After Avengers Endgame radically disrupted the MCU, I'm cautiously looking forward to where Marvel Studios takes the story in Phase Four. But with Black Widow coming out soon, I wanted to take a look back at one of my favorite films, Captain America, Winter Soldier. Hey fellas, either one of you know where the Smithsonian is, I'm here to pick up a fossil. It's hilarious. For me, Winter Soldier was the moment that the MCU grew up. Don't get me wrong, I loved Iron Man, the first Avenger and Thor were both really solid, fun introductions to their title characters and the Incredible Hulk exists. Joss Whedon's Avengers brought the team together and unified the feel and tone with an incredible mix of clever writing, great humor, heart and action. But Joe and Anthony Russo's work on Winter Soldier brought meaning and depth to the universe that was just missing before. It opened the door to a broader world of themes and allowed Marvel's films to go beyond just telling fun, entertaining stories about the exploits of colorful comic book characters and start telling fun, entertaining stories about all of that and big, important ideas. This isn't freedom, this is fear. And that's what we're going to talk about on this episode of Out of Frame. In the first Avenger, Steve Rogers is a soldier and a leader. He believes in the righteousness of his mission and his country, he does his duty, he follows orders, for the most part.  I gotta put her in the water. Please don't do this, we have time, we can work it out. Right now I'm in the middle of nowhere, if I wait any longer a lot of people are gonna die. Peggy, this is my choice. I really like the film, but if I had one complaint about the first Avenger, it would be that a lot of the characters, including Rogers, aren't all that complex or well-developed. The drama is largely physical. Will Steve be able to save his friends? Will he defeat Hydra? Will he and Peggy get together? The emotional and intellectual stakes are much lower and almost entirely about Steve's level of commitment to saving the day. We all know Nazis are the worst, so there's no debate about whether or not the villain has a point, he doesn't, or if Steve's mission to defeat Hydra is justified, it is, it's all very black and white. The same thing is true for most of the other Phase One movies. Even in Avengers, the primary external stakes are simply to save the world from a massive army of subhuman alien monsters. Loki's reasons for bringing them to Earth are borderline incoherent and in the end it's really just part of Thanos' master plan. It's very one-dimensional. Enough!  I am a god, you dull creature, and I will not be bullied by that. The biggest internal question in Avengers is simply whether or not the heroes can get their act together and work as a team. That's fine, but it's also the reason a lot of critics and snobs think that superhero movies are for kids. But by developing the internal, intellectual conflict and making Winter Soldier about a battle of ideas, every bit as much as it's a battle of strength, the Russo's permanently changed the game for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Before we dig into this too much more, just know that there are going to be a lot of spoilers for Captain America, Winter Soldier. If you haven't seen it yet, definitely check it out. I'll wait. Duh? Okay, let's talk about it. There are a ton of reasons to love this film. It's got some of the best action sequences of any movie in the canon. It deeply developed Steve's character in his relationship with Nick Fury, Bucky, and Natasha. What about the nurse that lives across the hall from you? She seems kind of nice. Secure the engine room, then find me a date. I'm multitasking. It establishes a great new relationship with Sam Wilson. Don't say it. Don't you say it. I left. Come on! And its plot is filled with complex and exciting mysteries to unravel. The personal stakes for Captain America are really high. You're my friend. You're my mission. Then finish it. Cause I'm with you to the end of the line. But more than all of that, the film is a debate between two fundamentally opposing world views, pitting the value of individual freedom against the goal of national security. Multiple scenes throughout the movie reinforce these ideas, but it begins in an elevator with Nick Fury telling Steve Rogers a story. Well, Grandad worked in a nice building, got good tips. He'd walk home every night, roll a wand, stuffed in his lunch bag. He'd say hi, people would say hi back. Time went on, neighborhood got rougher. Grandad got the grip in that lunch bag a little tighter. Every week something punk would say, what's in the bag? What would he do? He'd show him a bunch of crumpled ones and a loaded 22 Magnum. Grandad loved people, but he didn't trust them very much. Yeah, I know.  This is not only an incredible cinematic set piece that establishes the terms of the final confrontation. It's also the central intellectual argument for the whole film. SHIELD is building new helicarriers that can not only hover above the planet indefinitely, but which can also remotely target individuals with long range guns based on their DNA. These weapons would be a source of concentrated, deadly power, unparalleled in human history. Nick Fury would have us believe this is a good thing. We're gonna neutralize a lot of threats before they even happen. Not the punishment usually came after the crime. We can't afford to wait that long. Who's we? Take note of that line. It's incredibly insightful, but we'll get back to that later. We're about to get to the core issue at hand. After New York, I convinced the World Security Council we needed a quantum surge in threat analysis. For once, we're way ahead of the curve. By holding a gun to everyone on earth and calling it protection. You know, I read those SSR files. Greatest generation, guys did some nasty stuff. Yeah, we compromised, sometimes in ways that made us not sleep so well, but we did it so that people could be free. This isn't freedom, this is fear. This isn't freedom. Even though a lot of the plot of Captain America, Winter Soldier revolves around the mystery of a superhuman assassin and Hydra's infiltration inside S.H.I.E.L.D. that line is the absolute core of what matters in this movie. The question it asks of Steve and of all of us is this, is the promise of a perfectly secure world worth the price of our individual rights? At the end of the film, World Security Council Secretary Alexander Pierce played masterfully by Robert Redford is even more direct. Let me ask you a question. What if Pakistan marched into Mumbai tomorrow and you knew that they were gonna drag your daughters into a soccer stadium for execution and you could just stop it with a flick of the switch? Wouldn't you? When you are? A lot of people would struggle with an answer, but before you give me yours, let me turn that question around. Imagine that it's not you with the power to decide who lives or dies. In fact, imagine that this power will never be in your hands.  Should you trust any group of people with that power? I don't, but let's get back to Steve. Who's we? Nick Fury uses the term to mean shield, but as the movie reveals, shield has already been corrupted by Hydra and they're planning to use the power of the helicarriers to target and kill millions of innocent people. I can bring order to the lives of seven billion people by sacrificing 20 million. It's the next step, Nick. You have the courage to take it. And let's not forget that in this universe, the World Security Council already fired a nuclear weapon at New York City. But more importantly, it's worth really thinking about what we actually means in terms of making decisions. This is always one of the more controversial points I make on this series, but the fact of the matter is groups of people don't make decisions. They can't. They have no brains or agency of their own. This observation is at the heart of a branch of economics called public choice theory, which looks at the way incentives and individual self-interest affects political decision-making. While groups help us easily categorize communities of people who share one trade or another, we should never forget that they are comprised of individuals with their own values and goals. They're the ones who are actually making decisions. Even if we're talking about democracy, a majority of voters can only share their general preferences by electing individual politicians to make decisions on their behalf.  I'm sorry, did I just mishear you or did you agree with me? Oh, I want to take it back. Politicians are just people who have their own values and who respond to incentives just the same as anyone else. The big difference is that they face far fewer direct consequences for their actions and the cost of their decisions is paid for by other people. When those same politicians can imprison or physically harm anyone who refuses to do what they say, it's easy to see why power is so often abused. Now, in theory, if enough people are unhappy with their representatives' choices, they can hold another election and try again.  Who's we? The point is, when Nick Fury says we, he's using a shorthand that obscures reality.  Meanwhile, people like Captain America, who don't agree that they should have that power to begin with, don't get a say. And who knows, maybe Nick Fury would have been more trustworthy with that kind of power, but he wasn't in control of it for very long. That's predictable, and we need to keep it in mind whenever someone demands that we give them tons of power in exchange for security. We've seen this kind of logic play out in the real world more times than I can count. When I was a freshman in college, 19 terrorist hijackers brought down the Twin Towers and crashed into the Pentagon on 9-11. It was such a shocking experience that at first I thought the news clips I was seeing on the TVs in the cafeteria were from a movie. But as the grim reality set in and I had a chance to think about what was happening, my biggest fear wasn't that there would be more terrorist attacks all over the country, but that the reaction would be a terrifying push for the expansion of power in the name of national security. I was right. In just a few months, the United States launched a global war on terror, starting with a military invasion of Afghanistan and Congress fast-tracked an unbelievably expansive piece of legislation, now known as the USA Patriot Act. The 342-page bill was passed less than two months after the attack with shockingly little debate or dissent. The language of the final bill was not even available to read for 24 hours before Congress voted to approve it on October 24th, 2001. The US Senate approved it the next day, almost unanimously. It was originally supposed to expire in 2005, but each time it's come up for reauthorization, it's sailed through the process with little opposition. In fact, it was set to expire again in March of this year and you probably didn't even hear about it. You also might not be aware that the name of the bill itself is an acronym, which stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism. The 23-year-old staffer who came up with that name probably felt clever, but what exactly were those appropriate tools? Well, glad you asked. The Patriot Act gave the US government the power to wiretap and search homes without notification or due process in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. It gave them the power to obtain private business and personal records with little more than a rubber stamp from FISA courts that are required to approve the action, even if the FBI can't offer any material facts to justify the search. It created hundreds of new banking regulations and reporting requirements, giving the government access to your financial records and accounts. It gave the Immigration and Naturalization Service more power to detain people at the border and restrict immigration, denying visas or entry to anyone they claim has ties to terrorist or criminal organizations. It smashed the due process standards the NSA and FBI used to have to follow in order to obtain digital records, allowing them to go through your internet service provider and companies like Google to gain access to your private browsing and email history with something called a national security letter. The NSL also prevents companies from notifying you that your records were compromised. The Patriot Act also paved the way for law enforcement agencies around the country to expand civil asset forfeiture and policies like stop and frisk. Every one of these powers has been abused. Everyone has left a trail of innocent people whose lives were ruined because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or because creative prosecutors figured out how to use their newfound authority to get convictions. And yet with all this power, there's little evidence that the law has ever directly prevented an attack or helped us catch a major terrorist. But repealing a law is much, much harder than getting it passed to begin with. And so a few weeks ago, the USA Patriot Act was quietly reauthorized again. The real question is, why did we allow this? When people feel fear, they're much more willing to accept anything that makes the world seem a little safer. This happens because anxiety actually disrupts the normal functions of the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that helps us make decisions and solve problems. When people are stressed, it's much easier to convince them to accept policies without thinking critically. I'm concerned that's happening again right now. In the wake of a viral pandemic, we've seen an explosion of support for expanding government power. It's easy to understand why people are afraid, but if the answer is restricting individual liberty all over the world on the hope that politicians will use that power for good, the cure could do far more harm than the disease. Politicians have an incentive to exploit fear to gain more power. And just like in Captain America Winter Soldier, that power won't always be in the hands of people with good intentions or the right ideas. I'm not going to say that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but whenever life forces us to deal with danger and anxiety, we need to be careful not to let that drive us to overreact and abandon our most important principles. It's possible to counteract this effect by slowing down, calming ourselves and waiting to make important decisions until after our strongest emotional reactions, subside. One of the things that makes Steve Rogers such a great character for the MCU is that he's always been the moral bedrock for everyone around him. His principles and courage allow him to stand up to those who would trade freedom for the false promise of security. Shield, Hydra, it all goes. Looks like you're giving the orders now, Captain. Intuitively, it's easy to think that totalitarianism performs better in a crisis. Dictators can mobilize more resources. They're all too happy to use brutality to force people to do what they want, and citizens who live in fear of their rulers are more compliant. But as confident as political leaders often want to appear, nobody actually knows what solutions are going to work best. One size doesn't actually fit all. Freedom doesn't just make us more independent. It also makes us the most flexible and agile when those traits are the most needed. It allows us to experiment with different ways of helping each other and to communicate what we've learned with everyone else. It allows entrepreneurs to quickly adapt and bring goods and services to people who need them instead of waiting for slow-moving bureaucracies to grant their approval. Free societies are also considerably wealthier, which means that they have way more ability to cushion people from the worst consequences of a disaster. Throughout history, people who have traded their freedom for promises of security have found that they wind up with neither. The intellectual conflict at the heart of Captain America Winter Soldier is just as relevant today as it has ever been. We're constantly bombarded with alarming messages from the news and social media. Terrorism, immigration, drug cartels and gangs, pandemic disease, GMOs, student loan debt, there's always something to be afraid of and there's always someone willing to sell us a sense of security in exchange for more power. But while that sense of security is usually an illusion, the cost of giving up our freedom is not. We need to calm ourselves and confront our fear instead of allowing it to hijack our ability to reason and lead us to make bad decisions that we can't take back. The price of freedom is high. It always has been. And it's price I'm willing to pay. And if I'm the only one, then so be it. But I'm willing to bet I'm not. I'm with Captain Rogers. Are you? Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. How do you calm yourself when you experience fear and anxiety? Have you ever made a decision that you wish you'd made differently today? Let's talk about it in the comments. And while you're there, don't forget to give this video a like, subscribe and hit that bell icon to be sure you're the first to know when a new episode comes out. Lastly, be sure to follow us on all our social media at YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Thanks for watching.


Now that was after, I believe we inside the Dow industrials as well as the S&P, you went to a new all-time high. And so yesterday was really interesting, well we definitely went to a new all-time high with the Dow industrials as well as the S&P, 36,679 and then you closed out down 90 bucks. So let's take a look at the S&P, same type of setup inside the S&P, what we have is this, is that you had the S&P go up to a price point today of $4808 and close at $4786, that being said guess what, you know this break topside on Monday was a decent break. So we'll see where this shakes out, I suspect tomorrow is going to be another sideways day, no big deal, Monday we come back to work, 2022 and we go from there. Gold, gold contract caught a bit out here, it's going to be interesting overnight here and see how gold actually trades because gold's going back into a swing and it's very possible it's going to be an ABC structure on their way up. What's really here, let me give you the numbers on gold right now because if you're trading overnight, well not overnight but like 7 this morning, you'll know these numbers if you traded this before I just watched them by 7 in the morning. So gold needs 101,000 contracts for an ABC structure up. We did 108 today. If gold, what happens is this folks, by approximately 8.30 in the morning, a lot of the trading's done on gold, 8.30 a.m., okay? If you see 30 or 40,000, maybe 45,000 at that level, let's say it's going to do more than 100,000 and if we have that, that's an ABC structure on the way up and we just may be on our way here. We got to take a look at, and the reason that would happen is good old King dollar. So when we go over to King dollar on the other side, what you're going to see here with King dollar is that we came down yesterday with price big time, okay? We went straight down. Today, it tried to bottom line, get up higher, it rejected 96,220. You're at 96,009. That's saying it wants to go for the lower swing that was generated yesterday and if we get that, you just might break down, you know, because you can see the breakout area in the dollar is 94,563 and if that's where it's going to go, you're going to see gold doing an ABC structure up and that being said, you're going to see that all the equities are already at a higher level. Have a great night, folks. Have a safe night. Come back and visit Tommy tomorrow morning, 9 a.m., great show.


On a certain day, a lion was really feeling great within himself. He was walking and a little rabbit was going, he caught him and roared at him, who is the king of the jungle?  He let him go, swaggered around a little bit. Then he found a fox, caught him, who is the king of the jungle?  Then he swaggered around a little bit, caught a few more animals, everybody screamed out of fear, you are the king of the jungle. Then he was in full swagger, walked into a clearing in the jungle, there was a huge tusker standing.  The tusker took his trunk, rolled him up, picked him up, twirled him around, smashed him to the ground. The lion's back broke. Then the lion said, you could have just told me the tusker that you see I had to make my point. So, a lot of people generally are thinking management means just throwing their weight around. Throwing your weight around is not management, any fool can do that. So leadership means not a position of power, but a position of responsibility. A leadership, usually a leader means he becomes gross, crude, insensitive. No, those are never the qualities of leadership. Leadership comes only with sensitivity. Leader means you are seeing things that other people are yet to see. Otherwise you are not a leader. When other people complain, you protest and unwillingly you give in, that is not leadership. Leadership means you are able to see those things which other people are not able to see.


Hello everybody, Andrea Trausky here with Dental L Tutoring. So the question of a week seems to be about oil pulling. Now a couple years ago, this seemed to be a very popular question more so than it was now because I think something exploded on Pinterest where just everybody was talking about oil pulling and back then like a couple years ago. It was pretty much those who didn't want to floss heard that oil pulling means that you don't have to floss. So you might be wondering well, what is oil pulling? So what what actually is is you would swish oil in your mouth like like you would mouthwash almost but for 20 minutes.  So all of that are those toxins, the bacteria, the unhealthiness plaque that's supposed to come out with the oil. Now, but you should only be using a certain kind of oil because there are some healthier oils and there are some not so healthy oils. So they say that the coconut oil, the sunflower oil, the avocado oil, those are the healthy ones to use. Canola oil as an example is not healthy, so you shouldn't be using it because if you're swishing around for 20 whole minutes, that's a long time for that oil to be absorbed almost in your system. But you might be wondering what I think about oil pulling. Now I can't say that it hurts because I don't see it hurting anything hurting anybody. But if you think about it, I mean, try it. If you haven't yet, are you able to swish around with oil for 20 minutes? I tried it. I couldn't do it because I had patients asking me. I thought, okay, well, let me see what this is all about. I tried it with coconut oil and I couldn't do it. I mean, I even tried it where I tried to do other things so I wouldn't notice it as much. Like I believe I hopped in the shower. You know, I was getting ready. But I still couldn't do it for the whole 20 minutes because I didn't like constantly having something in my mouth having to swish it around, but then of course you have to spit it out, right? But a lot of people ask me, well, is it better than flossing? Well, how can it be better because you're not able to get in between your teeth properly? But what I was also thinking was so if a patient's coming to me asking if they should use the oil pulling or the flossing, well, what I typically say is, well, if you floss, that takes two minutes, but you're okay to put oil in your mouth and just swish around for 20 minutes. You know, because typically when a patient doesn't want to do something it's because it takes too long. So if people don't have problem with oil pulling and they all want to try it so that way they don't have to floss, it doesn't make sense to me because flossing is a lot easier and takes less time. Why not just floss? You know what I mean? And why not just brush?  So I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but anytime a patient asks me, I just kind of say, well, it's not a bad thing. I don't see it actually helping because for it to work, they say to take out the toxins, you have to be swishing around for 20 minutes. Who has time for that? Who wants to do that? Why not just brushing floss in the first place? It's a lot easier. It's quicker and done. So that's kind of my two cents about the whole thing. So you should always kind of have your own opinion if a patient asks you about it but that's just kind of my two cents. It's just pretty much me saying, well, if you can do that for 20 minutes, you might as well just floss for two minutes and you know that's actually working. There has been studies showing that it's actually working with oil pulling. There's no studies saying that it's actually doing anything. So that's what it is you guys. That's just kind of my two cents. But good luck and let me know what you think. Thank you so much for watching.


forget about what the social media hot stock or hot traders doing. Be the best version of yourself. You trade small caps, God bless, but be the best version of yourself.  Welcome to Access a Trader, the number one community for those who are committed to taking control of their trading in order to achieve success, profitability, and longevity. Thank you for joining us. Here's Dan Shapiro to help you find your edge, master your process, and own your future. Hey, guys. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to 2023. Welcome aboard, guys. Good morning. Hope everybody is doing great. Welcome to another edition of theaxisitrader.com weekend update show, the first broadcast for 2023. Before we get started, I want to wish everybody a very, very happy and healthy. Again, health is the most important part. You can have whatever you want. Does every desire meet whatever financial or relationship goal you want, but if you don't have the health to back it up, what is it for, right? So everybody, make sure again, like I've been preaching for years and years and years 2023, be a better friend to yourself. Take care of your health. Take care of your family. You only have one life to live. That's it. As far as I know, you don't get a mulligan. So live your best life and just be happy. You don't need to fight with anybody. You don't need to care about what anybody else is doing. Be the best version of yourself and everything else will take care of itself. So if you are brand new to the broadcast, my name is Dan Shapiro. I've been trading since 1999 in one of the, you know, one of the bigger prop names in the world at that time. Carl and financial owned generic trading. So I'm going on my 24th year. I've been through the internet craze. I've been through a time in my life from 2001 through 2003 that I didn't make a single penny in those two years. I've traded a number of bear markets, including the bear market from last year. And the most important part is I'm here, right? I'm still here. So the most important part out of everything that I just said was if you are watching this broadcast, and this was your first year of trading, congratulations, right? You made it through your first year. I think it's a big, big deal. I don't think a lot of people give themselves enough credit, whether you lost, made or indifferent, the more important part is you got that first year under your belt, right? If this is going on your second year of trading, or your third year of trading, congratulations, you've traded your first bear market. Okay, we'll get to that in a second. I do believe that a trader can't really put into perspective how important their journey is without trading a number of bear markets. The bear market that I traded from 2001-2003 was, I don't want to use the word, but the whole Ben Laden market, right? The whole fear of anxiety, of waking up in the morning of safety, then came the mortgage crisis from 2007-2009, a factual, materialistic, global potential demise of the financial system. That was kind of a big deal. And this last one that we saw from 2022, which out of all the bear markets, well, the several that I traded, this one was the most orderly, and this is the more of the three very, very biased of bears. But there were so many periods of time in 2022, which I'll show you in a second, that the bulls had a really, really good time. It was very organic, right? It was very, very tradable, but the most important part is you did it, right? And give yourself a round of applause. I know this doesn't seem like a big deal, but it is. I've always maintained that first two, three, five year period of your existence is going to build your foundation. It's all about screen time. It's all about, as a t-shirt says, stay patient, right?  Your time will come, right? The screen time is everything. Don't put a lot of pressure on yourself. Don't try to be in the predicting business, right? I'm not in the predicting business. Every single video that I record, I have no idea what's going to happen the next day. I'm prepared for it, right? I'm prepared for it, but I have no idea, right? I have absolutely no idea. I'm wrong a lot. Sometimes, like, for example, last Thursday, going into Thursday's day, the way we closed, right? The way we closed at the low of the channel, I was 2,000% cell bias, and we had a pretty aggressive bounce back day. Again, it's okay to be wrong, right? It's okay. Trust me. Everybody's wrong in this business. It's okay to be wrong theoretically. Just don't be wrong financially. That's being stubborn, that's having an opinion, that's having a bias, that's putting yourself in a situation that the more important part of what you're doing is being right instead of being rational, instead of being solvent. And I think a lot of traders, unfortunately, they go belly up in this business, and that first two to three to five-year channel, because they're trying to be smart. They're trying to outsmart the market. They're trying to show everybody how talented and how brilliant they are. And again, it's the easiest business to get into. It's the easiest business to quit, and it's the hardest business to get back into because it's sold to moralizing mentally and it takes away your money, it takes away everything that you have, your confidence, and your money is gone. You can't get it back until you are ready to go again. So this business is rough. I've never hid the fact that I hated this business. I hate this business because what it put me through that first five years of that darkest time of my life, think about it, try going two years from 2001 to 2003 after the internet craze from 99 to 2001. Try to go two years without making any money, and then you're trying to rationalize every single day while the depression is kicking in while the walls are closing in on you. Why can't you replicate those results? And you realize you don't know how to trade. You never did know how to trade. It becomes very, very depressing, and it was the most darkest time in my life as I never hid the fact I had periods of suicidal thoughts. Thank God that God gave me the strength to kind of move on, but the most important part is I will never have love for this business because it just exactly would have put me through. So the idea that you need to be in love with this to be very, very effective is nonsense. I think it's complete BS, but it's a job. It's a job, it's a very, very serious job. This channel is not designed for the investor that's looking out to Dan, where do you think Amazon is going to be in five years? Okay, high. I don't know. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But the point is we're not in the guessing business. We're not in the forecasting business. I see every single year all the time. What do you think the S&P is going to be? I couldn't tell you where the S&P is going to be on Monday, on Tuesday, let alone where it's going to be a year from now. And I don't think a lot of traders, when they went to sleep, when they went to sleep in December of 2021, had an inkling in their mind that this was going to happen. And these were the final stats going into for 2022. The S&P lost a staggering 19.5%. Just let that sink in. Let that sink in. The Dow dropped about 9%. And this is the big one. This is the big one, all the growth stories, all the high flyers, all the PEs, there were 10,000. And when the bubble popped, and the bubble popped, and Wall Street stopped paying for potential, NASDAQ lost 33%. And these are staggering numbers. These are not numbers that you can debate or have a subjective conversation. This is exactly what happened. We traded a bear market in 2022. When you look at 33% of the NASDAQ, it's very, very hard to spin it. It is what it is. And the common denominator for where we are right now, and you can see here where we are right now, we closed the same way we closed. Here we go. Let me just show you guys. So here is December. Here is December, here is, here we go. Here is the first trading day, right? The first trading day of 2022 was January the 5th. And we closed below the 50-day moving average. If you are brand new to this channel, number one, please subscribe. Again, we try to give an incredibly unbiased opinion of what we think is going to happen tomorrow, not the next day, not the following day, not the following year, tomorrow. And what happened was we closed below the 50-day moving average on January the 5th. And this started pretty much an eight-month cycle, right? With periods of pretty good strength in between. This is kind of what I've said in the past year. This has been the most bullish bear market of all time, because you did have periods of really, really good strength. Like here was a time in March that we had a month rally. Think about it, a month rally in a bear market is a lot. And then we lost the 50-day moving average again. And here we are, right? Here we are kind of present day, right? Here we are present day. And you can see, and here we are, let me just go back to present day. And so you can see 80% of the market in 2022 was traded below the 50-day moving average, like I said, with sporadic runs to the upside. And we've been saying all along, the market's not going to go straight down. The market's not going to be violent every single day. But the overall theme that 80% of the time, we are going to try and sell buys. And this is kind of the latest example here. Here we are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Out of the 12 days, we have four days of upside, right? Out of the 12 days, we're below the 50-day moving average. We have four days of upside. So you can do the math. You kind of correlates exactly what I said. And the most important part going into this year, I know new traders are excited, right? I know you're excited. If you're in this business, especially only a couple of years that you probably spent the last couple of days partying, right?  I've done it. You're sitting there in a night club or a bar or hell, even a house party, whatever the case may be, and you're drunk, and you're drinking, you're having a good time. Raise your glasses, guys. This is the year we kill it, right? This is the year we kill it. You come back the first trading day, you're excited, everything is great, and then the next thing you know of 15 minutes into the day, you realize that nothing has changed, just the date on the calendar and the year in the calendar, and you're still doing exactly the same thing you did from the previous week, and it becomes very, very demoralizing.  A big reality check of that, hey, you haven't done anything different, right? You haven't done anything necessary to kind of progress your development. You're still doing the same thing. You're still waking up five minutes prior to the close and looking at the high list of the day, the hot stock list. You're still trading the same stocks that 99% of all retail traders are saying, and again, I've said this for many, many years, if you're trading the same stocks as everybody else, well, why are you expecting different results, right? Everybody piles in at the same time, the same denominators. The traders are still trading on these little one-minute intervals, which is incredible to me. Again, for all you guys who don't know, we trade on the 60-minute channels, and the most important part is you're still doing the same thing, repeating the same thing over and over and over again, and now you're expecting different results just because it's a brand new year, and I've been there, right? I've absolutely been there, and the key to this business is find your edge. I know it's a very broad generic statement, but you're not going to find your edge trading the same type of stocks, the same type of way of everybody else. You're just not. That's why it's called retail. That's why when you open up a chessboard, the pawns are the first one to die, right? It's not the king and the queen. It's the pawns, and unfortunately, retail is part of the pawns. So if you're looking at the hot stock, again, maybe you'll make money, right? Maybe you won't, but it's not an edge.  Maybe you won, maybe you lose, but it's very, very tough to sustain an edge over the markets. Again, I don't have all the answers. I've seen a lot of the questions. I don't have all the answers every single year. The only thing I'm trying to do is just develop, right? Just develop in ways mentally, technically, right? This year, towards the end of the year, I found, well, and I haven't found, we've been using it for a long time, but I personally have been starting just to start trading a lot of rejections off the daily and 60-minute channels who've been working pretty well. I know a lot of you guys have been doing it for years, but this is my development, right? This is my personal journey. And again, you know, I'm not trying to be the best trader in the world.  Nobody loads themselves more than I do, but this is why I'm grounded. This is why I look at the market in reality. I look at the market, at the market that I have, not the market that I want. Again, everybody wants a bull market, right?  I want a market that every single night you could just take over nights and they just gap up every single night, right? Isn't that what the internet craze was? You know, all my friends, to this day, to this day, from anybody who started in 99 and 2000, they will not acknowledge that we had no idea what we were doing. Again, I traded with one of the best traders of all time, Meyer Hoffman, one of my mentors, Ron Shear, one of my mentors at Generic Trading. You could Google them. They got bought out by the Royal Bank of Canada. There was 12 pages for that book, Flash Boys and the Royal Bank of Canada acquired Generic Trading in Carlin Financial years back. And they portrayed us as thugs. It was almost like a scene out of the Sopranos, which we weren't, okay? But I've been around for a very, very long time. So I'm not trying to be the greatest trader in the world.  That's it. I'm just trying to take away things that I know I shouldn't do every single day and try not to do it. I'll never be perfect. I make a lot of mistakes. I'll continue to make a lot of mistakes. But that's where human beings are. But the most important part is, as like you, we made it, right? We made it to another year. So it's another year under our belts. Another year of screen time. There's another year of watching news events. There's another year of being the best version that you can be. And that's the only thing you can ask for. You will never in a million years. And this is why the whole alert service thing is ridiculous. There's no way you will ever emulate another trader's results. There's absolutely no way. You don't have the same account size. You don't have the same history. You don't have the same mental makeup. You don't have the same financial lifestyle. So how can you possibly emulate another trader's results? Guys, forget about what the social media hot stock or hot traders doing. Be the best version of yourself. You trade small caps. God bless. But be the best version of yourself.  If you're an E-mini trader, if you trade technology, the high-baton name just like me, be the best version of yourself. Because without the best version of yourself, you're never living up to your potential. And the worst thing possible you can do in this business is go from style to style, process to process, trader to trader.  So the best piece of advice going into this year is, again, just relax. Stay patient. I don't know if you can see my shirt. Stay patient. That's me, by the way. Stay patient. Let everything come to you. When your time comes, everything will click. Don't put a lot of pressure on yourself. Don't put yourself in a situation that you are doing something outside of your comfort zone. Don't deviate from your process, whether you found one or not, or still looking. Never deviate and let the market tell you you're wrong technically. Don't have an opinion of what you think is going to happen because the market changes on a dime. The market trades fluently.  You don't want to be that trader. You want to be around. The best type of business and the best type of environment is the person who stays in business and thrives in whatever environment as well. If you are just a long biased trader, again, again, look at those stats that we showed, right? Look at those stats that we showed. It's very, very tough considering we've been talking about what happens generally underneath the 50-day moving average. What happens generally when the market's below, bearish action and 2022 has proved it. Is it possible the bull start reclaiming channels start moving their way up? Absolutely. Again, there's nothing more that I would love than a bull market. It's just so much easier to navigate than a bear market. There's much more liquidity. There's much more market participants. Everybody's in a much better mood, right? Food tastes better. The air smells fresher. Everybody's just a better overall human being, but unfortunately life is not fair. Trading is not fair. And again, just like 2022, we start the year two weeks in below the 50-day moving average. And the way I like to approach every single day, I look at the macro, I look at the big picture. Where are we? We already know. This is how I kind of prepare for my day. Where are we? We're below the 50-day moving average. So I know 80% of the time we're going to be below because again, that's the data that shows us going into 2023 from 2022. So I already know that there's a bearish sentiment. Yes. We rallied the last couple of days. Yeah, absolutely. We rallied a number of times in 2022. It doesn't change the fact that we were still 33% down in the NASDAQ. So I look at the overall environment. I know we're to the downside, but I know now the Q's are building a little bit of channel here. I also know that 10-day is the next supply zone and the next supply zone on the Q's is 267. Everybody see that? That's 267. So for the bulls to have a chance to prolong this dead cab bounce, we're going to need to reclaim. The Q's are going to need to reclaim this 267 on a close. If we can reclaim this 267 on a close, I know going into the next trading day, I know that again, if you believe that stocks trade from supply to supply and demand to demand, I know that if we can reclaim the 267 level on the Q's, we will rally to at least attempt the rally into this 273 level, which is the next supply zone. This is the next measured potential. So when you see me, for example, tweeting something on Twitter saying, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, has room measured potential to this area, this is what I mean, the next supply zone. So if the Q's can reclaim 267 on the close, then yeah, we do have a very, very strong shot of a move back to 273. And if the Q's can reclaim 275, then we go back to the 50-day moving average of 278. And obviously, that's what every bull wants. We want to remount, to reclaim whatever you want to call it. We want the bulls ultimately to close at 278 because if that's the case, they reclaim the 50-day moving average and that starts a higher channel and it starts moving up the higher prices. Unfortunately, we're not at that point yet. We're just going day-to-day, trade by trade, one day at a time, one trade at a time. But there's a flip side to this as well. We know that again, we're again in downside bias, and we know that 267 is going to be a big area to the upside, but we also know the opposite. And that's the whole point of trading both sides of the market, putting yourself in a position that you're prepared for both sides, and that's what we do. We have an opinion for the next day. We have a sentiment for the next day, but we also have to be conscious there's a top of the channel that we need to build, and there's a bottom of the channel that we need to build as well. So 267 is to the upside, but look at the base that's putting into the downside as well. Everybody see that, right? On December the 29th, the low here is 262.25, right? The low from Friday was 62.29. So there's your channel, right? And the longer it builds in that channel on both sides, the higher probability it'll break that channel, confirm that channel, and start moving higher. So going into this week, the only thing that matters to me, okay? Not to anybody else, not to any other trader. Only thing that matters to me is 267 to the upside and 262 to the downside. If we start reclaiming 267, I think we go higher. If we start reclaiming 262, then I believe that ultimately we were going to get down to the bottom range here of 254. That's it. Everything else doesn't matter. Everything else is noise. Everything else is opinion. Everything else is subjective. Everything else is, and by the way, if you're still arguing with somebody on a symbol on social media, you're really doing it wrong, right? Nobody cares, guys.  Nobody cares about my opinion. Nobody cares about your opinion. It's all about price action. The cues are either going to reclaim 267 to the up, or break down below 262 and test this 254 channel, or nothing is happening. We don't care where Apple is going to be three years from now, right? I don't at least. So the most important part is be the best version of yourself. Put yourself in a situation that you feel comfortable in your own skin. You don't need to poll 2,000 people on Twitter. What do they think about Tesla going into the new year, right? It's all in the charts, and that's the greatest kept secret. That's not a secret at all. It's all in the chart. So let me give you guys a specific number, right? Specific. Usually on social media, we always kind of save the specific numbers for access to Trader. But let me show you guys exactly what I'm looking for going into Tuesday, right? So here's a chart on Tesla, right? The same way we just talked about the cues, I'm going to give you a symbol. But obviously, this is my favorite stock. I traded both ways. It's been a phenomenal trader since the breakdown of the 50-day moving average. Big ranges, breakdown, big ranges, breakdown. Have we rallied off some levels in the past? Absolutely. As a matter of fact, we're three days into this kind of reversal. And as you can see here, on Friday, it stopped right at the linear regression line. You see this linear regression line? How it stopped perfectly. So I know there's a channel building in Tesla. And the longer it stays in that channel, it will give us a trade, whether it's going to be the upside to the downside, still to be determined. But this is kind of what I look for, okay? Right? So you see the top of the channel's highs, right? Top of the channel's highs was 124.50, right? That was Friday's highs, right? 124.50. The low for the last couple of days has been the five-day moving average support of 117.50. Everybody see that guys, right? So you have 9, you have 24.50 to the upside, and you have 17.50 to the downside. So what's going to happen? If Tesla can start building, and the word building just means price action developing over Friday's channel. So building doesn't mean, well, then it traded 124.60 and then it died. No, it just traded it. It has to build. And what it built is basically buyers and sellers have to establish a new base over Friday's channel for at least three to five minutes, right? Volume and price action has to take place above Friday's channels. If they can do so, and here's kind of when we talk about measured potential again, if they can do so, so the next measured potential, if they start building off that 124.50, 125 is 129, right? We're not saying Tesla's going to go back to 145, 176, 200, again, baby steps. We're just trying to win our interval. We're not trying to guess the closing price. So we have 124.50 to 125 to the upside with measured potential here at 129. And to the downside, right? To the downside, if Tesla starts confirming the five-day moving average, which is the shortest term sent on whoever has control of the five, as usually has control of short-term price action, if the bears start building, right, the price action continues to take place below 17.5, 17, right? The measured potential is this lower channel of last week's lows of 108. So you have measured potential of 129 to the upside of a 124.50, 125 build, and you have a measured potential of 108, initial measure potential of 108 if we start building below 17.5. Obviously, the value is to the downside because you have only five points to the upside and you have not only 11, you know, nine, 10 points to the downside, but then if it starts building, then you have $100 price potential as well. So every single day, that's all I do, right? So the idea that I'm trying to predict the market or anybody's trying to be right is ridiculous. I'm looking at price action, okay? I'm looking at a channel development to the upside. I'm looking for the channel development to the downside and whichever side confirms, that's the channel where I'm trading. Again, I'll give you one more, right? Give you one more, like look at AMD, right? AMD is a little bit tighter than Tesla, but you have the same thing brewing, right? Look how tight it's starting to get here in the last couple of days. The upside channel of AMD, right? The high here is 65.20. Friday's high was 64.80, right? 64.80 and 65.20. The bottom here, it stopped twice at 63. You see that? Thursday it stopped at 63.06. Friday it stopped at 63.14. So the top of the channel here is 65.20, right? It needs to build for a possible move back to 67. And if it starts building below 63, it should have a move all the way back down to 60. That's all we do. We're not trying to guess. We're just putting ourselves in a position to let the market tell us which way the wind is going to blow. And we're going with the tidal wave, not against it. And that's it, guys. That's it. I wish I could make it more. I wish I could sound smarter or have a better, broader indicators of what we're trying to look for or an opinion of what's going to happen three months from now. We don't.    I let the price action dictate to us what's going to happen next.  Today and tomorrow is the last day that you can take advantage of the holiday sale, the holiday trial. If this interests you, right? If trading channels interest you or you're always interested in trading pivots, I think I gave you just a little bit of a microcosmic view of exactly what this PS60 theory is, what it's not. But most important, seeing it in real time with the moving parts is a really, really pretty cool thing. So that's it, everybody. I hope everybody has an incredible long weekend. I wish everybody nothing but health and happiness and all your wishes and desires. I hope you are looking for, if it's not with pivots and it's not with me, I really hope you find what you're looking for and just be, again, the best version of yourself that you can be. Happy 2023, everybody. God bless and I will see you all on Tuesday. Take care.


Hey everybody, JR Fisher here, and we are live on a Tuesday from I guess north of Austin, Texas is where I'm located now. I want to welcome everybody today. I want to talk a little bit about pricing, how you can figure out the pricing on your products or stores. Matter of fact in the very end what I'm going to do is I'm also going to go over consulting, how you can charge consulting fees, and what's the charge for that. I've sold products online, I've sold consulting and coaching and courses. I've done millions of dollars of both digital and physical products. On this channel, all I do is share that information with you so that you can get good results and you can make money too. Don't forget, if you haven't subscribed to my channel, let's say you're watching it on YouTube, make sure you hit that subscribe button down there. Make sure you turn on all notifications. That means bring the bell, turn on all notifications so you're notified every time I go live or if I upload a video. Now if you're watching me on Facebook, if you would just like the video, if you would put some comments down there, I would greatly appreciate it. It really helps the algorithm and it helps that video get out there. Yeah, utilize that chat area, guys. That's what that's for, whether it's on Facebook, whether it's on YouTube. I see both of them with this new software I have, which I love called StreamYard. I used to have to use OBS and try to connect it and it never quite connected, right? Ah, it's pain. But this stuff's really good. I highly recommend it. I'll get y'all a link to it later on and I'll stick that in there so that you can get this software too if you want to use something like that. Off to the side, I've got an iPad here so I can talk to you guys back and forth. I can put some chat stuff in there. Let me know if you could hear me. That would be really nice if you would just type in there, hey, J.R., I could hear you. I could see you. You're not talking to yourself, okay, which has been done before by me in the past, but I would really like to know if you can hear me. So if you put that in there and I want to get to know you guys, you know, it's funny. Over the years, I've met a lot of people online. They've helped me out and I've helped them out and you could be one of those people where we just become friends online and we can exchange information, which is really pretty cool to do, that you can actually do that nowadays, right? I think that's pretty awesome. So let's talk about this pricing thing. The first part I'm going to talk about is pricing your products on a store. If you have a store like that, you know, every business owner has had to try to figure this out, this pricing thing. And it's difficult to do, but there are some tricks you can use so that you have good prices and you make good money too. But if you do this wrong, you face imminent failure, okay? And we don't want that to happen. We want you to stay in business, okay? So the first thing I'm going to tell you, step one is you have to factor in all your business costs, okay? Every business has costs. Your business needs to account for the amount that you're going to be paying into the business, okay? So it actually costs you money to run a business.  You know what you've been spending and you have a pretty clear idea of what your budget is moving forward. But if not, that would be your first step, okay, to figure out all that stuff. So it would consider things like inventory, okay? Any supplies that you need to get the product or sell the product, any other various things you need to run your business ranging from, you know, higher cost items like a computer and furniture to smaller items like pins and paper and all that stuff. You want to factor in everything, maybe web hosting for your business, designing your website. You know, if you took time to do it, you got to factor that in. If you hired somebody else, you got to factor that in all your marketing efforts, whatever you're doing for marketing, your labor for hire, including employees, contractors, you know, people that you hired on Fiverr or whatever, you got to figure all that out. Because that's step one. Step one, you've got to have those things covered. That just has to be covered. Now, step two, and this is the one that a lot of people forget to do, consider your time. I mean, what does your time take to do these things? Just as you track your expenses, you should be tracking your time. Whatever business you're in, okay, you can find a number of free time tracking tools like toggle or my hours that will help you accomplish a picture of how much time you're putting into the store or your business. Now, with me, I'm putting in tons of hours every single day. So I don't even need one of those tools because I know I work a lot of hours a day, probably 10, 12 hours a day. Now, in the early days, you're just getting set up, you're likely won't be making anything back for your time. This is not going to happen in the beginning. You've got to get everything set up. You haven't sold anything yet. But eventually, okay, you will need to calculate this. Okay, so it's really important to start tracking it now. Your pricing therefore needs to consider your labor as well as your costs. Okay, so you want to figure out two numbers here. You want to figure out how much you will like to be paid for your time. Okay, and that can be based on your previous job, based on what you want to earn. You know, if you're feeling really ambitious, a huge increase in what you used to earn. What is the bare minimum you feel you need to be paid for your time for this business to pay off, and then add something to that. Okay, don't just say I'm just going to work for the bare minimum. This range can help you clarify how much your business needs to make for you to be happy with the profits and earn the amount of money you want. Step three, research your competitors prices. Now, this is a huge thing. I remember Sam Walton, who started Walmart, he used to fly to other towns and walk through grocery stores and dollar stores and all that and figure out what everybody else was charging. And then he would call back to his home office and he would say, change our prices to this. And that's what he would actually do. So the first two steps make it easy for you to think big and, you know, might make you inclined to price high. But there is a step where you have to figure out what's realistic within the industry. What's everybody else charging? Some time browsing other people's websites a lot easier. Now you don't have to drive around in people's stores. But you can see what they are selling similar products for. Think like a customer. Do searches for these terms that they're most likely to find products like yours and check out what's typical on other websites. Show up first. If so, what are they charging? Record what you find. Go to a spreadsheet so you can better see the trends and pricing in your industry and track how prices vary across products with different sets of features. Now, we're going to talk about number four. And number four, I think is pretty darn important. Here's number four. Figure out your unique selling position. A lot of people never figure this out because they don't have anything unique. They don't have anything better than anybody else's. So, you know, they're not trying to figure out anything unique. You really, really need to do this guys. You know, I sell survival food and our product is unique. You know, nobody really sells what we sell. We have canned meats. We have beef, chicken, turkey, pork and ground beef. We have 28 ounce cans. We have 14 and a half ounce cans. Of course, the smaller ones or a smaller number of people. Maybe it's just a couple or an individual. But it's very unique. You know, other people aren't selling what we sell. We have a process to which we can can meets that gives it a very long shelf life. People love it. They've been buying from us for years and years and years over a decade now. So, we have that unique selling position. And our tagline is helping families prepare. And that's really what we do. And I was doing a video script before I started here this morning. I just got up early and started writing. And the one thing that I've always said to people over the years, because a lot of people say, well, I don't know if I want to spend the money on survival food. You know, if I waste the money on that, I won't have it for something else. But here's the truth.  You're going to need food. Food without food. Nothing else matters.  Here's the interesting thing about food. Unlike a lot of other things out there, it's never gone down in price ever. Food always goes up since the beginning of time. Food becomes more and more and more valuable. So, if you want a really good investment, you're going to invest in food. I mean, that makes sense, right? So, I tell people that, and then kind of a light bulb, you can see this light bulb goes off and they're like, oh yeah.  You can't eat ammunition. You can't eat any of those things, okay? Paul says, is there a general formula for pricing physical products? I read once three to four times the cost of products. You know, Paul, there isn't. And there isn't because of these other factors that I just talked about. If that, if that was the case, everybody could just multiply, you know, what their product was, I guess, valued at wholesale. And it also has to do with what people can get it for, what they can buy it for in the market. I read car dealerships for years, Paul. You'll appreciate this. And I would have used car managers and I would say, do the ad for the weekend.  And they would ultimately give me a list of cars and pricing. And I would go back and look at their cost and I would look at what they priced it at. And they would price the car at $800 over their cost or $1,000 over the cost. They would do them all that way. They would do them all that way. And I would sit them down. I would say, this is wrong. This is all wrong. They're like, well, no, because this is my cost and I need to make $800 or $1,000 above that. I say, but that's wrong. It's wrong because, let's say you have a car that you own for $10,000, okay? Or you have a product that you own for $1,000. However, you want to look at it. And in the market, that car is worth $12,000. You just happen to get it cheaper. Okay? Why would you only add $800 or $1,000 to the price of that car? You're right there below what the wholesale market is on that car. Right? So you're way underselling that, but you got to figure out what its true value is. Not what you paid for. That's why if you use a formula of three or four times or twice or whatever you want to use, it's going to be wrong because you got to look at the value of that product in the market. Now, on the flip side, let's say we took in a car and we were in it $10,000, but it was really worth $7,000. It was worth $7,000 because when we took it in, we put $7,000 in it, but then the transmission went out and then we had to fix some dings on it. We had to put some tires on it. And before you knew it, we were in that car for $10,000. But wholesale wise, it was only worth $7,000. So to put an $800 profit on that car, you're way above what the market is. So that would be the wrong pricing. So in that case, if you're going to sell that car, you're going to have to sell it below your cost. And that happens with products on your website too, guys. It's not a formula of multiplying something. And if you think through this, you're going to go, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, you can't sell something in the market that's 30% more than the entire market just because you own it for 30% more than the entire market. That's not what you want to do, okay? So let's see here. Paul also says, by the way, thumbnail says Monday live. Whoops. Sorry about that, Paul. Yeah, I originally scheduled this for Monday and I had a conflict of appointments. So unfortunately, I couldn't do it on Monday and I'll get that fixed. Paul, I appreciate you, man. You check stuff. You know, if I make a mistake, you let me know, and he does say loud and clear there, which is great. And guys, everybody participate. Paul participates. Be like Paul, participate in these things. If you don't participate, you don't learn as much. It's a fact. If you don't participate, your odds of success are lower. And participation can be as little as saying hello. It can be after I've done this video and after I've recorded, after I was live, you could just go in there and say, you know, hey, I enjoyed this or hey, I listened to your video or hey, I've got the suggestion. Okay? So step four, and we're getting into this now, is figure out your unique position. Okay? If seeing what businesses were charging on the low end of your range, and step three was disheartening, don't let it get to you. Don't let it get to you. Okay? You can go higher than your competitors if you can figure out what makes your business or product special. Now, we sell canned meats at our survival food site. You can buy a can of chicken in the grocery store cheaper than what I can sell it to you for. However, it's not the same thing. It's going to last you 18 to 24 months. Ours last 12 to 15 years. There's a huge difference right there. Okay? In addition to that, it's going to have every part of the chicken. Can you imagine what that is? Can you imagine what every part of the chicken is? Ours is going to have two-thirds white meat, one-third dark meat. Okay? 100% of the time. Ours does not have any fillers. It does not have any water in the can. They add a lot of water to make the volume of the can look bigger. So the can may say 10 ounces, but it's seven ounces of meat and three ounces of water. We don't ever do that.  We close the can. We slow pressure cook the entire can with the chicken in it, which tenderizes the meat, kills all the bacteria, and preserves it, and gives it a long shelf life. The meat that you get in a grocery store is cooked in a big bat, okay, pre-cooked, and then the can is put underneath it, and they plop some meat down in there, then they close it, which means the air that touched the meat is now what, contaminated basically, okay, can only last so long, 18 to 24 months before it goes bad, and they fill it up with water, and they put a ton of salt to preserve it. We don't do any of those things. So that would be our unique selling position. It's different. The can is thicker than the one you get in a grocery store, so it's stronger, so it lasts longer. So whether it's because your products look better, they last longer, they work better in some key way, if you can find the thing that differentiates what you're selling from the low-end options out there, then you can convince your customers it's worth paying more for, okay, and buying from you as opposed to all your competitors. A marketing consultant can help you with that, okay, and I do some of that, but I'm not doing that right now, with this step, if you're having a hard time on your own, it's their part of the job to help clients figure out that clear branding position, all right? So, or you keep it up with me, I hope you're taking some notes here, I hope you're writing some of this down. Now comes to the big thing. Now comes to the big thing, okay, the big thing right here, nowadays, selling online is your shipping, your shipping, shipping cost are inevitable, I can't talk inevitable parts of online business, people hate paying for shipping, they hate it, but the fact remains is they always pay for it, they always pay for it, it's either built into the price or some fee or something, or they actually directly pay for it. Now, how you handle that in your business is entirely up to you, okay? The added expense immediately makes your products look more expensive if you are charging for shipping, okay? 44% of customers said they've abandoned an online purchase because of high shipping cost, this is the number one reason for abandoned carts is a high shipping cost, 44% of the customers say they have abandoned your sales form because of high shipping cost, okay? So you have a few options, what can you do? Option one, you can stick with passing the cost of shipping onto your customers, many businesses do this and they thrive, but you increase the chances of shopping cart abandonment, okay? So this is something you have to take into consideration. Option B, you could offer a flat fee for all of your shipping, say something like, you know, five dollars or, you know, ten dollars or twenty, whatever it is that you think will overall work out. Now the fact is if your average shipping is seven dollars, you know, you wouldn't want to charge five dollars, but you want to figure out what that average shipping is because like, you know, our warehouse is in Utah and if we ship from Utah to California, it's going to cost x number of dollars, okay? It's going to cost a lot or to Virginia, it's going to cost a lot, but if we ship to somebody in Utah, it's going to cost hardly anything. So somewhere between those costs we have to figure out if we were going to do that flat shipping, what would be a good fee to charge to make it equal so that overall, not all the time, but overall we could recoup our shipping costs. That's how that's done. And a lot of people don't understand that when I get new retailers, they're like, well, how much should I charge for shipping? I'm like, well, there's so many different things you could do. I wish they would just watch this video and this would tell them what to do, right? So you could do it that way. You could have that flat shipping. Option C would be you can offer free shipping for orders over a certain amount, okay? Now this is becoming an increasingly common option because businesses offer it. They really encourage the customers to spend more, right? You know, if a guy's putting an order for $120, but he knows that 200 is going to get free shipping, that may bump him up, that they bump her up, okay? So while you do have to pay more in shipping costs, you end up making more on the order as a whole. So that is one way you can go about this. Now, option D, which Amazon does, and we know if you're, let's say, a Prime member, you can offer free shipping on all orders and raise your prices to account for the difference. Now, even on Amazon, a lot of people say, well, anybody could buy anything on Amazon and get free shipping. That's not entirely true because there are some products on there that don't fall under the Amazon Prime and you actually do have to pay for shipping. And I was looking at some products the other day and I got to say I actually, I skipped over a lot of those products that you had to pay for. Let me look at some of the comments here. Let's see, with your unique selling position, do you add a bonus as a lead magnet to enhance your position? We often do, Paul, that's a very good point. I'm getting ready to do a sale sequence right now and in that sale sequence they can get free shipping and I'm also throwing in a free copy of my book, The Great American Food Shortage, which I wrote, which is a great book guys, you got to check it out. I wonder if I can put that in the chat section here. I've got so many screens up now, you have no idea how many screens are up here right now. All right, I'm going to put in here, check out The Great American Food Shortage on Amazon, period. Okay, so that's in the chat guys, you can grab that book.  When I wrote the book everybody thought it was crazy. So we did that. Okay, I'm going to get through a lot of the good questions in here guys, really. Thank you so much for putting these questions in here. I really appreciate it. Paul says, just talk to a guy who said that cruise ships are utilizing ships as cargo ships. Huh, because the lower three decks are storage, they are shipping higher price products to make it work. You know, isn't that cool? I mean, isn't that cool how problems turn into opportunities? I mean, that's an opportunity, right? It's a problem because, you know, it was really costly to get stuff shipped, but you know, ships are going away, we got some spare rubles, stick stuff in there. I didn't know that, but that's very interesting that he puts that in there. So guys, if you're on, Paul is, Paul, you're on YouTube, I believe. Yeah, I see him on YouTube because we've got people who are on YouTube, we've got people who are on Facebook right now because I'm broadcasting to both these places. And guys, this stream yard is pretty cool. I like stream yard because you can actually, you know, post a several different. I think the program I have, I can, I can actually go live three different places, but I don't post that much on social media, so I'm Facebook and YouTube primarily. Let's see here. The Queen, Queen, Queenals within, Queen is within. I got it right. Okay, thank you so much for being here. The Queen is within. I'm going into dropshing was considering profit of 20 to 30 on any product costing 15 to 30. I'm thinking of reviewing competitors also just to make sure I'm not overcharging shipping absorbed in price. That may be, that may be a good plan you've got there, but like I said in the beginning of this training, we do want to check with competitors. We want to see what's going on. And, you know, keep in mind, as a product gets higher and higher and higher, this is a problem I have with some of my retailers, they don't understand this. They say, you know, I've been selling $20 products and I always make $5 on it. So, since I always make $5 on it, you know, I want to make, you know, the same percentage on your product.  Now, they say, well, if I sell a $1,000 item, I want to make 25% too. Now, a $1,000 item for us can be one order, you know, say five cases of meat. So, if that's the case, and you want to make 25% on $1,000, you now want to make $250, is that the right thing to do, though? It probably isn't, and here's why, because you do the same amount of work for that five cases of meat as you do the $20 product. So, if you lower your profit margin on some of these higher priced items, maybe I only need to make 10% or 15%, because I'm still making $100 to $150, whereas on the $20 product, I only make $5, and I'm doing the same amount of work. So, don't get caught up in that it's got to be a percent above. I think that's something that hurts a lot of people. They go, well, it's got to be an x% above JR, because if it's x% above, that way I can just do it to every product.  It's like, well, that way I don't have to think about each product. You do want to think about each product. You want to think about what profit margin each product should have, and you want to think price categories. If this is a cheaper price product, you need to make a higher percentage. If it's a more expensive price product, I don't need to make as much percentage.  So, think about the cost to your item. How expensive is the item? If you're selling a $10 item, you need to make 40-50%. I mean, you just got to to make it reasonable. Man, you guys have some good stuff in here. The queen is within. I think you can get away with charging larger margins on cheaper products. 100%, you have got this figured out 100%. That is definitely what you can do. And don't forget, guys, at the end of this, I'm going to go over consulting because everybody listening to this right now, if you get a little bit of education, you can be a consultant and make money on the side, or full time if you want. But I want to talk to you about how to go about pricing that and what you can do for people. All right. So, let me move on here to my last part. Okay. So, we've gone through the pricing. So, the last step of this thing is to set your prices. Okay? Even all your prior research won't make this step easy per say, but it will give you the information you need to make an informed decision. That's all we're trying to do, make an informed decision. And it doesn't mean that when she sets your prices, they have to stay that way. You could change your prices. They can change. So, many people are like, oh my gosh, if I make this decision, it's done. No, it's not. Every decision can pretty much be undone when you're selling stuff online. So, but you do have to come up with a price. Set pricing that falls within the range that you have found your competitors charging. While being high enough to cover your expenses and allow for some healthy profits besides, make sure the prices are high enough to leave some room for discounts and specials. That's another thing I see people do is they price their product so low that when they go to have a sale, they can't do much. They can go, oh, we give you 3% off. 3% off is not a good deal. So, you've got to set them high enough where you can run some sales. You don't want to lose money with great sales opportunities like the holidays or Black Friday or any of that type of stuff. Determining your pricing can actually be fun if you want. Okay, it could be fun. People look at everything they have to do is, oh my gosh, I have to do this, I have to do that. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to do anything. You say, well, JR, if I don't set pricing, I won't sell anything. Then don't sell anything. You're like, well, I want to sell something. Well, if you said you want to sell something, then you must want to set your prices. Okay, we get so hung up every day talking about all these things that we do that we don't want to do. You only do things that you want to do because if you didn't want to get out of bed, you could just stay in bed. You don't even have to get out of bed if you don't want. You said, JR, I have to get out of bed. If I don't make money, I'll lose my home. Well, then lose your home. You're like, well, I don't want to lose my home. I say, then you want to get out of bed. Quit telling yourself if you're doing stuff you don't want to do. Now, I want to touch upon real quick the consulting thing. Okay, the consulting thing, I think interests a lot of people because they're like, am I qualified? Am I qualified to be a consultant? What do I charge as a consultant? Can I really do this? Queen is within. True. Every choice has a responsibility. 100%. Let's see here. Okay, so I'm going to talk about this consulting thing. Here's the qualifications to be a consultant. Are you ready for this? You got to know more than the person you're consulting with. That's it. That's it. You don't have to have a degree. You don't have to have accomplished some major thing. Though that helps, you know, when I do consulting, you know, I can say to people, well, I've sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products and I've done it for over a decade. And they're like, hmm, that has some value. Okay, that has some value. Okay, if you've done that. But, you know, when I first started charging for consulting, I was charging $495 a month and you got two sessions a month for one hour on the phone and then you could email me in between and that was $495. I started to get busy. I then charged $995 a month. I doubled it. I just said $995. When I started charging $995, more people that I talked to decided to go ahead and do the consulting with me. In other words, a higher percentage of people bought from me. I then went to $1495 a month. Okay, so I started at $495. I'm now at $1495. They got the same exact thing. A higher percentage of people started buying from me. Then I went to $2,500 a month. A higher percentage of the people once again started buying from me. But here's something else I got. I got a better degree of clients when I was charging $2,500 a month versus $495 a month because the people that could afford $2,500 a month probably, probably, had already had some successes in their life.  And not only that, they were more successful with the stuff I gave them because they were already types of people that would apply this information. Let's see here. I'm going to look into your pulses. At what point do you sell a product as a loss? But it's a lead to a higher ticket product like Brunson does with his books. There's a couple times you're going to want to do this. And I revert back to the car business because we had to sell cars at a loss. And people would never believe it. Matter of fact, I would never tell somebody I was selling a car at a loss because they would think I was lying. But when you have a product that is not selling, when you have a product that is setting in your inventory, wasting your space, wasting your money, then you need to sell it at a loss and get out of it. That's the first time you need to do it. When you have a product that's not selling, or you own it for too much, you own it for more than what market value is, you need to get your money out of that product even if you take a loss. Even if you take a loss. Now, the something else you mentioned here was that Russell Brunson will have a book and he'll sell it as a loss. He may say, you know, buy my book for $9.95 shipping, I'll give you the book for free. And it actually costs him let's say $12 to do that. So in effect, what he's doing is he's losing $2 every time somebody makes a purchase. However, behind that he has a funnel and the funnel may go to $195 course. It may go to, you know, a $47 a month membership. It may go to a $1995 course. So what he has done over the years and what I've done too is I figured out if somebody buys the book over the lifetime, that customer may spend $600 or $500. It may take me two years to get that money back, but they're going to spend five or $600. Whatever the number is, you get to determine what that number is. Then you can say to yourself, I can afford to spend $2 on a customer to gain somebody if I get back $500. Or let's put it this way. Let's say they only spend, you only make $20 more on them. I could still afford to lose $2 to get $20. Even though it looks like on the surface when I'm selling that book, I've lost $2 because my cost to send it out is $12 and they only paid me $10. But I know that if I get them on my list, overall, I'm going to make $20 or $30. Whatever the number is. Now, is that true with every single customer? Absolutely not. You may have 20 customers in a row that you sell the book to and lose $2, and they don't ever buy from you again. But then you may have the customer two or three in a row that spend $500 with you that more than make up for the other ones. You got to look at the numbers and in the beginning, you won't know what those numbers are. So you've got to kind of just throw the bait out there and see what happens. Okay. If I sell these products at this price, what am I going to earn overall? You've got to wait. You've got to wait 12 months. You've got to send out extra emails. You've got to try to get them to buy other products. You've got to work the list. Now, you can't just say, I hope they come back and buy from me again. You've got to actually send them out emails and try to sell something to them. Let's see here. Okay. I'm trying to stay up with all my comments. And guys, thank you so much for these comments. I really appreciate them. They mean so much. They help other people. Every time you write a comment in there, you are helping somebody else because you very well may be asking the question that somebody else had in their mind but they were afraid to ask. I think a lot of people don't ask questions because they're so afraid of what people may think. Somebody may judge them.   And unfortunately, it takes years to get there. My daughter posted the other day on Facebook that she finally got to a stage in her life where she's not going to quit worried about what everybody thinks. She's just going to do what she wants. And I was like, wow, that's so liberating. That's not something I could teach her. That's not something I could just hand her. She had to figure that out on her own and she's a mother of three boys.  Her other son's four years old. But she's figured that out over the years. Some people never come to this realization, guys. Imagine what you could do and what you would accomplish if you no longer worried about what everybody thought about you. And to finish up that coaching thing, I ended up at $2,000 an hour. Yeah, $2,000 an hour is what I ended up with with my coaching. Now, think about this. In the beginning, I was worried and I started at $495 a month with two phone calls. I ended up at $2,000 an hour. Wow. That's really something. That's really something. And guess what? I don't do coaching right now. Why? Because it takes up too much of my time. I can make more money doing other things. Yeah, I can make more money doing other things. And it's hard work coaching. It really is hard work. By the way, glad to be back from podcast movement. Yeah, I'd like to hear about that, Paul. In Nashville, it was a great show and got to meet Mark Cuban. Oh, Cuban. Is it Cuban or Cuban? I don't know. Something like that.  I'm sure it's a telemarketer. What a great show. Got to meet him backstage, looking forward to seeing future videos. Very cool, Paul. Paul, I met, gosh, Paul, what's it been? Three years? Three years ago, maybe? Four? I don't know on a cruise, on a marketer's cruise. As a matter of fact, I think it's called the marketer's cruise. Great cruise. If you ever want to check that out. Captain, what's his name? Paul, help me out with that. Captain, somebody. As a matter of fact, I dressed up as him at the costume party. Captain Lou. Captain Lou. Did you know that, Paul? Did you know it was Captain Lou? Did you remember? It took me a second here, but I'm on camera, so it takes a little time. So guys, that's what I've got for you today. If you've got any other questions, anything you'd like to ask me, feel free to put them in the chat right now. You know, I'll stay on here another couple of minutes if you have a couple of things you would hit me with, if it has to do with pricing, if it has to do with coaching, that has to do with not caring what people think. Put it in the chat section. You know, ask me those questions. We've got a good group of people here today. And what always happens when I do one of these lives is on down the road, there's like 10 times or 100 times as many people see this, then they do it alive. And I get it. I mean, I do lives in the morning when everybody's supposed to be at work. Okay?  I think I am now. I get confused. That was specific time before in California, but people can't show up at this time. So I understand that you may be watching it afterwards. And if you are watching it afterwards, that doesn't mean you can't ask questions. It doesn't mean you can't comment. Put those comments in the comment section. There won't be a chat section. You can see the past chat that you can't post in there. But put it in the comment section. Ask me any question you want. Put any comments you want. Put any input you want. Let's see here. The Queens Within, I'll check out your books. Always trying to expand my library. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here today. I really do. If you have a channel that you want people to subscribe to, mention that, and we'll send them over to your channel, too. And that goes for anybody that's in here today. I want to help everybody grow their business. That's the whole point of me doing these lives is to help you grow your business. When cooking show going to start, ah, Paul, you got me on that one. Here's the deal. I've already worked on it. I've got it set up. Obviously, I have the kitchen. It's right past the doorways here. And I have all that set up. I have the recipes I'm going to do. It's going to be called restaurant quality recipes. So if you want to be doing recipes at home, and you want them to taste like those amazing meals that you get at restaurants, and for those of you who don't know, I grew up in restaurants and everything from dishwasher to prep cook to, you know, all those weighted tables and bartending and all that. So I've put together a channel that's restaurant quality recipes so that the home cook can come up with a meal that's just as good as a restaurant, probably even better for a whole lot less money. So that's going to be coming real soon. I'm having the artwork done now, Paul. We've been going back and forth for the past three days because I got to get the banner for the channel and all that stuff and my Twitter and my Facebook and all that stuff. So as soon as he finishes that, I will start filming. It's probably going to be a video a week to start off with. But man, guys, if you want to see some really cool recipes, I do a lot of research. I'm going to give you a lot of tricks, a lot of techniques that you can do at home that make your food really look and taste special. So that's another channel. And I'm doing that just out of love of cooking. I mean, I'm not trying to make any money or anything. That's just the way it is. Let's see here. The cooking show couldn't have come at a better time. I'm interested in new recipes for some reason. Really? That's very cool. James Breen! James Breen! You haven't made any comments about your push-up routine. I haven't. I did push-ups yesterday, James. And I got to admit, I hadn't been doing push-ups for a couple weeks, two, three weeks. And I got to get back to it. You know, it was a little difficult. It was a little hard. But I am back to it, James.  I haven't seen you in weeks, James. So good to see you back. If you're going to be around, let me know. I'll start doing a lot of videos every day.  He's, I don't know, been around the world, but he certainly has been around the United States. He's an over-the-road truck driver. Hey, guys, I want to know about you. Tell me what you're doing. I know Paul used to be a firefighter, I believe. And you know, you were into that. So there's a lot of public service there. And I consider a truck driver public service, too, because I tell you, well, without trucks, we've got nothing. Everything in your home is transported by a truck. Just look around your home. I don't care if it's furniture or food or appliances or carpet or whatever it is, it's transported by trucks. So James is somebody who's been on my live streams for a long time now, probably nine months, maybe? Nine months, 10 months, something like that. So I'll be doing these on a daily basis, probably. I'm going to try to get back here tomorrow. If you want me to come back tomorrow, I'll put something in that comment section and say that you're going to be around at 9 a.m. Because I want to make sure people are going to be here.  I will go across some stuff and come up with some information to help you guys out. Also, if you have some subjects you want me to cover, this is your channel. This is not my channel. Because if it was my channel, I wouldn't have anybody. Nobody would be listening. I need you guys, okay? I need you guys to do that. Let's see. Are you planning on going to any events this year besides the Affiliate Show? I don't have plans for that. Paul, just Affiliate Summit. Is it Affiliate Summit? Yeah, Affiliate Summit West is what I'm going to. I have the plane. I don't have the hotel. I've got, what do I have? I've got the tickets. Yes. And I've got the airplane. I've got to get the hotel. I've been holding off because I want to stay at Caesars and it's a darn expensive, but it's not going to get any cheaper. I need to get on it and do that. Looking forward to 9 a.m. Paul says he will be here. Good. Need more on building audiences? Okay. I can do that. I can help you with building audiences. James Breen said, I'll hold your feet to the fire. Yeah. I've been around the world as a merchant seaman. Dang. James has done everything. He was a merchant seaman, too. Peace and blessings to everyone. Thank you so much, James, with that. I'm going to go ahead and end it today, guys. You've been awesome. Thanks so much for being here. Let me put that in here. Thank you for everybody being here. Comma. Love each and every one of you and really appreciate your input, period. Hey, guys, if you have not subscribed yet, please do so. Hit that button down there. Turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or I upload a video. And kind of the comment here, by the way, got John Lee Dumas book, Common Path to Uncommon Success. Great read. Hey, guys, there's a book suggestion. It's out there. Check it out. Paul says it's good. Go read it. Love you guys. Talk to you later.


Joseph Smith translated a number of ancient records during his lifetime, the Book of Mormon, the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible, and the Book of Abraham. I've done a little bit of translating myself from Japanese to English, and so when I think of the word translation, I think of the process of converting a written foreign language into my own language, usually with the use of a dictionary. That doesn't seem to be what Joseph Smith is doing. What do we know about his translation processes? I think what's important to remember is that he has an intellectual component that he tries on occasion, but for the majority of the translation that he does, he has this revelatory process. For instance, Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon used interpreters, used physical objects as a way of translating. With the Joseph Smith translation, there are a number of different ways that he translated. He received revelation, inspiration. The Book of Moses, for instance, seems to be not based upon any text. Then with the Book of Abraham, you also have both a more intellectual and a spiritual component, where he's trying to understand the language on an intellectual level. He's copying down characters, but he's also then through inspiration receiving the text of the Book of Abraham. In terms of the translation process, then we can't think of just one way in which he translated all these records. There's different ways in which he drew upon the Lord's power to be able to do that. Exactly. In the case of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith is directed to get these plates by an angel of God. In the case of the Joseph Smith translation in the Bible, he's drawing from a sacred text that people are familiar with. On the other hand, the Book of Abraham, Joseph Smith is translating from Egyptian hieroglyphs that are on these papyri. Why is Joseph Smith interested in Egyptian papyri? The Western culture has long been fascinated with ancient Egypt. Towards the beginning of the 19th century, there's a lot of people buying and selling mummies and artifacts and other things. People would go and see mummies, and they would make the comment that, here it is, this person that lived thousands of years ago, and here I can still see them. Someone wrote this passage so long ago, and yet I can still see it. I can still have it. I think what's going on in Joseph Smith's mind is he recognizes that God speaks to his children in every age. So Joseph Smith looks to the ancient cultures as a way of uncovering additional truths from God. It's not just about God's words or translated texts. It's also about the language itself. Joseph Smith is interested in recovering ancient languages as a way of getting to this pure language of Adam talked about in Moses. And so when papyri come in Ohio, he's going to seek that out. He's going to want to include that in his language study. So in the summer of 1835, Joseph Smith and others purchased Egyptian papyri along with some mummies. What do they do with the papyri once they get them? He was interested, I believe, in the papyri to understand the language. And other scribes begin to create what's called alphabet documents. They essentially copy characters from the papyri onto these sheets of paper. And they begin to systematize the language. But then related to that is the book of Abraham text. So you have Joseph Smith trying to understand the language and also revealing, translating the book of Abraham text. So at least in 1835, Joseph Smith and his associates are engaged in, it sounds like, two related projects. You've got the book of Abraham on one side. You've got the Egyptian alphabet and grammar on the other. So fast forward to the late 1960s. Some of the fragments of the papyri that Joseph Smith supposedly used to translate the book of Abraham resurface in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of New York. When Egyptologists study the Egyptian hieroglyphs that are on those remaining fragments, they come to the conclusion that it does not match the dictated texts that Joseph Smith has given through the book of Abraham. How do we make sense of this? Yeah, the Egyptologists look to the papyri and they recognize them for Egyptian funerary rights, books of the dead, book of breathings. And the book of Abraham doesn't fit into that Egyptian context, according to many Egyptologists. And so we're left to understand what's going on. Some have looked at the papyri, recognized that there are missing pieces and have postulated that some of those missing papyri could have contained the book of Abraham. Other scholars have looked to the papyri as maybe a catalyst for Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith is looking to the papyri and receiving inspiration when he's dictating the book of Abraham. Similar to his work on the Joseph Smith translation, where the book of Moses is not found in the King James Version, though Joseph Smith is clearly working from the Bible. Some suggest that there is an as-of-yet-unknown relationship between the language documents and the book of Abraham documents. Some look to the ancient past to find parallels. Some look to the historical context of Joseph Smith to try to understand what he believed about hieroglyphs and translation and whatnot. In all of these theories, I think what's important to remember is that scholars are engaged on an intellectual level. They're trying to understand the book of Abraham. Members should be doing the same thing. They should be engaged in trying to understand the history of their scripture. But that only takes us so far. Ultimately, they need to ask God.