people using Muse were more effective at falling asleep and falling back asleep, leading to a 20% improvement in sleep quality. All right. So for listeners who aren't familiar with Muse, tell us what it is and why it was designed to do what it does. It's a fascinating story. Thank you. So Muse is a brain-sensing headband that helps you meditate and sleep. For those of you on YouTube, I've got one right here.  And it's able to track your brain during meditation and sleep and give you real-time feedback to help you start or enhance your meditation practice and to help you sleep better. So this actually is measuring EEGs, right? Of your brain. Exactly.  Muse is able to measure it and then determine if you're meditating and how to do it better and what stage of sleep you're in and how to fall asleep faster. So can you actually feel Muse working? I mean, it's not going to shock my brain, is it? No, it's passive. It's just reading the brain's electrical activity and from there giving you audio cues and audio signals that help you do what you want to do better. Okay, so you're, and I know your device, I have your device. What you're using sound to help me and why and you really want to help sleep? What, how does this different than just buying a sound machine to help me sleep? This is really different. This is personalized feedback. So when you're using Muse to help you fall asleep, you slip on your Muse, you choose some beautiful content to listen to, which might be a meditation or a bedtime story or a soundtrack and then Muse actually shifts in changes that content to help you fall asleep faster. So sometimes people listen to audio to help them fall asleep, but that audio is just playing at one speed and you wake up, you know, half an hour later and the audio is still playing with Muse. What it's doing is it delivers something called the digital sleeping pill, which is actually able to shift and change the content depending on your level of wakefulness in a way that's designed to walk your brain and to sleep even faster. And once you fall asleep, the audio shuts off. And then if you wake up in the middle of the night and you're still wearing your Muse, then Muse automatically wakes up with you and brings in the same beautiful experience to help you fall back asleep in a way that's designed to help you fall asleep faster. Wow. So wait a minute. We know from experience with our children or even being children that a bedtime story is quite useful to help a child go to sleep.  How does that work? Sure. So in the same way that when you're a kid, you have an adult there who is reading you a bedtime story and they can understand your sleepy cues. They can see when you're starting to close your eyes and yawn and they'll slow down the story as they see you get sleepier.  Well, Muse, in essence, can do the same thing. So because it's tracking your levels of wakefulness, your level of stage one sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep, etc., as you begin to move from wakefulness into sleep, Muse automatically starts to change the bedtime story so it becomes quieter and easier for you in a way that cues your brain that more sleep is coming. And as you have fallen asleep and you move into deep sleep, stage two sleep and deep sleep, the audio actually shuts off so it doesn't wake you back up again. And then if you do wake back up again, it'll pick back up the story and do the same thing to let you back down and to sleep a second time. So Muse really is working personally with you in a way that helps you fall asleep more effectively. And do most people utilize the bedtime story feature or do most people use music? What's been the experience? So we have a wide range of content. Some people like to fall asleep to bedtime stories and we have ones like Sherlock Holmes and sleepy stories like lavender fields. We also have beautiful guided meditations because some people want to deep breathe their way into sleep or release anger or tension and that's more useful. We have soundtracks like gentle sounds of rain and ambient sounds. So each person is really different and how everybody likes to fall asleep is a little bit different. Some people want to be told a story and just let their mind wander. Some people feel better really working with their body and relaxing the parts of it to float themselves into sleep. And so what we've seen is that people find the thing that works for them and then stick with it and that really becomes a cue every night to help them sleep. And then when they're no longer using Muse after a period of time, they understand, hey, I can fall asleep because when you're an insomniac, when you really don't sleep well, you end up becoming really anxious about sleeping. And the process of falling asleep becomes uncomfortable and scary because you're lying there going like, oh god, when am I going to sleep? And so once you spend some time with a tool that allows you to fall asleep far more easily and make the process much more pleasant, and over time also learns that it can sleep itself. And so the entire process, the stress, the anxiety, the frustration starts to dissipate and you become a better sleeper. Now I have a lot of patients and I'll count myself in that who we have, we have four dogs and usually we have a new rescue dog as one of our dogs. And this new rescue dog seems to like to get up at about two o'clock in the morning. And luckily it wants to go out, but I find that, okay, I've taken the dog outside, blah, blah, blah. And then I'm awake for maybe a half hour, 45 minutes. And I can track it with my aura ring or a whoop band. So can this device, if I had it on, will that get me back to sleep faster than me just laying there waiting? Yep, it's designed to get you back to sleep faster because the same technique that it used in the first place, the same bedtime story, et cetera, will automatically come back in when it's time to fall back to sleep after you've woken up.  I'm open. So then you're like, oh geez, I'm awake again. So then the device automatically turns itself on because it can detect your state of wakefulness and then guides you back into sleep. So in a recent study with Dr. Adrian Owen's lab, we found that people using Muse were more effective at falling asleep and falling back asleep, leading to a 20% improvement in sleep quality in the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, which is like the gold standard. Wow. And how about for new mothers? Has it been tried on new mothers? Obviously, there's a lot of wakeful nights and new fathers for that matter. You're looking at a new mother right here. That's right. Congratulations. Thank you. I have a six-year-old and a six-month-old. So we've just moved out of the intensive non-sleeping period of early infancy. And Muse has been invaluable because, of course, kids wake up in the middle of the night. They need you. You get up. You, you know, settle them. You lie back down. Sometimes as a new mother, you're so ridiculously exhausted that you don't need anything to help you fall asleep. You just crank back out.  And Muse has been key in helping me fall back asleep. And also, at the end of the day, tracking my sleep and making sure that even though I've had multiple awakenings throughout the night, I've been able to get enough sufficient sleep of deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep in order to be functional the next day. Now, I would think that EEG would be definitely the gold standard for determining light sleep, REM sleep, deep sleep. How does your device, or we've had the science officer of Aura on a few weeks ago, how do these guys compare? Because there's a lot of subtle differences between devices like an Apple Watch and an Aura Ring. And how does Muse track with all these? Sure. So Aura is definitely a great device. What Muse does is a little bit different. So Aura is measuring your temperature and your heart rate, which are both a proxy for how well you're sleeping. It's EEG that really is, as you say, the gold standard for measuring sleep. So if you go into a sleep lab and you want to really find out how well you're sleeping, they're going to put EEG sensors on your head. And then they're also going to track your heart and your breathing. So with Muse, what you're getting is essentially sleep lab quality data. We have a number of sleep labs that use Muse. And the results have come out looking shockingly similar. So you're really getting the experience of being in a sleep lab. But in this super cozy little headband that you're wearing comfortably in your own bed night after night. And Muse doesn't just track your sleep amazingly effectively, including really telling you the level of deep sleep that you're in. So not just how much deep sleep you had, which some of the other devices can do, but it can actually tell you the level of deep sleep, how much deep sleep you've had within that time, the depth of it. And then not just tracking, it gives you interventions. So tracking device like an Apple Watch or Fitbit can say this is how long you slept. Okay, what do I do with that? Muse actually gives you the intervention to help you fall asleep. So while it's tracking your brain, it's using that to give you real time feedback from your brain and your biosignals that helps you fall asleep in a way that's designed to be faster, designed to help you sleep more deeply and help you fall back asleep when you wake up. So no other device can do that. All right, let's talk, let's go deeper into sleep, excuse the pun. People know that sleep is important. We're beginning to convince people that we actually should have good sleep, that it correlates with a lot of things. It's not just recharging the battery and these stages of sleep are really important. You want to take our listeners and viewers through these stages of what happens during those stages briefly? Absolutely.  Then as you fall asleep, you enter into stage one sleep and you get some particular sleep characteristics that happen there. You're going to see as you move from stage one to stage two sleep, you're going to start to see things called sleep spindles. So these are little bursts of brain activity, about 13-15 hertz and they are indicating that you're starting to fall asleep and they're helping with memory consolidation.  Then you move into stage two sleep and then REM sleep. So REM sleep and deep sleep are the most fascinating parts of sleep. Deep sleep happens in the first part of the night, typically the first half of the night. So when I said as a new mom, it's actually important for me to know how much sleep I got of the different stages. I've been able to, using news, make sure that my first five hours of sleep, I get really good deep sleep because deep sleep you shouldn't interrupt. But REM sleep in the second half of the night, you can interrupt with less negative effects on your body. So you know, knowing when you're sleeping, how much is key in planning around that. So when you get into deep sleep, you're doing things like memory consolidation. So your brain is going through the events that you saw during the day, the things that you heard and things that you learned and associating it with other information and deciding whether to keep that memory or toss that memory out. And believe it or not, that kind of forgetting that your brain does during the middle of the night is important. Deep sleep has another amazing effect, which is to help your brain actually move out the toxins that are in it. So there's a fascinating study that was published in June 2021 demonstrating that Alzheimer's patients may have impairment in the cleaning of their brain during deep sleep. Because in deep sleep, your brain flushes out things like amyloid beta, whose accumulation could lead to Alzheimer's. The next phase that you should go through for the second half of your night is REM sleep. So your brain goes in cycles throughout the night, but the second half is dominated by REM sleep. And that's the dreaming stage. That's when your brain is associating all of the things that you did in the day with images and emotions and experiences. And that's why you get these crazy, amazing, weird dreams.  Now, there's the phase of light sleep. Many people go, oh, light sleep is not important, but there's actually a lot of mitochondrial repair work that happens during light sleep. So light sleep is not bad for you, right? All stages of sleep are important. So people tend to focus on deep sleep as being really important. And it is. Deep sleep is essential for maintaining your cognitive function in a host of ways. But each stage of sleep actually has its own function. And so ideally, you really want to progress nicely through each stage of sleep multiple times throughout the night, get enough deep sleep and enough REM sleep in order to function effectively. And you know, some people who go to bed chronically late, maybe short changing themselves on their deep sleep. Some people who are getting up too early to go to a basketball practice in the morning or, you know, I can get up early and go to the gym, they're short changing themselves on their REM sleep, neither of which is good. So you want to make sure that you're getting in your seven to eight hours every night and not cutting off on one end or the other. Are we finally getting to the point where this argument of, well, I'll sleep when I die and I can do fine on four hours of sleep a night. I'm, you know, I'm a type A hard charging American and sleep can wait until I get older. What, what say you? I say, well, you're going to get older much faster. You know, if you want to sleep when you die, that might happen sooner if you sleep less. Sleep is essential for every system of your body. Sleep is important for your cognitive function, for your emotional function. When you don't sleep, well, you become cranky just like a child does. It's interrupts your emotional self regulation. If you get only six hours of sleep per night for a period of time, your cognitive function, your IQ drops 10 points.  Your insulin functions get disrupted. Your body's hormonal functions are disruptive. It comes harder to keep up the weight. Your cardiovascular risk goes up dramatically if you sleep for less than seven hours, six hours a night as does your immune system crash. So, you know, sleep when you're dead. If that's the way you want to do it, don't worry, you'll get there much sooner. For the rest of us, sleep now. It's really helpful. Yeah. You brought up an important point.   It changes your hunger patterns and you crave sugar. You just crave sugar to keep going. And, you know, we'd hit the vending machines at all times during the night just to stay awake. And, you know, we were looking for hostess cupcakes and ding-dongs and candy bars. And it's amazing how, you know, sleep deprivation will drive people putting on the pounds.  And you can prove this from tracking studies, right? Yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot of studies that have been done that demonstrate the impact of sleep on weight loss or lack thereof. Because sleep, as you mentioned, disrupts your insulin. It disrupts your leptin. It disrupts all of your, a lot of your hormonal signalings that tell you when you are full. And your circadian rhythm is often set by food. So, if you get into the pattern of eating at two o'clock in the morning, for example, or waking up in the middle of the night to eat, that sets your circadian rhythm, which is the rhythm that governs both your sleeping and your eating. That sets your circadian rhythm to say, oh, it's 2 a.m. Let's wake you back up again tonight because you did it last night to eat.  So, it's a really unfortunate feed forward, which you can break yourself out of once you realize that you can actually change your sleep and you can change your sleep and hunger patterns. How does the Muse headband train you to be a better sleeper besides what you've just told me? Sure. So, there's a number of different ways that it works. One, Muse is a tool both for meditation and for sleep. We actually started using Muse as a meditation tool back in 2014. So, it's been in the market for many, many years. It's used by hundreds of thousands of people to learn to meditate or enhance their meditation practice. And we started to hear from people that they were using their Muse just before they went to bed to help them fall asleep. And that when they did that, they seemed to be sleeping better. And so, we really dug into that and started to create Muse S, which is the tool that's really purpose-built to help you sleep. And it gives you beautiful guided meditations that you during the day. And as you learn to meditate, you learn how to shut down that racing mind that you have.   So, that's the first level. We have meditation training. Then we have the guided meditations that, and sleep stories that help you fall asleep. We then pair that with the digital sleeping pill, which is the real-time biofeedback from your brain and body that's designed to help you sleep better. Then you have the tool that tracks you through the night so that you can really see your sleep patterns and what you're doing. And so, you can start to realize how you can change and shift or how you are changing and shifting. We have the tool that helps you fall back asleep after you've woken up in the night. And then we have broad range of content that really teaches you sleep habits and hygiene, it teaches you what to do to sleep better, their guided meditations to help you let go of the stress that you might have during the day, and a range of meditations to do things like help you wake up with morning joy, to, you know, greet the day bright and sunny and happy and to deal with any of the things that come up during the day with greater grace and calm and ease so that you can also sleep better the next night. Now, wait a minute. You said digital sleeping pill. I don't want a sleeping pill. How does a digital sleeping pill with Muse work? Exactly. It has nothing to do with a real pharmacological sleeping pill. The digital sleeping pill is the name that we have for the guided content that shifts and changes to guide you into sleep. We are not into physical sleeping pills either, you know, taking prescription sleep medications or non-prescription sleep medications actually gives you potentially really poor sleep that can interrupt your delta waves. There's all sorts of reasons not to use them. The digital sleeping pill is guided meditation content that actually works with you to teach you to fall asleep more effectively. Yeah, I see so many patients who are addicted to prescription sleeping pills and it's one of the worst things you can do for your brain health. It does not promote normal sleep, as you and I both know. And it's very difficult to get people off of these. I think a Muse prescription may be a good start to get them a digital sleeping pill instead. That's a great idea. Thank you. Yeah, we have a lot of doctors that recommend Muse to their patients both for sleep and for meditation to help deal with poor sleep, stress, etc. So we're actually seeing Muse prescribed in that way, you know, prescribing meditation and good sleep habits and hygiene and tools and techniques and biofeedback as a replacement for pills, which has been very rewarding. All right, you mentioned meditation and, you know, we've had you on before really to talk about the benefits of meditation. I write about it in all of my books, both as a brain tool but also as a longevity and immune support tool. So as a very poor meditator, I have a monkey brain. My wife is a great meditator.  Why meditation and why Muse?  Okay, so first of all, I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted when we say everybody should be meditating, but I also recognize that it is incredibly hard to do. I too had one of those monkey brains before really building Muse. I was a psychotherapist. I would be recommending to my patients that they should meditate. I would be teaching them to meditate even though I sucked at it myself, because my mind would bounce all over the place and then I'd be frustrated at myself because I couldn't meditate. And so in the process of doing that, I recognized with my team that we could build Muse as a tool to help you actually meditate more effectively. So what Muse does is it tracks your brain during meditation and gives you guiding sounds to let you know when you're meditating and to keep you there, kind of helping you know when you're doing it right.  We're like, forget this.   And when you're back on your breath, the sound gets quiet and pleasant again, which reinforces to your brain that you're doing the right thing. And then eventually your mind wanders as all of our minds do, and the sound guides you back. So with Muse, you're getting instant feedback during your meditation to actually know what's going on in your brain, to actually show you what you're supposed to be doing during a focused attention meditation, and to really make it rewarding both to your brain and your motivation systems to do it and stay there. And then after the fact, you get data, charts, graph scores, things that actually show you what your brain was doing and become highly motivating to keep you engaged in the practice day after day. And what we hear all the time is, you know, I tried for years to meditate and I couldn't do it. And it's Muse that helped me start my practice. And then it's Muse that helped me go deeper into it. So it's been amazing to actually get people to do this thing that's so good for you that so many people resist through the use of Muse. You know, I was realizing a couple days ago, my car has a lane departure feature that I don't use that once you leave your lane, it starts vibrating and doing all these crazy noises. And it just so happened it was on. And it started doing that as I was just changing lanes. I said, what the heck? And I went, oh, my lane departure feature is on.   I absolutely will. That's really funny. So Trevor Coleman, who's one of the co-founders in Muse and really responsible for guiding the initial product, he actually used to describe it as it's like rumble strips for the road. Now, this was back in like 2012 before lane departure features were very common.  Come on back gently. You're going off the path. Come on back gently. So you've nailed it. It's the lane departure feature with rewards and encouragement for staying in the right lane and getting to your destination. We can keep going with this metaphor. We give a lot of lip service to the benefits of meditation and I think people in general know that it should be a part of their hopefully daily practice. But take us through why meditation is probably a really, not probably, is a really good idea. Sure. So meditation has by now tens of thousands of published studies behind it demonstrating why it is good for your brain, your body, your relationships. It improves your attention. It can decrease your stress. It can help improve your mood, depression, anxiety. Meditation has been shown to improve your sleep. It's been ensured to improve school testing scores, workplace wellness. You name it, meditation can have benefit in it. Diving into it a little bit more specifically, when we look at how meditation helps you in your life, what it's really doing is it's teaching you to not become so caught up in your own thoughts. Now, most of many of the thoughts that we have are thoughts that are stressful and anxious. Some of them are not useful and repetitive. Some of them cause us anxiety and frustration and we're just used to thinking those thoughts and being carried wherever the thought takes us. With the meditation practice, what you're doing is learning to observe your thoughts and rather than being caught up in them and like thinking about that fight you had with your boyfriend over and over and over again and just thinking that's what's supposed to happen because that thought is in your brain. With meditation what you learn to do is notice that you're having that thought and then exercise the skill of moving your mind away from that thought and onto something that's more important to you or something that's neutral that you want to focus on. Over time as you do that more and more, you begin to recognize, hey, I don't need to think about that fight with my boyfriend or I don't need to think over and over again about the cookie that I really want to eat but I'm not supposed to or the stress that I have over this thing that I need to do that I can't handle.  So that allows you to do things like listen to your wife when she's arguing with you and rather than just reacting on something that she said and being like, well, you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you can listen. You might notice that I'm feeling a little tense about this. You can step back. You can take a deep breath and then you can just continue to listen and not react badly or you can recognize like, hey, I have this intensive craving and you know what? I don't need to act on it. If I just move my attention elsewhere and I do what I know is good for me, I can get myself out of this loop of these bad thoughts or feelings or behaviors that I engage in and in doing so, it can dramatically improve multiple parts of your life. And as you know, I'm very interested in longevity. I guess the older I get, the more interested I am in longevity. There are actual physical things that happen to meditators that promote longevity. Give me an example about telomere length and talk about brain changes that are observed in meditators. I think this is, this to me, rather than arguing with my wife, which I don't do, I learned years ago never to do that. But if I can promote longevity, health span, that's a winner for me. So tell us about that. Sure. It's phenomenal, the cellular changes that meditation has been demonstrated to make. There's an amazing set of studies that demonstrate that meditation can actually impact your cellular aging. These come initially from Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn. She is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and she looked at mothers who were very stressed in caring for their kids and she gave half of them meditation classes. She went back and then she looked at their markers of cellular aging and she saw that those mothers that had taken meditation classes and were actively meditating had cells that were demonstrating themselves to be significantly younger than those who didn't meditate. Now she looks specifically at the telomeres and your listeners might know about telomeres. Telomeres are kind of like the little ends of your DNA, kind of like the little pieces of plastic on the ends of your shoelace. Yep. And as you age they start to degrade. They're there to protect your DNA so your telomeres will begin to degrade first, get shorter and shorter as your cells replicate as time goes on. What meditation seems to do is actually increase the length of those telomeres. So as you age rather than the telomeres getting shorter and shorter and shorter until there's none left in your DNA starts to unravel, the telomeres with meditation seem to be getting longer and maintaining their length. And telomeres really are a marker of cellular aging. So you can look at one instance with a shorter telomere, one instance with a longer, and a scientist would say, well, sadly, literally the one with the shorter telomeres is more aged. And so in this way it actually seems that meditation is slowing cellular aging. That sounds good. Yeah. Now let's talk about the brain because this one's just as cool.  So in the work of Dr. Sarah Lazar she's shown that meditation can maintain the size of your hippocampus. So as you age your hippocampus can shrink with stress. Meditation can maintain that size. Meditation has been shown to maintain the thickness of your prefrontal cortex as you age.  As you age, that thins. But if you're able to maintain a long-term meditation practice in her study she showed that individuals were able to maintain the thickness of their prefrontal cortices, like reduce the aging of it. There was one subject who was 50 years old and he had the prefrontal cortex thickness of a 23-year-old thanks to meditation. Now in the work of Dr. Eileen Luters what she did was she just looked at an overall map of the brain of meditators and non-meditators to see what the difference in brain age looked like. And so she looked at long-term meditators who she defined as meditating five years or more. And on average those long-term meditators' brains looked 7.5 years younger than the non-meditators. So that's a pretty amazing investment when you sit there and think, why am I wasting my time? What's this five or ten minutes a day meditating every day? If I just use that time for something else, well here just five years of meditation can lead to a brain that may look on average 7.5 years younger. That's a pretty great investment of your time. Well you bring up an important point. I don't have an hour every day to go to my quiet place and quiet my monkey brain. So what's the evidence that you mentioned five to ten minutes? Is five to ten minutes going to do it for me? I probably have five or ten minutes that I've wasted every day. Is that going to do it for me? That's going to help. So with meditation you know more can be better but even five minutes a day can be impactful. So in a study that was done with Muse at the Mayo Clinic they used Muse meditation to help women with breast cancer. And these women were told to meditate with Muse for a minimum of three minutes per day. And they did so over three months and at the end of that time they saw a decrease in their stress, improvements in their fatigue and improvements in their overall quality of life during the cancer care process. Now a lot of these women obviously meditated more than three minutes but the only instruction was you know just minimum of three minutes a day and they liked it so they continued on and some of them did more some of them stayed at three minutes but even a small amount of meditation is better than none and as you do the practice it ends up being something that is rewarding and is engaging and so you know you start with three minutes you move to five minutes eventually you're up to 10 minutes every day and if you meditate for 10 minutes each day you will begin to see the benefits it's it's significant. Okay that brings up the next question. This strikes people as a really good training device to learn how to meditate almost like training wheels on a bike and once you know how to balance on a bike you throw away the training wheels. Is Muse something that you should always use? Is it a way to train you to learn what meditation is or is it there's a whole spectrum? So Muse can be used in many different ways so we have people who you know have never meditated before and they use Muse to learn how to meditate but Muse has so many features that it can be used throughout your journey so once you learn the practice of meditation obviously you're going to go throughout your day and then practice that meditation without your Muse you know Muse is a tool to teach you it's not a tool to do it for you so that when you're in that meeting and feeling stressed you apply what you've learned when you're in that argument and feeling you know ramped up you apply what you've learned but then you can go back to your Muse and engage in any of the content so we have meditations for the brain the heart the breath and the body so it teaches you different breathing exercises it teaches you to sense your heart rate and when it's rising and when it's falling it has literally hundreds of guided meditations on basically any topic that comes up in your life we say if there's something's come up in your life we have a meditation for that you know going into an interview and work wanting to perform better in the gym anxious about college frustrated standing in line you know we have meditations for all of these things that really meet you where you're at to help you gain new perspective on whatever challenges arise in your day so you know it becomes this buddy that you can really turn to to increase your own internal resources and wisdom and help you become your best person at day during the day and your best sleep at night have you considered doing a study with politicians using Muse we have considered um we haven't had any volunteers quite yet but well maybe a better place if they would we need uh maybe the federal government could fund that uh either either the canadian government or the u.s government but anyhow one thing you know you you brought out all these benefits of meditation do you the science yet understand what's happening at the cellular or organ level with meditation that's producing these observable changes in telomere length or in hippocampal size and that's the memory center folks so that's a good thing to have what what's happening at the cellular level sure so there's a number of different ways to look at this um one way we can look at this is from the top down from the brain and what elizabeth blackburn showed is that negative thoughts actually impact your cellular physiology so the way that we are thinking then creates a sense of stress in the body which ramps your cortisol system which leads to a host of negative changes inside your physiology in your body with meditation what you're doing is you're both learning to disengage the negative thoughts which trigger the stress and you're breathing deeply which trigger your vagus nerve to bring in a rest and digest response so as you breathe deeply there's an little nerve that runs up even down into your gut from your head to your gut it's called your vagus nerve and it becomes stimulated with meditation to bring in relaxation to your body to dilate your blood vessels to slow your breathing to slow your heart rate and this then brings on a positive cellular positive set of cellular interactions to do things like reduce aging so when we look into the brain we see some really fascinating things happening so the work of Dr. Sarah Lazar also showed us that even a short term meditation session like eight weeks of meditating is able to increase the number of connections in your brain your amount of gray matter and then when you look at the parts of the brain that seem to be affected meditation seems to be down regulating your amygdala so the amygdala is the part of the brain that's associated with fight or flight so it's a thing that's causing the stressful experience so it seems to down regulate the amygdala and it seems to be strengthening or increasing the prefrontal cortex and it's kind of like the amygdala is the child who's like scared of everything and can be freaked out by a shadow on the wall and the prefrontal cortex is the adult that's the person who's able to come into your bedroom look around to the child and say it's not a monster it's just a shadow it's okay and in some meditators it even looks like the amount of projections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala have increased so it's easier for the prefrontal cortex to talk to the amygdala and down regulate it and quiet it kind of for the parent of your brain to go you can relax it's okay to the child there's a host of other changes also going on in meditation but those are just some big ones in the few minutes that we have left well i actually have written about meditators have a much more diverse gut microbiome than non-meditators and from my standpoint all disease begins and ends in the gut so meditation will give me a more diverse gut microbiome just by meditating so bring it on it's so exciting to watch you and your company through the years and where it's going and how you've helped so many people it's it's it's a remarkable device folks uh it particularly for folks with monkey brains it it really does you know just have to sit there and let your mind go blank that's not the whole idea i can guarantee you but this is a really great way to teach you you know how to bring that focus and focus your attention focus your breathing that's you've actually made it quite enjoyable to meditate how's that and i guess that's the most important thing the things that you enjoy are the things that you do in life and so if we're going to be spending anything you know time on anything in our lives we might as well be enjoying it i think you're going to love this next one if you've got to have breakfast there's better things to have for breakfast that can actually continue to activate ketosis


What's up everybody? Jayce here for jazby's casebricks.com 2013 Panini select mini box break random teams number 27 sold out that helps give away seven spots in the mixer The baseball mixer that is guys So first guys will randomize the customer names and teams distribute the hits out of the mini box of select And then at the end of the break will take the customer names randomize them again in a separate dice roll or randomizer and Customers in the top seven get a spot in the mixer each So good luck guys Here's a dice roll. Let's roll it and it's gonna be for the break itself first four and a six ten times One two three four five six seven eight nine ten It should be my guy. I'll double check right now man. Give me one sec. Let's say skipped it, but it should be up there times here one two three four Five six seven eight nine ten You touch as down to the Philadelphia 76ers All right, so again.  This is basketball, that's what the hell one second guys. Sorry about that. I was thinking I was doing the other break right now The other filler that sold out All right, sorry about that guys ten times here one two three four five six seven eight nine Ten All right ten times Rolls down the Cardinals That really quick and again 2013. I believe what rookies in here would be Kristen Yellich, I believe is a rookie in here. They seem to be Miami Marlins I also believe Marlins should also have a Fernandez, right the one that passed away I think pro far jerkerson pro far was was one of them in here I don't think of anything else 2013 that There you go. Just think of what you got of course Me alphabetize it by team so you guys can see a little bit quicker. I'll give you like 10 seconds to go out Take a glance at your teams And I think Mike trout 2013 select silvers go for a ton in this too So good luck to Michael who has the angels Stick what you got grass Alright, let's quickly do this filler. I mean everybody can have their own of pants on prices, right? but when we have When we have prices that are so cheap and people say wow your prices are so great And I guess we should raise them right? Okay, I'll put it up right now man. I look like I did skip it and Jackie Bradley, Jr. Rookie it'll be Boston You got a silver Dwight Gooden and we got a silver Evan Longoria You got the 750 Andrew Werner There's a Mike trial just a base, but You got Edwin in Carnation and a Buster Posey silver. Oh, there you go quick little mini box Now let's switch scenes Let's roll the dice and we got ourselves a six and a five eleven times and here the original customer names here eleven times Good luck one two three four five six seven eight nine ten And it was eleven in final time Boom eleven times It was the top seven right yeah seven So Kyle you are in at seven Brian crouches in Anthony Nicoba Michael Lonnie and Kyle There you go top seven are in Congrats guys. We have another filler and if not, I'm gonna post one up right now So that way we can try to fill that baseball mixer tonight guys Jaspies case breaks calm


I still don't have all the data unless they talk to me. I can literally click two buttons and get all the data I want to have any subdivision in my area. Now I have all the data like that. Hey, good to see everybody. Where are you guys located? We're out in Massachusetts right outside Boston. About 15 minutes. Some of us actually live in Boston. We're a team of eight. We're at Compass and our teams are the movement group. Nice. Cool. So what can I do to help you guys?  We love what you do. We love what you're putting out there. It's genuine authentic content. And that's what we're all about. Like we work hard. We don't, you know, kind of deal with all the fluff and complain in the nonsense. We put our nose to the grindstone work. But we're kind of coming up short with obviously what everyone else's pain point is, which is inventory levels. You know, and I will admit to be the first one that we are a fairly, we're a listing heavy team. We work with a lot of buyers, but we're listing heavy, but we could always add on more business. We have the assets to do it. We have the knowledge to do it. We have the skill sets and obviously we dabble with the phone, the cold calling. But, you know, we just want a little bit more guidance because we have the social media locked down. We're not worried about our social media content. We are predominantly one of the better teams around sort of, you know, north of Boston, Boston proper and Massachusetts in general. So we have the social media aspect all down, but we need to get a little bit more gritty with getting listings, getting sellers from, you know, opposed to our SOI. We just want to get sellers just from, you know, random places, I guess, if you will. Walk me through being a listing, listing heavy team, but yet the problem is lack of listings. Right. So, I mean, we want to create more inventory. I mean, we're putting on more listings every week. We'll put on like 1 to 2 listings a week and just as quick as they're going. And, you know, we're looking down the line saying like, you know, quarter to quarter 3, our pipeline isn't as full as we want it to be. So as much as we're listing heavy, we can always do a lot more. I mean, we're a team of eight. So for instance, if we're putting on 2 new listings a week, okay. You know, we're not necessarily having everybody included in those listings. So we want to ramp it up where we can have 3, 5, 7, 8 listings going on, you know, per week to keep everybody busy. Okay. And then everybody on the team is basically like other roles.  Or is everybody just kind of an agent on the team who has the ability to go out and list, sell, etc. So Ryan on our team is our team administrator. He helps us with the back end. He helps us with goings and he's also a sales rep as well. I have a personal transaction coordinator. That's an online TC. And, you know, we have, we're compromised of seven sale, you know, eight sales reps for all in sales. You know, but again, we're just looking to add on more business. And I know that sounds so general, but like I said, there's no roles of listing agent, buyer agent. Everyone's basically a sales agent or some do more rentals just because that's where they're at. But there's no like specific list agent or or buyer agent. I think depending on where they're at with their careers, some people are more buyer heavy. Some people are more or less heavy. And so it's up to each team member to go out and basically build their own brand and create their own database and do their own deals. For the most part, yeah, I mean, the way that we look at it is like this. Everybody is a 1099. Obviously, they're on our team. They're leveraging, you know, our brand, our assets, what we're able to help them with. But obviously we want to be able to provide more listings and just more general business. So, you know, whether our lead capture comes from our SOI or open houses, obviously we got to make it happen, you know, more. We got to, we got to bring more inventory to the table. I think it's our pain point. You know, the listings come from sellers that choose an agent they want when they decide they want to sell. It's real simple. So how do they choose the agent that they want to represent them when they decide to sell? Well, somebody that has established a relationship with them pre-decision, right? Somebody that has built that trust up to that point. You know, a lot of coaches and trainers will, you know, get into, you know, like taking an expired setting, setting an appointment and like closing them right then and there. When, you know, it happens, but it isn't necessarily a way to build your business. It's a way just to get a quick deal. And you actually really crush the chances of doing so much long term business, which is really where the money's at, right? The long-tail relationships turn into tens and tens of deals. And you're really kind of crushing a lot of the relationships just trying to close a deal today with people you don't even know and most agents are trying to convert before they connect. And so we have to get in the mindset that our job is basically to create as many relationships with property owners in our market as humanly possible. Okay. Do we already know this or am I telling you something new? Oh, not new. No, that's definitely not new. Okay. I'm just, I'm just trying to dissect the entire situation for you guys. So if you guys already know that in order to get the most listings, you have to have the most relationships with property owners in the market. Then my question is, what are you guys doing on a daily basis to, to procure as many new relationships with property owners in your market as humanly possible? What actions are you taking daily to systemize a way that guarantees new relationships with property owners in your market every day? I think that's where we sort of come down to like having a faulty system and sort of like a systematic approach. Like we are very heavy on social media and we're almost too reliant on that. Like we're, we're giving a lot, but we're not getting back as much. Okay. Okay. Let's hang out there for a second. Okay. Um, what are you doing on social media? And if you're so social media heavy, you know, I'm going to play devil's advocate on this. Cause what I have to do is I have to rearrange how you guys are thinking about your business. Okay. So on social media, what are you doing and why aren't you collecting data? Cause the bottom line is if you're telling me that you're just putting out social and you're not getting a lot in return. And that tells me that you're doing social wrong, right? Social needs to be a platform that you collect data and then call people convert if possible and then remark it to forever. So are, so either you're not collecting data or you're not collecting enough data. You're not getting enough leads from social media to really make a, to really move the needle in your business. Um, or, or you're not putting out enough content. You're not engaging with people. So there's a breakdown in your social media, um, strategy somewhere. So before we move, before we get back on the, how do we, how do we put systems in place to just churn listings? Let's break the social media thing down first. What are you doing from top to bottom? I think we can, I can speak for everybody on this. We do a lot of educational content and we're basically providing that to the masses. I personally have been doing that for over seven years. I've done last year probably close to $20 million of business on social media. And my price point is probably like 6,800,000. Okay. We, we've done a fair share on social media, but we're putting on a lot of educational content. Now, something that you mentioned is consistency. I personally stay very consistent with that. We're trying to hone it and preach to everybody that you have to stay consistent.  Hey, I want to buy. I want to sell. So that's a warm lead coming to me directly. The indirect comments of like, oh, that's like a cool property or like they're trying to just kind of engage.  Everybody like so when people engage with you, your next step is to pursue that conversation to see what it is that they're trying to do. If anything, why they're trying to do it. If they already have an agent they're working with, right? So that you can figure out what it is you can do to help them accomplish whatever they're trying to accomplish. The data is their email or cell number, what property they already own stuff like that. These platforms need to be used as a platform. See, if this is an e-commerce business, you don't have to talk to anybody. Your products there, they click it, they like it, they buy it, boom. You don't have to, you know, you're selling supplements. You're not talking to anybody. When you're selling real estate, real estate, think of real estate more as a high ticket sales product. You know, think of it as a coaching program that's $20,000. You know, nobody's going to buy a $20,000 coaching product without talking to a sales guy to get some questions answered to see if they want to move forward. Same thing here. They're paying you $20,000 to sell their house. This is a high ticket sales product, okay? And until they talk to someone, see, all the funnels need to be, if you look at these high ticket sales coaching products, they don't have the price on the landing page. They have click here to set up a call, okay? Same thing here, like it needs to be a funnel that leads to a conversation, right? Whoever's having that call, I don't know you, you know, the way you guys' team set up, I'm not sure how all the dynamics are, but somebody has to be talking to someone and we need it to be talking to people at a very high frequency in order to close the highest amount of transactions. So just collecting data to then talk to people. If it's a DM back and forth, great. Ask all these same questions in the DM, right? But until we know what someone's trying to do, why are they trying to do it? So many agents are playing just on the surface, right? It's like, I want to buy something. Okay, what do you want to buy? Let me send you some properties. Let's go look at some properties, but they failed to actually ask why they're looking to buy. And so therefore they don't even know what the motivation is or why they're even trying to do when they want to do it, how they want to do it, none of that stuff. You know, I want to sell. Okay, cool. Want to kind of come look at the property? No. It's like, okay, why are you looking to sell? So then you can figure out if the next step is to come look at the property. Maybe not. So that's one thing that agents are doing wrong right then and there. They're not going deeper with the process of discovery of what's going on behind the scenes. Okay. Yeah. So I mean, just for the sake of time, you guys get the point of the social media thing guys need to be more intentional around, right? Being detectives, doing discovery, collecting data, remarketing. You got to get these people off the social platforms and onto your platform via email and text messaging, right? You own those databases. You can't control the 5% organic reach on Instagram versus the 90% organic reach in your email database, whereas if your Instagram gets hacked and your account disappears, you've still got them on email, right? So yeah, you've got to get really good at creating your own database outside of these platforms. I don't know if you guys do that or not, but you have to be very intentional with grabbing these people off the platforms and getting them into your database. Meanwhile, continuing to put out content and staying in front of them on the social platforms. That just adds to the fact that you're also emailing them. You know, you email them once a week on the same day of the week. They see it every week. It means something versus if they don't engage with your content, you could be posting every day about seeing a single post for months. They forget who you are. They get the emails. You got to be hitting them from all different angles. So are you guys doing like an email campaign to your database? Consistently stuff like that. I think we're just like newsletters. What's up? I think mostly like monthly newsletters, but outside of that, I'm not sure. Hey, monthly monthly is like you're losing business to the guys that are doing weekly on the same day of the week every week. And then what's a monthly newsletter? What's in it? Some of it's compass, pre-made compass stuff. Okay, stop right there. Stop right there. Yeah, that doesn't work at all because they're getting the same email with the same compass, generic stuff that isn't helping anyone from three other agents at the exact same time. And now it's degrading your brand because they're like, oh, three emails from three different agents with the same exact subject and info. It's got to be your opinions on what's happening inside information about what your buyers and sellers are saying in the current marketplace. Deals you think are really good. New listings, restaurants around town you went to and give your experience. Email back for a chance to win a gift card. Market stats, you know, events and developments coming into the area and how you think it's going to impact the market. Your opinions on stuff, sitting down and spending time each and every week on an email on the same day of the week forever to your entire database. It will multiply and expand and completely blow your business up really fast. And then you'll see the power of this and then you'll keep doing it and three to five years later, you're like the number one team in Boston and everybody's like, how'd you do it? You're like a weekly email and they're like, oh, yeah, right. But that's exactly how you did it. So that's very much separated. Would you separate it all? No, no, no, no, not based on the area. No, no, no, what? Cause then it's not scalable. Now we're spending time doing five emails instead of one. You could put different areas on your email like you could have, you know, your email, your thoughts. And then you could have like a box, you know, like halfway down on the right or something that, um, that is like, you know, click on your area and then it has the five different areas and those links go to a dedicated web page on your website that tells them everything you want them to know new listings in that area, good deals in that area, stuff going on in that area that's automated. That way you have those same links every week and then everybody feels like, okay, he's covering the Boston, the greater Boston, you know, West side, whatever, and you've got those different links. That way you keep it one email to your entire database. Now you can, uh, now you can, um, scale, right?  Yeah. And you're just putting your opinions and maybe just even like your experiences over the weekend of, Hey, I went to these open houses. This is what the traffic was like. Exactly, bro. Exactly. Here, let me send you this. All right. This breaks down the weekly email. And also this is my lap, the last 11 emails, last 11 weeks of emails that I did. So you can see exactly what I'm doing. Um, my, I've been doing mine since 2007. It's literally the reason why I closed with a hundred deals a year in my sleep. And I've got 19,000 people on this email, 75 to 8,000 open it every single week. Um, so just kind of look at that. And dive deep into what's going on there and just use the same format and just start doing it and start doing it as, as well as you can and know that this is what's going to put you guys in a place where you don't have to prospect anymore. Cause once you build this up to a certain point, you don't have to prospect anymore. Everything's just coming in from this email, right? That's what so happened to me in 2017. I quit prospecting, but and I didn't do social media. Nothing and this email still produced a hundred deals a year. I was working five to 10 hours a week on my real estate business and I was able to go out and start a coaching business and build a brand while I was still selling a hundred properties a year because of this email. So like this is the long play, like you can see how the future is going to lay out kind of play on a 90 percent organic reach platform that you own versus putting all your eggs in a basket of a platform that could disappear tomorrow. Yeah. Meanwhile, still continuing to crush it on these platforms. Right. So there's the social media place. So now this email, everything funnels to the email, all the leads you get on social, all the leads at the open houses, all the leads on cold calling, all the leads on, you know, sphere of influence, all the leads on referrals, everything funnels right back to here. And this is where nobody ever forgets who you are. And they're like, Damn, every week. Oh God, they're a hardworking, honest, dependable professional. They're everything I want in an agent. You're not only were they nice when I talked to them, but now they're backing it up with actions.  Now I know who my agent is going to be. And I'm going to tell everybody about this dude because he's on it. Right. It's the same thing with social, you know, I'm posting four to six times a day on insta. Not everybody hits the like button on every video, but when they see it, they're like, Damn, he's working. Right.  Right. And also just differentiate yourself from everybody else because nobody's going to create the same content as you. So you know what it is? I think our pain point that we struggle with is you know, I've been a few of us have been the industry for more than six, seven years. It's been low hanging fruit for us for for quite some time and we are, we are grit and grind, but we never take the next step to collect that type of data. Right. Because we always have people DM and I say I want to buy I want to sell. So we're always preoccupied with the low hanging fruit. So basically what you're saying is essentially we have to take the people who aren't necessarily low hanging fruit, get them in that serum, get them in that email drip and really start ramping up in that because similar to what Toran said, you know, we're sending one newsletter a month. I mean, that's obviously not enough. We have a lot. There's a lot of us. There's a lot of people out there that you are defining right now is not low hanging fruit that are low hanging fruit. Gotcha. And the low hanging fruit, a lot of the what you call low hanging fruit is not low hanging fruit. Right. A lot of the low hanging fruit of people that come to you, they're not ready for six months to a year. They're still interviewing three agents, but you're calling that low hanging fruit. No, it's not. They're interviewing three agents to sell in six months. Some of them do buy now. Some of them do pick you. Same thing with this. Some of them do pick you now. Some of them pick you later. Some people are interviewing three agents. Right. So we got to quit saying low hanging and non low hanging. Everybody's in the same bucket. We got to quit saying this lead. I paid $200 from this lead and this lead was one cent because I just got their information on Red X. So that's a different lead. No, it's not. It's the same person. They're selling you the same contact information that you could get for a penny. For property owners in your market or even buyers or people looking to buy. They sold 200 million leads in 2021. There were six million transactions. Right. It's it's you have to get into. I'm just trying to help you guys understand that the entire population is the is the pull of clients and customers, not this segment of the population who might do something now in this segment over here. That's that's all irrelevant because people change their minds every five seconds. You could call somebody and they say, I'm never going to sell. Then two weeks later, they call back and say, you know what? Something happened. I got to sell all the time. People say I got to sell and call you back the next day and say, no, I don't want to sell. So it's just like what's hot? What's cold? What's low hanging? What's not low hanging? It's all the same. Right. So once you get into that mindset that okay, now we're just going after humans in the market and we got to create our job is not to find the motivated ones. No, it's to create as many relationships. See, we're in the building that the the the building of your business stage where you're you're in the building stage.  We're working our sphere. We're putting out content. You know, you should be pounding the phones, pounding the payments, hitting doors.  You should be doing all this stuff to try to create conversations, but you got to forget what works best for you and then package it into a systematic, executionable plan, right? Where every single day every morning when you wake up, you know exactly what you're doing. You know exactly what the outcomes going to be, right? And you know exactly where the bonus hours are in the day that give you like that extra credit to really boost everything because you're not lazy. You're going to go out there. You're not just going to do what's asked of you. You're going to do that and more so that you get where you want to go quicker, right? So we can talk about the systematic ways to do this. If that's the direction you guys want to go in. I'm just here to help you guys try to organize it as best I can with the little time that we have make sense. I think that everything you're saying, we're not necessarily implementing to its fullest effect. Like we've taken social media and put that on a pedestal and we sort of neglected the email chain. We've neglected to build our own personal database, if you will. And I personally will, you know, I refer to that low hanging fruit because I take those ones. I have a lot of those and I cultivate those. I nurture those and they might not be a two to three month transaction or closing time for and they might be a year, but I'm also then neglecting the people who I should have been adding to my database. That could have been the same time frame. That makes sense. What have been? No, not could have been. What have been? Yeah. Right. There would have been. Yeah. Yeah, that's huge. Ricky, what do you are like aside from that weekly email? Like what are the ways of hitting these people? Obviously calls. Like do you have a certain routine, like a morning routine where you're doing like that 20 dms and you're doing maybe 20 phone calls or what would something like that look like? So if it were me and I was building my business, I would wake up, do my morning thing or whatever by eight o'clock. I'm kind of organizing my day. Right. So I've got a legal pad. Like this is the one that I took right took the day, right? And I just organized my entire day like schedule where I have to be when I have to be there. Things have to follow up on hot prospects. So on and so forth. That's all on one sheet of paper that I organized and went through all my emails and text messages and went through this entire thing where now everything is on one sheet of paper. I know where I got to be when I got to be there, who, who, where, what my projects are when I have to post on social, you know, what's going on. And if I ever get lost in my day, I can just look down and say, okay, this is what I need to be doing right now to maximize because I thought about it beforehand. I took 15 to 20 minutes to organize. Now at eight 30, I'm going to start figuring out who I'm calling today. Is it people are calling back from my open house this weekend? Is it for sale by owners expired circle prospecting? Is it Zilla leads? Is it Facebook leads? Is it a sphere of influence past clients? Who am I calling? I need to know that around eight 30. I need to start preparing to dial at nine o'clock, whereas everything is in place where I hit the dial button at nine o'clock from nine to 12 solid calls hundreds of calls as many as I can get in between nine and 12 12. I'm doing lunch or whatever I do. And then for the rest of the day, I'm looking at marketing, which is social media, direct mail, SEO, blogs, whatever you do for marketing, you know, video creation, whatever it is, right? So in the afternoon, it's it's marketing and admin and appointments. Okay, so if I need to catch up on admin, if I've got, you know, if I've set appointments, if I'm showing property, if I'm creating videos, whatever I'm doing that day. And then like on Wednesday is my email, my email day, the weekly email goes out. So like Tuesday afternoon will be the focus will be creating that weekly email. That way it's ready to go out Wednesday morning. Right. Monday afternoon could be like Monday or Wednesday afternoon could be like where I sit down to come up with 10 really good video ideas for like one minute videos short form videos. And then I literally film all 10 of them the way I have one to go out every day. Do that once a week. But I've got to be on the phone from 9 to 12 solid ignoring everything else that comes through. If a client's calling, I'm going to answer that. Like as long as I'm on the phone, cultivating new business, creating new relationship. So like once you start breaking all this stuff down and realize that everything's kind of subjective and the, you know, you're we're all brainwashed. I think that the leads we buy are worth more than just random people in the market, which is false. Then we start to say, okay, well, listen, every single lead gen like path is exactly the same. Okay. No matter if it's social media, cold calling, you know, open houses, fear referrals, regardless. Okay. The process is data collection so that you can then talk to them so that you can then see if there's a possibility of conversion and then whether they convert or not, it's remarketing to forever. It's the same path every single time. Data, talk, convert, remarket same path. So if you start to realize it's just a data collection game so that you can then talk to people to see what you can do to help them to see if they want to buy or sell, you know, in terms of real estate and then remarketed to them forever. It's like, okay, the very top of that funnel is data collection. Okay. So who are my very targeted, highest quality leads that I want? Well, it's property owners that own the exact properties and the exact subdivisions and condo complexes that I want to sell in. Okay. How do I get their data so that I can then talk to them to see what I can do to help them to then remark it to? Well, Redx will give you any of them that you want to for about a penny a piece like one and a half cents. Email, phone number, the whole nine yards. So I can pick a subdivision, get all the data. So now I've data collected for a penny instead of $40 on Facebook, $20, $1 on Facebook. You know, $200 on Zillow, whatever, right? Or even if I spend a bunch of time just knocking on doors, I still don't have all the data unless they talk to me. I can literally click two buttons and get all the data I want to of any subdivision in my area. Now I have all the data like that instead of doing all the work most people do to create videos and do social and pay Zillow and all this stuff. I can just go like that for a penny and have as many as I want. Now what's the next step with the funnel? Talk to get the data, call them and or do see what I could do to help. See if they want to do something, right? Remark it to forever. It's real simple stuff. My goal every day from 9 to 12 is to create as many friends with property owners as I possibly can because at the end of the day, when somebody closes this deal and you ask the buyer or an seller, how'd you pick your agent? The most common answer is I had a friend in the business by that's overwhelming. It's overwhelming that answer. And so if that's the case, my job now becomes how do I create as many friends on the market as humanly possible with the exact people I want to do business with because you can't talk to every single person in your market, right?  You'll never talk to everybody. So now, okay, let's get smart about it. Let's get efficient about it. Let's break it all the way down to the exact people, the highest quality people. Well, that's that's you've picked all the sell division, you know, you want to sell houses there, you know the price point. This is the best, you know, you're this is the dream market you get to pick, right? So not only is it like, oh, with Zillow and Facebook, you're getting random people in the market for a God awful expensive price for random people, but over here for a penny, I can get the exact person I want. Unless it becomes pretty obvious that you can convert them and they seem like, you know, like a pretty motivated person is the number one objective then just to connect and basically be become as much of a friend as you can in that short amount of time you have. So when you are sending them that weekly email, they have a bit more of a like a face-to-name type thing where it means something as opposed to just being a random email. Yeah. So the number one skills making people feel comfortable with you, right? Not closing deals. The number one skill is to develop the communication skills to make people feel comfortable with you and it ease with you immediately within the first couple seconds, right? And then you never try to sell their house. You use their house as an excuse to talk to them to see if you can get to know them to see what it is they might want to do later if they already have an agent they're working with and if you can stay in touch and help them.  This hit me way different. This is a great first impression and then they start getting the weekly email and they're like, wow, you know, great first impression. Now I'm never going to forget this person. Three years later when I decided to do something, this is who I'm calling. I don't care who calls me and tries to tell me this or that. This is the one I'm going to call. So you put yourself in a very high probability situation that they are going to use you as their agent and refer everybody to you as you do this. Will this win everyone over? No, no system will. But what we got to do is put ourselves in the best position possible to have the highest percentage of people we run into do business with us now and later refer everybody to us. That's why I love the email because it's like 90% organic rates versus like 5% on the social platforms and it's your database. You've got it, right? It doesn't matter what happens, you know, to the platforms. So like it's a way to it's not like you will have some stuff go to the promotion folders. You will have people that never check emails. You will blah, blah, blah, right? You'll have people that check your emails, love your stuff, get all the information they need and go use other agents. All that will happen. You'll have tons of people unsubscribed. That's great. It filters out the people that doesn't want to do business with you and then continues to provide value to the people who do want to do business with you. All that stuff is going to happen. But that's all just part of becoming a top producer. If you're a top producer doing 100 deals, 200, 300 deals, you're going to lose 100, 200, 300 deals that year. You're going to have people tons of people unsubscribed.  Your database number stays exactly the same. Every day that goes by that that number is exactly the same. Your database is becoming more and more valuable every single day because you're filtering out the people that don't want to do business with you while adding people who do and out of the five that that you add maybe one or two of those unsubscribed, right? But you're still adding this like you're still adding to the condensed group of people in your database who just really love you and the in the in the larger you can build that up that base up the better you're going to be. So, you know, it's like social like I'll have 6000 people follow me in a month and 3000 unfollow me. I was up 3000 that month, but it's like man, I wish I could who cares about the following the number the net number that the fact is that every day that goes by my account is worth more and more and more. You know what I mean? It's it's a it's a it's an aging thing like it's a maturing thing of your of your business as your business continues to mature and you filter out the people that don't and the people that do it just becomes more and more valuable. Ricky, how do you incorporate text messaging with emails as well? Are you using some type of like automated tax services? Are you like physically texting clients? I don't do anything automated. Okay. Just so you guys know. Okay. The only things that do automated is like if I say, Hey, DM me the word this and I'll send you information. That's automated. But outside of that, I'm not automating like text or emails or weekly emails or emails I send to agents. All that stuff is communications that actually wrote right then as when it when it was sent. That means I had just wrote it and sent it myself, right? So individualizing tax opposed to like any type of like mass tax. No, I'll do mass. I'll do mass tax, but it's not automated. Right. Right. I'm I'm actually writing those. Um, right. So here's the thing about text. Okay. The from what I can tell it's great and it should be implemented immediately in your business 100%. I still at this point, I think it'll change. I think this will change. But at this point, I still love email the most even though text message is a higher organic reach. Um, and the reason being is because right now business in your text is still on the spammy side. People still look at his, uh, like people are still people like this is where more friends and family are communicating versus like business spamming and stuff. Whereas email you're getting like spam like a hundred a day. So it's like, like we're used to getting marketed to on our emails versus text messaging. And I think that'll change. I just think it's going to take some time. But I think like I use it, uh, you know, I try to use it in a very, I try to be very smart about how I use it. Um, in terms of, you know, not selling as much on tax, uh, you know, giving, you know, bringing the most value that I can. Um, you know, stuff of that nature. So I think you just have to kind of be careful. Like don't put them in the same boat. Like what you send out via email. May not be the same thing that you, it's just like YouTube and Instagram. I mean, you don't really nest, you don't put the same stuff right on YouTube and Instagram. Right. Where do you, where do you see like trends moving?  Do you see type of like shift in trends or shifts in marketing that you've observed over the past couple of years or anything else that you've implemented other than the Instagram and email like small tactics or anything like that on a daily basis. Yeah, it's always changing. I went from posting like once or twice a day to four to six times a day and I went from literally having zero followers a day to 200 a day. New followers. So that's just basically from the algorithm we're wrapping up on Instagram. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. When you're posting a lot, when you're hitting people like, like if you post at eight o'clock, you're missing the person that sleeps in till 10 because they work all day or if you, you know, if you posted, if you post at 12 and that's it, you didn't post at eight and you miss the person that wakes up at eight checks Instagram and then has to work all day and can't check their phone till four. And so when you post throughout the day, you're hitting everybody, right? You're hitting is you're maximizing the amount of people that actually may see your content. That's why I post so much because that's how the Instagram algorithm works. Right. And then the more time people spend on your content, whether it's a post, a story, whatever, you know, the more the algorithm is going to push it out to more people organically, you know, so there's the post a lot part of it, then there's the post good content part of it. They've balanced out the engagement on video versus images. That was really cool. They did that about a month ago. Yeah. I'm getting way more engagement on it on images than I do a video. So I try to you just you just have to mix it up when it comes to that. But for me, when I look at all the platforms and I see kind of what tick tocks done with their algorithms in the past 12 months and and then, you know, conversely what Instagram has done. Instagram is like really becoming a beast. You know, like they're kind of emerging.  They've got images. You can really kind of post any format video you want. They've got stories like it's popping. Right. So we'll see what happens. It's kind of fun now watching all the different platforms. You know, compete against each other for the most eyeballs and stuff. So that's fun. Ricky, would you ever post something like to get the five to six times a day? Like I feel like it would be relatively hard to make sure each piece of that is like truly valuable to who you try to get out to. If you cannot ensure that each piece was actually valuable, would you not do it?    You know, like why is the content not as great? Is it great production? It's just not good info. Like there's a lot of different questions there, but yeah, more like the info like we do a lot of educational stuff.  Or what would you mix in with that? Depends on what the goal is for the business, you know, with the educational stuff, you know, if I'm just a real estate agent, then one a day is plenty. Because I'm out here trying to show property, set appointments, prospect, I'm doing all these other things. I'm able to go out and create five to six pieces of content a day because that's what I do full time. Yeah. You know, I'm not showing property anymore. I'm not prospecting to build my real estate business. Real estate business is built. So I have the time to go out and create all that content. Real estate agents don't who are trying to build their business. So like I say for an agent, you should set aside a half a day once a week to time block to brainstorm 10 really good ideas and film them all right then in that day. And that way you've got 10 a week that you can post, which will at least get you one a day, right? So if you could do like one short form video a day that you can put that short form on YouTube, Tiktok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, all the different places you can put that vertical style short form content. If you can put one of those and then like an image, you know, like where you've got two posts a day. That's crushing it honestly for an agent and then and then if you take that and of course engage with everybody that engages with you, but also search your area and start engaging with people that aren't following you that you're not connected to and start trying to create some back and forth with people that are in your market who who are on these platforms that you're not already connected with, you know, and they start going back and forth and then they go to your profile and see, Oh, they're an agent in Boston. Oh, look at their content twice a day. Wow, this is educational stuff. Cool. I love the images will follow, you know, and then it kind of starts to go down that rabbit hole where you're deeming them about what they might want to do real estate wise. If they have an agent, if you can stay in touch with their phone number, email stuff like that. How do you feel about paid ads in terms of like you talked about red X, right? You know, on the scent for a lead compared to paying 10,000 for Zillow on. Yeah. How do you translate that in terms of your branding with social media? Are you doing about paid ad spends with a lot of things right now?  Well, you have to pay for ads. You know, you can only you can go really far organically, but you want some paid stuff. So with red X, they have ad builder so the people that you're collecting the data from, you can run ads directly to those people. So the way Facebook ads and Instagram ads work. Generally is as you run an ad to geographical location with not with with just not a call to action, just just an ad they can engage with and then you filter out the people that engage with the ad and then you run another ad that has a call to action to it.  Oh, this is crappy lead.  No, they don't suck. You just have to do it in stages and then filter through the population to get to the people that want to do business with you. Right. Well, with this day one, you can run call to action ads. With ad builder to the exact people you want to do business with because every dollar is just hitting someone that you want to do business with a property owner that you've picked up in red X. They allow you to to run ads directly to that database. So like G leads plus you have to get plus because that gives you the emails they find them on Facebook through the emails and cell phone numbers. Right. So like would you lead plus you can get 7500 property owners a month. So even if you don't call them just get the 75. Whereas like after like two, three, four months, you've got like 40, 50,000 property owners there and growing by 7500 every month, you know, and just constantly be running ads of those people as you're calling them. They're recognizing who you are. Right.  You're just building like massive brand that way for really efficient prices because all the ads are running directly to the people in that database, you know, get expired plus and go back like 10 years worth of expires withdrawals and cancels. There's no telling how many are in Boston probably a million right over the last 10 years. Boom. Start running ads to those million people that had a property that expired in the last 10 years as you're calling through that list. But yeah, you can do all that right there on on Redx. Are you taking your email list and making because you can make an audience through with email list to are you doing that? So you can you can add your you can add your email list to Redx in there and use the same. See you you create the ads right there on the platform and you don't have to go to the Redx. I mean to the Facebook ad manager and go through all that craziness. You build it right there. Just like step one two three four. You say with the ad once you get to preview it. You just boom and then bam it's going out. Let's see. I'll send you this. This is a hundred fifty dollar discount for Redx. Um, if it were me, I'd get geolites plus expireds plus the multi-line dialer and ad builder and just get as many leads as you can with those two products and and call them with the multi-line dialer, but then run ads to them for like ten dollars a day or something. I mean, I'm doing it right now. I've got ads running for all the people that I've picked up in Redx over the years. I'm running it right now. I had after the framerate at five dollars a day after the first day had three hundred and eleven people. Half of them got hit twice and I had eight website clicks that went to my website to search property and stuff like for five dollars at three hundred and eleven people in my market, you know, half of them hit twice and eight clicks right there. Do you always? So I do a lot of ads on Instagram, for instance, I'll do send message because I want to start the conversation and just go right into the DMs and start a dialogue. Are you I'm afraid if I send them to my website or something like that, they might look and they might like it, but maybe not actually have that. They might never actually connect. Are you doing the opposite or you send them to your website first or? Yeah, I just ran it as a test to see what would happen with the ad builder. Right. Rad Builder is a new product in the last like month and a half. So I just got on there last week. I mean, a lot of my students are using it, but I haven't used it myself. So last week I got on there to mess around and create an ad, see how it all worked and everything. Um, but yeah, like to send you a DM is great. Whatever your method is on the call to action, whatever link you want them to go to, um, you know, doesn't really matter to me there. Whatever you feel like is the most efficient. You can do whatever you want to do. Yeah, I think it's a matter of split testing and figuring out what would make some less sense with that. Um, also at a zero diamond dot com. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but, uh, all my scripts, there's videos of me calling prospects live. I don't know if you guys have seen all that stuff. There's like seven or eight free courses there. All kinds of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I have a, I've logged in and been on it. Um, I'll check, check into that more. Look at the scripts. Talk about your CRM real quick. Like obviously you have an email list. Are you integrating the CRM with that as well? Like how we, I don't, I don't, I mean, I've got everybody in constant contact. So they can get the weekly email, but outside of that, I don't have a CRM of any sorts. Makes sense. Yeah.  I'll never use like, I don't need to know when their dog's birthday is and stuff. Um, you know, I'm just like, I'm close. I mean, my thing is service, right? So like they call me. I'm jumping on whatever it is. They're like, wow, Ricky's on it. I'll never use another agent. That's it. It's done deal. Right. Yeah.  You're like, all right, what else more can you do?  No, no, no, no. No, I mean, like if you can somehow systemize it, but like if people, like the time, if you spend 30 minutes a week, okay, just a week, 30 minutes a week, inputting data into a CRM that you're never going to use. That's 26 hours that year working hours. Do you know how much you can get done in 26 hours? How many, how many deals you can get put together in 26 hours? It's ridiculous, but people think, Oh, 30 minutes a week. Oh, that's not much. Yeah, it is. It adds up to be really, really massive. It could really be the difference in you exploding in your business and not exploding honestly. Um, that makes sense. It makes sense. No, yeah, you're doing, you're doing everything that you need to do. To ensure that you're hitting these people. I feel like there's a lot of fluff in the industry where people are telling you, Hey, you know, go do this. Go do that. Like, but they're not actually doing the common practices of what really makes a business wholesome similar to what you're doing. And I, that's my approach very similar to yours in terms of like, you got to do what you need to get done.  Um, but yeah, that makes sense. I just cut out all the fluff, man.  Let me just focus on the meat. You know, and like it's not a perfect system. Of course, there's a lot of things that I'm missing within what I do, but, um, you know, my, what, how I do things is just an example for you guys. Of how something could be done. You know, you guys can take what I do and go turn it into whatever you want to turn it into. Right. Now, this has been super helpful. Do you guys have any? Yeah, that's been a lot of good stuff. Yeah. Honestly, Ricky, this was amazing.  I personally, I'll admit, I'll be the first one. I mean, I have a backlog of probably 70 videos that I can post and I was thinking, okay, I'll do like three a week, but I've never even tried doing it more than one a day. So it's like, I got to kind of start there and just see how I can execute that. Yeah, you need more consistency. You know, at least once a day. Um, does anybody have any questions? Last many questions or feedback, comments? No, I asked mine. That was awesome. I appreciate your time, man. I don't know if you can hear me, Ricky. Can you hear me? I can. I can. Awesome. Thank you for guiding us and spending your time. I know your time is valuable.  It's like, it's like a machine. It's like a system. Do I have that right? Like there's, here's what it is, right?  So when you're in front of someone and you're talking to a prospect, it's like the world stops and nothing matters but them.  Right? How many can I rack up? How many, you know, calls can I make? You know, how many deals can I do? But then when you get in front of somebody again, now everything stops. Now we're in slow motion again. So this push and pull of speed versus quality is kind of where the big business is built because honestly, you know, everything revolves around how deep their relationships are that you can create with your prospects.  Right. That would be more valuable to me. You know, so a lot of people are like, I want to make this many dials. Well, I don't really look at dials. I look at hours on the phone. You know, I can't really control how many dials because I don't know how many people are going to pick up today. I don't know how if people are going to want to be talkative. If I run into one person that wants to talk for an hour. So, you know, you could have a call session where you dialed 45 numbers over the course of two hours and you could have a call session where you dialed 220 numbers over two hours. Right. And the results from the 45 calls could be way better than the 220 calls. So it's not always about the numbers. It's about speed until you're in front of someone then quality. Right. Then speed again, then quality, then speed again. Yeah, it makes sense. It's like you're using breath, like covering a large portion to get to depth. Like that's it. That's what I hear you saying. Yeah. Because like some people will spend so much time on one client. Yeah. Right. To give service. I'm giving service. I'm giving service. I'm giving service. And it's like, man, you could have gave that client the same warm and fuzzy feeling that you really care about them in a tenth of the time that you spent with them. That's facts. And then and then you could have done that you could have gave 10, nine more people that same warm and fuzzy that you're just care about them so much in that same amount of time. But people use this as a blanket to cover up the fact that they don't they're scared to go talk to nine more people. So when they find somebody, they're like a leech. They just hang on for dear life hoping they don't have to talk to anybody else today. It's like, man, you better be trying to figure out how to make them feel incredible, finish the conversation and get to nine more people today before the sun goes down.  There's got to be volume somewhere. I think is what the bottom line is like quality is great. But where's volume? You know, if you want to have this massive business at some point, it's got to be about a volume of people, not just quality, you know, time spent and servicing. It's got it. There's got to be this massive number of this high volume and high frequency of conversations and people and relationships. Or you're never going to get where you want to go.  Ricky, so my question is, do you have a, or at least when you first started calling from 9 to 12, do you have a goal? I may like to say five new friends in the market a day. Yeah. Yeah. How many hours have I dedicated to make these calls? So if I say I'm going to call from 9 to 12 every day, my goal is to stay on the phone solid from 9 to 12. I can't control what the results are of that call session, whether I dialed 45 numbers, 220 numbers, created five new friends, created 15 new friends. I don't know what the results are going to be really, but my goal is just to make calls solid from 9 to 12. That's one thing I can control. I can't control what happens on the calls, right? Now I can start to get better and better at making my calls and get to where, you know, I'm pretty good at mapping out what those results might look like over time. But especially in the beginning, my goal is how many hours are going to make me? Am I dedicated to make, if I committed to making calls today? And I want to hit those hours. Well, good guys. Good spending some time with you. I hope this helped and brought you some value. And we'll stay in touch and let me know how the journey is going and maybe we can hop on another call at some point soon. Yeah, we'll get you a hotel for the weekend at Boston. Anytime you want, you can come up to our team for us.  We'll be happy to have you. So yeah, I mean, if you guys want to put together a big event or something, I'm happy to happy to do that. So if that's something you guys are interested in, just let me know. All right, cool. Man, we appreciate you guys be good. Have a good rest of your week. Hey, thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope it brought you tons of value. Let me know what you think in the comments. I'm going to put the next video right here for you. So you don't have to go anywhere. You can just click this video to keep that Ricky train rolling. Hey, we'll see you guys on this next video and I'll talk to you soon.