All right, so let's start with the clip from the Young Tokes, and I guess here we go. Is a GOP operative. And recently during an interview, he had some interesting things to say about Bernie Sanders and what the future holds for the Democratic Party. Take a look. Frank Lund's found in an online survey of 1,000 people that 52% of Hillary Clinton voters agree with the statement, I prefer living in a socialist country to a capitalist country, compared to just 16% of Donald Trump voters. No, 16%. Asked about the... 16% of Trump voters would prefer living in a socialist country.  Of course, that adds up to 79. I don't know what happened to that at 21%. Maybe they didn't know. They didn't have an opinion about whether they wanted to live in a socialist country. It just tells you a little bit about Trump's voters. The next statistic is even more shocking. The proposal to impose a 70% marginal tax rate on the top 1% of taxpayers, 79% of Clinton voters agree. And look at this. So do 46% Trump voters. Now let's be clear here, because I know the first thing everybody's going to jump on. Oh, it's the mainstream. This is Fox, Fox. And they're not citing a New York Times poll. They're not citing some, I don't know, left-wing poll. This is a Frank Lund's poll. Frank Lund's is a GOP poll taker, right? He is a GOP guy. He's a GOP, he spends a lot of time helping the GOP frame the debate, use the right words. He's the guy who came up with death taxes rather than estate taxes because that is more powerful. He talks a lot about what words the GOP should use. We'll see him on the TV in a few minutes talking about a little bit about that. And note 46%, almost half of Trump voters say that we should increase, again, according to a Republican poll done by a Republican, say that we should increase taxes to 70% on the top 1% of Americans. I'm not making this up, Frank Lutz. This is the ball. 79 of Hillary voters. Now, that, if you add that up, that as a majority of Americans is my guess. Majority of Americans, according to this particular poll, supports 70% tax rate on the top 1%. All right, let's see what Frank Lutz is to say about this. And veteran Republican poster Frank Lunds joins us now. Before we get to more numbers, are the media kind of soft on socialism? By which I mean giving pretty favorable press to Democrats like Bernie Sanders and AOC and while being pretty tough on the flaws of capitalism and the excesses of big corporations. I have to do is read the New York Times business section. Typically seven stories, six of the seven will be hostile to a corporation or hostile to capitalist. This is absolutely true, right? Absolutely true. The mainstream media, New York Times, even, I mean, CNBC might be an exception, but almost all of them constantly run stories, antagonistic to business, to corporations, have commentary that is hostile to the idea of markets, never mind, you know, full blown capitalism. So absolutely, he's right that the mainstream media or the much of the media is very sympathetic towards left-wing candidates, very antagonistic towards markets. As we know it, and in fact it's gotten so bad that I've actually started to say that people stop trying to defend capitalism. It's economic freedom. Note that. All right. Don't use the word capitalism. Use economic freedom. Now this is, this is the same thing I hear about selfishness, right? Don't use the term selfishness. Use something else. I don't know. Self-actualization of some bogus term like that. Not that self-actualization is solely bogus, but as a replacement of self-interest, I think it is. It's as if, right, it's as if. If you only use the different term, people would say, oh my God, yes, I now get it. I get Iron Man's morality. I get Helmholtke's code of ethics. I get reason, purpose, and self-esteem. Yes, that's it. It was just that selfishness term that was blocking my consciousness from the truth of reality. And the same with capitalism. Oh my God. If only we used free markets, right, it would, it would, everybody would get it. Separation of economics and state, absolutely no question. The thing, the barrier that's, that's between us and them is that capitalism is a dirty word. Really? I'm not even sure that's true, but you just saw a poll. He just ran a poll. This is a Republican we're talking about. He just ran a poll showing that 46% of Republicans, never mind everybody else, thinks not that capitalism is bad. That wasn't what the poll was. Think that 70% tax rates on the top 1% is a good idea, right? So if you talk to those people about free markets instead of about capitalism, that's going to change their mind. Well, people object to the content of these ideas, not to the term we use to describe them, to the content of capitalism. And the poll illustrated that 16% of Trump voters, I assume Republicans, would rather live in a socialist country. I mean, what more is there to say? Right? Like keep going. You want to know what's economic freedom? Not having to worry about whether or not you can pay for a treatment you need to stay alive. That's economic freedom. So today, today's, all right. So interesting what she's saying. So economic freedom is having the freedom to have the money to, you know, get, be able to eat, get decent housing, get a decent education. And this is an important, again, I think we're going to talk a lot about concepts today. This is important because freedom is one of those terms that everybody is for, right? I mean, she's for freedom. If you ask her if she's for, she'd even say she's for economic freedom. And Frank, let's just be economic freedom. And I'm for economic freedom. And yet none of us mean the same thing by that term.  Every hand in the room will go up.  Every hand will go up. If you go in front of a group of conservatives, libertarians, and certainly in front of a group of objectivists, everybody will raise their hand when they're asked if they're for freedom. And the reason is, is because that word means nothing really to most of these people. What does she mean by freedom? Into the left usually means getting what you want, being able to do whatever you want. And indeed the left recognizes that we don't have freedom because like you want to fly and you can't because you don't have wings. So you don't have the freedom to fly. I mean literally flap wings and fly, not go in an airplane. Freedom is doing whatever you feel like doing. It's doing whatever you want to do. And when asked audiences, what is freedom, including libertarian or conservative audiences? It takes a while before I get the right answer. And most of the answers come back as doing what you want, but is it? Because you might want things that don't make sense. You might want the irrational. You won't want the metaphysically impossible like flying. You might want lots of things. And yet you're not going to get them. And freedom can't mean you being able to get them when it's impossible for you to get them. This is the whole argument that the left always makes about you can't be free on an empty stomach. And if freedom man means in any sense getting what you want, then it's true. If you don't have money, you can't get a lot of stuff. And if you're hungry and don't have the money to eat, then you can't have the stuff that you need. And therefore you're not free. So you can't have the stuff that you want. Never mind need. And you're never free according to that definition. Because again, the metaphysical limitation sometimes on what you want, and sometimes what you want is so important that nobody's going to allow you to get it. And that's a restriction in your freedom. So you see how that definition of freedom just falls apart. It just becomes meaningless. But the left uses it constantly. And nobody ever calls them on it. Nobody ever says, well, what do you mean by that's not freedom? You can't have. I mean, freedom can't mean doing what's impossible. So what does freedom actually mean? If you ask conservatives or Republicans or on the right, people on the right, they mostly don't know. They mostly don't bother defining. They mostly struggle with the definition that the left provides. And they don't have an answer. They don't have an answer to it. Freedom actually means the absence of coercion. Freedom is the ability to act based on your own judgment, free of coercion. And it's the freedom of coercion, which is essential. And it's acting based on your judgment. It's not getting stuff. It's not what you want. It's the action. So it's a, I don't know if you call it a negative concept, but it's the idea of the lack of coercion. And that's what freedom means. So we're free when the government or our neighbor is not pulling a gun on us and restricting our ability to act for our own well-being. And that's what the left has no clue about. So she goes on and on about economic freedom means poor people are not, they can't be free because they can't get what they want. So not having to worry about whether or not you can afford a roof under your head. That's economic freedom. I love how he's trying to rebrand capitalism because, yeah, there's been some pretty negative news coverage of these massive multinational corporations that in a lot of cases pay nothing in federal taxes. Amazon would be a good example of that.   Amazon, Amazon didn't pay federal taxes in 2018. Why? Well, one, because in spite of the fact of having massive revenue, it made a relatively small profit and the reason it made a small profit is primarily because it invested a huge amount of the revenue it received. I mean, there were expenses, obviously, but then they invested a huge amount of the revenues they received. One in R&D. They're the largest investor in research and development, I think in the United States, probably in the world. Second, second, they building warehouses. I mean, they get the deducted expenses of building those warehouses. It's a massive expense. Third, they pay their employees overwhelmingly in the form of stock options and stock, which is priced, given how expensive the stock is, very, very high. So there's a lot of expense associated with employee compensation, more than just salaries, but also all the stock and the stock options. And third, because for a long, long, long time, Amazon was losing money. And when you lose money according to the American tax code, you can roll over, you don't pay taxes the year you lost, and you can take those losses and roll them into the future. You get what's called a tax credit, and you can roll them into the future so that when you do make money, you don't pay taxes, because for a long time, you act to actually absorb all those losses and invest more and more and more capital into your company. And the tax code recognizes that big deal. Indeed, Amazon paid a huge amount of taxes. Local, state, and what do you call it, employment taxes. So security, Medicare for its employees. Massive, billions and billions of dollars. But no, they're never going to mention that. It's all that bad news about those evil corporations. Notice how they use, how they manipulate it. And it's not that she's against cronyism. She's never mentioned that. She's just against corporations and that they don't pay enough taxes. That's the other thing. I mean, what is the virtue of paying taxes? Why is paying taxes the measure of virtues? You hear this from, by the way, and this is another area where the left is so similar to the right. What is Trump complained over and over and over again about Amazon? He tweets about the fact that they didn't pay taxes. Trump and the young Turks agree that the system we have today is broken. Why? Because Amazon didn't pay taxes last year. Of course, we know that Trump incredibly values revenue, taxes, because he keeps boasting about the amount of revenue, taxes that they have received from his tariffs. So again, notice the similarities between left and right. They both value government, value government spending, value taxation, cost of taxation. They both accuse Amazon of being bad somehow, because Amazon is not paying taxes. All right, let's keep going here. Amazon paid nothing in federal taxes in 2018, meaning that you and I paid more in federal taxes than one of the biggest corporations in the country. It's insane. Maybe because they created massive numbers of jobs, maybe because they've actually producing something, maybe because you're not investing in R&D and you're not employing anybody. And it's not insane at all. It makes complete and out of sense if you had any understanding of economics. The world has ever seen, in fact. So I'm greatly amused by Howard Kurtz, who used to, by the way, be on CNN and Washington Post, saying, oh my God, the mainstream media, they're so hard on capitalism. And they love socialism so much. Notice this. I mean, these are the moments where I ask if we live on the same planet. Every time I turn on television, I see anchors on CNN. I'm not talking about just Fox News. I'm talking about CNN, et cetera, yelling at some progressive, aren't you a socialist? Isn't it just like Cuba and Castro and Venezuela? Where's the part where they like socialism? I've never seen that on television. Notice, I mean, I find this always interesting. Because obviously, most of the people I interact with and most of the people who are on my chats and on my shows and I guess at conferences and stuff are people who bitterly, constantly complain about how the mainstream media is on the left. And I think they're right because I think the whole American political map is on the left. I think the right and the left on the left. And therefore, of course, mainstream media is going to be on the left. But notice that people like Young Turks, what you'd call the progressive side of the Democratic Party of the left, thinks that the media is too pro-capitalist, too pro-corporations, too pro-right. And part of the reason for this is that the media and 90% of all politicians are basically pragmatists. They're not capitalists, they're not socialists. They're all statists. They're all about the same. There's no big difference between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The difference is they're a really minor on almost every important issue. And they're squabbling in between. And I think we can identify them all as being in a sense on the left, being left on economic policy in a sense of all of them being statists. But the people who are progressives look at them and say, you're just pragmatists of the center. You like corporations. And the people on the right look at it and say, yeah, you're just all leftists, but really they're all just nothing. And they're all just consistently the same. I mean, there's no big difference between CNN and Trump, not on the issues. Not really. All right. I've ever seen on television is that one attack after another after another, without even defining what socialism means, which goes to the next point about the poll. They're like, oh, even 46% of Trump voters want taxes raised for the top 1%, all the way up to 70% marginal tax rate, which AOC suggested. And you wanna know what the number is for all Americans here. I'm gonna go to graphic 28, okay? This is scary. In a different poll, 76% of Americans believe the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes. No, we quarters of the country says the rich should pay higher taxes. By the way, is that socialism? No, we had a marginal tax rate of 70 all the way up to 91% in America. He's right. Under Dwight Eisenhower. I don't remember anybody calling Dwight Eisenhower a socialist or... He doesn't say nobody actually paid that rate, but it's true. From the 50s until Ronald Reagan, we had marginal tax rates over 60% and in some cases during certain parts of that period, certainly during Eisenhower, actually Kennedy lowered them, over at 90% marginal tax rates on Americans. Now, nobody actually paid that. There were huge loopholes, all kinds of exclusions, deductions and so on. But yeah, I mean, it's all one big mixed economy and the details are somewhat meaningless. You either fighting for principle or you're not. And 70% marginal tax rate is not that radical. We've had it in America before and it's not necessarily socialism. Socialism is a lot more than that, but it's all statism. It's all statism. Right? We had it under Kennedy. We had it under Johnson. We had it all the way through Reagan. We had those rates. So calling of socialism is wrong and if you are calling of socialism, apparently the American people love it because three quarters of them says yes. American people want socialism. They don't wanna call it socialism because so much of their identity of the American people is tied up with capitalism was tied up with antisocialism. They want socialism but they won't call it that. Basically it's the bottom line. If you ask them policy by policy, they want socialized medicine. For years I said, and people objected, but I said the American people object to Obamacare not because they want free market healthcare. They object to Obamacare, many of them because it didn't go far enough because it didn't socialize medicine. Enough. American people want, unfortunately, sadly, depressingly, they want more statism. They want the policies of the left even if they don't vote for the left because for many Americans, for example, illegal immigration is a bigger issue than taxes or healthcare stuff. Like I said, I vote for Donald Trump under their guise that he will fix the illegal immigration issue and fight for them on that. But there's no big difference in terms of what Americans actually want or what seemingly is a majority of Americans. Oops. Tax on the rich and the reality is the only thing that's stopping it is the corruption because if you lived in a real democracy and three quarters of the people wanted something, you'd have it. But instead, not only do we not have it, we cut taxes on the rich. The exact opposite of what the American people wanted. Why? Because the media is controlled by people who are rich. See? By multi-billion dollar corporations. And our politicians through the donations are controlled by billionaires, millionaires, and most importantly, corporations. Now in the next video. Yeah, you'll notice corporations are the ultimate villain. The ultimate villain. And by the way, I see this often on the right as well. The same kind of attitude towards corporations, those corporations. And you get it a little bit from Trump, at least when it comes to Amazon or it comes to, and you get it a lot from people all the time about Silicon Valley, those corporations and Silicon Valley. And spooky stuff. Spooky stuff when it comes from both sides. Talks about his predictions for this upcoming election. Half of Trump voters supporting AOC's 70% marginal tax rate and you wouldn't know that from the coverage.  It's because the public is really frustrated about being forgotten or left behind. And those two motions which elected Donald Trump are alive and well, not just on the right, but also on the left. The public is forgotten and it's being left behind, right? I mean, I think there's a lot, that is absolutely right. But why do they feel like they've been left behind? Mostly because they keep hearing it from the intellectual elites. People keep telling them they've been left behind. People keep giving them statistics about being left behind. But if you actually examine their lives, if you actually examine the lives of working Americans, if you actually look at the data, if you actually look at the facts, if you look at the quality and standard of living of an American today, as compared to what it was 40, 30 years ago, it's dramatically higher. But they hear constant drumbeat from both left and right that we have lost manufacturing jobs. Sure, but we've gained other jobs. More people are working today in America than ever before. There is, you know, we've lost all these manufacturers. Not true. We manufacture more stuff today than we ever have in American history. Wages are down. Not true. If you take into account the whole package offered to employees, including benefits and everything else, all driven by the way by government, not by business, not by corporations, not by the market. So this whole notion of Americans left behind, which Republicans buy into, which Trump capitalizes on and feeds, constantly feeds, and that the left buys into it, constantly feeds and has solutions for, again, what's the difference between left and right? People are being left behind. They're working class Americans are being left behind. It's just not true. Not true. Not true when you look at the data. And again, if you want to look at that data, if you want the evidence of that, pick up my book. Equal is unfair because we document it all there. We document the rise in the standard of living over the last 30 years. We document the flaws, the empirical flaws, and all the studies showing the decline, so-called decline in wages and standard of living of the middle class. But when you hear it over and over again, and what is true when you have elites talking about issues you don't care about, and as nationalism and tribalism rise, which again, both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for, left and right are responsible for, then the fact about the individual's quality of life dissipate, they disappear. And at the end of the day, what you get is my group is losing at the expense of some other group. It's group warfare. And that's unfortunately the tragedy of what it is America today. The reason why Bernie Sanders did so well in 2016 and why I'll be blunt with you, I think he's the most likely nominee in 2020. Yes, so look, Frank Luntz is the top Republican pollster. In the post game today, I'll tell you about how I applied to work for him when I came out of college. What? Remember back then I was a Republican. God, you made a lot of mistakes. I did, man, lots of mistakes. Anyway, tyt.com slash join to become a member and get the last half hour of the young tourists where we talk about topics like that. But he's not dumb, okay? He might be Republican, we might not agree with him, but he's an awfully smart guy and he's been right about a lot of the issues, both in terms of framing that. But also from time to time, giving them a heads up of the imminent danger. And in their case, yes, he's right. Bernie is the most likely to win and because of that untapped anger, frustration, that is legitimate. It is legitimate. And so Luntz, again, is correct about this. So yeah, so the Republican is predicting that the Democrats will dominate Bernie Sanders, which makes a lot of sense. You know, I think that's right. I think Bernie Sanders to a large extent taps in to the same fears, the same concerns that Americans voted for Trump have. Primarily fears and concerns that have been fueled by the whole inequality debate, all inequality discussion. And primarily by the tribalism.  I mean, I have a feeling that he's not going to win. Somebody else will win. I'm not sure who. Partially because identity policy has gone even beyond Bernie Sanders. And it'll be focused on gender and race much more than he thinks. But imagine an election between Bernie and Trump.  What do you do in an election like that? So, you know, I think that would be fascinating if it happens. You know, I don't know. I don't know what you do in an election like that. You know, it's hard to tell who will win because I think to a logical extent they do indeed appeal to a common group. And it's who can convince those 16% of Trump supporters who would like to live under socialist country, I think they might go to Bernie. But then you've got a whole bunch of people in the center who didn't vote for Bernie because he's too left and might vote for Trump. And I don't know. I think it's a toss-up. If Bernie and Trump go up, I'm not sure who wins at all. At all. Yeah, I mean. So, Frank Lutz is predicting that's what's going to happen. It's going to be interesting to watch. The rest of his statement, though, and I'm curious to hear what you think about it. Lutz believes that it's a great thing for Trump to have Republicans if Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination. No, see that's- I think this is actually pretty good. So he wears two hats, right? One is doing polling that helps Republicans either know the danger that's coming.   He's a poster that frames things to the advantage of Republicans. He's the one that came up with a lot of the terms you know now, like the death tax instead of the estate tax, etc. So when he says, oh, it'd be great if Bernie Sanders won the general election. He's wearing the second hat. Meanwhile, he's like, no, no, no, no. He said, no, we would have real trouble if it was Michael Bennett from Colorado. Michael Bennett's a total pro-corporate, pro-rich Democrat who would present no problem at all, just like Hillary Clinton in the general election. Luntz knows that. It's fascinating to listen to these Democrats, I mean to these progressives, kind of on the left. Anything that smacks from business, they hate. Anything that smacks from free markets, they hate. These are the real socialists. These are the real committed guys. And it's fascinating to actually listen to how they analyze I think, how they analyze kind of who they would support, what they think is good and what they think isn't, and who would win and who would lose. You know, it's going to be interesting because Bernie is kind of self-spoken Trump business. I think Bernie could get pretty aggressive. I think it would be very entertaining to have a Bernie versus Trump election. And it's really, it would be really interesting. I also think turnout would be quite low. I think a lot of people would stay home in an election like that. But it is interesting. These are the guys who animate AOC. This is the kind of viewpoint that animates AOC in much of the kind of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. You know, Dave Rubin was part of this team, was part of the young Turks before he left or right. Okay, we're going to have, there's less than a minute he had to finish himself. Common trick on Fox News. Oh, please don't pick Michael Bennett. That would be dangerous for Republicans. But Bernie Sanders, yeah, we would love to face him, even though he's going to win. And it's like, he's super popular, even with Trump voters, even with Fox News viewers. So, but yeah, we want, we think Michael Bennett's the real danger. Sure you do, sure you do. I guarantee you've asked Frank Luntz behind the scenes and he was being honest. He'd say, are you kidding me? We're going to get our clock cleaned by Bernie Sanders. It'd be his dream to run against somebody like Michael Bennett. That poses no problems for him at all.  He'll repeat the things I framed 20 years ago. And so will Klobuchar and so will all the establishment. So to them, kind of establishment Democrats are, you know, are sellouts. They're Republicans. Just as I think to me, all Republicans are sellouts to the left. All right. Somebody said that in the polls, Bernie is way behind Biden. You know, I think that's true, but what is it now? Oh, it's 2019. The election is in November, 2020. I think if Bernie's going to have a hard time because he's male and white, I think that Biden is going to have a much bigger time with that. You know, it's going to be, it's going to be interesting. It's going to be, I think the Democratic field is fascinating. It's going to be interesting who emerges. It's, they're going to have the first few debates this summer are going to have like 20 people on the stage and it'll be interesting to see who actually stands out and who managed to capture the imagination of people. And I think Biden's going to be in the race, but I'm not sure that the Democratic government can win, can motivate young Democrats, can motivate minorities to come out and vote. And the fact is that Democrats want to win, they have to get, they have to get certain segments of the population to vote, primarily young people. And I just don't see Biden as doing that. And I think a lot of Democrats know that and they're going to be looking for an alternative candidate. And it's way, way, way, way too early now. I mean, Trump wasn't even on the radar this early, certainly wasn't leading the polls this early in terms of who is going to win the Republican nomination. So I think it's a mistake to look at polls right now and come to any kind of conclusions in terms of who's going to win and who not. I think Biden, somebody says Biden can win because of the anti-Trump vote. I think that's right. I think Biden is the one Democratic candidate who could attract a significant anti-Trump vote. Whereas I don't think Bernie gets that. Bernie gets the Trump... Bernie can win not because of an anti-Trump vote. Bernie can win because of Trump's supporters who are actually more in line with Bernie than they are with Trump. Particularly if Bernie actually is honest about immigration and he says his real views about immigration. You know, he's pretty much anti-immigration.


Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Tom Stewart here. I'm with Derek Christian. This is Smart Business Moves. How many? Thanks, Armie. Whoo! What is it today? Twenty-third of March. Can you believe? Twenty-second. Don't take my days away from me, Tom. I need them. Are you behind? I'm so behind. You don't even want to know. Look at grief. Everyone's always impressed. Like, you have so many companies and I'm like, ask me if I like having so many companies. Well, there's a solution for that. I'm working on it. I'm narrowing them down. Liz is transitioning from another commitment. She's going to be here momentarily. She will be here while we're waiting for her. We can talk about what we're going to be doing the rest of the week. How about that? What's today? Twenty-second. We're talking about SEO in plain English today. What's the fun in that? If we do it in plain English, people might understand what you're talking about. I know. You can't charge as much, but I'm not selling SEO services. That's kind of the secret of these SEO companies. If everybody understands what they're doing, that could be part of their business. They always just say, well, you've got to trust me, it takes six to seven months to see any results. So sign a long-term contract and you'll see results eventually. That's one of the things we want to do today is kind of talk about what should they be doing. You know, that's funny because if you've been doing this long enough, I mean that was a pitch back with traditional advertising, be it like newspaper or direct marketing or radio fill in the blank. It's like, well, it's going to take months before you see any benefit of this. So just keep struggling those checks and keep the faith. That's one of the reasons why I like the company I'm actually with now is, A, let me do a month for free and we'll show you what we can do in a month and I can cancel any time. So I'm like, cool. I like that much more. So what else do we have on the agenda? You've got me up, but who else is speaking? I'm just looking here. We've got some folks here. Travis needs coaching. Hit us up, Travis. Actually, we're doing a foundations event. Will, should we talk about that? You're freezing on me just a bit there, Tom. No, I'm going to pull up another website here. At least I'm efforting to. Well, I'm doing that. Travis, I'll get back to you on the coaching. Hey there, let me in. Wow, this must be a popular topic, Tom. I don't think I've seen this before. He wants to know the secrets to SEO, scan the Navy. No idea what TJ is throwing at us today. You don't have to explain that one, TJ. We're at a loss. Hey, Don. You can see him. Hey, Leslie. Welcome. There's a, who somebody is in cognito mode. Okay, Travis is in Louisiana. So tomorrow, we're going to be talking about pay, price, productivity, and efficiency. It was a model that we built actually. I kind of introduced it as part of the Juno Summit. And I got a lot of good feedback on it. So we're incorporating that into foundations this year. As an add-on, it's a different model where I'm managing those four metrics. You can get predictable outcomes on top-line revenue and bottom-line profit. And it's pretty cool. And Wednesday, Liz is going to be talking about improve recruitment to improve retention. Because it looks like at, would you say the market is supply constrained at the moment? Can't find enough people to clean homes. Is that what you're hearing, Derek? Yeah, definitely. The shortage of people is a big deal right now. Nobody can seem to get enough. And every company I'm involved in right now, it's labor that's the constraint. Yeah. So part of it is being able to recruit better and being able to hire more people. But a bigger part of it actually is hiring the right people and figuring out how to do the things in your business like training and proper onboarding and the right culture. And there's a long list of things that I guess over the last couple of months we've been talking about off and on that if you hire the right people and keep them, you don't have to hire as many. And that's really the heart of the solution of the product. Yep. So what about Lauren? She's interested in SEO companies, perfect timing. Yeah. Yeah, she asked if we were sharing mine. If you want, you can message me and I will talk to you about the SEO company I use. Like everything there is a trade off. So I always want to kind of tell people about the company before I send them over just so you kind of know because they are going to give you homework. And if you're not willing to do the homework, you're going to be grumpy with them. Tom and I were just talking at the beginning of the call because he just signed up with them. I was like, so how's it going? He's like, they're giving us a lot to do. I thought I was sharing this, but I wasn't. So again, tomorrow is KPIs with a new model that I don't think many of you have seen. And Wednesday, we're going to talk about how to improve our retention to help deal with our staffing challenges. And then we're going to swing around to client management on the following week. And Derek, you're going to be talking about sales as a teachable skill. Yeah. Everyone tends to think that sales is all about personality and it's not. I remember meeting a sales trainer named escapes me at the moment really doesn't matter. But the guy was like an engineer by training and he was the most dry, boring person you could ever find. But from a sales standpoint, he got outstanding results because he had a workflow, he had a methodology, and he just followed the recipe and he was disciplined. It was like, it was more about being disciplined than it was about being talented. I guess there's an overlap, but it doesn't, he was kind of an example of it didn't really matter as much as your God given talents. If you had the discipline to follow the recipe, you can get results. Yeah. And I mean, I worked lots of sales jobs in my life and it's all about numbers. When I was at P&G, we used to have to make 20 sales calls a day and you do the right things, you hit the right numbers. By the way, TJ wants you to explain it in Scandinavian. Anybody can do it in English. That makes sense. I'm not so good at Scandinavian. And Leslie doesn't want to do her homework. Okay. So Tuesday, the following week, we're going to be talking about stacking revenue and all the techniques to get high frequency recovery revenue. And Wednesday is going to wrap it up with Liz talking about how to control our quality standards. Yep. Oh, this is kind of wrapped around foundations. We'll be talking about that a little bit later. Here's a link if anybody wants more details. Foundations is our week long coaching program that we do. We all cram into Beach House and work intensely on our business. And this whole point of these two, three weeks is we're kind of doing some samplers of what we do there. So just to give some idea of some of the stuff we get into. Anything exciting going on in the news, Tom?  I don't even know what the stock market did. What did I mention there? Stock market did, but they're talking about a $3 billion jobs and infrastructure stimulus plan now. $3 trillion, I mean. $3 trillion. And so about one and a half times the $1.9 trillion they just did. And the $4 trillion they did last year in total. Yep. I've not seen too many of the details. They're just calling it job creation and infrastructure act. So all of this is just dead. You know, one-tenth of all of the dollars floating around in the world was printed in 2020. Oh, wow. So, and that was, and since then, we just printed another $2 trillion. We're planning on printing another $4 trillion? $3 trillion. $4 trillion. $3 trillion. I'm sorry. You just said $3 trillion. Good grief. Yeah. I feel old. I'm old enough to actually see inflation in action now. And I measure it in weird ways. When I used to work in the comic book story, it was $0.75 for a comic book and it's $5 now. I'm like, I won't even buy these things anymore. They're too expensive. Well, it depends what a dollar is worth. Yeah. So you want to take us into SEO in English? We'll jump into the exciting world of search engine optimization. So allow me to share my screen here and switch over to Google. Hide this so you guys don't have to see it all. So we're just going to start by talking kind of the sections of Google. And a lot of people know this, but there's always different people on these calls. So I've got to kind of start at a basic level and work my way up. In this example, I did a Google search on maid service for Collins, Colorado, because that's when the city is where there's a cleaning company that I'm involved with. And a lot of you guys know this, but up top here, this is Google local services. It's a service that Google launched about three years ago and is constantly changing. Basically, it's a paper click type model. And then we've got the good old fashioned Google paid ads here. There's not too many of those. We're discovering that these guys up top are kind of killing off the traditional paid search. Then you've got what we call the three pack or the map pack, which is where it's showing your Google local business results. And then at the bottom, you've got what we've always referred to natural search, once again, showing my age once upon a time when you typed in something, this is all you got down here, but that that's now on the bottom of the page. So when we're talking about search engine optimization, I'm not including the paid stuff. A lot of search engine optimization companies will help you with your paid ads because a lot of the skills to search engine optimization are very similar to the skills for paid ads. But while we cover this stuff up here in foundations, I'm going to kind of start at the map pack. So most people know this, but once again, just to be sure the map pack here comes off of your Google, my business listing or Google local business listing. And this is the free listing you get from Google. And honestly, we're finding up to 70% of our leads are actually coming from this, not from down here. So honestly, the bigger part of your search engine optimization game is probably to get into this three pack, not down here. Although we are going to talk about both of them because, hey, call me crazy. I'd like to get the one third as well as the two thirds. But if I had to pick which one to do first, I'm going to concentrate on getting up here into the map pack. And the company I'm involved with is reliable cleaning, which is this one right here that's going to pop up. And there's a couple of things that come into play on actually showing up in the map pack. The first thing is of course, actually having a legitimate address where Google is going to accept your address. They normally send you a postcard out to prove that you actually exist. A lot of you guys have done this before. The other thing which really helps with the map pack and you can kind of tell by looking is reviews. The more reviews you have and the higher rating, the better you're going to do. One of the things that's not as obvious is what is actually in your Google listing. Google is kind of an interesting company. In fact, all of the search engine optimization company or all of the internet companies are kind of the same. And that they've got a little bit of an ego. They tend to think that the most important thing is their own service. And what I mean by that is one of the things that's going to really help you with your Google listing is to just fill out everything. If they've got a category for it, fill it out because Google thinks the most important platform in the world is Google. So how on earth could you be a real business and not have a detailed Google My Business listing? How could you not fill out all of those great features and products they give you? So for example on mine, you'll notice we've got the reviews, but right under it you've got the list of products and we've actually gone in and filled out all of the products with nice little pictures so that people know what our products are. A lot of people are not filling these in on Google and that will help you to have an advantage. Part of it is because you're going to be hitting these key phrases. So when people are typing in deep cleaning, moving clean in, these phrases are popping up. But honestly, a lot of it is just because Google wants you to fill out your Google profile all the way. They're going to want you to have categories filled out and once again, including your subcategories. And they're going to want you to have lots of pictures. The other thing which helps a lot that a lot of people aren't using is the questions and answers. And so what can happen on this is you can actually have your friends or family actually prompt you with questions. And you'll see if you look at our questions, some of the questions are designed potentially to help Google find us. So do you offer post-construction cleaning? How much do you charge for this size house? What's the price of a deep cleaning package? Because when you look at these questions, what do those questions look like to you, Tom? I'm having a hard time reading it, Derek. Okay. Can you read? I mean, I can see the... So for example, one of the questions is, what does your deep cleaning package include? Another one of the questions is, how much would you charge me for a move-in cleaning on a 2,500 square foot house? The questions that are being asked are questions like people would potentially type into a Google search. So that's why having questions and answers on your Google profile helps.  What happens is people need to ask you questions and then you need to answer it. But like I said, you can cheat and have your friends and family help you fill these out. So you can have people basically email people and say, do me a favor, I need you to go to my Google profile and ask some questions. Here's three questions for you. And then you answer them. Google also wants to see that you respond to your Google reviews. There's some debate on this, but I have heard from multiple people that it helps if your Google review actually includes some comments like what city people are in. So for example, we say things like, we love doing the office cleaning in your Fort Collins home or your Fort Collins business because we're trying to hit that phrase, office cleaning and Fort Collins in our response. So when we're responding, we want to make sure that we A, respond because Google likes to see that, but we also want to try to include some key words in our responses like what cities we're servicing. Even the name of your cleaning company could be advantageous. Yep. To try to include that in your responses. Thank you. Well, I will clean gloves to hear feedback from our happy house cleaning customers in Fort Collins. Yep. Yeah. And also try to change up your responses. Once again, Google doesn't like to feel like a bot responding to people. So you don't just want to write the same thing over again. Thank you for your kind of review. We appreciate it. Don't copy and paste your response. Use it as an opportunity. So like I said on ours, we'll typically try to look up where the customer lives because a lot of you guys, because I've worked with so many cleaning services now, don't have the same problem we do, but Cincinnati's actually got 17 distinct neighborhoods in Cincinnati and 32 suburbs. So to service Cincinnati, I'm not trying to hit Cincinnati. I'm trying to hit what is that 50 different 49 distinct places. People don't think of themselves as Cincinnati. They think of themselves as blue ash Hyde Park. So those responses give me an opportunity to say, thank you so much. We love all of our customers in Hyde Park, Ohio. You know, we've been servicing it for so many years. Now for Collins, I don't have that problem. There's like five cities we service. But for a lot of us, like it, for example, you guys in Atlanta, Tom, I know have the same challenge where you just serve us a lot of very unique suburbs and those responses give you a chance to fill it out. The other thing that I've heard from lots of people and I'm not going to get into all the detail on this because once again, this is designed to be a sampler class because Google doesn't like you to be lazy. Google gives you the option to say we service people within a 25 foot radius or the ability to pick specific zip codes. It seems like they do better if you pick specific zip codes. Like if you say, yeah, we do everything in 25 miles, they're kind of like, yeah, sure you do. But if you actually bother to pick specific zip codes, they go, okay, yeah, you must really care because you're bothering to go in and pick those specific ones. As you see when it comes to pictures, they have a lot of categories for pictures. You're going to want to fill them all out. You're going to want to fill the categories out for team photos, for office photos, for all of those different categories that they're going to give you because all of that stuff is going to help you rank higher. And a lot of it is because once again, Google's got a little bit of an ego and Google thinks that their platform is the world's most important platform. So how on earth can you be a good service and not use all of their things, which includes the messages that you can post. It includes the ability to message people. I don't know if everyone knows this, but Google actually has an app that you can download on your smartphone, and it's the only way you can do it is on a smartphone where people can send you messages through your Google business listing and then it goes to your smartphone. The more of those features that are enabled, probably the higher you're going to rank. And Tom, I don't have split screens going, so am I getting any questions I need to try to cover? Not yet, but if you do have a question you can just drop it in chat and we'll be glad to answer it. Yeah, for those of you who don't know, I typically for these presentations just kind of go and don't have a planned agenda. So I typically go where people have questions. So if I'm saying anything that makes you go, wait a minute, back up, call it out and we'll go over it. Another thing that is really important when it comes to your local listing for Google is what's called citations. And citations is anywhere on the internet that your company is mentioned. And there are a couple of key things about citations. One, more is better. So the more times you can get your name, address, phone number and website listed on the internet, on non-spammy websites, you don't want to just go on every contest site on the world, but real websites, the better for you. And I find a lot of times people are missing some real low-hanging fruit of high-value websites. For example, a lot of people don't have a Bing listing. We may not think of Bing as very highly, but they've got very high what's called domain authority, which basically explains how highly ranked a website is within the world, and we'll get to that in a little bit. Apple Maps. I find a lot of people don't have their Apple Maps listing up and running, which when you talk about all the people who are using Apple devices out there, more and more data for things like Siri is being pulled out of Apple Maps, not out of Google. So why on earth would you not have your Apple Maps listing? So you want to have as many citations as you can, which is places that your name, address, and phone number are listed. And it's also very important that they be consistent. So for example, the way we have our address listed here is something that we cut and paste. Anytime we list our business anywhere, we always list it as 1414 Blue Spruce DR, not drive, Unit D, Fort Collins, Colorado, 80524. You don't want to change it around and say, D, drive, DR, you want it to be the same over and over again because despite how much Google will talk about how great their machine learning is and how they can figure out what synonyms are, it seems like even small changes sometimes confuse it. So if you say sweet instead of unit, they don't always catch it. And this could actually be a challenge for some of us that have moved a few times because my cleaning company at one point was growing so quickly, we moved three times. So cleaning up our citations was really key to helping us rank higher. So they need to be consistent and you want to have as many really good ones as you can. And don't forget about the easy ones like Bing, Apple Maps.  A lot of times things like setting up your LinkedIn profile is a very important citation. Are you actually going to get much business off of LinkedIn? No, probably not. Most house cleaning companies don't work LinkedIn for leads, but it is a citation. It is a place with high rank that your name, address and phone number should be listed. Hello, Liz. Hi, y'all. Liz. I'm trying to catch up on all the notes. I'm glad you guys were able to hold the fort down for me. It's been, well, I actually got a lot of people here today. Everybody wants to know about SEO and plain English. We had some requests to do it in other languages, but we figured that we'd be more effective in English. Yep. We had some requests, but... Hablo solamente un poquito español. So it would be bad if I did it in another language. Susan's got a good question. How do we list our business on Apple, Bing, so on and so forth? Sure. Well, honestly, on a lot of them, you can just look it up. If you go to Google right now and type in, how do I list my business on Bing, it's going to tell you and it's normally free. The SEO service I work with actually sends me homework assignments. Here's the 10 websites I want to get your business listed on this week.  There are also some other services you can use. Oh, I'm forgetting. Oh, I've used one called Up City before, which will also walk you through those websites and what you are and where you should think about it. But there's pretty good instructions online for if you Google most of these. And name matters. For example, one of the things that helped us is we used to just be listed as reliable cleaning. We changed it as reliable cleaning services of Fort Collins. Why? Because people Google cleaning services and people Google Fort Collins. So your name matters as well, which is why, you know, Paul's on here saying, made in Mexico, here I come. Believe it or not, having the name made and the name of the city you service in it is helpful. So once again, when it comes to that citation listing, know what that means is everywhere we list our business now we are listed as reliable cleaning services of Fort Collins, not just reliable cleaning. Or a country. Yeah. Right, right, Liz? Yeah, right. It's like you read my mind right there. Well, that actually leads to another topic, actually, a little bit, which is it's actually hard for one listing to rank for too many things. Google, and this applies both to your website and to your Google My Business listing. At the end of the day, the more stuff you link, think of it as dividing your authority.  Your citations builds your authority.  But the more things you try to rank for, think of it as dividing it. So if my cleaning service has enough for the sake of math, I'm going to say an authority of 100. And I'm saying I want to rank for reoccurring service and one-time service. It's going to kind of treat that as 50-50. It's going to take my authority and divide it in half. If I start deciding I want the same profile to also rank for my carpet cleaning and for my window washing and a bunch of other ancillary services, it's really going to drive down my domain authority. And that may not be terribly relevant immediately and be super obvious. But just to give you an example, I think a lot of you guys know that I own a handyman connection as well. It's for me to do search engine optimization on because we do so much stuff. And the more stuff I try to rank for, the more I take my authority and divide it. So I don't rank really well for any one term. So same thing can happen on a cleaning service. You don't want one profile that covers six different services. It's actually a lot harder to rank. You would almost be better getting different profiles with different addresses to rank, which if you were going to do that, you would need to have things like a real physical address and things along those lines. So don't try to rank everything at once. You're going to rank a lot faster if you pick one or two key things and then add more things with time. So don't overreach. If you occasionally clean windows here and there, that's awesome. And if somebody asks you, you can do it, but you're probably hurting yourself if you try to rank for that. Exactly. If you offer window washing and carpet cleaning, maybe even through an affiliate partner, and you offer it so you have a full package so that a customer who wants to move out clean can get everything, you can. But I actually wouldn't add it to my Google profile because at that point you're trying to rank for too many things. And think about it. Google doesn't want to make it so that one company ranks for everything. Otherwise, Amazon would be the number one for every single thing in the world. So the more you try to rank for, the more difficult it's going to be to rank for any one thing. Be careful about listing every service under the sun. It can come back and bite you. Yeah, that makes really good sense. Right. And that's why, for example, you don't see a lot of the big national companies always ranking real well in the local listings because it also applies to geography. If they're trying to rank too many cities at once, it can backfire. So you want to be careful. What about Lauren's question here, Derek? Which one was that? I was just telling Tom I don't have a split screen. She wants to know, what would you list if you have multiple locations? Okay. Well, if you have multiple locations, first of all, you have to actually have multiple locations. And that's perfectly fine. For example, in Cincinnati, we have two locations and that actually helps our ranking because it's easier to rank in each one. And for example, we're crossing into different sections. In Cincinnati, they have different landing pages. So our blue ash listing is blue sky services backslash blue ash. And our other one is backslash Westchester. We're not pointing them to the same website. Because remember, citations is important. If I list the same exact website on two different Google listings, it can backfire. So it's okay to have one website with two backslashes and go to the sub pages. It doesn't always have to go to the home page. Hopefully I'm explaining that well. I feel like I'm rambling a little bit on that one. Well, you know, we do it within Castlekeepers. Yeah. And each physical location has its own page. And each physical location, each city has its own Google My Business page, its own Bing page, its own Apple listing page. And you can see all the citations for all of those. And you build them out like three different websites, kind of, but it's all under one general domain. And then underneath these brands, you can build out city pages. And you might get to that later on, but that's doable. It just kind of cascades down from there. So I don't know how much I missed. I mean, obviously I know I missed a lot. It was awesome. But that's amazing life changing. And I get to go watch it. So, which, you know, I will. All right. So my question here, though, on this section right here. I just heard you say two things that seemed like they were going against each other. So Lauren was asking, if you have multiple locations, it sounded like you said, have two different businesses like with separate addresses. And then for the title, you would do whatever, like I think we're doing reliable cleaning services at Fort Collins for one, and reliable cleaning services of Linwood. Or the other one, or Loveland. Or would you write reliable cleaning services backslash Fort Collins, reliable cleaning services backslash Loveland. So you can actually do both strategies. If you, remember, you're going to divide your authority. So if you can build one website strong enough, you can split it by two, you're probably okay. In the example you just gave, where they're kind of in the same metro area, to some extent it makes sense, where it gets tricky is when you divide it out to more and more locations. For example, a lot of you know I'm involved with Blue Sky Services. And Blue Sky Services, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Cleveland, and us, and I'm forgetting the last one, Cincinnati. And then we offer window washing and maid service in multiple locations. Our SEO companies actually recommend it and we are in the process of breaking our one website up into different websites. Because we're trying to rank for too many cities, we're trying to rank for too many services all in one. And so we are going to be breaking that up in the future. That's kind of, Lauren's asking that here as well. She says that she's trying to rank for corporate, it's windows, and cleaning, which you need different websites for and can I do them all in the same web address? Once again, you can, but the more you try to rank for, the harder it's going to be. And it's going to vary by market. In some markets, it's easier to rank than others. I wouldn't want to be in Atlanta trying to rank for carpet cleaning windows and maid service all at once. It's hard enough to rank for one service in those markets. If I was in, you know, a smaller city like Akron, Ohio, I maybe would go for it because it's easier to rank. So part of it is also what you're up against, but you're going to be better if you break it up. For example, specifically in Cincinnati, we are for both maid service and window washing. And I don't know if all of you know the history, but Blue Skies traditionally was window washing and my maid service was the home cleaning company and our SEO company is actually recommended that we split it up and have two different brands again. That they're like, listen, you can't rank for both. You can't rank for two different brand names again and answer the phone as Blue Skies and my maid service. So we're actually working on spinning the brands out independently again because we were trying to rank for too many things. So you can rank for both, but you got to do it under different titles, different names. Right. You can't have like the same Blue Skies window cleaning and residential cleaning and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's where you're going to get into trouble. You want to have different locations and different websites supporting each. So we are talking mostly about the Google local listing. So what we've touched on a little bit accidentally is actually back on the actual main website. So let's go back to our search and scroll down a little bit and we're going to come down here to the natural search results. And this is when people used to talk about searching and optimization, what they were talking about the most. I'm going to come down here to reliable cleaning and drop that one open for us. And one of the things which really matters a lot for search engine optimization is what people do on your website. And one of the reasons why is Google's caught on that a lot of people have figured out how to game Google and do keyword stuffing and buy backlinks and do all sorts of gimmicks to raise their web ranking. But one of the things Google's figured out is people can't cheat how people behave. And what they mean by that is somebody types in Fort Collins maid service and they go to this website for reliable cleaning and then they press back and go back to Mali Mades. Google over time is actually going to decrease the search result for reliable cleaning. And the reason why is Google makes all of their money off a search at the end of the day well most of their money. And so what happens is if somebody goes out there and searches for maid service Fort Collins goes to reliable, presses back and goes back to Google and then picks a competitor Google basically records that as a download I gave you an answer and you just liked it so much you left it went to another website. The opposite thing happens if somebody comes to your website and actually books a service and gives you a credit card and the world of Google they figure that's the biggest upvote in the world. You asked for something I gave you an answer and you bought something you must have liked the answer. So that is why for a long time a lot of launch 27 companies that were allowing online booking were ranking so quickly and outranking a lot of us traditional companies wasn't necessarily that they were better they had more reviews but they were letting people key a credit card in on their website. And Google sees keen and a credit card is the ultimate upvote. You bought something you must have been happy. I agree with Google if people are giving you money they're happy versus if you're leaving and going somewhere. Well like I said you can do all sorts of things add fake keywords and create landing pages and do all these things to trick people to get to your website but if they get there and they don't pay for something Google is going to say you must not have liked the answer. Now it's all what's going on versus other website searches too so if nobody lets anybody buy anything it doesn't matter. If there's five websites and one website Google starts noticing credit card transactions and the other four don't Google over time goes people like this website they buy stuff. The reason why that's important is you don't necessarily have to let people do a book it now feature it's almost as good if somebody fills out a form so if somebody comes in here and does a form request Google says you must like this company you gave them your contact information you wouldn't have given them your contact information if you didn't want to talk to them. Or if you've got one of those buttons on a cell phone for click to call where it physically calls at the time that's also good. The point is you want to get people interacting with your website you want to get them filling out forms getting downloads the more active they are with your website the higher you are going to rank over time. Because the number one thing Google wants is people to find what they want and they figure if they come to your website and they look around and they don't do anything that's not good.  Are there any special considerations between mobile versus desktop? I know notice a lot of times as managers of businesses we spend a lot of time looking at our website on our desktop but most of the people who are consumers are doing it on their phone aren't they? Yeah, phone is now more than half of searches so A it's important you realize what your website is going to look like on a phone and does it make sense. And once again that click to call button which shows up on mobile is super important. Once again that's once again Google doesn't tell you how they rank things but I got to believe somebody calling you is as good as doing a credit card. They're taking action they're physically talking to somebody. And I find a lot of websites that phone number isn't enabled for click to call which is silly it's a little line of script to make it work. I think probably just people are in the same boat as me. There's so much you don't know. There's so much you don't know and there's so much we're trying to do every single day and it's tricky. And it takes time. I mean we were talking earlier that Google wants what's your love and that equates to time and they want your engagement so they want you logging into your Google My Business page uploading pictures and adding content and they want you to be doing it frequently and encouraging your customers to give you reviews and it just used to be advertising was about spending dollars and you can still spend money on advertising but it's as much as time and calories as anything else. Yeah and search engine optimization honestly and I always explain this to people it's like 90% grunt work. A lot of it's just really boring grunt work. Did you go to Google? Did you post a comment on your Google business profile? Did you respond to all of the reviews? Have you uploaded any new pictures? So that all matters. Yeah there's so much stuff that needs to be done. So I'm using a different SEO company right now and stop asking me for so much information. I told you they work to get a lot done and they ask you for a lot don't they? Yeah they really do. That really makes you recognize though that it's a lot more they're doing a lot of work even if you're not recognizing a lot of results in the beginning. I know that's so hard on people when you're dealing with SEO is you're not seeing a whole lot for that first couple of months at least and for a lot of times you're looking at at least 90 days hard but it does make sense they're doing a lot. I don't know who did we have on Tom? I think it was might have been Greg that was saying that he really likes the idea or maybe it was I'm not sure. Whoever it was was saying they really want their SEO company to have a report so that they can see what's being done so in the absence of results they can at least see activity until they start seeing results. Yeah I believe it was Greg that was his assessment that a good SEO company would give you an update of all the activity that they engaged in over the course of the month just sometimes you might not see the results immediately but at least you want to know what they've done if they're getting you back links where are those back links I want to be able to click on them and see where I'm being mentioned on other people's websites for instance Yeah that's awesome so did you guys already talk about some of the stuff if you don't have an SEO company where you should personally start is there like a start is there a checklist one of the things that we like for a checklist is we use the service called Up City before that used to be $40 a month it's been a while since I used it so don't quote me on that but it's a self-help service that will basically walk you through step by step of how to do it yourself and they work off of a point system where they tell you these things are worth 100 points and these things are worth 5 points so that you know where the most important things are Mars does this too don't they Tom? Mars has some tools there's a handful of SEO tools out there you might want to check Up City I think they changed their business model I'm not even sure what they're doing what they used to do I'll have to check yeah like I said I haven't used them in a couple years as I've gotten bigger and have more companies I can't do it myself anymore so I'm outsourcing where I used to just use their checklist models but Mars is a good tool we use that you know SEM Rush is another tool that's very popular AH refs is pretty good and some of them are better at some things than others there's tons of great training courses I don't know if Garrett got stuck or if that was my internet I think he got stuck because we are you there Derek? yeah sorry it looks like I dropped out there for a second on you guys but I'm back all these tools that are out there yeah Mars local is pretty cool we were talking about citations that's a free tool that will let you know give you a pretty good snapshot of where you need to do work on your citations yeah Mars local does an audit for your local citations a lot of times honestly I just Google my own business to see all the different ways I show up particularly if you know what your old addresses are which is a problem for me I'm constantly Googling my business name in my old address which will give me places I need to find and I need to go fix it and they tend to repopulate sometimes so you gotta go back out there sometimes and play a little bit of whack-a-mole and beat them down all the time yeah that's quite the visual right there so what about did you guys talk at all about I'm sure that all companies are like mine I get three or four emails a week saying hey I'm happy I noticed your website is ranking as well as it should and I'd love to do a report for you and tell you where all the problems are and how we can help you are those like legit should you do those not do them like what what you're thinking on all of those I mean I'm not a big believer in it because I figure if you're a good search engine optimization company people should find you when they search for you shouldn't have to be reaching out to them and a lot of those unsolicited ones aren't real legit no that's interesting though because a lot of times SEO companies if you search for them they show up five pages deep does that disqualify them as being a legitimate SEO company depends how you're searching for it if you're searching for an SEO company specialized in your industry I'd say they should definitely pop up if you're looking for a local agency they should show up when you search local so it depends what you're looking for why would you want how do people decide do they want something local or do they want industry specific I would do one or the other industry specific of course has the advantage that they really know how people search for your service what has worked in other markets the advantage of someone local is just that they know the local stuff for example in Cincinnati people don't refer to it as Cincinnati we have 13 distinct neighborhoods Hyde Park things like that that don't necessarily if you don't live here you don't know you don't know the phrases people use and I like my SEO company actually updates my website so I want them to be able to write stuff that's relevant to the industry that people locally will read and have it make sense to them so you just said something that prompted another question for me should we be expecting our SEO companies to write for us to write vlogs or to be able to write content on our website or what did you mean I mean content to your website is one of the key things for a search engine optimization company because what they're going to be doing is creating the content on your site which is going to have a lot of the key phrases in it like service names for things that people search for because what Google does is they basically go through your website and they read it and when they read it they're looking for key phrases and this is actually a bit of a challenge for somebody like me because when I used to work at Procter & Gamble we were told to say a certain phrase over and over again and hammer it into your mind that was kind of the pushed version of marketing and the easiest way to explain it is Pringles we were told to never call it a potato chip it is a potato crisp and we wanted to get that phrase crisp in the consumer mind so all of our ads said crisp crisp crisp the problem with that in the world of search engine optimization if I only ever used the word crisp when somebody searches for potato chip they're never going to find me and the same thing happens on maid service and for example if you look at the reliable cleaning page that we have up right now I say it says house cleaning it says maid service we've tried to include all of the different ways that people would potentially search for cleaning service in the content of our page so we're trying to hit all of those key phrases which once again when I used to own my maid service in Cincinnati I was still an old school Procter & Gamble guy where all I would say was maid service we're a maid service we employ maids now I've learned that I need to say things like our house cleaners instead of always referring to them as maids because that actually helps us rank on those phrases and your SEO company should know what those phrases are and should help you get those phrases into the website now mine actually physically goes in and writes the pages for me but at a minimum they should be coaching you on what to do and I guess part of it too is figuring out what keywords you want to rank on and like you want to rank on maid service or house cleaning and depending on what part of the country you're in determines some parts of the country maid service is used more than house cleaning and vice versa and that's where you're asking about what's good about an industry specific SEO company and the one I'm working with does a lot of home cleaning companies is they know things like these FAQs at the bottom these are included on here not really for consumers let's be honest they're largely there for Google and so these search phrases they're there for Google to find how do I get in touch with a reliable cleaning service in Windsor Colorado and beyond that question is put there for Google that question is not put there for someone to get to the bottom of my page I did not know that if you get to the bottom of my page and you don't know how to find a reliable cleaning service in Windsor Colorado my web page has failed you that makes good sense you should have come to the conclusion that it was us who left down there for Google that's not really there for the people reading the page alright that makes perfect sense yep alright we have any good questions coming in because I feel like I'm spitting a bunch out here well we're not really at the moment Johnny's got a question it's not directly related SEO but I just want to know about websites and advertising in general he wants to know what websites are best to advertise on Meeks I mean how about retargeting where you know you're basically advertising on like say Google or Facebook to people who've been to your website no yeah I mean the reason why I said Yeek is that's a big topic it's not what I'm going to cover quickly obviously social media the places where people are Facebook is really good and once again what does marketing what do you mean by advertising for example I've done paid to ads on Nextdoor and they suck I work with a company that I pay influencers to mention me on Nextdoor and we do great from it so having people mention you in conversations on Nextdoor has been great for me paying for display ads on Nextdoor has been terrible so what do you mean by what platforms should you advertise on a lot of it isn't you know I could tell you to advertise on Instagram but I could also tell you how to advertise with influencers on Instagram which is a different strategy so there's a platform but then there's also a strategy to go with it and it's not a two-minute conversation well we're kind of we're kind of getting towards the top of the hour and what we wanted to do here since we're the whole context of what we're doing here is kind of giving you a highlight of what foundations is about is we've got a guest here we have Trisha Lake who's hey Trisha Trisha I guess has been to at least one foundation are we going to do? yeah I did too okay and Liz you had some things in mind where we wanted to talk about foundations a little bit well I just thought I'm going to bring Trisha on because she has been to two foundations one of the questions that we get from people is what's so great about the program I'm thinking if somebody has been there twice and is already registered for the third one she probably has a much better idea of what is great about the program than I do because we look at it from different perspectives Trisha I thought you could just share some of your basics and then if anybody has any questions about foundations specifically Trisha's your gal and so she's already been coached but I'm going to remind you again Trisha that foundations is and all of the programs are about your own personal perspective and what works for you and there's no right or wrong answers so you might ask her a question and she might say yeah I don't think foundations is right for you in your situation sometimes that's the right answer just kind of depending she's like now I'm trying to see comments here so I can know to answer them actually and Tom can be coming up on the screen for you too okay so you guys might not think like for you guys as teachers you've been used to doing this for so long that kind of old news to you guys but for me I felt like a sponge wanting to suck up as much knowledge and information as possible and the sponges can only suck up so much right hence why I want to go to every foundation as possible because I truly think that every time I continue to go I can learn more and more and more it's kind of like watching a movie three times like oh hey I never noticed that you know so just all kinds of knowledge that is great Derek went over my SEO with me he told me ways to improve it we're ranking wonderfully for SEO now there's just so many benefits it's just kind of mind blowing the spread we're a company that was fairly large going into foundations we already hit our million dollar mark and I had no spreadsheets I had no KPI numbers I just winged everything and I was just happy with life like that right we were successful but I didn't know why we were successful and that's how a lot of companies fail is because they don't know what they're doing I was just blessed with being I don't know blessed and successful I guess but knowing your numbers and knowing that kind of stuff helps you set directions of where you're going to go now we have awesome spreadsheet awesome knowledge about just everything a wonderful training program like we can hire 10 new employees in one week without stressing about it and now a lot of companies can say that you know and so we have really good systems in place now okay I do have some insight Trisha into why you were able to grow to the size you were with just kind of getting lucky and not having stuff all in place and you had something going for you that a lot of people don't have going for them and you don't you had iris right let's not forget about the people that you had so your people just like you can take yourself to a great level in your company without having all the support materials if you have that great person that's been with you for forever they also can increase the level that you can get to because they add in all of their knowledge to and their work they put in their additional work because those people don't just give you their 40 hours which is really closer to 25 or 30 hours and check out those people give you 40 hours and it's really more like 50 60 hours and they're still not checked out they're on the weekend like hey I forgot about blah blah blah so we had a St. Patty's Day parade we're in every parade possible and this was the first year that I wasn't in the parade myself my family and my little kids always are in the parade and my husband and I were talking and we're like our kids have never been in the parade we've always been in the parade and so this year we sat on the sidelines and got thrown little tiny pieces of candy and it was it was great you know and I watched my company go by and oh yeah and Iris managed everything you know so that was pretty cool yeah that is very cool that's very fun I love that so I just wanted to point that out for people because Tom is always reminding us that you can get lucky almost anybody can grow this business to a certain level through luck and whatever your personal leadership level is you can be able to grow to that size if you find yourself consistently going and a really good first point is that six employee mark right you got six employees back down to three back up to six down to four back up to six down to two up to 17 down to three again if you find yourself struggling right there then you probably need a little bit more and structure leadership you need something more as far as the foundations of your company you need to be built up a little bit so that you can move past that spot that's true like Tom says you can get lucky but what about when your luck runs out y'all okay and a lot of people their luck ran out during covid guys have seen a lot of businesses this went under and couldn't sustain when you understand how it's working when business conditions change when market forces change then you know how to react and I think that's one of the coolest parts about foundations is the inner workings of my own company and maybe why I've done what I've done but I didn't realize type thing and what's helped me is to be able to understand the back setting to be able to decide where to steer the company what is you know most profitable and what is not what's a waste of our time and you know we changed a lot of things from leaving foundations we opened up two more additional locations we have three locations now and so it just it changes your mindset because you just become more educated in the fine workings of a company yeah awesome well does anybody have any questions about foundations any anything that you're curious about that you want to know because you can get directly from the horse's mouth right here somebody that's been here twice that I wouldn't feel bad saying that about Tom but I actually feel bad saying that about you so how about directly from the expert's mouth referring to his other parts so I'll take horse's mouth as a compliment another part of the horse other than the mouth gone well you haven't so anybody have any questions if not I mean we are pretty close to being at the top of the hour Tom do you have a picture of the mansion I was just curious I do I do think that the mansion plays a part of the experience of foundations for the people that went through the online version of foundations their experience is nowhere near as intense or impactful as the people that went through with in the mansion there is one thing I can say with that too is that I first ordered the foundations online course that was my first step and then I sat with it for a couple months and I just could not push myself to do it it was just too hard for me to do it on my own and that's when I reached out to you and I was like hey I wanted the in person one and just getting away from your business for that seven days and being able to brainstorm with like minded people and work through these problems that was super beneficial which created long term friendships for years I have some of my best friends are from foundations and we talk daily and we are able to help each other through our company issues still today so that's a huge benefit as well we do have a question with Facebook user they know who it is no they are in a group so I don't Facebook user your name ends up being awful please give you everything that you need a hard copy workbook that is like this is Rochelle that's just a mountain of information we give you a flash drive that's got all the material and all the power points all the examples all the workbooks so really you can sit there and listen and think rather than trying to record everything it's you know you're also because you are getting into the MMA groups in advance of the foundations you're going to be getting all the information about what to bring so Rochelle one of the things that you'll need to have is all your KPIs you'll need to have quick books in order so that you can do the work so that is a huge piece of foundation is you learn the thing and then you do the work you guys have heard a lot about my snowboarding analogy you watch the video on how to snowboard but then you pop the snowboard on and you get on the hill and that makes all the difference in the world because once you start actually doing it you find out oh okay I can do this oh I get it so that's a big big piece of it Anthony yeah I'm excited to have you so we are smidge past the top of the hour um Garrett thanks for giving us the skinny on SEO in plain English that was good and we'll do another language next time we'll be right tomorrow we're going to be talking about pay price productivity and efficiency the PPP model of how to grow a cleaning business it's a different spin on something that I think you'll find very useful so we'll see you tomorrow at five o'clock bye bye


Hi, my name is Jonathan Boutel and today I'm going to tell you about our work on linear time arguments with sublinear verification from tensor codes which is joint work with Alessandro Chiesa and Janskorp. Now in a setting of efficient arguments, a prover wants to convince a verifier that a statement is true, for example, that an N gate circuit over some finite field F is satisfiable and ideally the prover should convince the verifier sending only a polylogarithmic number of bits and neither the prover nor the verifier should do more than a linear amount of work in the size of the circuit. Now we can hope for even better verification time if we introduce an indexer who does a one-time preprocessing of the circuit so that the verifier doesn't have to read the circuit and then we can aim for polylogarithmic verification time but of course we still want the preprocessing done by the indexer to cost no more than a linear amount of time in the size of the circuit. Many existing argument systems use fast Fourier transforms or algebraic commitments and this is an obstacle to achieving the dream that we outlined above because if you use a fast Fourier transform on a polynomial of degree O of N, then it costs O of N log N field operations. On the other hand, if you use algebraic commitments such as the Pedersen Commitment Scheme, which requires O of N group exponentiation and appears to be a linear time operation, well actually on closer inspection, you'll see that the number of field operations that you have to do to compute a multi-exponentiation depends on the size of the group, so this isn't really a linear cost at all. Lots of exciting existing works which achieve excellent concrete efficiency actually fail to achieve the linear time call outlined above because they either use fast Fourier transforms or algebraic commitments and many of these works have eliminated the fast Fourier transform from their cryptographic arguments, but they still use algebraic commitments and still incur a linear number of group explanations. In order to achieve this holy grail, we'll need to drop the the use of algebraic commitments and fast Fourier transforms completely. There is one cryptographic argument, which was published in 2017 that does manage to achieve a linear time prover and index of complexity and has a sub-linear verification complexity and proof size. That's a square root in the size of the circuit and that work is based on an interactive oracle proof with similar parameters. Once they've designed this information theoretic interactive oracle proof, they note that you can compile it into a real cryptographic argument using a special hash function, which itself only incurs a constant computational overhead in the number of bits that you want to hash. So our challenge is to see if we can do better and reach our holy grail by constructing linear time IOPs with better query complexity and here are the results of our work. In this work, our main theorem is that for any epsilon and for any finite field with sufficiently many elements, we show that there's a point query IOP, which has a linear index of complexity and a linear prover complexity and then a sub-linear verifier complexity and sub-linear query complexity by using the linear time hash function and the same strategy as this 2017 work, we show that there is a corresponding linear time argument with very similar parameters. Our work is an interactive oracle proof. So I'm just going to briefly explain what that means. In the interactive oracle proof model, a prover will send proof oracles to a verifier who doesn't read the entire proof oracle but just has query access to each proof oracle. The prover and the verifier can interact and the verifier can send back challenge messages to the prover who can respond with more proof oracles over several rounds of interaction. And we can design interactive oracle proofs with different types of queries. For example, there are point queries which return one location of a proof oracle and our main result is going to be a point query IOP. There are also linear queries in which the verifier asks for a linear combination of elements in the proof oracle. And finally, there are tensor queries in which the verifier asks for especially structured linear combination of elements in the proof oracle where the linear combination has to be a tensor product of two different vectors. Our approach to proving the main theorem is actually not to directly construct a point query IOP but to start by designing a linear time tensor query IOP and then using a compiler which takes the tensor query IOP and a linear error correcting code and produces our point query IOP to prove our main theorem. In more detail, we start by showing that there's a tensor query IOP which has a linear prover time, linear indexer time, sublinear verification time and a constant number of queries and then using the code-based compiler, we convert this into the IOP for our main theorem. Now, note here that the tensor IOP had a constant number of queries whereas the point query IOP in our main theorem actually has a sublinear query complexity and in some sense, this is the cost of converting from tensor queries which are very powerful, more powerful than point queries, into point queries for which you can only see a single location. Now, if you look at the parameters for the inputs and output of the point query IOP that we produce, they're very closely related. In particular, the output point query IOP has indexer prover and verifier complexity which depend on the complexity of the prover indexer and verifier from the input IOP plus some additional overheads related to the encoding time of the error correcting code. In a particular, if we use a linear time encodable code C, then our code-based compiler actually preserves the complexity of the prover and the indexer and so if we use a linear time tensor query IOP as input, then the output is a linear time point query IOP. Our work's related to lots of different techniques in the field of probabilistic proofs. For example, the various linear time interactive proofs which have been published over the past 12 years or so. Holographic arguments, some of which have been published very recently, studying how the preprocessing can work, and code-based IOPs which act as compilers or give interesting IOPs of proximity. Now I'm going to say a few words about the techniques used in our code-based compiler. The first input to the code-based compiler is the tensor query IOP, in which the prover sends their proof oracles and the verifier can make tensor queries to those proof oracles. In the compiled point query IOP, we start off with a simulation phase which follows the same pattern as the tensor query IOP, except that instead of sending tensor IOP proof oracles, the prover sends encodings of those tensor IOP proof oracles to which the verifier can make point queries. And because the verifier isn't allowed to make tensor queries anymore, they send their tensor queries directly to the prover who computes the tensor query answers for themselves and sends those answers back to the verifier. This seems like it could be a problem because now we're trusting that the prover correctly computes the answers to each tensor query and sends the correct answers to the verifier. In fact, we're even trusting the prover to come up with valid encodings of tensor IOP proof oracles in the first place. So after the simulation phase, we introduce a tensor query consistency phase in which the prover verifier conducts a proximity test which checks whether the prover really sent encoded proof oracles and a consistency test which shows that the prover's tensor query answers must be consistent with the encoded proof oracles. This boils down to designing an efficient IOP of proximity to handle tasks one and two. Now, we want to be able to preserve the linear time property of an input tensor query IOP. And so we have to choose our encoding scheme very carefully to make sure that it not only preserves linear time of the underlying tensor IOP, but we have to be sure that the encoding scheme will admit efficient proximity and consistency tests. We choose tensor encodings. More precisely, we take a linear code C which doesn't need to have any special properties at all and we encode the tensor IOP proof messages using the tensor code C to the power T. If C is a linear time encodable code such as a Spiegelman code or a Drogelschei code, then the tensor code is also linear time encodable. So how does our consistency test work? Somehow we have to find a connection between tensor query answers and encodings of some piece of tensor IOP proof data. Of course, these are supposed to be connected by some tensor IOP proof oracle which has been encoded to get the tensor code word and queried to get the tensor query answer. So first, let's focus on how tensor queries can be computed from the tensor IOP proof oracles. First, I'll talk about a folding operation which is really simple. If we have a collection of different tensors or matrices or arrays A1, A2 and A3 and a vector of V1, V2 and V3, then the folding operation simply takes the linear combination of the As using the Vs. And using this folding operation, we can describe the computation of a tensor IOP query answer sequentially by folding the three-dimensional tensor proof data that you can see at the start of this slide. First with one component of the tensor query Q3 to get something two-dimensional, then with Q2 and then with Q1, and this procedure actually gives you the tensor query answer in the end. So the tensor IOP proof oracle is connected to the tensor query answer by this sequential folding operation. Now, what's about the tensor encodings? How can they be computed from the tensor IOP proof oracle? Now, by definition of the tensor encoding, we can actually consider the tensor encoding as a sequential computation too, where we encode different dimensions of this piece of tensor IOP proof data separately so we could encode horizontally first, for example, and then vertically to get our final tensor codeword. In order to perform the consistency check, we fill in an extra piece of this diagram, the green rectangle that you can see, and this is an encoding of a piece of tensor IOP proof data that's already been partially folded up, or alternatively, if you like, it's a folding of some tensor IOP proof data that's only been partially encoded. And the idea behind our consistency test is that we check consistency diagonally, so as every step we have something which has been partially folded up and less and less encoded compared with the original tensor codeword, and we want to check consistency between all of these intermediate values. In the actual IOP of proximity that we design, we make use of the fact that the folding operation and partial encodings can commute with one another, and so we check consistency between these intermediate values by encoding one and folding the other and checking that the two answers are equal to one another. At least this is the basis of the verification checks. In the actual consistency check IOP of proximity, the approval will send all of these intermediate values on the diagonal to the verifier, and now what the verifier wants to check is the collision between these encoding and folding operations. They want to check that those two values are equal, but this has to be done using just a small number of queries. So instead of reading the entire array in every case, the verifier makes spot checks using only a few queries. They just query these stripes of each of the arrays, and then the distance properties of the code C guarantee that any inconsistencies in the computation of the tensor query answer are caught by the verifier. Now, if we use Spiegelman codes or Drucker-Scheich codes, which are encodable in linear time, then since the original tensor query IOP had a linear amount of proof data and the codes are linear time encodable, all the steps at the top cost a linear amount of time for encoding, as well as for this folding operation. Now, after the first folding step, the prover is only dealing with proof data which has a sublinear size, and so the encoding and folding operations associated with the bottom part of the consistency test are sublinear. As for the proof size and the verifier complexity, the verifier only ever queries these one-dimensional stripes of each array. So for the running example on the board, this leads to a query complexity and a verifier complexity of O of n cubed. Now, of course, everything I've shown you generalizes to t dimensions and to approve size and verifier complexity of O of n to the power 1 over t in that case. Now, I'd like to conclude the talk by giving a summary of the approach used to prove our main theorem and describing once more our main results. In our paper, we show that given any tensor IOP and any linear code, we can use our code based compiler to convert the tensor IOP into a point query IOP. And then given any collision resistant hash function, we can compile the point query IOP into a cryptographic argument which has sublinear proof size. Now, if we instantiate the tensor IOP with our own linear time tensor IOP and we take linear time encodable codes such as the code Spiegelman or Drucker-Schei as inputs to our code based compiler. And finally, if we take linear time computable hash functions, then what we get in the end is a linear time computable cryptographic argument with sublinear proof size. Thank you very much for listening.