Russell Brunson's, like ClickFunnel's kind of challenge. And so this is the, the, the, the kind of what, what would you call him? More of the the, the behind the scenes?

Well, not really behind the scenes, but he, he really kind of was, he was the one that was instrumental in creating all these lead pages, , to get you to buy all these Googles books. And he was the guy that was selling stuff, you know, crazy on, off of the internet. Yeah. 

Mr. Benja: Yeah. He, he, Brunson. Brunson is cool. You know what we should do?

We should just kind of go through these and say what we like, what we don't like about 'em, if they're trash, whatever, . Okay. Let's do it. Yeah. Let's, let's let's, let's start with Brunson then. , what, what do you gotta say about Bronson just in general? Cause I 

Theo: mean, I kind of was around about him, but, you know, really what kind of blew my mind was like you know, one of, you know, that Myron Golden talked about him.

I may think, I think he was part of Russell's initial mastermind when it was only 30,000. I think it's like 200,000, 250,000 now. But yes, they, they, they talk big numbers. So he so he, that's what Myron Golden did, and he's got ClickFunnels to kind of start his campaigns. Yeah. But yeah. I've been impressed.

I mean, you know, it's, it is nothing ground shaking. I tried ClickFunnels to do some stuff I wanted to do. Mm-hmm. click funnels not 2.0. It's kind of trash a little bit . I mean, it's not just not robust. You could tell a marketer 

Mr. Benja: made this , right? Right. So it's not 

Theo: like, you know, it's going to set the world on fire.

But 

Mr. Benja: but. 

Theo: In a way, in a way, I mean, you know, cause I guess he just put a name to this whole system of, you know, collecting emails through lead pages and then, you know, keep bombarding them with emails, right? basically. So they buy something. But then, you know, now he, he created like a name, he calls it a funnel, right?

And basically, you know, getting ads to get people into your funnel, which is a lead page usually to get 'em a lead offer or you want to give 'em your core offer, which is a book or something like that. Or course, or then you can have a premium ticket or a high ticket you know, coaching program or something like that.

And so he gets all these different ways to kind of do that in marketing copy and all that stuff to help people you know, create these kind of things called lead funnels. And so, so, so far, I mean, you know, like I said, I'm impressed by like, how to think like a marketer, cuz he, he has some good insights about simple things.

Like, you know, you wanna have a hook, a story and a offer, right? Whenever you kind of do an ad. And I was like, okay, you know, simple way to remember that. And so he's got, and then he is also got a lot of good, you know, he's got a lot of connections cuz he did everything for everybody. So Grant Cardone showed up.

I mean he just had what's that guy? From Shark Tank the brother Damon Damon, John Damon. Damon John did something with him. You know, he did Tony Robbins stuff, you know, when he was positioning stuff. So, you know, he's definitely connected. Okay. And and just learning how he sells too is kind of interesting too, how he sets everything.

Mr. Benja: Yeah. So what I would look to Russell Brunson for and yeah, that's a good thing. Dude. I'll, I'll throw a little bit of what I like, what I don't like. What I liked about him was definitely the way his whole speaking setup is literally like a sales funnel. Mm-hmm. , there's the headline opening the, the hook point really quick.

Then, you know, the, the myths like, Hey, you think this, that's, that's all wrong. You're like, oh, what's wrong with it? Well, it's this, this, and this. So he has this whole setup down, and his call to actions are pretty powerful. And I remember one of, yeah, he's just, just really good for understanding that whole sales pitch very quickly.

Mm-hmm. , and that's, that's what sales funnels do, and that's what ClickFunnels, his multimillion dollar company's about. Yeah. So he's all right. He's cool. , I, I, have you played with ClickFunnels at all? I think ClickFunnels is a bit overblown for my purposes, you know, because you can, like, you can set up a, a lead page where you're collecting an email, and if they didn't respond in five minutes, you can have 'em send an email, Hey, listen, this offer expires in 10 minutes.

You can set up all these weird connections. It's, it's extremely complicated. Mm-hmm. To where it starts. It starts segmenting the audiences, ab testing follow ups. So that's where the power of click funnels lies. Mm-hmm. in managing all of that. for the most part. You know, there, there are pages out there where you just have a simpler or a much more scaled down version of ClickFunnels, like a Sam cart I think mm-hmm.

leadpages.com is now another site or whatever. But yeah, I think it's cool. You just don't need all that for the most part. 

Theo: Yeah. I mean yeah, I try to do my video sales letter. So basically you have a video, you know, call it case study that you do, and then you have a application that people fill out for like a high ticket offer.

I try to do that in click photos two portal . I'm sorry, we don't have a form ready to go to collect this information. I said, what? So I just went in WordPress, created it and did WP Forms, and I was Good . Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I was like, ClickFunnels, I love you . So anyway, all right. You wanna keep moving?

Mr. Benja: Yeah. Gary v the, the loud mouth on the scene, I don't mean that in a bad way, but he is. 

Theo: You still listen to him every now and 

Mr. Benja: then? Yeah. You know what's, I actually, yesterday I actually went back and listened to a piece from 2019 and it's so appropriate to today. Wow. And I'm like, this guy is still on it.

So, Basically, I think he's good for understanding where attention is going. Hmm. So if you watch what he does and you're looking at how he's garnering attention, that's pretty much going to be the way that everybody else is going to be garnering attention as well. So he's definitely good for figuring out what's 

Theo: current.

Yeah. You know, and to his point, he was early to this game of, you know, I think he had a book called crush It was it No Crush It, it was, yeah. Crush It. Crushing it. Yeah. I mean, you know, that was just about examples of how you can do on the internet. But it was called jab, jab, jab Hook. Yeah. And he was the first to kind of say, look, don't sell every time you talk to folks.

And you know, that was the first time I ever heard that. Right. You know, and he said, look, put the content out. Give 'em information. And he said, the longer you kinda hold that hook, you know, when you're trying to offer something, the more powerful it is. And so I was like, whew. That blew my mind. And now everybody, a lot of folks are realizing that, you know, when you get to a certain level, you can say all the time you said, no, we can't.

We just gotta build the audience. Gotta see so much value. It's, and he thoughts about this, Gary V was the first one to kind of realize that you got, you give so much value that, you know, if you just ask for one little thing, it's not even a big ass to them. It's like, oh yeah, I'll pay you a hundred bucks.

You gave me so much for free, why not? So, yeah. 

Mr. Benja: Yeah. It's good stuff kind of. I won't say breaks, but evolves the mold of the mode of thinking of always be selling. 

Theo: Yes. And I think, you know, and Grant Cardone and Ryan Pineda had that conversation, it says, better to be a marketer now than a seller.

Mm-hmm. because of where everything's at. So, but yeah. Yeah. And, and he's 

Mr. Benja: got nothing to sell. He's just basically building his name. Yeah. So as he builds his name his other companies get money. So un unless you're talking about vre, which is I think his pretty much only relevant consumer based product.

Yeah, 

Theo: yeah. Good point. 

Mr. Benja: So yeah, I think he's worth listening to Patrick 

Theo: Bet. . Yeah. I mean, you know, just, you know, a solid business guy. I mean, you know, he's, he, you know, I don't think he's gives anything like super insightful, but he's always giving you entertainment. He calls it Valuetainment. And you know, I think he has some insights just on the world in general, you know, coming from Iran.

And I think I kind of, you know, I bought his book your next Five Moves last year. So, you know, it was stuff I knew, but it was good to kind of get his perspective. He gives me things like you know, speed. He talks about speed, you know, this, that's how, you know, someone's serious, how fast they go and things like that.

So yeah, he's good, you know, for interviews too. He's pretty good. So, I mean, I, I'm not saying anything bad or good. I don't think he's, you know, it is not, I guess he was one of the early ones out there, so that's probably why. I mean, he was doing interviews with like Kobe and Shaq, I mean, you know, way before Yeah.

Folks were doing that. Who he did well with Kevin Hart too. So he's he's big time. Yeah. 

Mr. Benja: Definitely. He's one of the guys I listened to the Kobe interview. That's how I, I pretty much decided he was worth listening to. Yeah, same here. I was like, . And I realized he was playing the attention game when he did that.

I was like, ah, this is what Gary V was talking about, like when Gary V was saying interview, you know, the guy, the neighborhood pizza. Store owner. I realized that's what Patrick bet David was doing just on a much higher scale. 

Theo: Absolutely. Absolutely. So he got the attention, that's for sure. 

Mr. Benja: Exactly. Conspiracies.

So he's all about the Yeah, a good point. Talking random 

Theo: stuff. So yeah, getting that attention going and stuff like that. I think he even sold his company recently. That's the last I heard. So you talked about the other guy, the, the he, so Patrick bet David came from insurance. Didn't the other guy you talked about, the real Bradley, didn't he come from insurance as well?

I kind of heard about him recently. 

Mr. Benja: Did he come from insurance? I don't know. He was, he was really good friends with Grant Cardone and helped Grant Cardone set up his, his whole training platform. Cuz Grant Cardone's all about sales training. Bradley owns the company that built out Grant Cardone's sales training 

Theo: platform.

Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. So, so Bradley is more like a seller that did like a sales guy. That's his claim to fame. 

Mr. Benja: He was now he's still working on this you know, getting, everybody's talking about virtual training and all that. So he basically sells to businesses, . It's like, Hey, if you have your whole business and you want them all to train on a certain software product, you, you use my system.

Mm-hmm. . So he uses his, he uses his platform to kind of sell his system to other businesses. So yeah, Bradley, I guess we can. Yeah, he, he's all right. A lot of people don't like him because he's one of those cigar smoking, you know? Yeah. Steak. Steak and eggs for breakfast with a beer kind of guys.

Yeah. . So, yeah. I'll, I'll put him down. Bradley, he's, he's cool, but he's more of a talk host than a actual, I'm gonna teach 

Theo: you something guy, you know what? And I was just adding two more folks here. I'm gonna put them in that list, you know me, Kevin, and then Boyce Watkins, you know, I mean, they, they come up with some, you know financials stuff every now and then, but they're more like entertainment kind of speakers.

Not really gurus, but during the pandemic, I, I watched a lot of Meat Cabin. I don't know if you saw his stuff. And then, then heard of this guy. Yeah. He was doing a lot of stock stuff, and that's kind of when I got into that. And then Boyce Watkins, you know, from the black standpoint, you know, he giving you stock tips, but from, you know, and then, but also giving you, you know, some tea on the black culture.

So, you 

Mr. Benja: know, saw you know, I saw Voice Watkins live. No, where was this? Yeah, he came out to LA and he was at the African American Cultural Center or something. 

Theo: That's right. You did tell me that. Yeah. . 

Mr. Benja: And I'm like, I'm like, boy Watkins. That's the guy talking that, talking that black stuff. All right. I'm, and that's how I found out about him.

Cause I was into the black ISE at the time. You know, black Lives Matter was popping off and it was even before that though actually. But yeah, I heard about him, said, I'm gonna go down to this cultural center and yeah man, he gets up there. He was like, Hey everybody there are a lot of black people need to get their shit together.

Lemme start talking about that. So how come you have this business and how come you're not? So he was basically saying, you know, you need to get your business together and if you're, if you're black, you need to understand these things. And he's got solid information, but his entertainment side kind of veers off into other stuff.

And you're like, . 

Theo: I know. Well, you know, he's a PhD in finance, you know, he'll let you know that like every, every episode. So you know, don't get twisted. Yeah. , I'm the only PhD from, you know, Purdue, you know, in finance, black finance, PhD. But so he knows his stuff, you know, he is got his he's got tons of his But it's funny, it's like I saw Myron Golden.

It's so funny. It's like I'm, I'm trying to figure out what Myron did that made me buy his stuff. Cause I listened to all these other gurus. I never bought their stuff. . Well I take that back. I did buy Kevin's stuff. He had like a stock course, like 80, 60 bucks and I bought it. You know, so my family and I could, you know, learn about stocks cuz he had, he had a lot of content, me, Kevin, all about like stocks at the time and Tesla and stuff like that.

So, I mean, he, he, he did know what he was talking about, but you know, he was just, you know, all over the place. And he started getting into politics and I don't know if you saw this guy, me, Kevin, he was trying to run for governor for a second of California. It was like, 

Mr. Benja: dude, he is, he is, he is listed as a

Wait, wait, landlord influencer, . Yo, I don't trust this. Meet Kevin Guy. He may be great, but he's definitely got the car, the car salesman, insurance sales. 

Theo: Kind of look, well, you know what his claim to fame was. Go look him up. Kevin, meet Kevin and grant Cardone. He did, he did some practical jokes on Karen Cardone back in the day and that's kind of, kind of got him, you know, I think he said some flowers or some stupid stuff just to gain attention.

And that kind of helped him. That was pre pandemic. And then, you know, the pandemic helped him get to the next level. 

Mr. Benja: Okay. Who else we got the feed to this. We talked about Grant Cardone a lot. You know what, man, I still gotta go back to dog cuz he's, I don't know. He, he's the one if anybody on this list that I would hands down say, there's stuff you can learn from this guy.

I don't, I'm not even sure I would like hanging out with him. , he's intense, man. It's like there's, I could, I don't know if I could take him all day. But I'm like, people have called, someone called me Intenses and I'm like, huh, okay. , maybe I, you know, and then I had got a little softer heart for Grant Cardone just being all energetic and doing his thing.

But for his books alone, 10 x rule seller be sold and be obsessed or be average for those three alone. It's like some, some groundbreaking stuff in terms of breaking through your mental 

Theo: barriers. Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I mean, you know, I think I mean, he's entertainment as hell too, let's be honest.

I mean, look, he's got that Louisiana accent, you know, man, there's no money in your couch. You know, just the stuff he says and just , you know, and just, it's just, yeah. I mean, That's half the battle with this thing, right? It's just are you entertaining too? Yeah. And I think he's got a mix of both. And now he's on a whole nother level.

I think he's trying to beat the bank, right? He's got real estate and he is got this, you know, capital company. It's funny, we'll get into Ryan Panera, I think Ryan Panera trying to copy everything he's doing. So it's, it's interesting to see. But yeah, so that's kind of, you know, grant. But I didn't know he partnered so much of folks.

So at first I thought he was kinda like on this island, but now I'm realizing man, he is like connected to almost everybody. 

Mr. Benja: So, well, let me use, let me use that connection to bring up the next guy. Frank Kern, do you know who this is? No. So Frank Kern is a guy actually from from La Jolla in San Diego where I was, where I was saying that this guy preferred, he's an old surfer type dude, likes to remain underground, but he basically came up with the winning formula for getting online, going omnipresent, setting up Facebook ads, talking to people.

And he set all this up and there's this old conference thing from sales a long time ago, I gotta look it up. But he was like, listen, we're in a new era. Here's how you can set up your whole sales talk to people and. Have it work online, talk to 'em to get their email. And it started, it sounded basic at first, but then you started to notice, okay, here's where people screw up.

Here's where they do something wrong. Here's where they go different, here's where you need to do what's not quote unquote appropriate. And you know, he's one of those guys that's, he's not trying to be loud and flashy, which was interesting to me. Mm-hmm. . But he, he worked with Grant Cardone and set a lot of his stuff up.

So Grant was like, Hey, I'm just out here talking loud online. And Frank was like, yeah, you can target what you're doing a lot better. Let me show you how. And he showed him how to figure out, like, okay, when it comes New Year's time, you know, two weeks before that you start doing some New Year's stuff and put this out and attach that to a product.

So you have your entertainment and your product going out at the same time in parallel. And it was, he just set a lot of this stuff up that people are using now. And he sells his services to people like Grant Cardone, Tyler Lopez, and so forth, where it's like, hey, , you think you're just talking. I can show you how to actually make this work and get all of your energy to synergize.

So a lot of these people are playing from Frank Kern's playbook. 

Theo: Oh, thanks man. Yeah, I'll check 'em out. Okay. Sam, so many gurus. . Yeah. Even the gurus have, even the gurus have gurus they use that we, you know, that we don't even know. Yeah. A 

Mr. Benja: lot of these people aren't like good at the internet. Frank was the guy who taught them how to be good at the internet.

You 

Theo: think he taught Russell too? 

Mr. Benja: Russell kind of came about it his own way with his own ClickFunnels thing. So I don't know if they've ever had any connections, but yeah, 

Theo: Russell, you know Russell. Russell Russell is connected to Dan Kennedy and he wrote the ultimate Sales Letter and that guy was connected to Tony Robbins.

And so, but Dan Kennedy kind of created this whole copywriting thoughts, right? And I think Russell kind of connected with him, but but Russell is good about partnering too, so, 

Mr. Benja: Yes. Frank Kern came up with omni presence, if you want to know if everybody used that word. He actually coined that phrase.

He's like, you gotta be omnipresent. I was like, what do you mean everywhere? All the time in their face on all platforms. How do you even do that? It's like, I got you, Doug . 

Theo: Okay. Yeah. See, I, there's so many guru I didn't know. All right. We're gonna get to the brothers, the brothers and the sisters. 

Mr. Benja: Yeah. Yeah.

Let's plow to the let's go through them real quick. Everybody knows Damon John, right? Yeah, 

Theo: yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I, I, I, I haven't seen, you know Sure , I haven't listened to this stuff, but have you he seen anything interesting? 

Mr. Benja: No. He just, he honestly seems rather basic. Yeah. And you know, from his books that I've read, it's, it's solid basic information, but he did pretty much come from nothing.

So he knows, I mean, he 

Theo: did build a billion dollar business, a clothing brand in the early nineties that, you know, so that is, you know, I mean, he's got, he's got bonafides. Unlike some of the rappers, you know, out here running their mouths. I mean, they, they got a little money now, but, you know, 50 cent or , Rick Ross, you know.

Sure. You know, you guys are making a little money now, but, you know, come 

Mr. Benja: on. Yeah. It's funny. I think he's an actual business person as opposed to a marketer salesman. I think he's. , you know, he, he understands well that's why he's on Shark Tank, you know, he's breaking down deals and everything. I think he's stronger there than actually talking.

So, 

Theo: yeah. And I think he also understands, like you said, operations, which is a big component cuz I mean, you know, he had to understand distribution lines for his clothing line negotiation with vendors, partners. So yeah, he knows his stuff. 

Mr. Benja: All right. And we talked about your friend Myron Golden. 

Theo: Yeah.

Have you checked out of his stuff? 

Mr. Benja: I like him. He's, he's easy to listen to, and I think that's, that old, you know, older man, Southern Black, yeah. Church activist kind of, you know, I listen to him and I'm like what, what, what psalm should I turn to? open up my Bible to chapter, you know, Psalms chapter 47.

Mm-hmm. . But he's easy to listen to. Yeah. So I, I'm, I'm cool with him. I like him. 

Theo: Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. What's you got next? 

Mr. Benja: Danielle, Leslie. You know her? I don't so she's like the, she's like the, when people talk about selling courses, they're probably following Danielle Leslie's blueprint, cuz she made, she worked for teachable.com back in the day.

Yeah. and she started she started doing Skillshare. She started doing you know, all the different course platforms and she started like realizing, Hey, wait a minute, I'm doing so well with these courses. I could sell courses. You know, she looked around and not many people were really selling courses.

So she started selling courses on how to sell courses. And everybody's like, oh crap, somebody knows how to sell courses, let's go to her. And she blew up starting her own platform. Came a multimillionaire quickly, very organized, very like Russ organized, she, she talks kind of light and airy when she's just, you know, doing her social media.

Mm-hmm. . But I looked into some of her products and she's like cracking her knuckles, like, okay, you're gonna go, want to go open a Excel and start filling out these forms and that. I'm like, whoa, whoa. She knows what she's talking about. Calendars and timing and yeah. So 

Theo: have you took in one of her courses or tried her 

Mr. Benja: stuff out?

I got some of her early products and it was like a very introductory kind of thing. Like, yeah, if you want the basics of building a course, here's my Black Friday sale, $10. Just read through it and kind of understand what you're getting into. And I was like, okay, cool. So I didn't, I haven't spent much on her, but I, cuz I'm not that interested in making a course that I spent that much money on it.

Yeah. But that was, that's her. 

Theo: Okay. Yeah, I'm looking at it. And obviously she's targeting women, so that helps. So but no, good for her man. I, I'll, I, I appre. Yeah. So I didn't know you, you forgot David Sand Shannons you got any thoughts on him? 

Mr. Benja: He's new to the game and he's definitely for the entry level podcaster, media production guy for my podcasting and media production.

He's just focusing on people early on in their podcast ventures, like, Hey, I can show you how to do this and that. He's good, he's cool. He's very inquisitive, so if you ever listen to him, he really knows how to ask questions and find out things, and that's one of the reasons I started listening to him, was just to find out how to talk with people, question people, get information out of them in a productive business way.

Theo: Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Yeah he has a, you know, his core, his offer is basically an accountability program where you go on Instagram. So on my accountability partners, you know, she says she's joined up for that. And so, like she said, every day you know, you got, you, you got say the one thing you're gonna get done today and then everybody pings you throughout the day.

Did you get that done? ? So yeah, the morning meetup. And so yeah, I was like that's not too much accountability. . I'm good once a week, it's fine. But I get it. It is, you know, some people need it. And then, you know, along that line, Ash Cash, he's kind of similar, kind of new to the game, but he's kind of associated with those, you know, earn your leisure guys.

He does a lot of interviews and you know, he's trying to get his name out there. I think he came from. I'm always curious where these guys come from first, you know, to kind of Yeah. Get a sense of what they know. And so so yeah, well, 

Mr. Benja: David Chans came from he, he keeps saying he came from what's that place?

The Cheesecake Factory

Theo: I wouldn't, I wouldn't doubt it. 

Mr. Benja: So yeah, but he actually pivoted, he actually pivoted into event spaces, so. Okay. 

Theo: Yeah. That's the other guy. I can't remember his name. Is it Nehemiah? Is that his name? I don't know if you saw him. Nehemiah Davis. Yeah. I ran into him actually on a Humble, I was in Atlanta.

In the Delta Club or something. And I was talking to a guy, I think he was listening to my presentation or to some, some, some, some investor. He said, what do you do? I said this way. He said, what do you do? He said, he does investments. I said, okay, they should connect. And I didn't know he was big time like that,

So, but yeah, he's he's doing this thing too. But yeah, these newer black guys, man, I'm, I'm impressed man. And then ultimately we just skip down to like, you know earn your Leisure guys. I mean, you know, those guys are really the, probably the apex, you know what I mean? You put me onto them. Early on they were kind of inspiration too, a little bit for this podcast.

You know, two brothers just sitting, talking to shit. And they were an anchor, remember back in the day and kind of just has some content out and they just some financial litera, literacy and yeah, now they got big conference, they can get anybody show up. They got, you know who they have come up, Steve Harvey and other folks.

People swear by 'em. So it's gonna be interesting. All these gurus that kind of blew up during the pandemic and then clubhouse. Do you think, you think they have long longevity ? 

Mr. Benja: Well, you know, I mean, they had the ability to get the audience. Now can they keep their audience? Yeah. You know? And can they, can they multiply on top of their audience?

That's a good question. Neo has set himself up as one of the, I don't wanna say he's, he's one of the, the big dogs. puts people underneath him. So he is got this thing called the Circle of CEOs. Mm-hmm. . So he's making all these connections and pulling everybody along with him. So even if he's not like the greatest or whatever, he's, he's like, if you're not under my umbrella or in my little network, you're missing out.

So I, I, I think that's a very interesting thing that he does that's unique to him, where it's like, Hey, let's go to a conference. It's like, is Neo gonna be there? You know, it's so, it's very interesting. I don't even know what to call that with him just to, 

Theo: Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think that's important.

You gotta have an infrastructure in place that you can talk about, you know, different things that you start to expand out and keep your audience. But I mean, earn your leisure guys. I mean, you know, they're always putting folks on, or, I mean, even if the stock market is down, you know, they talk, what's that guy Ian?

They talk on Market Mondays. You know, they're still talking about stuff, but, you know, they're, they're bringing in other entrepreneurs to talk about different angles. Obviously Airbnb arbitrage, or I saw somebody in there, in the healthcare space, I said, oh, I need to talk to 'em. Or someone had a trucking business, right?

And so they're really good at, you know, just find all these little niches that they can just, you know, use their platform to, you know, and expose people to. So, so I think that's pretty 

Mr. Benja: interesting. I will say they definitely pioneered for anybody the podcast network model. Works for this type of thing. Good point.

There are other podcast networks out there, but it's like, with Earn leisure 19 Keys, IM Ash Cash, you 

Theo: know? Yeah. They're all under 

Mr. Benja: them. You're right. Good point. Very early on they started the E Y L network and I was like, oh, okay. And you know, you've seen in other things like drink Champs and 

Theo: mm-hmm. Joe Bud.

Well, did Joe Button do a, did he do a network? 

Mr. Benja: I don't know. But you've got these other big guys and that makes sense because they come from, you know, revolt TV or Yeah. Yeah. From these large conglomerations and E Y L kind of came from nothing. Like two guys, it came from nothing. Yeah. Literally talking, talking to kids in the classroom about finance, , they started recording those discussions about talking into, you know, talking to kids on finance and talking to adults and then holding events and showing up at places.

Then having interviews with powerful people. Yeah. Next thing you know, like they were doing networks and I was like, why are you doing a network? Why are you doing an online university? And, you know, they would bring somebody on and in the middle of their discussion they're like, yeah, yeah. So when you came to our online university, Hey, everybody go to, you know, e y l online university and you can hear this whole discussion.

And I was like, , they're setting this stuff up even before it happens. So it very, very good guys. Yeah. Yeah. And 

Theo: then in a merch, you know, the assets over liabilities, merch, and, you know, yep. Stuff like that. They, they're really good at just branding and getting their name out there, so, so yeah. It'll be interesting.

But, you know, they have that network. It's be interesting to see, I mean, you know, they still have life courses and stuff like that, so so we'll see. I mean, yeah, they're, they're very popular. So all right. What else we got here? Do you wanna, did you wanna say anything about David Grace or Two

Mr. Benja: You'll be, yes, I Derrick Grace two is one of the, the fundamental, the foundational guru types in my journey. This guy, somebody was saying, wow, you know, you're online, you're talking to people, you're doing all this, you know, where are you getting your inspiration from? And because I was, I was being a, an idiot in the moment, and I just wanted to say my actual thoughts.

I said, oh yeah, this guy, Derek Grace two. And I'm like, oh, wait, no, don't look him up. Don't look him up. And then they looked him up, , and while we were talking, they kind of looked at me like, what this guy, are you kidding me? And he's almost, I, I would put him high on the, the scam list. Aw, the scam level.

He's dude, he knows how to, he knows how to market. He's very low budget. He's extremely catchy when you're, yeah. When you're into his vibe and he's got a lot of stuff together. But for like, for a long time during the, he had this thing called the Post-Trump pack. Mm-hmm. . And he would jump on and he was like, Hey bro, you just need to get on this man, and you need to go ahead and buy that post-Trump pack.

You jump to the website, it's like a thousand dollars and, which is fine for whatever he's selling, but, but the way he was putting it out there, I think a lot of people just got kind of balled into his, okay, I gotta buy this. And I'm like, you haven't looked around, you don't know what you're buying into.

Chill out for one second. But Derek Grace is like, it's like, Hey man, this thing's on sale for, you know, for, for $200 for the next hour. And you're like, oh, crap. And then you go back to go to the website and it's, it's like, I thought $1,500 where he's like, Hey man, this thing just costs way too much, man.

It's too much good information. So we bumped the price up to $1,500 and we threw in this little add-on. And it was so interesting because a lot of the stuff he was doing, aside from being extremely interesting to watch, he was just, Hitting you so hard. He was the first guy who I really saw hit people hard with like, standing outside in the pool with his gut hanging out.

you've seen him, right? 

Theo: Yeah. Well, you know, give, give everybody a complete description. This guy with the tattoos on the face and the, the teeth. I mean, he just, I mean, you know, you're, you know who you're looking at when you kinda scroll. I mean, he's an intention game. And so if you're scrolling his face on on Instagram or Insta or any, or TikTok, you know who you're seeing.

Mr. Benja: Yeah, definitely. He's, he's got a, he's got these channels that he puts out, like he's got a board game that he sells. Mm-hmm. . He he does, his father does security, so he helps run his father's security company. They sell, they sell guns. You'll have to find out how to buy those on your own . He doesn't, he doesn't really push that.

That's what I'm saying. But it's kind of this like, if you really want to know what I'm about, I run this gun store, check it out. And Yeah. In terms of getting attention you know, showing his kids that he homeschools, he has a homeschooling course. He put me on a lot of ideas. And I'm not saying that you should like the guy and it's very easy to get caught up in his, you've gotta buy this now, you know, kind of rhetoric.

So you have to stop and say, wait a minute, is this for me? Do I need this? He, he's connected too, so all these guys know him like pretty intimately. Yeah. I 

Theo: mean, how knew him? He, he was on earn leisure, so Yeah. So he's, yeah, he's definitely connected, so, and thrusting. Okay. So moving on. So the guy I've been kind of bringing up a lot is Ryan Pineda.

He was the one that I talked about earlier. So high level, I like, I like him, you know, I, I joined his mastermind on, you know, how to build a you know you know, social media following as a business owner. So and really what I'm impressed with, you know, is his speed. I mean, this guy is literally in everything, even before he even got on the scene, he already had like four businesses.

He had started running already. Mm-hmm. He had, you know, the flipping business, you know, the real estate company. He had a tax company, he had a education company, and then you know, he got online and that just took him to the next level. Right? So he, and so everything this guy has done, you know, he's just been successful, right?

And so he even told us getting some insight already that what he's doing now is kind of getting out his niche, niche of real estate. That's why he opened this thing called. , he's, he got this, he has a new brand called Wealthy Creator. He's trying to bring in his faith conversations into it. And so he can have a bigger presence, but more importantly, he's trying to get outta the real estate niche cuz now he's, you know, bringing companies like mine into this space.

So eventually he can start acquiring them, right? And so he's already thinking like, you know, three or four steps ahead and just kind of follow his speed. I mean, literally in the two months I've been with him, I seen he changed the name of the course. I was in , he was content empired. He changed a wealthy creator.

He got a book out, he had a conference. He did two interviews with like, big time people like Liver King and, you know grant Cardone. And yeah, this dude moves man. He's just moving. And so that's what I'm Impre and even talking to his team, they kinda explained that and say, yeah, that's just Ryan.

He's just like, I mean, he's always moving and say, look, he'll establish something, make sure he is got the right people in place at high level and he's off to the next thing. And so so yeah, I'm learning a lot from him. I think that's what turned 

Mr. Benja: me off from him. He, he seemed so, I don't wanna say just fast, but it didn't seem like he was grounded anywhere.

Yeah. 

Theo: That, that, that, that could be a turnoff. I , I would say that, but you know what, he, he kinda gave me a, a recommended a book called Traction. They talked about the entrepreneurial operating system where you put in operating managers in place and all your different businesses, and they run the day to day and you're more like the vision.

And, and, and that's what I'm trying to do with my business now. Right. I'm trying to, once I get the my co-founder, he kind of runs a lot of operations. Now I'm trying to just finish up the marketing and the sales piece. And then once that's, you know, I have the sales folks in place, then I can just be high level marketing and I can do other stuff.

So that's kind of division. I mean, he's kind of got me on that path there, but to your point, he can come off a little all over the place , but who, who doesn't at this point? 

Mr. Benja: Yeah. Yeah. None of these guys are, are perfect by any means. And you probably shouldn't listen to everything they say, but No, because they're moving fast and because they're out there in the cutting edge, there is stuff to learn from them, so.

Yeah. Exactly. So I'll, I'll check 'em out some more. Yeah. But you mentioned he was doing acquisitions, so that, that brought me that brought me up to Alex homos from acquisitions.com, which he says all the time, 

Theo: and I have nothing to sell you . Well, he used to say that. Yeah. But yeah. How'd you come about him?

Mr. Benja: you know, I had a book of his, the a hundred million offers. 

Theo: Oh, okay. Yeah. How, yeah. I was gonna order that, how I, I actually listened to the video course he had and, mm-hmm. and I listened to a lot of YouTube videos, so I got a lot of his knowledge from that. So, what'd you think? 

Mr. Benja: I liked it. Here's the thing.

I got onto a lot of these people before I heard about them as gurus or online. Mm-hmm. Whatevers, what I was doing was finding interviews from Grant Cardone. Grant Cardone, or you know, people who've done things. I was just listening to interviews and anytime they said, yeah, I read this book. Mm-hmm.

You know, about, you know, offers about a hundred million offers, I would stop right there and say, okay, these people have invested interest in something that somebody else said or did. Let me go look that person up. And then I'll look up that person and find out, okay, what did that person look into? Or who do they recommend?

And this is how I'm finding a lot of these people. It's like, who do the experts look to as other experts? And I forgot who said it, but this was before Alex Formo decided to do his social media marketing thing. Yeah, of course. Yeah. He, somebody said there's this you know, I was looking up offers because I was trying to figure out, you know, how do you sell somebody that you've never met a, you know, $5,000 painting?

Yeah. And, and you know, you're just some, some scruffy looking artist. standing around next to Fazel and you know, , you know, it's like, okay, how do I get this person to believe? And I was looking up information on offers and some guy said, Hey, well I don't care what type of offers you're doing, you need to look into this book, a hundred million offers.

So I was like, Hmm. And it was Alex Her's book. So that's how I got on him. Wow. 

Theo: That's interesting man. Yeah, I mean, I only got onto him cuz, you know, I just heard people talking about him so much and I started seeing his content with interviews cuz I guess he was releasing the book. And so I started doing a deep dive on him, man.

And the dude knows his stuff. I mean, so his background is, you were seeing him, he looks like, you know, meathead, you know, he was all into gym. I mean, that was his first company claiming fame was Jim Launch. And he you know, built all these first he was going to build, you know own all these gyms.

And then I guess he met Russell Brunson, he was in his mastermind group. Yeah. And changed his mind is gonna license it. And so he that's what took him to the next level and sold his business in like four years. And but all the gurus, man, he breaks it down to exactly how you do it. And I never seen anyone do it to that level where he even breaks down like the offer play, like, you know, why you have bonuses, why you have scarcity, why you, you know, why you do add-ons, right?

You gonna do it anyway? So just tell him it's add-on. Then he'll break down like all the different ways you can kind of position and offer to make it attractive enough that anyone would buy it. And I was like, wow. 

Mr. Benja: Yeah. Which. I think he's similar in vibe to Grant Cardone, except he comes from a, like you said, break it down.

First Grant will come to you F from the, you know, Hey, you need to be doing this and this. What's wrong with you? Get in the game, get ex, you know, get excited, get Hype dog. And then when you press him, he'll say, okay, here's why Alex does it the other way, where he presents the information, Hey, you need to do this, this, and this, and this and this, and this and this.

And the guy's like, oh yeah. He is like, no, you need to do it now. And then he gets hyped. So I kind of see them. , two sides 

Theo: at the same coin. Same. And he even says, I mean, you know, and, and he just says he bought all these gurus, right? He spent time with Grant, he said he bought Russell's stuff, right? He's so, he's, you know, and, and, you know, just come up with his philosophies.

He's, he's, he's done all that, right? And so, so to me, I, I always thought that was kind of interesting. And he said, the best investment you can make, just like a lot of folks is in yourself because you, cuz he's, he, he's he thoughts what skill? Stacking, right. And he's a big believer in that, you know, you have your character traits, you know, you have your, your skills and you have your beliefs and you gotta, you know, you can't, you gotta kind of build 'em all at the same time so you can get higher and higher levels.

And so, so anyway, so I thought some of the concepts he comes up with is like, you know, pretty good. And so so yeah, I went deep dive in it, but really, I, I love how he kind of thinks about offers cuz you know, I'm trying to create some high ticket offers in my business and that's really what's, you know, got me, you know, excited about, oh, I couldn't make this a little bit more attractive.

So anyway, so I, I, yeah, I really like him. I mean, you know, and then the fact that he has nothing to sell me, , unless you wanna sell, sell your business. to him. . Yeah. But, you know, you gotta at least make, you know, several million dollars in revenue and he'll come in and do some stuff, but, you know, good for him.

So, so, yeah. Yeah. And the fact that he actually could have been, you know, he was a consultant, you know, I think he was going his way to get B right. And so I did an b a I did all that stuff. So he comes from, you know, you know, he's not one of these. entrepreneurs. Like that's all they had to, they they could, you know, like Yeah.

You hear a grand story, you hear even what's his name? Ryan Pineda. He was a failed baseball player. Right. All these entrepreneurs, they were like, nobody's Right. . They couldn't, they had nothing else to do with be entrepreneur. This guy literally could have did something else. Right. You know? But he decided down this path and so he comes to it a little bit more intellectual, which I like.

And you know, another person who's like that young lady, you, universal, Kobe, I can't remember her last name, but Cody Sanchez. Yeah, Cody Sanchez. He's very similar where she came from the business world and now she's all about selling like, you know, these boring businesses of how you can make millions off of 'em.

So that's her claim to fame. So yeah, so I like guys who kind of like me, you know, I went to school a lot. I kind of have that corporate vibe still about me, but they, you know, chose entrepreneurship. So Alex is like that to me. 

Mr. Benja: Yeah. Yeah. All, all these guys are, are extreme turnoffs in terms of because they're doing their marketing thing.

It's like a lot of times when you first run into 'em, you're like, are you, are you kidding me? Like, how do I like Derek Grace? Or how do I not know this isn't some bum? And that's some bum talking noise. And that's the hard part where it's like, okay, I have to actually sit down and discern who you are. In fact, if I was, if I was back in my standup comedy days, I'd go through and just like Frank Kern Surfer bum.

Don't listen to him. Alex Hormoze, you know, muscle head steak. Steak, eating bum. Don't listen to him. dare tattooed random from Randall . Yeah. Don't listen to this guy. Yeah. Grant Cardone car salesman. Old guy. Don't listen to him. Yeah, there's just, I'm sorry. It just stuck out to me. I 

Theo: mean, yeah, no, well, speaking of witch, the ultimate of all these kind of bums of bums, man, but, you know, did a lot, little stuff was Ty Lopez, man.

Ooh. He took the internet bus, my garage storm. Hey guys, look at me. I got this car here. I, I did my, in my garage, in my garage and all, he did this reading all these books,

Mr. Benja: You know, it, it amazed me how so many people had seen that ad, that ad hit YouTube like nothing else. 

Theo: Like what, when did it come out? Do you remember when it came out 

Mr. Benja: around? Oh, we can, we can look that up. If you search here in my garage. There's just so much on it. 

Theo: I mean, he took dinner there by Storm Man, and it was like, I think he was one of the first ones to kind of really pushed YouTube marketing like that.

And yeah, he blew up, man, 2015. Wow. Yep. Yep. That was early days. Yeah, 

Mr. Benja: because he did a few things in there where it. There's kind of this entertainment version. He was totally doing the sales thing where it's like, Hey, if you, you could get what I have too, if you just listen to me, not if you do this, if you listen to me.

Which brought you into his, his his funnel, his, his inner circle, right? Mm-hmm. where it was like, Hey, you're not here to buy a product necessarily. You're here to follow me. So he was starting to kind of get into that with, Hey, here in my garage, just looking over at all these books I've read and how much in information I have stored in my brain.

Don't mind the Lamborghini, I just bought that last week. , you know, whatever. 

Theo: Yeah. Just that low key. I'm bawling, but you, you know, even though he rented it, you know? Anyway, so it was one of those things that was you know, you were like, is this real? Or what is this guy selling? And it was kind of weird.

Mr. Benja: And it was, it was so, it, it also did the low, the low key thing where it's like he just had his cell phone. It was kind of grainy footage. Yes. You know, so you're like, two things are hitting you. It's like, who has all these, who has all these books and a Lamborghini in their garage, , and at the same time is filming it on a cell phone, at a bad angle.

And he didn't, he didn't look like salesmany attractive kind of, you know, really smile. Hey everybody, I'm doing this and this. He was so low key. , hold on. This is interesting. And he had had a number of attempts, but I think this is the one, well obviously this is the one that really knocked it out the park, so he's on to doing other things.

What, what'd you have to say about him? Cuz you brought him up? . 

Theo: Well, you know, we were just talking about folks you know, just being kind of scam artists a little bit like that. I mean, you know, there's some su su su suspiciousness about him. And he came, I think the last thing I heard, I mean, you know, he's, he's going back out there again.

I don't know what he's selling now, but like, maybe even a year ago he was talking about he's gonna buy all these bad, he, he had bought Bad Beth, bad Bed and Beyond and some other bad businesses. 

Mr. Benja: Peer, he bought Pier One Radio, pier One Imports Radio Shack, Steinmart. And did he buy them 

Theo: or he just had like a license agreement 

Mr. Benja: with them?

No, so the brands were doing very poorly and, you know, he left the stores alone. He left the he he left a lot of the stores to be held by whoever. Yeah. But what he was making a deal was, was to control the front end of the brand and control the e-commerce of the brands. So, okay. Effectively he owns those brands.

Does, I'm not sure how the deal works exactly with the physical institutions that are still hanging around. Yeah, like, I'm not sure if they went through in wholesale. Destroyed every Stein Mart out there. Yeah, yeah. But he's the, like if you go to one of the stores and they're stein mart.com, now you're under, now you're under Ty Lopez's handiwork.

He was a Shopify early pioneer expert where he was figuring stuff out with Shopify drop shipping and Oh, really? Stuff. Okay. Yeah. So he kind of figured out, oh, well if I can do that and I'm just some rando, what if I could do that with an established brand like Radio Shack? So if somebody's looking for electronic components and they go to radio shack.com, it's like, think about, it's like a fry is closed down.

You're, you don't wanna go to Amazon for some random, you know, television RF switch or something that you need. And it's like, well, where do I go? Oh, radio shack.com and he's got all his drop shipping and supply selling commerce. He's got that all funneled into radio shack.com. So 

Theo: yeah, I'm looking at now.

Yeah, it says Pier one Dress barn, Stein Mart linens and things Radio jack. Yeah. Okay. 

Mr. Benja: And those are so those are places with established audiences. Like my mom used to love Stein Mart. I used to hate that place. Yeah, yeah, 

Theo: yeah. Me too. My mom too. weird. They're Cole's. They're we're Cole's family now. But yes, back in the day.

Mr. Benja: Yeah. Yeah. 

Theo: But he's So you think he's legit? Do you like him? Is he legit? What do you think? 

Mr. Benja: Hey, legits a tough word to throw around for, for anybody in this space. I am not singling out outside a little bit . Are they legit? It's like, look man, a lot of these people, I would just kind of step back and shake my head if they offered me certain things.

So you gotta know what good to get from them. What good is there to get from Ty Lopez? He's got a lot of programs on his website. Some of them cost more than others. I think that he's got some good information out there, but it's really, it's really pick and choose because 67 Steps that the main program he pumps out.

I bought it. I thought there was some good information. It recommended a lot of good books. People will tell you it's a scam. This is information you can get anywhere. It's like, yeah, but it's kind of, you know, all laid out. Didn't cost that much money. Some people are like, it's poorly produced. It's like, that's part of his brand.

I don't care so much. He's this guy sitting down in his office talking to you. Mm-hmm. , whatever. So there's a lot to watch out for with him. I mean, like, I wouldn't have bought into his Radio Shack crypto token. 

Theo: Oh wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Yeah, I'm checking him out. So, yeah, I mean, you know that he doesn't resonate with me at all,

So it's not like I'm looking at his stuff. I'm like I'm not feeling you. Let's, let's round the bases on these guys. So Dan, so the other two, last two here, cuz we kind of already talked about the OGs, unless there's something you wanna throw there, but I don't know. I, I just saw recently, Dan Lockey looks intense.

He's 

Mr. Benja: intense and I would say a lot of people could fall, fall prey to getting caught up in something that's not for them. Mm-hmm. , he may, he wrote a book called F You Money, which I actually thought was, I actually thought it was a pretty decent book. I might read it again, but he's like, Hey listen, if you want to get somewhere, you need to go high ticket.

Find that vehicle that's gonna take you wherever and latch onto it and work it. So I was listening to him and, you know, he was in this class talking to people and they were like, well, how do I get this? He's like, Hey, listen, a lot of you're gonna pay money for this course and you're not gonna get anything out of it,

And I was like, what

And he's like, he's like, yeah. But if you can find that way to make this information work, to make these connections work, to make this play out, you're gonna be successful. And that's, that's basically part of his story where it's like he figured, there was this guy he was talking to and the guy was like, I really, really need your help with X, Y, and Z.

And he's like, look, I don't even offer this kind of service. But then he had to stop himself and said, okay, here's how much I charge. And wrote down some, you know, 10 stupid number, tens of thousands of dollars for two days. And the guy I had to, you know, pay for the flight, fly out to him, you know, you know how to say all expenses paid mm-hmm.

And it's like all expenses on me kind of deal. And he realized like, you know what? I can, I can push these high ticket offers. Yeah. And I just go around and find enough people. There will be somebody in there who is right for, and I'm the right person for them. Mm-hmm. . So it was funny when he was talking to the class, he was like, yeah, some of you're gonna be here.

And it's like, well that didn't work for me. And he, he, so he's kind of openly saying, not that he's a scam artist, but it's like, Hey, , you know? 

Theo: Yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, I'm trying to sell some high ticket offers to, you know, to a group that, you know, notoriously may not wanna jump on it. But I mean, you know, I'm a big believer in it because it helps with margins and so, so I gotta make it work, right?

But I get it. It's, it's not easy, but you can, you can crack that code, man. I mean, you know, and have the confidence to just say, this is what it costs to man, that the, the sky is open at that point, right? And so so that's, I think a lot of these gurus, you know, some that figured that out are doing extremely well, right?

Because they, they, you know, they know. And so so I might check out Dan Locke to see what he's talking about, but you know, I think to me that's a path I wanna go down too, cuz it's like Myron Golden said, this is the, I listen to a lot. He said it takes as much time and energy to get, make little money as it does to make big money.

He's so right. So , he's so right. You might as well make the big money man. I be, I literally got, you know, clients that got like, you know, hundreds of patients on our platform and then I got clients that got like five and guess what? They both call me with problems. I'm like, why are you calling me? You got five patients.

Get outta here. I don't got time for you. . . 

Mr. Benja: Yeah. 

Theo: So anyway, so yeah. So so okay, I might check him out. Thanks for the recommendation. And then Seth Golden, I mean, you know, he's kinda like uncles in OG category. I mean he about, 

Mr. Benja: you 

Theo: know, marketing and what was his claim to fame? What was that marketing term?

He came 

Mr. Benja: up with purple. Cow. Yeah. He actually didn't come up with that. He popularized it, which is more to his marketing prowess, where it's like, I only have to create this thing. Here's a great concept. I just need to popularize it. So yeah, Seth Gin's got a lot of short and simple Yeah. Marketing books that are really like, if you need to get certain concepts, I think he's good for 'em.

Like the purple Cows one, just about being differentiating or about differentiating yourself. Mark, all marketers are Liars, which is a, which is a great book actually. It's just, it gets you into the mindset of what marketing might be about. The idea virus Gorilla Marketing was way back in the day.

Yeah. So he's got a lot of really short ones that are, that are good right now. He doesn't really like, or doesn't really play around so much in the normal space of social media, so you're not gonna find too much of 'em unless you look for him. 

Theo: Yeah. He's kind of slowed down a little bit. And you know what?

I didn't put the, we should probably put him, it's kinda like Mid og, but what's that one guy? The 4, 4 4 day? for Tim Ferris. Tim. Tim Ferris. Yeah. He was the OG man too, but like mid, you know, like new og. Right. And so, yeah, I like him. He, yeah, he came out the box with just like, hey, the four day work week and just took it by storm.

He made the four day what did he say? The four day workout and all this other stuff. Yeah. And had a podcast. We interviewed everybody. I haven't kept up with him too much lately, but what have you, what's the latest and greatest you heard from 

Mr. Benja: him? He's chilling dude. He's, you know, I think he's more into the scientific mindset now.

Yeah. Where he's just like, he's gonna spend all his money just trying to figure something out for his own, you know, mental 

Theo: edification. Yeah. Yeah. He was big into experimentation. I remember that. And just, you know, trying different things. So, but hey, he was, yeah, he was an early, he was one of the first ones out there and a lot of folks kind of took some inspiration from him, right.

To be, I mean, he came with a whole concept of getting VAs Right. Virtual assistants to kind of do a lot of the meial work for you. And so that's how he kind 

Mr. Benja: of created this. Well, yeah, that was the, that was the four hour concept. And it's funny, I'll think a lot of these guys are saying, Much of the same thing, and they're working in the same vein, and they start having beefs with each other, like like Grant Cardo, it's like four hour work week.

Why are you telling people that you need to be working 10 times that No. Yeah, I know. 10 times what you should be working, which is 400 hours a week. What's wrong with you ? It's like all right. 

Theo: Yeah. I mean, you know, I think there's man, I, I come around to that, you know, like different ways. So I do believe there's a time and a place for it, right?

When you do have to kind of put that time in and make it happen. But then when you put systems in place, you shouldn't have to, you know, lease on this thing, work that hard. Now if you're building something else, yes, but you know, it, it shouldn't be, you know, grinding all out, you know, all the time. It should be a season for that.

But that's my, my take now as I'm, you know, building a business that's a little bit sustainable long term. But yeah, so I used to think that. But yeah, so these guys are interesting. Anything about the OGs? 

Mr. Benja: OGs, yeah. Some CLE classics here. Tony Robbins, Napoleon Hill, Zig Zigler, Jim Roh, Brian Tracy.

All of these people on this list that we've talked about will probably point you back to any of these in the past. But the one interesting one I will mention, and this is a story that kind of blew my mind from Napoleon Hill, I, which I would call the. right after PT Barnum is probably the OG of OGs on this list, right?

Mm-hmm. PT Barnum basically from, you know, barn and Bailey Circus. Look 'em up if you don't know. And then 

Theo: Napoleon and Napoleon Hill wrote, thinking Grow Rich, right? That's classic. 

Mr. Benja: Yes. Thinking Grow Rich. So here's what I've, my gosh. And this guy might be a legit scam artist, which is funny. , there is information that a lot of the people in his books didn't exist that you know, he was bad with his own money, but, which is funny because even if you're, even, what if what he's saying was true?

It's like, it's like a guy saying, Hey, you need to do X, Y, and Z to get fit. And you look at him and you're like, wow, this guy is not fit. But he sounds like he's saying the right thing. Apparently he never got it all together to make an a lot of money himself. Mm. So he wasn't that rich. He, you know, a lot of his stuff may have made up or fabricated, and this is what American business is built off of.

I won't even go as far as , I'll almost go as far as to say that this mindset. But he, so he has a lot of books, not just Thinking Grow Rich. Right? Yeah. I realized, cause I was listening to a, a woo woo person, right? And they were like, yeah, I got this from Napoleon Hill. And, you know, manifesting. and I was like, holy crap.

It just clicked to me, the spiritual and the, the spiritual side. And the business side of America used to be one thing where people would evangelize and they would sell you on, you know, the idea of America and buying into all their products. And when I was reading these Napoleon Hill books, I'm like, he, he talking about, you know you know, it's your God-given duty to uphold.

And I'm like, yo, this dude sounds like a pastor. He sounds like a business person. Mm-hmm. . And then it's somewhere along the way you ended up with the woowoo side of America and the business side. And I'm looking at, I'm listening to Napoleon Hill, I'm like, yo, this is the foundation of America. And it used to be one thing that it blew my mind to have that realization that both of these sides are extremely American.

Theo: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's Americana one-on-one. And you're right. I mean some would argue that now we decoupled it too much, where, you know, there's this. , you know, success without God , you know, and not enough, you know, business success talked about with God. Right. So, but you're right. I mean, Jim Ron's another one of you listening to some of his stuff.

He talks about like, you know, someone in reaping, right? Which is Yeah, absolutely. A biblical, you know, concept. And but yeah. But Jim going back to Napoleon Hill one of the things that always blew my mind was he has a chapter 11, and I'm looking at the chapters, the Mystery of Sex transmutation, , 

Mr. Benja: dude.

Yes. Do you remember that chapter? Sex Transmutation? Sounds crazy, but 

Theo: there's some truth there. So basically the concept was that it's hard for a young man to make a lot of money because he is out there chasing that tail. . Yeah. So the power of a man, if he can just take all that energy and transform into his business, he will be so much more successful.

And, and so to me, that blew my mind. And he's not wrong. , you know? Cause literally, I remember my, my co-founder now, my business partner now, he came to me when I was in grad school and we were going, he said, I wanna start business, you know, and, and I said, yeah. I was sitting in the room with him, you know, I was like, yeah, we're gonna start this business.

Yeah, I'm excited. He was talking about, oh, we got some lst, we gonna do this stuff. And all I could think about. I got some girls, I got a call, right? , you know, some dates and stuff, and, and I sat there. I said, man, look man, I ain't paying attention, man. I don't think it's the right time for me to start this right now.

And so I walked out the room and that was a good decision for me at the time, right? Because I wasn't ready. I had too much other stuff that, that was, you know, energies. And so, so when I, when I, I read that book, I think I read this book like maybe like during the pandemic again, I was like, oh my God, this dude.

So yeah, I mean, specialized knowledge is in there. Imagination, organized planning. I mean, you know, it's stuff that we know now, but it's definitely a core, some of the things that the Google 

Mr. Benja: trans, trans mutation, 

Theo: That was hilarious. You know, so, so, so look out. I mean, and there's some other folks we don't talk about on this list, but if you're not an entrepreneur in the corporate America, like Peter Drucker, he's a big guy.

He has a book called Manage Oneself, and you know, that's a good book to check out. Jim Collins get to Great, you know, he talks about like how businesses can, you know, stay last at, you know, till a time. So there's a lot of other business gurus. I forgot the guy who did the the zero email guy. I can't remember his name, but, you know, zero email, that was, yeah.

There was a a guru that went around talking about he to have zero email ebox inbox. Oh, you know, Yeah. So yeah, it's come to me later. Yeah, that was his big thing. So so yeah, so there's a lot of gurus and just corporate America, and then we didn't get into the health gurus and . 

Mr. Benja: Yeah. Every, all stuff, every niche is going to have their own style of gurus.

So what I actually suggest is people find a, a high level guy that they can kind of match with their vibe and personality. For me, it was pretty much Grant Cardone as being the, the major overriding kind of, okay, let me, let me rock with what he's doing as far as attention getting goes and social media.

Gary v is the, the big guy for me. And then there are a bunch of little, like, there's a, there's a book guru guy, Hey, you can market your books this way. Let me show you how. Then there's a, a fitness guru, obviously, you know, you have these guys, Hey, you want to live like this and eat what you want, or whatever, you know, do this.

So yeah, I, I just, I find a big guy and then a very, the very low level guys that I look for. 

Theo: Yeah. That's probably more tactical too, right? He'll give you the nuts and bolts of how this thing really works. Yeah. So pastor Gurus real quick. The big two I always think about. I know there's more scam.

Mr. Benja: Scam. Sorry, sorry. No, just kidding. , 

Theo: Joel Osteen, the smiling pastor. Right. He just blew up over the last, you know, decade or so, or 20 years really. And then TD Jakes Right. You know, who's big time outta Houston and you know, just, you know, everywhere. So I did, I did. Now, you know, we could talk about the passes in general or you know, I did wanna ask you a specific question before the pod asked you about why is TD Jake showing up, smiling on a grand card, sales marketing le Leaflet.

So maybe you can get some insight on where's this connection between a Scientologist and a Baptist 

Mr. Benja: preacher . So, so, yeah. You know, TD Jakes has been around for a while doing his thing. He started you know, the Potter House selling books and tapes and all that. So he was fully in line to go the entrepreneur, preacher, evangelist kind of route where he's selling books, tv appearances, DVDs.

He's got these little Potter House franchises in different cities where, you know, you kind of go and I don't wanna call it a church service, but yeah, it's just, you know, faith-based production that he's got going on in franchise. So you kind of saw him going in that direction and with this whole social media.

It's like on the down low, he started kicking it up a notch. Like he's wearing crazier clothes, he's showing up and he's like, oh, you need to, you know, so he's slowly bringing in the sales stuff. And I was like, what's t Jake's doing? Of course, I'm already on Grant Cardone, so I'm looking at him from one side and I'm going through all the videos of interviews and TD Jake shows up and I'm like, wait, what?

Hold on, lemme read this again. Russell Bronson, Ty Lopez, you know Bradley, Frank Kern, TD Jakes . So I, 

Theo: what was this at? What was this, what was this event? 

Mr. Benja: No, he did a he did one of the Grant Cardone 10 x. Yeah, 

Theo: I think I did see that. Okay. 

Mr. Benja: And he was on stage doing his talk, like, you know, how do Grant asked him, Hey, how do you get out there and do your thing?

And TD Jakes, oh, you gotta have conviction. You gotta be, you know, you can't just be talking about getting money, you gotta get the money for the, and I was like, really? Wow. These two. So they just breached that whole thing. And he didn't say money, but he's talking about success being fruitful. Yeah. So you could easily take whatever he said and put it in a sermon and you're like, yeah, there it goes.

Yeah. 

Theo: Interesting. So he's connected to him through the 10 x. Yeah, that's, I mean, why not? I guess it's. It's a new world, man. 

Mr. Benja: What's interesting about Grant Cardone real quick he took the podcast model and applied it to events, which I thought was great. Where the podcast model is, you know, start a podcast, find a guest that's bigger than you.

Find some guests that are smaller than you and interview both of those people. And what you start doing is the podcast guests that are smaller than you, they have their own communities and they're like, Hey, I got on this podcast that was bigger than me, that has more following than me, that has more attention than me.

I'm gonna tell all my friends, I was on this podcast. And then when you get the guy bigger than you, you're like getting a favor from that person. Mm-hmm. . So you're like, Hey, listen, I, I have all these people that follow me. I'm trying to get together. Could you help me out? And once in a while you'll get somebody that says, yes, I'll be on your podcast.

Here are the stipulations. Here's what I'm trying to sell. So you have this cache now with a bigger guy to pull in more people smaller than you and pull pulling more podcast guests. And once you get more podcast guests more listens, more episodes, you have more people following you. Yeah. It's, it's just flywheel, continually flywheel type of thing.

So I noticed Grant Cardone was doing that with live events where it's like, Hey, listen, I'm holding this seminar in Chicago. We're gonna be there for three days. Guess who's gonna be there? And it's all these names of people, and I'm like, the podcast thing, but applied to live events where he's getting people smaller than him.

And when I say smaller than him, he's he's picked up on, like you said, interviews with David Chans, interviews with, you know, just a lot of smaller people who you wouldn't think he'd have time for. Yeah. But he's doing that to get his name out. So that's, that's what that, that's what I got from that.

And that's wait, I was supposed to answer your question. I didn't 

Theo: get to it. Yeah. Just about TD and TD Jakes mixing with grant Cardone. But you're right. I mean, you know, grant Cardone is definitely becoming the epicenter. He just did. And I was listening to another guy we didn't talk about, what's his name?

Henry. Henry. The guy that, the sales guy, he's kind of out there. Oh, Dan Henry. Dan Henry, yeah. He came under Russell Brunson then he is a big influencer on the sales thing now. And he actually got coached by Myron and then he you know grant Cardone invited him out to a big event in Miami where all these, you know, mid, to your point, smaller creators, you know, compared to Grant came out and he kind of, you know, gave him some insight on how he runs his operations, which, and it's so funny.

So now, you know, so I was like, Hmm, why'd he do that? And so I'm sitting here getting emails from Ryan, right? Because, you know, I'm on his little mastermind and he sends me an email about Grant Cardone's thing, . And so I was like, oh. So he, you know, indoctrinated them, rolled him around on 10 X plane, the helicopter gave him some love, said, Hey, I just want to, you know, want you guys to, but I'm gonna have this event, so please promote it.

You know, I may give you some affiliate money or, you know, but see he's building this, you know, you know this, this, this, this group of connections and stuff of different influencers in different markets, you know, so that, you know, they love on him and, and he gives them love back cuz he'll show up on their pods and stuff like that, right?

So yeah, man, he Yeah, you are right man. I think Grant is like, I mean the dude is making it happen, man. And now he's promoting his Jared guy like, you know, kind like the second in command. So he's starting to speak more. He's got his wife out there freaking, so so yeah, yeah, Grant's gonna be. 

Mr. Benja: Yeah, I follow it.

I follow his camera man on the Instagram

Cause it's like, cause it's, it's funny. No one's, no one's following the camera man. Right? So you can actually ask questions and the people over there be like, yeah man, we were just hanging out in Miami and grab some drinks and blah, blah, blah. And you can just have conversations. You can't do that on Grants page, so, Hmm.

Theo: Interesting. So, yeah, man. Oh shoot, man, we, we covered them, man. Ooh, this, this is a longer pot than we thought would be, but yeah, so so I guess they could tell we, we know our gu man, we know a lot of stuff, man. I, I, I didn't think we would do to our pot on 

Mr. Benja: gurus . So, so real, real quick as we, as we wrap up here, who do you trust 

Theo: that Good point, man.

Mr. Benja: Cause ultimately, I, like you got, you've got money, you think you have a gap in your knowledge that you need to fill out, and somebody comes online and says, Hey, buy my product, get into my course. Follow me on Instagram. It's just, it just seems like the car salesman, you're gonna buy a lemon. What do you 

Theo: look for?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I. I'm just thinking about recent experiences, right? I mean, you know, it's gotta be a low cost entry for me, right, initially to kind of understand more about them. So when I kind of got into, yeah, so, you know, that that's what helped me get into Grant's, you know, funnel and even Gary v's.

Funnel. But then it was you know, with Myron it was more trust because I saw all the content he had. And there's a book on that called Oversubscribed If you can get 11. And that's my goal for my, my, my content. Get at least, you know, people watch you about you. 11 times they feel like they know you. You know, it's almost like they get addicted to you.

And so, you know, my goal is to get 11 hours of content, at least , you know, a couple months. Cause I want 

Mr. Benja: people hundred 10. Huh? You mean 110 hours? 

Theo: Well you said, oh yeah, yeah. 10 x baby. Come on, dog. But you know, I mean that's, that's just my golden niche goal, you know, because you just want people just to see so much of you so often that you know, they, they feel like they know you.

Right. And then that then you and I made a good point to someone else, you know, when you're scrolling now on your ut on YouTube or TikTok, you know, you're seeing like celebrities right? Next to regular people who gurus, right? And so now your mind is associating, you know, celebrity, you know, these gurus at celebrities.

And so now you're almost like following them like that. So anyway so who do I trust? So I do trust the folks that, you know, they have low barrier entry. I can kind of get to know and see the, the body of work and then that builds more faith and trust in me and right. And then reason and the biggest expense I spent was the Ryan Pineda thing.

And the reason why I spent so much, cause I saw it, right? I saw him go from nothing to this. And, you know, he came at the right time. I was like, Hey, I gotta build more of a better presence. Okay? And he has a program. So, so when it comes to trust, it's just, you know, having a body of work and consistency. And I, I, I'm like, okay, you're legit.

Mr. Benja: So you're seeing, when you say, , you saw him do something. Those are the receipts for you. Get the receipts. 

Theo: Yeah, get the receipts, man. I mean, you know, I mean, yeah. People can give you like, oh, I got these folks talking. You know, I did, I did this for this person, this, this person. But you know, for what I needed for my business and what he transformed his business using social media, I said, okay, he, he has a receipts.

I saw it from my eyes. Right. So that, you know, you don't always get that with gurus, you know, some of the, because they, they don't have it cuz this, they usually just have avatars, you know, examples of customers that look like you, that you know, you can talk to. So, you know, that that could help too. But barring that, I have to, you know, get a sense that, you know, they they have something in need right now and I seen that they got the results and so, you know, now, you know, you go through it.

Be honest with you, some of the stuff I'm like, okay, you know, I, I don't think there's some death here that's missing a little bit, you know, here and there with some of the social media. But you know, it's fine. You know, at least if nothing else I'm at least tracking what he's doing. And so, cuz he's probably seen more trends than I'm seeing with social media cuz of his connections.

Yeah. So if nothing else, I can gleam on that. It's a little bit faster than other folks. And so that could gimme enough arbitrage, right? To just, you know, in my niche stand out a little bit more. So that's kind of how I'm looking at it. All right. That makes sense. Yeah. Do you, you understand what I'm saying?

So basically I'm just saying, so yeah, the information he's given, you know, after some basic fundamentals, you know, is, is basically what everyone is saying. You know, just how to stand out and be different. But because he's so high up and he's kind of, you know, seeing things a little bit different, more than I can, if I could just draft off his and then take his knowledge set and then probably to my niche, I'd probably be so much further advanced in my competition cuz I'm seeing stuff they'll never see.

So, 

Mr. Benja: so, and I want to ask a question that somebody who really hasn't bought into something was fine. Why is that different or doing what you're doing different? We're not talking about the speed thing, but if you're just talking about pure information, what does that person have that you couldn't get from a free book at the library on like sales, marketing or real estate business or whatever?

Theo: I mean Well, books, I mean, how fast are books That knowledge, how, how relevant is that knowledge? Is it like, you know, knowledge that is like day of Knowledge, you know, like these algorithms are changing all the time. You know, you got some basic stuff. I get that part. You know, marketing is marketing, but you know, if you're not seeing, you know, how, you know, some one little tweak, like, you know, one of the strategies told me, and I'm just putting it out there, you know, he said, focus on shorts.

That's where YouTube is putting an algorithm, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. . So that you'll start seeing traction faster in your niche if you just focus on shorts and, and, and then how you follow that model to kind of get people to watch your shorts fast more. And so so stuff like that, you know, and that he's, you know, you know, kind of drafting on, cuz he's spending so much money mm-hmm.

to keep his , his, his marketing engine going. So yeah. So to your point, you know, speed, but also timing of that, you know, it's all speed too. Timing of that knowledge. And also man, you know, you don't have time for everything. You gotta build the product and you gotta learn this stuff. You know, you gotta realize, you gotta pick and choose which one you really going to like, you know, go all in on.

And if there's pieces that you can gleam a little bit faster, especially if an artist. I don't see how you gonna have the time, you know, you gotta perfect your art, you know, artistry, how you gonna have the time to kind of, you know you know, you can do some basic stuff, but then, you know, there's, there's levels to this, right?

just like in your art. And so, yeah. You know, just because you can build a, a landing page and get some emails. Sure. But like you said, there's levels to this. Like, you know, okay, when they send the email at two, then you know, you can send an offer at three and then you can change that offer at four. So yeah, yeah.

You can do all kinds of stuff and you just don't have time to get to optimize it, so why don't you go learn from someone else? 

Mr. Benja: I think along that line what I figured out is that a lot of these gurus, while they are telling you a lot of times basic information, that's like saying, you know, how do I, the relevancy of what they're talking about, because at any given time there are 27 different things that I could be doing, and they're all basic.

So it's like, I could be fixing up my website, I could be hitting my email list, I could be, you know, doing whatever. And they can cut through all the garbage and say, well, for, to get the bank for your buck to get the speed and the momentum that you need, you need to do this right now. That should be your first priority.

And for me, a lot of times I couldn't figure that out. I went on, I went on live with some guy, like he was. one of these I don't wanna say lower level, but a smaller guru called Dorian, the Dorian Group. Mm-hmm. , I don't know if you know them. He's into, he's into music and he figured out how to, how to work his music thing.

And out of nowhere became the number one iTunes artist in France, . He's like, he's like, Hey, I don't care what you say. I became the number one iTunes artist in France above a lot of these other cats. And just cuz he worked the system. Yeah. So I'm, so I'm talking to him and he's like, because he, I said he went on live and he, he said, if we want to call, tap in, you know, talk to him.

And I did. And he was like, yeah he's like, what are you doing? Like X, Y, and Z? He's like, okay, okay. So you're trying to, and then he asks what I was trying to do. So he's like, what am I doing? What am I trying to accomplish? And then he's like listening to me and he's like, okay, yeah, stop all that other stuff and just pump out content.

Like, just pump that out if that's your thing, just get it out to people consistently. And I was like, well, you know, I need my graphics. And he is like, at this point, screw your graphics. No one cares about that right now. And it was just the bang for your buck thing. So out of all the things I could have done, he was like, with the platform and what's happening, you need to do this.

Mm-hmm. . So that happened and that kind of led to me, that was one of the reasons why I did that whole push for you know, content last year or the year before where I was doing like, I was doing an hour long Instagram live a day. I was jumping on Instagram live doing those an hour a day, and I cut up content, put those out.

Mm. And that worked, that worked like extremely well for me. Mm-hmm. . But if I would've tried any of the other 26 options I had, I could have spent a month or two. Cause, you know, some of this stuff takes time to actually play out, which is something I didn't realize where it's like, well, yeah. If I have 27 things to do and I want to, it's gonna take at least a week to do them all, or two weeks to do them all.

That's like a whole year of just trying out stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And so to your speed point, so yeah. That was cutting 

Theo: through all this, what, what'd you say? S si Yeah. Sick program so I can, right. And so it's kind of like, you gotta do all this stuff so you can, but what if you just had someone so you just, you can, right.

What if they did all that Yeah. Stuff. Then you just do it. The other stuff you 

Mr. Benja: do. Yeah. And, and that becomes part of your sick chain. It's like, yeah. You know, I paid the guru, why, so I can get to that? It's like, 

Theo: okay, good point. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Because I, if not, I would've had, my sick chain would've been this much longer.

Right. You know? Right. Well, now it's this. Exactly. So, yeah. I, I agree. So, so anyway, so I guess we're advocating what you know, trust but verify. Right. These gurus, right? Yes. Trust but verify. Yeah. Trust that they, they have some knowledge and insight that can get you to the next level. Yeah. But, you know, verify, 

Mr. Benja: do your research.

I, I will say you will waste. Yeah, I agree. There will be wasted money. It's like sometimes you go to a movie and it's like, well, I learned never to trust this director again. It's like you just have to, when you're out there on the cutting edge, you have to learn some of these things where it's like, no, this is, it's the cost of doing business.

You have to learn, oh, he's pushing this, not that that's bad, but he's pushing this and I need to go in this direction. Oh, this guy is a complete, you know, scammer or a complete sham. I shouldn't listen to him. I can keep following him because he, they're entertaining and knows how to get followers, but he's teaching something that's not relevant to me that I can't use.

So, . Yeah, just, 

Theo: and I would just say this, I mean, you know, people always worried about, oh, if I get scammed all this stuff, you know what Myron Golden, I'll leave it that day. , I said his name multiple times, but the way he framed stuff is always insight insightful. Yeah, I know, but it's good. He makes a good point.

He said all work works. All work works. So even the work that, that you put into something that didn't work, you learn something from it, you know, that doesn't work that way or you know, or like for instance, it took me forever to get this VSL page up, but now that I have it, now I know it. So I can do it like so much faster next time I have to.

Right? Yeah. Or at least the, the framework's there, even though if it may never work at Lisa's there. So I think that's the insight. People realize they only think, they only look at the, the work that gives you the result that you want, but the one that doesn't give you the result you want could probably be the, the better one.

Because that could set you up for way bigger payday later. But you just don't know. You just gotta go through it. So, so that's the painful part, you know, cuz we want stuff now the results now, but you know, you, to your point, you pay a guru and didn't work out but you learn something. I guarantee you learn either that's guru not to use or what, what don't do or why you didn't like that or even frame what you thinking in your head.

You thought you were gonna be a gu doing what this guru said. Do you realize? Nah, that's not me, . So it worked. 

Mr. Benja: Yeah. And you'll see plenty of times where a guru actually tries something themselves, it doesn't work, and then they immediately drop it and move to something else. Yes. All the time. That seems so untrustworthy.

But if you're living that life, that's what's gonna happen. So they do it. Why shouldn't you try things out and mess up and, you know, sunk costs too bad. 

Theo: Yeah. Yeah. I love it, man, man. I love it. Brother. Anything else man? 

Mr. Benja: Thanks for thanks for doing this one. I, I wasn't sure if you'd be down with talking about the gurus and things, but as you know, from my Facebook group, it's something that's been on my mind, so wanted to talk about it.

Theo: Yeah, man. So hopefully get some good advice out there, man. So anything coming up this week, 

Mr. Benja: Anything coming up this week? We got I, I'm still just plowing away to finish this resolutions book. It's not gonna be a pamphlet. It's actually, I've got 68 pages so far. Nice. It's a solid, solid book. So that's why my social media hasn't, hasn't been extremely on point for the b a this year.

I'm posting like memes and weird stuff mostly. Yeah. But I'm getting this book out dog and it's about to be . It's good Baby . I love it. This will be my, this will be my 10 X rule, or my Celebrate Soul. This will be my version of that. 

Theo: Oh, snap. Oh, oh, gauntlet. Gauntlet. Oh. So we try to be like, grand card, don't Now what you think.

So I love it. I love it. Yeah, man, same here, man. I'm out here in these streets, man. These, these digital media streets, man. Putting out content every day. It's been interesting, man. I'm learning a lot about myself, but it's like every, to your point, every idea I have, I mean, I, you know, since I gotta do video, I'm like, you know, I was at Disney World, I had an idea about business I, or I was at McDonald's.

I had an idea about that, right? I just saw this movie. I got an idea about that. So, so I'm kind of excited. It is really ki And then also, like I said, literally I'm getting comments and stuff already from folks, you know, newbies that I'm getting subscribers. And I just did this like two weeks ago, so really, you know, started going in.

So I'm excited about where it can go in the next two months, if two months, if we stay consistent. So, so yeah, I'm building my personal brand and my, you know, and that's helping my business brand long term. And so I'm excited about where that goes. And yeah. And business, you know, still trucking along, man.

Still trucking 

Mr. Benja: along. Good stuff. Good stuff. Well guess we'll wrap it up. I am Mr. Veja, former video game developer creative for, for, for Life and newly, newly minted babe in this social media sales marketing, branding mindset. It's kind of been dormant, but now I've kicking it. I love 

Theo: it.

Yeah. And I'm theo business owner in the health tech space. Also babe, in the social media space. But pod has been going on for two years. It's going probably go long. Still go guys, and probably be the thing that would probably known for over time, , all the other stuff we do, we'll probably circle back and put all our knowledge into this and this thing will blow up so quick and fast.

Everybody, you know, blow people's mind. But but yeah, so we we're excited that you guys had a chance to listen. So go check us out whether you listen to podcasts show versus business. We usually on. So you know what, Mr. Benja, we talked about so many gurus. I forgot to give the people the le the the shout outs.

But anyway, please like subscribing, comment, show versus business on Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. Listen to us at Spotify, iTunes, wherever you listen to podcasts, and then visit us at our website show versus business. All right, Mr. Benja. Take care. Peace.