The Russell Brunson Show

In the latest episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast, Russell Brunson delves into the concept of curation and its growing importance for influencers and entrepreneurs. He begins by discussing his own struggle with remembering the word "curate" and how he's been contemplating this topic for several months. Russell explains that the future of business, particularly for influencers and experts, lies in mastering the art of curation. He describes his journey over the past 20 years, noting that his primary role has been to curate ideas. By reading countless books, attending courses, and experimenting with various concepts, Russell has been able to sift through vast amounts of information and distill it into practical frameworks that he shares with his audience through his books like Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, and Traffic Secrets.Russell emphasizes that his books are not just collections of his original thoughts but rather curated insights from a wide array of sources that he has tested and refined. This process of curation involves sifting through information, retaining the most valuable elements, and presenting them in a way that is accessible and actionable for his audience.He shares an anecdote about a conversation with a fellow church member who inquired about his framework development process. Russell likens it to sifting sand, where the non-essential elements fall away, leaving behind the core principles that form the foundation of his frameworks. This method, he suggests, is applicable to everyone in their respective fields.To illustrate the power of curation, Russell recounts a story about Dan Usher, a member of his team. Dan is a fan of the band Rufus and trusts their curated recommendations for art and decor. When Dan moved to a new house, he relied on the band's curation to furnish his home, demonstrating how trust in a curator can extend beyond their primary expertise.Russell notes that as influencers, people come to them for their core expertise but often end up seeking advice on various aspects of life, from family and health to personal routines. This broader interest underscores the potential for influencers to curate content across multiple domains.One of Russell's major current projects is building a 20,000 square foot library next to the ClickFunnels HQ. This library will house an extensive collection of books and materials that he has curated, particularly in the fields of personal development and business. He has invested significantly in acquiring rare and valuable works by influential figures like Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie. The library will serve as a resource for deep learning and will include both physical copies and curated frameworks derived from these materials.Russell explains his vision of creating a comprehensive resource where visitors can explore various sections dedicated to his passions, such as religion, personal development, business, and advertising. Each section will feature rare first editions and curated materials, allowing visitors to dive deep into the subjects that Russell has meticulously curated.He emphasizes the importance of simplifying complex ideas through curation, making them more accessible and actionable for the audience. This approach not only enhances the value provided to the audience but also establishes the curator as a trusted source across multiple areas of interest.In conclusion, Russell encourages listeners to embrace their roles as curators. By curating and simplifying information, they can provide immense value to their audiences, who trust them not only for their primary expertise but for broader life guidance as well. This, he believes, is the future for influencers, experts, and entrepreneurs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this final segment, you get to hear Russell answer some questions from the attendees of the ROR Symposium. If you have enjoyed these episodes about the importance of relationships, please check out RORUniversity.com to learn more! Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: Hey everybody. This is Russell. Welcome back to Marketing Secrets podcast. All right. What did you guys think? Did you like the keynote presentation so far? I hope you did. Hopefully it gave you some ideas about how we grow a business using relationships and joint ventures and the Dream 100, and give you guys some realistic expectations on how the game is played. Hope you guys enjoyed it so far. Now at the end of the symposium, they opened up to Q&A, which was really fun. And so I had a chance to do some Q&A, answer some questions, and we kind of jumped all over the board. So this episode will be fun. You'll get a couple different perspectives on some questions. My guess is that one of the questions you're going to hear is a question that you're probably wondering or something maybe you should have asked and didn't even think about it. So I hope this gives you a some value and you get some benefit from it. Once again, I want to thank Christopher Voss for allowed me to use my presentation from his ROR symposium for the podcast episode. If you want to follow Christopher and learn more about what he's doing and how to build better relationships in your business, get more traffic, build more referrals and things like that, make sure you go to roruniversity.com and get on his list. All right, that said, I'm going to open up the third and final episode from our ROR symposium. We had a chance to do some Q&A with me, and I hope you guys enjoy it. Thanks so much. Don: One of my capacities today, just in this hour, is to be bouncer. So y'all get on the velvet rope, I've got my clipboard. I will let you go first, McCall, because I can see you on my screen. McCall, we've got 10 or 15 minutes, so just do me a favor, people: ask Russell your question with a certain amount of concise nature, and then he can answer it, because we have one last thing we need to do before Russell goes, and then we can wrap up the symposium. So McCall, go ahead. Unmute yourself and ask your question. McCall: Hi! Okay. I want to know who's on your list next. Don: Ooh. McCall: You got to have a list of people who you are always trying to connect with. I know you've gone to Tony Robbins. I mean, I know there are, but who are the people who you are actively trying to connect with now? Are you going to share it with us? Is it a secret? Is it supposed to be a secret? Am I missing something here? Russell: That's a good question. Maybe I'll put out the word, and guys can go find these people for me. McCall: Yes! Russell: It's interesting, and partially it's kind of where my life, like number one... Okay. So partially it's because I started getting obsessed with UFC during COVID, so I enjoyed watching more UFC fights... So this will make sense in a second. Also, I'm working on my success and personal development books right now, so it kind of opens up the reason why also. But the two people that I really am looking forward to eventually is Dana White and Joe Rogan. Those two guys are super fascinating to me. I don't agree with- McCall: Joe Rogan and, who was the first one? Russell: Dana White, who's the owner of UFC. Both of them, I don't agree with our belief system, like half, but they fascinate me on the other half and I have the ability to... Hopefully, all of us can learn is you can disagree with somebody on a lot of things and still have respect from them and still learn from them, so. But those are the two I'm really fascinated by and I have so many things... I'm not a very good interviewer, but man, if I sit down for an hour or two them, I would have so many things I want to ask them and like, ah, those guys fascinate me, so. McCall: Do you just do it in a Kevin Bacon way? Where you're like, okay, the six degrees of Kevin Bacon away from Joe Rogan and Dana White, and you just like start to eliminate? Russell: Definitely. There's that, but there's also like, is there a way I can incorporate Joe? How can I serve Joe Rogan? Right? He's the biggest podcast, my podcast doesn't help him, but I'll put him on stage potentially. Or there's something we could do, or... What's the next thing? If he's going to be doing his comedy shows, maybe I could find out like, "Hey, I can help fill a show in a city. We can do a funnel." Something like that where I can use my unique abilities to help magnify something they're doing. Or Dana White, I don't know how I'd serve him yet, but that would be kind of the thing. And then yes, it's looking at degrees of separation. I do know that Grand Cardone had Dana White on stage, I know there's that; I know Alex Sharpton is moving next door to Joe Rogan. So there's all kind of things. But I'm not like, "Hey Sharpton, can you call Joe Rogan for me? What's his address?" I'm not doing that, because I don't want to be the creepy guy. But I'm like, okay, I do know there's connection points, and who and how and all this kind of things. And then I'm also trying to pay attention to him. So like when I do have a chance to meet them the very first time, I can have an intelligent conversation. I can tell when people are prepared to meet me, because they... Like today, I had a guy that I'm potentially interviewing for a big position. And it was in the conversation, I could just... like, little things. He asked something about wrestling. I was like, "Oh, how do you like wrestling?" And he's like, "Your kid's wrestle?" I was like, I literally Instagramed a picture of Aiden on a wrestling mat last night. He did his homework, so we had this thing, and that's when I was like, "Oh, he is cool because he's paying attention." And all of a sudden I was like, "Ah, he got me. I trust this guy now because he had that commonality." And so, I'm trying to pay enough attention to them, what they're doing, where I could have a... Not that I have to agree with him, but I can like have a conversation. Like, "Hey, I don't agree with this. What do you think?" Sometimes agreeing with people don't create the connection points. The disagreement, you can have a discussion. That gets more fascinating and you get closer to someone through that than you ever could like, "Oh, you're so cool." People don't want to feel like they're being worshiped, they want to feel like an equal. So it's like, you get a mentally stimulating conversation with somebody that you disagree with, sometimes that's the best connection. I don't have the same opinion of that person, but that was the fascinating view to look at it through. And so, just gotta do my homework there. And yeah, stuff like that. McCall: That's cool. Thanks man! Russell: No worries. Don: Awesome. Okay, next... That's how rumors get started. Did you guys know that Russell's getting into UFC? He's going to be the ultimate fighter champion. Russell: I’m ready for it, let's go. Don: Let's go! All right, Daniel, you're next. Go ahead. Russell: I think if I was to have just retired from wrestling right now in my life, I 100% would be going towards UFC. Now that I'm an old man, I can't. And I didn't understand fighting back when I did get done competing, but if I was graduating from competition right now, I had 100% be in the UFC, or trying to be in the UFC, for sure. Don: And I had no idea that you were such a pop culture reference person. I've seen you do it stage a few time, but you did it in this small group, and I'm like, "Thank God. Russell and I have this in common." Because my immediate thought when you talked about it was, you can be like the guy from friends when John Favreau tries to be the ultimate fighting champion. He's passed his prime there and he has to give up the dream. But anyway. Daniel, go ahead with your question. Daniel: All right. First up, thank you so much, Russell. It's such an honor to be here in the same room as you. It's because of you, my mindset has switched from the mindset of just wanting to earn more money to serving people. I'm a big fan of you and your podcast, and especially Marketing In Your Car. That totally rocks. And my question… Russell: By the way, did you notice that? Now I know, first off, he's paid attention, but it wasn't just like, "Oh, I bought your book." He's like, Marketing In Your Car, which is my old podcast, he paid attention to. Yeah, so checked out connection point, now I'm like this guy's a real fan. I actually trust him even more. So, very good for you. That was awesome. Daniel: I love for you, Russell. I love you so much. So your latest podcast where you mentioned about the reasons for entry versus the reasons to stay, from Dan Kennedy. So I believe that we can also use that same framework for our Dream 100 too. If yes, could you expound a little bit more on that for me, please? Russell: Yeah. For sure. Those who don't know the reference yet, I did a podcast about this fax right here. Hold on. Oh, it’s not this one, dang it. Anyway, Dan only sends things through fax. So, there's fax that we got, which was like the fax he sent to the guy who bought it before me about how the other company destroyed his brand and his name, and there's a whole bunch of these little nuggets. So I shared one nugget, which was the difference between why people come into your business and why they stay in your business. They're different, right? For example, in our Mastermind, people come, it's like, "I want to be in my Russell's Mastermind!" And they get there and they're like, "Russell's not that cool, but all the people here are amazing!" And they stick because of the community of people, right? So it's like, I'm the hook to get him in, but this is what you're actually paying for is this amazing community. Right? And Dan was talking about, because for them, it's like, people come in because they want the money making secret of whatever, but they stay for the community and the newsletter, and Dan and his thoughts. It's understanding that they come and they stick for different reasons. And so Dream 100's very similar. I think a good practical example is like when we launched ClickFunnels, I was trying to find people that we could build funnels for free. Right? So I called a bunch of like bigger name people. Tony was one, Dave Asprey, a bunch of people who I woke up to. And I was like, "Hey, can I build you a funnel for your new book launch or for your thing?" It's like, they came because I wanted to serve them, do a thing like that. But then, that's how I got to know him. Right? I had a chance to go to Bulletproof Cafe and film Dave Asprey and get to know him, and become personal with him and like build a relationship. And so the hook was what got him to say yes to the meeting and to me spending half a day with him. Right? But then after that, the relationship stuck because of the other things. Does that make sense? So it's kind of the same thing. How do I surge enough hook to get them in so you have time to build relationships. That's the hardest thing. Right now it's hard because my time's so busy. How am I going to have time to… I can’t please everybody? So it's like, what's the hook? Like, what's something I can bring this value to you. It's like, "Okay, I got 30 minutes. Let's figure this out." And then during that window, if you build a relationship now, they stick for that. And I think that's a lot of times the way you open the door is through how can I serve you? For me, it's like, I don't have many talents, but funnels is one of them. So I built funnels for a lot of people. And nowadays, those other people aren't get ahold. Well, I don't necessarily build a funnel, but I'm like, "Hey, we want to migrate you over. I got a few amazing people to help you do your thing and build it out." And that way, again, we're serving them, getting it like, "Hey, now your things on ClickFunnel's platform." And then now, relationship is built. So I think that's probably how I look at it from an affiliate standpoint. Daniel: So yeah, just like going all out to serve them and just having that house service, and from there on, you build a reciprocity, and that's how you continue on the relationship. Thank you so much, Russell. Really appreciate you. Russell: No worries. Here’s an example, when Dave was out with somebody, we were at this thing and we'd asked this guy... We knew who it was. He's a friend but not best buddies. And we had ClickFunnels. It was when ClickFunnels first came out. We asked him three or four times, like, "Hey, you want to help us..." And he was just like, "No, no." And then Dave found out that he lives in Australia, he was flying back to Australia, and he wanted this surfboard. So Dave went and bought the surfboard, and then tried to give it to him that will miss the thing. So David had to jump in a car and drive three hours to the airport to get it to him and all this stuff. And then he flew back to Australia, he called me, he's like, "Man, Dave literally bought the thing I was looking for, drove it to me, got it for me in time. Now I have it here." He's like, "I have to roll ClickFunnels now." So Dave was the hook, and I was like, "Oh, you guys serve a level that nobody else does." Like, yes. Okay. Now I'll do the thing. And back, one of our early promoters, way back in the day. So anyway, just, it's always looking for that, like how do you help the people out first? Daniel: Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much, Russell. Appreciate it. Russell: No worries. Thank you. Daniel: God bless. Don: Great question, Daniel. Thanks for being a real life example of what we're supposed to be doing, man. Russell was able to point out three things you did right, right there. That was amazing. All right, Jim, you're next buddy. Mr. Show, go ahead and unmute yourself and ask Russell your question. And try not to get in trouble. Jim: Don't get trouble. That's harsh. Russell: I'm like, "Cut the mic, cut the mic." Jim: Yeah. Russell: "Get him off, get him off." Don: I'm just kidding. Jim and I have had a really great relationship. He's been helping out, and he's going to help me out with something a little bit. Russell: Very good. Jim: Yes. So I focus on live streaming because I'm addicted to it. I think that Twitch is the future and I'm just trying to bring it here a little faster. And to entrepreneurs in particular, and I love the relationships that come from it. I had a game show called Exes Knows game show that formed amazing relationships. But it was very tight-knit, small family kind of a thing. So like, I want to give that to the audience too, and I wanted to know with like you have the Marketing Secrets show, and when you did that YouTube video, like I got giddy. You were like, "You need a show." I was like, "Yeah." But I just want to know if you had any recommendations for how to make it, that personal feel of being on the show, how can I give that to the audience? Russell: Mm. So I know what Twitch is because my kids watch video games on it and stuff. So can you explain so I understand like, are you in Twitch shows like more like, business type stuff? Or how are you… Jim: Yeah. If you go under Just Chatting for Twitch, they have actual shows. And shows like talk shows, interviews, game shows like what I ended up doing. They have round tables and all sorts of things that are not game centric, and the audiences are just loving it. They're adoring it. And they have things like Patreon to where you can take that step closer. They had exclusive content and things. So I was thinking of doing something more like that, but I'm not a big fan of Patreon. I just want to give that to them anyway. Russell: Yeah. It's funny. Again, this is mostly because I don't understand how the whole platform works. We talked about like, "We should do a Twitch show where people are just building funnels all day long, and my kids watch video games, and like..." We talked about it a couple times, so it's interesting. Again, I haven't done it on the platform, so I don't know exactly how it worked, but I think conceptually, the way you build communities is a couple things, right? Number one is like, people have to feel like they're a part of something. So it's not just like a bunch of randos coming to an event. It's like for Funnel Hacking Live, it’s a bunch of funnel hackers come to an event. Like, they're coming, and it's not like they're showing up just randomly. It's like, this is my people. I'm part of this. It's a tribe, it's a community. They're part of it, right? Just like family reunion, you go back and it's like, all my family comes together because we're family. And you can talk forever because it's a family mixed with family. And so we always try to create that, but it comes with people identifying with the thing you're doing, right? Expert Seekers talks a lot about this, but it's like those kind things. How do you get people to self-identify so they feel like they're part of the thing as opposed, I'm going to watch a show. Like I'm part of this, right? When we do ClickFunnel specifically, I was like, if people think it's Russell's company, they're not going to... It might be successful, but it'll stop. I was like, I want people to feel like ClickFunnels is our software. This is our company together. Right? And so you look at my languaging that I talk through things. I'm never like, "My company ClickFunnels." I'm like, "Yeah, it's a community." I'm like, "This is ClickFunnels, we have this community." And I'm trying to make it our company, not my company. Because no one cares if my company succeeds or not, but they care if our company, if our movement, if our culture, if our thing is different. Right? And so it's like, how do we make it we instead of just you? And I think that's one reason we've had so much success inside of our industries, I look at everybody else and everybody else doesn't do that. Everyone else is like, them and about them and about the thing. And it's like, we try to be us and try to make people feel tighter. And then you don't have to necessarily monetize on Patreon or whatever. It could be just swag. Like for example, we had Derral Eves came and spoke at our last Inner Circle meeting and he... Jim: I love Derral Eves. Russell: I don't know if you guys know the Chosen, but they've done $29 million in t-shirt sales on the back of the Chosen. So the content's completely free. Everything's free out there. But because the community and people want it, just in t-shirt sales. Right? And they've done a lot more in other stuff. But if you think about that, it's like, all the content's completely free, but it's the community. And so it's looking at that like how it's going to monetize it. Maybe it's not a paid thing or Patreon or whatever, but what do you have? Is it swag? For me, it's software. My whole goal is to get people into software eventually. Dan Kennedy was all about newsletters, physical newsletters is their thing that they monetize. And so it's just looking at like what monetization vehicle is exciting for you, and then making that the thing that, that you plug people into. It could be anything. It could be, again, software supplements. It could be all of us drink the same drink, supplement drink. Whatever the thing is. But there's this commonality thing that ties everybody together where they have this unique experience. In fact, prove it's a network marketing company I've done a lot of work with in the past. But everyone's drinking Ketones. Literally, the drink that they're drinking is what ties this community together, and they all have Ketone shirts and all these things, but that's the glue that ties all the people together, where they're all doing the same things. For me, it's software; other people, it's supplements; some people, it's new... whatever the thing is that glues the tribe together. Jim: Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. Russell: Sunday, if I remember on Twitch, doing the funnel hacker, funnel building show. I'll have to consult with you. Jim: Check out Just Chatting, man. It's really, really fun. Russell: Yeah. Very cool. Don: Awesome. Thank you so much, Jim. That's a great question. Russell, we have three more hands raised, and I've kind of cut it off and said that we're not going to have any more time. So if we could just take the last few questions, and then we'll wrap things up. Tammy, you're next. Could you please unmute and ask your question? Tammy: Hey Russell. I am so excited to have the opportunity. Thank you very much. And you mentioned something that was kind of a segue as to what I wanted to ask you, had I ever got the opportunity to ask you. And here it is! Tell me a little bit about the Funnel Hacker t-shirt. And the reason I asked is because this is what I do. I help clients make connections with their clients and customers, and love on them and kind of work their way through building these amazing relationships. And I use the Funnel Hacker t-shirt as an example all of the time. It's crazy. I don't even know if you know. Do you know you can't even go on eBay and buy a Funnel Hackers t-shirt. Like, occasionally you could find one, but most generally- Russell: A nasty one somebody had… Tammy: ... you just can't, man. I mean, you just can't find it. And so, it is a coveted item that defines your community. It gives them a jumping off point, not because it has your logo on it. I don't even think that's the brilliant part of this. The reason is because you have, either intentionally or not intentionally, you have connected with the end product of what you're delivering, and people self-identify with that to the point of, they want to be what it is that you offer. And I think people miss that so much in the branding. I see that in my business and things that I do; people want to slap their logo on it. Their first thing's like, let's put a logo on it and it's not about you. Can you speak to that just a little bit? Because got to love it. Russell: 100%. So I remember going to T&C before we launched Funnel Hacking Live. And I remember they gave swag items, and it was weird things. Like, one was a tuxedo and the things... And everybody got home and had them, and I just kind of threw them away and I didn't do anything with it. I remember we were building swag, I definitely didn't do this intentionally, but then after it happened, I realized it, and then we doubled down on that. And so what we realized is that, 100% of what you said. So yes, everything you said has my mark of approval. They have to identify. If they can't say I am a blank, they're not going to connect with it. Right? So I am a funnel hacker. I am a biohacker. I am a lady boss. I am a funnel builder. You can say, "I am a..." And then the word. That's how it is. Because I put it on like, I'm a funnel hacker. This is funnel hacker. But they have to be able to say that, "I am a..." Whatever. Expert Seekers would be a horrible t-shirt. I'm an Expert Seekers. No, I am a ClickFunnels. No, this is not going to work. It's not going to create a movement. Right here, Dan. Right? "I am diehard. I'm a diehard funnel hacker." That's the amplification of it. Right? But you wear that because that's who you are. I am a... Boom. And so that's what self identifies. And wearing a tuxedo thing was weird. I can't remember the one they had. I remember specifically, because Funnel Hacking Live was like a year later or something. And I remember thinking like I want swag that people would wear. And what's crazy now is I get texts probably two or three times a week from friends who are like, "I'm in Malaysia on those little carts." And as I'm driving down the street, there's this dude. They are taking pictures. "This dude in the middle of nowhere is wearing your shirt." And like, I get texts. It's like the craziest thing. Someone the day was like, "I'm in an airport in Singapore," "I'm in Australia," "I'm in New Zea-". All these things, and they're sending these random shirts, yeah I see a bunch of you guys wearing them. And it's just the coolest thing. And it's been spread through. If you notice nowadays, not all of them, sometimes they have different reasons, but almost all of our core shirts that we give away or do things with, always the test for me is like, "Can I say I am a blank?" If we can, sweet. If not... maybe it's something that's like a cool whatever, but it's not like a movement making something that someone wears. And so yes, 100% agree. And that's why we do it. And again, I don't think I did it up front. In fact, I think it was actually Kaelin Poulin. Because we had Funnel Hacker, and she had launched her swag stuff and a bunch of them didn't work. And then the one that just said LadyBoss on it, she came back, and I remember in our Inner Circle meeting, that's what she said. She's like I realize if they can't say I am a whatever, they don't self-identify, she's like, "We may sell it, but for us to sell a lot, it's like the self-identification gives people to actually buy, wear it, all that kind of stuff." So, very cool. Tammy: Thank you. Daniel: Awesome. Great question. Okay, Larry. And then we've got the last two. So Larry, go ahead and unmute and ask your question. Larry: Thank you. Thank you, Russell. For this wonderful speech. I'm really excited, because I started my journey three years ago with your Secrets books, and I have read them dozens of times, and audiobooks also. So I very well know your concepts of Dream 100 and making movements. I just want to, to ask you, I'm starting to make movement. It's a really, really small, really small group of fearless live go-getters. We are fighting the fear of going lives and starting those lives in the business. So what's your recommendation for me? I have finally a month and a half ago started to get some traction. I joined One Comma Club. So how to make that movement. Russell: So your people are going live like on Facebook. Is that what we're talking about? Larry: Yes. Yes. Since inside of the group, we are practicing, and later they are starting using that in their business. Russell: Okay. And then what type of people are you trading? Larry: Entrepreneurs and marketers. Russell: Do they fall in a certain subcategory underneath that? Larry: Yeah. Well, yes, they are people who actually haven't done those lives at all, but can realize very fast the power of it and have to overcome that fear. I'm also introverted, just like you, and I have done 160 lives in a row just to persuade myself. And during that period, I have persuaded so many people, so eventually the moment catch up. Russell: Oh, that's awesome. Well, I'd be looking at it like, if I was you, it'd be like, what do these people identify as, right? You know, McCall did Charisma Hackers. I did Funnel Hackers. What do you people consider themselves? Are they creators? The whole creator economy is a big thing. I'm a creator, I'm a go live creator. Are they doing physical projects? Are they experts? I look at how they would identify themselves. In fact, I don't even ask them. Hey, there's a lot of different people in this group. How would you self-identify yourself? And do a little quiz or survey, and see what the words that they're using. Because I didn't come up with funnel hacker, by the way. It's interesting. I had a webinar called the Funnel Hacks webinar, and we sold a course called Funnel Hacking Secrets or something like that, or Funnel Hacks. Anyway, whatever it was. And it was someone in our forum who posted, "Good morning, funnel hackers! Blah, blah, blah, blah." And I was like, "Oh, that's so cool! They called themselves funnel hackers." And they're like, "Oh!" And then like, "We need to..." And that started the whole thing. It wasn't something I came up with. It was like, they said it, someone said it. I wish I knew who said it, because I'd like give them an award or something. But someone said it in our little Facebook group of maybe 2000 or 3000 people at the time. And I was just like, "That's the coolest..." I remember like literally calling Dylan and Todd. And I was like, "It is the coolest thing. Someone just calls themselves a funnel hacker." Like, ah! So I would maybe ask your people and like, how would you identify yourself? Like, what are you? What would you call yourself? You can tell them, "We're building a tribe here. What should we call ourselves? We need a cool name." And see what the people in the group, kind of what they come up with as well. Larry: We are fearless live goal getters, but they like that name, but maybe I should reiterate it. Russell: Yeah. So there are fierce side go-getters so like with people who build funnels, so are we go-getters? Are we livers? Are we... Something. Something. Larry: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Russell: So very cool. Congrats, man. That's awesome. The Two Comma Club's the hardest. By the way, for who does is that after you get past the Two Comma Club, at least for me, there's a mental block for three years to break. Then after I got it, the rest of business got really. That's like the hardest one, is that first two Comma Clubs. One Comma Club is huge. Anyway, you get it. That's awesome. Larry: Thank you. Thank you. You're fantastic. Don: Love it. Awesome. Okay. So we have Michael Vale. Michael, you're not on camera, but I'm sure you're there. Yep. Michael: Yeah, I'm here. I'm actually hiding at work, so I can't put the camera on. Don: Understand. Michael: Yeah. That's a little different question for you, Russell. I love the way that you include your family, and I got to meet your two kids and your wife at Funnel Hacking Live. You'll have. And I know you're trying to get your boy cut up to be a little bit, but how does this play into the relationship world? Kind of an odd question, but... Russell: Say it again. So how does having my- Michael: Well, I'm just one of your hacker hire, but to see that and to see you share your faith, bring, for me, validity. It makes you aesthetic as a person. And how does that build relationships out in the community? , Russell: So, I think Myron Golden said, he said, "You don't attract who you want, you attract who you are." And so initially, I would try to get whoever into my world and I would kind of hide who I was more so, and I got people who I actually didn't like very much. If you've read the intro to Dotcom Secrets, I talk about how one day I woke up and I hated all my customers because I wasn't being like... And I hate the cliche. Like, "You need to be more authentic!" I was like, all right, well, I'm going to start sharing everything in my life. And I remember I started talking about my wrestling, I started talking about my kids back then. We just had our twins. I told that story, and I started with my wife. And it was crazy because I talked about these things, people who liked me started coming into my world. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I actually like these people that I'm serving now," because we attract who we like. And there's people who… you know, it was years before I was willing to talk about God and my beliefs there, because I was like scared, like, "Ah!" And I started doing it and it was crazy, because one of two things happening. They didn't believe in God and they're like, "I don't care. Russell's cool for this." Or that you like, "Oh, I'm offended because you talked about that," and left. And I was like, "Sweet. That's great that they're gone." You know what I mean? And it's just interesting because the more I've done it, the more the people who we attract, I like them more and it's are exciting. And so I think it's just... I don't know. And I get a question a lot like, well, "Are you scared showing your kids on Instagram? Are you scared?" And yes, it's scary. At the same time, this is the world we live in today. You know what I mean? There comes a point where you've got to trade your kids, you got to do stuff, you got to pray that things are going to be safe and then hope for the best. And you know what I mean? And so, I don't know. It's being willing to share those things that are scary. And I'm not vulnerable at the point where I'm sharing everything about my life, but I definitely introduce people so they know who I am and where I stand and my values. Because at the end of day, I want more of those people around me. And there's people who come into our world who don't have my values, but a lot of times we transition, right? They come in because I make money, make money. And then they keep coming, then we talk about this and eventually like, "Huh." You start thinking about things differently. And so it's just being willing and open to share those kind of things. And if you do it, then it'll attract the right people. So yeah, I think for everybody just be being okay with that. Don's a great example of this, right? Don, I've seen a transformation in him over the last year and I love him. I love him however he wants to be. I don't care. And I respect him. He's a great friend, so it doesn't matter to me. And it's the same thing. Right? And some people, I'm sure you've lost friends, I'm sure you've gained friends. And it's like, who cares? Are long as the people I want are going to be around me and that's amazing. And the people who are not okay with that, they're gone and that's amazing too. It makes life so much better. I think it's like, all us should be who we want to be, and I think it's awesome. Michael: Thank you, Russell. Thank you. Russell: Hey, can we actually... I see Luke over here. Can we do one more question? Because I'm curious… Don: Don't worry. Don't worry. He's here. I just very quickly, I just want to say thank you, Russell, for that, by the way. It's my turn to cry. I made it through three days without crying, which is not easy for me. Losing people in my life like you was my biggest fear. Not because of who you are, because of the stories I told myself. So thank you for letting me love unapologetically and love myself unconditionally. I appreciate it. Russell: No worries, man. Don: Hey, Luke. So what you don't know about Luke yet, maybe, Russell, is Luke is 12, just turned 13, spoke on this symposium as one of the 35 amazing speakers, and did it on his birthday. And he courageously has raised his hand to ask the Russell Brunson a question. Luke, let's go, buddy. Luke: Hey Russell, I'm a super big fan. I have Dotcom Secrets. It's completely stained and everything because I've carried it everywhere around with me. And my brother he created- Russell: My kids don't think I'm cool, so if you could let him know, that'd be awesome. Luke: My brother, he's a huge fan. He created his own landing page, promoting your book at the age of seven. And so he loves you too. My question for you is how do you get credibility at a young age in an adult world? Russell: Ooh, that's that's a great question. So, I would say first off you're doing it. Like the bigger thing is in people's minds, and I'm the same way. We ought to set our our minds, like, "I can't be successful because of blah." Right. "Because I'm too young, I'm too old, I've got..." Everyone's got an excuse of why they can't do it, but what's crazy is like, when I got started, as I started doing stuff, people were like, "Oh my gosh, you're so young. This is cool." Right? And then you seem a little bit older. I think more of it's a mental thing. The fact you are here, there's a whole bunch of speakers on here, and I kept seeing your face. And I was like, "I want to talk to that guy. I want to talk to that guy the most. Like everyone else, oh, they're all boring adults. They're like, blah. Who cares?" I want to talk to you, that's why I called you at the end. So I think it's actually like a superpower. Like, usually the things that we are afraid of or we think are going to be are limiting things, end up becoming our superpowers. Right? And I think it's just leaning into it and being okay with it. Because most of that is just in our head, thinking like, I can't do it because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can't do it. Everyone's got excuse. I'm still to this day have tons of excuses. Like, I can't do it because I talk too fast or I'm not as cool as somebody else, or blah, blah, blah. We all have these same things. I think it's just understanding that that's actually a superpower. The fact that you're young and you're having success and you're doing these things is going to attract more people to you. More people are going to want to have you speaking at their events. And no lens. I don't know if you know Noah yet, but he was, I think, I think he was 11 or 12 when he somehow figured out my Voxer ID, hacked into my Voxer ID, and started messaging me. Anyway, I was just like, there's this young kid messaging me and... and I don't know. I wasn't scared. So if I started, do I respond back or not? Because it's a weird conversation and then I just showed you the message. It was so funny because he's like, "Hey Russell, I found an error on your funnel. Here's the fix, send it to your tech guy," and sent it to me. I was like, "What?" An 11 year old kid like found an error on my thing and then sent it to me. Right? And then the next day he's like, "Hey Russell, you talked about this thing. So I built an entire funnel that you could use to give your audience just as a gift. Here's the share funnel link if you want to use it. If not, that's totally cool as well." And then something else, he's like, "Hey, I took your sales page. I think I got a better hook so I rebuilt it. Feel free to A-B split test." And he kept sending me these things and eventually like, "Who are you?" And we started talking, and he's a young kid, same kind of thing. And then his story was so cool. I introduced a bunch of people and he introduced himself, and he spoke at one of our events and just all these doors got open because he was young. Right? If would've been a 35 year old dude, I just would have blocked everything because he was young, I was curious and it opened up all these things. And so I would just lean into it and realize that what you have as youth is a superpower. It's not a negative thing at all, and people are going to see you and just be blown away by what you're doing, and just keep doing it. And anyway, so hope that helps. Luke: Yeah, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Russell. Russell: No worries. Thank you. Don: So Luke, I don't know if you know, but Russell has this really awesome event. I know personally that he said a number of times that behind Funnel Hacking Live. It's his favorite, if not a dead heat for his favorite, it's called unlock the secrets. And it's a family driven event and we were able to go to the one that happened in I think Denver in 2019, but is there a rumor that you're going to do another one, Russell? Russell: We do have one coming up. So Luke, if you want a message my team we'll invite you and your family. You guys can come to it. It's awesome. It's going to be in Arizona. Where are you from? Luke: I'm in Canada. Russell: In Canada. Okay. Well, if you can break out of Canada, it's in Arizona, I think in June of this year. So message Chris or someone. He can connect you with that with my assistant, and we'll give you your family tickets if you guys want to come to it. Yeah. It's a family event. Luke: I would love that. Russell: Last time we did it, I think we had 300 or 400 like teenagers there and it was like the coolest experience ever. This year's going to be even cooler, so. Don: Russell, do you have time for me to tell one quick anecdote before we do something for Chris? Russell: Yeah. Don: The anecdote is about Unlock the Secrets, and number one, I'm a huge for family person, so I love the fact that during that event, you light up in a different way. And taking pictures of you, you make different faces, you act a little differently just because you're nurturing what you love about life in children, and it's so fun to watch. Two things. I watched a person, a young man, sitting at the corner of one of the edge of the roads, and he was furiously typing and doing stuff. And I kind of looked at his mom and she goes, yeah, and she kind of did this thing. And I was like, what? And she goes, "He's building another funnel." And I'm like, "Oh, another funnel?" And I was like... And I have a picture. He turned it around and he had his ClickFunnels page open and he scrolled it for me. He had dozens and dozens and dozens of that. This like 11 year old had designed himself. And then Noah, my interaction with him was when I was photographing him on stage, you allowed people to ask some questions at the panel. And they said, "Hey, I'm just curious. What do you charge to build a funnel?" You remember this? Russell: This is the best ever! Don: You want to tell everybody? Russell: Yeah. He's like, "Actually, I don't charge people for funnels anymore. I only trade for equity." Don: Uh-huh (affirmative). He's like, "I don't charge hourly. I only do it for equity." And I was literally like, "This kid is my idol now." He's not even in high school, and he doesn't do it for hourly wage. He only does it for equity. So, Luke, if I have the honor and pleasure of seeing you at Unlock the Secrets, I can't wait to see your funnel, and you can tell me that you want equity in my company to help me with something. Luke: I'm super excited. Don: Appreciate you, Luke. Russell: I love my… My kids actually told me this morning, I was driving to school. And Ellie's like, "Dad, you're the least mature adult that we know." Or something like that. And I'm like, "Thank you. That's amazing." Don: It's the Peter Pan quote, right? We have to get older, but we never have to grow up. That's all there is to it. Russell: Yes, exactly. Don: Hey Christopher, as we wrap up, I'm sure you're going to have words for Russell. I'm going to have a few myself, but I need to find you in my list. There you are. Russell: He passed out, he’s tired. Let's give him a break. Don: He is. He's probably sleeping. Hey buddy, how you doing? Christopher: Doing good. Don: Blown away. Blown away. Christopher, do me a favor. I'm sure Russell has very busy and important things to do. He's graced us with 90 minutes of his time. Now that we were able to surprise you with this, thank Russell for his time and thank you. What do you have to say to Russell before he goes and we wrap things up? Christopher: Thank you. Thanks for being here, and this is a dream come true. This is not the last symposium for Return on Relationship. I call this a movement, not just an event. And it just means the world to me, Russell, to have your support, and to have everyone's support. Everyone that came out to speak, and all of you that came out to attend. I want people to think differently about how they build relationships. I think this is something that's a need and I can't wait for all of you to go away from here and take everything that you've learned and apply it and change your lives. And Russell, you mentioned it when you told the story about Dave, what great news that we got about Dave. He's an incredible individual. I look up to him about as much as I look up to you, and I already thank you publicly, but yeah, relationships saved my life. I'm here putting on this symposium because I met you, and I never would've met Wallace Nelson if it wasn't for meeting you, and relationships to the foundation, for everything in your life; and just thank you, Russell, for being here and supporting me in my first symposium. It means the world to me. Thank you. And all of you, thank you. Russell: No worries, man. I'm proud of you for doing it. It takes a lot to put something like this together and to have the vision and everything. So, proud of you man, for doing it. And it's just the beginning, not the end. This is the beginning of, I think, your business, your movement and everything. So, proud of you and love you, man. Christopher: Love you too. Thank you. Don: Everybody wave at Russell. Thank Russell. Russell, thank you, man, for being here. We appreciate you so much. We'll see you again soon. Russell: Thanks everyone! Christopher: Thanks Russell! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In part 2 of this special 3 part series, you get to hear more of Russell’s presentation at the ROR (Return on Relationships) Symposium! In this half, Russell explains how you should provide value to people before you ask them for anything. Enjoy the second half of this keynote presentation, and don’t forget to check out RORUniversity.com to learn more! Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: Hey, what's up everybody? This is Russell. Welcome back to the Marketing Seekers Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the last episode for my keynote presentation at Christopher Vos' ROR Symposium. So far, in the episode number one, I had a chance to talk us through some of the history and the background of how we started building our business and I'm excited this next episode's going to be the second half of my keynote presentation. I hope you enjoy. And then afterwards, the third episode, we're actually going to, I opened up some Q & A and we had a really good time doing some of that as well. That'll be the third episode, so this episode would be the last half of my keynote presentation. I hope you enjoy it. Again, if you want to go deeper with Christopher Vos, make sure you go to roruniversity.com and get on his list, read his stuff, listen to what he is doing because he is helping a lot of people to build businesses by using relationships and really understanding how to do the stuff we talk about. I talked about Dream 100 in the Traffic Secrets book. This is what he's talking at a much deeper, much more powerful level. With that said, I'm going to cue up the theme song and when we come back, you'll have a chance to listen to second half of my keynote from the ROR Symposium. Okay. Now, I'll tell a side story because it popped in my head right now and that's what I do, right? About the time, it was after Joe Vitale promoted me, I had a list with certain sites and then I got a phone call from a guy named Tellman Knudson. Anybody here know who Tellman is? Tellman used to be big at our space. He shifted it over to more hypnosis, personal development space. But Tellman messaged me on the phone. He was like, "Hey, Russell, I had this idea. I'm building or I'm interviewing all these people and," I can't remember, "I'm going to interview you for an hour about a topic and then I'm going to put it behind the squeeze page and then everyone's going to promote the squeeze page. People are going to join my list, they'll get your interview and all the other interviews." And I was like, Uh, okay, I think that's the worst idea ever." He's like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "I'm not going to email my list to your squeeze page so they can opt in and join your list to get my free interview. I'll just give them my free interview. Why would I do that? It does it make any logical sense." He's like, "Well, everyone's going to promote it and that way, everybody, everybody's lists, people from other lists will see you as well and it's going to be the huge thing for you." I was like, "Dude, that's the stupidest idea ever. No. No." I told him no, flat out, I was like, "This is never going to work, but good luck in your future," and I hung up, right? I was nice because on my DISC profile, I'm a high S, so I can't be mean to people. So I was like, "Okay, well, sorry." Anyway, so that happens and then fast forward three months later, all of a sudden, in one day, I get emails from everybody, Joe Vitale, the Nitro Marketing guys, all the people who are the biggest of the time, emails from everybody and I open up and it's like, "There's this guy named Tellman Knutson, the interview is on his ListBuilder and you should go check it out." And I clicked on it and went to, it was called listcrusade.com, it was his site, I went to listcrusade.com and sure enough, there's an opt-in to get all these interviews and I opted in and there's all these people's interviews. I was like, "What? How do you pull it off? You got the biggest names in the world to go and do this." And I was just perplexed, like how? I'm like, "This is the dumbest idea ever. I should have done it. If it worked, this is crazy. So I found his number, I messaged him, "Okay, tell me, I'm so confused. Can I ask you a question?" So he jumped on a call with me and I was like, "Okay. I just saw yesterday 50 people all promoted your squeeze page." He's like, "Yeah, I've added 120,000, 130,000 people to my list and the last 48 hours." And I was like, "How did you do that?" And it was so fascinating. He said, "You know what, Russell? I called 49 people and I got 49 nos in a row. First one said no, no, no, no, no. You said no. Someone said, everyone said no." And he's like, "But guess what? The 50th person," he said it was Kevin and Matt from Nitro. He said, "I called Kevin and Matt and for some reason, they said yes. And after they said yes, I was like, "Cool, do you know else would be a good fit?" And then Kevin and Matt were like, "Oh, yeah, you should get so and so and so," and then they emailed the Nitro like, "Hey, you should meet so and so and so and so," they jumped over there. Those people said yes as well." And he's like, "The next 37 people in the row all said yes." Oh, he even had Jay Abraham on the list. Anyway, he said, "The next 37 people all said yes and here we are." And I was like, "Oh, my gosh, how many of us, including me, would've stopped at the first no or the second or the third? But as soon as he got one cool kid to think he was cool, he was in. Okay? So you start thinking about this, actually, this is probably more for the women. This is embarrassing, I'm going to say this. How many you guys ever seen the movie Never Been Kissed? Drew Barrymore. Okay. Macaulay, can you act this out while I explain? Just kidding. Okay. Here's the story from Never Been Kissed. Drew Barrymore, in the movie, she's never been kissed, she graduates high school and now she's a columnist at a newspaper. She's a big columnist and her brother was the cool kid. He was the jock and the coolest kid and he graduated now he's this loser because he's graduated from high school. Anyway, she's in her day job as a columnist and they're like, "We want article from what are the high school kids doing so we need you to go undercover back to high school and find out about the cool parties and all the cool stuff." So Josie, drew Barrymore's, character goes back to high school and within five seconds, she slides back into the nerd group which they're doing chess club and all these kind of things and she's writing articles about chess club and her editor's like, "No, we don't want these articles. I want the cool kids, the drugs and all this stuff, what's happening. We want the underground dirt, that's the article we're looking for." So she tries to get in and she's like, no one will, the cool kids club will not let her in. So she's home and she's frustrated and then her brother's there and her brother's played by David Arquette and so David Arquette is jealous. He's like, "I want to go back to high school, I was the coolest kid in high school." And, and Josie's like, "There's no way, you don't understand, it's harder, it's not the same thing. If you went back to school, you wouldn't be cool." And it gives the idea for him. He's like, "No, I'm going back to school." So he somehow, and Tammy says it isn't on Netflix, I'm sure it's on Netflix. Anyway, this is your homework. Everyone go watch it. So Drew Barrymore or David Arquette's character goes back and gets in high high school somehow and she sees him in the hallway, she's like, "You can't do this. It's not going to be like, you're not going to be cool like you were before." He's like, "Watch this." So he goes into the lunch room, this is the greatest scene of all film. He's in the lunch room, he's standing up on the table and he's got this huge bucket of cole slaw and he's trying to eat the entire thing, shove it in his mouth and the whole high school's cheering him on like, "Oh," and he's eating the stuff he slams the thing down. He's like, "Oh," and that fast, he's the coolest kid in high school, everybody loves him and he's the man. And then, the next day, he's like, "Okay, I'm going to show you, Josie. I'm going to make you cool." So he goes with Josie, his sister and one of the cool kids sees him and he's like, "Oh, why are you hanging out with her?" And he's like," "Her? She's the coolest girl. She actually broke up with me, she's so cool." All this stuff. And he starts talking about how cool she is and all of a sudden, everyone's like, "Oh," and then all of a sudden the cool kids are like, "Oh, she's cool." And all of a sudden, boom, she gets sucked in. And then one cool kid thinks she's cool, the next, the next and eventually, that fast, she's cool. Okay? That was a very long story to tell you that the secret is, as soon as one kid thinks you're cool, as soon as one cool kid thinks you're cool, you're in. So Tellman Knudson, same thing. He was going back here. No, no, no, no, and he got one cool kid, Kevin and Matt from Nitro who thought he was cool and then opened up everything else. So if you guys are on this ROR thing again, a couple things that I was hoping to get through to you guys, number one is, we're shooting for the stars, that'd be amazing, but don't start there because it's going to be really hard to get in. Build your thing. Find people who are around you who are doing the same, in the same business, same industry and start building from there and start growing. As you do that, it's going to start opening more doors for you. Someone's going to introduce you to somebody else, someone else is going to introduce you and you start building this network of people and you start doing it collectively. If you do it collectively, all, what's the saying? High tide rises all boats. So it starts getting bigger and bigger and bigger and eventually, it gets easier to open the next door and the next door. And eventually, what happens is, I had this group of people, Mike Filsaime and Gary Ambrose, Brad Callen and Brad Fallon, all these people, all my friends at the time, Frank Kern, all of us who are this level and eventually, at that point, we're at the level of all these other people. But guess what? There's always a next level. And there was this guy that, oh, I looked up at this guy, crazy. He's a giant, he's got big old teeth. Anyone guess who it is? It's Tony Robbins. And Tony's the next level up here. And Tony's up there and we're all down here. And one day, somehow, one of my cool kid friends got into Tony. I don't know how or who it was or anything, but somehow, one of them got into Tony. He had a meeting with Tony and blew Tony's mind and then my friend, I actually I know, it was Mike Koenigs. Mike Koenigs got into Tony somehow, blew his mind and then, so one cool guy, cool with Tony. And then Mike Koenigs introduced him to me like, "Hey, you should meet Russell." He's so and so, and suddenly Tony, I get a, and this is the craziest experience ever, Saturday morning with my kids getting ready and the phone rings, I pick it up and it's Tony Robbins' assistant. "Hey, Tony Robbins wants to see if you can meet him today?" I'm like, "Okay, who is this?" I thought it was my friends messing with me and they're like, "No, my name's Jay Garrity, I'm Tony Robbins assistant. He's in Salt Lake City, he wants to meet with you." I'm like, "I live in Boise." They're like, "Yeah, well, he knows who you are and he meet with you. Can you get to Salt Lake?" And I'm like, "Well, it's a five hour drive. I can jump in my car." He's like, "Oh, we're flying out in three hours." He's like, "How about next week? Can you meet Tony in Toronto? He's your UPW, you can show up, go to the event, walk on fire and then he'll have a private meeting with you." I was like, "What's your name again? Is this a real person?" I'm like, "Heck yes, I'll be in Toronto next week." So the next week, I'm flying to Toronto. Again, I've never been to a Tony Robbins event so I show up with my backpack, my computer, I'm going to sit back and take notes like the internet nerd that I am. And I walk in and people are jumping and screaming and we're sitting there dancing and rubbing people shoulders and I'm so confused what's even happening. And then, we walk on fire and the first time I met Tony actually was the fire walk. He had me in a VIP section, so imagine there's 2000 people in the event and then right next to the stage, he has these two VIP sections and I actually stood next to Chuck Liddell. I didn't know who Chuck Liddell was at the time, I'm like, "That guy looks scary," big old mustache and big old muscles and I was like, but he was there. Anyway, I saw him when he went to UFC and I'm like, "That was my partner at UPW, I know everything was messed up in his life. This is so weird." Anyway. He's probably offended I had no idea who actually was. Anyway, we're in this little group so we could have a chance, to go back, the first time I met Tony is, after everyone leaves the fire walk, we walked through the front thing and they opened the curtain and Tony's standing there and he was like, "Russell, I heard so much about you," he gives me this huge hug and then we walk with him and I did the fire walk with Tony and that's my first impression. But check it out, it wasn't because I emailed Tony and tried to get to know him. I probably emailed him a lot and it never made it to the gatekeepers. But it was because one cool kid got in there and told him I was cool. And after that, it was open. Doors were open. So this is in, in my mind, this is the stuff I want you guys thinking through. Sometimes, with Dream 100, we're going to turn the relationship, we're going to give a list and we're going to send it to mailboxes and that's going to be how we grow our company. There's a place and a time for that, but that's not how it really works. It's this organic thing where it's building actual relationships, getting to know people, finding out about them and their families and how can I serve them and back here, when we're all at this level, it's like me trying to help them like, "Oh, I tried this in my business and it worked. You should try that." We're having these back and forth and it builds these relationships. And then, together, we all collectively rise up to the next level and the next level and the next level to eventually, we are the top level and that's when it gets more and more fun. So that's what I was hoping to really share with you guys, especially because I think, for some of you guys, as I'm sure for many, you look at someone who, like me, who's been doing this now for 20 years, oh, it's easy for us. Anyone will take this call. Yeah, but it's 20 years I've been playing this game. 20 years I've been putting the coins in the deposit box over and over and over and over and over again. When I found out who Dan Kennedy was, I'm like, "Okay, I want to get to know that person, but I don't know how to get there and it was like, well, there's two ways I can get into Dan Kennedy's world. I can work my way in or I can buy my way in. I'm like, working my way could take a decade or two, so I'm going to buy my way in. So I was like, "Okay, I've joined the mastermind group, I'm getting in there." And then I didn't go. I have people, oh, people that joined my mastermind group this last time around, amazing group, but there's different, everyone's got a different mindset and I have people coming in initially and they're like, "Russell, this is so cool. Can I make a testimony with my video? Hey, can I get a picture?" And they were trying to take, take, take, take, I'm like, "Ah." When I went to Dan Kennedy's group, guess what I didn't do? I didn't take from Dan. First off, because I'm scared of him. Number two, I was like, all right, I'm going to serve these guys because I want Dan to know who my name is. I don't want me to message Dan, I want people telling Dan who I am. If I can do that, that's the secret. So I'm in Bill Grazer's group, I'm serving the group, I'm trying to help as much as possible. I'm helping these offline people in this group to launch online businesses. I'm helping them get funnels. I'm helping them do the launch, I'm doing coordination. All this stuff to serve Bill Grazer's group. And Bill's like, "Oh, my gosh, Russell's really helpful." And he tells Dan, "Dude, this guy in our group, he loves you, he loves everything, he's helping our group." And I always wanted to speak at Dan's event, but I'm like, I'm not going to ask him because I don't want to do it, but I'm just going to keep serving and eventually, he's going to have to, because I do so much stuff for so many people, they're going to want to put me on stage. So I get in that group and I'm serving like crazy. In fact, after, I think it was three years in, I wanted to, anyway, I had to fly to Baltimore three times a year and it's not just flying to Baltimore, Bill was in Baltimore. You'd fly to Baltimore and then you'd drive in a taxi for an hour to get to the hotel that Bill would have it at, and after three years I was like, "I can't do this anymore." So literally, I messaged Bill, I'm like, "Hey, I'm not going to re-up this next year because I just can't keep coming to Baltimore." And he literally was like, "This is the deal, Russell, you have to be in the room so you're not going to have to pay anymore, but you're still coming." I was like, "Okay." And for the next three years, I didn't pay but I kept showing up because I provided so much value, he's like, "You have to be in this room because you're facilitating all these things." And then he had me on stage, had me on stage again and then eventually, I remember the last event I spoke at, I spoke on stage four times. I was on stage longer than Dan Kennedy was. Do you think Dan Kennedy knew my name? Yes, he did. He was like, "There's this internet nerd who keeps showing up and helping everybody, he's never asked for anything. We should get to know him," and that's how I built a relationship with Dan and then with Bill and with all these kind of things. And now, fast forward a couple years later, the opportunity to buy Dan's company's there and I'm like, what if he hates me? Because he's not going to approve ... And I literally, I faxed him because you can't email Dan, he has no email, you have to fax him. So I had to open an eFax account, write it on a piece of paper, send it, it's this whole thing. So I faxed him, I was like, "Hey, there's an opportunity to buy your company, but I just want to make sure that you don't hate me or I'm not ... We're going to be working together so I want to make sure this is going to be a good fit." And he faxes me back, he was like, "Dude, every time I've heard about you, it's you on stage talking about how good I am, you always praise my name, all these kind of things. Of course, I would love to work with you," because he knew who I was. I had been trying to serve him for all this time and I'd never asked him for something so because of that, he said yes. And now we're have this partnership and we're 30 days away from watching the new magnetic marketing and you guys are going to die when you see this, it's the most exciting thing ever, but it all came off of that, building these relationships over the long term. If you guys haven't, on YouTube, there's a video, if you type in "Russell Brunson Tony Robbins Dream 100," there's a video documenting my Dream 100 process with Tony, which was over a decade and a half to do this thing, the very first time he actually promoted me. But it wasn't me coming in like, "Tony promote, Tony, promote." If I would've done that, I would've had one meeting with Tony and that would've been the last. It was a decade of me just, every meeting with Tony, "How can I help? How can I help?" People from this company would call like, "Hey, can you consult us on this thing?" I'm like, "Yes." "How much does it cost?" I'm like, "For Tony, it's free." "I'm sure your time’s valuable, we’re willing to pay you." "No, tell Tony, your money's no good with Russell," because I wanted the relationship. And fast forward now, I'm going to get emotional. Oh. This isn't a story that we've publicly told, but you guys know Funnel Hacking Live, Dave had his cancer, if you know the real story, it's literally the worst kind of cancer you have, they give them like a 6% survival rate past eight months, 10 months, something like that. So we were so scared and after Funnel Hacking Live, after Tony off stage, went backstage with him and Tony was like, "How can I serve? What else, what can I do for you guys?" And Todd had the impression, "Hey Tony, this is our friend and partner Dave. He's dying. Is there anything you can do?" And Tony says, "Yes, these are the people. Call this person, call this person. In fact, I'll connect you. Here's the people." Two weeks later, Dave's flying to Dallas, he's with this doctor who does things the opposite of what every other cancer doctor does, Dave spends two weeks down there with him. I won't get too deep into the details, but discovers there's a root canal that causes the tumor, pulls his tooth out, throws the oxygen in there, oxygens his body, does a bunch of things. Two days later, Dave goes back for his MRI where they're supposed to tell him how long he's got left so he can plan with his family. They do an MRI, the doctor looks inside and says, "There's not a bit of cancer inside you. What did you do the last two weeks?" And because of my relationship with Tony, I had access to this guy who saved Dave's life. And Dave's going to be here for the next 20, 30 years because I was willing to put in, for a decade and a half, this relationship with Tony and Tony had a relationship with these other guys and man ... So is it worth it? Yes. Is it worth financially? Yes. Is it worth it from so many more things? Yes. It is. So I'm forever grateful that I didn't ask Tony to promote my thing on day one. I'm forever grateful that I didn't try to figure out what I could take. I'm forever grateful that when they asked for help, I just gave it because I love Tony and because that opened all these doors where, yeah, so whew, not planning going there, but that's the power of this stuff. So when Christopher's talking about this, I'm sure he is told his story. He had a very similar situation where, because of the relationship, his life was saved. So you never know, it's coming into these things not looking for something, but coming in as a servant. And as you have that servant feeling and you're going into it, it's amazing what doors open and you never know what door you're going to need or when you're going to need it or what the thing is or what the, you know what I mean? It's crazy. Whew. I don't know how I wrap that up or how to- Don Mamone: Do you need a minute? Do you need a minute? I mean, I'm going to step in and just say, take a drip of water. That's probably one of the most amazing stories and I have to say that you, unknowingly maybe, and the reason you needed to tell that story was because we had an ongoing over-under bet on how long it takes a speaker to cry on Christopher's stage because so many people have come up and told stories from the depths of their heart and soul. So, hey, I want to thank you for joining those of us that have joined Christopher's stage in which you have an over-under on telling an emotional story, so thanks for that, Russell. Russell: No worries. You set a environment where it was there. Anyway. Yeah, I hope that this was helpful for you guys. Again, I was like, I could go and give you guys the foundation and step one and step two and step three, stuff we talked about here, but I was like, I don't want to do that. I want to be real as possible because it's real in so many aspects of your life. And now's the time, wherever you are, is to start planting those seeds and starting looking at who can you serve, who can you serve and the more you do that, the more doors open and the more things. And it's okay eventually because I think sometimes, people are scared to ask and I would tease Christopher about this. He's been building a relationship with me for now, I don't even know, three or four years and we used to have a joke inside of the office, "What's he going to ask?" Somebody's going to ask something. "I don't know. Maybe he's just going to keep serving and serving and never ask." And then when he finally is like, "Hey, I'm doing this thing, would you be willing?" "Finally, thank you for asking." Because we know, there's always, all of us, when I was dating my wife, I was asking her on a date and she knows my intentions. If I already came date number one, "Hey, can we get a picture just in case if we get married, we'll have the ... " Whatever. If I'd done these weird things along the way, it wouldn't have worked, but like everyone knows, we're in business, we're in things like that, we know what the goal is, but we're trying to feel people out to see if they're genuine or not. It's interesting. I heard Adam Sandler talk about it one time and he was like, "I don't have very many friends." He said the reason why is because, he's like, "Earlier in my career, as I started having more success, everyone wanted be my friend. I realized really quickly they didn't want to be my friend, they wanted something from me." And the higher tier you get, you'll find out that happens. For me, I don't have a whole bunch of friends because I don't know who my friends are a lot of times. It's interesting because there was a time in my life where I thought everyone who was coming was my friend and I started giving people jobs and some of you have heard the story, I built a huge company of over a hundred people and I thought they were my friends and were here because of the mission, because of the vision. And when we had a hiccup and things kind of crashed, they all went away. And it was interesting because thought that they were coming for that. I can't remember exactly where I was trying to go with this train of thought, but ... Oh, yeah. At the higher levels, just Understand that their guards are up because they've been burned in the past and it's like, who's true friends? And if you show up as a true friend where you're giving, you're serving, they know you want to do something with them eventually anyway, that's in the back of their mind, but they're testing, is this person the person who's coming because they're trying to get something from me or someone who genuinely wants to be a friend or genuinely wants to help, genuinely wants to do something? So it's just consistently showing up for a long time and maybe it's not as fast to turning on a Facebook ad, but for the long term stability, what you're trying to do, it's the best thing. Anyway, I hope that helps. I hope that gave somebody something today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this special 3 part series, you get to hear Russell’s presentation at the ROR (Return on Relationships) Symposium! Russell discusses the importance of what he calls the “Dream 100”, and how it helps create relationships that support both his business and his personal life. Check out RORUniversity.com to learn more! Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: Hey. What's going on, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Want to welcome you back to The Marking Secrets podcast. I got something special for you guys over the next three episodes. I'm actually on vacation right now, Thanksgiving vacation. My wife and my kids and I are all in Kauai, Hawaii. You might hear them giggling in the background depending on how well this microphone picks up noise. And so, I didn't have a chance to record a podcast for the next couple episodes, but before I left on vacation, I actually had a chance to be part of a really cool summit that my friend, Christopher Voss put on called The ROR Symposium. And he had me as one of his keynote speakers, and he had me talk about just my history, my journey, using relationships, and joint ventures, and things like that. The Dream 100, as I call it, to build my business and everything we've done over the last almost 20 years now. And so, it was a really special presentation. It was one that I came to with notes, but not PowerPoint slides and things like that. It was more, I just wanted to kind of share from my heart. And if you know Christopher Voss you know he's a very emotional person and he brings that emotion. And apparently, I found out afterwards, all the speakers end up crying. In fact, I did as well during my presentation. So, there's something really special in the middle that you'll find out about. But anyway, I hope you really enjoy these. They're going to help you to learn how to build joint ventures, how to find your Dream 100, how to build better relationships with people, and how to turn that into more business and help you to get your mission out there to change more people's lives. If you don't know who Christopher Voss is, I recommend following him. He told me that the best site to send you guys to... I said, "Where should I send people to listen who want to go deeper with you and learn more about relationships and how to build businesses using them?" And he said theroruniversity.com would be the best place for you guys to go. So, if you want to go deeper with Chris, go to roruniversity.com, check out what he's got there. And with that said, I'm going to cue the theme song. When we come back, you have a chance to hear the first part of my keynote presentation. As I was kind of thinking through this, I was like, "Man, there's 30-something speakers coming. Everyone's talking about different ways to do this ROR, return on relationship game. And everyone's got different ideas and things, and it got me to back, man, almost 19, 20 years ago now. And so I... If you guys are cool with it, I just want to do some story time and tell you guys my story and some of the things along the journey that I tried, that I... failures, the successes, specifically inside of this relationship, and joint venture partners, and things like that. And hopefully, it'll give you guys some comfort. Because everyone starting different points and sometimes you look at someone like me like, "Oh, well, Russell knows Tony Robbins, and Dan Kennedy," and da, da, da. But there was a day, 18, 19, 20 years ago where I was a little kid scared out of my mind awkwardly trying to message people pre-Facebook. So, I'm sending emails and trying to... and it was scary, and hard, and so hopefully, it'll give you some faith in wherever you are in your journey. Just like, "Okay, this is right. It's going to be good." It's going to be for some of us, especially the introverts like me, this is going to be something that kind of stretches you and feels uncomfortable sometimes, but then it can become something you really love and enjoy and gives you the ability to change the world at a level you never thought was possible. So, that's kind of my game plan. Then after that, we can open for some Q&A and... or whatever we want to do. Or we can celebrate, have a party, or we can sing Christopher's song and let him have a nap. Hey, whatever we want to do, it'll be fun. So, looking back, it's funny, because when I got started in this business, I was still in college. So, I had just met my beautiful wife, Colette, who I think we're celebrating our... I think it's our 20th anniversary this summer, which is crazy. So, she's stuck around my chaos for this long and she's... Gosh, she's the best. But we had just gotten married and I was trying to figure out how to support her. I was wrestling and I didn't want to quit wrestling, so I'm like, "How do I wrestle and do all these things at once?" And so, I did what most people do and I went to Google and typed in how to make money. Right? Which, who here has done that at one point in your career? And you go on this rabbit trail, right? Of like, "Whoa, there's a lot of things to do." And everyone's got a different thing, and you start joining email newsletters. You know what those are at first and you start getting these emails from all these people, and then for me, it was like I was reading blogs and then I was joining... They didn't have Facebook groups back then. They had forums. So, I was joining the Warrior forum and How-To Court forum, and then... Anyway, there's like 20 or 30 different forums. So, all day long I'm reading forums of people, and I'm getting emails, and I'm learning all these things. And it was interesting because I was learning all the different pieces, right? Some people would talk about SEO and that's what they geeked out on. So, I started reading all the SEO articles, and I started learning how to do SEO and backlinking. So, I was like, "Oh, this is how you make money." And then someone else was like, "SEO's stupid. This is how we make money," and they had a whole different strategy. And then someone else had a different strategy, and soon I was just looking at all these shiny objects and I was like, "I don't know which one I'm supposed to do." How many of you guys ever felt that before? There's like 8,000 things. Like, "Russell said funnel. Someone else said this." Like, "Ah." And so, I was in that as well, and so I was just like... I got in this perpetual learning phase, right? Where I was learning and studying, and learning and studying. Then I started watching what was happening. Right? And I was on all these different email lists, but then it seemed like it was coordinated. Once every couple months, all of a sudden I would get an email from 30 or 40 people who somehow I had got on their email lists and all of them would be talking about the same product at the exact same time. Right? And all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, my gosh. Everyone's talking about this thing." Right? And I think the first ones I saw there was an old e-book called Google Cash. And it's how people are making money on Google doing Google ads. It was Chris Carpenter's offer, and he had gotten a whole bunch of affiliates. I don't know how at the time, but he had a whole bunch of affiliates all promote at the same time, so my inbox... And I'm at college opening my inbox and there's like 40 emails from people all talking about this book. I'm like, "This is the thing everyone's talking about. It's got to be the secret." I was so excited. And I went and paid this $67 for an e-book, which no one knew what e-books were back then and we were all confused. Literally, I remember messaging the support team and I was... like two weeks later. I'm like, "When's the book going to show up?" And they're like, "It's digital." I'm like, "I don't know what that means." They're like, "It means you download it." And again, 20 years ago, that was like... that was weird. That wasn't a thing that nowadays we all get it. But back then... And so I download this book, and I'm trying to read it, and I was just like, "I paid $67 for a PDF. My wife's going to kill me when she finds out." But I'm reading it and I'm getting all excited like t's next big thing, and all of a sudden, there's this next promotion and everybody's talking about this next thing. I'm getting all these... like 20, 30 emails. And I was like, "It's got to be this," so I jumped over there, and it's started me on this rabbit trail. And I just remember being confused, and overwhelmed, and all the things a lot of us go through. Right? And about that time... This was probably the very first ever high-ticket... Not even high-ticket, like $1,00 product. There was this guy, and I didn't know who he was at the time, but again, all of a sudden the emails start flying in my inbox. Right? And they're all for this guy. They say this guy is the godfather of internet marketing and he's retiring. And because of that, he's giving away his entire empire, everything he's built. And he called it the farewell package. Like, "This is my farewell from the internet. I'm done. I'm out. I've made millions of dollars, now I'm leaving." And his name was Mark Joyner. And I didn't know who Mark was at the time, but I started reading the emails and the stuff, and I was just like, "This is the greatest thing in the world." Right? So, I remember going to the sales page, reading through it ready to try to buy it for 20, or 30 bucks, or whatever, and the price went was $1,000. And I was like, "Oh, I do not have $1,000. I've never had $1,000." My wife was working, supporting at the time, and she was making, I believe $9.50 an hour. So, I mean, it would take her, man, over 100 hours. No, because you got taxes. Probably 200 hours of her working, so that's a lot of time to pay for this $1,000 course. I remember looking at it and I was like, "Oh, I don't have any money. I'm a broke wrestler." I had just gotten married, therefore, now I'm living off my wife who's making $9.50 an hour as a receptionist where she was working at. And I was like, "There's no way I can do it." And so, I remember not being able to buy it, not being able to buy it, but I kept seeing the emails, and the promotions, and the urgency, and the scarcity, and it eventually got to the point where it was about to sell out. Probably five or six weeks into this whole thing and about to sell out. And they were closing down the cart. And I remember the night before... This is... Again, for those of you who are newer before there were webinars, there were things called teleseminars where you would pick up the phone, and you would call, and you'd just listen to people talk. And so, I called this teleseminar, and on the teleseminar these guys are talking about the Mark Joyner Farewell Package. And it was just... It was going to be gone the next day and you had to get it. And I remember listening to it and being sick to my stomach and laying in bed that night, and I was like, "I have to do it. This is my thing," and being so stressed out. And finally, the next morning I was still laying in bed. My wife woke up and I was like, "Colette, I know I bought a lot of stupid things that I haven't done anything with any of it yet, but I think this is the one. I think this is the thing." I remember asking her. I was like, "Can I buy it?" And she said something like... In fact, I talked about it. I wrote it in the Traffic Secrets book, this story, but she's like, "Well, do you think this is the one for you?" I was like, "I think this is the one." She's like, "Okay, then here's our credit card." And we only had like a $500 credit limit I had to call up my bank like, "Can you double our limit to 1,000?" This is how like green we were back then. And we did it, and I bought the course, and I remember I got the course and there was like 15 CDs, all these interviews. And so, I started listening to the CDs, and what was crazy, as Mark was talking, he kept talking over and over and over again, about two concepts. The first one was the power of your own list. He kept talking about, "You have to have your own email list, and this is how it works, and if you have an email list of 10,000 people, you send an email out to your offer, you can sell a whole bunch of your things." And I started realize, I'm like, "Oh, my gosh. This is literally what's been happening to me. I'm on all these people's email lists. They have a big email list and send an email, and if I buy a $1,000 course, they must have made 500 bucks." And I started putting the pieces together. It's like, "Oh, my gosh. This is how it works." And some of you guys... I'm not going to tell the whole story, but some of you guys have heard my story. After listening to two or three of these CDs I was like, "I need an email list." And I went down that whole journey where I got called a spammer and... Anyway, so that's... Insert that story there. I'm not going to tell that story because it's outside the context of this event. But I started trying to send email and it didn't work. And I was just like, "This thing Mark is teaching me, I need to have an email list, but everyone's got one, except for me. I don't have a list. It's not fair." And I kept listening to Mark's course, and as he got deeper and deeper in the course, he started talking about this thing called joint ventures. And he was like, "Every time you start a new company or launch a new product, the first thing we do before you buy ads or anything is we go and we have these different partners who all already have email lists." He's like, "Go with people who already have email lists, and then some of them will promote and send traffic to my thing, and that's how you make money." And I was like... I was just seeing... You know there's those curtain in front of your face, and the curtain's lifted? I saw the Wizard of Oz. I'm like, "This is how it works. You have to have an email list. If you don't have an email list, you find other people with email lists, and they promote your offer, and then the people buy your product, and then you have an email list." And I was like... It all started making sense in my head. I was like, "Okay." And then I did what I'm sure all of you guys did, especially if you've read Traffic Secrets book... And I didn't know what this was called at the time. I didn't have words for it, but it was basically my first Dream 100. I was like, "Okay. Who's got an email list?" Like, "Mark said people have email lists. We need to find people with email lists," and so that was kind of the next question. And so, I started making my first Dream 100 list. And it was funny because I had this farewell package I bought from Mark Joyner and he had all the people he interviewed. So I said, "Well, this is my Dream 100, all the people Mark interviewed." And so, I don't remember most of the names. I do remember Joe Vitale though. He was one of the names. And some of you guys know Joe Vitale. If you go to mrfire.com, he's written like 400 books. He's awesome. I wrote Joe Vitale down. I started writing other people's names down. And so, I remember I'm building this Dream 100 list and I was like, "Okay, this is easy. I'm just going to email them all, and then they're going to promote my thing, and I'm going to be rich. This seems really awesome." Right? And I'm sure some of you guys have thought of that before. Hopefully, it's not just me. So, I start emailing Joe Vitale, and I can't remember all the other names. Joe's the one that stuck out in my head. I remember emailing them all and then just waiting like, "Okay, they're going to respond back to me, and then this is going to be this big thing, and I'm going to make a bunch of money." And I think I had my first or second product at the time, so it was like I had a product for them to sell and everything. Sent all the emails out and it was crickets. Not one person wrote back to me. And I was like, "Huh." I was like, "Okay, either this Mark Joyner's full of crap or I need to send another email." So, being a relentless person, I send another email to all them like, "Hey, Joe Vitale. Did you not get my email? Because I've got this new product and if you promote it, we can split the money 50/50. It's going to be awesome." Right? Like he's for sure... Like, "I'll even give you 60% commission." Maybe I'll blow his mind. Right? So, I tell him this thing, crickets. Nobody responds back to me. And I remember just being like... I was like, "This internet thing doesn't work." So, I remember being frustrated and just not knowing what to do, not believing this JV thing actually worked. Assuming that it's impossible to build an email list and I was stuck in that rut for a while. Probably, I don't know how many, four or five months of this rut of just like, "It didn't work. I tried." And have you guys done that where you try something somebody told you and then you're like, "Oh"? It reminds me of... Well, never mind. I'm not going to tell that story, but it reminds me of just so many of us do that where we're trying to follow a guru. We try the thing and it doesn't work, and we're like, "Oh, it didn't work." It's like, maybe we just didn't execute it quite correctly. So, fast forward a little while later there was this internet marketing event. It was Armand Morin. It was called the Big Seminar back then. And it was the seminar in the industry. Kind of like Funnel Hacking Live is nowadays. It was the seminar. And so, I remember saving up some money and we flew out to... And I had made a little bit of money online at this point. Not a lot. I was making, I don't know, maybe 1,000 bucks a month or something. So, I had a little bit of money just so I didn't have to yell... borrow more money from Colette's credit card to go and go to this event. So, I fly out to this event. It's in Atlanta. I go to the seminar and I remember thinking, "All the speakers on stage, I'm going to get all... That's going to be my next affiliates or my next people I'm going to be partners with." And so, we're seeing all the speakers and they seem bigger than life. They're on stage, and they're talking, and I was just like, "If any of these guys promoted my product, I'd be rich." That's the thing going through my head. Right? And so, I'm seeing them, writing all their names down. I'm like, "I'm going to become partners with them and become friends with them. I'm going to go meet them face-to-face. Maybe that's the secret. If I meet them face-to-face then it'll be easy." Unfortunately, I'm insanely introverted, and shy, and scared. So, I'm at the event, I see the person walking by. I remember seeing Stephen Pierce. He was the guy at the time. He walked past and I was just like... He walked right past me, and he walked past, and I'm like, "Ah, I blew it. Stupid, Russell. Stupid, Russell. You didn't even talk to him." And I'm sitting there in the hallway and all of a sudden Armand... Actually, I was in the bathroom and Armand walked next to me in the urinal next to me. I'm like, "Armand's right here. What do I do? Do I say something? I can't say in the bathroom. It's so awkward." And he looks over and he is like, "Hey, man. How's it going?" I'm like, "Good." And he is like, "All right," and then walks away and walks out of the bathroom. I'm like, "Ah, I blew it again. I blew it again." You know? And I'm too scared to talk to any of the speakers, but I'm like... For me, I'm like, "This is the key. This is the key to my freedom is these speakers," and I didn't dare do it. I wimped out every single person. I didn't talk to a single one of them. And then at nights, all the attendees would go to the bar. Now, I'm not a drinker. I've never drank in my life. Most people don't believe me, but I've literally never drank in my entire life. So, I'd go to these bars and I was like, "I don't want people to think I'm drinking," because like I have a thing like that where I want to avoid the appearance of evil at all costs. Right? So, I remember I'd go to the bar and I was like, "Ah, how do I..." And literally, the bartender was like, "You want something to drink?" I was like, "Can you give me milk?" He was like, "Seriously?" I'm like, "I don't know. Can you?" I was like "Because if it's going to be a Sprite, people going to think it's some fizzy drink." I don't know. I don't even know what drinks are. Like, "It's going to be fizzy something." So, I'm like, "If you give me milk they're going to know that it's not alcohol." Right? So, he's like, "All right." So, the guy gives me a milk. I'm holding this milk at the bar walking around and everyone's like... All these people start coming to me, which is really cool, and they're like, "Are you drinking milk?" I was like, "Yeah." They're like, "Why are drinking milk?" I'm like, "Oh, well, I'm Mormon, so I don't drink." They all kind of laugh at me, but it opened dialogue when they came to me. And this is... Okay, side note. Interesting for the introvert. Who are the introverts in the room? If you're introvert, I learned something really cool. Nicholas Bailey actually told me this. He dresses weird because he's introverted and he's too scared to go talk to people. He's like, "If I do something weird," he's like, "people come to me and like, 'Oh, nice shirt. Nice glasses. Nice,'" blah, blah, blah, blah. And so, that's what happens. I had this weird thing, and then people came to me. They're like, "Why are you drinking milk in a bar?" And then it started a conversation, and then when I'm in a conversation I can do it. It's the walking up to. Like, "How am I going to go and..." You know what I mean? So scary for me. And so, people started talking to me. We started becoming friends and get to know people, and I'm talking in this group, and it was interesting because everyone I was talking to, they all had businesses just like me, but they weren't the guy on stage with a list of 100,000 people and all this kind of stuff They were here and they had a list of like 500 people. Or I got a list of 1,200 people. They were all kind of at this level. About the same level I was at. I was like, "Oh, my gosh," and we started talking, getting to know each other. And back then it was before Skype or before... It was pre-Skype. It was pre... What do we use nowadays? Slack or Instant Messenger. Whatever. We used to use Yahoo Messenger, or IRQ, or AOL, and so it always like, "What messenger are you on? Here's my AOL chat," or, "Here's my IRQ." Or ICQ Sorry. ICQ. Or, "Here's my..." And so, they give them to you, and so that was how we get to know people. So, I put it out, write it down, and then I remember the people. I remember Mike Phillip's name was on Yahoo Messenger. His name was signanddrive.com. And I remember Brad Callen. I remember Brad Fallon. And so, I started meeting all these people at the bar while I'm drinking my milk, and getting to know them, and I'm writing down all their little handles. And then we get home and away from the event, and so I start putting those things in and I start messaging them. I feel way more comfortable talking through text, through Yahoo Messenger. I was like, "Hey, great meeting you at the event," blah, blah, blah. "This is a picture of me so you remember who I was." Right? And the person would write back, "Oh, yeah. It was really cool. You were the guy with the milk, right?" I'm like, "Yeah." And we'd start this dialogue. And then I was like, "Okay..." Not even thinking that these guys would be big partners someday, but I kind of started getting to know these people. And we were all kind of the same level. And this is the key. Okay? I'm trying to tell stories with hopefully principles you guys can pick from it. So, all these people were at the same level. And I remember because at the same time I was messaging Joe, Vitale, and messaging all the speakers in the event, and none of them are responding to me. It's just like crickets. No one's responding back. I'm talking to these guys. And I remember I was creating an offer and these guys had become my friends. And I was like, "Hey, can you check this out? Do you think this is good? Is the offer good?" And they started messaging back, and all of a sudden they started becoming involved in my business, right? They had a vested interest because they were kind of like, "Oh, I would do this," or, "I'd try this over here. And all of a sudden they started sharing ideas back and forth and it was really cool. And then they would share with me what they were doing back and forth, and it was really, really cool. And I had vested interest in their projects because I was like, "Oh, you should try this, or, "Oh, I did this. You should try this." We built this little group of people. And I don't even know. It was probably four, five, six people maybe that we kind of did this thing. And I remember because about this time is when my very first software product ever came out, and I don't talk much about this product. It was a product called ZIP Brander, and I was so proud of it. And I remember I sent it to Mike Filsaime. I was like, "Hey, here's my first software. Check it out." He was like, "Dude, that's so cool. Do you want me to promote it to my list?" And I was like, "Wait, he just asked me." Like never it happened. I was just like, "I've been asking all these people at this level up here, all the people I'm looking up to, the gurus, the big famous people. No one, crickets, and all of a sudden my friend's, like, 'I'll promote it to my list.'" And I was like, "Dude, you serious?" He's like, "Yeah." I'm like, "Okay." And so I give him the link. He sends an email to his list, and I can't remember. I paid him like 50, 60, 70. I don't know. I was like, "You can have all the money. I just want... I need a list. I know the goal. The goal to get a list. I'll give you 100% commission." Right? And so, he promoted and I think he sold... I don't know, he sold five or six copies of my thing, but then I got the money, and then I gave most of it to him. But then what happened is I got five or six customers, but a bunch of people... I had a pop-up on the site. A bunch of people filled out the pop-up, and I got like 300 or 400 people on my email list. And I was like, "This is awesome." And then I knew Mike had a product, and I was like, "Hey, man." I was like, "Dude, I love..." He had a product called Carbon Copy Marketing back then or something. It was a two-disc DVD set. And this is before DVD, so he literally would go and he would print a DVD and ship it out to you from his house. This is how... 20 years ago. Remember, this is before things like that. And so, he said, "Yeah." So, I emailed my list of like 300 people from him the 400 or 500 people I built, so maybe a thousand from my list. I sent the email and I sold like five or six of his DVDs. And he is like, "Thanks, man." And we did our first little cross-promotion, and me and Mike became friends. And then Mike told me. Then Mike's like, "Dude, you know who you should do? I met this guy named Gary Ambrose. You should meet Gary because Gary has got a list too, and he promoted the same DVDs you just promoted and it was awesome. You should get to know him." So, he introduced me to Gary. Me and Gary met up, and I was like, "Oh." And Gary and I started sharing ideas, and then eventually he promoted my things, I promoted his, and then Gary's like, "Oh, dude, you should meet so and so." And I was like, "Oh, you should meet..." And all of a sudden we started this little four or five people start introducing more and more people, and soon I've got 20 or 30 friends all on Yahoo Messenger and AOL that we're talking back and forth and getting to know each other. Right? And what's interesting is that we all kind of helped promoting each other. Our list went from 400 or 500 people to 1,000 to 1,500, to 1,000 to 2,500, and they kept growing and growing. And I was looking at this little group of people all working together. It was like a groundswell where our businesses all started gradually rising together. What do they say? A rising tide raises all ships, right? That's what started happening. And we started getting bigger and bigger. I'm like, "Oh, my gosh. This is so cool." And then we started doing more things and this is, man, a two or three-year period of time while I was in college, we were going back and doing these things. And it was just... It was really, really cool. Right? And I remember one day Mike had this idea, Mike Filsaime had this idea for a product called Butterfly Marketing. Some of you guys may have heard of it, but it was the first time he had the idea. And he's like, "Hey, man, check out the sales letter." He had this huge sales letter. And on the sales letter, he had these testimonials from all the people. All the people you'd want, right? I was like, "How'd you get all those guys' testimonials?" He's like, "Oh, I didn't. I just put their pictures in just as the placeholders as a dream of someday I'm wanting to get these people's testimonials." I was like, "Oh, that'd be so cool to get to know them." And then he's like, "Well, I met so and so. I know so and so who does know that person," and all of a sudden this network started happening, right? Anyway, Mike went and started messaging and eventually got to the person, one of the people, and they gave him a thing, and all of a sudden he got a bigger promotion from a bigger person. And what happened is, is we started doing this. Again, the people I looked up to were way up here and they wouldn't respond to me and things like that. And this group down here became friends. We all started growing together, and eventually what started happening is as we got bigger and bigger and bigger, we got closer to these people. I remember probably, man, two years, maybe three years into this business I had an idea. And I was creating this whole project. It was a membership site. It was called The Lost Files, and it was based on old public domain books, which I could talk about for six years. But it's this geeky, nerdy thing that you can make money with. And so I got excited, I'm creating this thing, and I was like, "Joe Vitale, he's written like 500 books." I'm like, "Oh, Joe would be my dream person." I know Joe had talked about public domain in the past. Joe had actually published a couple books from the public domain. And I was like, "He'd be my dream partner." But I was like, "He's ignored like 40 emails from me. There's no way he's going to respond to me now." Right? But I was like, "Oh, I got to do something." So, I remember I messaged him again this time and I was like, "Hey, Joe. Sorry to bug you. I have this new site." I explained what my site, thelostfiles.com. Like, "This is what is, how it works," and everything. And then the next day I get email back from Joe, and I was too scared to even open it. I'm like, "This is crazy." And Joe messaged me back. He's like, "Hey, Russell, so good to meet you." He's like, "I've been seeing your name everywhere. All these different people keep promoting your stuff. They keep popping up in my inbox. The Lost Files sounds awesome." The way he made the connection, he didn't... I don't think he... He didn't connect that it was me who was annoying him for like 40 emails prior. He just didn't connect it. Or maybe he just ignored it, or he forgave me, or whatever, but he message back and said, "Yes." And I was like, "Joe Vitale said yes." And I was freaking out. And so he goes and he does this... We had this promotion where we had a teleseminar together. He promoted his list. And then at the teleseminar he promoted The Lost Files, and we signed up like 300 members off his list at like 40 bucks a month, which for a college kid, is insane. And it was this one deal, and then Joe was like, "Oh, by the way, have you ever met so and so, and so and so?" and starts opening these doors again. Now, because I've gotten closer and closer, I got one person in and all of sudden it opened up this whole network of people. And that was my journey for the first three or four years. And so I wanted to kind of lead with that because again, I think so many of you guys are like me where you see the people. I meet people all the time. "Russell, you say to build a Dream 100 list, I've got to dream one, and it's just you." And I'm like, "Not a good strategy." I literally said Dream 100 for a very important reason because it shouldn't be me. I do maybe one promotion a year and usually, it's for Tony Robbins. And so, for me to say yes, it's going to be like... We got to date for a decade before it's going to happen, so if you're banking on that it's going to be a long, long time for something to happen, right? I was like, "Instead, go and do things with people at your own tier, your own level where they're looking for things, and looking for cross-promotions, and things will start happening. And then what happened is you start rising to the top, and all of a sudden people like me are going to start seeing you. You show up my news feed. I start seeing emails." All of a sudden it's like now there's this relationship, right? It's funny. There's... This is a funny story. So, one of my buddies, I met him probably... It's probably been 12 years ago now. Some of you guys know him. He's Chad Wallner. He's a chiropractor. I talk about him in the Dot Com Secrets book. But he moved into our area, and so we go to church. We were going to the same church, and so he shows up and he sees me. And he was seeing me online. He knew I was and stuff. He came to me and he's like, "Russell." He's like, "Dude, this is so... I can't believe you're in my ward. I've seen you before," blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. And he's like, "We actually have a mutual friend together." And I was like, "We do?" He's like, "Yeah." So, he's trying to build a connection so we can connect and stuff. And it was interesting because he said, "We got this mutual friend." And then he told me the name. He's like, "Here's the guy's name." And I was like, "Don't know who he is." He was like, "Oh, weird." He's like, "He talks about you all the time as if you guys were best friends." I was like, "I don't know who that is. I'm so sorry." And years later, Chad and I had this discussion about this and it was funny because he was like, "Man, I..." The realization is it's not who you know, it's who knows you. Right? I knew who Joe Vitale was. I knew who these people... I knew Tony Robbins. So, I wanted them, but it's not that I know them. I need them to know me. Right? So, it's how do you get them to know you? Well, it's by doing cool stuff in the market that they're playing in. Showing up. Will they see you in news feeds, see you in emails, see you in stuff? Where all of a sudden they keep seeing these things and then they see you. They got to know who you are. Right? When you approach them like, "Hey, my name is so and so," if they don't know who you are, it's going to be really hard to build a relationship. If they're like, "Hey, this is so and so," it's easy. For example, I was trying to do a negotiation with someone the other day. I wish I could tell you all the details. I can't though. Anyway, really big company. You'd be aware of who they are. And so, I tried to get a meeting with the founder of it, and we get on a Zoom call like this, and the very first thing he says, he's like, "Man, Russell," he's like, "I see you like 12 times a day. You are everywhere in my news feed. I get emails from you. You must be the best internet marketer on the planet." And I was like, "This is going to be the easiest negotiation in my entire life because he knows exactly who I am." Right? As opposed to me coming to him and trying to explain who I was. Right? And so it's like, as you're doing stuff actively in the marketplace, people will start seeing that and become aware of you. Right? And that's how you start rising to the top. I get people all the time that message me like, "Hey, can I speak at Funnel Hacking Live?" I'm like, "I don't know who you are." Like, "I'm the best speaker. Here's my speaker," blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "I don't know who you are." Right? But check this out. McCall Jones, who I think is on here, or she was on here earlier, right? McCall, she showed up on Funnel Hacking Live. Then she does this thing, and then she starts publishing, and she starts doing everything, and I start seeing her everywhere. I see her energy and her excitement. I see how she's developing things. She's like using things she learned from me, but developing her own things, which was really cool. Because I'm like, "Oh, my gosh. She's a good student and she's doing things." And this whole thing starts happening, and I see her in my feed. I see her all the time. And my friends start talking about her, and then Monica, who's on this as well. Monica messaged me. There's McCall right there. Yeah. What's up? And Monica messaged me, "You know McCall? You got to..." And so, her friends are calling me and telling me to listen and stuff. And soon, I'm watching everything she's doing. And I'm like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm impressed." I start podcasts. How many... Once or twice I talked about you on the podcast before we even met officially. I'm like, "This girl McCall keeps showing up. She's doing these cool things." And on Funnel Hacking Live, I'm like, "Who should speak on Funnel Hacking Live?" I'm like, "There's this girl who's never spoken on stage before. Right? She's never... Doesn't like, 'Here's my speaker reel. I've got a perfect presentation.'" But I'm seeing that. I was like, "She'd be like the perfect person to come on stage and, and speak." And so anyway... Hey, McCall. What's up? McCall Jones: Thank you. Wow, that's so nice. I'm just hyping you up, over here reacting to all of your stuff, so hey. Funnel Hacking Live. Woo hoo! Russell: All right. But conceptually, you guys, it make sense. If you want to get into, they call it the good old boys club. Like, "How do I get in the good old boys club?" It's the way you get into it is you have to infiltrate it. And it starts finding people at your own level and start playing the game, start moving forward, start making noise, start doing stuff, and then people are going to start seeing you and start becoming aware of you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

See if your question got answered live! Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: What's up everyone. This is Russell. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. I'm back with Josh today. And do I tell them what today's episode is, this is a really fun one? Josh Forti: Yeah. Today guys, we're doing rapid fire. We went to the community. We asked a bunch of different questions and by the way, we have like so many more to go over. So like, hey, just keep coming in, which is awesome. But it's a rapid fire Q and A with Russell to kind of bring out a side of Russell that maybe, maybe we don't get to see as much by asking just a bunch of rapid fire questions. Russell: There's some cool questions there. I think you guys going to enjoy. I think there's something for everybody. So listen, take notes. And next time we ask you for some questions, make sure you submit them maybe you'll get answered live. Josh: And called out. We called out some people. Russell: It's true. Maybe you got called out. You should pay attention. Anyway, thanks Josh. This was a fun episode, with that said, let’s queue up the theme song and we'll get right back with some Q and As. Josh: All right. So this one I want to do a little bit different, kind of phase three here as we go through this is I went and ask community bunch of different questions and there's so many different ones. I've got screenshots on screenshots on screenshots of, on Facebook, on Instagram and kind of things like that. And so I thought it would be cool to go through and do a rapid fire style where we hit you with a bunch of different questions. And there's a lot of similarities, like underlying actual questions at what it is. But a lot of it is people they want to understand your thought process. They want to understand how you run certain things or how you do certain things or whatever. And so what I thought would be cool is I have enough questions to where we could literally do one a minute for the next couple hours. So take as much time as you want or need to go through this. But I think if we just went through and did like a rapid fire of like, all right, start here and then go through and do this, I think that'd be super beneficial. And I think it'd be a unique creative thing that we could try and see how people like it, sound good? Russell: That'd be fun. Let's do it. Josh: All right. So the first question is, and I think this kind of... It's interesting, I think this ties into both of our previous topics that we covered and talked about, whether it be podcasting and finding your voice there or funnels and figuring that all out is like... The question got asked probably three or four different times, some variation of like, what do you do when you don't know what you want to do yet, like when you haven't found that voice? And you're like, because I think... For me, it's interesting. I actually found my voice before I found my product, right? And I think a lot of people figure out what they are going to sell before they find their voice. And so for me it was a little bit easier because I had all these followers before I was ever selling anything and I was super broke and then I found dotcom secrets and it was like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing." I literally went from making like $25,000 a year to like $250,000 a year and like one year. It was amazing because I just added it too. But a lot of people, they really struggle with like, "Okay, cool, I get all these things conceptually. I know I need a funnel and I know I need a value ad. I know I need a community and a following and raving fans. And I get all the things, but I don't know mine yet. I don't know the thing. And so when you're doing that, like what's the thing that you do or what advice would you give people to fix that problem of, or what things should they be focused on when they haven't found their voice yet? Russell: I'd say there's two directions on this, and both of them are correct. It's just depends on who you are. Number one, if you are a visionary, if you do the DISC profile, and you're a high I, you want to be the person that's there; the biggest key is not to wait. If I would've waited four click funnels and funnels, I never would've got here. I just started creating stuff that was bad like potato guns, zip brander, or forum fortunes. All these things that didn't work or I made very little money. No one's ever heard of, but I did 150 funnels before I was ever like, "I'm the funnel guy. I'm going to fun... I go on teach..." I started getting into funnels and then we built funnel software, but it was man 14 years and 150 funnels before I figure that out. But if I wouldn't have been in motion, I never would've found that. So if you are a creator and you know that's your calling, just start moving forward and find out what you're passionate about. If I was starting today, I would be into bio hacking, I'd be into nutrition. I'd be into those are the things I'm really geeking out about now in my life. So I'd be running that direction. I don't know what the opportunity's going to be, but I'm going to do something or I'm going to nothing… And then eventually I feel like God, as we start moving in a direction, like conscious I'm moving this direction, trying to figure this out; He will give us little ideas. He'll give us impressions and ideas. And He's trying to see like, "If I give Russell's idea, is he going to be good steward to this idea or not? And if I take it and I implement it, He's like, oh, he's a good steward of little thing, let me give him some more. Let me give him some more." And then 14 years later, He is like, "Okay, now I know he's worthy of this. Let me give him the big idea." But He's checking it. And if you get the idea, you're like, "Oh, I'm scared. I get fearful, whatever." And you don't do it, He's not going to give you the next one. He's like, "Oh, he's not a good steward of ideas." And He gives idea to somebody else. It's why, how many times you are like, "I had an idea for that, but so, and so did this." Because you weren’t a good steward of the idea when it showed up. So that's the one thing it's like moving forward. The second thing is that some of you guys, you're not the visionary person and that's okay. There's 450 people who work at ClickFunnels who aren't the visionary person. And if it wasn't for all of them, I'd be screwed. There are people that are my number twos that are my psychics that are helping me support it and they can buy into my vision. In fact, I remember Leon who designs all my slides for me. He's one of the most amazing people in the world. And he was out here in Boise one day and he's a quiet guy, just more reserved and he's got to leave for the airport. And he pulled me aside, he said, "I want to talk to you real quick." And I was like, "Yeah, what's going on?" And he said, he's like, "I've decided that my mission in life is to help you to get your word out to the world." I got chills and I was like, "Oh my gosh. Thank you." It was such a cool thing. And I was like... And I got it. He's got this skillset. He's not going to be on stage doing the things and doing podcasts and stuff, man, without him, I couldn't do what I'm doing. So being a supporting role is huge. So find a vision you do believe in. If you're like... I think Dave Asprey in the bio... and the bulletproof movement is the thing, go get a job from them, go work for them, go work for free, whatever. It's like, go figure out how you can be close to that person and help bolster. It's like, I'm hoping that everyone believes in something. Figure out something you believe in, you're passionate about and go be a supporter of that. Your vision is not to be something you created. It's just something you're supporting and you're helping to move forward. And so that'd be my two advice, depending on which side you fall on. If you're not sure, just start running. Josh: Love it. Russell: See what happens. Josh: Love it. That's awesome. And I think that's really, really cool. My current assistant, I've cycled through a couple of assistants now and I finally have one and she's amazing. And she's just like, "I came into your company thinking that this is what you needed." And I was like, "Yeah, because that's what I told you I needed. But I had no idea what I needed." And she's like, "What you actually needed is this." And I'm like- Russell: "I need you to tell me what I need." Josh: ... right. I was like, "Are you going to leave me now?" She's like, "No, I believe in you. And I believe in your vision. I know what you're trying to accomplish. You didn't realize this is what you needed but I believe in you." And I'm like, "Huh, that is a relief." If you can find that person, that's lucky. Next thing kind of goes along with this another rapid fire one is, as you're going through and you are figuring out all these different things and testing through your things, how do you make it to where you're not confusing your audience and to where they don't feel you're just a mess, that's everything is everywhere? You're trying all these different things. You're throwing things at the wall. Is that just something that people are just going to leave and just be upset just because, or is that like, is there ways to minimize that and communicate to your community that you don't know what you're doing, but that this is the vision. This is what we're going. I'm just trying a bunch of different things. Is there a way to do that well? Russell: Yeah. I think a couple things, number one is understanding that until you really dial that in, it's going to be hard to get a huge following anyway. Like the other day I was searching my name with someone else's name that I did a deal with 20 years ago and it pulled up the Google results and there was like, "Oh, I was so embarrassed." Anyway, it was bad. But guess what? Those people are all gone now. They left. They're are not even aware what happened. They don't know who I am. Most people are like, "Russell I've been following you since the beginning. Ever since you guys launched Funnel Hacking Live." I was like, "Oh, I was in business 15 years before the first Funnel Hacking Live." "I followed you all the way back from Micro Continuity." I was like, "That was a long time ago, I was in business nine years before Micro Continuity." Most people... Just understanding the people are going to be... When you figure out the thing, it's going to be a whole new group of people. And so it's not stressing too much about that, but at the same time, it's like, it's helping people understand like, I'm experimenting. I call it marketing experiments or like I used to call mine dotcom secrets labs before I wrote the book and anything it's like, I'm practicing these principles. So I would like study SEO and talk about like, "Oh." And I'd sell SEO courses for other people because I’m learning from this person to understand SEO. I'm over here and I'm in a laboratory testing these things out. This is what I'm actually doing. And there's a lot of value in that because you're becoming in proxy the person and sometimes you can cut through stuff that's working and not working, you can get direct access to people that they can. So just helping them understand like, my end goal is I want to be... Again, if I was going to bio hacking world right now, my end goal is I want to be healthier. So for example, this is my live mushroom GTS root beer. It's literally my favorite thing. I get twice a day. It's from Whole Foods. It's got Reishi, Chaga, and Turkey Tail. The actual fruiting bodies of the mushrooms in here blended into this root beer. It tastes like root beer my grandma used to make, I love it. I'm obsessed with it. So I could be like, "This thing's amazing. I'm excited about it. And this is why, and this is why I did the study and this is why I'm doing it." I could probably sell a crap ton of these right now. And then I could find out something else like Anthony DiClementi, he's got this thing. And I'm like, "I can be excited. I'm testing it. I bought his newsletter. I bought his membership site." And so it's just like you as the, I'm like a reporter, who's testing these things out in the beginning until you figure out what your thing is and you can really dial it. Maybe I become the mushroom dude who sells mushroom root beer. I don't know, but anyway. Josh: Please stick with funnels. We need you in that lane more. Is it good? All right. Cool. Next question we got here is, do you ever struggle with scarcity and being in scarcity mode even after you've made... Had all the success and as much money as you you've made, do you still struggle with being in scarcity mode or have you evolved past that? Russell: I don't struggle with scarcity. I have a lot of my own issues for sure. And it's funny because every time someone launches the next click funnels killer, it annoys me. But then I'm like, "You know what? First off they're not going to... I'm willing to outwork all of them and so I'm not worried that way." Number two, competition drives me, which is really, really good. And number three, actually, Annie Grace messaged me this a little while ago. She was talking about her business and all these people who were competing and she felt they were leading her people astray. And I was like, "I get that." And I said, "The thing that's most comforting to me is actually a Bible scripture where Jesus Christ said, my sheep will hear my voice and they'll follow me." That's not direct translation, but basically that's just like, my sheep will hear my voice. And I believe that's something that was true for him. But I think it's true for all of us. It's a universal principle. And so what I understand is like, I'm going to go out there. I'm going to be Russell. The best Russell I can be. And a lot of people are not going to follow me. They're going to understand that person better or whatever. Like some other product better, but my sheep are going to hear my voice and they're going to follow me. I'm going to attract the right people and they're going to come to Funnel Hacking Live, and they're going to use my platform. They're going to be exciting. And those are the people I've been called to serve. I am not called to serve the people who are going to go and go somewhere else. Or they don't resonate my message or with me or whatever. And I got to be okay with that because my sheep will hear my voice. And that's my belief that helps me to not be scared of scarcity, because I don't want those people anyway. I want my sheep to follow me and I'm going to help them. I'm going to serve them. Because that's what I've been called to serve. Josh: That's awesome. That's super cool. All right, next one here is actually from Parker Woodward, shout out Parker. Russell: Yeah, Parker. Josh: He says, "How do you know what positions to put members of your team in so they personally thrive?" Russell: Man, I cannot tell you, just you know Parker, this is a constant thing. So if you read the book Good To Great, one thing he talks about is like finding the right people and then putting them on the right seats on the bus. And those are two different activities. And sometimes you nail it. You're like, "Got the right person. They're on the right seat on the bus. And it's awesome." So many times in my company, I find someone who's amazing and we put them in a thing and it's like, "Oh, they don't fit there." And you move around four or five times like, "This person sucks at their job. They're horrible." And it's not actually true. It's horrible. The problem is you have the right person in the wrong seat on the bus. You get them the right seat and then they thrive. And so it's understanding that and really defining it of like, "What are the seats initially?" Because I think that's... You had this with your system. I don't really know what the seat is. I just know I need help. And I'm drowning, what that is, right? Josh: Yeah. Russell: You or someone around you understands like, this is where I'm hurting, this is what I'm struggling and they can define the seat, then it’s easy to find the right person, or you find somebody like knows the right person. And then having them like working with them, being okay like, "We may have to try a couple seats so we figure out, I know you're the right cultural fit. I know you're the right person, the right work ethic." But I don't know what the skillset is yet. Maybe they don't know yet either. And as soon as you're able to figure out what their unique ability is, then you put in the right spot and then they can thrive. And so it's a two step process. Josh: Interesting. All right. This one's from Braden. He says, "What are the biggest beliefs fundamentally that you had to shift early on in your life or career that you believe are required to get to $100 million and beyond?" Russell: It's funny you think it's like belief that some marketing principles. So I found out every tier, so me to get to a million dollars, I was trying to get a million dollars in the calendar year. It took me three years in row. I missed it by like 20 grand, three years in a row, I couldn't do it. And it was totally like a mental block. I didn't believe that I could do it for some reason. And after I did the first time it was like, "Oh." Then it was easy. And then 10 million was my next mental block. I missed it first year, second year we got, and then... So it's there's these mental blocks where I don't know if it's we don't believe in ourselves. We don't believe in, that we're worth. I don't know if it's, we don't believe worthy of it or we have the abilities of it, whatever. But the first thing is you got to believe in yourself. And that just comes with a lot of you doing things. Again, it comes back... We talked about earlier, like God gives you an idea. You're going to be a good steward of this idea. And the more often you take an idea and you run with it. Even if you fail, the more times you do that, the more you start trusting yourself. And that's a big part of it. Right now I can walk into a room where there's like, things are on fire and there's pure chaos, I have no idea what I'm going to go into it. I walk in knowing that the right idea's going to show up and I need it because I've done it so many times over and over and over and over and over again. I just know that it's going to happen. And I have belief in myself. That's the first thing. I honestly believe that the second thing, this comes back to the spiritual side of things, is that there's a purpose behind it. I struggled growing ClickFunnels because I thought that it was for Russell and Todd and our friends to make money. I thought that's what the business was, for probably the first three or four years. And it wasn't until I hired this coach who helped me see the connection between things. And she's just... Because I was always like, there's business and there's spiritual things. And God doesn't care right with my business because whatever. And she helped me bridge the gap. Like, "Do you see what's actually happening because this business..." She see people's lives are changed. All these kind of things. And she was the first person who said, "This is literally a calling that God gave you to do this." And as soon as I heard that and I felt it and I believed it, it changed everything for me. I was like, "This isn't just something Russell does as a hobby on the side to keep me busy till I die, this is what I was made for." I was made to do this, to inspire entrepreneurs, to change the world because each entrepreneur can do that. And when I heard that and I believed it, then it changed everything. It gave me permission like, "Okay, well then it's all my donkey Kong. I'm going to publish. I'm going to create, I'm going to write books. I'm going to do software. I'm going to do things." Because it wasn't just like money for money's sake. It was because this is the mission. This is the calling. I need to do it. And so it changed everything for me. So I think for you guys, that'd be the next thing is like, you got to be connected. Is this actually what God wants me doing? And if you believe that, you believe it's not just some side hobby, man it gives you the feel you need to grow row because now it's bigger than just you making money. Making money is so uninspiring. Changing the world because you were called to, at least, for me changed everything. Josh: That's super, super interesting. And so obviously, I've worked with Katie Richardson and tremendous mindset shifting things in there. And one of the things that I've learned just about mindset, what you said there is your brain, by default just runs. And so it will run with whatever program... Like 90% of your life is basically autopilot. You don't even realize that you're making the decision that you're making. So it's like, whatever program is there, that's how your life operates. And how you change that is not by changing this or all these different things, it's by literally reprogramming is changing belief. And so if you could actually just shift the belief, that's actually shifting the program. And so I think, for me, when I first got started in entrepreneurship, it was how do I hustle my way to success? It was freaking. I was at Gary Vaynerchuk working 18 hours a day. Let's go. And so I was like, "That's what I'm going to do." And it was like, Katie came in and was like, "Cool. That's the belief that you have and it's only going to get you so far." And then once you can replace that belief, that it's like, "Oh, you don't have to do that anymore, this is the way to do it." It was a real identity crisis. It was like, "But wait, no, I'm a hustler. I'm up to 4:00 in the morning, every single morning. You can't take that away from me." But then once the belief shifted, then it was like, "Oh, everything else in life shifted." It was like, "Okay, cool. Now I operate this way." And so that's super, super interesting that you say that because I feel like- Russell: If you look at like what I believe my only role is inside of ClickFunnels literally is for me to stand on stage, to write books, do podcasts, everything so I can get our customers to believe this will work for them. That's it. I know it works for them. But if I get them the tool and they don't believe this is going to work for them, it will not work for them. I get them to believe this works. I'm the head belief, cheerleader. That's all I'm actually doing is trying to take my... Whoever has the most certainty, any circumstance, any situation always wins. So when I come into something, I've got to come with more certainty than them and I've got to prove them I believe it can work and it can work for them. And if I can get them to believe it, then it'll happen. But that's the hardest thing is just the mental thing inside people's head. As soon as they believe it, you see it, because it's like, "Oh, they're struggling, struggling." And all of a sudden something happens, and I believe it'll work for them and holy cow, next thing they know they're Two Comma Club. It's weird. Because it makes sense. You're like, "No, it's just a process." Like, "No, it's a process, but your belief is your fuel and how you attack this thing one way or the other, 100% depends on if you believe is going to work." If I believe that if I write a book, a million people are going to buy it, I can go write a book. If I'm like, "I don't think anyone's going to buy it. What if they don't like it? What if..." I'll spend 25 years writing this book, it's never going to get done. The belief is everything. Josh: ... yeah. Garrett White talks about that with Warrior Way. He's like, "We tell people this isn't the only way, this is A way." And I was talking with my students the other day, I was like, "Hey guys, how many different ways are there to grow your business?" And they're like, "I don't know, thousands of them." I'm like, "Sweet, what's the way you grow their business?" And they're like, "Funnels." Like without even thinking about it. And it was like, "See what Russell did there." He convinced me… Russell: And that took me seven years of preaching consistently to get the market and get people to believe that. But it wasn't that… yeah. It's interesting. Josh: All right. The next question here, and this comes up... I mean this probably came up probably more than anything outside of funnels was how do you manage the relationship with your family and the balance between work and family? Because this is something I think a lot of people struggle with. I didn't even realize that this was a thing until I got married and then I got married and I was like, "Oh, I'm experiencing a little bit of this." And I'm like, I can't imagine like then kids and then being around. So how do you balance your work and your family and overwhelm and burn out and like... I mean there's limited amounts and it seems you can do everything Russell, like cause you’re everything over there. So how do you balance that with your family and the work life balance of that? Russell: That's a great question. I get asked that a lot, which is interesting. I think a lot of people... Well I think the big problem is most people who are doing what I do, they have... The area of life they’re the entrepreneur, they're killing it, and then the rest of their life's a wreck. Or they just don't talk about the rest of life. No one knows. And so anyway, a couple things is number one, Charfen had us do like a time study before. You ever heard of that before? Josh: Yeah. They were the worst. I hate them so much. Russell: So annoying. Yeah I did it for like three minutes, I was like, "I want to die." But you basically sit down and you start every 15 minutes, you're like, write down what you're doing during the day and really quick you realize, "Oh I'm only actually working two hours a day." And I think the average employee, I think is in two hours and eight hour days is actual productive work, the rest is… Josh: Yeah, something like that. It's super low. Russell: So the first thing is just by default, this is comes from me being a wrestler, right? As a wrestler, we have two hour practice. We got the limited time and I wanted to be the best. So I had to cram as much actual stuff in those small windows as humanly possible. And you know when you're an entrepreneur, you're going on a trip and it's like, "My plane leaves at 2:00, but I got an hour and a half to work." In the hour and a half, you'll get more done than an entire day typically. And so I trick my mind that all the time. So if you look at like a typical eight hour day, like I'm coming in from usually from 9:30, till 5:00, it's like my window that I'm here at the office. When I'm here, I'm super present. But what I do in that window of time is what most people do in a week. Because I don't... People always ask me, "Hey Russell, can I take you to lunch?" I'm like, "You have the luxury of lunch. I've not eaten lunch in, I don't know, decade and a half, I'm working. I quit Uber eats. I keep working. It shows up, I'm eating it. And I keep going." I don't waste time for that crap. I'm in the zone and I'm working and I'm not doodling and texting in a million different things. When I'm doing something, I'm doing the thing. I was up this morning from 5:30, till 7:00, I was writing copy for the new offer. And like, that's what I did by myself. Cranked it out. Seven o'clock, boom, I hear Nora talking, hear the kids getting up. And then I break my presence at the thing and I leave and from 7:00 to like 8:30 ish, I'm a dad. And so I take high school kids in school. I come back and I pick up Nora and I play with her a little bit. And then I get her fed and then Collette's getting her dressed and stuff and I go wake up Aiden and then me and Aiden are hanging out. We're talking about the day. And then Collette takes Ellie to school. Aiden's there. I get in the shower. I get dressed. And by nine o'clock I'm ready to go. And I jump in my car. I come here and then boom, I'm in Russell, like I'm entrepreneur mode and from 9:30 ish till 5;00 I'm here. I'm cranking. My days blocked out. I know everything I got to do during the day. I got a to-do list. I got schedule. Everything's blocked out. I knew from 9:00 to 10:30, me and you were here and I'm present. I'm not looking at 1000... We're here doing the thing, it's going to be done. And then at 10:30, I know exactly what I'm doing. As soon as we're done, I'm not sitting around for 30 minutes, like what should I do next. I know what's going to be happening and I'm going, I'm doing the thing. And so my days are like that. So boom, boom, boom, by the time I get to the end of the day, it's like, "Oh, I got a lot of done today. This is amazing." And then I go home. And when I walk through the door from my car in the garage to the door, I send... Before I walk to the door I stop. And I'm like, "Okay, I got to literally stop for a second." I'm like, I'm getting dad mode. I'm getting husband mode. And I get done and I walk through the door and I'm now a dad and husband. I'm not an entrepreneur. And I go, literally go to every one of my kids in the house. My love language is physical touch. I go give each a hug. I go give my wife a hug. And then I'm there. And from that time I'm dad till 9:00 and then from 9:00 to 11:00 I'm husband and 11 o'clock I'm in bed waiting for the next day. And so it's just, I'm really good at chunking time. And I'm not perfect. Some days I'll get depressed or I'll get tired or burned out or whatever, and I don't hit it. But for the most part, I would say I'm pretty consistent in getting a lot of stuff done in the windows that I got. Josh: That's super, super interesting. Being present and being present at work, being present at home, that balance that once again, something Katie talked about a lot is just like, be fully present with where you are and then set boundaries. Having those clear for that Russell: You ask my wife too, I'm not perfect at it, but I try to let things bleed from thing to thing. I try that when I walk through the garage door at night that I'm done with work and I'm home and then, you know what I mean? Josh: Yeah. Russell: And I think that's what most people don't do is like, it all just mushes together where they're doing everything. So everything becomes done inefficiently. I was listening to Dan Kennedy actually yesterday. He's like, "Would you hire a doctor who is going to do surgery on you, and while he's doing surgery, he's watching YouTube video and he's eating something on the side?" He's like, "No, you want presence if you're going to hire someone." Same thing, if you want to build a funnel, you need your designer and everyone who's doing this to have laser focus. You don't want them doing these other things because you need their full attention and presence. Josh: That's awesome. This one's from Paul Vanblum He says, and I'm going to paraphrase this here because... But how do you modify your behavior? Which is, like maybe you've got this thing that you... I don't know, scroll Facebook too much and you just can't seem to quit. I'm sure that's not a problem for you, but how do you go through it actually change or modify behavior? Because it sounds like a lot of your life is routine. Is that true? You figure out the process that works and then you go until it needs to change. And then it's just you pick the next process. So how do you go through and modify behavior that you want to be able to change? Russell: That's a big section of the new book that's coming out someday in the future. So this is a reality is that the shorter versions if we're running close on time is understanding that we do things that meet our needs. And so we had to figure out, how are our needs being met? Talked about this at Funnel Hacking Live a little bit with Tony Robbins, Six Human Needs, right? Like if any... I wish I could geek out on this for like two hours. Maybe this would be the first topic for next time we do this. Josh: Yeah. I was going to say maybe we do that. Russell: That'd be fun. But there's six human needs and there's four needs of the body. And anytime three of the four needs of the body are met, it creates a physical addiction inside you. So if you're scrolling Facebook all day long, it's because it's meeting a need. Like you're getting certainty from it. You're getting significance from it. And you're probably getting love and connection from it. So three of your four needs are being met... And variety, all four of your needs are being met by scrolling Facebook. So it's creating a physical addiction. So for you to break that physical addiction, it's not going to be easy unless you replace it with another physical addiction that you enjoy more. So it's like I have to replacing that. I can't just just willpower it out and got this thing out and be gone. It's like, I'm trying to get my needs met somewhere. And so they're getting met there, I'm good. So I need to get met somewhere else to replace it. It's a lot of people get their needs met by eating. And so they keep eating, eating, and they want to lose weight and they can't lose weight because all their needs are met there. And so until they replace those needs somewhere else, they're going to keep defaulting to that. Again, we can geek on that for a long time, but that's the core root of it. Is it fulfills your need until you get those needs met somewhere else you're going to keep falling back to it over and over and over again. Josh: All right. Last two, super rapid fire questions. Number one. What is the top, the number one or... I'll give you top three, because number one's impossible. Top three books outside of your own that someone must read? Outside of your own because duh obviously is DotcomSecrets, Expert Secrets, and Traffic Secrets. Thinking bio... Russell: Oh, depends on which area of your life looking at. I just bought... I spent a... not a small, a pretty big fortune buying the Napoleon Hill thing. So I'm in the middle of this Napoleon Hill like Deep Dive. Can I give you my three best Napoleon Hill books because that’s all I got right now. Josh: There you go. All right, modify the question, three best Napoleon Hill books? Russell: Everything else seems like a distraction. So for me Outwitting the Devil is the best thing he's ever written. It is insanely good and very, very practical. Think and Grow Rich, I've been revisiting and like, oh, it's so good. And then the Laws of Success is not a book. It's a book series, which I now own. Oh my gosh. I don't know if I've even told you this yet. I think I showed you a quick picture, but- Josh: You showed me a video, yeah. Russell: ... The Laws of Success was published in 1928. I have his version that he wrote in 1925 before he sent it to the editors or publishers, first edition signed that he printed at a schoolhouse here in my possession. It's insane. Josh: I can't wait to visit your library bro. Oh my gosh. It's crazy. Russell: But those are the three. I would start with Outwitting the Devil because I'll make you fall in love with Napoleon Hill, then go Think and Grow Rich. And if you love that, then go into Laws of Success' it's like a longer form version of stuff, but it's... Ah, he's my favorite right now. Josh: All right, last question for you. And we all know the answer to this, but I thought it was a great last question to end on just to make sure in business, in marketing, in success for all of success, what's the number one skillset that someone must learn? Russell: Oh, persuasion. Josh: Persuasion. Russell: It's learning how to tell a story in a way that gets people to move. Because everything else, like I can outsource all the rest of it. But like I said, we're talking about creating the offer for the Magnetic Marketing. It's the story, the persuasion, the thing that's going to get people to move. And that... Because that weaves into your funnel, weaves into your email, like weaves into how you get your team to move. How you get your community. All the stuff comes down to that skillset of learning how to persuade people. Josh: Awesome. Well, Russell, I think that wraps it up. We'll see what the audience says. But that is a fun run. Russell: That was really fun, man. I appreciate that. This has been a good day. I woke up this morning working, have a ton of energy. This has been a lot of fun energy. I appreciate you appreciate it. And if you guys like these episodes like this, let us know and we'll do it again. This was kind of a test drive to see if you enjoyed it. Josh: Yeah, you got to let us know guys. Russell: And I had a lot of fun. So hopefully you did too. Josh: Was this was super fun. Yeah, man, for sure. It was good chatting with you and everybody go buy Russell stuff and ClickFunnels and all the things because it'll make you tons and tons of money and that's it. That's just the end of it. Russell: That’s the real reason we did this… I wanted you to pitch the stuff so I didn't have to awkwardly tell people to buy it. Thank you so much. Josh: Okay. Everybody go buy stuff right now. It is amazing. That's my pitch. The first thing you're going to get is you're going to get a change of belief. The second thing you're going to get is you're going to get, I don't know what it is, a step by step process of the marketing bible. The third thing you're going to get is increase the status because Russell will like you. Boom there's my pitch. Russell: Boom. What more do you want in life? Come on now. Josh: Yeah, you can't imagine. All right, Russell. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate your time and we'll talk to you soon. Russell: Awesome. Thank you too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the future of funnels...? With meta-verse coming, what should we be focused on now!? Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: What's up everybody? This is Russell Brunson. I'm back with my co-host Josh Forti. How you doing, man? Josh Forti: I'm doing awesome, man. How are you? Russell: Doing so good. We just recorded a new episode for you guys. This one's all about funnels and I think it went in a different direction you thought it was going to go, didn't it? Josh: Yeah, it did, a little bit. It was super good. Russell: …because the question was like, "What is the next funnel? What's the thing?" And it wasn't a funnel thing, it was something different. So, I think this is an episode you guys can enjoy. Josh: It's tough. Russell: It's been so exciting for me, I literally woke up at 5:00 AM every morning this week because I'm geeking out on the thing that you're going to learn about. And hopefully, it'll help you guys with all your funnels, no matter if you're running a webinar funnel, or a book funnel, or a challenge funnel, or whatever, doesn't really matter. This principle, you can overlay on top of all of them and it'll make them all better. So, that said, should we queue up the theme song? Josh: Let's do it. Russell: Let's go. Josh: Now we got to move into.. I want to move into funnels, dude. This is a topic that continued to come up. So kind of a back story. When we're preparing for this episode, guys like, Russell hit me up and was like, "Do you want to do a podcast together?" And I was like, "Yeah, what do you want to do it on?" He's like, "I don't know, find something." And I'm like, "oh, all right." And so- Russell: "You tell me." Josh: I do what I all always do and I go to the community and I'm like, if the community tells me... I loved Poland's presentation at Funnel Hacking Live it's like, "Ask, go ask your community. What did they tell you?" And so, that's what we did. I went to my Facebook group and I went on my Instagram and luckily, I have a pretty engaged following that will give us lots of feedback back. And this theme that kept coming up was funnels. And obviously, this is your world. But it was interesting because I've been talking with several different higher level people that are like, "How are all the funnels, they made tens of millions of dollars or whatever?" And it's like, "This funnel's not really working anymore. This funnel's kind of working here. This type of funnel is working." And so there's like, I feel like we're in this phase of funnels are almost evolving, where it used to be that you could run an ad to a webinar and sell a 9.97 product, and make a million bucks, and high profit margins, and you can make it work. But I was talking to Dan Henry the other day and he's like, "Dude, I can't even make that work anymore." And he's like, "And I'm brilliant at ads." And like Sam Ovens, I was talking to him the other day- Russell: Dan Henry, "I know everything." I love Dan. Josh: And Sam Ovens was like, "Man, we're probably going to shut down our front-end $2,000 program and we're going to transition up and evolve the way we do funnels." And so, funnels are the thing, obviously. They're going to be around forever, they've been around forever, you popularized them. But I want to go and take this into two parts and see where this goes. But number one, what is the foundation of funnels? What are the things that like... it doesn't matter how it's executed, the funnel itself, this is the thing that works. Because I think a lot of people get confused that... Whenever I talk to a lot of my students that are building funnels, they're like, "Should I do this type or this?" And I'm like, "The core essence of funnels doesn't change," so what are the core essence of funnels? And then two, what is the future of what that looks like rolled out with technology? Because I mean, I know it's not here yet and one of the things we'll talk about, but- Russell: Metaverse. Josh: We got Metaverse. And my wife was like, "Oh my gosh, ask Russell. If I want to be able to walk into Metaverse and Russell's going to be right there being like, "'Hey, do you want to buy my funnel cake,' click this button and you go into a portal. Instead of another page, you enter a new world that is Russell's world, that'd be so cool." But let's start with the foundation of funnels. When someone is building a funnel, when they're looking at it, what are the core pieces that they're actually looking at? Take us back to the foundation of that because I think a lot of people miss that or forget. Russell: Yeah. So, I'll take you back in history back in time so back to my beginning. Think what example I have sitting here on my desk that I can show you. So, the core, the thing you have to understand why funnels are essential, and why they'll always be here, comes back to my favorite Dan Kennedy quote of all time which is, "Whoever can spend the most money to acquire customer wins." This is the foundation but... Everything else you have understand- Josh: Like 7,000 speakers at Funnel Hacking Live all said that. Russell: Yeah, because it's the thing. In fact, you'll see, if you look at the... And maybe we'll get into this. My next move, what's happening next year for me? I'm looking at this, all ties into that as well. Why did I buy Dan Kennedy's company? Why am I doing these things? And I'll show you it's literally to solve that exact same question. So, when I got started 20 years ago, people didn't have offers yet they just had a product. So, you would be... Just say a book, like, "Okay, here's my book," and I would just sell a product, and that was what I was selling. And it worked for a long time and then guess what? Everyone else is like, "Oh, dude's making money with this product, I can make a product," they make the same product. Now you got 10 people selling a product that's similar. And so, then it's harder to compete because now you're no longer a unique thing, you are a commodity. And anytime you're a commodity, the person with the lowest price always wins. So, as soon as everyone's doing it, you got to drop at the bottom and then you lose your margin and then life sucks because if you don't profit what's the point of what we're doing? So, there's the first phase. So, then the next phase is like, "Okay, well I got a product, everyone's got the same product but how do I turn this from a product into an offer?" That was the first evolution. It's like, "Hey, when you buy my book, you also get my book, but you're also going to get my video course, my audio course, and then my checklist and my..." And all of a sudden you make something truly unique again where it's like, not just a product, but this is my offer that's specific, unique to me, that nobody else has. So that was the next evolution. And we got really good then in making offers that were sexy. It's like, "Oh yeah, everyone's selling this, but mine, if you get mine, you also da da, da, da, these other things." Right? And that's where this whole offer development started happening. In my mind, probably 15 years ago is when this became the thing that we all focused on. And whoever had the best offer was going to win because ads didn't ship that much. It was just like you're competing so now you're competing with six different people or 10 different people. So because that, Google ads AdWords cost went up, because there's 20 people bidding on the same keyword versus just you, initially. Now you're coming in, you make a better offer. Then you get the lion share people buy from you because your offer is the best. That was kind the next phase. And then of course the market evolves. Everyone gets smart. Everyone starts making good offers. Now it's like, maybe they're unique offers, but they're all good offers. Now it's like the market's getting fragmented up again. And so this is where the evolution now of funnels started happening where... And it was before. We didn't have one click up-sales back in the day. But the first thing was like: you buy my potato gun DVD, fill in your credit card, you buy it. The next page, you're like, "Do you want the potato gun kit? Cool. Get your credit card back out and fill it out again." And they'd fill out all the credit card again. Josh: Dang. Russell: But even with that, there's no one-click up-sales, man, like 15, 20, 30% people would buy the second thing. And all of a sudden, I'm selling a potato gun DVD, but I'm making 200 bucks on the back of the kit and nobody else selling potato gun DVDs was doing. I could outspend them all. So even though costs me more per click, I was able to get all the clicks because I made way more money than anybody else. So I was able to dominate the market. And that was kind of the next phase. And what's interesting is that depending on the market you're in, depends on where this is. For example, I'm in a fun phase where I wanted some side projects. So I'm launching a couple supplement companies. The first supplement company launched is called Zooma Juice. It's a green drink company. And some of you guys know, I actually worked with Drew Canole and his team back in the day on Organifi, and helped them launch that when it first came out seven years ago, and helped him build an actual funnel. And what's interesting is because of that... The green drink market is sophisticated. I went and funnel hacked, probably, 30 green drink offers before we built Zooma Juice. And all of them have pretty advanced funnels. Everyone's doing the best practices pretty well. Second company that we are starting, I acquired a bone broth company. And so I took... Got bone broth company and went funnel hacked every bone broth offer. And that market's new. Nobody had a funnel, not one. They have an offer, they have a product, that's it. And I'm like, "I'm walking into virgin funnel territory." We’ll be the biggest bone broth company on the planet in like 30 days? Because there's nobody who understands any of what we're talking about. We'll outspend everybody 10 to 1 because we understand the funnel structure. So depending on what market you're in, some markets haven't even evolved to the funnels yet. Some have, that's exciting. If they have, it's like, "Cool. We got... We can funnel hack. We get good ideas of what's working." If it hasn't like, "Man, you can bring all the stuff we know into these markets and just dominate and destroy them all." It was funny, as we were buying, I was funnel hacking the bone broth offers, I was like, "There's literally not single upsell, order form bump, email sequence. Like nothing." I was just like, "This is like, oh, embarrassing. Almost too easy." That was next phase though. And then to your point, initially it was like... In fact, I remember 10 pre-click funnels. Almost every funnel was the same. It was a video sales letter order button order form upsell one, upsell two, down-sell, down-sell. Thank you, basically. That was what a funnel was. In fact, if you look at, before we launched ClickFunnels, the first T and C event, Ryan Dice and Perry, and they had this whole team event talk about, "Here's the funnel." And they had a funnel and there's only one. And it was just like, "This is the five steps of every funnel." And it fits. It was like trip wire. They had these five steps like trip wire, profit maximizer, and they five or six... They had a name for each page. And it was like, "This is the funnel." And in reality, that was the funnel. There weren't funnels. It was like, "This is a funnel. This is kind of the one." And at the time when I was writing The Dot Com Seekers book and we had been playing with different ones, but there wasn't a lot of this thing out there. Was just kind of like, for the most part, there was a funnel. After ClickFunnels came out and it gave people the ability to create things fast and start innovating, creating ideas, that. And then I was like writing all my ideas in the book and people are doing stuff. It started evolving quickly. Last seven years have evolved where now there's been like a million different funnel things come out, from webinar funnels, auto webinar funnels, high funnels, low ticket funnels, trip wires, SLOs VSLs, challenges, paid challenges, free challenges, challenges to a webinar challenges to high tickets, a webinar to high ticket. There's a billion variations that come from that which probably gets people overwhelming. And so this os what I want to tell them because, this kind of comes back to your first questions, what is it? The reality is, it's going to be shocking for most of you guys, what funnel type you use doesn't really matter. They all work. The thing that matters is the offer. You still have to make the sexiest offer. That's still the most important. We acquired Dan Kennedy's company and we're doing this merger. And like I've spent I podcast episode this morning driving to the office. I've been up every single morning at 5:00 AM because I'm so excited. Because we have a fun, we picked a funnel on structure, we have all of products. I spend a week every morning at 5:00 AM, from 5:00 till like 7:30, when my kids are getting up, in there writing the page for the copy and the offer, and then tweaking and tweaking. That's the thing. The sexiness of the offer that gets people in is the key. So I can get them in, I can use this to get them in a webinar, in a challenge, in a free plus shipping. It doesn't matter. It's like the offer is the thing that puts people in a momentum. And the thing that I'm selling, I could sell it in the webinar. I could sell it in the challenge. I like there's I could sell in all the different funnels. It would fit in all of them. I'm picking the one that I'm using because I think it's going to go... For like the launch campaign, it the one that'll probably get sells the fastest, but it'll work in all of them. And So it's understanding that, it's still coming to the core fundamentals. The funnel structure is the sales process. All of them will work. You just got to figure out better way to sell. Like that's the harder thing that people are missing. Josh: All right. So let's talk... I want to dive into that offer. When you say specifically here... Because I think, and this is just from coaching with a lot of people, the questions that I get asked when I talk about this type of stuff. You talk about the offers, the sexy thing, but how does the offer affect getting somebody to opt in? How does the offer affect my ad? How does the offer affect the training? I don't show my offer until the end after the whole thing. So how does that affect every other step of the funnel? Russell: Okay, great question. So if I can see one here. Right, sorry. I had all the examples here a second ago. Oh, well. I'll just tell you the story. So when Dan Kennedy started his newsletter, in the Dan Kennedy company, the newsletter's the foundation of everything. And we could do a whole podcast episode just on psychology of the original GKIC, when Bill Glazer was running it with Dan. But the newsletter- Josh: Sounds like a sexy topic. Russell: Yeah. It'd be really fun, actually. I love... In fact, it's funny because I spent so much time with Bill Glazer geeking out about. I knew their business really well. And when that they sold it the very first time people bought it and didn't understand the business. And I saw within weeks of them destroying the foundation, I was like, "You guys literally don't know what you bought. You should have asked some questions before you wrote a check that big anyway." But the core is the newsletter. And so I had a chance to go back in the archives. I literally... they gave me, "Here's Google drive. Everything's ever been created." So I'm like, "This is... It's insane." for nerdy Russell, everything Dan's ever said is in this drive. And most of it, no one's ever seen before, so I'm freaking out. But the newsletter started back in like 1995 ish. I was like 15 years old when it started and it was just a newsletter. That's all it was right. It's like a product. That's how they sold it. And from '95 till I think I was probably 23, 24. So, 2004, 2005 ish was when Bill Glazer bought out the company from Dan and kind of ran it, and then they launched it. Instead of a newsletter, they launched it as an offer. And the offer at the time... I still remember the day it happened because I got like 400 emails from my Yanik Silver and all the different gurus at the time. They all started emailing about this Dan Kennedy offer. And it was called the most incredible free gift ever. And in fact, internally in the company called the MIFGE offer, M-I-F-G-E, the most incredible free gift ever. And what it was, it was like, "Hey, when you sign up for magnetic marketing net letter, what you're going to get is you're going to get..." I think it's like, "$639.93 for the money making material from Dan Kennedy himself." So it was like, "We'll give you all this cool stuff when you sign up for the newsletter." And it was the bribe. It's kind of like, if you guys remember back in the day, sports illustrator. It's really hard to sell sports illustrated issues. So what they would do is they would have TV commercials were like, "Here's sports illustrator, 12 issues year about the best sports. When you sign up today, we're going to give you..." And then they had their version of the most incredible free gift offer. It was this huge football clock and the sports illustrator swimsuit issue. That was the MIFGE offer for sports illustrator. And so Dan had their... They had their MIFGE offer, and they went from having five or 600 subscribers at that time to... Bill built it up to over, I don't know, 10, 15, 20. I don't know how big it got it as peak, but 10,000 plus members. And it was because they took a newsletter and they made it an offer. And that's how they launched initially. And so the MIFGE is how they did it. Now, fast forward to Russell gets access to all this stuff. I'm like, "This is amazing." So I'm trying to sit... I sat down Monday morning. No, sorry. It was last Saturday. Saturday. I wanted to write... I didn't want to do all the pages in the offer. So I have some of my team do the upsells and down-sells. I was like, "The landing page, this is mine." I want to write because I want to make sure I get the offer right and everything. Because this is... everything hinges on this. The landing page is broken, nothing works. And so I went and I funnel hacked. I every newsletter, sales letter, I could find throughout time. I just went deep in my archives, way back machine. People I knew who publishing newsletters, looked at every variation of theirs for the last 10 years. I totally geeked out like Russell does. Funnel hacking. I want to understand how people are structuring their newsletter offers. Gore's got a ton of them. So I'm looking at tons of them and everyone I looked at, I come back to like the Dan Kennedy one I'm like this offers just not sexy. More like $630 of money making information sounded cool in 2003. But today, it's like every opt-in, people are giving a thousand dollars worth of free crap. It wasn't that sexy- Josh: Right. Inflation, baby. Oh my word. Russell: Yeah. And then I'm like, "Now my funnel nerds are going to go and they're going to sign for this newsletter, and they're going to get this newsletter from Dan. He's talking about direct mail and faxing. And they're going to be confused and they're going to cancel." I have this weird opportunity. I was like, "This is just not the right thing." And I was like, "How do I make this sexy excited? How do I get myself excited to email about it?" And then Dan's email. I got to get affiliates on board and other people. How do I make this sexy so that I can create the noise? So that when there's an ad, there's a good enough hook in the ad that people are going to click? Because if the ads like, "Old marketing, grumpy marketing genius is going to give you 300 or $639 money making material for free when you join this newsletter," no one's going to click on that. The hook sucks now. It was good in 2003, horrible in 2021. And so I'm like sitting there and I spent three hours just going to yourself. And I was like, no matter how I tried, the offer just didn't feel right. And I explain to other knight, I was like, "I know I wouldn't click and I know I wouldn't buy it. And I don't want to even email my list tell them about it because it's not that exciting. How do I structure this in a way that's going to be really exciting?" And so that the problem. This is where I got stuck at. Right. And then, after about three hours of it is when I had the light bulb, I was like, "Oh my gosh." So all of the current Dan Kennedy customers, they love Dan. They're obsessed with them. And actually, this is a fascinating step. You'll appreciate this. Have you read a thousand true fans? Josh: Yeah. I love that book. Russell: It was crazy. So Dan's company was sold initially like 10 years ago, from Bill Glazer sold it. In the last 10 years, they haven't bought a single ad. So that's the attrition of the company, that's been happening. And I'm acquiring it like, "Oh, let's buy some ads." But what's crazy is 10 years since they bought the last ad, there are almost, to a T, it's like 990 something active paid subscribers still on a newsletter a decade later, without any ads at all. A thousand true fans. Is that crazy? Josh: That's insane. Russell: Really? Josh: And you're one of those true fans because you bought the whole company. Russell: Yeah. I thought that was a fascinating side note. So anyway, that's crazy. Like Dan's people love Dan. They love him talking. If they want Dan, but they need funnels. And I'm like, I don't want to come and be the guy who acquires the company and just starts emailing his own offer. I need them to.. I need to indoctrinate them to want it. So it's like, they're going to read Dan's newsletter and how do I bridge that to ClickFunnels? And I'm like, my funnel nerds are going to read his newsletter and be like, "I don't understand. This isn't..." They need it. They don't know they want it yet. If I can indoctrinate them for a while, they'll be like, "Oh my gosh, I get this," but it's going to take a while for them to really respect it enough that they'll get it. I was the same way. First time I heard Kennedy, I was like, "This guy's old, boring, and doesn't relate to what I'm talking about." And after I went deep in, I was like, "Oh my gosh, everything he says is literal. He's handing gold nuggets out." And I was just like, I didn't notice them. Now I'm like, "Oh my gosh." And so I was like, "I need this bridge." And some people know, when I first joined the Kennedy world, we actually launched my first print newsletter right afterwards. It was called The Dot Com Seekers Journal. It morphed from The Dot Com Seekers Journal to eventually call it, The Dot Com Seekers Labs. And then it became a Funnel Report and then it became Funnel University. So I actually ran a print newsletter for 14 years. We shut it down two years ago, but 14 years I ran a print newsletter. Josh: Yeah. I remember when you shut it down actually. Russell: Yeah. And I loved it, but I just, anyway... There's reasons like the person who was publishing it, she had a baby and she retired and all these things. I was just like, "Ah. I'm, I'm focusing ClickFunnels. Don't even worry about this right now." So we shut it down. But I loved that part of it. And I was like, what if I create an offer where the concept, the story, the hook of this whole entire thing is like, "Russell bought Dan company and they're coming together to give you two things like the best foundational direct response in the world. Plus the best in the marketing, the cutting edge, the new things are happening. So you can have both sides. So you understand the foundation you need to be able to survive Facebook slapping you and all these things happening and media shifting and changing. But you also have like what's working today so you can capitalize on things in real time." What if we took those two worlds together? The baby. And so instead of just being like, "You're signing for the new, from the Dan Kennedy newsletter," what if it was like, "Dan Kennedy, Russell Brunson?" Two different newsletters. You get two newsletters for the price of one. I was like, "That's the offer. That's the hook. That's what gets affiliates excited, to get ads excited, everything gets excited around this offer." And then, every mornings at 5:00 in this morning, or 5:00 AM every morning this week, I woke up and I'm writing copy for this page of like, "Okay, here's the hook. They're coming in. And there's Dan and there's Russell." How these things are coming together. And the story behind that, how it worked and then the offer instead of just like, "Here's $697 worth of free stuff," it's like, "you get two newsletters. You get the best direct response, best of Russell, every two weeks." So you get one in the mail and then 14 days later, you get the next one. And you're getting both of these. You get the old and the new but you only pay one price. You get both for the price of one. And then you get all Dan's bonus, all Russell's bonuses. Now becomes this like insane offer where, now, it's like, "I'm excited to mail my list." We bought Dan's company, you get all my best stuff in this to get, and it's this combination. And then affiliates will be excited. It just... And maybe the hook bombs, I don't know. But it gave me the energy, just like, "Okay, now, this is exciting and sexy." And so I can turn that into webinar where it's just like, "Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson coming together to literally blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever." Like, "Opt in here to find our webinar," and people would opt in because the story, the hook is exciting or I can do a challenge like, "The seven day challenge. Me and Dan are going to go through how to destroy your business and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And in the end, I'm selling a newsletter or it could be a VSL telling the story with a newsletter or could be... all of them work. The book is the secrets of story. Josh: Well, what it sounds like... Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it sounds like you just created this story about the offer. And now that you know what the offer is, and there's a reason that that came together and like, "That's what it is," now, you understand the story behind that. I'm trying to think of it like an analogy. For example, Disney world. That offer is so good. You're literally going into a different world that pretty much sells itself once you put it out there. And so once you have the story, once you have that idea around what the offer does and how it's unique and how it's it's own unique thing, then you can just take that and then it fills the rest of the funnel. Because everybody wants that thing because now the offer itself is so good. And I think one of the problems that I had, man, for so long is, I was trying to convince people that they wanted my thing be... Or convince people that they had this problem, and then that they wanted this thing, and then I would make them an offer on it. And they wouldn't get to... they wouldn't even know about the offer, or what the offer did, or like anything about it, until like forced or like right before the offer. And they'd be like, "And then I've got this offer? Boo." And because of that, there was no story around it. There's no congruency with it. And so then it was like, "Oh, I didn't even know. That's what I was here for." And then I would like try to sell them something and it wouldn't sell. And I feel like that's the problem that got solved right there, is like first you created the offer and the story around the offer and you made it sexy. And then that made everything else on the funnel super, super easy, because you were just pointing them back to that. Russell: Everything, the funnel plus all the ads. Because now the ads are fun. "Why Dan Kennedy came out of retirement? Dan Kennedy almost died. What's he doing today?" All a sudden, all these hooks that tie into that. "Why did Dan Kennedy partner with the owner ClickFunnels? Why did... Is it true that ClickFunnels was built off the back of all Dan Kennedy principles?" There's so many stories I can tell now that are hooks. That'll grab his people in or my people in or... And then the landing page. And then... It creates everything. And the people that the best in the world of this, and they also make the most money, is Agora. The good Gora publishing. They're selling newsletters. That's all they sell. Right. But every single time they have these insane stories like Porter Stan's got... I think maybe not still, but for like a decade and a half, the highest of all the Agora divisions. I think he'll do like 1.5 or 2 billion dollars a year. Like these are big divisions. Porter's letter one. And, the story was like, "The railroad across America." And it was talking about like, "The original railroad, how it happened and all the people made money along the way. And this is the next railroad that's being built. It's the digital highway and all this stuff." And that offer was selling a newsletter. But it's the story behind it that became this thing that built a billion dollar company. And they're good. They're so good at figuring out the story, those kind of things. And I think sometimes we're like, "Hey, I've created a course in the passed. You should create a course too. I made money. It's going to be awesome." And then like, "You should buy my course creating software or whatever." Like, "That's not the thing." We're so bad at telling stories. We brag about our result. We tell them making the same result and that's it. It's like, no, that's not the key. It's the story. It's the entry. It's the... We want to be entertained. We want to be courted. We want to be... that's the game we're playing in marketing. And so when you figure that out... The offer is actually sexy. And then why is that sexy? The sexiness is not just, "You get a bunch of crap." The sexiness is the story about like how this was created. Josh: Literally what it does that. Russell: That’s the fascinating part. Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Catherine Jones. One of her favorite things is, "When your stories become their stories, then your solutions become their solutions." and that's literally what this is. If you can tell them a story where they like it and they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing," then, go and do it. So for example, Harry Potter world. The story, it... My wife freaking loves Harry Potter world. I mean, that was her thing. When we went down to Funnel Hacking Live, it was like, we were going to take a half a day just to go to Harry Potter world. So we showed up and then it was like, "Hey." Miles is like, "Dude, the buss is leaving for Harry Potter world." There wasn't much convincing that has to be done. The story is, "Oh my gosh, Harry Potter world's amazing. It's Harry Potter. I want it" She wanted that thing because of the story that was leading up to it. There was no, "What's Harry Potter world? Is it any good? What's this?" It's like, "No, it's Harry Potter world." And you're like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I want it." That's like the story with that. So that's super, super interesting. So where do you see the future of funnels going? Because obviously there's a lot of changes coming with ClickFunnels and ClickFunnels 2.0, which, oh my gosh, I'm so excited. Gusting. Gusting hits me up. Probably... Dude, he probably hits me up once a week and is like, "Hey, guess what? ClickFunnel 2.0 is awesome. And you don't have it." And I'm like, "I heard you. Stop." Russell: He actually built out the magnetic marketing funnel hub right now for me, which is cool. Josh: So, yeah. So anyway, but what's the next evolution? And we don't have really have too much to talk about metaverse and where that goes. But we're entering this new world. I mean, the world is changing very, very, very rapidly. COVID is one of those things that we thought the internet was a big deal, and internet marketing was a big deal, pre-COVID, and then we watch zoom blow up by like 3000% or something like that. And they ruin zoom for us. But anyway, so where are things going that people should be paying attention to and going actually studying and understanding about the future of funnels? Because one of the things that I've been really, really focused on and we're kind of getting dialed in, is community funnels, Specifically, I think for me, one of the things that I've noticed is that it's very, very... It's getting increasingly harder to sell things unless you have a community that's tied with it. And so like for me, one of the things we're focusing on is how do we build funnels inside of our community where our community actually becomes part of the funnel? Which is kind of a cool concept. What do you see as those future things of where funnels are headed, where the big opportunities are going to be? What's the next add to webinar to a 9 97 course? You know what I'm saying? What's the future? Where we're heading? Russell: I hate to make it sound simple, but if I come back to the fundamentals we talked about the beginning of this call. Like Dan Kennedy, whoever can spend the most money to acquire customer wins. So you look at it through that lens. Went from a product, to an offer, to a funnel. And now with the funnel, I have more ways to make money. And then, from there, the next evolution was like from funnel to value ladder. Right now, it's like, I have a break even funnel and move people up a value ladder and that's how I may lose money or break even on my book funnel, but then my webinar funnel's going to make money or vice versa. Right? Josh: Right. Russell: That was the next phase. And I think, for me, where I'm playing because I'm trying to play for the next 10 years. How do I win this game? We're doing well. I want to.. How do I get a point where, Shopify, or Salesforce is like, "I want to write you a check for 20 billion because you're such annoyance." The way I'm going to do that, for me, is... and it comes back to why did I acquire Magnet Marketing? Why did I buy Brad Callin’s company? Why am I doing this? Because I'm not looking at breakeven funnels anymore. Breakeven funnels, awesome. I'm going one chair back or I'm building breakeven businesses. So magnetic marketing, the only gold magnetic is to break even. The entire company, the value ladder, the coaching, the everything. So every penny made side of magnetic marketing be dumped back into ads, want 100% of the profits dump back into ads. So this company's blowing up. And I get now all these things dumped into my value ladder for ClickFunnels. Like that's it. Voomly doing 40 million a year? Why do we acquire that company? Tons of lead flow. Now, right now there's... it was 10 million dollars a year net profit. All that money now is being dumped directly into lead flow as a breakeven business, to acquire customers for ClickFunnel. So I think it's going deeper. It's looking past... from product to offer, to funnel, to value ladder, to how do I buy or acquire or create something where the only goal of this entire business is just get customers for free that can put into here. And I thing, for me, that's the next level is just like that thought. Josh: You just blew my mind, dude. Holy cow. You're creating an ecosystem, but in a very specific way. It's interesting, as you just told that out, just, "First, it was this. Then, it was this." The thing before it didn't change. That's still part of it. Russell: It's both the same. Yeah. Josh: Right. But it's kind of that next evolution, that next piece of where that comes out. That's fascinating. I think a lot of people need to just really rewind that, go listen to that clip again and let your brain sit on that. Russell: That's how I'm playing the game. Yes. Hopefully I'm four step ahead everyone else, but I'm all for showing that with you guys. And so I just... Again, for everyone to start thinking that, because it's going to get harder. It's going to get more expensive. It's going to get more... We've seen that this year. Ad costs have gone up. It's not going to get cheap. It's not going to bounce back down and be cheaper. It's going to keep doing that. The people who only had a product back in the day are out of business. People only had an offer back in day, they're out of business. People don't have a funnel are out of a business. People don't have a value ladder out of a business. So it's just thinking ahead of that. Metaverse or whatever next step is, doesn't really matter. It's the principle still is the same for me. For 20 years, whoever can spend the most money to acquire customer wins. Josh: Wins. Russell: How do I do that in a way that serves the customers, brings them in and then... I'll end on this, because it back to what you said. And I did a podcast on this. It's in the facts I got from Dan Kennedy. After the company sold last time, he was super mad at the company that had jacked up his brand and his legacy and stuff. And so like he sent this 25 page facts, like all the things to do to fix it. And there's one paragraph where he said, "There's difference between why customers come in and why they stay." He said, "People think they're the same things." He's like, "No, no, they're different." Why they come in is because they see the hook of like, "Ooh, the scene." They come in from that. They stay for something different. And you have to understand that. So like I had my inner circle meeting, right. Everyone paid 50 grand to be in the room. We had a hundred entrepreneurs in the room and I told them. I said like, "Well, you guys all because you want to learn funnels from Russell." But I'm like, "The reason why you came is not why you were going to stay here. The reason I get sick year, after year, after year is because of the community." That's it. That's why I sat in Dan Kennedy rooms for six years of my life is because the community built and I wanted to be around these people. I came for Dan stuck for the community. And I think that you start understanding that, that's how you get these people to come in on a front end, but they stay and they buy over and over and they stay on continuity. They stick because it's like.. They come in from a hook, but they stay for the something different. And so really understanding that and then weaving everything you're doing like you're doing now with the community funnels, which is perfect. Josh: That's amazing. That's amazing. All right. Well I think that's a good ending point for that topic. Russell: There's episode number two of our hangout today, which was amazing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With everything we have to do... does podcasting really make sense? Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. We've got three special episodes for you. The first one, well, actually all three of them are with my guest host, Josh Forti. We're going to be breaking down some cool things. The first episode... What happened in the first episode? It was really good. Josh Forti: Yeah. We talked all about podcasting, why podcasting is important. Russell: Yeah, podcasting. So episode number one, we learned about podcasting, why we do it, how we do it, the reasons behind it, and a whole bunch of other things. If you haven't been doing a podcast yet, it's going to sell you on why you need to do one. If you have done one, it's going to show you guys why and how to amplify it, and why it's so important and how to find your best buyers from it. I hope you guys enjoy this episode. We'll cue up the theme song, and we'll be right back. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Like I said today, the next actually couple episodes, I've got a guest host with me, which I'm pumped for. We actually did two podcasts. Well, technically, they were podcasts episodes for your podcast, right? Josh: Yeah. Russell: And I ripped them off for my podcast because they turned out so good. One is after the Atlas Shrugged book, Josh Forti flew out, and we did... How long? We went for... Josh: It was three and three and a half hours. Yeah. Russell: Three hours. Yeah. Josh: Three and a half hours, yeah. Russell: Going deep into Atlas Shrugged, which was really fascinating. I actually just reread it recently, so if you want to do Round Two, we should totally do that. And then, after I read Atwood and the devil book, I freaked out, and then Josh flew out and we did one there. So you guys who have been listening to the podcast are familiar with him and his voice. But I asked him, I love doing the podcast, but sometimes I fall behind, and my brother who does our podcast settings, "Russell, any episode today?" I'm like, "Huh." I don't even know what to think. I want someone to help come up with ideas so it's not just me. And so Josh went out to the community, asked a bunch of questions and the next couple episodes are going to be some fun conversations. So I'm pumped, man. And thank you for doing this. I know this you're doing this pro bono to hang out and just to help me out, so I appreciate that. And I'm excited to find out what people want to know about. Josh: Yeah, for sure. I love podcasting. That's my life. If I could do one thing, it would just be, have a show that we just talk all the time. So this is fun for me. It's like asking you to come hang out and geek out about funnels. So I'm super excited, though. It's going to be super cool, and dive in further, and pick your brain, and open up a new world that I don't think a lot of people get to see. Russell: Yeah. It's interesting, because I feel that when it's me doing my own podcast, I pick a topic, I go into it. But it's fun when... Yesterday I had a chance to speak at a virtual event thing, and I did my thing and in the end people ask questions. It just opens up a different side that you don't normally do. And so I don't do a lot of Q&A stuff. So I'm excited to... Josh: Yeah. It's interesting. Russell: And maybe this is the only time we do this. Maybe it's a huge train wreck, and this is the only time it happens. Or maybe it becomes a thing. We'll find out. Josh: We'll try to make it not a train wreck. We'll try. We'll do our very best. I think one of the big things though that I want to start with and kick this whole thing off is why you spend so much time with podcasting. Because here's the thing, man. You're rich. We all know it. You don't have to do this. You have this company that you could. We all learned at funnel hacking live, you turned down a billion dollar offer, so clearly you're not doing this for the money. And you've got a company. You've got a team. You've got all these resources. You could spend money on ads. You could do whatever it is that you want. Yet, somehow you are calling me up and are like, "Dude, I need to do podcasts." And to somebody who gets it, and I get it. I have a podcast. I dedicate time when it doesn't make sense. I put money into a podcast that doesn't make sense. On paper, I get and I understand content and putting it out there, and I've never been at your level either. I don't think a lot of people understand. Why do you do it, dude? Why a podcast? And why are you investing so much of the time that you have now, which is limited, I'm sure? There's a lot of people trying for your attention. Why a podcast? And why is that such a core, fundamental piece that you actually spend so much time on, when you clearly don't have to? Russell: I could probably, in fact, I'll probably give you four or five reasons, because there's not just one reason. There's a lot of them. And I actually, I remember when podcasting started. I was at at Armand Morin's BigSeminar, and someone was on stage, Paul Collier was on stage. He's like, "There's this thing coming. It's going to be the greatest thing in the world. It's called podcasting. And you're going to put these things in your ears and listen to people talk." I remember, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. No one will ever listen to that." I just didn't get it. He's like, "No, this is the future." And I remember because I was my roommate at the time was Josh Anderson, some of you may know Josh, and Josh went and bought every podcast domain he could think of. And I was like, "You're dumb. That's never going to happen." But I do remember, "Well, if I ever did a podcast, I'd call it the Marketing In Your Car Podcast, because when I drive my car, I could record it. And I remember thinking that. And I remember I bought, at the time, Marketing In Your Car, and I did nothing with it for, I don't know, eight or nine years. I just had it. In fact, I even paid someone to write an intro song for it. So if you ever go back to the first episodes, the first hundred-something episodes, there was this really... At the time it was so cool, and now it's corny, but there was this theme song that some guy wrote for me. And I had it for five years, this theme song, and I never used it because I was like, "I don't get podcasting." Then in my business life, we had grown up my company at the time. We had a hundred employees. And then, the long story you guys have heard before, is the company crashed. Everything fell around, and it went from a 20,000 square foot office to 2000 square foot office. I felt like an idiot. I was embarrassed. My status was at an all time low. I was weird. And for some reason in that season of my life, I had this impression, "You need to start podcasting and talk about marketing." And I was convinced at this time I was the worst marketer in the world, because I had just crashed my entire empire. I'm an idiot. I didn't want to, but I felt this impression like now it's time to start a podcast. So I literally, from the ashes of my business, started this podcast, and I had at that time a four or five minute drive to the office. Okay, I can be consistent with this. It's going to happen all the time. I'm going to do it. So I got my phone out, I clicked record, and I would literally just drive to my office and I would just talk about what we were trying to figure out. "All right. Today, we're going in the office and working on this new offer, and this is what we're thinking and da, da, da." And then the next steps were, "Oh, we launched the offer and it worked." Or it didn't work. So we tried this. It was just me documenting. It's funny. I heard Vaynerchuk talk about, "Document your journey." And I didn't know. That wasn't a thing at the time, but that's literally what I started doing. And it was nice, because it was something that was so easy. It was easy to be consistent with. I think if I would have had to do a podcast where, for me, if I had a studio and a microphone, all those things, I probably wouldn't have done it because I wouldn't have gotten enough momentum to stick with it. But it was easy. And at first the way we set it up, we couldn't track stats, so we had no idea if anyone was listening, which was a huge benefit. Because had I known how few people were listening, I probably wouldn't have kept doing it. But I just kept doing it and doing it, not really knowing what kind of return was going to happen. It's funny now. I had someone, about a year ago, go through and start from the very beginning and listen all the episodes. I was trying to get some notes and trying to remember. And it was cool, because they started coming back, reporting. He's like, "Did you know on this day you talked about why you thought anyone who wanted to build a company over 10 million dollars in sales was a moron? You should never try to grow company that big. And then over here you talked about, you're never going to hire an employee again." All my thoughts at the time, which have morphed and shifted obviously. But it's this cool thing where I have this record now of this journey from the ashes to ClickFunnels and beyond. So it's been very special for me. Josh: Okay. Sorry. I want to continue down that path, I want to interject right there. The reason I started a podcast is because, literally, you told me to. You didn't physically be like, "Josh, start a podcast." But all your books, all your content, you're like, "Publish, publish, publish, publish, publish." And I'm like, "Okay." And so it started on Facebook. It started on Facebook Live, and then it grew. And then my friend Daxy, he is like, "Dude, turn it into a podcast. Way more people would listen." All right. So I have, I don't know, four or five hundred episodes now on my podcast that I have done with you and all these different interviews or whatever. But what I tell people is, and this is true in all areas of my life, I'm so blatantly honest on my podcast. I don't filter or mince my words at all. Shocking. Russell: You're filtered on Facebook and Instagram, you're telling me? Josh: Just a little bit. But what's interesting is one of the things that you pointed out there was you have this document. You have this record of exactly where you were at at the time. And so for me, one of the things... And this is bigger than just podcasting. When you're just blatantly honest with yourself and where things are at, and you just turn on the microphone and you just talk, you actually can go back and you can watch your progress. And you can see. Oh man, when I was 26 years old, when this happened, this is what I thought about life, or this is what I thought about this particular topic, or this is what I was learning here. When I'm building a funnel or I'm building something that I knew I worked on in the past and I talked about it, I can literally go back, and I can remember the struggles. And I think it was you. It might have been. It might have not been you. It might have been Gary. I think it was you, though. You were like, "Imagine if Jeff Bezos would've documented every single day or every single week building Amazon." How much people would pay for that. That would be so epically cool. That's what it's like. So I totally understand what you're talking about there. I feel like people are embarrassed to start, they're embarrassed where they're at now. And so they don't want to put it out there. I'll never forget Liz Benny. Obviously, you know Liz. She's amazing. I had her on my podcast. This is probably a year and a half ago. And she's like, "Josh, I've watched you grow so much." And I'm like, "Really?" She's like, "Oh yeah." I'm like, "How do you know?" She's like, "Because I listen to your podcast." And it was like, "Oh, this is a long term thing." It was at that moment that I realized it. Russell: Uh huh. For sure. It's interesting because, if I haven't publicly talked much about this yet, but I've been acquiring old books. I just bought this whole, literally, library of Napoleon Hill books and stuff. And it's been so fascinating because I'm reading through and these are the records of these people and their beliefs and their thoughts. I've got old magazines from early 1900s, late 1800s. I'm reading. I found articles from Thomas Edison, who were in the publishing these. I'm reading this stuff and it's so cool. And one thing, this is Russell guilt. In the Mormon church one thing they always talk about is, you need to keep a journal, so that way your posterity has this thing. And I've never been good at keeping a journal. And what I started realizing as I'm going through all the Napoleon Hill stuff, I'm so grateful that they wrote these things down and they have this journal. And I started from that guilt again. And all of a sudden I was like, "Wait a minute. I don't have a journal, but I've been podcasting now for seven years." This is my record. This is, when I'm dead, my kids or my grandkids or my posterity or people, whoever it is. This is how they're going to learn about me and figure out who I was. And hopefully I shortcut them some trial and error. Here's the journey I went on, but here's what I figured out. I can help them. I think all of us are always talking about wanting to leave an impact. I think my podcast episodes, I'm hoping these are my journals. These are my records. This is like what I just bought from Napoleon Hill. I'm hoping that this becomes something for the future generations that they can build their businesses off and their ideas and their plans. Because my podcast is... It's a marketing podcast, but I don't talk about marketing most of the time. I talk about my family and my kids, and I'm learning, and my personal development and all the things. Marketing is just the hook I got people in, but it's my life record. It's my journal, which is cool too. Josh: Yeah, that is super cool. It's funny. Quick side note, we have to shut down this indifferent theory, because Apple.... Russell: Just spell it different. Josh: Yeah. Believe me. We've tried some things. I'm not trying to push against the biggest company in the world. So anyway, we have a new name. I'm not going to say it yet, but it's coming. But anyway, in the last just couple weeks, I've had to pause doing podcasts. And it's weird because what you said right there is, "I don't keep a journal." But I know that I do keep a journal via that exact same thing. And it was weird. I went to my wife literally two days ago. And I was like, "I need you to, to help me create a system for the short term to be able to document my thoughts because right now I'm not doing it. And I have so many things that we're going through right now." So I totally get that. But I feel like there's got to be more than that. There's got to be another reason besides just the documentation process for the podcast for you. Russell: For sure. That's the first thing. Again, I got four or five that run in my head, so I don't know what the order they'll come out in. But the next one is eventually I wrote a book. And people were like, "These books are so good. How do you know all these stories?" And for me, I have an idea, and the idea percolates in my head for a minute, and I got to tell someone. So usually first person I tell is usually the podcast. I'm thinking about this thing and I talk about it. And so I tell the story the first time. The first time it may not even be that fleshed out. Then I get to the office and I see Dave over there. Dave's excited. I'm like, "Dave, check this out." And I tell it to him again. And then I tell someone else. And then I'm doing an interview and I say it again. And I tell the story four or five, six times, and I get better and better at telling the story. And then when I'm at a seminar and I'm on stage and I'm talking. I have no idea which direction I'm going. All of a sudden, this thing will pop up my head. I've told that story six times three months ago, and it appears. I remember Tony Robbins told me this. He said, "When I go on stage, I have a plan, but the plan, it never goes to plan. I start talking." And then he's like, "These downloads just come from God or from the universe, and they just show up." And for me, as I started podcasting and telling these stories over and over and over again, that's exactly what happens now. When I need something, I'm in a situation, I'm coaching someone, I talking, I'm on an event or a stage or something. I need something often that just, it appears when I need it. And I think it's because I didn't just think about it and forget about it. I think about it. I tell it on a story. It's published. I tell someone else. And then when I write a book, I've told the story 400 times. I know the best way to tell the story now. I've seen what people laugh at, what they don't laugh at, how to do it the right way. In fact, it's interesting, my next book is a personal development book. I've struggled with that one, because I don't have a personal development podcast. And I haven't tested these stories, these principles or these theories. I've been stuck, as you know. I sent you the rough draft eight months ago, and I haven't written a word since then. Part of it is I haven't had a chance to flesh these things out. So it gives me idea to flush out my ideas is another one of them. Another one that's interesting... I don't know the exact stats, but I read it somewhere. I think I talked about on Traffic Secrets.I put it in there. But conceptually, they talked about people who are podcast listeners versus the rest of humanity. And I'm going to tell you about the stat, and I'll tell you how the practical application of that stat, which is really fascinating. So the stat was something like the average person who listens to the radio makes, I don't know, $60,000 a year. And whereas the average podcast listener makes $120,000 a year. So the people you are getting and acquiring, they are people with more spending power. They're more affluent people that are the kind of people who are trying to develop their brain, their minds, things like that. They're more likely to buy a course or software or a Mastermind or things like that, because they're the kind of people who aren't just listening to the radio to numb themselves. They're listening to audio to grow. That's the fascinating thing that you're getting a better caliber customer who are listening. Number two, you are getting them in their most intimate moments. When do you listen to a podcast? It's when I'm working out and I'm by myself and it's me and them, and I have their full attention. I'm not listening to a podcast where I'm writing an email or texting someone. Or I'm in the car driving. I'm getting access to their brains and their minds in their most intimate moments. But it's just me and them. Even video. Josh: It's not even like that on YouTube either. Russell: Yeah. I'll watch a YouTube video while I'm cooking dinner, while I'm doing five other things. Josh: That's super interesting. Russell: I don't listen to podcasts with my kids in the room, because they're going to ask me a question. They're going to mess it up. It's when I'm separate and it's just me and them and that's it. I have a different level of intimacy with the podcast people that I'm listening to. So the higher quality customers, better level of intimacy, and then the practical application. The first time I really got this, it was after I launched my Inner Circle the very first time. And again, it was funny, because I always told everybody I never money on my podcast. I’m doing this podcast, I'm not making any money from it… And as I did it for four or five years, and I launched my first version of my first version of my Inner Circle, and we had a point where we had about 33 people in it paying 25 grand. And I remember at one of the events, somebody asked, "How did you guys bump into Russell?" And all of them were like, "Oh, I saw something, but then I got on this podcast, and I listened to him every single day while I was working out for six months. And he kept talking about this Inner Circle and talking about this thing. He's going to get all these things." And it was fascinating. Almost everyone in the room, they didn't hear about my podcast. Podcast isn't good for lead gen. It's never. Josh: Yeah. It's horrible for lead gen. Russell: You can't just buy ads and blow up your podcast. But people find out about you. They plug in to your podcast. And the people who make that transition from, "I saw a book." "I saw an ad." "I saw something." And they make that transition where they actually get the phone out, subscribe, and then plug you in. Those become your best customers, your highest buyers. They're the best. And so the practical application is yes, by doing this podcast, I'm taking... And I talk about this in Expert Secrets. And actually my Inner Circle meeting last month, we talked a lot about this. We talked about creating a new opportunity versus an improvement offer. And for the most part you want to create new opportunities. That's what gets people in the door. And I told everyone, your value ladder should be this new opportunity. There's opportunity stacking. The back of the value ladder, there's one section that's saved for people with ambition. New opportunity is all about getting people who have a desire to come in. But people with ambition, and the percentage of your audience is small. The percentage of people who have true ambition, it might be 15 to 20%, maybe. Josh: Yeah. Russell: But those are your most ambition. I told them my Master, I didn't sell you guys new opportunity. Do you want to come to Boise and talk to other entrepreneurs? Or are you going to get better and stronger and smarter, all the ER words? You guys are the ones at the top of the value ladder. You are ambitious. So I'm not selling you new opportunity. I'm selling you guys improvement. And it's the hardest thing to sell, but it's what one tier of your audience wants. I feel like same thing, the people who are listening to your podcasts, these are the people who want improvement. These are the ambitious ones. They're not the tire kickers. And so it's the best way to convert people in their highest ticket backing things as well. Josh: Yeah. And I also think, one thing that's very important to point out, I think here, is the style slash type of podcast that you particularly create. Because I've studied a lot of different podcasts. Joe Rogan obviously is a big inspiration of mine when it just comes to creating content or whatever. But what's interesting is that the type of content that a Joe Rogan creates, or that even a Logan Paul or any of the bigger mainstream podcasts, oftentimes it's much more for entertainment. And Joe Rogan, I think, maybe is the blend between the two. But a lot of podcasts, they're not specifically for solving a very specific problem. And so what I always say about specifically the type of podcast that you create, you or Steve or whatever, your type of podcast is horrible for lead generation, but is amazing for lead education. It's because once they're in there, you have that. And what's interesting is one of the times that I listened to your podcast most... I'm going to let you guess. I'm sure you're not going to get it. But what do you think one of the times I listened to your podcast most? Russell: When you're driving somewhere in your car. Josh: That's a time. Yeah. But it's when I'm in pain. When I have a specific pain around my funnel, I will literally go, "Russell has this podcast. He's got all these episodes. I bet you he's talked about it." And so I'll literally go on my phone and I'll keyword search for different things. And I'll specifically go. There was one time I was listening to, it was something about a webinar or something, and you were talking about how you wrote your headlines and basically how you came up with your framework for it. And I remember you did that one time. And so I was struggling with it, and so I literally searched it and I did it. And so the type of podcast that you create, in my head there's two different ones. There's one for entertainment. And then there's one for education. And you create one specifically for education. And when you do that, that's the type of podcast or that's the type of content that literally goes and educates your member. And when you have that, a hundred percent, my top buyers, anybody that gives me top dollar for my stuff, they all listen to my podcast or have been on my podcast and I'll pull something out of it. They're always the ones that pay the most money. For sure. Russell: For sure. It's interesting too. And there's, as you said, a lot of formats. When I did mine, I did a short form for a couple reasons. Number one is it was my drive to the office, so that's how it started. But number two, I love Joe Rogan and I probably listen to one of his entire podcast ever. Josh: Oh my gosh. I probably listen to a hundred of them at least. Russell: And I get overwhelmed, because each one's four hours long and there's all these different people. Everyone keeps talking recently about the Jewel one. "It's the greatest thing in the world. You've got to listen to it." Four hours. I could get a whole audio book, the entire book done in four hours. Is that worth the investment? I don't ever want to dive into it, because it's so big. Whereas mine, again, someone's in the car and only got a 10 minute commute. Boom. Throw it in. They get an episode. And then what happens is they get hooked, and then they'll listen for four hours. So it's different though, because if Joe Rogan's were broken up into even 20 minute blocks, I would probably listen to all of them. Josh: YouTube Joe Rogan clips. It's Joe Rogan experience clips. And it's literally 20 minute episodes. Russell: Oh cool. Josh: So if you ever want to. Russell: That's probably what I would do. And I think it's interesting. And then also another nice thing about short form is people come in, they listen to one... And I get this all the time. People are like, "I got your podcast, listened to three or four episodes, and I loved it. So I started at the very beginning and I binge-listened to all of them." It happens all the time as well. Whereas Joe Rogan, you're not going to binge-listen because that's 65 years worth of content you're going to go through. Mine, they're short. I'm going to go to the beginning. And they start and they binge listen. And then they've gone through your journey with you. And by the time they show up, they know everything that you've ever said. And they're so much easier to work with if they've got that stuff. I think everyone needs... It's one of the things where you're not going to see a big return or not initially. But over time, if you're consistent with it, it's the best thing. And then obviously, I don't use my platform for this, but you do and I think it's brilliant. It gives you access to all these people. Whereas the interviewing people, you get access to people you can't otherwise. Josh: Doors open that you literally can't even understand simply because you're like, "Hey, I have a podcast and hey, I've got these couple other cool players on here. You want to come?" Alex Hormozi is coming on my podcast. I literally reached out to him, "I have a podcast." And a hundred percent, I'm going to admit something to you right now. I was like, "Hey, I had a podcast, and Russell's been on a couple times. You want to come on?" He's like, "I love Russell. Of course I'll come on your show." Russell: That's awesome. Josh: Crazy big doors that get open simply because you have a platform to be able to allow someone to use their voice as well. Russell: I remember, before Tony and I were super close, we met a couple times and stuff, but I remember he was doing some launch. I remember Lewis Howes and him did a big interview. And three or four people they interview sound so annoying. Why is Tony hanging out with these people and not me? And now all of a sudden, I had the ahas. "Lewis Howes has got a big podcast. Oh my gosh. Okay, I need to be able to offer my platform to him to get in that door and really build that relationship." And that's one of the powers of it too. You have a platform, now you've got ability to access people you can't otherwise. As you know. Josh: All right. Two rapid fire questions here really quick. Because I want to move on to the next topic to keep us on track. But number one, what's the Joe Rogan episode that you listened to all the way through? Do you remember which one it was? Russell: Oh, I do know. Yeah. And I actually hate that I listened this one. It was the Gary Vee one. Josh: Oh. Yeah. Russell: And the reason why I listened, because I want to be on Joe Rogan's podcast someday. And I want to see what Gary talked about because... As you know, Gary and I have a... He probably has idea who I am. Josh: You have a light beef. Russell: We've got an interesting relationship. He's not my... Anyway. I've got to make sure I'm the next internet marketer who actually does a better job. Josh: Okay. Two things on that. One, anybody listening, I'm going to do this, so don't take it, but I'll beat you to it. If you ever can get Russell Brunson on Joe Rogan, that's a great Dream 100 gift right there. That would be amazing. Secondly, I've listened to so many episode of Joe Rogan. One of my favorite ones is actually with Kanye. I know everyone thinks Kanye's an idiot. But if you can, that's five hours. It's insane. It's one of the most intense episodes I've ever listened to. But one that is a must-listen to, seriously one of the best podcast episodes ever done is his first interview with Elon Musk. If you ever get the chance, just sit down and listen to it. It's three or three and a half hours, but understanding that dude's mind, Elon Musk, you will not regret that three hours of your life. It was a fantastic episode. So that's the one. Russell: Very cool. Josh: Okay. Last thing here before we move on, are there any other points that we didn't cover about why someone should have a podcast? Wrap up, make your closing arguments around why somebody should go setup a podcast. Russell: The last one I'll say, and I quote Nathan Barry, actually, in Traffic Secrets. And I'll probably mess up the quote, but it was interesting. He talked about how... I think the title of the blog post I share is, You Got to Publish Long Enough to Get Noticed. And he talks about how for most of us there's so much content out nowadays. There's all these things. It's hard to know what's going to be good. 5,000 podcasts launched today. How many Netflix episodes, all sorts stuff. He says most of us find out about a good show at Season Two or Season Three, because of this, we waited to see, our friends talked about it. All of sudden it gets a breaking point where everyone's talking about it, and then you become this overnight success. It's interesting. He said you have to publish long enough to get noticed. And I think that's the biggest thing to understand. Especially most people who are getting started and they're so scared. "I'm going to look like an idiot." "They're all going to make fun of me." "I'm just a beginner." Blah, blah. All these different excuses. The good news is, at the very beginning, no one's listening. Josh: No one's listening. Russell: It doesn't matter. Just do it. This is your chance to actually find your voice and learn how to speak and tell stories, and all those things. No one's listening. And if you keep doing it, I tell people all the time, if you publish consistently for a year, that doesn't mean once a month for a year, daily for a year, or three, four times, five times a week consistently for year. Two things will happen. Number one, you'll find your voice. Number two, your audience will have a chance and have enough time to actually find you. And so it's going out there and just setting it up, the ROI. And I'm a big ROI. You look at my DiSC profile, my number one value is ROI. If I can't see the return on investment on something, it's hard for me to do. It's why I struggled in school. It's why I struggle in awkward conversations. Because I'm like, "What's the point of this?" I don't get it. Podcasting was hard, because I didn't know what the ROI was. And luckily again, I didn't see the stats for three years. Josh: Is that how long it was? It was three years? Russell: Yeah, before we figured out how to get the stats on it. Josh: That's crazy. Russell: But because of that, because I didn't know what the ROI was, and I was just hoping and praying with faith that it would be good. Now I see the ROI. Now it's important. Now I do it twice a week. Regardless, it happens in the queue, in the can because it's that important. Josh: If your number one thing is ROI and you figured out the podcast is worth it, guys, there's your selling point. Go start a podcast already. Russell: Got a podcast. Let's go. Josh: Honestly, it's amazing. And it's so much fun too. You learn so much about yourself. And I think the one thing I'll say about podcasting is you've got to really find your own unique style. I was listening to, I know you know Alex Becker, but Alex Becker is probably one of the biggest influencers in crypto right now. Just insane. One of my friends who got his NFT, and he's up a quarter million bucks in three months. Just insane stuff. One of the things that he said is right now in the industry, everybody is trying to become an influencer. And so he says, "I see all these people trying to model exactly what it is that I do." And he's like, "I have no problem with you guys doing that because I get it." At the beginning, you don't know your voice yet or whatever, but he's like, "You'll never be me." And I won't use the language that he used. But he's basically like, "There's only one me, so eventually model me, do whatever you need to do. But eventually go find your voice. Go find your own thing, because that's why people are going to watch you. I'm going to make sure that you're irrelevant if you try to model me long term." And so it's giving you that permission to model somebody at the beginning, but then, people are not going to listen to you if they can go listen to somebody else that has the exact same style. So it allows you to really be yourself when you give yourself permission to just try different things. And at the beginning, like you said, no one's listening. Russell: Yeah. It's funny talking about modeling. I talked about this yesterday on a call I was on. It's fascinating because people, they're trying to copy or model somebody because they're trying to get those people to attract the right audience. And Myron said, "You don't attract who you want, you attract who you are." And so if you're trying to be someone else, you're not going to... Because you want those customers. It's going to be weird. I remember when we launched ClickFunnels, I was trying to be like all the other internet marketing guys, because I thought I was competing against Ryan and Perry and Traffic & Conversion. So I was trying to be more corporatey businessy, like they were. Wait a minute. That's not me. I'm not going to wear a shirt and tie on stage. I'm not going to wear a suit jacket. I'm going to wear my t-shirts and jeans. And I'm going to talk about my family and God and wrestling and things I'm excited by. And I don't care about agency, not that I don't care agency, but I don't care about... I'm going to speak to the entrepreneur, because that's who I want. Wherein Ryan and Perry, literally, one of their Traffic & Conversions were, "This is less for the entrepreneur, more for your teams and your staff." It's crazy now because you look at the... I thought we were in the same market, but as soon as I leaned into who Russell was, it's separated. And it's not that one's better or worse. They're different, but if you go to Funnel Hacking Live, it’s my people. You're in the audience. Most of these people here are Christians, who are athletes, who've got kids, who are entrepreneurs, who are not doing this for the money, but doing it because they want to change the world. That's the overwhelming percentage of our audience. Not everyone. But as a whole we attract who we are. So lean into that, because otherwise you're going to attract people you don't like, and you're going to hate your life, and you're going to hate your business, you're going to hate your customers. But you put yourself out there, the people who do not resonate with you will leave on their own. You don't have to kick them out. They're be like, "Russell's annoying." I get people all the time, if I mention God on a podcast or anything, they're like, "If you're talking about God, I'm out." Sweet. All right. Bye. I'm good with that. I know people are like, "I don't believe in God, but I respect that you lean into it." They're cool too. But the people who are offended leave and the people who stick are the ones you want to hang out with anyway, because you attract who you are and not who you want to bring in. Josh: And I can talk about that topic super long, but I want to keep moving on the next piece here. Russell: That's it for the first episode then. Here with Josh on the Market Secrets Podcast. We're going to transition to the next one on the next episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here's a quick breakdown of the cool things I witnessed at a recent fundraiser for my boys' wrestling team and how these salesmanship and marketing strategies can be applied to your business:1. Building Rapport Quickly:  - The auctioneers started by sharing personal stories and jokes to build rapport with the audience, making them more receptive to the sales process.2. Training the Audience to Buy:  - The auctioneers used a low-risk offer ($20 for a chance to win $500) to teach the audience how to bid. This technique, which I learned from Bill Glazer, is effective because it makes the audience comfortable with the buying process before asking them for larger purchases.3. Creating Social Proof:  - The auctioneers had assistants in the audience who made noise and interacted with bidders, creating an energetic atmosphere. This approach heightened the perception of activity and demand, similar to how table rushes work at live events.4. Identifying and Engaging Key Bidders:  - The assistants identified the most interested bidders and focused on them, encouraging higher bids through personal engagement and social pressure.5. Leveraging Cross-Industry Strategies:  - By observing successful techniques in other industries, such as network marketing's car incentives, we can adapt and apply these methods to our own businesses. This practice, as taught by Jay Abraham, allows for innovative strategies to enhance sales and marketing efforts.For more insights and updates, follow me on Instagram @russellbrunson, text me at 208-231-3797, or join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com. You can also connect with me on Clubhouse at ClubHouseWithRussell.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here's a shortened version:Hey everyone, Russell here. I wanted to share a story about leaning in when times get tough. Recently, Steven Larsen and I were discussing the Two Comma Club X coaching program. One member, Marie, was struggling with payments. Instead of quitting, Steven told her to lean in. And she did. Despite the challenges, Marie built a successful business helping people launch podcasts.The lesson is simple: when faced with adversity, lean in. It's about doubling down and going all in, even when it's scary. I've seen this principle work in my life, from sports to business. Leaning in during tough times often leads to greatness on the other side.So, remember to lean in when life throws challenges your way. It could be the key to your success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My personal biggest take-away from Inner Circle mastermind.Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.comRussell Brunson shared insights on simplifying the value ladder concept. He mentioned waking up in a good mood and reflected on the evolving complexity of his value ladder over time. He encouraged listeners to start with his "Dotcom Secrets" book and outlined the concept of the value ladder, emphasizing the importance of providing value at each step to guide customers through the journey. Drawing parallels with dating, he explained how building relationships progresses through providing incremental value. Russell admitted that despite his efforts, his own value ladder had become convoluted, leading to the need for restructuring. He discussed the challenges of letting go of beloved programs to streamline the value ladder and create a clearer path for customers. Russell highlighted the benefits of a well-defined value ladder, including improved scalability and customer acquisition. He urged listeners to assess their own value ladder and make necessary adjustments to avoid a maze-like structure. Finally, he emphasized the value of self-coaching through these processes, akin to having a consultant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices