David Greene - Host of Bigger Pockets Podcast & Best Selling Author | Building Wealth Through Real Estate

Today, my guest is David Green, a former police officer turned real estate investor, agent and author. He is the co-host of the Bigger Pockets Real Estate Podcast, one of the most popular and influential podcasts in the industry. He is also the author of four best-selling books, published by Bigger Pockets, including his latest book, The Pillars of Wealth. He's been featured on CNN, Forbes, HTTV, and other media outlets as a leading expert on real estate investing, wealth building, and personal development. He owns and operates a few companies, the David Green team, a top-producing real estate company in Keller Williams, the one brokerage, a mortgage company, and Spartan League, a coaching program for real estate professionals. David is passionate about helping others achieve financial freedom through real estate and sharing his knowledge and experience with the Bigger Pockets community. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. Quick shout out to HubSpot. Before we get started, HubSpot has an incredible tool called the Sales Hub. If you haven't checked it out now, you got to why? Well, you know what time it is. It is sweater weather, football season, Q4. This is the home stretch for your business. It is time to close out another year of growth, another year of business building strong, and to prep for the next year of more revenue, more customers, more deals. To bring in more business, this Q4 and beyond, you need sales software that helps you score, and top tools are all inside the new HubSpot sales hub. With the customizable prospecting workspace, smart deal management, and AI-powered apps, you can take total control of your sales operation and manage your people and your pipeline with ease. They've built it and designed it all into an accelerated workflow bake right into your HubSpot CRM. When you pair sales hub with other hubs like HubSpot Smart CRM, your team will be on the same page across the entire customer journey. Leads don't slip through the crack. Stop sticking to the same old strategies and start closing more deals because the best time to score is Q4. Make the switch to HubSpotSales at HubSpot.com slash sales. So when I was a kid, my parents fought like many parents did back in the day, and it was particularly rough. They had a brutal relationship of just arguing, throwing things, and I noticed that most of the fights were about money. It would usually be this pattern of my mom asking my dad if she could have money, and sometimes unfortunately it was for something I asked for. I wanted a GI Joe. She says, Hey, Hun, can I have $5 to get David this toy? He stressed out because there's not enough money. It probably makes him feel like he's not providing for the family when he has to say that. He explodes. I as a little kid, I'm thinking this is my fault. I wanted something and because of it, my mom is now getting screamed at, and it's all me. I think we all make agreements. We interpret things that happen in life that hurt us a certain way. You'll hear women say all men are trash or men say all women are worthless. It's that. This thing hurt me and to protect myself, I'm just going to create a big category and I'm going to look at the world this way because that'll keep me safe. For me, it was if you don't have money, you'll be in pain. I just I didn't see money as a thing that I necessarily wanted to buy the toys. I saw money as a thing that I needed so that my mom and dad wouldn't fight and I wouldn't grow up to be in situations that caused emotional pain. And then as I get older, that was sort of affirmed. I watched other people fight about money. I heard the statistics about what causes divorce. And when I was a kid, you know, in the 90s, it was financial problems. It wasn't infidelity. That wasn't I'm sure it was happening, but I don't think it was happening to degree this today. It was mostly about not having enough money. I heard about businesses that were starting and the number one reason that they didn't succeed was lack of capital. It just seemed like this problem of money was constantly showing up. And I didn't connect all the dots of understanding that you make money by bringing value to a marketplace and you do that by improving yourself. I didn't know any of it. I just knew money matters. So I would save all of my birthday money, all of my Christmas money. I can't remember a time I didn't have $100. I was just a saver from a very young age. And then I would start working at the same time. I would go with my grandpa to paint houses. I would cut grass for people in the neighborhood. When someone else saw that I was cutting grass, I would ask for their address. And I would go knock on their door and say, do you want me to cut your grass? I would babysit the kids in the neighborhood whenever the grownups want to do something on referee basketball and football games. There's if I wasn't doing something like school or sports, I was thinking, what can I do to earn some money just to save it. And I think starting young like that built these habits so that work did not seem like a dirty word. I think you see a lot of people now that are not used to that. They're used to, I have free time, call of duty. I've got some time of my own, drink some mountain dew. Working was normal. And I sort of enjoyed the impact it had on my development. Right. When I would referee games, I would see I missed a call that parents are yelling at me. And I don't know what to say. It sort of revealed areas of that I could develop in my own self. Much like a body that you're working out and you think you're in shape and then you do a different kind of work. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is horrible. No cardio. So you realize I have to work out in this way to develop my fitness. Money was very similar. I made this connection between I can make more money if I can become a better person. If I develop skills to talk to the angry parents, if I get better angles to see the play, the more that I watch this game, I remember referring a like a junior high girls basketball game and just being in my wits end because it felt like they travel every single time they touch the ball. There's no clear. I shot it and they hit my hand. They all they don't really jump. So they all just kind of collide in one place and it's so hard to tell that there is a foul. And I realized I need to watch so much more women's basketball to develop what's normal. So I could have standard deviations outside the norm that I would know. That's how I would call a foul. Those are thoughts I don't think most human beings are having because they're just frankly not really trying hard at something when they're young. So money always to sum that up represented safety. It represented emotional security. It represented options and it represented opportunities for personal growth. And because I had that young, I had a lot of opportunities growing up that I could tie to improving my value by making more money. But did you growing up ever had exposure to removing the dollars for time concept where you stuck in that paradigm because a lot of things you were doing you were working hard. Yeah, but it seems like I don't think your parents were very entrepreneurial. It doesn't sound like it. I have no idea what they did, but it doesn't sound like they were entrepreneurial people. And that's eventually where you gravitated towards. Where was that mindset shift in your life? Yeah, that came much later. That's a very good point. When I was a little bit older around the time that I bought maybe my third rental property is funny because I had bought in several rentals and I still didn't make the connection of not trading time for money. I thought I was trading time for cash flow, perhaps you might say, but I also recognize the cash flow of real estate is wildly unpredictable. You never know when it's going to come. When I bought my, I guess it was my fourth property. It was a fourplex in the Central Valley, California was the first time that I ran numbers to determine the cash on cash return. Before that, I just made sure that the rent was more than the expenses. I didn't think of it like an ROI. My brain just didn't even make the connection. I knew what that asset was worth and what I paid for it was good. I knew that it was going to make more money. And I was like, this is a better place to stick my cash than just leaving it in the bank. But I didn't think of it that nuanced. And then I bought this property and I was like, all right, the rents are $700 a unit. I can bump them up to 800 as soon as I buy it. My mortgage is this much. What's the spread? And I didn't even know it was called a cash on cash return. I just sort of naturally said, with the money I'm putting in, if I put that in the bank, what would what would they pay me? And I was like, it was like a 3% return at the time in the bank if you open a CD or something. And I saw I was getting a 30% return on that asset. And it just something clicked like I could make my money back in three years. That's how my brain interpreted. It didn't even look at it like a 30% return. And three years I could have all my capital back. I don't know anything that I could do that. It would take 30 years if I put it in the bank. I need to buy more of these. And at that point, the click happened. Okay, if you work hard and you invest into something that you understand, you can get money coming into you that isn't something you traded your time for. When you when you started off because this is something that I think is very important. There's a lot of real estate professionals that are very smart somewhere. And we'll talk about the ones that maybe are not serving you well. And maybe shouldn't be putting content out there. But regardless, there's always the one strategy that they have to start. And they all have different strategies to start. You can be buying multi-res. You can house hack. You can flip and fit whatever it is. I'm not a real estate person. So I don't know all the different ones. But pretty good there. Yeah, thank you. I've done enough of these shows. So what are the things that you recommend you have a nine to five job? You're a police officer at the time. And I'm assuming you're funding this with other people's money, your money, what is the first play? And what is and how do you how do you structure that first deal? I never touch other people's money inside. I was in for more than a decade. It was just blue collar approach. It's still the way I recommend the majority of people start. People push back because it's not the easy road, but it's the best road. And that's really what I wrote the pillars of wealthbook all about is too many people look at building wealth through only the third pillar, which is investing. You have to learn how to invest if you're going to be wealthy. If you do not put your money into something that grows, you will not be wealthy. But the first two pillars, which are defense and offense, saving money and making money, you really have to have those down before you'll have cash to invest. And if you get in the habit of borrowing other people's money to buy or invest, you lose respect for that money. It's not fair to the people you're borrowing it from. If you wouldn't put your own money in that deal, I don't love people borrowing money to put into someone else's deal unless they're very experienced in that asset class. So when I first got started, it was save every dollar I could. I budgeted very carefully. I didn't spend money on frivolous things because I was very committed to the goal. I wasn't going to go to the movies or go out to eat if there was food at home because it just I would look at it like, well, when I'm done eating, I've lost the $20. What do I have to show for it? If I don't go out to eat, I'll still be full and I'll have my $20. So it just seemed like an obvious choice to not do it. And then the other one was making money. And I wasn't a millionaire. I wasn't crushing it. I wasn't entrepreneurs, but I made the most of what I had. So when I was in college, I worked in restaurants and I worked at the nicest ones I could find. I drove an hour after school. I would drive an hour to go to college, come back home because I live with my parents at the time. Then I would drive an hour to go to the restaurant. And my friends would say, why are you living at home? And I'm like, dude, I'm never at home. It's just where I go to sleep and shower. Man, like my clothes are there. If you're working really hard, living at home is not a very big deal. It's if you're lazy and you're doing nothing, you just want to play call of duty all day. And mom keeps bugging you because she wants a vacuum and you got to lift your feet up. That's when living at home is a problem. But when you're out getting stuff done, it didn't bother me. So I would work at these restaurants and every day that I had off, I would try to pick up a shift from another waiter. I made it a game. How much money can I save this week, which meant I can't spend it on dumb things. And I have to work as much as possible. And then I learned how to make more money at work. I staying late and picking up the late tables, you could almost double the money that you made in the night. So restaurants work where the tables get rotated between servers until it gets busy and crazy. And then they just dump everything on the strong servers. And at the end of the night, they stop sitting most of them. They have one closer that gets all the late tables so everyone else can get the place cleaned up and go home. Well, I learned at the end of the night, I might have four or five tables at a nice restaurant on a good night. But if I close, I can pick up another four or five. You just had to be really good, very efficient, able to keep up when you got busy, good with your movements. You have to be able to use the computer and type the orders in really fast, great with the customers because it was harder. You're doing four times the work without as much of the help. But getting good at that made a big difference. So if I'm doubling my money every night and I'm working more shifts than other people are at the end of the year, I'm making more than twice as much as an average waiter would. And after four years of college, I had my school completely paid for. I had my car paid for in cash. And then I had saved $100,000. And that became the seed capital for the real estate that I would end up buying. So because I took that approach, I left just being a waiter, which you would think this is a dead end job. You'll never get anywhere doing it. Well, that's true. And that's your playing defense with that money. And it's true. If you're just working at a diner and Applebee somewhere, not pushing to get into stake houses and learning how to upsell wine, I took it really like, I want to be the best waiter in that restaurant. So I had to prove in these skills. You put those two first pillars together. You've earned the right to have money to invest. You will respect that money much more. You will make sure you understand the asset you're putting the money into because that wasn't just money. That was for that thing years of my life that I didn't go do the dumb stuff. My friends were doing, I sacrificed to get that money. You watch it like your baby. So you learn much quicker when it's your money. But it's interesting. I think that as you speak through you just busting your ass in a restaurant to make that cash to be able to invest, I think that you probably see this with a lot of the people that reach out to you. There's people don't want to work as hard. They want the easy out. And I think that even before we went live, we're talking about how many gurus, gurus, tear gurus there, talking about OPM, talking about leverage, nothing wrong with that. But it's playing into the you don't have to work as hard and you don't have to save as hard. And if you speak to the right person and if you find the right deal, you don't need your own money. You don't need your own you don't need your own. You just need to put yourself into a position and go into the market and find the deals and find the money and put those two people together and all of a sudden you're now in real estate or you're finding a rental and you're doing Airbnb arbitrage and you're doing all these things that are basically everything but making your own money and spending your own money on real estate deals. And it's funny because that is the one thing like you mentioned that will make you learn it the quickest. Yep. I love that respect the other respect the money and you don't respect the money if it's not yours starting out. And I've never even thought about that. But that is probably what is causing so many issues with people getting into real estate. I think it causes issues with life in general. This is like a good philosophical understanding because the way that money works is the way fitness works, it's way everything else works. And the enemy, whether you believe in God and you think it's Satan or the dark side of human nature, however, people interpret it, there is absolutely a philosophy out there that prays on your desire to get results without having to put it work. Remember the liver king scandal that just came out here. Right. So people don't know the liver king is this ridiculously jack guy with no body fat that told everybody that he's never touched a steroid that he looks like that because he touches the dirt every day and he gets sun every day and he's got this like ancestral tenants that he would preach and everyone was like, man, I want what he has. We all want to be a big jack ripped guy. And he was telling people that they could have it without what without the truth of what he actually did to get it. And he had a huge following. And then it turned out he's been doing steroids. He does a lot of steroids. It's impossible to look like that without doing steroids. And everyone was crazy. You know how he's found out just was an accident. He's found something right. He sent an email to somebody asking asking him to get like I guess asking for coaching advice with his whole steroid cycle. And it wasn't just like a light cycle. It was like thousands of dollars in gear per month. It was the most ridiculous. Which when you look at his body and then you see what he's doing to you, Scott, that makes sense, right? Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. You weren't surprised to see that the liver king was on gear. No, not at all. Right. Obviously not at all because you in the right mind would ever think that guy's not at the right mind. That's what I'm getting at. Okay. If you're if you haven't done the work itself. If you haven't had a successful business or developed a body like him on your own. It is very easy to believe his version of reality that he's painting, but his motive to do that is to get your money. Okay. When when you think you're watching free content online, it's usually not free. You're not getting an accurate representation of how that asset class or that endeavor works. You're getting the version that the person is selling you that makes you more likely to buy their supplements, sign up for their course, give them a follow, whatever metric they're tracking. They are thinking, how does my video perform? How do I get more views? Well, when I tell people the truth, I work out really hard or I still have fat on my body. They don't want to watch me. When I look like this, I get a lot of it. And they get sucked into this version of painting things that that isn't realistic, right? If you think about how people used to marry, there was a very long courtship. You were investing in that partner for a long time before you ever hooked up with them. Okay. You respected the work you had put in. So when you married them, you stuck through the tough times. When my parents were fighting all the time, they never got divorced. They just fought terribly, but they didn't say, let's split up fast forward to the way it works now. You meet someone on Tinder. You hook up with them on the first or the second date. There's zero investment. And then the minute that there's a disagreement or you see that they like Pepsi, not Coke or whatever the case is, it's over and you're on to the next one. When you remove the initial investment into whatever the thing is you're pursuing, it is very difficult to stick with it. And most wealth building endeavors, like most fitness endeavors, like most relationships, you have to do for a long time to figure them out. Nobody goes to the gym on their first day and leaves looking like the liver king. You don't meet a person and they love it for sight and you never have a problem. It's it's the fighting and the getting through the problems and the disagreements and accidentally hurting each other's feelings and disrespecting each other and apologizing. That builds the bond that keeps people together. And I bring this up because there will be pushback from some on the content in my book. They're going to say, you know what David? I hear what you're saying, but that sounds like a lot of work. This person says I can buy real estate with no or low money down. This person says they know a super secret strategy that no one else knows. And if I just pay them $20,000, they'll teach me how to make $100,000 whole sailing real estate. And I get it and I just I can't prove that they're wrong. I would say look at everything else in life and tell me if you see that pattern successful anywhere else. And by the way, when you look at let's let's talk about what's sort of peddled online in terms of real estate courses. This is probably one of the biggest pain in your asses and you deal with every single day when you speak to people. But when you look at the people, there's a couple different things. You look at people that have figured it out one way. And maybe they've gone through a lot of shit and a lot of failures that they're not speaking about publicly. Maybe they actually haven't even figured it out to the degree that they're alluding to online and they're making a lot of money selling courses. That's another issue. But the point is you still will not respect the process compared to if you're putting your own money in, which is why I love sort of just the framework that you teach over to people. But what are some of the, you know, the false stories, false narratives of what real estate success looks like? Well, everybody, my friend Brandon Turner has a really good statement. He says nobody buys a drill. They nobody wants a drill. They want a hole. You buy the drill to get the hole. Nobody wants to learn how to put the work into invest in real estate. They want financial freedom. They want to be rich. They want to not have a job. They want to they're sitting in commute traffic and they're pissed and they hate it and they want a way out of it. Okay, my my experience in life is that the only way you get out of a situation you don't like is that you rise to the top and you earn the right to get in a better one. It in everything in life, if your spouse isn't happy with you, you don't have a good relationship. The only way to fix that is to change the things in you that make it hard to be a good partner, bad a thousand. And now your spouse usually starts to fill guilty. I'm not married, but I see this in marriage all the time. Like, man, they're showing up every day and I'm not. It puts pressure on them to do the same thing. If you get into the, I'm going to make threats like, well, all be a better husband when you're a better wife. It never works. It becomes a race to the bottom work is like that. You can't as a basketball player tell the coach, I'll play harder when you give me more playing time. You have to be showing a lot of effort in practice and improving to earn. That is the order of the world. Okay. Like it is naturally a meritocracy, even though we live in a society that sort of does a misdirection to try to make you believe that's not the case. It's still a meritocracy. When I decide where I'm going to go for dinner, I don't ask what the most mediocre tacos are. I say, what is the best taco stand in town? And that is how I make my choices. You buy a Rolex because you think it's the best. You buy a Lamborghini because you think it's the best. That's how we all make decisions. And so it's disingenuous to tell people, hey, somewhere, someone out there is going to like your tacos just the way they are. And it doesn't matter if they're not the best or they're stale or it takes a long time to make them. You are, they are a unique and special snowflake taco. And someone's going to love it. It's ridiculous to think that way. And so getting back to your original question of like, what can you do to? Sorry, we'll take this part out. What would remind me what you would ask me the real estate so you went down this really good rabbit hole and there's the things I'll pull out of every single thing you mentioned. And most of it is in the pursuit of excellence. I want to get to that in the pursuit of mastery, but I was saying the false stories around real estate success. Thank you. What are they? What are they? So what I talk about in my book, there's three pillars. There's chapters on defense, literally the heart of tracking your money, budgeting, your money, knowing where it's going, reading a profit and loss statement, having a personal budget and having a plan for every dollar, then there's a pillar on offense. And this is the skills that you need to develop, the things that people who make money do, it is not, it doesn't just happen. Like people that are really good with with women or women that get a lot of of mail attention, it doesn't just happen. There are things they are doing that you could identify and say, this is why they do so well. So there's chapters on extreme ownership and being a leader taken on responsibility, there's chapters on the process of skill development, the literal process you go through to build skills. I did a TED talk on that topic that if you want to be good at things, here's the path you follow, like Napoleon Dynamite said, you got to have skills. There's the pursuit of excellence. You have to fall in love with the process of being great because I'm going to go spend my money for the best tacos. I'm looking for the best partner. My friends are going to be the best friends that I think I can get. The pursuit of excellence is how you earn the right to get more money. Now in our space, the real estate investing space, there are a lot of people that are going to sell you on the opposite of that. You don't have to do anything. It should just happen. If you know, it's sort of like a mixed martial artist who trains every day versus a person who says, well, I went to this kung fu place and they taught me the secret ancient art of the five finger death punch. And so I don't have to practice. I know this special technique, right? Well, we know that doesn't exist because there's nobody in the UFC that's doing five finger death punches. That is something that hacks to use to get you to sign up for their gym and they're praying on the fact that there are a lot of people that want the result without having to put in the work. In the real estate investing space, you will frequently see people that are bragging about they quit their job because they made enough money from real estate and they they have this amazing car because they got it from real estate. But the reality is when I talk to these people, their real estate is not doing much. They're making these money from the courses that they're selling. They're really just really good marketers, which is oftentimes a good synonyms with deceivers. And they're using the money you pay on their courses to fund the lifestyle that they're now selling you. And so the book was written almost as an antidote to that. I don't know any wealthy people who approach things like that. And I do know that it is possible to deceive people and separate them from their money, but not for the long term. Eventually, you get exposed. Eventually, people figure it out. You also have to live with yourself that it kind of makes you my opinion a POS that you're selling a dream to people that's that's not real. Well, you know what you're doing? You're you're selling the dream of what you're that person was experiencing in their commute to work. The not having to work anymore. The I don't want to I don't want to have a W2 income. I want to have passive income. My most word in the world is passive. It doesn't it doesn't exist. Like everything. I would have worked really hard to get a great body. And then never have to work again. And my six pack will it's not how it works. That's just never how it works. And then once people start into real estate listening to people that actually don't know what they're talking about and don't know what they're preaching because again, they're making a lot of their money off core sales. Then you have an overreliance on whatever that person is teaching you and you're not looking elsewhere because you're so bought into it. And you're now not just financially invested. You're emotionally invested in whatever this person is teaching, which I think is a whole other issue because like religion, like fitness, you you attach yourself to this dogma and you refuse to look at anything else because you're so invested in it. And I think this is a very toxic place to be because now you have spent 10, 20, 30, 40, 100,000 dollars on courses. You have to make it work. So now you're not even going to allow yourself to look elsewhere for other opportunities because you feel like you're failing. That's it. You feel that's right. You invested in the wrong thing. And now you're low to let it go. It sort of supports that theory we talked about earlier that when you're invested in something, you'll hang on to it. But it can work against you when you invest in the wrong thing. I spent $50,000 learning how to do this technique. But there's not opportunities in the space for that technique anymore. Or I don't have the skills that are needed. Like in our in our world, that's often wholesaling. Hey, you got no money. That's okay. Put $15,000 charge on your credit card. Buy my course. I'll teach you how to make money in real estate without any capital. And they teach you wholesaling, which is basically going and finding an incredible deal putting under contract and selling the right to buy that property at an incredible price to someone else. And you get like a middle man fee. It's the hardest way that I know up to make money in real estate. You got to relentlessly go out there and look for people that are trying to sell a home. A lot of the time, not every time, but a lot of the time you're buying from grandma who doesn't know what her house is worth and still thinks $100,000 is a lot of money. Or you're finding a person in serious financial jeopardy that you're you're taking advantage of in a sense. But you got to have a great mouthpiece. You got to be really good salesperson. You got to talk people into something you got to make them think they're winning even if they're not. There is a lot of skills that a whole seller needs much more than a average Joe that just does a good job being a plumber and slowly puts their money into real estate and lets it grow over 30 years. That's a you don't need very many skills to make that work at all. But you got to have some money. So all of these courses that will teach you how to do real estate without money, they end up meeting you to have the highest talent level that most people won't have. So then they'll fail at it. But like you said, they'll think, well, I have to keep going because I've already spent the money. And then they get what I call course shame. They sign up for a course. They sign up for a group. It didn't work out and they internalize it. And there's something wrong with me. I'm the problem. I suck at life. Their confidence takes a hit. They're less likely to go work hard at what they're doing. Meanwhile, the person who left them feeling that way is driving around in the Ferrari that they got from the money that that person spent on their course. It's a vicious cycle. Okay. So what what is I'm curious if there's any other thing because you live in this world. Are there any other major red flags that if somebody is looking to get started into real estate and they're going to go to Google or they're going to go to YouTube and they're going to find all the people that I'm sure you absolutely hate. So what are the things without naming names or whatever you do whatever you want to do. But what are the things people should look out for us that they should be wary of that they shouldn't pay for. I mean, we're talking about courses, but there's some education that's useful. That's a good. That's a really good question. I don't know that I've ever been asked that. I like that. So a couple of things I would think about is the person selling you on because I don't think there's anything wrong with selling education. It's selling shit education. That's the problem. Okay. Are they telling you I will teach you and a list of what they're going to teach you or are they selling you a result? If you take my course, you will make this much money. If you do this thing, you will get this lifestyle. They cannot guarantee that. You can own a gym. You can't tell everyone that comes to sign up for the gym. This is the body you're going to have because that's up to them. You can show them the machines. You can show them the personal fitness instructors. You can show them the protein supplements. You can show the tools that you will offer. You cannot guarantee a result. So if you're being sold on a result, first off, that is impossible. That's a big red flag. Another one and I just thought of this is have you ever noticed Scott that like a very high proportion of influencers and people that sell education or products happen to also be really good looking. You're not wrong. There's not a lot of ugly fat people, right? What my theory would be is we all like looking at good looking people. Part of their success is because of their looks, not what they're teaching you. We just rather hear information from a hot girl or a really confident but I think that's a proven psychological phenomenon. I think it's easier to connect with people when you're in good shape. You present well. You just increase the trust factor almost 100% when you engage. Yes. That is absolutely true. That might be a contributing factor to why they have a great reputation. It's odd but the really old, ugly fat dude that's teaching you how you're going to make money in real estate. I would probably trust them first. That person before like the 25 year old smoke show who's telling you how she's traveling to the Maldives every weekend because of the money that comes from real estate. It's a sniff test. You just look at the Instagram. You look at the Instagram and again to your point, they're selling if they're selling the lifestyle. Then there's always a I don't know. It's not a 100% hard and fast rule. But if it is, like every single post on Instagram has like 100,000 likes and tons of comments and there are a million followers and all they're doing is taking pictures in front of different infinity pools around the world. It's like you start to be like listen. The more that you see their toes or their legs or the pictures. That's a little bit of a red flag. No, that's a little bit of a red flag. It's a little bit of a red flag. The real estate space specifically is you'll take a really smart guy that they could teach you how to analyze an apartment complex at a high level and there's a really good information. Okay. Side note, if you're not good with numbers and spreadsheets and analysis, it doesn't matter how smart that guy is, you're not going to be good at that job. If you have a huge physique, you're not ever going to be a really good log distance runner. It's just there's a skill set that every human has that they need to find the right match. But you'll find that person who he wears new balance tennis shoes and tucks in his shirt way too high and they're not comfortable on camera, but they're really the brains behind the operation. And then they get a very attractive younger influencer to talk about real estate all the time and say, here's my life. Look what I did. Look at my cool car. Look at my cool clothes. Look at my bag. Here's me at the infinity pool. And then everyone wants that person's life. So they go follow them. They sign up for a webinar. That person explains at a very high level, not very nuanced at all, how this works. You give them your money. They give it to the guy in the new balance tennis shoes and he goes and invest it. Okay. They sell you. We will teach you how to do the thing as a way to get a foot in the door to get you to give them your money. And then they're not even the ones investing it. They're giving it to somebody else. This is a like repeatable common pattern that you will see. And it's not just in real estate. You see the Kardashians doing this like, I don't know which one of them has the makeup brand. She's not designing the makeup. She's not in the lab as a chemist, figuring out how to put this together. They go to an established makeup company. They put Kylie Kendall Kim, whatever on the brand and they put some form of like lips or sensual looking thing. And then everyone goes, Oh, I trust her. I want to look like her all by that makeup. But they're not the ones doing it. So just anytime you're paying for education, that's another thing to vet. Am I learning from someone who does it or am I learning from a person who's lifestyle? I want just going to take a quick break. Thank the longtime friend and sponsor to show the HubSpot podcast network. They have incredible podcasts. One of my favorites. One you have to check out this month is Nudge hosted by Phil Agnew. Now, if you've ever noticed, the smallest changes always seem to have the biggest impact on Nudge. You learn simple evidence back tips to help you kick bad habits. Get a raise, grow a business. The point is every bite size 20-minute show comes packed with practical advice from these incredible entrepreneurs, behavioral scientists, and everybody in between. Not just fast paced, but very insightful, and a must listen if you're a podcast fan. Make sure you listen to Nudge wherever you love to get your podcasts. Well, that's the difference too. So when you have an influencer and a product, the product is not promising to do anything except what the product does. So if it's makeup, it should be good quality makeup. The issue starts to manifest when you have somebody who's teaching education that doesn't actually know what they're doing. That's really the issue. Because influencer marketing, celebrity marketing is not a big deal, but has to be positioned as such. This is, you know, I'm the face of the brand. If I'm highly your camera, whatever the hell's doing that makeup company, it's makeup. It's something that has my, you know, name on it. It's made by Canvas, but it's going to do what it is. I'm not trying to change your life. It's it's makeup, but the investment play and the education and the tying into, you know, you don't want to be working your job anymore. That to me is a little bit more malicious because it's very manipulative as to what they're actually selling. And I actually thought of something just now, I look at the people that I actually respect online and the people I respect online are the people that teach. And when they put out content, they're talking on podcasts or teaching things themselves could done it before. And I think that the people that put out content and teach online, the reason why they do that is because that's how they got from point A to point B, from point, you know, whatever, from the beginning to the end, because they learned from other people that were also putting out educational content. And that's how they want to give back. So it's not saying that people that put out educational content are all great, but I think that that's a great lit mistest for is that somebody that I actually want to buy from somebody who's teaching actively on Reels on TikTok on YouTube, or is it somebody who's just posting nice pictures and selling lifestyle? And that's like a quick little, yeah, easy way to that. That's a great point because if you're doing that, you're not going to fall for the face of the company. You're going to recognize if this person actually has skills that you can learn from. Yeah. Well, how many, how many millions of hours have people listen to you? Yeah. That's how they trust you. It's be hard. It's really going to be asking people at this point because you can go listen to everything I've said for so long. Exactly. Okay. So you said there's there's three pillars in this book. So what is that? So let's go through the, I think there was a last pillar that I'd like to go into a little bit more because we spoke about the offense and the defense. But after we figure out our life and we figure out making our money and we figure out saving and we figure out all these different pieces that are just smart things to do, then what do we do next? Well, you have to learn the asset class. You want to put your money in. And my opinion, this part I can't say is fact. This is just David's perspective on things and people can have different ones. And I don't know if there's any way we can prove it. But my perspective is that the US government has printed so much freaky money that they created massive inflation and that trying to raise interest rates isn't actually going to stop that because you're not, you're not diminishing the supply of dollars that are out there. You're just slowing down the velocity of which those dollars change hands. So you can sort of like create, I use example in the book of a semi-treat going down a hill. You can smash on the brakes and for temporary time, you can try to slow that truck, but eventually those breaks will wear out. The only way you slow it is you have to shift into lower gears. And I don't know how you do that in economy. I don't know that it's ever been done. Every economy, if you follow Ray Dalio has a really good video on the something about the changing the new world order. And he describes almost every country follows the same pattern of going to war, financing the wars through printing more money because nobody wants to vote to go to war. The dollars that are printed now weaken the currency. The people think that they have prosperity because it creates this credit cycle where it's easy to borrow money. You have this boom in quality of life that is then ended very abruptly when people realize that their currency is worth nothing. And then the changing world order, a new country comes in and takes over. I think America's gotten away with this because a lot of other countries are doing the same thing, but we're doing it worse. We have created a massive, massive problem with inflation. And what I've noticed is it used to be before inflation was really bad, you didn't need to know a ton about money to be good with it. You just played defense, you played offense, you had your job, you live beneath your means, you put the money in stocks, you put the money in bonds, you put the money in a CDE, some kind of a savings account. And the money grew and that was fine. I know we measure inflation by the CPI, but that can be manipulated. It's very easy to take things out of the consumer price index or put things in that aren't growing. And they don't measure a lot of the things that are hurting us the most. And so I think inflation is way higher than what the CPI shows. If you just like look at how much cars are costing right now, these are things that are supposed to go down in value. They're going up. How much even though we've doubled or tripled interest rates on real estate, the values really aren't coming down at all. How much would they be going up if we had just left interest rates even? We have a nasty inflation problem. And it creates pressure on people to learn how money works because if you go invest your money at 10%, which most people think is a great return, but inflation's at 15%, you're still losing 5%. And another thing we don't think about is that let's say inflation hits 10%. We typically look at that Scott, like, okay, this year I lost 10% of my purchasing power. But what if that happens every year for five years? That's I'm in some ways food is up much more than 10% transportation and energy. It's up a lot more than that over five years. That is 50%. Everything is 50% more expensive. This is a massive thing. If your boss came to you and said in five years, I'm taking away half your paycheck. Would you just be calm and like, okay, well, it happens. You'd probably panic. I'm getting another job. I'm learning a new trade. You would kick your butt in a gear and say, I'm doing something to figure out how to improve my position here. But because it happens through inflation and it happens a little slower than that, we don't get this emotional response that I'm having that I think people need to have. The example that I give in the book is we think we're on a staircase and we're going to work every day. We're bringing our lunchpale. We're clocking in. We're doing just as good enough of a job to not get fired. But what I say people should do is they should show up to work every day and work like it's the last day of tryouts and they don't want to get cut. They should be trying to be the best employee they have and they think that the consequence of not doing that is they just don't go up the stairs. They're just midway on the staircase and they're chilling like, yeah, if I wanted a Ferrari at the work harder, but I'm okay with my camera. So I'm just going to be comfortable. What I am proposing is you're actually on an escalator and it's going down. The money that you have saved the money that you're making is becoming less and less valuable at a fast rate. But because you aren't paying attention to what's going on around you, you don't see that you're going down. The majority of people listening to this have lost a lot of their wealth. They've lost a lot of their purchasing power and they've done nothing to increase their skill set to be able to make more money. If you if you had your eyes opened and you looked around and said, wait a minute, this escalator is going down. It's going down fast. I'm going to hit the bottom. I'm going to be poor. This is going to lead to socialism and we're going to have to have universal basic income come into bail us all out. You'd start running up that down escalator. And when you put all this effort in and you saw you weren't getting as far as you used to on the stairs, you wouldn't get discouraged. You'd be like, that means I'd better be in better shape. I think we should all be thinking, I need to work harder. I need to develop more skills. I need to have a higher sense of urgency when I go to work. If I know that I could be getting that promotion or I could be starting that business or I could be learning to code in a new computer language or I could be learning more about an asset class. If you had that emotional instinct of, I'm afraid it would kick your butt into gear. It's this false sense of security that we've been lulled into from 10 years of economic stimulus that made an incredibly easy economy to make money in that we now think is the new normal. So for somebody who is working in a job and a W2 job, there's ways to upskill yourself and there's ways to get to your point, other markets and start to invest. And I think that's something that people always should be thinking about, but to your point, maybe with a little bit more urgency. But I'm also curious about somebody like yourself who is an experienced investor, granted in more or less in one particular asset class. But this is not investment advice, but I am curious. What is David Green doing with inflation, with interest rates? Are you looking at different types of things to put your money into that maybe? So what are some of those things? Well, the first thing you have to recognize is that real estate typically makes money. It makes money in 10 different ways, but they fall largely into two categories, which would be cash flow. That's the income that you receive being more than the expenses of the property and equity, which would be the value of the property going up over time, while the amount of money that you leveraged against the property is slowly paid down, right? It's designed to make money over time. Architecturally, everything in real estate works in your favor for a long period of time. We inflate our currency, the rents go up, but your mortgage stays the same. The value goes up, but your loan balance stays the same. The loans get paid off in bigger and bigger chunks with every payment. That's called amortization. So you make a $2,000 month payment in our brains. That's what we think we're paying. But in the beginning, $1,700 of that $2,000 goes towards the interest. And only $300 gets paid off the loan balance. Well, with every single payment, a little bit more gets paid off of the principal. So by the time you own it for 20 years, it's almost reversed that, right? Maybe only $500 goes to the interest at $1,500 goes towards the principal. We have tried to turn real estate into something that makes money in year one. Hey, I want to buy a property. I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't make me a bunch of money right when I do it. And when the economy was cooking, when we were just dumping met them, that I mean into into the marketplace. And it was like, man, rents are going up all the time. Everybody has all this money. Bosses are giving wages. I see, yeah, that's something you want to comment on with that. No, no, no, no, no, no, just that was a slapping. Okay. I mean, no, go ahead. It's a point. So it was easier than ever. And we got spoiled. And now we've raised interest rates to try to stop this. It's like, okay, well, now let's, let's shoot some heroin into the system because we're all pumped up. And it's going to fast inflations too high. And they think that they're going to fix it by raising rates, which is not a healthy way to do it. We just need to let the economy sleep, right? I worked as a cop for a long time. I saw what I was like when people were high. They might spend three nights in a row tinkering with a lawnmower and a bicycle. And it made them feel like they were being productive, but they weren't. They just needed to go to sleep. And you're not productive during sleep, which is like an economic recession. But rebuilding happens, right? Bad businesses need to fail. Bad CEOs need to be exposed. There needs to be pain. That is a normal thing. It's not fun, but it's how life works. Again, it's a rhythm we see with forest fires. We see with human beings. We can't just work 24 hours a day, even though that feels productive. You have to be able to sleep and recover. So cash flow is largely incredibly difficult to find right now. Rates have gone up, asset prices have not gone down. So in my mind, I'm thinking, all right, if I'm not going to get cash flow, I need to be thinking about how I would maximize the equity because you still have to invest in something. Because like I said, the escalators going down, you're losing purchasing power. So I'm extending the window of when I expect a return. If I know that I'm not going to get cash flow, well, that I'm not going to target properties in bad areas that are going to barely make any money at all, I'm saying, all right, I'm going to buy in the best locations where I believe that demand is going to go up where supply remains constricted. I'm not going to go investing Kansas where they theoretically have just tons of land and can keep building homes. It's very hard for the price of the house to go up if you keep adding supply. What are the areas where I see constricted supply and increasing demand? South Florida, I see a lot of New Yorkers, a lot of Wall Street monies moving into that space. There's not a ton of homes in the best locations. I'm buying there really good neighborhoods in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Bay Area San Francisco itself is struggling, but the people aren't moving. They're just leaving the city of San Francisco and going into suburbs. So I'm buying houses in the hills of the Bay Area where there's not very much supply. And if it doesn't cash flow when I first buy it, I'm not as concerned as if it will in three years, if it will in five years, and how much it will in 10 years. Because my bet is you're going to see human beings moving away from the locations where they don't like the political bend. There's less opportunity and they're going to be moving into the areas where there's lower taxes. There's better weather. There's more economic opportunity. The wise investor thinks 10 years down the road. Where are people going to be living in 10 years and where's their constricted supply? The foolish investor who took a course that had someone that showed them a spreadsheet to determine what a property cash flows right now lacks that insight that's, I don't know, in your world, maybe they're learning how to use the computer code that was popular five years ago, not the one that's going to be popular because that's what they were taught from the influencer. Yeah. And do you at this point try and learn other asset classes or is that beyond the scope of what you're focused on right now? Does that distract you from what you're trying to work on? I would learn an asset class if I thought that there was like a, I'm trying to remember the word I'm trying to describe this. Basically, if the risk versus the reward was really heavily weighted towards reward, I tend to focus my energy not on investing in other asset classes. I tend to focus that energy when it's harder to find real estate investments into the businesses that I have. Right. So let's start a business that would service people who are buying real estate. I started a mortgage company. I'm expanding my real estate team to buying in other states because they're just not a lot of houses to sell in California. It's great if you own it, the values aren't going down because there's not a lot of supply, but if you're trying to represent clients here, there's, the example I use is there's no game in the woods. There's no houses to sell. No one's putting their house on the market because they don't want to lose their 3% interest rate to get one at eight. So we're expanding into new areas. I actually tried to start an insurance company. I did and now there's no insurance to sell. That's something no one's talking about right now, but it's a massive problem. Oh, yeah, insurance carriers are just completely fleeing certain states and saying, we will not ensure homes. Yeah, there's no way to buy in policies. And if you do own real estate here first, you can expect your policy to double triple or quadruple when it expires. It's really, really bad right now. There's a lot of fraud claims that are going on. The cost of replacement is getting really high because of regulation and and labor costs. I don't know exactly everything that goes into this, but that's where instead of just thinking, okay, I'll learn a new asset. That's great if you're interested in it. If you love private equity, if you love the different options that are out there, if you don't, I really think you just move your energy into the offense pillar. Okay, I have a job. How do I start a business? How do I get exposed to my deficiencies that stop me from being successful in business and give myself a runway to build up to where I hit that inflection point where the business takes off. Then I can quit my job and I can jump into the business. But if you don't have this framework of defense offense and investing, you just get helpless. You just end up waiting for someone to come tap you on the shoulder and say, we're giving you the rage. You're getting the corner office. That's not how decisions get made from the bosses of the companies. I love this. I also love the lesson that keeps coming up is just absolute excellence and mastery in what you know. I think that is so, so important because outside of the fake gurus online, even if you are a smart person, your shiny object syndrome is so real. You always jump to the next thing or the new thing. Even myself, I'm trying to learn real estate where I have an operational background in companies and it's comfortable for me to do a private equity play. But you have 10 friends that are all putting money into various types of real estate. It's hard to just pull yourself away and say, no, that's not my expertise. It's not that you have to do that, but maybe it would be more successful if you just focus on the thing that you already know. And you got even better at that thing and you just focused all your attention on that thing. We interviewed Alex Formozine. He referred to that as the woman in the red dress that seemed from the matrix. So sometimes you got to ask yourself, is that a woman in a red dress or is that a legit opportunity? I don't think you can just assume that everything new is a woman in a red dress, but this book was written so that you could understand what the right move for you is. If I had a nephew that just turned 18 and he's like, Uncle David, I want to be rich. What do I need to do? These are the things that I would be teaching him. If he followed me around every day at work. This is the stuff. This is the antidote to the gurus that you've tried to learn from and you see that they're amazing, successful life. And it's not happening for you. And you're feeling that shame. Maybe I'm just not meant to be wealthy. Well, you're not. You have to build the right to be wealthy by doing this. One of the examples I use in the book is this full of analogy so people can help understand how much poison they've had put in their brain when it comes to wealth is imagine if you went to the gym and your goal was to not touch away the whole time or touch as few of them as possible. Okay. We would think that was utterly ridiculous and stupid, but how many people go to work and their goal is to do the bare minimum that they have to at that job. And when they leave and they didn't have to work hard, they didn't get stressed. They didn't take any additional responsibility. They feel good about themselves because they won in the battle with their boss. Like I think subconsciously, that's what's going on. Employers are saying, how do I pay you the least and get the most out of you? And employees are saying, how do I do the least amount of work and get the most money? And the last 10 years that the scales have been tipped in favor of the employee. We've had a talent drain, companies have had to pay people way more than they're then they're really worth objectively. We've let people work from home. Work ethics have gone really far down. It's same in the real estate space. It's been a sellers market for so long. You can sell your house with shag carpet and oak cabinets and like white tile counters with brown grout. It used to be no one would touch that house. There's nothing to buy. So ever like you get away with a poor effort as a seller because you've got the supply and demand tilted in your favor. That's happened in the business world too. And I don't know, but what I feel and what I see happening is a recession is starting to you see what happened when Elon Musk took over Twitter and he realized they didn't need a ton of these people. I'm having people every week that are coming to me and saying, my job is laying me off. They're letting me go. These were the same people Scott that would be talking to me saying, hey, I only have to work two hours a day. I've got my job automated. I work from home. I want to learn real estate. They looked at it like something to be proud of that they only had to work two hours a day. No one's going to turn that down. But if that's you, you have to understand you were not entitled to that paycheck. It is very, very likely that when your job starts seeing their revenue going down because we've slowed the velocity of money, less people are spending money. That means less companies are making it. They will look at their PNL. This is the same thing that I do and say, where can we make cuts? And when they see the huge expenses associated with salaries, they will say, what are these people doing? And if they realize you're only needing to work two hours a day, they can lay four people off and have one person doing the work of the others, there's going to be a lot more layoffs. And that's why I'm saying we need to kick it in gear. If you're the person who it's never really resonated with you that money should come easy or fitness should come easy, stop being proud that you go to the gym every day and you don't lift the weights. Look for ways when you go to work to be more valuable to contribute more to build more skills so that when other people get laid off, you're the one that stays in their position and you'll take advantage of the marketplace when it turns. Yeah, I love this. I think that we've had this knee jerk reaction to hustle culture and we went too far to the other end of the spectrum. In the spirit of, I guess, really your bigger news show, I think that it's just interesting to get some last minute predictions, some things that you see in your world that would be really interesting to people. I know that I think on the last episode, you were talking about BlackRock, we don't have to talk about BlackRock, but we can talk about that. It's good that you're seeing in your life that people should be aware of. So here's how I'll build this up. People keep expecting prices of real estate to come down because it's becoming less affordable. It's too simplistic to look at this asset class like the owners of the homes care what you think is affordable. I've sold real estate for a long time now. The only thing that makes a seller drop their price is when their house sits on the market for a long time and doesn't sell. Nobody wants to drop their, so nobody watches the news and sees Jerome Powell say we're going to raise rates and says David dropped my house by $100,000, but that's what every buyer thinks is going to happen, okay? So if the days on market is not creeping really high, 60, 90, 120 days, sellers aren't going to drop the price of their home. The days on market is not dropping because they're still a massive demand for real estate. I think, because like these are the symptoms, I'm trying to figure out the the cause of it like a doctor. I think the reason is that real estate is one of the only asset classes that is beating inflation and smart people know that. Okay, if you have a skill set like you to look at a company, see there's value ad or it's price below what it's worth or their particular service they offer is primed to explode. If you have those goggles that can look and see the night vision, you know where to put your money. The average person doesn't. And if you put it in bonds, you're going to lose purchasing power. The bonds don't make enough money to make up for inflation. Stock market, very similar. Putting in the bank, guaranteed loss. You're running out of places to put that money. Most people are going to give it to someone smarter than them if they have a lot of it, which is going to be some type of institutional investor. Like you mentioned, BlackRocker or funds like that. They're putting their money in real estate. They're seeing all the things that the influencers have been teaching for a long time or maybe the educators have been teaching and recognizing we get to leverage this investment at really low rates. Interest rates are going up for our competition, but we can borrow the money at much lower rates. Rents are going to be going up. Inflation is going to be really bad. They're all buying the real estate. So prices aren't going down. I think the future is that you're going to see fractional ownership take off. You're going to see companies that come in and say, Hey, yeah, you can't afford to buy a house. They're too expensive. You don't have enough money. But put your $10,000 in a pot with 20 other people. And that can be a $200,000 down payment on a million dollar house. Now you can say you own this property. You get to put it on your stupid Instagram. It pretend like it's yours. You get to play the influencer game that they're all playing when they pretend like I own 400 units, but you have like 1% interest in 400 units, right? And values won't go down. They'll actually go up because it'll be easier to buy it. The other thing I'd add is you're probably going to see products coming out that allow you to get the equity out of your home similar to a home equity line of credit. But maybe sold as like a security, right? Or something like where Wall Street will come up with plans to say, Look, your home is worth this much. You have this much equity. We will give you this much money to sort of buy shares of your home. I think we're going to see that type of product eventually start to come out because it makes people people are dumb. Scott and they think that by getting this money for their house, it's not they don't think of it like I'm losing equity because they don't think equity is real. They think money in the bank is what's real. So I think you're going to see in general this shift towards institutions buying tons of inventory, which is going to keep supply from going up, which is going to keep prices from going down. And then you're going to see fractional ownership really take off and all these people bragging about owning a share of a home like what time shares did a couple decades ago. Okay, so give me give me just some some final thoughts on what somebody can learn from your book. Who's it for? How's it going to help them? I was a waiter in restaurants. became a deputy sheriff, moved to a police department and that's all I did. Okay, I'd never had this huge payday. I never had an IPO. I didn't understand much about business. I wanted to be a really good cop and all my energy was spent trying to become super cop, go into trainings trying to you know, catch the most bad guys I could. I became a millionaire on accident just from working as much as I could, making as much money as I could, saving as much money as I could. I house hacked, but I didn't even own the house. I was I bet seven rental properties before I ever bought my own home. I was paying money to rent a bedroom from another cop, right? So at my expenses were like 500 bucks for rent plus cell phone and gym and whatever food I ate, but I was able to save 10 grand a month from just working crazy over time as a single guy. That strategy alone got me to being a multi millionaire from the real estate that I bought. Then I learned how to be a business owner and it was a kick in the teeth, man. It was hard. It's still hard. I still wonder if I'm really good at business because it's you have this entrepreneurial bipolarism where one day you think you're taking over the world and the next day you're like, I'm a complete shame when feels out. Yeah, it's you don't feel that I'm doing something wrong. But there it's very blue collar stuff. It's learning how do I meet the demands of the marketplace? How do I hold my employees accountable to doing the job? How do I constantly pivot sort of like playing a sport, right? You can do the same thing every time you go out there to play that sport. You have a defender that's trying to stop you. This book is the proven blueprint of what creates millionaires that you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand. You will learn the skills of budgeting money if no one ever taught you. And then the book will prepare you for what emotions you're going to experience when you start doing that. It's hard. It's it's not like it's complicated to budget money, but it's it's the example I compare it to is like changing your diet. No one is wondering what the secret to a six pack is, but no one has one because it's effing hard to do it, right? So you would want someone to prepare you for these are the emotions you're going to experience when you start telling yourself know you're going to realize how much you relied on retail therapy to deal with problems in your life that you didn't want to address. You're going to realize how in your dating life you just threw money at problems like, hey, let's just go spend $400 on dinner. You didn't connect with your partner. You didn't get any deeper. You didn't address any of your issues. You just threw money at a problem. It's probably hurting your relationship. You stop spending that money on dinner and date night becomes taking a hike together and you actually have to talk to them or listen to what they're saying or a bike ride together. You end up making more meaningful memories and it improves other parts of your life like it's going to improve some of your fitness if you stop just spending money frivolously on things. Well, I have tools that I offer people through my masterminds spartan league and that is talked about in the book how you create a spreadsheet and you software like mint or rocket money to track where your money is going. Then you're going to learn what you figured out Scott when you started a business is there is an actual rhythm or pattern to making money. It's not easy to do, but it's the same things will pop up over and over and over. There's a chapter on performance improving hacks, the pursuit of excellence, skill development, assuming more responsibility as a leader, people run away from that and it's like running away from the weights at the gym. What you can expect when you say, hey, I actually want to make money. Great, here's what the marketplace rewards. This is what you're going to have to become and while defense is about discipline, offense is about self improvement. You got to be okay accepting, I'm not enough. I am not enough for the life that I want and I have to get better. Just like every time I work out, I work out to failure. I hit the point where realize I'm not enough, but that's how you get stronger. Your ego has to be able to accept. You're going to fail and fail and fail and that's probably what's stopping you from doing your best is you don't want that. The book will help you understand what to expect and what to start working on right now to improve your position to earn the right to get to another space. Then the investing chapters all about delayed gratification, real estate strategies that a normal person can use. For example, what influencers want to teach you is these really fancy tricks that sound so cool and make you think you're out smarting the world and then you never actually get to use it. In the world of wrestling, it's like the flying squirrel. A really tough move that the best people can do, but it never really happens in a real wrestling match. There's a strategy. I have dozens of them, but one of them is what I call the 15 15 strategy. If you went out there and you bought a house just like a duplex or a triplex and you put it on a 15-year note or you put it on a 30-year note, but you paid it off as if it was a 15-year note. You might lose a couple hundred bucks in the beginning, so most people would just say, nope, not going to do it doesn't cash flow, but you wouldn't realize you're paying off a thousand bucks, 1500 bucks a month of principle when you put it on a 15-year note. Next year, you do the same thing. Another house, another triplex, 15-year note, you're going to lose a couple hundred bucks, but the first one you bought is going to maybe go up 50 bucks or a hundred bucks and rent, so that loss gets less significant every year. You do the same thing for 15 years. Eventually, the portfolio as a whole is cashling positive because the stuff you bought first is making more money. The stuff you bought later is losing it, but it still is tilted in your favor. At the end of 15 years, that first house is paid off. You do a cash out refinance based on whatever the cash flow can support, and you live off that money tax-free. You pull 150 grand out, $200,000 out. No taxes on it at all. The debt is going to be covered by the rents of the property. You get to live on $200,000 a year tax-free money from decisions you made 15 years ago. Next year, that second house is paid off. You do the same thing. You pull $200,000 out of it. You live on the $200,000. You don't have to work if you don't want to work. Every single year a new house pays off, and once you refinance all 15, the one that you refinance the first time is now paid off again. It's this idea that real estate does not have to be complicated. It is about discipline and delayed gratification and thinking like what future, David, future Scott is going to benefit rather than I hate my job, I hate my boss, I hate my life. If I only had cash flow, I could fix it that stops people from ever getting to that dream. I love that, man. Okay. Where should people connect with you? Where do you want to send them? Obviously, the book will be everywhere. You can buy books, but is there any websites you want to send people to for social? They can get the book at bigger pockets.com slash pillars, and there's some bonus content they can get if they buy it there. They can find me at davidgreen24.com. There's the end of green. That's my website, and then they can follow me on Instagram or whatever social media they like at davidgreen24. Awesome. Okay. Last two quick questions to close these, close this interview out. What would be one lesson that you would tell your 20-year-old self? Oh, that's really good. I would have told my 20-year-old self, and I think about this often, stop worrying about what you're earning and start worrying about what you're learning. I did a good job making money and saving money, but at the same time, the money I made in a year back then I can make it a week now. It wasn't as important as what I thought it was. It only became important because I invested it. I would have taken way more chances and learned way more things. I would have kept working on the restaurant, but maybe gave up one shift a week or something to go learn from some business person or some real estate investor. I would have read more books from successful people. I had a fear of failure that came from very low self-esteem from just a bad relationship with my dad, and that drove so many of my decisions. I didn't understand. It was this rudder in my subconscious that was putting me away from taking chances and learning new things because I was always afraid of failing. If I could go back, I'd say you're 20, expect to fail. No one is watching. No one cares. Like, fail all the way until you're 40. Then maybe you don't want to fail because people are going to be paying attention to you, but I would have just learned as much as I could about everything that I could when there were very low stakes for failure. And at this point in your life, what a success mean to you. Man, that's really good. Success right now, I think, is about influence. Money gives you the ability to influence people because they all want it. But wisdom gives you a form of influence. I think integrity, character can be influential when you have influence. Influence is like, not just being influencer, not just the number of people that are on social media, but when you speak, do your words move people? Or do they just hit them and wash off, except for the few ignorant, stupid people that are going to believe lies, right? The relationships I have with people, I like to feel like when I give them advice, it hits them powerfully. When you say the words, I love you, does that mean something? Do the people who hear that feel different from when you're saying it? And I think money plays a role in that. Health like you said, better looking people tend to command more trust and respect and people want their approval more. So all of those pieces that people measure, ultimately in my mind, all add up to how much influence do you have, and do you use it to influence people in a positive direction that moves them closer to God, closer to success, closer to the life they want or in a negative direction so that you can extract resources from them and have an easier life for yourself.