What Fred wanted me to do was to go through a few of the events in our history that has helped us to put together our plans that we have today for fighting fire both in the swamp and in the uplands. And in the beginning of this, I think back to one of the fires we had several years ago was called the Honey Buck Fire and this was an escaped prescribed fire like a number of others of ours but anyhow it was in its wind down stage and we had a volunteer fire department crew on Joneses Island for whatever we needed them for and the IC asked me to have them to drive down to the other end of the island to check on something that was supposed to be burning out or some rather mundane chore but anyhow I asked them to do it and they all jumped into the truck and they were real enthusiastic and they started the engine and turned on the siren and turned on the lights and raced a half mile down to where they were going and then slammed on the brakes and got out and did what they were supposed to do well there's nothing wrong with being enthusiastic about an assignment but there is something about fighting fire that gets our adrenaline raging even though we know better we want to jump into it with both feet no matter what because wildfire is bad, it's our enemy and it must be destroyed. Well fire can be our enemy but it can also be our friend and our environment's friend. With experience fire managers have learned how to have patience with fire how to work with it instead of fighting it and how to make it less of an enemy and more of a friend. We also learned that each habitat has its own particular set of problems for instance managing fire within the Okefenokee swamp is different from almost any other habitat that we have in this country including the the cultivated bogs up in in Michigan and around the lake states and in the northeast. Well these lessons are all not new in fact history shows that that we often learn them over and over again the problem is that wet and dry periods and the resulting difficult fire years tend to occur in cycles in this area these cycles tend to occur every 10 to 30 years during the period between cycles entire management staffs can change priorities change current management plans are replaced and and the files that tell our history are in the archives that's why we're here today to we we have to document the lessons that we have learned in the past in a form that will survive through maybe long periods when fire suppression isn't an emergency and when everything just becomes kind of mundane so we can remain ready to cope with the year when it once again becomes a major priority and and and I think like the title was on there how to deal with something unexpected well I'm going to go over some of our history and go over some of our fires in the past and these may not be the most spectacular fires that we've had but they're going to be those that were kind of stepping stones in our development of our management techniques that we've learned over over the years if we can go to the first first slide here we'll notice that the like you might expect we these are you can see the years when we have a high precip high amount of precipitation and years when we when it's when it's low and and obviously our fires occur during the years when we when we have little rain and right to begin with let's have the next slide right to begin with these are fires that occurred during the beginning times before the refuge was established between 1855 and 1927 now back during this period the fire management managers kind of had this little rule when the swamp water level was high they do they make the best use of the swamp they could and do everything they could to try to run the fire into the swamp so they had one less line to worry about and there the fire would go out on that side when water levels in the swamp were low if they had a fire on the upland they'd do everything in their power to keep the fire out of the swamp because they knew that once that got in there we were in for a long period of trouble well next slide please the the the next dry period was in the early 30s and and we had a major fire in 1932 that's the the pink area there that you can see and and according to John Hopkins it covered most of the swamp and as you can see there it didn't exactly cover most of the swamp but probably as he looked at it it did it covered a lot of it but the spring of 1932 was very dry and there was a fishing party somewhere in the vicinity of mix and tammock and there was a youth within the party that decided his hands were cold and he started a little fire in the grass to try to warm his hands and the fire got away and they left it well the wind blew hard in one direction and spread the fire one way then it shifted and spread the fire another way and it covered much of the swamp and according to John Hopkins John Hopkins by the way was the was the project leader for the Hebert Cypress Company during the timber operations when they they logged the Cypress out of most of the swamp then when the government acquired the land in 1937 he became our first refuge manager when he retired in 1945 he wrote a book and and and I have excerpts here from I think it's just four pages in his books things that he learned from this 1932 fire he mentioned that it was the the prairie areas were very dry in the swamp and one of the observations that he noted was that the fire would burn over an area it could dry out more and then it would burn back over the area again and so repeat burning occurred as the muck dried out and he made the statement at that time he said no equipment known at that time would have been of any value to control or suppress the fire in the swamp the timber owners around the swamp made no attempt to suppress the fire in the swamp but fought fire out in the uplands where suppression was possible he also noted that where prescribed burning had been practiced on the uplands it it helped their suppression efforts and where the fire did burn over those areas the damage was minimized and he also noted that this area has been subjected to fire since time out of mind a fair stand of good pine was found here by the european settlers when they came and his conclusion was the pine woods has adapted to fire and most damage in the upland was limited to turpentine areas he also found after the fire they examined he and his staff examined the burned area very carefully he found very little dead wildlife and observed that native wildlife had a natural ability to survive or recover or adapt to wildfire and his conclusions as he was that fires in our piney woods thought at first to be damaging have instead been beneficial and he said i am not alone in that thought well then we entered let's have the next slide please then we entered a new period if you notice between 1950 and 1955 we have another low precipitation period and we have fires that way up at the top of the off the chart there these these were the 1954-55 fires now in between we went through a wet period and things had changed somewhat during this time for one thing prescribed burning that had taken place around the swamp rather informally these these were the years that we began our fire suppression actions when we first begin to get the idea that fire was bad and we had private landowners that would burn every spring to develop forage for the cattle and they were discouraged from doing this there was still quite a lot of prescribed burning going on but a lot of it had been curtailed and now as time as we enter 1954 we're just beginning to go into a rather extended dry cycle and and i have several notes from refuge manager Roy Moore's fire reports and and and up to this point they were using this old axon well you know if the fire burns into the swamp that's good it'll go out there in july 1951 Mitchells Island caught fire there was no suppression action taken the fire burned out at the edge of the island and there was very little damage to the timber okay in august 1952 compartment 15 burned the upland was suppressed the fire was allowed to burn into the swamp where it went out january in the march 1953 two fires in upland compartments 13 and 15 burned the fire was suppressed and the upland the fire went out at the edge of the swamp july 1954 same thing billy's island burned a comment by refuge manager more that the wildlife habitat which had deteriorated since they quit burning on the island had had benefited due to the wildfire then august 15 1954 blackjack island burned he said all of it but the fire went out at the edge of the swamp right here we're at the point where we're turning the page between the time when they they should have worried about the fire in the swamp now the next entry next report was september 10 1954 less than a month afterwards the report noted that the blackjack island fire did not go out as had been thought but the fire continued to burn smolder into the swamp until it burned on to mim's island mim's island burned over november 31 1954 fire on fiddler's island and again the refuge manager noted that the damage was limited because they'd had wildfire here a few years before and he didn't mention whether the fire had just burned across the swamp to let's have the next slide please he didn't mention whether the fire had burned across the swamp to fiddler's island if i can make this thing work here okay billy's island is here blackjack island is here and here's where the fire started on blackjack island it smoldered through the swamp until it got on to mim's island right here then then we had the fire on fiddler's island and i don't know whether the fire burned across two fiddler's island or whether we had a new strike on fiddler's island and it went into the swamp from there but but this gray area the the major fire had completely encompassed the whole area then um in november 20 on november 27 1954 the classic fire began the the mule tail fire and let's um let's go back to the the previous slide there the this is the classic fire where reports tell us that a turpentine or some place in the southeast side of the swamp uh got cold and he built a little fire in a pot and put it in the front of the wagon and according to the legend the the mule was pulling the wagon dangled his tail in the burning pot which upset him and he went uh tearing it through the wood spreading fire as he went well the the fire um there were high winds and the fire burned up almost the whole east side of the swamp and uh one of the points that refuge manager roymor uh noted was that uh they had done regular prescribed burning at camp canalia camp canals where all the buildings are right in here and uh because the fuels were low the fire burned right through the area but they were able to save the buildings and control the fire as it went through there well as a result of these fires uh 90 000 acres of private land burned with destruction of much of the upland timber uh some of oki finoki's uplands survive because of prescribed fires or wildfires uh areas destroyed included chesser island where the refuge manager had been ordered not to burn there anymore um and uh on riddlies and bugaboo islands where most of the trees had turpentine faces and then after also after these fires uh many turpentine face trees throughout the refuge uplands were uh that had been partially burned by the fire or where had been salvaged and removed and this of course uh reduced the amount of longleaf pine that we had in much of our longleaf pine communities within the swamp um a fire review was conducted after the fire and this is these are some of the recommendations this fire review uh was conducted by the fire suppression personnel and the landowners that surrounded the swamp and there were several recommendations that came out of this fire review one was that a sill should be built across the swanee river and certain other places in the swamp to keep the water levels high in the swamp so that a fire like this could never happen again second that a perimeter road uh road should be built around the perimeter of the swamp to facilitate access uh near the edge of the swamp by the fire management crews third there should be a break constructed right at the line between the swamp land and the upland uh to to help to uh burn off from or to get uh suppression crews next to the edge of the swamp well no action was ever taken on the on the break around the edge of the swamp the perimeter road was constructed in the early 1960s and uh and we have it today the swanee river sill was constructed about the same time and that over time has proven uh to be not effective in and maintaining the water levels of the swamp it only maintained a few thousand acres and actually from the habitat standpoint the resulting stabilized water levels were detrimental to the habitat well continuing our fire sequence let's look at the next slide here uh in 1981 we uh got caught a fire on uh lightning started a fire on black jack island this is where the whole thing started in 1954 and we'd had here again we'd had years of uh of not real uh emergency type fire weather and the swamp the swamp water level had been fairly high in 1980 the 1980s was another period when it became low um the the fire started on the island and uh and the georgia forestry commission uh picked us up in the helicopter and we were going to go try to put the fire out on the island with the helicopter and the helicopter broke and so the island burned off and uh the uh and it did not do a bad job of burning it put a good job and then the fire left the island and burned about oh 900 or a thousand or so acres within the swamp and uh the the forestry commission got the helicopter fixed and uh mr dozer's uh personnel there were we're kind of adamant about wanting us to use that uh helicopter to put that fire out that was in the swamp there uh so we wouldn't have a repeat of the 1954 fire manager then was john eddie and we looked at the uh we looked at the area around the fire and we had uh some open prairie area around here with water in it and uh for one thing one thing we didn't have any fire suppression money and we really couldn't hire a helicopter to work on the fire in the swamp but uh but also we just we thought the fire would go out when it reached that point and there was a little bit of consternation there because the water kept going down as the fire kept coming closer but fortunately the the uh the fire burned up to the edge of the open prairies and it went out at that point and then later rains suppressed the fire and put it out but there was always the question after that would would the helicopters have been beneficial excuse me in suppressing the fire in the swamp and the the forest service even sent a crew of fire behavior officers we you know we'd we'd had fires in bog lands throughout the countries and we have fought them there for years and sent a crew of fire behavior officers down and we flew over the area and looked at the uh the boundary between the burned scrub shrub and the and and uh where the fire occurred and where it didn't occur and they determined that yes probably the uh the helicopters would have been beneficial so that's something we can use in the future if we have another fire like this in the swamp well then a few years after this and and we did use helicopters for putting out fires and some of the uplands uh uh they were they were useful to us and the state was always generous with the use of their helicopter uh then 1988 happened and Yellowstone the fire in Yellowstone National Park happened and as we all know the the uh the fire really was that occurred in Yellowstone was beneficial probably in most areas but uh there weren't really good plans for what to do with wildfire if it occurred how it should be managed and and this sort of thing there was a lot of unanswered questions and so our department heads in washington decided they they handed down the edict that uh that when we had a wildfire or if we had a fire that occurred uh on uh fish and wildlife service lands uh and there was no prescription that that said how when the fire should start and how it should be handled and all this sort of thing uh it would be considered a wildfire and would be aggressively suppressed so these are the orders that we were under for the next few years and of course the the uh the intended result was that we would have real good fire plans and so from that point we'd be able to uh manage the fires but we weren't at that point at this time um later this particular year in 1988 we had a fire up uh someplace up in here on uh oh rather right here I believe in mcdonald island at the edge of the swamp not a very big fire but we had used the helicopters a couple of times by then and refuge manager john shore was there then and we had ordered uh let's let's have the next slide we had ordered his humongous helicopter biggest one we'd ever seen on the refuge I think had a 450 gallon bucket and uh we flew over the fire area and the refuge manager asked the pilot he says uh can you put this fire out with this helicopter in that big bucket he says a piece of cake and so he dumped a 450 gallon load on the fire and it didn't do much he dumped another load on it didn't do much he fought it the rest of the day we had crews in there uh in the swamp along we had this little old line going into the swamp where he'd dump a bucket and they'd get in there and they'd try to mix the water and stuff around and the fire got suppressed but I don't think that we or the helicopter had much to do with it uh then the next year we had uh with the fire I was talking about right at the beginning the honey buck fire it was an escape prescribed fire and there we uh let's go to the go to the next slide we can be ready for that um there we had a fire um we were burning on on um honey island which is here and the the fire escaped and started burning toward the pocket and then boy we got all upset about this and uh and and we and the state got together and did everything we could to stop it we set uh we set a backing fire I think six miles all the way from the end from the to Stephen Foster State Park clear to the end of the refuge the the backing fire that we set escaped and got on the private land and I don't think that the backing fire and the swamp fire ever met one another so um uh so this operation wasn't we didn't burn a lot of private land just a little bit but this operation wasn't really successful either uh the next year the next year we had another fire um in the vicinity of Bugaboo Island and this fire took off and burned and and before we knew it it was almost up here to Honey Island and it was momentarily stopped there a little piece of uh open area next to Honey Island and we got all upset about this and we here we really turned out we had helicopters dump water on the fire we had our folks we literally built hand line around a lot of that fire just about kill ourselves doing it and and when the fire finally uh stopped or was suppressed by whatever sometime later we determined that probably we may have saved maybe one square foot of of land by by killing ourselves on this fire well then the real turning point was uh just later on that same year a fire started uh some place in the vicinity of the swamp here on the west side lightning caused fire and uh and and it it really took off and started burning and and we here we had a major we had several uh incident management teams on this fire and let's have the next slide okay uh the uh okay let's let's go through through these okay um go ahead to the next slide till it's changes here okay uh we had we had upwards of almost 700 people on this fire we had crews in the swamp working on the fire building hand line uh putting fire out uh putting burning embers jabbing them into the swamp to put them out um we had uh next slide we had helicopters I don't know how many helicopters of all sizes dumping water in the swamp next slide we even had retardant drops the the red stuff falling in the swamp um and water handling crews we had we had experts and putting out bog fires from Michigan and the northeast down there and we had miles and miles and miles of hose in the swamp and sprinkler systems uh everything that we could that we could come up with and uh for a while we thought we had the fire stopped at a two or three thousand acres but it went on and it burned 23,000 acres and I think we uh I think we finally put the declared the fire out several months later when the when the rains came but um overall this fire cost us over nine million dollars and uh it did there was one good thing that resulted from the fire the the break that they had uh suggested be built back in 1955 was started uh we determined that we needed an area we knew we decided we knew to begin with we couldn't put the fire out in the swamp we're going to have to attack it when it comes to the edge of the swamp but we have this transition zone where it makes it kind of hard to fight it right there and we don't want to let it build up until it gets a half mile inland so we started this break around the very edge of the swamp kind of between the the uh between the transition area where the swamp starts and the and the upland uh begins and we built a break around the probably the lower the lower one quarter of the swamp and by utilizing this break we were able to uh attack the fire as it came to the uplands and we really rather than to work in the swamp we were able to do what needed to be done where we thought the fire was going to hit that break on the uplands and we managed to come out without damaging too much private land well we also had other we we learned other lessons throughout the uh throughout the the time let's have the next slide please the reason why do we have such a problem trying to put out fire within the swamp uh first of all this is kind of a a profile of the of the vegetation in the swamp we have a mixture of things but a lot of hurrah bush greenbrier and other impenetrable vegetation that grows anywhere from three to fifteen feet high within the swamp and uh and we've got this layer of dead material that falls next to the surface of the root mat and then uh below that we've got the peat layer and the sand and uh next slide please the uh when this burns we get a tremendous fire we have smoked in Tallahassee with smokes from our fire next slide please and it's a very hot fire a very extremely hot fire and uh now we can have uh let's next slide please the the uh water level can be right up to the top of the root mat and you still have a fire like this now when we if if the water level is at the top of the root mat will burn off all the surface vegetation next slide please and uh you'll see here uh in the background was where the fire stopped that's what the vegetation looked like to begin with this in front here burned last year and you notice that it is growing up just the way it was before next slide please now if the water level is low enough so we burn into the root mat a little bit then we'll get uh a change in vegetation next slide please uh we may have grasses instead of instead of brush when it when it comes up and next slide and then the classic thing is if it burns down to the peat layer then we get the uh we get the open areas that open prairie areas and open lakes okay um a couple other lessons we learned back in 1979 uh when uh one of our technicians was plowing out uh a wildfire uh he went a couple hundred yards down from the edge of the wildfire in the pocket and uh was starting to plow out uh run a line between the road and the swamp he had maybe a couple 300 yards to go the wind direction changed and within a few seconds it burned the fire it blew the fire over him uh he was using this old 1954 tractor at the time and we didn't have any equipment no money to do anything and uh and he died a few days later and and the burn center in texas two years later at marit island we lost two more people uh they were trying to plow a line in front of a fire and they got their tractor on a stump and were burned over and as a result of this uh we got a lot of uh we got a lot more money we got funding and most of probably most important of all we got training uh so that uh folks learned how to put out wildfire well in closing the lessons we learned is one we can't safely manage fires without adequate fire suppression equipment personal protection equipment training and funding two it's impossible to suppress fires in the swamp other than a very small spotfire three it's dangerous and foolhardy to put personnel in the swamp travel is hazardous and difficult and personnel may easily become trapped four it's dangerous to put equipment in the swamp it will get stuck uh and if you could put five if you could put equipment personnel and anything you wanted to in the swamp it wouldn't do any good anyhow uh the helicopter drops in the swamp this vegetation layer is so thick that it atomizes the water when it hits it and it doesn't soak the actual burning area uh you'd have to dump buckets and buckets in a single spot just to put out a little piece of fire um seven retardant drops just make a real good show besides fertilizing the uh the vegetation that's there uh eight if it were possible to create a fire line in the swamp the chance of it holding anything or zero because there's too much burning stuff in the air nine as they did in 1932 the most effective management technique is to retreat to the upland and fight fire when it gets there uh ten managed wildfire used in conjunction with prescribed fire is beneficial in the uplands and in the swamp for both fire suppression and habitat quality uh 11 the surface fire in a stop swamp stop spreading only when it reaches an open water area and 12 the fire isn't out until the water level comes up from underneath and as a result of all of our planning we did finish the swamp's edge break around the rest of the swamp and fred will tell you more about that we developed a plan for when we would fight fire in the swamp when we wouldn't and we've also developed a series of um of uh dip sites throughout the swamp so that we can use helicopters to help us when the fire uh comes to the upland and thank you very much


What's happening guys? It's Shane here. So we've all gotten spammed by these YouTube ads from gurus that made it rich and out of the kindness of their hearts, spam you relentlessly with ads trying to show you how you can become rich too. Some of them want to show you how to make a Shopify store 45 seconds. I'm going to show you how my buddy Justin generates nearly $500,000 per month selling weird stuff like cat socks, fishing t-shirts, and of course the legendary wolf mug of truth and justice. Others want to show you how to start a real estate empire. Or maybe you're bored browsing YouTube one day and someone wants to show you how to get rich from cryptocurrency. And then my personal favorite is when an old friend that you haven't seen for years invites you out to coffee to tell you about a super amazing business idea that is definitely not a pyramid scheme. The more people that get involved, the more people who are investing, the more money we're all going to make. It's not a pyramid scheme. It is a it's not even a scheme per se.  That's going to teach you how to be rich.  So the first one on the list is going to be MLMs or multi-level marketing.  You know, they're illegal in the United States and several other countries. And if you get caught doing one, you could literally get sent to jail for 150 years. But what about multi-level marketing? I mean, after all, they are legal and they're compliant with the FTC. Well, technically, yes, they're legal. And if you ask any of these MLM companies, they'll throw all these statistics at you. And in their defense, you know, it is very difficult to keep track of these statistics. But according to research by the FTC, 99% of MLM participants lose money. And let's talk quickly about a few things in this study. So it analyzed about 350 different MLM companies. And it only included the ones that were confident enough to actually release data. So these were basically the best MLM companies. Now, a second thing about the study is the term liberal assumptions was mentioned over and over again when it came to the data, which basically means that whenever it wasn't clear or whenever the data seemed to go off in one direction, they always gave the MLM companies the benefit of the doubt. So they assumed the best for the MLM companies. So for instance, if the operating costs of a participant in an MLM company was a little bit unclear, the author would just assume that the operating costs were as low as possible. Despite all this, the study found that 99.12% of participants in MLMs lose money. Not that they don't make enough or anything like that. They straight up lose money. And the craziest thing I learned when I was doing my research for this video is that MLM companies actually have a worse track record than pyramid schemes. That's right. Back in the day when pyramid schemes were legal, you actually had a better chance of being successful doing a pyramid scheme than you do if you get involved with an MLM company.  And it really blows my mind how many different people fall for these. I mean, I knew a person who I consider to be basically a genius. I mean, she was a doctor and she started selling for an MLM company. I don't know how they trick people into doing it, but the bottom line here is MLMs are F tier, guys. Definitely, definitely going into F tier. If you go into an MLM, you're basically losing money and you would be better off in terms of just learning how business works by just starting a normal business on your own. Okay. Second opportunity on the list is going to be Amazon FBA. Okay. So this is a great one, guys. So basically what Amazon FBA is, it's fulfillment by Amazon. So you're basically a partner with Amazon and you would probably have manufacturers make products in China.  You do the listing, you do the design on the product, all that sort of thing.  You're basically a partner with Amazon. Now, when Amazon FBA first started a few years back, like let's say five years ago, Amazon FBA was probably a great opportunity, something that you would be really good to get into. But these days, your chances of being successful on Amazon FBA are incredibly low. So according to Marketplace Pulse, out of the 7,890,000 or so people who are selling on Amazon, only about 206,000 of them are doing $100,000 in sales. That's about 2.6% of the total sellers on Amazon, which I admit is better percentages than if you get involved in an MLM. Now, anybody who's done anything in the physical product business knows that profit margins are very, very low. Usually if it's a good product, it'll be somewhere around 10% or 15% in profit margins. And that's after you consider everything on Amazon that you have to do, including marketing budget, paper click, buying the product from the manufacturer, shipping it, storage fees at the Amazon warehouse, the percentage cut that Amazon takes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So let's be really liberal in our assumptions here. Let's be nice and say that they are getting a 20% profit margin. These people that are making $100,000 in sales are getting a 20% profit margin on their sales on Amazon. That's about $20,000 a year in profit, which is just above the minimum wage in the United States of America. So the top guys, the top dogs, the 2.6%, the elites of Amazon, the total badasses on Amazon are making $20,000 a year, which is just above minimum wage. Now, I already know some people in the comments are gonna say, well, a lot of those sellers aren't active anymore, and they're gonna say, well, maybe some people have multiple stores and all that sort of thing. I get it. Of course, these numbers are not gonna be completely accurate, but they can't be that far off. I lived in Las Vegas, and I actually knew a guy who sold over 10 million on Amazon, and he told me, because I was interested in it, to stay away from Amazon, because when he started Amazon FBA, first of all, he started it right when it was at the beginning, and he had a background in the physical product business. So he really, really knew what he was doing, and he told me all about some of the tactics that some of the successful sellers are using on Amazon, and some of these tactics just blew my mind. I mean, let's not even talk about the fake reviews.  Some of the other tactics he told me about were how they would make multiple stores. So you'd make 10 or 15 different stores when you found a product you thought was good, and then you'd just flood the market with all those different stores to make it look like there were a ton of different people who were selling that product and it was saturated, when in reality, it was just one person selling the product with 15 different stores. And as you can imagine, opening up 15 different stores, well, you have to pay the monthly fee to Amazon. There's a lot of costs involved in that. It's not something where you can just buy like $500 or $1,000 worth of inventory, and then you're good to go. There is a huge startup cost involved in opening 15 different stores. So a normal person probably isn't going to have the money in order to get involved in that. And therefore, the normal person can't really compete. And on top of all of this, if that wasn't enough, let's say you defy the odds and you create a successful Amazon store. Amazon owns your data. They know what products you're selling. They know the keywords that are leading to that product being sold. They know the pictures that you used. They know what your sales are. They know which variations of the product are selling the best. They know everything and they own your data. So basically, once you've done all the hard work, all the grunt work of figuring out, you know, what sales copy does really well, what types of pictures do really well, Amazon can just go in there and just copy your product. They can make their own version of your product and then guess what? They have all the control. They can put their product at the top when somebody searches all of those keywords that you worked so hard to rank for. They'll put theirs over yours and they'll just absolutely crush your sales. And you really do not want to be competing with Amazon. I mean, we all know what Amazon does to their competitors. They absolutely destroy them.  It's super easy. Anybody can do it.  Still with that being said, I have seen some people be successful on Amazon. So I have to be fair here. You know, it's much better than the stats when it comes to MLMs, for instance. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to put Amazon in C tier. All right. So the next one on the list is going to be starting a traditional business. And I think we should be fair here and talk about what the success rate for a normal business or a traditional business is. And what I mean by that is like starting a plumbing company or an air conditioning business or a restaurant or an accounting firm, something that you see all over the place. Now, there's all kinds of statistics and studies out there. And you know, they kind of group all the different businesses together, which I don't think is very fair. But basically what they say is about 70% of businesses fail within their first 10 years. And then out of the ones that do succeed, 10 to 20% of those are reasonably profitable. And by reasonably profitable, I mean you're probably making more than if you just got a normal job. You know, it's not a get rich quick sort of thing, but you're making a decent living and you're getting by. And statistics show that a good amount of people are actually successful doing this. You know, 30% of businesses are still around after 10 years. That's not bad at all. So I think this is a really good bar to set when you're thinking about the, make money online opportunities. Amazon, it's 2.6% to make a minimum wage. A traditional business is actually pretty good. Like after 10 years, 30% of them are still making enough to keep the business going. That's not bad at all. Now, the only problem with traditional businesses is they are pretty difficult to scale for the most part. And in a lot of cases, businesses like this, you sort of reach a saturation point at some point where it's pretty difficult to increase your income. And so for that reason, I'm going to put these in A tier. All right, so the next one on the list is cryptocurrency. And this is the one we've all been waiting for, right? And I admit, I have actually made money with cryptocurrency. I am net positive even after the market dropped, but I fully realized that I'm basically gambling with that money. And it's a very small part of a much bigger portfolio that I have in terms of investments. And I'm 100% aware that I could lose all of that money at some point and I'd be totally okay. I'm not afraid to lose that money. With that being said, I do have a pretty close friend who invested in Ethereum and Monero when they were around somewhere around $1 to $5. And I think we all know what happened to that. Ethereum got all the way up to like $1,000 and Monero got to several hundred. And he basically ended up getting rich from cryptocurrency. So I have seen this happening with my own eyes. I've seen people getting rich from this stuff. But with that being said, there's a ton of sketchy, scammy companies and coins and blockchain and whatever you want to call it out there. Take BitConnect for example.  There were people who posted videos on YouTube saying they were suicidal after it was found that BitConnect was a scam.  They made music videos to get people to buy it. And they had a very lucrative affiliate program going on, which attracted some amazing entrepreneurs like Craig Grant. Now I'm still extremely skeptical about cryptocurrency. I think there's way too much hype. And my friend who got rich is also very skeptical. He took most of his money out of the market. So with that being said, crypto is going to go in B tier because I still think it's a pretty bad option but better than a lot of the other options on this list. So when you compare cryptocurrency to a lot of these other options, it's got to go in B tier. Okay, so the next one on the list is going to be startups that solve a real problem. And by that I mean a company that solves a big problem or they make an existing service better. Think Uber, Venmo, think a lot of the companies that you see on Shark Tank for instance. So it's not a traditional business like a plumbing company or something like that. Now the success rates and statistics for companies like this are really tough to see. But it's pretty widely accepted that nine out of 10 startups fail and out of the 10% that's left, who knows how profitable they actually are as about only 30% or so of successful businesses have over $100,000 in sales, which as we talked about before has nothing to do with profit. But like I said, it's really difficult to actually calculate this because a lot of these startups will actually get bought out by bigger businesses which technically means they failed. So it's just very difficult to get accurate data because if you get bought out by a bigger business that's actually a very good thing. So the point here is there's not that many that are successful but the ones that are successful are really, really successful. A lot of the times these company founders will make $10 million, $100 million dollars or even more when they get bought out. Think Pillpack getting bought out by Amazon for almost a billion dollars for instance. On top of this, a lot of startups get funded by outside sources and so there isn't as much risk involved and so if they fail, they can just try over and over and over again. There's really no such thing as something that you can reliably get rich quick from without a ton of luck anyways but this one is probably the one that comes closest to that. So for that reason, I'm gonna go ahead and put this one in S tier. Okay, so coaching can be a little bit cringy. I mean we all know the person whose life is an absolute dumpster fire that all of a sudden becomes a life coach or something like that and they wanna try to teach you how to have a great life even though they don't have one themselves. Now I've met hundreds, if not thousands of different entrepreneurs and mentors and I spent a ton of time of different groups and masterminds and I even lived in a house full of entrepreneurs and I have to say that the one business model that I've seen the most average people find success with has got to be coaching and consulting and they're very similar but I'll explain the differences here in a minute. But quickly, let me explain what I mean by average. So average intelligence is not a business genius like Elon Musk. They don't have a ton of business experience because if you had a ton of business experience you wouldn't be average. You don't have some kind of unfair advantage like they have a lot of money coming in from their parents or they have some kind of investor in their family or one of their friends that's giving them a ton of money. They don't have another advantage like they're mentored by a world class entrepreneur like Frickin Tony Robbins or something like that. This is what I mean by average. I've seen more average people become successful using this business model than any other one. So the differences between coaching and consulting basically means like what niche you're in.  But they both basically do the same thing which is they identify a painful problem that a bunch of people in a particular group are having and then they figure out how to solve that painful problem. A great example of this is one of my favorite channels which is DSLR video shooter and he basically teaches people how to use their cameras how to make really good videos and I bought one of his products because I just wanted to figure out how to use my camera that I got and it was excellent.  And this is a really great business model because you can do it without investing like $10,000 in products or business infrastructure or anything like that. And then you can decide when you want to scale you don't have to worry about inventory and I've really seen a ton of average people become successful using this business model just teaching people how to do things that they're passionate about themselves. This one is definitely S tier. You're not actually going to get rich quick nothing is guaranteed unless you get super, super lucky in terms of getting rich quick but this one is pretty close to that it's the one that's the closest and the most realistic. Next one on the list is going to be Shopify. Ah yes you've probably seen the 300 different channels from 17 year old high school dropouts who are making $50,000 a month in their first month on Shopify and being a 17 year old with the infinite wisdom and the kindness in their heart that they likely have with all those hormones coursing through their veins they decide to teach everybody else how to do the same thing. So this is probably the hottest niche in e-commerce right now. I mean so many people want to become Shopify millionaires and it's just so attractive. I mean think about it.  I mean this is just a dream business model for an introvert right but here's the problem guys let's think about this logically for a second. Now there isn't much hard data out there about the success rate of Shopify stores but Reddit and YouTuber Rules for Rebels posted about how out of the 1,139 people that started a Shopify store using their affiliate link only 2% still have an active store and this was just after a few months of posting the affiliate link so within a few months 98% of them failed. Now looking back at our baseline numbers for like a normal business you know 30% are still around after 10 years so conservatively let's say 1% of Shopify stores are still around after 10 years. Now out of those that are still around let's be really nice let's think back to the Amazon example and let's say 10% of them are making $100,000 in sales and then there's a 20% profit margin let's be really nice and let's say 20% so they're making about $20,000 in profit so if we're being really nice you have about a 0.2% chance conservatively speaking of making $20,000 a year which is just above minimum wage but let's just use a crazy extreme example here and say you get incredibly lucky you find a product you sell on a million dollars a year that means you're making $200,000 a year if you can build a store like that that doesn't require any personal branding or anything like that you know there's not like a personal brand like a person who is selling the product anybody else out there can go and just copy your store and do the exact same thing there's no barrier to entry and think about this when the supplier on Alibaba the person who actually ships the product to whoever ordered it sees that you're selling like 1,000 units a week they're gonna look into it and they'll probably just cut you out completely after a few months and start selling the product themselves and there's tons of software out there for this that allows people to figure out how much you're selling and you know someone on Amazon is gonna find out you're selling a crazy amount of this product and then they're gonna post it on their Amazon FBA which is one to two day shipping versus the one to two week shipping of Shopify and of course Amazon is just gonna blow Shopify out of the water so the thing about Shopify is it's usually like seasonal products or just products that got super hot all of a sudden because it's you know on a show or something like that and after a few months they just die and so you'll start a store and if you get super, super lucky it'll do well for a few months and then they'll usually just die and even if you do happen to find a product that is good for years and years someone is gonna use this fancy software they're gonna find it they're gonna copy your store and then they're just gonna blow you out of the water Shopify might be the absolute worst business model on this list because at least with Amazon if you do build a successful store you have a brand that people can recognize they can trust and they can buy from that brand and then you also have a ton of traffic on Amazon so if your product goes out of style or Amazon kicks you off the platform technically there's a ton of people who know your brand and you can just make your own store in your own website but with Shopify you don't really have a brand it's just a quick webpage that you're throwing up has an offer for a product that everybody else is also selling because everybody knows how to find products on Alibaba so Shopify is basically below F tier it's basically F minus tier but I'm just gonna put it in F tier it's the worst one on the list so far except for maybe MLMs MLMs might be a little bit worse but it's close it's close okay next on the list is going to be day trading and this one is gonna get a ton of hate I probably see a hundred thumbnails a day with some guy smiling sitting in front of a computer with a bunch of green and red graphs on it claiming that he can teach you how to trade during the day and make a ton of money well it's a well-known fact that about 90% of day traders lose money not that they don't make money they actually end up losing money some studies say that it's even worse than 90% some say it's more like 95% or above so you would be much better off just getting a minimum wage job on top of this you often have to pay whatever brokerage you're using fees in order to trade and then even if you do have a successful trade you know you enter it like one dollar and you exit at $10 or whatever it is you have to pay what's known as short-term capital gains taxes which is a lot more than if you held the stock for one year or more trading is also extremely time consuming and it takes a ton of skill to even be decent at on top of that you have to sit at a computer all day long monitoring real-time data with expensive software and then make extremely stressful decisions based on your assessments you might make $5,000 before lunch and then you lose $10,000 before dinner then you go to the movies and you found out you lost another $5,000 depression and anxiety is extremely common among day traders and there's a reason for that and you could potentially get lucky here and a lot of beginners do get lucky when they first start but you have to know that that was just luck and you better get the heck out with whatever you want day trading is going to go in D tier next one on the list is going to be penny stocks now penny stocks is basically like day trading but it's even worse and the reason for this is because these small companies you're investing in when you buy penny stocks aren't as regulated as bigger companies this means that the markets for these smaller companies are just full of manipulation and shady tactics there's lots of pump and dump schemes there's fake media campaigns for these small companies so many different shady tactics are used to make you think that there's some hot stock that's about to go from $0.02 to $5 and make you rich penny stock trading has even worse stats than day trading and I think it easily deserves to be in F tier that's right penny stocks go in F tier right there with MLMs Shopify I really can't decide which one is the worst all right next one on the list is going to be a service based online business and usually this is going to be what's known as a middleman business so what I mean by this is you find something that a ton of people are doing like creating websites for their businesses and then you get really good at that so there's something that a ton of people are doing and you get really good at it and you basically find a bunch of people that want the service that you are offering you know creating a really effective website is not easy to do and a lot of people want to outsource that rather than you know take the hundreds of hours it would take in order to learn how to use WordPress for instance so a friend of mine got into website design and development like this and he found a really good service that basically they would design six different websites for your client based on their needs and then do all of the development and backend stuff after they've chosen their favorite design and they would charge about $500 for each step of the process so $500 to create six different website designs you'd show all six to your client and then they'd choose one of them and then they'd charge another $500 or so I think it was actually a little less in order to actually create that website do the development and the backend stuff on the website itself and these websites were excellent we're talking like awesome A++ tier maybe even S tier level websites and a lot of people around the country would pay $5,000 to $10,000 to have these done professionally so my friend did this and it was a successful business for years and years and he was basically just the middle man he found a really awesome service that did amazing work I'm sure there's tons of services out there that don't do amazing work but he found the one that was really good and then he basically was just the middle man between this amazing service and all the people that wanted the amazing service so he just did the marketing and stuff another friend of mine did a very similar thing with search engine optimization which is basically the process of showing up really high when someone searches a particular phrase or term on Google and if it's a big enough niche you can just cut out the supplier hire your own employees and complete the service yourself but the great thing is is you don't have to do it in that backwards order where you hire people not knowing whether you can actually you know get a bunch of people to pay for it you can just be a middle man you know validate that there is a ton of people in the market willing to pay for this service and then you start your own business now don't get me wrong your chances of success are still pretty low here you probably won't get rich quick from this but this is definitely one of the better ones that I've seen and for that reason I think I'm gonna have to put this one in a tier okay so the next one on the list is going to be digital marketing and this one was popularized by our good friend Ty Lopez when he opened his social media marketing agency course and took YouTube by storm and this definitely was a really good huge opportunity you know five years back or so maybe even like eight years back or so when Facebook first started doing their ads and a lot of people were getting really good with the ads and they were teaching others how to do it themselves and then businesses started wanting people who had this skill set and as a you know a normal business it's just simply unfair you've got an unfair advantage if your social media game is on point you drive a bunch of people to your restaurant or whatever your business is and that gives you a huge advantage over all of the other businesses in the area however you know this social media marketing thing is extremely oversaturated at this point and business owners are very very tired of working with people that give mediocre or bad results so if you start a business like this they probably don't want to work with you unless you have a track record a proven track record of you know making other people's businesses more successful because there's just tons of people out there that have zero experience and they just think they know how to do everything when they're actually really bad at it it's also extremely time consuming and you have to deal with your clients all day long like they might not like one little thing about this ad that you created and so you have to start the whole thing over and just like scrap it and create an entirely new one and you know you might send them a form with information that you need to know in order to run an ad and then they take like a week and a half in order to fill out the form and then they get mad at you when they're not getting results well you took forever to fill out the form I couldn't get you results you know they might call you or text you late at night and they're expecting you to get back to them it just gets a little bit ridiculous and it's a pain also let's say you do get really good at doing Facebook ads well a few months later Facebook will come out with an update they'll switch everything around for no reason whatsoever and then all of a sudden your ads aren't working anymore they change the algorithm or they change something like that your ads aren't working and you also need to relearn the entire interface because they changed everything around they've done this over and over again and you have to drop everything you're doing and fix that because if you don't fix it within a few days your clients are going to drop you just like that so anyways this is a legitimate business model that does solve problems that businesses are having right now it's just really tough to break into so for that reason I'm probably going to give this B tier status all right next on the list is this no money down real estate that I keep seeing here on YouTube now real estate historically is a fantastic investment in my opinion it's one of the two best long-term investments that you can make you know and after 2008 you know the crash around 2011 or so a bunch of people got extremely rich investing in housing and because of that a ton of YouTube channels started they were trying to teach other people how to get rich investing in real estate as well and like I said for a long-term investment if you know what you're doing real estate is great it is amazing if you get a good deal you are just you're going to be set but short-term it's a very mediocre investment and you know almost 70% of millennials regret investing in real estate for instance now some people on YouTube say that you can invest in real estate with no money down and in my opinion anybody who says this is wrong you need money to make money and from everybody I've talked to in my experience no money down real estate is a bad idea you know different areas of the country are also much better for investing some areas are pretty bad and then some areas are absolutely amazing it's also a ton of work if your tenant's washer breaks down you got to go fix that in the middle of the night sometimes or you got to go get a new one and so a lot of people end up hiring a property manager but of course when you hire a property manager that means you're not making as much from your investment so I really think it's a better idea to buy houses wherever you're living assuming that the place that you live is a place where investing in real estate is profitable and then just manage the tenants yourself but then you have to deal with background checks late night calls to fix stuff tenants trashing your property all sorts of other things that are not fun and take up a lot of your time so basically real estate is a great investment and a great opportunity it's a ton of work and you can get rich slowly from it but it's definitely not a get rich quick scheme like a lot of these YouTubers make it sound it might have been pretty close to that back in 2011 but the housing market has recovered and it's not like that anymore so for those reasons I'm gonna go ahead and put that one in A tier all right so next on the list is becoming an influencer so what do I mean by this I mean starting a YouTube channel starting an Instagram page something like this you know Gary Vee talks about this all the time you need to be creating content every single day you need to be putting out as much content as possible so there's a ton of cringy courses out there trying to teach you to start a YouTube channel or a blog or an Instagram or something like that and there's a ton of snake oil salesmen that will tell you you can make a ton of money with a small channel within a month it's not true it's just not true you know they'll use examples like Janelle Eliana who grew ridiculously fast and got like a million subscribers in a month or something like that but that is seriously like winning the lottery that almost never happens now if you're willing to work really hard for like three years and you're really smart about the type of channel that you make this can be an incredible opportunity I mean YouTube hasn't been around for long and this is one of the only times in human history where you know you can go from an absolute nobody you can choose yourself instead of having to be chosen by somebody else and then create your own destiny and you know build your own business you know other times in history you would have to be chosen by somebody or maybe get really lucky or be born into a rich family in order to do something like this and you can basically make a living just talking about whatever you're passionate about and helping a lot of people at the same time and I think that's pretty cool this one is a great opportunity but if you think you're gonna get rich overnight you're wrong it'll probably take like a thousand days and tons of hard work then you might be able to make a good living on YouTube or one of the other social media platforms but with that being said I am gonna go ahead and put this one in S tier the next one on the list is the lottery and speaking of getting lucky let's talk about winning the lottery you know I'm pretty sure that you all know this but your chances of winning the lottery are extremely low we're talking about 1 in 14 million or somewhere around there and you can probably tell that those are pretty bad odds and you'd be better off just keeping your money for yourself or investing it or basically doing anything other than that still if you type in how to win the lottery on Google there are people that claim that they have a six step system for winning the lottery I mean I can't even make this stuff up it's that ridiculous for every get rich quick scheme or thing out there there's always some fake guru trying to sell you the secret method to get into it and get rich quick this one is clearly F tier guys you're basically just wasting your money if you do this I mean if you want to do it just for the you know shits and giggles just as fun that's one thing but in terms of getting rich quick this one is awful it's F tier all right so the next one on the list is pretty great you know we've talked about becoming a consultant or an influencer and those are legitimate business models you can make money from unfortunately this is a relatively new industry with all the technology we have it's only been around for about a decade and because of that it's pretty unregulated and anyone can claim basically anything package it up in a $997 course and sell it and I've made some videos about this but I would estimate about 80 to 90 percent of the courses out there are just complete scams and you definitely should not buy them with that being said that doesn't mean that all of e-learning and the information product business is a scam I think that e-learning and information products can change the world and accelerate human learning in the same way that books did thousands of years ago still at this point in this relatively new market there are a ton of fake gurus out there that will sell you of course promising the world and then delivering absolutely nothing in fact a lot of these courses are designed to have you fail so that you will buy whatever the next upsell is and I think in the next decade this particular market is going to turn around for the better consumers are going to get smart about this they're going to realize that a lot of these guys are charlatans and anybody that offers a course that doesn't get a reasonable amount of people's success is just going to get totally wiped out and there's also a good chance that the FTC is going to regulate the market as well but hopefully it will become just like any other market where there's mostly good people who are just great entrepreneurs trying to make the world a better place and then of course there's always going to be a few apples any market is going to have a few bad apples but for now as long as you lack empathy and you have no problem scamming a ton of people and ruining lives and you can still look in the mirror yourself at the end of the day and respect yourself then this is probably the best possible business model for you this one is definitely going to go in S tier but anyways thank you guys so much for watching the video go ahead smash the like button hit the subscribe button ring the little notification bell and then check out my other videos right here because I made them just for you have a good one and bye for now