#1168 Kris Krohn | Broke To Financially Free In 4 Years

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 1:17Speaker 01

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• 1:47Speaker 02

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay, and Workforce Management.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. Because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:05Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 3:30Speaker 05

  Man, we talk about real estate. We could talk about business. We could talk about personal life. We could talk about marriage and it's always the same mess. Everyone is always lone wolfing it. They're basically just intuitively thinking that they have what it takes. And that is always the slowest path to achieve anything is just assuming that you know. So if you're going to invest in the game of real estate, you can do the typical mom and pop shop thing. You can go it alone. You can say, I read a book or two and now I'm good to go. And I'm like, well, I don't know if that's going to produce your best results. Think about that. There's 30 major strategies in all of real estate. And what are you going to do? Try a flip? Try to wholesale a deal? You're going to try to buy an apartment complex? And you're coming into this with no experience.

• 4:14Speaker 05

  And so sometimes your, your learning experience is enough to kill you financially, but people don't really get that. And so it's just bizarre to me. I'm like, why, why don't more people understand that if you're going to go? And expect greatness. Do something where you want to make a big splash. You gotta surround yourself with people of experience that have been there and done that. Because it's almost like the biggest ripoff strategy on the planet is the ultimate shortcut, which is just literally, don't reinvent the wheel. Just get in proximity to people that know what they're doing and then copy them. And literally just follow them step by step, because I'd rather follow someone that's done it, you know, a thousand times. Like, take single family real estate. I've done $2 billion worth 6,500 projects over the last 20 years.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  At this point, I invest in the top five markets out of 324. And I've made my mistakes. Like, the first time I went and bought out of state real estate, it was a nightmare. I lost $1 million on 186 properties. After 2008, that I thought I had bought right, turned out I was 100% wrong. But today, I've gone on to buy now literally over 6,000 out of state properties. And I've learned how to like maximize my ROI. So you can literally learn from me, watch a guy like me and have way more success. Or you can just do the prideful, stubborn, I'll do it all by myself thing.

• 5:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about this idea of surrounding yourself with people who have done it before, getting proximity to people who have experience. What is that normal conversation in your career? Is it something where you go to them and you say, hey, I need a mentor? Or is it, you go to them and you say, hey, I want to be a real estate investor. You're a real estate investor. Let me try to learn from you and kind of shadow you day to day. Like, what does that actually look like from a practical standpoint? As people go down this path of trying to get around successful people and learn from them?

• 6:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, so there is this world of coaches and mentors. And then there's a world of successful people. And they're often not the exact same thing. So there's a lot of people who have great success, but they actually can't reverse engineer and tell you exactly how they do it. Because it's just not their calling in life. They're just too busy building wealth. They can't tell you what they're doing. But on the other extreme, you've got people that love to teach and don't do. The world is filled with all of these, all of these fake people that, oh, yeah, I bought three deals. And now I'm a marketer, so I teach hundreds of people how to do what I've done only this little bit. And what I'm actually looking for is someone who's relevant in The game today and what that means is my standards, they have to have at least achieved

• 6:43Speaker 05

  10 times more than the epitome of what I hope to. So for example, if I want to be worth nine figures, a hundred million dollars, then I gotta be training with the billionaire, someone that's got 10 times that result and they've got to be actively in the game today. It's kind of like, what I want to train with Michael Jordan today, or what I want to train with Michael Jordan 1998. And for me, it's like, I want the dude that is, that crushed it, but is still crushing it today. And number three, actually has some type of system or pathway or mastermind, or I can freaking write a check, something to get into their airspace enough that I can learn it directly from the horse's mouth.

• 7:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And as you're going through this process, right? So I love this idea of finding people who are 10 times as successful as you want to be, and also people who are actively doing it at the moment and able to deliver those practical kind of details that really is where a lot of the value comes from. What is that conversation like? How much of it do you think people can get out of being like, hey, here's a deal I'm looking at. What do you think? Versus, hey, I just want to watch you do a deal and I'll kind of just learn through osmosis.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. So let's talk about the most lighthearted version of that. I read their book. The book doesn't talk back. The book doesn't answer questions. I love reading, but I do not mistake books for mentors. Then you go a little further. If this person has, for example, some type of mastermind, sometimes you gotta stroke a check to be in the room. And that doesn't mean that they're helping you. That just means that you're in their airspace to actually learn from them. If you go to the furthest extreme, what I actually look for whenever possible is partnership. How do I get you vested in my success? And it might be a, I'll do all the work. I'll put up the resources. I'll put up the whatever. And as long as you're like on my team and we're sharing in the winnings

• 8:34Speaker 05

  together, that's where you can almost guarantee the highest and best outcome. So for example, you know, after I made my big splash in real estate and I've automated my systems and I'm buying houses literally every day right now, but I spend an hour a month on it. Like I have Team doing all that. I've graduated. I'm not the operator. I'm the owner. Now I'm in the game of private equity. And so for example, Roland Fraser literally has helped participated in 1,000 different mergers and acquisitions and exits. And Roland and I are now partners on 27 different companies together. And that means that he's vested. Every time I need something, I call him, I text him and he's there. He shows up. He brings resources to the table. And I'm achieving a much higher level of of business outcome with Roland than without. Now he's got a consult for equity model where he basically, I,

• 9:20Speaker 05

  I give him 10% of the company, but I get 100% of his brains whenever I need it. He's not an active employee. He's not that kind of partner. But that 10% of his mental bandwidth and experience is enough for me to trade 10% for a thousand X growth. And so that's another example of, oh, I got to find out how to literally catch a tiger by the tail, get the most successful person I can and find a way to literally structure deals together.

• 9:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So you've got a very unique way of viewing kind of how people can find success, get around the right people. But you're actively doing this yourself. What's your daily schedule like? You got a lot of things going on. You own a bunch of different companies. Like what does your daily schedule look like?

• 9:58Speaker 05

  So I don't believe that time is required to create outcome. Cause I used to be that 80, 100 hour week entrepreneur many, many years ago. I'm married. I got four kids. And I felt totally out of balance in my life. And many years ago, I had my best friend die in a paragliding accident and he left his widowed wife and four little baby boys back on earth. And I remember after that, I thought, why am I killing myself and working so hard? Because what if today were my last day? And I said, okay, this is gonna be weird. There's gonna be a stretch for you, Mr. 100 hour week dude. What would your ultimate schedule look like? Like, um, what, what's perfect?

• 10:41Speaker 05

  Because I know, like, I wake up at 4am. I got two hours in the gym every day. I love that. I got a bodybuilding competition coming up in seven weeks. Last year I took second. I'm pissed. This year I'm taking first. I'm going to do my best. So I got goals there. I got goals with my wife. Everything that's important is done by 9am in the morning. And when we kind of talk about my typical schedule, it's kind of weird because here's what my perfect life currently looks like. On Mondays, I produce videos for the game of influence. Tuesday and Thursday, I work on my businesses from home. Wednesday, all day is my wife's day. We spend all day together. We'll take our jet, we'll fly somewhere, we'll hang out, we'll do something, something that builds us. Friday is my kids' day. All my kids are privately educated. We bring teachers into our home. We got four people that basically

• 11:24Speaker 05

  create this custom education for them. Saturday is my day, Sunday is God's day. So for me, my perfect is working about 25 to 30 hours a week. And if I work twice as much, I might be able to make more money. I don't believe so. I think I would be less happy. I think I'd be more stressed. And so I don't really think success is a function of time. I think it's a function of understanding your value and then also balancing that against what is your perfect? Cause all of us should be striving for our ideal and our relationships and our health and also in our finances. And I've been living that schedule for years now. And that one, it works for me. If I work more than 35 hours, I get cranky. If I work less than 20 hours, I'm not creating enough. 25, 30 hours is kind of my jam.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  And for me, I like to block that. So it's not just a little bit every day. It's like, uh-uh. When I'm in, I'm 100% present and I'm working on this thing. I'm having a board meeting, pull people in, we're causing, we're creating, we're doing something. And when I'm not, I'm out. I'm fully present in some other game of life that is designed to produce other utility, other happiness, other joy, other fulfillment.

• 12:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about the impact on the businesses. How many businesses do you think that you are an owner of or kind of actively operating alongside right now?

• 12:35Speaker 05

  Uh, over 400 companies right now.

• 12:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And are all of these in the real estate slash investment and, you know, including other types of content or like, what would the buckets be of those 400 companies?

• 12:47Speaker 05

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

• 13:31Speaker 05

  nature that if you take a tree and extract a branch, the branch looks like a tree. If you extract a twig, it looks like a tree. If you take a leaf, it actually under a microscope looks like a tree and on and on. So in my world, I've got a president of the board that runs, you know, X number of companies. Those people report to the other companies and basically everything flows down in this business geometry. And I can, in two board meetings a month and about eight hours a month, I can run all of my companies.

• 14:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So of those 400, how, what is like the biggest one, maybe? And then what is one that you're like, hey, we have it. It is a business, but we spend almost no time on it. Like, give us kind of the example of the two different extremes on that spectrum.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, you're actually bringing up, Pom, a really good point, which is, what is the goal? And I'm going to hit this a little bit sideways if I can for a moment, because you've got a lot of people out there that are entrepreneurs and what they do is they traded a job for their business. And what they did is they went from one stream of income to another stream of income. But the problem is they have a stream. And some businesses have huge potential. But honestly, sometimes we get to a point where it's like, wow, I maximized my market cap, my potential, what I can do, or I can't bring more to it. And so most entrepreneurs fail to graduate. And graduate means you empower an executive director, a CEO, somebody to run it for you so that you reclaim your time. And on the second go around, pick a bigger business, pick a bigger

• 14:58Speaker 05

  space, take all your experience and do it bigger and better. After that second one, and you get a CEO in place, then you're going to want eight more, because you're going to learn that you don't have to bootstrap anymore. You have resources that you can borrow or get to self-fund. You can start with the CEO from day one. You don't graduate to one. And that's, that's when all of a sudden, the whole world opened up to me where it's like, wow, the most intelligent approach to business is the one that doesn't need you. I start the party, I bring the people together, I collect them, collate them, I get them organized, I get them producing. That business has six months, a year or two to do what it's supposed to do, or I take it out in the back of the shed and shoot it and just start iterate again.

• 15:39Speaker 05

  And most entrepreneurs don't understand that their most powerful creations will not be on their first, second, and third business. It'll be on their fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh. So the goal is to have a system to iterate, to not become so attached to your own core business. So with that in mind, my real estate that kicked off this whole party, every year I add hundreds of new doors to my portfolio. And my system is on Monday, I shoot a bunch of social media, people from around the world, millions of people every week watch me. They look at my vast and growing experience in real estate. They come into my sales department, decide if they're going to partner with me, they put up the assets. And there's this whole system that runs and operates independent of me, that basically builds portfolios for people. We're 50/50 owners. That business takes me about an hour a month.

• 16:24Speaker 05

  And with an hour, that whole thing is really hands off. Now, that's a really ideal scenario to get to. But if we go to the other extreme, this last year, we've launched half a dozen companies or acquired companies that have billion dollar potential. One of them is actually a master franchise company that creates franchises for companies where we actually vet companies, set them up for franchise, and then take the very best ones, negotiate some equity, and then we do the marketing for them and sell the franchises and blast them off. One of the companies in there that we launched is called Property, and it's actually a real estate franchise that I'm partnered with on Carlos Reyes, where we are actually combining the power of wholesaling for people that want to make a couple million dollars a year wholesaling,

• 17:06Speaker 05

  and all of my buy and hold strategies, so that, you know, after every number of wholesale deals and flips, you're also acquiring, and you're actually getting the longevity of the long-term play while having an absolute killer active income. You know, that will probably be sold out in a two to three year span. It'll be a hundred million dollars in sales to onboard all the people for that, and that's designed in royalties to produce about a hundred million dollars a year. Just yesterday, we pointed our CEO for that company, our pre-launches in two months, our official launches in June. And we've got all the components that we need. That one, I'm probably going to put in a couple hours a week. For the next couple of months and once it's something going, I'm basically going to be playing a board of directors role.

• 17:50Speaker 05

  And I will, on that one, you know, because of some of my expertise, I'll be doing a little bit more social media for it. When we have conventions, I'll be booked to speak at those conventions. And then we're going to have, you know, our leadership franchise training modules. So I'll participate probably once or twice a month for an hour here or there to share my perspective on how to successfully run this franchise. So that one's going to be a little bit of a heavier lift. That's probably my heaviest type of lift on that other extreme. But even there, I'm not going to allocate on average more than two, three or four hours a week. That's the max that it gets as it's going through its optimization process.

• 18:26Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you pick the CEOs for all of these businesses? Like, what are you looking for? Where do you find them? How do you compensate them? How do you incentivize them?

• 18:33Speaker 05

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

• 19:18Speaker 05

  leadership training, there's this communal accounting, we've, we've centralized a lot of our systems. And so what I'm now doing is we're going out into the marketplace and we're recruiting talent, potential CEOs. And basically they get to know us, we say, we'll fly you in, come check us out, go through CEO Bootcamp, train with us, educate with us. We got people paying $50,000 to $100,000 for that training. We'll give it to you for free and now it's an incubator. So we incubate our leadership well in advance of our needs. Two days ago, I appointed a new CEO, yesterday, another one, and on Monday, I'm flying in someone that might be a CEO, I'm hoping for my franchise company. And so we're trying to now start the courting process months in advance.

• 19:59Speaker 05

  But depending on the company, you know, CEO salaries can range, you know, from a hundred to 250 or $300,000. Bonuses, another 100, 150, 200, depending. It just depends on the company and the size, the tech space, or what really what it's in. And, and I'm a huge believer in talent density, which means I want to find top of market talent and not people that I hope end up becoming great and I'm their first. I don't want, with some companies, you can be my first. If you were a successful division leader or manager and we promoted you, cool, that happens. But for some of these really big ones, I, I like to find the most expensive people that I can, because they bring in the most experience.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  They've had, you know, usually multiple eight-figure, nine-figure wins, maybe even a 10-figure win. And those are the people that we bring in to help build these companies.

• 20:50Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you screen those people for, yes, they have experience, but that they will also be able to operate within a startup environment, right? There's something different between the Fortune 500 CEO having to go back and kind of build a building from, or a business from scratch with two or three people. Those are two very different types of roles. How do you screen for that?

• 21:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, so what we usually do is we, we have multiple interviews just to get to know them. I just had a call a few days ago with a gentleman who had a nine-figure exit at his last company. This dude interviews so well and the president of my board is like, Chris, I need you to talk to this dude. Because Tim, he's either too good to be true or he's real. His resume is real, his Glassdoor reviews are real. And as I got to know him, I got to throw some very funky side wider questions by him. Cause my, my culture is built on feedback, candidness, vulnerability. A lot of organizations find that taboo, they won't go there. So I actually asked him a lot of vulnerable questions. I actually got hyper personal, talked about his personal life. And he passed that interview really, really well because he was willing, there was no resistance.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  And he was having the kind of conversations that people just normally don't have. I'm like, okay, we have a personality fit, we have a, a character fit, and we also look like we have a professional fit. Let's fly him in. After we fly him in, we'll investigate some of our company options. And then I'm probably going to dump him into CEO bootcamp and say, hey, Come hang out with us for the next several weeks or several months and learn with us. It's only going to take a couple hours, uh, you know, a week. And our hope is that as we grow together and find philosophy together, if we have a match, the moment we have something that could be a fit, we'll now have an interview for that. So all the original interviews are not about a company. It's about down the road, three months, six months, a year from now, we might have a really impressive company fit for you. So what we're doing is recording before there's an opportunity usually.

• 22:36Speaker 05

  And that creates an environment where people don't have to impress more than they should. People can really take the time to get to know each other. And I think with CEOs, that's the best approach.

• 22:46Anthony Pompliano?

  What are some of the questions that you would ask in that type of interview where uh, it's a little bit more probing or a little bit more personal that you're trying to really understand who is this person?

• 22:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I actually want to go to in their childhood. What was the most difficult thing that you faced? I'm going to find out real fast if they're willing to be vulnerable. Or if they're going to be, you know, they're going to tighten their sphincter and they're going to pull back a little bit and say, hey, can we keep this professional? Can we just talk about my career? And I'm like, actually for us to embark on the journey that we're going to, our culture is actually built on vulnerability. And I need to see if you can demonstrate the ability to get personal like that. And frankly, if I find people that can, I just don't want to have anything to do with them. Uh, because I don't want just, there's a strong attraction that people have to the culture that we built. And it's one of personal growth.

• 23:32Speaker 05

  Our, our core foundational philosophy is what you achieve in your personal life is far more important than what you'll ever professionally achieve. So are you finding fulfillment in your health and in your relationships? Cause look at these basics. When someone can't keep a budget and financially they've got problems or they just can't control their spending. When someone has relationship problems and issues and they just can't figure them out. And when someone is fat, when someone doesn't prioritize their health, how does that not impact your leadership in an organization? And it sounds a little bit harsh, maybe a little bit rude, but the reality is I'm looking for leaders that can inspire. And if you've got a problem with your health, I'm sorry, you're going to struggle to inspire people. And there are going to be people judging that book by its cover saying, why should I follow you?

• 24:16Speaker 05

  You clearly are wearing all of your problems on the outside. It doesn't mean people have to be perfect, but if they're willing to work on their stuff, that's attractive. And people that aren't, that's unattractive. So if there's resistance, it's just not going to be a fit.

• 24:29Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you manage the businesses from like an operational or financial like reporting standpoint? Right? So you've got all these businesses. I can only imagine kind of the day to day of some of the people who work with you, what they have to go through because there's individual companies that I'm an investor in that they struggle to figure out, you know, what is the revenue in Stripe? Where did that money go? Which bank account? Like, you know, just the complexity of one business now multiplied by 400. What have you learned there? Are there certain systems or processes that you all have put in place that have really been helpful that other people could learn from?

• 25:03Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I find that with every new startup, with every new company, there's a bunch of decisions that have to be met if you're going to achieve success. For example, what is the culture? How are we going to tackle accounting? And I think, by the way, those two out the gate are really important. Some other ones are, what is our system for accountability? Are we using critical drivers and Kris? And so, you know, when someone is a brand new business operator, they don't understand these things. They're literally, I'm throwing out money, I'm hiring you to do stuff, and then we're going to figure things out. But after you've actually optimized the business to the point where you know how to get it to make money and you're manipulating

• 25:45Speaker 05

  things to impact margin expenses, etc., you finally figure out how to actually run business well. So when we start a company, I never say, hey, let's start from scratch again and see if we can figure out culture and systems and CRMs and management tools. I'm like, no. When we start a company, you are going to inherit our entire system. So for example, my CFO, his name's Tim Weeks, he owns a company called CompanyVitals, and they do fractional CFOing for companies. And when I started with them years ago, it was for a handful of my companies. Now they provide 19 fractional CFOs for all of my organizations. Well, what that means is our weekly reporting is, is the same, our monthly financials are always prepared at the same

• 26:30Speaker 05

  time so that our CEOs and directors can review them, our quarterly reports all look the same, and everything is on the same system. I am, you know, there's people that look at me like, wow, Chris, you're like that real estate guy that knows how to make, you know, snap your fingers, make money and deals. And I'm like, actually, I'm the scale guy, which is if I have to repeat anything one time.

• 26:51Speaker 05

  Then it's worth building a system around so that I never have to ever repeat ever again. I don't want to like to repeat what I say. I don't like to repeat words. Everything that is manual should find a way to achieve some level of automation. So in business, we just, we basically adopt our, our systems for automation.

• 27:07Anthony Pompliano?

  When you're doing this, uh, there's a lot of other companies that reach very large scale that have a bunch of different philosophies. Uh, one of them I'm thinking about is the Koch Industries business. One of the, you know, first or second largest private companies in America. They have this whole philosophy of good profit. And the idea is they want to pursue profit that is done not through regulatory capture or kind of, uh, you know, government credits or anything like that. They want to pursue profit that is captured by competing in the free market. Uh, and you only can do that by actually solving customer problems. Is there some phrase or some way that you talk about your business philosophy? That people can kind of take away and say, okay, when I think of Chris, this is the business philosophy that he's used to build these 400 companies?

• 27:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there's actually two. Um, we live in a world where enlightened capitalism is really being diminished. And we, we have, it's been replaced with a selfish version of capitalism. Hey, I wanna, my intention is to create this company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Create value in the world and I'm going to have this exit. I'm going to make a grundle of money. And where that selfish is that the core focus is not on your just cause. Uh, Simon Sinek wrote a great book called The Infinite Game. And he talks about this enlightened capitalism where a company has to be driven. If you're gonna, if you die, who's going to pick up the baton? And continue the mission forward. Profits is not a mission. Profits is a goal. Um, you know, Eli, um, Goldenrod wrote this, my favorite business book called The Goal.

• 28:35Speaker 05

  And basically the goal is your profits and your margin. And if you don't learn how to do that well, then you don't get to stay in business very long. So on the one hand, one of the missions has to be, yes, we have to generate appropriate margin profits for the success of the business or else we don't have sustainability. But that has to be balanced with your mission. What is your just cause? What cause is powerful enough that people want to work for you? Because people don't want to work for you. Like, wow, you guys are really profitable. You're stable. Sounds like a great company. You're going to attract professionals that are basically looking for stability and financial opportunity. And I just think that's weak. I think there needs to be a balance of who are you and what are you about? What is your cause? And is it inspiring enough to take people's breath away? Does it cause them want to be with you?

• 29:20Speaker 05

  For example, I put on, I own an event center in Utah. And five, six times a year, people come in from the, you know, mostly around the country. And they'll enjoy a four day fully immersive event where they experience powerful financial training on real estate and private equity and everything that, that multimillionaires and billionaires are doing. And then I combine it with really, really powerful mindset training. And this stuff, I mean, we get crazy. We're doing glass walks, fire walks. We're challenging our limiting beliefs. It's a space of incredible vulnerability. It's terrifying at first, but all these exercises I put people through, force them to make a choice. Either you are or you're not about the personal development thing. Because what I'm doing is I'm attracting a culture of growth and find people that are so committed

• 30:06Speaker 05

  to their personal growth in life. And that's who I want in my companies. So that is a place where we display a part of our just cause, which is pouring into people. Literally, I want to promote everyone in my company. And if you're not an A player and you don't seek promotion, I don't want you on my team. Literally, I want you, if you're making 50,000 a year now, I'm asking you, how do we get you to 100K? How do we get you to, you know, to serious six figures? Why? Because if you're an intrapreneur, you've got to work with the founder and the owners of the company who want to pour into you, that will want to pay you for adding more value on this planet. So that you can save enough meaningful money to be a professional investor and say, hey, for my career, I'm a crazy, successful intrapreneur.

• 30:46Speaker 05

  And I have enough financial success on the outside that either way, I get my millions of dollars. And I'm not replying, relying just on a single sole source of income. Well, in my crowd, that's really exciting. And I don't just say it, I mean it. I invest in them. I give them access to my investing tools for free when they're a member of my team. And, and so I've got people that work for me with, that are being encouraged, have businesses on the side. And it means that from time to time, I lose really good people.

• 31:13Speaker 05

  But I would rather lose people to a better opportunity of them doing what they're meant to do with their life than just trying to control people. And most corporations don't get that today. They're losing people because their cause isn't just, it's not worthy. People are feeling disconnected. The, the mental health crisis is so out of whack and companies don't know how to treat their, their people in a way where, man, they think they had a hard time adjusting to millennials. Just wait, Gen Z is coming up. Ninety-four percent of them want entrepreneurship, which means if they get hired to work in your company, if you can't create a fun, stimulating, exciting opportunity of growth, they're out. And so corporations, they're, I think they're in really big trouble because we, the, the shift that's coming is, is so much bigger in tidal wave size than, you know,

• 31:57Speaker 05

  the millennial shift that we've had over the last decade.

• 31:59Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned earlier that Monday is for all of the content, Tuesday and Thursday is for the business. Wednesday is a day for you and your wife. Explain a little bit as to what you guys do on those Wednesdays and what are some of the benefits and maybe even some of the trade-offs that you've had to make, to make sure that Wednesdays you spend with your wife. Hey guys, I hope that you're enjoying this conversation. As you probably realize, we don't run any ads on this show. That's right. All the other podcasts, all the other YouTube shows that you watch, they have advertisers. We don't have any direct relationships with advertisers and we simply create this because we enjoy doing it. Now that we do that though, we have a team. And if you'd like to support us, one way you can do that is to go subscribe to the Pomp Letter. It's a daily letter that I write to about 235,000 people about my

• 32:44Anthony Pompliano?

  personal opinion on financial markets, business, technology and Bitcoin. Just go to pompletter.com and you can sign up there. I'd love to have you join us and it's a great, easy way to support the work that the team and I are doing on a daily basis. All right, let's get back into this conversation.

• 33:00Speaker 05

  So imagine for a moment,

• 33:04Speaker 05

  That you had all the money on the planet and you didn't need more. And then the question is, are you happy? Do you feel fulfilled? And often the pursuit of financial success and fulfillment, they don't go hand in hand. There's a limit. There's a limit to a perfect amount of work that someone can gain from fulfillment from. But then it leaves a huge gap in the rest of their life. And everyone's a little different. I can't speak for others, but I can tell you that for me, my wife is my best friend. We've been married for 21 years and we just love spending time together. We love learning new things together. We love traveling together. We love experiencing the world together. We've been to more than 40 different countries together and we live to have time for each other.

• 33:47Speaker 05

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

• 34:32Speaker 05

  with a hundred printed pictures on fabric of our favorite life memories. And when I went through 10,000 pictures at that time to find the top 100 moments, period. 91 of the 100 were found traveling. And after I realized that, I said, we're going to start traveling every month. We're going to live to create these memories. We've brought our children on that journey and.

• 34:57Speaker 05

  That's when we are out of routine and doing what matters most to us. For me to experience balance in my life, I live to have time with my wife, to connect meaningfully, to spend time with our kids and just be with my best friend. And so, you know, the trade off is, my company probably would love to have more time with me, but it forces me to value my time differently and empower the right kind of people that can keep things growing without me.

• 35:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you do on those Wednesdays? Do you just sit and talk? Do you guys go, go visit? Like, what, what are you actually doing?

• 35:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I mean, we, you know, one of my favorite things to do with our private jet is to do a same day teleportation in and out. And so what that means is my, my morning is a sacred routine between exercise and meditation and time with my wife and kids. But at nine o'clock, that's all done. So we usually, you know, our airport's 20 minutes away, our, our private. And so, you know, by nine 30, we're in the air. And the goal is to sleep in our own bed. And so, you know, one of our Wednesdays this last year, we went to Disneyland for a day. And we literally just lived it up, did the very best rides, flew home, slept in our bed. That was a blast. And so my wife and I, we, you know, we'll

• 36:14Speaker 05

  go teleport somewhere and go experience a culture, a people, or something fun. Sometimes it's a spa day, you know, something local. My wife is a crazy, I'd like to use the professional word geologist, but she is nuts about crystals and rocks like crazy. Our house is filled with them. And so we'll, we'll go out to like Tucson, to the big annual gem show, or in Denver in September, we'll do that one. Or we'll literally go rock hounding in Oklahoma, where we can pull out big quartz crystals out of the ground. That stuff lights her up. My wife and I practice this thing called spousal advocacy. And the game is, she knows what I want, and I know what she wants. And whatever my wife wants, I want it more for her than she wants it herself. What we try to do is outdo each other. And so in this

• 36:58Speaker 05

  game, you know, sometimes a Wednesday will be focused on her, sometimes it'll be focused on me. And that way, we get to try different things. And the goal is to just support each other's different approaches to life and learn and grow together.

• 37:08Anthony Pompliano?

  That's amazing. Friday, you said you spend with your kids. What do you guys do on Fridays?

• 37:13Speaker 05

  You know, it's winter now and we got a lot of snow. Last week, we got dumped on two and a half feet in a single day. So we'll go skiing together or there will be some kind of outing. You know, Shenzhen, that big Chinese, you know, you know, traveling show was here last week. The kids have a Shakespearean module that they're going through. So in a couple of weeks, you know, there's a Friday play that we're going to go to. My wife and I, when we got married, we decided, wow, you know, if we are fortunate enough to figure out how to become, you know, financially well enough, we'd love to pull our kids out of the public school system and we'd love to customize their education. And so we've been experimenting with our kids. I mean, I don't know, maybe a decade from now, I'll look back and say, wow, I really messed some things up because I don't believe my kids need to know chemistry, trigonometry,

• 37:57Speaker 05

  a whole bunch of useful, useless things that I was taught growing up. And instead I'm like, what are you good at? What do you excel at? And let's spend the majority of our time there. And let's round you out by also helping you understand a couple of really important things in life that you're not good at to, you know, stretch your neural muscles and help you develop and grow and do a good, well-rounded human being. But it's a crazy different approach to school because I, I, I think that my, what I want is for my children to fall in love with learning. So my son is a beekeeper and he's got bees and he's got a mentor that helps him figure out that whole thing because he's nuts about that. And I've got another one of my boys that just, he's totally into architecture and wants to build things. So he gets projects based on that. My daughter wants to learn Japanese.

• 38:38Speaker 05

  So she's got, you know, a teacher in Japan that she converses with and, you know, we're going to Tokyo as a family this summer. And so, you know, part of what we're doing on Fridays is just rotating, hey, what do our children need to fulfill that custom curriculum? For example, my kids are crazy about animals. So we went this last year, we took the jet down to Ecuador, the Galapagos Islands, rented a private yacht for the week and just went around the islands and got to, like, we got to see all the crazy creatures, the Darwin Saw, and my kids loved it. Like, it was amazing. We're on this private beach and we've got sea lions swimming up to us, playing with us, interacting, putting on a show as if they had been trained, you know, by, by some circus. And it's like, I'll never forget that. And

• 39:21Speaker 05

  so I, you know, creating, leaning into these custom educational experiences is, you know, what we hope will end up being the hallmark of their education.

• 39:29Anthony Pompliano?

  How much time do you think that you're able to spend with your family versus at work? Is it 50 50? Is it 60 40 one way or the other? Like, how do you think about that just based on the days?

• 39:41Speaker 05

  So, Pomp, I don't.

• 39:45Speaker 05

  I think there's a danger in time blocking. And the danger of time blocking is that sometimes it keeps us from actually understanding the objective. Like, I remember I took my family to Disneyland. And when my kids were young and I was doing what I thought a good parent should. My wife and I, we drug these, you know, by the afternoon, they were crying. I was wrestling with them. They were just, they were so done. We were trying to get our money's worth. And at the end of the entire day, I'm in the, in the hotel with my wife and our bed. I'm exhausted. And I just realized something. I didn't connect with any of my children meaningfully once. But the truth is, I can sit down with any person, including my children,

• 40:28Speaker 05

  and less than one minute, cause a tear to drop just by connecting with their soul. And then from inspiration, speaking into them the greatness I see in them. I can create more meaning in one minute than a whole day at Disneyland. So when I time block, I'm, I'm always asking, what is the objective? Because most objectives are not a function of quantity of time. They're a function of quality of time. And so I feel like I maybe get, you know, my, my hope is I'm just getting a lot more done because I'm pausing to reflect on what, like, it's not about having two hours together. It's what can I do in this moment? Anything that is meaningful is always experienced in a moment. It's not experienced over, over time per se.

• 41:09Speaker 05

  And so I'm constantly challenging the time blocking and asking, what, what is actually meaningful? This morning, when I, you know, right before coming down here, I was lying on my bed with my wife and my daughter. I had headphones on and I was doing a private meditation to her, you know, with really nice calming soothing music. And I was asking her in this directed process to look in a mirror and figure out something that isn't working for her that she'd like to give up because she's struggling with a lot of depression right now. And she said, Dad, I'm, I'm carrying this weight on my body that I gained for a boy that likes bigger girls and, and I'm done with that boy and I don't like myself this way. And I said, great. Who would you want to have help you release that? And she said, my

• 41:53Speaker 05

  parents. And when she came out of that meditation, I looked at her and I said, I promise you by tomorrow night, your mom and I will give you a plan that you love. And we're at your side. And over the next few weeks, we'll help you do this. Well, there was a, there was an emotional exchange there that really only took less than 10 minutes. It didn't, it wasn't two hours of hanging out together, doing something else. And so I'm asking, I'm always asking, how do I use this moment to get the real objective? What is the maximum meaning? What is the maximum good? What is the highest and best use of this moment? And I, I think that's how we can condense a thousand meaningful lives into one is just by being far more intentional and present.

• 42:31Anthony Pompliano?

  It's interesting that you talk about this. There's a bunch of studies that recently have come out about the impact on young girls from social media. And I think that folks like you and I who have daughters, but also have had immense benefit from social media. There is almost this kind of pro and con or this trade off that as a society, we are somewhat struggling with, right? It's this amazing thing that allows people to connect with their family and friends to learn, to benefit, to build companies, like do all these awesome things. And then there's almost this dark side of it. How do you think about those pros and cons? Or if there is a trade offs from a society standpoint?

• 43:10Speaker 05

  So the last couple of months, this same daughter has been suicidal. And in December, she was in a mental hospital to keep her safe. And it was the most difficult thing my wife and I had ever been through. And when I came out of that, I realized, all right, God, I, I literally am, am a breakthrough transformation artist. People come to my events to experience life changing breakthroughs, but I as dad don't get to do that for my own daughter. And I felt inspired, I'm actually pursuing a company right now where I want to create an environment that is safe for children to experience everything from the internet and social media that they want. I'm not talking about filters. Filters are problematic. You

• 43:55Speaker 05

  filter out all the bad and what gets left behind isn't good. And so we're talking about and you know, a version of social media, the internet, a browser where everything is curated with family values. So you could set your kid loose and they wouldn't experience the dark side. And that company is right now deep in vetting and research process. And we think we might be on to something. So imagine if your daughter could, you know, if you actually look at the dark side of social media, the problem is, is there, the science is now confirming the dopamine hit of these kids who have accounts, they're posting and doing things because they're literally determining their self-worth from whether they are liked. And we know how cruel, dude, bro, you and I know how cruel people are with their comments because they can be, they can literally be trolls that hide behind keyboards and they're

• 44:39Speaker 05

  mean. So I'm creating a version of that where I can bring all the entertainment and education from social media, but it's not about having an account or being liked or being a creator because there's something that they want, but there's some dark side as well. So we're trying to figure out what to keep and what to lose. So with my own kids on their phones, literally even my 17 year old doesn't have the internet, you know, on her own, she doesn't have her own social media accounts. It's super ironic. I literally produce 2000 pieces of media a week that my, that my team were put out and my own kids are restricted from social media heavily because I don't trust it. Like the creators of TikTok in China,

• 45:19Speaker 05

  their version of TikTok is educational. What they sent America is undermining and hurting and weakening the fabric of our society with this mental health condition, this young generation that feels all this awkward social anxiety. They've been told to wear diapers on their face, mask up, social distance, and it's, it's, it's wrong. So yeah, this generation definitely has some challenges. And for me, I believe we have a really important just cause to try to fix it. And right now, you know, we might see later this year, the emergence of a company, you know, that can try to be a part of the solution.

• 45:54Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned on Saturdays, that's your day. What do you do on Saturday?

• 45:59Speaker 05

  Uh, you know, I think that everyone's got to have some type of system for self-care. How, and by the way, that system is daily. But I also give myself permission once a week where it's like, maybe I want to go snowboarding by myself. You know, maybe I want to go hang out with some of my friends. Like, what does Chris time look like? And, you know, in my world, I actually don't need a ton of it. Personally, there's other people I know that need loads of it. I'm an extrovert. I like to be with human beings. I feed off of that. You know, but this is where I just get really clear on, hey, what will create the most meaningful memories in my life? Let's go do those things. I've got some people coming in town. I've got a six by six apocalypse. I mounted a 50 caliber modus on it.

• 46:41Speaker 05

  We're going to go take a bunch of tannerite and fruit and we're going to blow stuff up. I've got a buddy of mine who's bringing flamethrower and a whole bunch of, you know, you know, full automatics. And we're literally going to go create in the desert, this crazy custom experience and just have fun blowing stuff up. Like, that's fun. I enjoy that. So, yeah, part of Saturday is just asking, hey, how do I rejuvenate me? Because the most important person on this planet that I pour into is not my wife. And it's not even God. If I'm not okay, then no other relationship can be. And so I don't, I don't sacrifice myself for the greater good or to even serve my family, because the most powerful way for me to serve them is to make sure I'm good.

• 47:26Speaker 05

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

• 47:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So a lot of things are going right today. You've built this amazing system. You've been able to launch a bunch of businesses. You've been able to put yourself in a position financially. And also from a self-discipline standpoint, to spend specific days, doing specific things with your family or work or whatever. What would you say is the exact opposite end of the current situation? What was the darkest time in your life? What was the, the biggest thing that you faced where you felt like my business is blowing up? My relationship, like just everything is caving in on me. What was that situation and how did you get to the other side of it?

• 48:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, um, so I served a two-year Christian mission for my church as a 19-year-old. No college before then. So when I got back at 21, I felt late to the game. And for whatever strange reason, I really felt inspired that I wanted to, I didn't want to do the five, 10-year dating game. I actually wanted to find my best friend. And on third day of college, I found my wife and we were married 10 months later. And I sold her on this dream. I was going to be a doctor and I'm doing all my pre-med classes. And, and after failing chemistry for the second time, I gave up on that dream and I was scared of what she'd think. And I felt, I remember at that time in my life, I was the one paying for my schooling. My wife didn't want to go into debt, so I had a full-time job and like literally 18 credit hours and working

• 49:18Speaker 05

  full-time was, it was a lot and it was stressing me out max. And after four months of deciding I wasn't going to be a doctor, I couldn't find a major in college that I could connect with. I'm like, you could be this director of that company, make 80,000 a year. You could be an educator, make 30,000 a year. You could do this thing, psychologist, make 60,000 a year. And I was like, wow, this sucks. There's, there's no money in this whole college system. And that's when I started trying to figure out, I gotta find something outside the walls of these university that's going to work for me.

• 49:48Speaker 05

  But what kind of sucked is the job that I had was a, was a telemarketing job. I didn't enjoy it. I just was sucking the life out of me. And even after just being at this, one day I'd been at work for like an hour and I was like, I do not want to be here. And so I went home and it was early afternoon because I'd done school from six to noon. And when I come home, I, I found my wife in tears. And I was confused because this woman I had known for over a year now, I'd never seen her cry this way before. And I thought someone must have died because she had, her cheeks have been stained with tears. I could see it under the tiny little puck light, the only light in this tiny 400 square foot apartment, this little hallway. And so when I finally

• 50:29Speaker 05

  had the courage to ask what's wrong, she said, Chris, we have tuition due in three weeks, we can't pay for it. And I'm thinking, wait, is she stressing over going into debt? Is that what's producing these tears? That doesn't add up. And then she said, Chris, we have rent due in five days and we already spent this Friday's paycheck. And I was like, oh, I don't know. I don't know how I'm gonna fix that. And then I found out why she was really crying. She had gone grocery shopping. We only literally kept five days of food in our cabinets. We were empty. She had put like, I don't know, $20 or $30 worth of cheap ramen and groceries in the, in the cart. She went to checkout and basically insufficient funds.

• 51:13Speaker 05

  And she got denied. And the clerk told her that she couldn't take the food unless she had another form of payment and she didn't. My wife had been home already for a few hours, crying and literally hungry. And in that moment, I was like, oh, my gosh, like, I'm about to relive all of my parents' financial nightmares where they're constantly stressed and fighting about money, my entire childhood going up. And here we go. This is it. Like, my wife is, I suck as a human being. I don't know how to provide. I've let my best friend down. I feel like this big of a man. And that was a really sucky moment for me, but it was also one where I made a different decision too, because I poured a lot of negativity

• 51:51Speaker 05

  into my soul. But I also decided, I am going to do whatever it takes to never be in this situation again. In four and a half years, I was financially independent, graduated college, quit my job, never needed to work ever again. I basically lit a fire, a bonfire, under my ass. My ass just changed everything for me. And I mean, so that was that was definitely a key moment. But the one that really probably felt like it was going to destroy me was 2000, 2009, I had an employee steal some money from me. She got caught and then wanted to get back at

• 52:33Speaker 05

  me, which was really weird, and went to the SEC and made up 93 complaints. They went and did a full investigation on my company. It was a 14 month investigation. I was not emotionally equipped with hardly any intelligence. I'd never experienced anything like that. I learned how powerful this governing body was. And if they wanted to, they could shut me down and destroy me. Literally, someone could go to jail. Even though we had done nothing wrong, I learned at the end of that, my deposition at the end of that 14 month journey was the worst day of my entire life. And I remember after that thinking, oh, my gosh, it doesn't matter how financially successful I am. Mentally, I'm retarded. That's probably not a PC word,

• 53:15Speaker 05

  but I have zero emotional intelligence. I have like no coping mechanisms without my coaches. I'm worthless. I have to figure this out. And what it did is I challenged myself to, this is when I leaned hard into mentorship, spent a couple million dollars paying coaches like Tony Robbins and others to come into my world and literally start pouring into me and teaching me emotional intelligence, business intelligence. I started leveling up my body, my health, my relationships. And I said, you know what, I need to fortify this man. I need to become something more than I've been. Because if I go on to fulfill my mission and purpose in life, this regulatory incident, that'll be nothing compared to what I'm probably going to face in my future. And so, you know, for me, a lot of people

• 53:59Speaker 05

  will take hardship pump and they will pour negatively into themselves only, and they'll perceive everything as a failure. For me, there's a handful of people that go the opposite, and they say, you know what, I'm going to take, I'm going to take this horrible mire, and I'm going to consecrate it, and I'm going to make myself something better. And that's what I did with those incidents in my life and have sense with some of the others.

• 54:22Anthony Pompliano?

  You think very differently than most people. I think that's pretty obvious. I think you know that as well. What kind of content do you consume? What books do you read? What movies do you watch? What do you watch on YouTube? Who do you follow on Twitter? Like, what would you kind of characterize as the content that you're consuming on a day-to-day basis?

• 54:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would first just pass an admonition. I think you have to be careful about books.

• 54:46Speaker 05

  Because there's a lot of people, there's these sayings, leaders are readers, and the more books you read, the smarter you're going to get. And for me, I don't care about how much you consume. I care if I'm consuming the right quality and if I'm acting on it. And so I've probably honestly read less books in the last decade than a lot of people out there. I've probably read 100 books. And of those 100 books, for me, I will slow down and ask if it's the right book, it's an inspired book, and it's got the quality. For me, I would rather slow down and implement. And so for me, you know, I'm always warning people, be careful of just getting so consumed in the reader game. My current strategy today is I read about an hour a day. I do that on double time audiobook, so it takes about

• 55:28Speaker 05

  30 minutes. It's the first thing that happens between 4:00 AM and 4:30. And I toggle always back and forth between two books. One is some level of personal mental expansion, personal development-minded book by some major thought leader that I'm really connected with. And then the other one is usually some type of business book. And so every day, I just go back and forth between between books. And the moment I'm feeling inspired, the moment I'm connecting, I pause and I allow my mind to work instead of getting lost in someone else's mission and audio. And so what that does, it massively slows things down. But I believe that sometimes you should go slower if you want to go faster. So that's kind of my strategy for putting thoughts and ideas in my head. But it's also like nothing compared

• 56:11Speaker 05

  to being in a mastermind. I'm engaged at any moment in multiple masterminds. You know, these days often, I actually don't pay to be in masterminds. I get, you know, I'm the one that keynotes or speaks at them. So I actually get to swim in a lot of really cool ecosystems. And when I'm there, even if I'm going to be, you know, a main speaker, I always pause and put my student hat on and just, my goal is to take more notes than anyone present, and to get myself in that inspired state where I'm just writing. I like multi-day events. So if I go to a three-day conference, I usually want 10 to-do takeaways that are inspired per day. So I do a four-day conference, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have 40 takeaways, and I'll book time in the next two weeks after.

• 56:51Speaker 05

  To implement all 40 things so that a month, two, three later, when I get to the next conference, I didn't just learn something and fail to implement. I would rather consume way less and do way more rather than what most people I think do, which is consume a ton, but then do very little with it.

• 57:09Anthony Pompliano?

  That I think makes a ton of sense. If you had to give yourself, when you were first starting out, some advice, what are two or three things that you could have told yourself and saved yourself a lot of time, pain and headache?

• 57:20Speaker 05

  Uh.

• 57:24Speaker 05

  This is gonna be, this is probably not gonna land or make a whole lot of sense, but the most valuable skill, I believe in mastery. Gladwell says, Malcolm Gladwell, you need 10,000 hours to master something. I don't think that's true. I think that every time you master something else, you truncate the time and it gets faster and easier, especially if you go to source. So if you're going to do entry level amateur classes, you're gonna read books? Sure, it's gonna take four or five years to achieve 10,000 hours of mastery on something. But if you go to source and you go right to the top, there's usually a shortcut where in 50 hours or a couple hundred hours, you can hit mastery, especially if you've mastered other things. Today, I've mastered 21 different things. And if I could take one of them with me to the very beginning, it's an odd skill.

• 58:09Speaker 05

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

• 58:50Speaker 05

  And so this skill that I've developed with a lot of my coaches is a, it's a, it's a mental process where I would just, every day I ask, what's the number one limiting belief holding me back?

• 59:02Speaker 05

  A thought comes to mind, I judge the crap out of it and I replace it with something limitless instead of its limited notion. That skill I've practiced 6,500 times. It has rewritten my entire mindset. So everything in here is positively reinforced with, of course, that I can't. Of course, I can be President of the United States if that was my mission and purpose in life, which by the way, it's not. Of course, I can this. Of course, I can build a billion dollar company, a multi-billion dollar company. One of my companies working on is literally 100 billion dollar potential. That's not mentally scary as a number because I've done breakthroughs to be okay with that quantity and to be, you know, so belief breakthrough is probably the most, it's like a master skill for me because whatever you believe you can or can't, you're right. It's your

• 59:45Speaker 05

  thinking that makes it. So we've all heard that. And so this is the skill I'd take back to the very beginning and say, Chris, bro, you have to challenge your thoughts because most of them are crap. You've got to look at them because if you operate under the assumption they're true and they're not, you're not going to be able to manipulate reality and produce the results that you want. But that's probably the biggest thing I take back.

• 1:00:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's great. When you think of your life, how many of the people that you're surrounded by now are friends from childhood or people that you've known for, you know, 10, 20, 30 years versus people that are new, but you've almost sought out because they have specific experience or they are, you know, in a similar type of business. Like, how do you think about the balance between what I think a lot of like childhood friends that you've known for 20, 30 years versus maybe people you meet later in life, but they bring other value? Do you have any kind of framework to think through in your life specifically, what that balance is?

• 1:00:45Speaker 05

  I think that it is a natural developmental process to want to keep a small, close group of friends that you've known for a long time and keep them close. Those friends are holding you back.

• 1:00:59Speaker 05

  Question is, the people you spend time with, are they growth minded or fixed minded? Ninety-nine percent of this planet has a fixed mindset. That means that, you know, I take a look at my brothers today, beautiful souls, great men. They went to college, they decided their career, what they wanted to do, and today, you know, fifteen, twenty years later, they're still doing those things. And when I look at their lives, they have beautiful families, they have, you know, they've got great careers and they've done well. And I would chalk that up as what I would call a normal life. I think a lot of people want to have a normal life. Me personally, I detest normal. I associate it with mediocrity. It feels like the opposite of fulfilling life's purpose of growth. And, and I hate it.

• 1:01:44Speaker 05

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

• 1:02:26Speaker 05

  And so I, you know, on my side of the family, I've got eight brothers and sisters, my parents live with me, I take care of them. My siblings, once or twice a year, will pop into town, will connect. There's one of them that I have a really deep, meaningful relationship with. On my wife's side of the family, she's really close with her family. We get to see them a couple of times a month, they're, they're off, you know, half of them are living locally in the area. And we'll do a, you know, we'll travel together, you know, once or, you know, you know, I think once every other year on some kind of reunion thing together. But honestly, I don't spend a lot of time with them. The friends that I spend my time with today, right now, there's five couples that I spend a lot of time with for my wife and I in our friend circle. They're all entrepreneurs for the most part.

• 1:03:09Speaker 05

  We put on literally every month, growth night where we're gamifying the game of how are we growing and developing. Most of them are getting on stage with me in eight weeks for this physique competition. The ladies are doing bikini for the most part, the men are doing physique competition. We go to conferences together, we travel together, we're going to Iceland later this year together. And I found a tribe of people that I can grow with. And then outside of that, my family, you know, that I have my own masterminds that I run where I'm connecting with like ultra like minded people that believe in that just cause profitability, the game of growth, their health, everything. And that's kind of what my, my universe looks like.

• 1:03:48Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about your life today, is there a word that you would use to describe it?

• 1:03:58Speaker 05

  I think it's growth.

• 1:03:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Growth.

• 1:04:00Speaker 05

  It's growth. Yeah. I think growth is a spiritual game. I think it's the game of life. I think it's the one that matters the most. And, and this probably sound highly judgmental, but when I evaluate humans, not judge, but when I evaluate and assess behavior, what I'm looking for is whether they, whether they resist growing or whether they lean fully into it. And most don't.

• 1:04:22Speaker 05

  And I lead a tribe of people that are trying to figure that game out and they want more of that in their life.

• 1:04:30Speaker 05

  So yeah, growth is, is I think at the center.

• 1:04:34Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think of your life, one of the other things that a lot of entrepreneurs feel is interesting and inspiring is just to see how much growth someone can actually experience. If you go all the way back, you told the story of, you know, when your wife went to the grocery store, the card was declined and it was this, you know, somewhat embarrassing, but just kind of a moment that really shook you and said, hey, you have to change. When you think today, how much money do you make? How much are you able to invest every year? Like, how do you think about your financial portfolio? What, what information are you comfortable sharing there that can kind of help people see like, hey, you can go from not having anything, right? And kind of being in this really bad situation to like, here is what is possible.

• 1:05:21Speaker 05

  I look at health first and when I got married, I would say I was relatively fit, but I came from a very unhealthy family. Diabetes was always a fear, heart attack, stroke. And so I was trying to make fitness my game. And I'll go to the gym five to six times a week and I couldn't figure out the result. My body was usually 30, 40, 50 pounds overweight, pencil necked. And it was probably 10, 11 years ago, I got some specific health coaching and I was just like, I hate that I feel like I've wasted a decade of my life, like mistaking movement for achievement. Because every day I go to the gym and I move and I am not getting the outcome. I'm clearly doing something wrong.

• 1:06:03Speaker 05

  And so I went heavy into belief breakthrough work and hiring health coaches. And within six months, completely transformed my life and haven't been back since. Like I carry my trophy with me every year. My body right currently is a little faster, a little stronger. Longevity is connected to your VO2 levels and your muscular turn. That's it. Those two things determine the length of life. I want to be 140 years old and I take care of my body with the assumption that I am going to be. That's what I'm programming and signaling my genes and my body to do and produce in a 25 minute meditation. I do every single day. So my health today, I now carry a six pack with me all the time. And every year I'm a little more muscular, I'm a little less fat. And I do that for me. In the beginning, it was like, it was vanity. I wanted to uphold a certain image. I wanted to look good naked. I don't really care so much about that right now.

• 1:06:48Speaker 05

  My, my health is my wealth. And so that's a huge change. My marriage, 21 years. And honestly, the first five years sucked. My wife and I were not on the same page. We marry our opposites for a reason. I was Mr. Change and she was Mr. Don't move and Mrs. And so she was, I was like morphogenesis. She was homeostasis. And it took us years to figure out how to advocate for each other and support each other. And, you know, in the last decade, we have built an incredible marriage. Everything I want to get, everything she wants, she gets. And we have a system for verifying that every single day. That's one of our top priorities, one of our standards. Whatever you want, I want it more for you than you want it yourself.

• 1:07:30Speaker 05

  You know, so literally going from kind of in the dumps, honestly, with just, we don't get the marriage game to where we're at today's beautiful thing. And then of course financially.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  There's games that I used to play. I spent way too long in the real estate game. I was stuck as an operator. Most entrepreneurs are just like, well, this is my identity. This is who I am. This is my baby. And like, women make babies. And then they get attached to them for 18 years, frankly, for the rest of their lives. They have all this oxytocin and chemistry. There's like, I'll die for my baby. I'll do anything for my baby. But men that are entrepreneurs and females, when you create something like a business, it's also like a baby. This and and so we get really attached to it. And detachment has been a beautiful process for me to finally get to the point where I'm like, wait, create it. And then the real measure of success is not how much time you put into it.

• 1:08:21Speaker 05

  It's the maximum value you create in the world while reclaiming maximum time for you. So you can move on, leverage the life experience and do something bigger. So if you were to look at me financially, you know, six, seven years ago, I was still only the the real estate guy pomp. And so sure, my net worth like is on a great trajectory with all those doors that I buy. But most of what I do is a buy and hold strategy, which means there's limited cash flow and huge growth. Like a single property over 20 years at a 34% average ROI turns into 17.4 million dollars. And every day I form a partnership with someone in the world that says, here's my 401k or my equity or my home equity. Let me dump it in. Let's buy a house or two.

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  Because in 20 years, I want to wake up and be surprised by 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 million dollars. And so I build portfolios with people. When I finally gave myself permission to not be the operator, that's when I started my second business and within a year I learned it should be 10 and then it should be way more than that. So, um, yeah, I mean, like, how vulnerable am I willing to be?

• 1:09:27Speaker 05

  I'll put it to you this way. My goal since January 15th, 2009 was to be a billionaire. And right now, sometime end of 2023 or mid 2024, I believe that's when that's going to happen. And in my lifetime, I want to be a trillionaire. Like I'm like, I have the ability to grow and use the time that I set aside for this. And I'm just going to keep multiplying wealth and. And if I have 140 years on this planet, totally doable because you know, my wife and I, we put a lot of effort into our foundation. That's where we find a lot of our meaningful time together. And right now I want to just pour billions of dollars into that because that's the legacy that continues when we're not here. And, and the work that it does is

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  it change lives, it saves lives, it's, it's hugely impactful. So that's kind of the core motivation of just why more? Well, it doesn't really change my lifestyle much, but it sure can for a lot of other people.

• 1:10:23Anthony Pompliano?

  That is a beautiful place to end. Chris, where can we send people to find you on the internet, find the content that you're producing, the books that you've written, or any of the other things that you're doing?

• 1:10:33Speaker 05

  So I've got a whole bunch of gifts for anyone that's listened today. If you feel like there's something you want to explore more, you can go to freewellthgift.com. And what I did there is I put multiple giveaways. I put some of my books, I put free consultations or just literally even free event tickets. So instead of paying $1,500 for an event, literally you can come as my guest. So freewellthgift.com is where someone could go and learn more. But other than that, you just Google my name, just got to spell it right. It's Chris with a K and Chrome with a K. And, and I'm, I'm on all the different platforms. So yeah, feel free to connect and grab some of those gifts.

• 1:11:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Chris, I appreciate it so much. I've learned a lot from you today. I think there's a lot of people out there who, who could take your message and implement it in their life. And I appreciate you taking the time to have the conversation and hopefully we'll do it again in the future.

• 1:11:20Speaker 05

  Appreciate you, Paul. Thank you.